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
Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind...
Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism.
We're not dropping out here, we're infiltrating and taking over.
The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech.
What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.
Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy.
What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.
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.
Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.
Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.
The psychedelic universe, whatever it is, is the major datum of experience. It's larger than this planet. Nobody knows how large it is. The further in you go the bigger it gets. We don't know what to make of something like that. It's the reverse of our expectations.
Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.
In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.
I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.