Terence McKenna Quotes

The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.

DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.

Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.

That's why I always recommend a psychedelic experience because it makes you realize that all you've learned is in fact just learned and not necessarily the truth.

To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.

LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality.

The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip.

In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can't be told.

What happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds. Unlike mushrooms where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the mandala, DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightening.

Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.

Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.

If you're truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.

They call me the trippy king.

The power of psychedelics... is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life.

There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.

I sort of see [cannabis] as the pilot light of Gian consciousness.

I was looking for something and I wasn't sure what it was. [After experimenting with] certain funguses, I had a psychedelic experience where I looked up at the clouds and went, 'Oh!' I realized that we all have our own power, and that whatever I wanted to do, I had to make happen.

All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it's very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you're lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact.

I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.

It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening.

Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that's the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process.

It’s hard to stay away from religion when you mess with acid.

The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is?

Reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we're embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion.