Background Image
...
What We Need To Change Is Our Minds, That's The Part That's Doing Us Dirt And Dragging Us Under. How Can We Change Our Minds.
-Terence McKenna
...
Please Wait....
Translating....

What We Need To

Terence McKenna
...
What We Need To Change Is Our Minds, That's The Part That's Doing Us Dirt And Dragging Us Under. How Can We Change Our Minds.

Understanding the Quote: "what we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's..."

This quote by Terence McKenna reflects deeply on the theme of mind. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Mind, Needs, Dirt, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Terence McKenna interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna is celebrated for insightful thoughts on mind and needs. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

Views: 6
Topic
Mind
Needs
Dirt
More From Terence McKenna
Psychedelics Can Carry You Farther And Faster Than Most People Care To Go. Once You Get To Psychedelics, It's No Longer A Matter Of Seeking The Answer, You Have Found The Answer. Now The Issue Changes Dramatically, You Must Face The Answer.
Issues
People
Answers
The Same Organizational Principles Which Called Us Forth Into Self-reflection Have Called Forth Self-reflection Out Of The Planet Itself. And The Problem Then Is For Us To Suspect This, Act On Our Suspicion, And Be Good Detectives, And Track Down The Spirit In Its Lair. And This Is What Shamans Are Doing. They Are Hunters Of Spirit.
Reflection
Self
Track
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.
Ocean
Ideas
Imagination
A History-stopping Archetype Is Being Released Into The Skies Of This Planet, And If We Are Not Careful It Will Halt All Intellectual Inquiry In The Same Way That The Christos Archetype Halted Intellectual Inquiry In The Hellenistic Age.
Sky
Intellectual
Age
I Really Think There Is A Very Large Distinction Between Synthetic And Naturally Occurring Drugs. ... I Think That These Plants 'take People' As Much As People Take The Plants. ... When You Take One Of These Ancient, Ancient Hallucinogens You Are Locking In To The Morphogenetic Fields Of All The People Who Ever Took It.
Thinking
People
Drug
Half The Time You Think Your Thinking You’re Actually Listening
Thinking
Mind Blowing
Listening
I'm Not An Abuser. It Takes Me A Long Time To Assimilate Each Experience. And I Never Have Lost My Respect For It. I Mean I Really Feel Dread. It Is One Of The Emotions I Always Feel As I Approach It, Because I Have No Faith That My Sails Won't Be Ripped This Time.
Mean
Long
Emotion
The Data Stream Has Been Corrupted, Return To First Principles.
Data
Principles
Firsts
It's My Belief That One Of The Unconscious Reasons Which Underlies The Odd Attitude Of The Establishment Toward Hallucinogens Is The Fact That They Bring The Mystery To The Surface As An Individual Experience. In Other Words, You Do Not Understand The Psychedelic Experience By Getting A Report From Time Magazine Or Even The Economist. You Only Understand The Psychedelic Experience By Having It.
Attitude
Facts
Hallucinogens
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.
Responsibility
Mind Blowing
Understanding
The Terror Of Drugs Is A Terror Of Giving Up Control. This Is What People Are Most Alarmed About By Psychedelics, Is The Giving Up Control.
Giving Up
People
Drug
The State In The Matter Of Drugs Should Not, Any More Than In The Matter Of Sex, Act As The Secret Agent For The Agenda Of The Church.
Sex
Drug
Secret
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.
Dream
Commitment
Dmt
When We Free Ourselves We Are Not Freed Into A Void. When We Free Ourselves We Are Freed Into A Dimension In Which Art Is An Obligation.
Art
Void
Dimensions
The World Is Not An Unsolved Problem For Scientists Or Sociologists. The World Is A Living Mystery.
World
Mystery
Problem
There Is An Angel Within The Monkey Struggling To Get Free, And This Is What The Historical Crisis Is All About.
Struggle
Angel
Historical
I Believe That The Place To Search For Extraterrestrials Is In The Psychic Dimension.
Believe
Psychics
Dimensions
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.
Government
Information Processing
Dmt
We're Not Dropping Out Here, We're Infiltrating And Taking Over.
Dropping Out
Psychedelic
Dropping
I'm As Against Restricting Access To Drugs As I Am To Burning Books. It Offends Me In The Same Way.
Book
Drug
Burning
The Shaman Has Access To A Superhuman Dimension And A Superhuman Condition, And By Being Able To Do That He Affirms The Potential For Transcendence In All People. He Is An Exemplar, If You Will.
