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
As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.
Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.
I regard these people who are peddling angst and peddling pessimism and all that stuff as so 'two minutes ago'...
To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.
You put two egos together and you've either got a conflict, which is always interesting, or better yet, a love affair.
You are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. And in that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, ‘What is it?’ In that moment art can be created.
'Drugs' and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.
Well, you could almost say, I suppose, that the scientist seeks what is similar between any two days, or bluebirds, or glaciers. And the poet seeks what is different. The artist seeks to celebrate the unique.
The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries.
In fact, I think when we carry out a complete analysis of time, I think what we're going to discover is that like matter, time is composed of elemental, discrete types.
I live up at about the 2000 feet level on a five acre piece of forest that I built a small house on.
There are times when everything seems to go right, and times when everything seems to go wrong.
Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.
The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an antidrugs position. Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive behavior; these are precisely the tendencies in our psychological makup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric, and more grounded point of view within the individual.