The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation – Terance McKenna

Terence McKenna is a name well known amongst the psychedelic community. A man whose lectures I have spent countless hours listening to. His theories are fantastic and his philosophies have greatly affected my life. He was given many titles psychonaut, ethno botanist, lecturer, mystic, shaman, author and philosopher. For those who are still unaware of this man and his great body of work, let me share a glimpse of what he had to offer. Today I’ve put together a number of this mans quotes, thoughts and theories for your reading pleasure.

“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.”
― Terence McKenna

“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, and don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own road show. 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.”
― Terence McKenna

“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.”
― Terence McKenna

‘True hallucinations’ a movie based on the life and work of McKenna. And in lead role will be non other than…Jim Carrey!

When Carrey was asked about why he was inspired to do this project, he claims:
"Much of the problem of the modern dilemma is that direct experience has been discounted and in its place all kinds of belief systems have been erected." Go Jim!

“The deeper you go into the psychedelic dimension the bigger it gets. I’ve seen things, which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will see again. I retreated to nature and I took five grams of dried mushrooms in order to prepare for this role”
― Jim Carrey

“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.”
― Terence McKenna

“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.”
― Terence McKenna

One of most intriguing of McKenna's theories and observations is his explanation for the origin of the human mind and human culture.

McKenna theory is that as the North African jungles receded toward the end of the most recent ice age, giving way to grasslands, a branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the branches and took up a life out in the open. Following around herds of ungulates, nibbling on what they could along the way. Among the new items in their diet were psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing in the dung of these ungulate herds. The changes caused by the introduction of this drug to the primate diet were many! McKenna theories, for instance, that synesthesia (the blurring of boundaries between the senses) caused by psilocybin led to the development of spoken language: the ability to form pictures in another person's mind through the use of vocal sounds.

Terence Mckenna - The stoned ape theory

When asked on his idea of what the perfect future is…

The scene opens on a world that appears totally primitive. People are naked, people are orgiastic, people are nomadic. But when they close there eyes there are menus hanging in space. Culture has been internalized. Culture isnt supposed to be internalized. All this talk about virtual reality, people don’t seem to notice, this is virtual reality. These are all ideas, ideas that have been forced into matter so that we could live in a reconstruction of our imagination. And de-constructed these virtual realities in which we live is the only way to get back to some sort of baseline of what it is to be human. And then you carry culture with you. Culture was never meant to be materially realized. Culture is an intellectual object like a philosophy or a belief system.

I hope you found this interesting? One short but powerful quote to finish...

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

Thanks for stopping in