People
Able
Dimensions
We Are, In Fact, Hyper-dimentional Objects Of Some Sort Which Cast A Shadow Into Matter, And The Shadow In Matter Is The Body. And At Death, What Happens Basically, Is That The Shadow Withdraws, Or The Thing Which Cast The Shadow Withdraws, And Metabolism Ceases, And Matter Which Had Been Organized Into A Dissipative Structure In A Very Localized Area, Sustaining Itself Against Entropy By Cycling Material In And Degrading It And Expelling It, That Whole Phenomenon Ceases, But The Thing Which Ordered It Is Not Affected By That.
Cycling
Shadow
Body
I Think The Cybernetic Matrix Is A Tremendous Tool For Feminizing, And Radicalizing, And Psychedelicizing The Social Matrix. I See Computers As Entirely Feminine.
Thinking
Tools
Computer
You Put Two Egos Together And You've Either Got A Conflict, Which Is Always Interesting, Or Better Yet, A Love Affair.
Two
Interesting
Ego
I Think That A Lot Of People Are Making A Lot Of Money Spreading Anxiety. Anxiety Sells.
Thinking
People
Anxiety
I Have Nothing But Scorn For All Weird Ideas Other Than My Own.
Ideas
Scorn
My Own
Cyberspace Is The Human Transition Into A Mathematical Super Space Where We As A Collectivity Become Optionally A Single Point Of View.
Views
Space
Transition
What We Really Are Is A Community Of Mind, Knitted Together By Codes And Symbols, Intuitions, Aspirations, Histories, Hopes - The Invisible World Of The Human Experience Is Far More Real To Us Than The Visible World, Which Is Little More Than A Kind Of Stage Or Screen On Which We Move.
Real
Moving
Community
The Danger Is [in Using Psychedelic Drugs], Just To Put It Out There, Is Madness.
Drug
Psychedelic
Madness
If We Were To Place Our Power At The Service Of Our Imaginations Rather Than Our Primate Politics We Would Create A Civilization Worthy Of The Name.
Civilization
Names
Imagination
Time Will Perfect Matter.
Perfect
Matter
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.
Spiritual
Emotional
Mind Blowing
There Is No Mundane Dimension Really, If You Have The Eyes To See It, It Is All Transcendental.
Eye
Dimensions
Transcendental
We Can Will The Perfect Future Into Being By Becoming Microcosms Of The Perfect Future.
Perfect
Becoming
Microcosm
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.
Mind Blowing
Apes
Facts
I Think Really What Unites Psychedelic People Is The Faith In The Power Of The Imagination.
Thinking
People
Imagination
I Connect The Psychedelic Dimension To The Dimension Of Inspiration And Dream.
Dream
Inspiration
Dimensions
A Lot Of People Pass Through The Thinking I'm A Guru And Take Enough Trips To Understand That No, I Was Just A Witness. I Was Just A Witness.
Thinking
People
Enough
Having Lived Long Enough To Go At Least Once Or Twice Around The Block, I'm Noticing That The Strangeness Is Not Receding The Strangeness Seems To Be Accelerating.
Block
Long
Enough
We Need A Pharmacological Intervention On Anti-social Behavior Or We Are Not Going To Get Hold Of Our Dilemma.
Needs
Social Behavior
Dilemma
The Whole Of The Amazonian Narcotic Complex, As It's Called In The Old Literature, Is Based On Activation Of Dmt By One Strategy Or Another.
Dmt
Literature
Strategy
When We Really Understand Time Travel We May Find Out It's As Common As Dirt And Has Been Going On All Around Us Is All Kinds Of Physical Processes.
May
Dirt
Common
Language Betrays, In Order To Mean.
Mean
Order
Language
It Puts People Who Are Into This Psychedelic Thing In An Entirely Different Stance From All Other Spiritual Seekers, Because All Other Spiritual Seekers Are Furiously Seeking. Psychedelic People Are Holding It Back With All Their Power, Because They Are In The Presence Of The Mystery. And Then The Trick Is To Get A Spigot On It So That It Can Be Turned On And Off Rather Than Coming At You Like A Tidal Wave A Mile High And Twenty Miles Wide.
Spiritual
People
Twenties
Who Is To Say What Is Real And What Is Not?'real' Is A Distinction Of A Naïve Mind.
