Quote

We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses.

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
Self
Alarm
Must
Alarms
Psychedelic
Bizarre
Disguise
Hallucinogens
Dimensions
Encompasses
Truly
Extraterrestrial
Order
Alienated

More quotes by Terence McKenna

Image
You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.
Terence McKenna
Image
What you call man is time.
Terence McKenna
Image
We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.
Terence McKenna
Image
The content of the dialogue with 'the Other' is a content that indicates that man's horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, 'the body is the placenta of the soul'
Terence McKenna
Image
Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.
Terence McKenna
Image
Worrying is betting against yourself.
Terence McKenna
Image
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.
Terence McKenna
Image
We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum the world is something we make through the act of perception.
Terence McKenna
Image
What is needed, is an awakening.
Terence McKenna
Image
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.
Terence McKenna
Image
Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.
Terence McKenna
Image
By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.
Terence McKenna
Image
Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.
Terence McKenna
Image
The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.
Terence McKenna
Image
In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.
Terence McKenna
Image
The same organizational principles which called us forth into self-reflection have called forth self-reflection out of the planet itself. And the problem then is for us to suspect this, act on our suspicion, and be good detectives, and track down the spirit in its lair. And this is what shamans are doing. They are hunters of spirit.
Terence McKenna
Image
This is the nature of going forward into being: A series of self-transforming ascents of level.
Terence McKenna
Image
You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.
Terence McKenna
Image
The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.
Terence McKenna
Image
A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.
Terence McKenna