Terence McKenna

"Nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf."

"Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored."

"The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams."

"You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness."

"The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere."

"History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness."

"The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer"

"You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms."

"You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told."

"We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world."

"We are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” -"

"Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it."

"I think of going to the Grave without having a Psychedelic Experience is like going to the Grave without ever having Sex. It means that you never Figured out what it is all about. The Mystery is in the Body and the way the Body Works itself into Nature."

"Ecstasy is a complex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph, surrender, and empathy. What has replaced our prehistoric understanding of this complex of ecstasy now is the word comfort, a tremendously bloodless notion. Drugs are not comfortable, and anyone who thinks they are comfortable or even escapist should not toy with drugs unless they’re willing to get their noses rubbed in their own stuff."

"The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche."

"I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there"

"We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else."

"Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control."

"Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet."

"Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game."