Terence McKenna
Terence McKenna
Terence Kemp McKennawas an American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. He was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s", "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism", and the "intellectual voice of rave culture"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth16 November 1946
CityPaonia, CO
CountryUnited States of America
So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.
I believe in extraterrestrials, but I believe that real extraterrestrials are so peculiar that the job is to recognize them.
By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.
The question is being asked, 'Are we alone?' And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we're not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?
History is a series of approximations of the final singularity.
A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.
If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.
I would argue that it's almost better to do heroin than to watch TV. At least when you're doing heroin you're responsible for your own reveries and thought processes. When you're mainlining TV what is it but endless messages to fetishize products?
In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.
Inwardness is the characteristic feature of the vegetable rather than the animal approach to existence. The animals move, migrate and swarm, while plants hold fast. Plants live in a dimension characterised by solid state, the fixed and the enduring. If there is movement in the consciousness of plants then it must be the movement of spirit and attention in the domain of vegetal imagination. (...) This is the truth that the shamans have always known and practiced. Awareness of the green side of mind was called Veriditas by the twelfth century visionary Hildegard Von Bingen.
Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.
To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances.
What is needed, is an awakening.
As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.