Terence McKenna Quotes

And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.

In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones.

Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy.

The western mind, because of it's unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics.

Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history, essentially.

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.

And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.

'Drugs' and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.

The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.

There may be a jump on electronic LSD with virtual reality, and the problem just with saying LSD, enough time has gone by that there is no distinction between psychedelics and other drugs.

We were very fortunate to have a a little time in history when LSD was still legal and were able to experiment with drugs just like we were doing with music.

LSD caused a lot of experimenting going on. And we're thinking, 'Wait a minute, what if we've got...' I always thought, 'What if some of those experiments actually had worked?' And what if they did? We probably wouldn't know that they existed. We heard that they were shut down, but we probably wouldn't be told if they succeeded.

The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an antidrugs position. Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive behavior; these are precisely the tendencies in our psychological makup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric, and more grounded point of view within the individual.

I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.

As long as I had easy access to psychedelics at the government-sponsored research project, most of my energy went into psychedelic sessions.

Whether or not LSD research and therapy will return to society, the discoveries that psychedelics made possible have revolutionary implications for our understanding of the psyche, human nature, and the nature of reality.

My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.

Believe it or not, bananas do contain a small quantity of Musa Sapientum bananadine, which is a mild, short-lasting psychedelic.

Substances like LSD, which give away a secret about the nature of the social game - the human game and what underlies it - are potentially dangerous, of course, like any good thing is. Electricity is dangerous, fire is dangerous, cars are dangerous, planes are dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving on the freeway. The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it, then you make it worse. Because you project onto it all kinds of bogeys and threats which don't exist in it at all.

By banning psychedelic research we have not only given up the study of an interesting drug or group of substances, but also abandoned one of the most promising approaches to the understanding of the human mind and consciousness.

The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it.

If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it's an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.

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.

I will always support legalization of the entheogens, which are, without a doubt, the most important and the most grossly misunderstood medicines on earth.

These substances function as unspecific amplifiers that increase the energetic niveau in the psyche and make the deep unconscious dynamics available for conscious processing. This unique property of psychedelics makes it possible to study psychological undercurrents that govern our experiences and behaviors to a depth that cannot be matched by any other methods and tools available in modern mainstream science. In emotional and psychosomatic disorders, for positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.