Terence McKenna
Psychedelic philosopher
Sayings by Terence McKenna
The syntactical structures of English are living creatures, and they are trying to get out of your mouth and into my head.
The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.
Culture is not your friend.
The world is not made of atoms, it is made of stories.
Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third-story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
We are not aliens, we are the children of the aliens.
The mushroom is an alien intelligence, and it is speaking to us.
The universe is a machine for the production of novelty.
Life is a self-transforming, self-organizing, self-creating, self-replicating, self-referential, autopoietic, and autotelic process.
The world is not as it seems. It is much stranger, much more complex, much more beautiful, and much more terrifying.
The primary dogma of the psychedelic experience is that the universe is made of language.
The purpose of human life is to discover what it is to be a human being.
The psychedelic experience is a direct confrontation with the mystery of being.
The future is not something that happens to us, it is something we create.
Our world is an hallucination, but it's a consensus hallucination.
The psychedelic experience is a portal to the collective unconscious.
The universe is a cosmic joke, and we are the punchline.
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
The world is a magical place, and we are all magicians.
The psychedelic experience is a direct encounter with the divine.