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
This rising global humanism is, in fact, the rising into consciousness of a tribal god similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in these pre-Hellenic societies.
I regard these people who are peddling angst and peddling pessimism and all that stuff as so 'two minutes ago'...
Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination.
All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it's very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you're lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact.
Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.
And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self.
Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone.
I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.
Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.
Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.
In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones.
Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.
The obligation on us is to communicate the truth so that it is understood. The belief will take care of itself.