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.

People have different personalities when they're drunk or take heroin, or whatever drugs.

I do think that taking these sort of natural mind-opening and altering drugs does have an effect. Doors and windows that you didn't even know were in the house are open and you're seeing views you've never noticed before. Even though, when you come down, the world sort of goes back to the way it was, an inkling of that transformed vision and experience of the world remains. I think it's a little bit medicinal, and over time it sort of builds up a new experience of the world. That's when I think smoking pot and doing drugs is really good for you, spiritually speaking.

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

LSD is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be.

I did LSD and peyote in the late Sixties, before I got into cocaine. That was concurrent with my change from a straight comic to the album and counterculture period, and those drugs served their purpose. They helped open me up.

[DMT] raises all the questions in a hurry. It's so intense and so oriented toward the other and the visual and the hallucinogenic that it isn't really like a drug. It's more like an event that you ran into. You just came around a corner and there was the unspeakable.

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.

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.

LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.

Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.

If you've never seen an elephant ski, you've never been on acid.

For me from a pretty young age up until about 21 years old hallucinogenics had a huge place in my life.

LSD is a catalyst or amplifier of mental processes. If properly used it could become something like the microscope or telescope of psychiatry.

We need a new concept of reality and a new set of values for things to change in a positive direction. LSD could help to generate such a new concept.

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.

A cap of good acid costs $5, and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony, with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums.

The first time I took LSD, it just blew everything away. I had such an incredible feeling of well-being.

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

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.

What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.

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

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