Terence McKenna Psychedelic Quotations

Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind...

Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism.

We're not dropping out here, we're infiltrating and taking over.

The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech.

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.

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

What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.

Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.

Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.

Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.

The psychedelic universe, whatever it is, is the major datum of experience. It's larger than this planet. Nobody knows how large it is. The further in you go the bigger it gets. We don't know what to make of something like that. It's the reverse of our expectations.

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

In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.

I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.

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

The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is?

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.

One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.

Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair.

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

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

If you're truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.

The danger is [in using psychedelic drugs], just to put it out there, is madness.

By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.

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

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.

This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you're taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience.

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

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.

Memory training is great psychedelic training.

All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion.

The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.

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.

'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.

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.

The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.

Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that's the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process.

Psychedelic telepathy is you 'see' what I mean.

Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.