Real
Mind
Psychedelic
I Think Psychedelics Are Sort Of Like Doing Calisthenics In Preparation For The Marathon At The End Of Time.
Thinking
Preparation
Marathon
For Talking Monkeys To Speak Of Truth Is Hubris Of The Highest Degree. Where Is It Writ Large That Talking Monkeys Should Be Able To Model The Cosmos? If A Sea Urchin Or A Racoon Were To Propose To You That It Had A Viable Truth About The Universe, The Absurdity Of That Assertion Would Be Self-evident, But In Our Case We Make An Exception.
Self
Talking
Sea
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.
Silly
People
Mind Blowing
To Contact The Cosmic Giggle, To Have The Flow Of Casuistry Begin To Give Off Synchronistic Ripples, Whitecaps In The Billows Of The Coincidental Ether, If You Will. To Achieve That, A Precondition Is A Kind Of Unconsciousness, A Kind Of Drifting, A Certain Taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, A Certain Assumptions That Things Are Simpler Than They Are, Almost Always Precedes What Mircea Eliade Called ‘the Rupture Of Plane’ That Indicates That There Is An Archetypal World, An Archetypal Power Behind Profane Appearances.
Eye
Giving
Balls
The Real Nature Of Our Predicament Is Completely Opaque To Us.
Real
Opaque
Predicaments
The Monkey Body Has Carried Us To This Moment Of Release, But We Are Coming More And More To Exist In A World Made By The Human Imagination.
Imagination
World
Body
Modernity Is A Desert, And We Are Jungle Monkeys. And So New Evolutionary Selective Pressures Are Coming To Bear Upon The Human Situation, New Ideas Are Coming To The Fore. Psilocybin Is A Selective Filter For This. The Wish To Go To Space Is A Selective Filter For This. Just The Wish To Know Your Own Mind Is A Selective Filter For This.
Ideas
Space
Mind
Time Is A Series Of Fluctuating Variables.
Variables
Series
Since The Very Beginning Of Culture, What We Seem To Be Are Animals Which Take In Raw Material And Excrete It Imprinted With Ideas.
Animal
Ideas
Raw Materials
It’s Pretty Simple, The Ethical Life. It’s Just Demanding.
Simple
Ethical
Culture Is More And More Consciously Becoming A Project Carried Out In The Domain Of Language By, For Instance, Propaganda Both Governmental And Commercial.
Culture
Becoming
Language
I Think That's The Job Of Each Of Us - To Show Our Best Toys And Our Best Tricks That Lift Us And Our Friends To Higher And Higher Levels. There Is No End To This Bootstrapping Process. The Future Of The Human Mind And Body And The Future Of Humans Together Is Endlessly Bright.
Jobs
Thinking
Mind
This Is A Very Central Part Of The Psychedelic Attitude Toward The World, To Entertain All Possibilities But To Never Commit To Belief. Belief Always Being Seen As A Kind Of Trap, Because If You Belief Something You Are Forever Precluded From Believing Its Opposite.
Attitude
Believe
Opposites
I Think What We Have To Do Is Convince People That Matter Is Tacky.
Thinking
People
Tacky
Psychedelics Are Probably Responsible For Every Aspect Of Human Evolution Apart From The Decline In Bodyhair.
Dmt
Psychedelic
Evolution
We Can't Sell Short The Spiritual Power Of Cannabis, Especially When Eaten.
Spiritual
Cannabis
Spiritual Power
Worrying Is Betting Against Yourself.
Worry
Betting
I Mean Everybody Knows There's Something Wrong With The World And If You Read Left Wing Politicians Or Deconstructionists Or Thoughtful Historians They Will Offer Thoughtful Critiques Of Our Situation. But The Question Is, You Know, The Tolstoyian Question; 'what Is To Be Done?'
Mean
Thoughtful
Wings
I Believe In Extraterrestrials, But I Believe That Real Extraterrestrials Are So Peculiar That The Job Is To Recognize Them.
Jobs
Real
Believe
It [culture] Invites People To Diminish Themselves, And Dehumanize Themselves By Behaving Like Machines, Meme Processors Of Memes Passed Down From Madison Avenue, And Hollywood, And What Have You.
People
Hollywood
Culture
It's A Relationship Like To A Crusty Zen Master, Or Something Like That. And It Is Really Like Another Entity Because You Cannot Predict The Answers.
