Here are some quotes from Terence McKenna:
- “I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.”
- “Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.”
- “The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”
- “The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation.”
- “Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people's convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture.”
- “If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.”
- “The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.”
- “The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”
- “We are caged by our cultural programming. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it's worth.”
- “The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.”
