Terence McKenna Quotes

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

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.

It's the easiest thing in the world to assume that what seems so obvious at one moment in time is a hard, perpetual fact of life.

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

Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness. . . . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities. . . . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.

What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.

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.

When You smoke herb it reveals you to yourself. All the wickedness you do is revealed by the herb - it's you conscience and gives you an honest picture of yourself.

Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.

I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs.

It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality.

If life wasn't real it would be the craziest psychedelic trip ever

If you want reality to be different than it is, you might as well try to teach a cat to bark.

Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality.

I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.

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

Surrealism to me is reality. Psychedelic vision is reality to me and always was.

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

They call me the trippy king.

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.

One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available.

What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. And I use 'higher dimensional' in the mathematical sense.

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.

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