Terence McKenna Quotes

Through my LSD experience and my new picture of reality, I became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of the animal and plant kingdom. I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and all of us.

The Gaian mind is what were calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set.

The holy child is waiting to be born in every instant, not just once a year.

For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.

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.

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

When I was 18, I went to a Baptist church with my girlfriend, and had a breakthrough when a pastor laid hands on me on an altar call. I wept that evening and realized how numb I had become with God and how He was calling to me for restoration. I received that blessing and went on to raising my three children in a Lutheran Church in the Bay Area as a member of Journey.

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.

Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opens a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space...All that negative stuff. All the pain...It just floted away from me, I just floated away from it...up and away.

This lost world will never be reached and brought back to loyalty to God, until the children of God wake up to the fact that they have a mission in the world. If we are true Christians we should all be missionaries.

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.

LSD wanted to tell me something. It gave me an inner joy, an open mindedness, a gratefulness, open eyes and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation.

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.

There is no fundamental truth and there's nothing to be connected to: I just believe that [LSD] makes you feel better.

During an Ecstasy, LSD or mushroom experience, many people feel unbounded compassion for others and themselves. During a trip, the typical boundaries of our identity dissolve and you're able to experience your unity with all dimensions of reality simultaneously. It can be overwhelming, but it can also be a guidepost and affirmation of the soul's mission in life. A good trip can help us see and feel how perfect, beautiful and precious the world is, despite news reports to the contrary we get from CNN.

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

I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously.

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.

We're not going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience.

Psychedelics can carry you farther and faster than most people care to go. Once you get to psychedelics, it's no longer a matter of seeking the answer, you have found the answer. Now the issue changes dramatically, you must face the answer.

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.

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 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.