Language Quotes by Terence McKenna

Language betrays, in order to mean.

— Terence McKenna

Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.

— Terence McKenna

Cultures are virtual realities made of language.

— Terence McKenna

Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language.

— Terence McKenna

It seems to me that it is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language.

— Terence McKenna

To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.

— Terence McKenna

What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless…

— Terence McKenna

“There is a transcendental dimension beyond language... It's just hard as hell to talk about!”

— Terence McKenna

If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.

— Terence McKenna

It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things…

— Terence McKenna

Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.

— Terence McKenna

The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed…

— Terence McKenna

This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in…

— Terence McKenna

This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call…

— Terence McKenna

We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about:…

— Terence McKenna

Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental…

— Terence McKenna

It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would…

— Terence McKenna

We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push…

— Terence McKenna

I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language…

— Terence McKenna

One way to think about what psychedelics are is as catalysts for language development. They literally force the evolution of language. You…

— Terence McKenna

At still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. Psilocybin…

— Terence McKenna

The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message…

— Terence McKenna

No one yet understands the mysterious intelligence within plants or the implications of the idea that nature communicates in a basic chemical…

— Terence McKenna

If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language.…

— Terence McKenna

The world is mental in some way that we do not yet understand, but that which we're edging toward understanding. And the…

— Terence McKenna

The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one…

— Terence McKenna

We are reaping the fruits of ten thousand, fifty thousand years of sowing of the fields of mind. And it is being…

— Terence McKenna

History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.

— Terence McKenna

Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the…

— Terence McKenna

Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us.

— Terence McKenna

The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.

— Terence McKenna

What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and…

— Terence McKenna

Earth is a place where language has literally become alive. Language has infested matter; it is replicating and defining and building itself.…

— Terence McKenna

Obviously, it's some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but…

— Terence McKenna

What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are…

— Terence McKenna

If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But…

— Terence McKenna

Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence. A situation in which men…

— Terence McKenna

And what we're looking toward is a moment when the artificial language structures which bind us within the notion of ourselves are…

— Terence McKenna

Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the…

— Terence McKenna