Quote

The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.

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
Long
Predicament
Predicaments
Brief
Miracle
Place
Everything

More quotes by Terence McKenna

Image
Plants seem like an excellent model for the kind of future that we should be building.
Terence McKenna
Image
In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept.
Terence McKenna
Image
Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.
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
Our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts.
Terence McKenna
Image
There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.
Terence McKenna
Image
Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.
Terence McKenna
Image
This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well, you don't want to clench, you don't want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe, and sing, and sing it back, and it will step back. You can take control of your situation ... most of the time.
Terence McKenna
Image
One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.
Terence McKenna
Image
You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
Terence McKenna
Image
Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.
Terence McKenna
Image
We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.
Terence McKenna
Image
The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.
Terence McKenna
Image
I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety. Anxiety sells.
Terence McKenna
Image
We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
Terence McKenna
Image
This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine.
Terence McKenna
Image
The idea of psychedelic societies is something new. And it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone takes the drug. It merely means that the complexity and the mysteriousness of mind are centered in the consciousness of the civilization as the mystery which it comes from and which it must relate to in order to be relevant.
Terence McKenna
Image
The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls.
Terence McKenna
Image
DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don't want to know about it.
Terence McKenna
Image
The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
Terence McKenna