Quote

Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.

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
Meat
Chemical
Block
Quantum
Leaves
Chemicals
Strategy
Biology
Indeterminacy
Hundred
Realm
Amplifying
Present
Realms
Subatomic
Five
Pounds
Pound
Seems
Forty
Mechanical

More quotes by Terence McKenna

Image
The psychedelic experience is the beginning of the spiritual path. That's why it's not important that yogas' claim that they can deliver you the psychedelic experience, because it begins with the psychedelic experience, and then you go from there.
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
It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know... You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You'll have that!
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
Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed
Terence McKenna
Image
As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.
Terence McKenna
Image
Death is the black hole of biology. It's an event horizon, and once you go over that event horizon, no information can be passed back out of the hole.
Terence McKenna
Image
This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.
Terence McKenna
Image
What they [psychedelics] cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction.
Terence McKenna
Image
In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.
Terence McKenna
Image
We're not dropping out here, we're infiltrating and taking over.
Terence McKenna
Image
Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.
Terence McKenna
Image
Marcel Eliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent, and Gordon Wasson, very rightly I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit.
Terence McKenna
Image
No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.
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 felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor.
Terence McKenna
Image
What good is a theory of how the universe works if it’s a series of tensor equations that, even when understood, come nowhere tangential to experience? The only intellectual or noetic or spiritual path worth following is one that builds on personal experience
Terence McKenna
Image
Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.
Terence McKenna
Image
Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.
Terence McKenna
Image
The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
Terence McKenna