Answers
Masters
Entity
How Do We Fight Back? By Creating Art.
Inspirational
Life
Art
Without An Understanding And A Familiarity Of The Psychedelic Experience You Should Be Sued For Fraud If You're Practicing Psychotherapy.
Understanding
Psychedelic
Should
You See, A Secret Is Not Something Untold. It’s Something Which Can’t Be Told.
Mind Blowing
Secret
Blowing It
Our Ability To Destroy Ourselves Is The Mirror Image Of Our Ability To Save Ourselves.
Mirrors
Ability
Mirror Image
Alchemy Is About The Generation Of A Psychic Construct, A Wholeness, A Thing Which Has Many Properties, Which Is Paradoxical, Which Is Both Mind And Matter, Which Can Do Anything.
Psychics
Mind
Matter
We Want Freedom. We Want Freedom From The Constraints Of The Cycles Of The Sun And The Moon. We Want Freedom From Drought And Weather, Freedom From The Movement Of Game, The Growth Of Plants, Freedom From Control From Mendacious Popes And Kings, Freedom From Ideology, Freedom From Want. This Idea Of Freeing Ourselves Has Become The Compass Of The Human Journey.
Kings
Moon
Journey
This Is The Message Of Your Life And My Life - It’s That Nothing Lasts. Heraclitus Said It: Panta Rhei. All Flows, Nothing Lasts. Not Your Enemies, Not Your Fortune, Not Who You Sleep With At Night, Not The Books, Not The House In Saint-tropez, Not Even The Children - Nothing Lasts. To The Degree That You Avert Your Gaze From This Truth, You Build The Potential For Pain Into Your Life. Everything Is This Act Of Embracing The Present Moment, The Felt Presence Of Experience, And Then Moving On To The Next Felt Moment Of Experience. It’s Literally Psychological Nomadism Is What It Is.
Children
Pain
Moving
One Way Of Assessing The Toxicity Of A Drug Is How Do You Feel The Next Day?
Next Day
Drug
Way
National Governments Are Under Paid, Under Staffed, And Under Talented.
Government
Paid
The Notion Of Illegal Plants And Animals Is Obnoxious And Ridiculous.
Life
Animal
Ridiculous
No One Is In Charge Of This Process, This Is What Makes History So Interesting, It's A Runaway Freight Train On A Dark And Stormy Night.
Dark
Night
Interesting
We Get To The Point Then With Modern Science Where You Could Almost Say That Modern Science Is The Art Of Describing Those Systems So Crude In Their Structure That They Are Not Subject To Temporal Variables.
Art
Variables
Modern
The Only Evil That Associates Itself With Mushrooms Is Taking Too Little.
Mushrooms
Evil
Littles
I Believe That Great Weirdness Stalks The Universe. That's Not The Issue With Me, But It Is Not Tacky. It Is Not Tacky.
Believe
Issues
Tacky
I Believe That The Totemic Image For The Future Is The Octopus. This Is Because The Squids And Octopi Have Perfected A Form Of Communication That Is Both Psychedelic And Telepathic; A Model For The Human Communications Of The Future. In The Not-too-distant Future Men And Women May Shed The Monkey Body To Become Virtual Octopi Swimming In A Silicon Sea.
Believe
Communication
Swimming
Liberate Yourself From The Illusion Of Culture. Take Responsibility For What You Think And What You Do.
Responsibility
Thinking
Culture
Being Imposes Some Kind Of Obligation To Find Out What's Going On.
Kind
Obligation
I Don't Think That Mass Drug Taking Is A Good Idea. But I Think That We Must Have A Deputized Minority, A Shamanic Professional Class If You Will, Whose Job Is To Bring Ideas Out Of The Deep Black Water And Show Them Off To The Rest Of Us And Perform For Our Culture Some Of The Cultural Functions That Shaman Perform In Pre-literate Cultures.
Jobs
Thinking
Class
The Numinous Depth Of The Mystery That Seems To Have Called Us Out Of The Animal Mind Is Completely Impenetrable To Modern Analysis.
Animal
Mind
Depth
It's Getting Funnier Because Everybody's Categories Are Disintegrating, And The Cult Of Political Correctness Dictates That We Never Point Out That Other People Don't Make Sense.
People
Political
Categories
Inevitably Out Of The Psychedelic Experience Emerges Not Despair, Not Self-indulgence, But Wild-eyed Idealism, That's The Inevitable Product Of Any Psychedelically Driven Social Process.
