Terence McKenna Quotes

By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, whither we understand it as created or uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind.

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.

What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.

The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind.

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.

Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

Psychedelic telepathy is you 'see' what I mean.

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.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

Different ages have certain approaches, which may be more effective for one age and no longer effective in another age. The world that we live in now has much greater density to it; it is much more all-pervasive. And when I say "world," I include the human mind in it. The human mind has grown even since the time of the Buddha, 2,500 years ago. The human mind is more noisy and more all-pervasive, and the egos are bigger.

No species ... possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by genetic history ... The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques.

This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.

I think it's obvious that the psychedelics are demonized and illegalized by our society because somewhere in our society are controlling minds that realize that these substances have the potential, have the power to unpick the controlling hierarchy.

A mind that doesn't question its judgements, makes the world very small and dangerous.

Proximity is power. If you can get proximity with people that are the best in the world, things can happen because all of the people they know, the insights they have and the life experience they have. They can save you a decade of time by one insight.

Could we but rightly comprehend the mind of man, nothing would be impossible to us upon the earth.

When a coincidence seems amazing, that's because the human mind isn’t wired to naturally comprehend probability & statistics.

Government is the exercise of all the great qualities of the human mind.

The world is a living being - one nature, one soul. Keep that in mind.

We can't escape from the world anymore; we can't escape from the mind. We need to enter surrender while we are in the world. That seems to be the path that is effective in the world that we live in now.

I was obliged, at last, to come to the conclusion that the contemplation of nature alone is not sufficient to fill the human heart and mind.