Terence McKenna Quotes

If you sort of see yourself writing into a space that you don't always recognize, you sometimes learn things that you knew, but weren't entirely aware of. It's very liberating for a writer to go into a space where she or he has not gone before, because, instead of being a tourist, you're like an explorer now, and you're sort of lost in this new idea.

Let us each grasp a new idea this year. Let us grasp the awareness of what it is that makes us truly happy. Let us consider our personal preferences and learn how to recognize, then embrace, moments of happiness that are uniquely our own.

Why are we now going into space? Well, why did we trouble to look past the next mountain? Our prime obligation to ourselves is to make the unknown known. We are on a journey to keep an appointment with whatever we are.

The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience. The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation.

All new ideas begin in a non-conforming mind that questions some tenet of the conventional wisdom.

There's a heaven on earth that so few ever find, though the map's in your soul and the road's in your mind

It's the old idea that the process of evolution is some push in the direction of greater complexity--in particular greater intellectual complexity. In one twig of the tree of life, namely ours, having a big brain happened to have advantages. But that's just what worked for a particular species of primate 5 to 7 million years ago.

I'm always working on something. I wish I had more time for free-thinking and brainstorming new ideas. That's not to say my mind doesn't wander, but I find myself wishing for more of that kind of time.

When you're trying to create something and you need to hang out, in not knowing, in all the cracks and spaces where you feel lost, and you need to endure them, and have new ideas come out of that emptiness, well, the Internet is what we do when we feel lost, you know? Like, you go online or you check your email when you don't know what to do next, and so it's not helpful, in that sense.

Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.

The constants all through the centuries will be the same; wine, women and song. Other than that, life will be very different technologically. In the year 3000 the universe will be expanding as it will forever, infinitely. We will probe outer space but never find life as evolutionized as ours. We were not created by a deity. We created the deity in OUR image. Life began on this planet when the first amoeba split. Mankind will still be seeking God, not accepting that God is a spirit; can't see it, touch it, only feel it. It's called LOVE.

Every person should make it his business to gather new ideas from sources other than the environment in which he daily lives and works. The mind becomes withered, stagnant, narrow and closed unless it searches for new ideas.

In exploring new and doubtful tracts of speculation, the mind strikes out true and original views; as a drop of water hesitates at first what direction it will take, but afterwards follows its own course.

The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.

2001: A Space Odyssey was a wonderful conundrum when I was a boy, with its giant concepts thrown across the giant screen at Indian Hills Theater. That movie woke me up in ways that I hadn't imagined, and I went searching for book versions of the same drug.

The way of learning is none other than finding the lost mind.

To find anything comparable with our forthcoming ventures into space, we must go back far beyond Columbus, far beyond Odysseus-far, indeed, beyond the first ape-man. We must contemplate the moment, now irrevocably lost in the mists of time, when the ancestor off all of us came crawling out of the sea.

This be my pilgrimage and goal Daily to march and find The secret phrases of the soul, The evangels of the mind.

A planet is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.

A good traveller is one who knows how to travel with the mind.

It is a gift when someone can challenge you and open your mind to new ideas.

Neither a space station nor an enlightened mind can be realized in a day.

You cannot fathom your mind.... The more you draw from it, the more clear and fruitful it will be.

When you think about what Homo sapiens are about, you almost feel that we are replacing ourselves. We won't be able to breathe and breed on this earth, so we replace ourselves with androids that can do. The androids can go up into space and take the future of humanity forward because maybe we just bow out with a carbon-based epoch.

Writing is the crack through which you can crawl into a bigger world, into your wild mind.