Self
Despair
Psychedelic
Television, Introduced At The Close Of World War Ii, Has Become A Form Of Electronic Heroin, And It Isn't Even Your Trip. They Don't Even Let You Go On Your Own Trip, You Get A Trip Designed By Madison Avenue.
War
Goes On
Television
And What We're Looking Toward Is A Moment When The Artificial Language Structures Which Bind Us Within The Notion Of Ourselves Are Dissolved In The Presence Of The Realization That We Are A Part Of Nature. And When That Happens, The Childhood Of Our Species Will Pass Away, And We Will Stand Tremulously On The Brink Of Really The First Moment Of Coherent Human Civilization.
Civilization
Childhood
Passing Away
The Surface Of Things Is Not Where Attention Should Rest.
Inspirational
Life
Attention
This Is Where I Think The Psychedelics Come In Because They Are Anticipations Of The Future. They Seem To Channel Information That Is Not Strictly Governed By The Laws Of Normal Causality. So That There Really Is A Prophetic Dimension, A Glimpse Of The Potential Of The Far Centuries Of The Future Through These Compounds.
Thinking
Law
Dimensions
Nature Is Not Our Enemy, To Be Raped And Conquered. Nature Is Ourselves, To Be Cherished And Explored. Shamanism Has Always Known This, And Shamanism Has Always, In Its Most Authentic Expressions, Taught That The Path Required Allies. These Allies Are The Hallucinogenic Plants And The Mysterious Teaching Entities, Luminous And Transcendental, That Reside In That Nearby Dimension Of Ecstatic Beauty And Understanding That We Have Denied Until It Is Now Nearly Too Late.
Teaching
Expression
Understanding
It Seems To Me Far More Likely That An Advanced Civilization Would Communicate Inter Dimensionally And Telepathically.
Civilization
Communicate
Seems
Ideologies Are Cultural Memes. They Are The Most Confining Of The Cultural Memes. That's Where Culture Gets Real Ugly. It Is When You Rub Up Against Its Ideologies.
Real
Culture
Ugly
In 1948, Television Was Introduced, And Millions And Millions Of People Lead Larval, Low-awareness, Warehoused Lives Mainlining An Electronic Drug Straight Into Their Brains.
People
Drug
Brain
In Shamanism And Certain Yogas, Taoist Yoga, Claim Very Clearly That The Purpose Is To Familiarize Yourself With This After-death Body, In Life, And Then The Act Of Dying Will Not Create Confusion In The Psyche. You Will Recognize What Is Happening. You Will Know What To Do. And You Will Make The Clean Break.
Yoga
Confusion
Dying
The Central Figure In The Archaic Revival Is The Shaman.
Revival
Figures
We Cannot Evolve Faster Than Our Language. The Edge Of Being Is The Edge Of Meaning, And Somehow We Have To Push The Edge Of Meaning. We Have To Extend It.
Language
Faster
Evolve
If You Charge Off With Some Political Agenda That Is Not Informed By Clarity, You Are Going To End Up With Business As Usual. The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions But It Is Not Paved With Clarity.
Political
Usual
Agendas
What History Is, Essentially, Is A Careening, Out-of-control Effort To Find Our Way Back To This State Of Primordial Balance.
Effort
Balance
Way
The Mind Is A Far Bigger Domain Than We Ever Imagined.
Mind
Bigger
Domain
We Are Somehow The Children Of The Planet, We Are Somehow Its Finest Hour; We Bind Time, We Bind The Past, We Anticipate The Future - We Are Going Hyper-spatial; We Are Claiming A Whole New Dimension For Biology That It Never Claimed Before. We Are Actually Becoming A Fourth-dimensional Kind Of Creature. Our Future Is Somehow With Us, As We Seem To Be Able To Move Through Metamorphosis Into Our Own Imaginations - A Super Civilization Spread Throughout Space And Time. Our Future Is A Mystery, Our Destiny Is To Live In The Imagination.
Children
Moving
Past
Belief Is A Form Of Infantilism. There Is No Ground For Believing Anything.
Believe
Belief
Form
The Miracle Of Our Predicament Is Not How Long Everything Has Been In Place But How Brief It All Has Been.
Long
Miracle
Predicaments
It Doesn't Matter What Your Cultural Conditioning Is, It Falls Into Question Under The Influence Of The Psychedelic. And For Most People That's Frightening.
