Terence McKenna Quotes

I suddenly became strangely inebriated. The external world became changed as in a dream. Objects appeared to gain in relief; they assumed unusual dimensions; and colors became more glowing. Even self-perception and the sense of time were changed. When the eyes were closed, colored pictures flashed past in a quickly changing kaleidoscope. After a few hours, the not unpleasant inebriation, which had been experienced whilst I was fully conscious, disappeared. What had caused this condition?

Alcohol make you drunk, man. It don't make you meditate, it just make you drunk. Herb is more a consciousness.

I wanted to make a film that gave the people who took LSD at that time the hallucinations that you get with that drug, but without hallucinating.

I drink for the effect, because it loosens up the tongue a little bit.

I've written songs sober and I've written songs high.

It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know... You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You'll have that!

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

Everything’s better when you’re high.

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.

It's the most psychedelic experience I ever had, going to see Hendrix play. When he started to play, something changed: colors changed, everything changed.

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

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.

Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you, because nothing is happening...and then ZANG!

The government could take away all the drugs in the world and people would spin around on their lawns until they fell down and saw God.

What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.

I learned more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than in the preceding 15 years of studying and doing research in psychology.

This wasn't Weirdville, this was fricking Wonderland. Alice here was all grow up, but she was still chowing down on too much of that psychedelic mushroom.

After half an hour the drug hit me like a sensuous tidal wave. I turned into a tactile temptress and wanted to stroke the whole world. It gave me untold confidence.

I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you hate them, and that's because they dissolve world views. And if you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you, if you think that's a thrill, you'll probably love psychedelics.

Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

Don't eat a mushroom stem and see colors, eat the whole bag and see GOD

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.

Do you think it's possible that when we're on something like marijuana or mushrooms and we believe we're having a really spiritual experience that we're just high?

I remember taking mushrooms at the wrap party, it was like the first and last time I took that.