If I can paraphrase Teilhard de Chardin for a moment, he said, or I will paraphrase in this way, 'When the human race understands the potential of the hallucinogenic drug experience, it will have discovered fire for the second time.' — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
Marcel Eliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent, and Gordon Wasson, very rightly I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense. — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as… — Terence McKenna Copy Share
The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance. — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum. — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
Our culture difinitely takes an egocentric dominator view. The fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control. Dominator types… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage. — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
This is the message of your life and my life - it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children - nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze… — Terence McKenna Copy Share
I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of… — Terence McKenna Copy Share
Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about. — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