Fall
People
Matter
This Is How Magic Is Done. By Hurling Yourself Into The Abyss And Discovering Its A Feather Bed.
Mind Blowing
Magic
Bed
In Other Words, All These Things You Might Cling To, Catholicism, Democratic Ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, All Of These Things Are Exposed [through Use Of Psychedelics] As Simply Quaint Cultural Artifacts, Painted Masks And Rattles Assembled By People Of Good Intent But Clearly Not Great Grasp Of The Situation.
Democratic Ideals
People
Might
I Started Out In Psychedelic Drugs, And People Said It Was A Flight From Reality. It Still Is A Flight From Reality, But I Think Reality Is Now A Bit More Scary Than The Drugs We Used To Fly From It, So Long Ago.
Thinking
Reality
Long Ago
What I Think Is Going On Is That Probably Language Was Entertainment Long Before It Was Meaning. It's A Kind Of Tuneless Singing.
Thinking
Long
Singing
It's No Big Deal About How You Get Language To Evolve. You Cause Language To Evolve By Saying New And Intelligent Things To Each Other.
Intelligent
Causes
Language
I Think There Is A Global Commonality Of Understanding Coming Into Being. And It Is Not Necessarily Fostered By Institutions.
Thinking
Understanding
Institutions
Every Step Into Freedom Contains Within It The Potential For Greater Bondage.
Steps
Bondage
Greater
Once You Have The Psychedelic Tool In Hand Then Some Real Choices Have To Be Made.
Real
Hands
Choices
Behind Us: The Unknown. Before Us: The Secret.
Secret
Behinds
And That We Cannot Go To Space With Our Feet In The Mud. Nor Can We In Fact Turn Ourselves Into An Eco-sensitive Hallucinogenic-based Culture On Earth Unless We Fuse These Dichotomous Opposites. It Is Only In A Coincidencia Oppositorum, A Union Of Opposites, That Does Not Strive For Closure, That We Are Going To Find Cultural Sanity. And This Is The Thing That The Entheogens, The Hallucinogens, Deliver With Such Clarity And Regularity. They Raise Paradox To A Level Of Intensity That No One Can Evade.
Opposites
Feet
Space
If We Could Feel What We Are Doing To The Earth, We Would Stop Immediately.
Earth
Feels
Ifs
Culture Is Your Operating System.
Culture
Programming
Operating Systems
We're Not Mere Spectators, Or A Cosmic Accident, Or Some Sideshow, Or The Greek Chorus To The Main Event. The Human Experience Is The Main Event.
Greek
Events
Human Experience
If You Take Psychedelics And The Internet And Music And Put All Of That Together You Have The Basis For A New Community That Is Wider And Deeper Than You Know. The People Who Are Building The New Machines, Who Are Designing The New Circuitry, Who Are Writing The New Code Are All Freaks. They Work For Capitalist Dogs, Of Course, Because We All Do, But The Creative Thrust Of These Technologies Is Being Driven By People Just Like You And Me.
Dog
Writing
Technology
There's Only The Integrity Of Doing And Having Done.
Integrity
Done
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.
Reality
Sea
Moments
I'm Proposing On One Level That Hallucinogens Be Thought Of As Almost As Social Pheromones That Regulate The Rate At Which Language Develops, And Therefore Regulate Human Culture Generally.
Culture
Pheromones
Levels
The Psychedelic Universe, Whatever It Is, Is The Major Datum Of Experience. It's Larger Than This Planet. Nobody Knows How Large It Is. The Further In You Go The Bigger It Gets. We Don't Know What To Make Of Something Like That. It's The Reverse Of Our Expectations.
Data
Expectations
Psychedelic
You Are Not Naked When You Take Off Your Clothes. You Still Wear Your Religious Assumptions, Your Prejudices, Your Fears, Your Illusions, Your Delusions. When You Shed The Cultural Operating System, Then Essentially You Stand Naked Before The Inspection Of Your Own Psyche.
Religious
Clothes
Prejudice
Now, Through The Catalytic Interaction With Technology, The Human Species Is Getting Set To Redefine Itself.
Technology
Interaction
Humans
The Intellectual Tension That Seems To Work Its Way Through This Society Almost Like Fat Through Meat Is The Tension Between Scientific Reductionism And The Deeply Felt Intuition Of Most People That There Is A Spiritual Dimension, Or A Hidden Dimension, Or A Transcendental Dimension.
