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 believe that the totemic image for the future is the octopus. This is because the squids and octopi have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic; a model for the human communications of the future. In the not-too-distant future men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea.
We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it.
The state in the matter of drugs should not, any more than in the matter of sex, act as the secret agent for the agenda of the church.
We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.
It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.
My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.
Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
Without sounding too cliche, the Internet really is the birth of global mind.
The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination.
No one knows enough to worry.
We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.
The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.
Only psychos and shamans create their own reality