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. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic
behaviors are acceptable.

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 (The Archaic Revival, 1991)

There is a transcendental dimension beyond language... It's just hard as hell to talk about!

I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying, that the real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is
in control, absolutely no one. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. There may be entities seeking
control, but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself. It's like trying to control a dream.

I am convinced that if there were no shamanic pipeline, there would be no higher life, as we know it, on this planet. ...
We are all cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body it is hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern of
the whole of what is happening, and yet we can sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern...

Terence McKenna (History Ends In Green - Audio Lecture)

If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.

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. And so to whatever degree any one of us, can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to
the building to the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that after all it what
it's really all about.

Terence McKenna

Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves... What needs to be done is that
fundamental, ontological conceptions of reality need to be redone. We need a new language, and to have a new
language we must have a new reality...

Terence McKenna (Speech - Psychedelic Society, 1984)

Nothing lasts... but nothing is lost either.

Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was an American philosopher, psychonaut, ethnobotanist,
lecturer, writer and author of several books. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic
drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, culture, technology and the theoretical
origins of human consciousness. He was also the creator of a mathematical theory of time based on patterns found in
the I Ching which he termed novelty theory.

Here are 73 mind-blowing quotes from the mushroom ambassador Terence McKenna:

1. “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.”

2. “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.”

3. “If you don’t smoke cannabis, you may spend your evening balancing your checking account. If you do smoke
cannabis you may spend your evening contemplating the causes of the Greek Renaissance.”
-Terence McKenna

4. “Stop consuming images and start producing them.”

– Terence McKenna”73

5. “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.”

6. “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.”

7. “The male dominant agenda is so fragile that any competitor is felt as a deadly foe.”
– Terence McKenna

8. “You simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead and get with the program of a living
world and the imagination.”

9. “The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”

10. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather
than products. This is terrifying news.”

11. “Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing
impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the
trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is
what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the
abyss and discovering its a feather bed.”

12. “Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening.”
13. “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 behaviour
and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”

14. “The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.  If artists cannot
find the way, then the way cannot be found.”

15. “Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem
which they faced.”

16. “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.”

17. “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.”

18. “We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to
ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.”

19. “The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.”

20. “You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.”

21. “If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.”

22. “Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.”

23. “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.”

24. “My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing
its opposite.”

25. “It’s clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the
engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision,
the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it’s not easy.”

26. “We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare
Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.”

27. “Some kind of dialog is now going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge and
nothing can stop it.”

28. “Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it’s very important to actually listen to
your own intuition rather than driving through it.”

29. “We need to interact with like-minded people throughout the world to establish the new intellectual order which
will be the salvation of mankind.”

30. “Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.”

31. “Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability
of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.”
32. “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. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic
behaviors are acceptable.”

33. “Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.”

34. “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.”

35. “The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and
it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of
anticipating the apocalypse.”

36. “Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now
come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.”

37. We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander
across the room and look at the thermostat.

38. “If you keep yourself as the final arbiter you will be less susceptible to infection by cultural illusion”

39. “The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer”

40. “The way you stretch the envelope of culture is by creating language.” 

41. “The real tension is not between matter and spirit, or time and space, the real tension is between information and
nonsense.”

42. “Nothing lasts but nothing is lost.”

43. “Matter is not lacking in magic, matter is magic.”

44. “People are so alienated from their own soul that when they meet their soul they think it comes from another star
system.”

45. “Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.”

46. “Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity”

47. “The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are
suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.  It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with
his nets, and you let these nets down – sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you
just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray.   At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the
minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing.  But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is
food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.”

48. “You don’t want to become so open-minded that the wind can whistle between your ears.”

49. “If you’re not the hero of your own novel, then what kind of novel is it? You need to do some heavy editing.”

50. “Culture is the effort to hold back the mystery, and replace it with a mythology.”

51. “Unexamined cultural values & limitations of language have made us unwitting prisoners of our own assumptions.”
52. “This is a society, a world, a planet dying because there is not enough consciousness, because there is not enough
awareness, enough coordination of intent-to-problem. And yet, we spend vast amounts of money stigmatizing people
and substances that are part of this effort to expand consciousness, see things in different ways, unleash creativity. Isn’t
it perfectly clear that business as usual is a bullet through the head?”

53. “The culmination of man’s effort in time will be the perfection and the release of the human soul. And it’s not that
we are ‘doing’ it. It’s that a natural law that we are still unaware of is inexorably unfolding.”

54. “Our world is in danger by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
And so to whatever degree any one of us, can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of
the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that after all is what it’s really all
about.”

55. “We have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community
to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the
least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are
handed down as control icons.”

56. “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.”

57. “Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness,
endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish
themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.

58. “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.”

59. “Personal empowerment means deconditioning yourself from the values and the programs of the society and
putting your own values and programs in place.”

60. “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 existance is defined in terms of control.”

61. “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. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic
behaviors are acceptable.”

61. “You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only
understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.”

62. “The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and
it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of
anticipating the apocalypse. If you go to Bosnia or Somalia or Peru or much of the third-world then it appears that the
apocalypse has already arrived.”

63. “We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander
across the room and look at the thermostat.”

64. “The cost of sanity, in this society, is a certain level of alienation.”

65. “The future of communication is the future of the evolution of the human soul.”

66. “Our need to feel part of the world seems to demand that we express ourselves through creative activity.”

67. “Culture is not your friend, it’s an impediment to understanding what’s going on. That’s why the words cult and
culture have a direct relationship to each other. Culture is an extremely repressive cult that leads to all kinds of
humiliation and degradation, and automatic, unquestioned and unthinking behaviour.”

68. “We are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get this, get that.’ And then you’re a
player, but you don’t want to play in the game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural
engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the
bones of a dying world.”

