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
I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.
We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.
What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.
It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.
History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense.
The sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago. . . . Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting.
Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.
Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.
We need a metaphor that can contain the daemon of the future that we have conjured into being.
Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.
Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.
If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.
Our task is to create memes... Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate.
A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing. It's changed before, but not for a long time in our lives, not since before our lives. But now it's changing, and there are many many possibilities.