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
Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language.
Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.
The surface of things is not where attention should rest.
As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.
Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet
Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.
How do we fight back? By creating art.
The engineers of the future will be poets.
I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.
We're not going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience.
I don't believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.
It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us.
Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.