Spiritual
People
Intellectual
The Good News About Psychedelics Is That They Are Incredibly Democratic. Even The Clueless Can Be Swept Along If The Dose Is Sufficient.
Clueless
News
Democratic
Human Populations That Do Not Have Contact With The Psychedelic Tremendum Are Neurotic Because They Are Male Ego Dominated.
Ego
Males
Population
The Gaian Mind Is What Were Calling The Psychedelic Experience. Its An Experience Of The Living Fact Of The Entelechy Of The Planet - And Without That Experience We Wander In A Desert Of Bogus Ideologies. But With That Experience The Compass Of The Self Can Be Set.
Self
Mind
Desert
The Internet Is Light At The End Of The Tunnel. I Don't Care If It's Being Used To Peddle Pornography, I Don't Care If It's Being Trivialized In A Thousand Ways. Anything Can Be Trivialized. The Important Point Is That It Is Leveling The Playing Field Of Global Society. It Is Creating De-facto An Entirely New Set Of Political Realities. None Of The Constipated, Oligarchic Structures That Are Resisting This Were Ever Asked. Their Greed Betrayed Them Into Investing In This In The First Place Without Ever Fully Grasping What The Implications Of It Were For Their Larger Agenda.
Reality
Tunnels
Light
The Plants Are The Pipeline Into The Gaian Intention. It's Just Not A Coincidence That These Plants Carry This Immense Spiritual Message. They Are The Pipeline Of Gaian Intentionality.
Spiritual
Pipeline
Messages
The Traditional Manner Of Taking Psilocybin Is To Take A Very Healthy Dose, In The Vicinity Of 15 Mg. On An Empty Stomach In Total Darkness.
Healthy
Darkness
Psilocybin
Art's Task Is To Save The Soul Of Mankind.. Anything Less Is A Dithering While Rome Burns.
Inspirational
Life
Art
This Is A General Comment That You Should Take A Committed Dose Of Whatever It Is You're Taking So That There Is No Ambiguity, Because There's Nothing Worse Than A Sub-threshold Psychedelic Experience.
Psychedelic
Should
Threshold
What Is Always Left Out Of Descriptions Of The Psychedelic State, The Deep Psychedelic State, Is How Weird It Is.
Psychedelic
States
Description
Impressionism Is Simply Twenty Minutes Into Lsd.
Twenties
Lsd
Minutes
A Great Turning Point Is In The Offing. The World Is Changing. It's Changed Before, But Not For A Long Time In Our Lives, Not Since Before Our Lives. But Now It's Changing, And There Are Many Many Possibilities.
Long
World
Possibility
So What Needs To Be Done Is To Spread The Idea That Anxiety Is Inappropriate. It's Sort Of Like We Who Are Psychedelic Have To Function As Sitters For Society, Because Society Is Going To Thrash, And Resist, And Think It's Dying, And Be Deluded, And Regurgitate Unconscious Material, And So Forth And So On. And The Role Then, I Think, For Psychedelic People Is To Try And Spread Calm.
Thinking
Ideas
People
A Long Long Time Ago I Took An Oath To Tell All Secrets That Came My Way. Don't Tell Me A Secret, I Won't Keep It. I'm Against Secrets, I'm Against Hierarchies, Lineages, All Assumption Of Special Knowledge On The Part Of Anyone In The Presence Of Anyone Else Is Abhorrent To Me. I Mean, I Am A True Anarchist First And Foremost.
Mean
Long
Secret
For Me It's An Issue Of Are We Afraid Of Ourselves? And We Inherit A Huge Bunch Of Idealogical Baggage, Not Only Christianity, But Freudianism, And Marxism . . . We Inherit All Kinds Of Idealogical Baggage Designed To Make Us Fear Ourselves.
Issues
Baggage
Kind
It Is Now Very Clear That Techniques Of Machine-human Interfacing, Pharmacology Of The Synthetic Variety, All Kinds Of Manipulative Techniques, All Kinds Of Data Storage, Imaging And Retrieval Techniques - All Of This Is Coalescing Toward The Potential Of A Truly Demonic Or Angelic Kind Of Self-imaging Of Our Culture... And The People Who Are On The Demonic Side Are Fully Aware Of This And Hurrying Full-tilt Forward With Their Plans To Capture Everyone As A 100% Believing Consumer Inside Some Kind Of A Beige Furnished Fascism That Won't Even Raise A Ripple.