69. “We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own
roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re
worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away
to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is
shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your
associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant,
we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in
that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you
into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

70. “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.”

71. “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.”

72. “The internet is light at the end of the tunnel…it is creating a global society”

73. “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.”

“Psychedelics dissolve into the greater feeling of connectedness that underlies our being here, and to my mind that’s
the religious impulse. It’s not a laundry list of moral dos and don’ts, or a set of dietary prescriptions or practices: it’s a
sense of connectedness, responsibility for our fellow human beings and for the earth you walk on, and because these
psychedelics come out of that plant vegetable matrix they are the way back into it.”

The late, great Terence McKenna was a botantist, philosopher, author, speaker and self-proclaimed ‘psychonaut’ (an
explorer of consciousness through mind-altering, natural plants and fungi). Here are some of his most fascinating and
thought-provoking ideas on psychedelic substances, and in particular psilocybin (the key compound in magic
mushrooms). The quotes are taken from various books, articles and lectures across McKenna’s large body of work. If you
enjoy these insights, we recommend reading his books in full.
 “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.”

 “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.”

 “I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever
having sex.”

 “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.”

 “Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third storey
window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of
behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”

 “When you shed the cultural operating system, then, essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your
own psyche…and it’s from that position, a position outside the cultural operating system, that we can begin to
ask real questions about what does it mean to be human.”

 “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.”

 “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.”

 “Our culture, self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology and egocentric ideology, is the unhappy
inheritor of the dominator attitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants or substances is
somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. I will argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its
reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us of life’s meaning and made us enemies
of the planet, of ourselves, and our grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the
wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style.”

 “What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies
of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony.”

 “We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us
declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.”

 “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.”

 “Not to know one’s true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing. And, indeed, this image, sickeningly
Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their
authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media.
Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low
awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of
consuming.”
  “Could it not be that we are willing to pay the terrible toll that alcohol extracts because it is allowing us to
continue the repressive dominator style that keeps us all infantile and irresponsible participants in a dominator
world characterized by the marketing of ungratified sexual fantasy?”

 “The way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic
experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity…what we need is
a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we’re going in the universe and that true story
is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego
is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product
peddlers.”

McKenna genuinely believed that the psychedelic experience was a vital path to find a way out of the destruction
humanity has caused for itself

 “Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience
– and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in
the felt presence of immediate experience, but that’s what holds the community together.”
 “The idea that you could achieve a spiritual insight without suffering, soul-searching, flagellation, and that sort of
thing, is abhorrent to people because they believe that the vision of these higher dimensions should be
vouchsafed to the good, and probably to them only after death. It is alarming to people to think that they could
take a substance like psilocybin or DMT and have these kinds of experiences.”

 “What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies
of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get
them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected,
and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-
fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we’re calling the
psychedelic experience.”

 “You don’t go on bended knee to petition the official culture for your rights. You have to take them.”

 “We have to create culture. Don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own
roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if
you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re
giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or
have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and
your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told
‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a
player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of
the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being
manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

 “I believe that the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa gave us the model for all
religions to follow. And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, the
knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony
with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, we traded our birthright as
partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis,
and-if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament-planetary catastrophe.”

 “Shamanic ecstasy is an act of surrender that authenticates both the individual self and that which is
surrendered to, the mystery of being. Because our maps of reality are determined by our present circumstances,
we tend to lose awareness of the larger patterns of time and space. Only by gaining access to the Transcendent
Other can those patterns of time and space and our role in them be glimpsed.”

 “Our individuality, as people and as a species, is an illusion of bad language that the psychedelics dissolve into
the greater feeling of connectedness that underlies our being here, and to my mind that’s the religious impulse.
It’s not a laundry list of moral dos and don’ts, or a set of dietary prescriptions or practices: it’s a sense of
connectedness, responsibility for our fellow human beings and for the earth you walking around on, and
because these psychedelics come out of that plant vegetable matrix they are the way back into it.”
McKenna believed in exploring the inner, the private, the unseen. He advised people to create their own culture, their
own reality, and to understand the world through direct experience. Image and quote from Flickr user djandywdotcom,
used under CC license.

 “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.”

 “There is no question that a society that sets out to control its citizens’ use of drugs sets out on the slippery path
to totalitarianism…The war on drugs was never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long as
possible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wring the last few hundreds of millions of dollars in
illicit profits from the global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared.”

 “When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward toward the
futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within; the
paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.”

 “From a historical point of view, restricting the availability of addictive substances must be seen as a peculiarly
perverse example of Calvinist dominator thought – a system in which the sinner is to be punished in this world
by being transformed into an exploitable, of his cash, by the criminal/governmental combine that provides the
addictive substances.”

 “It’s very important that people take back their minds and that people analyse our dilemma in the context of the
entire human story from the descent onto the grassland to our potential destiny as citizens of the galaxy and the
universe. We are at a critical turning point…it’s up to each one of us to relate to this situation in a fashion that
will allow us to answer the question that will surely be put to us at some point in the future, which is: What did
you do to help save the world?”
  “If every alcoholic were a pothead, if every crack user were a pothead, if every smoker smoked only cannabis,
the social consequences of the ‘drug problem’ would be transformed. Yet, as a society we are not ready to
discuss the possibility of self-managed addictions and the possibility of intelligently choosing the plants we ally
ourselves to. In time, and perhaps out of desperation, this will come.”

 “When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward toward the
futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within; the
paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.”

 “The global triumph of Western values means we, as a species, have wandered into a state of prolonged
neurosis because of the absence of a connection to the unconscious. Gaining access to the unconscious through
plant hallucinogen use reaffirms our original bond to the living planet.”

Read More: http://www.trueactivist.com/terence-mckennas-most-mind-warping-thought-provoking-quotes-on-
psychedelics-freedom-and-spirituality/