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
The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together.
I think there's a shamanic temperament, which is a person who craves knowledge, knowledge in the Greek sense of gnosis. In other words, knowledge not of the sort where you subscribe to Scientific American, and it validates what you believe, but cosmologies constructed out of immediate experiences that are found to be always applicable.
The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.
Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.
Certainly neo-Platonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology, which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics.
The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.
We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.
Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.
I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.
Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.
I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.
I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.
Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.