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
Inside the boundaries of the old paradigm there's no hope, there's no way out of the box of capitalism, monogamy, consumer fetishism, egoism, money worship, no way out. No way. No way out!
In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.
Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew.
What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.
If reality is code, then it can be hacked in some way that we had not suspected before.
History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it.
Everything appears to me to be authored, in some strange way. And I wonder if this is not the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion/delusion/revelation that life is in fact art.
One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug is how do you feel the next day?
The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.
I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.
It seems to me that it is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language.
In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.
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.