Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal. - Terence McKenna
The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams. - Terence McKenna
We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together. - Terence McKenna
My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite. - Terence McKenna
Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored. - Terence McKenna
We live in condensations of our imagination - Terence McKenna
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. - Terence McKenna
Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet. - Terence McKenna
A hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously could not be imagined, and if it previously could not be imagined then there is no grounds for believing that you generated it out of yourself. - Terence McKenna
Human history is a Gaian dream. - Terence McKenna
A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life. - Terence McKenna
Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego. - Terence McKenna
Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you? - Terence McKenna
Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic. - Terence McKenna
You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms. - Terence McKenna
The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found. - Terence McKenna
The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination. - Terence McKenna
Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality. - Terence McKenna
What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation. - Terence McKenna
Nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf. - Terence McKenna
Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game. - Terence McKenna
Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control. - Terence McKenna
You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. - Terence McKenna
Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening - Terence McKenna
You don’t go on bended-knee to petition the official culture for your rights. You have to take them. - Terence McKenna