Quote

Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.

Terence McKenna

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Magic
Deity
Human
Deities
Humans
Partners
Life
Project
Basis
Bases
Projects
Beings
Paganism

More quotes by Terence McKenna

Image
It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.
Terence McKenna
Image
The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and creativity.
Terence McKenna
Image
The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries.
Terence McKenna
Image
If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
Terence McKenna
Image
Modernity is a desert, and we are jungle monkeys. And so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation, new ideas are coming to the fore. Psilocybin is a selective filter for this. The wish to go to space is a selective filter for this. Just the wish to know your own mind is a selective filter for this.
Terence McKenna
Image
Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair.
Terence McKenna
Image
We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.
Terence McKenna
Image
I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.
Terence McKenna
Image
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.
Terence McKenna
Image
It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
Terence McKenna
Image
We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.
Terence McKenna
Image
Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made.
Terence McKenna
Image
What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.
Terence McKenna
Image
We can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind, or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness.
Terence McKenna
Image
I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.
Terence McKenna
Image
Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.
Terence McKenna
Image
[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body.
Terence McKenna
Image
It's a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.
Terence McKenna
Image
Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.
Terence McKenna
Image
Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.
Terence McKenna