Quotes by Terence McKenna

McKenna was one of the great visionary leapers of our time!
I plan on adding more quotes from this provocative mind. Please, check back!


We're really at a very terminal point on the process of our historical unfoldment,
in the same way that our hunter-gatherer phase led into agriculture and advanced
role specialization and urbanization and all that. Now we're ready to make another
leap. But this time it's going to be done in the light of consciousness, because
consciousness is what was garnered in the last leap. How this is done depends
essentially on the collective state of mind -- how malleable it is, how phobic of closure
it is, how open it is to the Logos, to the downloading of universal intent into Human
understanding (which is what I would call the Logos), and finally, how deeply it
operates in the light of Eros. How much love is there in this culture? How much of
what we call true Human-ness made the journey with us to this new time? We're
going to find out. We're going to find out by pooling the love that is in each of us,
in a form in which it is coextensively shared by all of us. There may be many ways
to talk about what this will feel like, what it will look like -- but what it will BE,
if it works, is Love. If it isn't Love, than it's less than a perfect sublimation of the
alchemical purpose -- and less-than-perfect is now off the menu. So the only way
up is out. Up and out!
--from a lecture at the Wetlands, NYC, 7.28.98


The Other plays with us and approaches us through the imagination and then a
critical juncture is reached. To go beyond this juncture requires abandonment of
old and ingrained habits of thinking and seeing. At that moment the world turns
lazily inside out and what was hidden is revealed: a magical modality, a different
mental landscape than one has ever known...and the landscape becomes real.

This is the realm of the cosmic giggle.

UFOs, elves and the teeming pantheon of all religions are the denizens of this
previously invisiblelandscape. One reaches through to the continents and oceans
of the imagination, worlds able to sustain anyone who will but play, and then
one lets the play deepen and deepen until it is a reality that few would even
dare to entertain.
--from True Hallucinations


When I think about the terms chaos, creativity and imagination, I see them as
a three-stroke engine of some sort. Each impels and runs the other and sets up
a reinforcing cycle that stabilizes organisms and conserves processes caught up
in the phenomenon of being. This is a self-synergizing engine whose power emerges
out of chaos, moves through creativity, travels into the imagination, returns back
into chaos, then extends out into creativity, and so on. It operates on many levels
simultaneously. The planet is undergoing a destiny.
--From Trialogues at the Edge of the West  


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