Terence McKenna

The psychedelic experience is a journey into the heart of the cosmos.

The universe is a story, and we are its characters.

The syntactical structures of English are an impediment to the truth.

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter.

Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people's convenience and the convenience of various institutions, not for your convenience. And it is not your friend.

The mushroom is the antidote to the ego.

The message of psychedelics is that culture is a software that has been loaded into your operating system since birth.

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 cultural models of behavior and information processing. They open up the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

The planet has a kind of immune system, and we are the disease.

The drugs don't do it. You do it. The drugs are only a key to the door in your own mind.

Nature is not a commodity. Nature is a partner.

We are told that we are living in a democracy, but we are not. We are living in a corporate plutocracy.

The purpose of human life is to transcend the animal condition.

History is the story of accelerating novelty.

We are so much more than we are told we are.

The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a mystery to be experienced.

The imagination is the primary tool of human consciousness.

What we call 'sanity' is a culturally defined and culturally accepted form of madness.

The creative act is the highest expression of human consciousness.

The archaic revival is the return of the repressed, the re-emergence of the shamanic impulse in the modern world.