Terence McKenna Quotes

This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.

Do I need to ease up on the psychedelics, or did LP just recall one of her past lives unprompted at the most crucial juncture ever?

In order to experience the Ultimate Reality you have to be out of your mind.

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

That's why I always recommend a psychedelic experience because it makes you realize that all you've learned is in fact just learned and not necessarily the truth.

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

I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.

I've had - I don't really know how to describe them, except moments of 'extrasensory perception' of some sort. I've also had sort of a 'white light' moment.

Many of us who have experienced psychedelics feel very much that they are sacred tools. They open spiritual awareness.

It is possible to spend one's entire lifetime without ever experiencing the mystical realms or even without being aware of their existence.

Drugs took me to places; they were like portals. It's kind of a cliché, but they were like portals to altered states of consciousness into ways of imagining the world, or seeing a world beyond this world, or seeing a world beyond this world that I might not have gotten to unless I discovered meditation and a very deep, intense spiritual path based on contemplation and meditation.

All politicians should be required to drink Ayahuasca 10 times before taking office.

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 I experience something, I believe it. I almost choked to death when I was a four year old and had a near death experience. I was very upset that I didn't die because it was a lot more interesting out of your body than in it.

When you feel expansion of your consciousness, that is the most ecstatic experience possible, because suddenly you are the whole universe. Stars are within you. The sun rises within you and sets within you. The earth moves within you. The flowers blossom within you.

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.

I profoundly admire Aldous Huxley, both for his philosophy and uncompromising sincerity. But I disagree with his advocacy of 'the chemical opening of doors into the Other World', and with his belief that drugs can procure 'what Catholic theologians call a gratuitous grace'. Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system.

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.

There will be difficult moments in a five-gram trip, but on the other hand certain questions will be solved forever for you, because you will validate the existence of this dimension. You will see what your relationship to it is.

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

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.

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.