Believe
Self
Data
We Love To Congratulate Ourselves On The Forward-leaning Liberal Society That We Live In, And The Truth Is It's A Bunch Of Rattle Snake-handling Fundamentalists That Are Much Closer To Stalin Than They Are To Fdr Or Anybody Else Like That.
Snakes
Truth Is
Bunch
And The Whole Schtick Of The Psychedelic Experience, I Think, Is Reclaim Immediate Experience, Realize That You Out Vote All Parliaments, Police Forces, And Major Newspapers On The Planet Because, Who Knows, They May Be Illusions.
Thinking
Police
May
You Aren't An Object. You're A Process Of Some Sort.
Process
Objects
This Is The Nature Of Going Forward Into Being: A Series Of Self-transforming Ascents Of Level.
Self
Levels
Ascent
The Only Real Experience That Counts, Is Your Own.
Real
And I Want To Thank All The Women That Support Me. I Have Wonderful Support Systems From Women Of All Types Who Seem Dedicated To The Notion That Terence Mckenna Can Always Be Improved. I'm Extremely Grateful For That. The Frontiers Are Enormous In That Dimension.
Grateful
Support Systems
Dimensions
And Yet My, Not Only My Faith, But My Experience Has Led Me To Believe That The World Is Not A Construction Of Space And Time And Matter And Energy. That That Mapping Is Insufficient. That The World Is Instead Some Kind Of A Linguistic Construct. It Is More In The Nature Of A Sentence, Or A Novel, Or A Work Of Art Than It Is In The Nature Of These Machine Models Of Interlocking Law That We Inherit Out Of A Thousand Years Of Rational Reductionism.
Art
Believe
Space
[dmt] Raises All The Questions In A Hurry. It's So Intense And So Oriented Toward The Other And The Visual And The Hallucinogenic That It Isn't Really Like A Drug. It's More Like An Event That You Ran Into. You Just Came Around A Corner And There Was The Unspeakable.
Dmt
Drug
Events
For Unknown Reasons, There Is A Tremendous Concentration Of Psychoactive Plants On The South American Continent. The South American Continent Has More Known Hallucinogens Than The Rest Of The Planet Combined.
Hallucinogens
Reason
Plant
People Are, In The Confines Of Their Own Apartments, Becoming Magellans Of The Interior World And Reaching Out To This Alien Thing And Beginning To Map It And Bring Back Stories That Can Only Be Compared To The Kind Of Stories That The Chroniclers Of The New World Brought Back To Spain At The Close Of The 15th Century.
People
Spain
Stories
Skywalker Is A Direct Translation Of The Word Shaman Out Of The Tungusic, Which Is Where Siberian Shamanism Comes From. So These Heroes That Are Being Instilled In The Heart Of The Culture Are Shamanic Heroes. They Control A Force Which Is Bigger Than Everybody And Holds The Galaxy Together.
Hero
Heart
Together
‎the Way You Understand And Investigate Time Is By Moving Inward, Into Metabolism. The Human Body Is A Knot In Time.
Wisdom
Moving
Inward
Nobody Should Be Allowed More Than Fifty Years To Get Their Act Together.
Years
Together
Fifty
History, Call It 15,000 Or 25,000 Years Of Duration, Is The Story Of An Animal, Some Kind Of Complex Animal, Becoming Conscious.
Animal
Years
Stories
Time Is A Topological Manifold. It Is A Surface. Events Flow Across It Like Water Over Land And Like Water Flowing Over Land, When The Land Is Flat, The Water Becomes Reflective And Moves Slowly. When The Landscape Becomes Disrupted, The Water Moves Faster And Chaotic Attractors Appear And New Kinds Of Activity Emerge And Out Of That New Activity, There Comes The New States That Define The Future.
Moving
Land
Water
This Unique Strategy That The Advanced Primates Created, The Strategy Of Using Language To Bind Time, Is What The Process We Call 'civilization' Has Been All About.
Unique
Civilization
Language
I Think What's Really Happening Is That A Dialogue Opens Up Between The Ego And These Larger, More Integrated Parts Of The Psyche That Are Normally Hidden From View.
Thinking
Views
Ego
Capitalism Is Not A Human Being. Capitalism Is A Moloch, A God, A God Of Bloody Sacrifice That Sees Human Beings As Ants
Sacrifice
Ants
Bloody
One Has Attained A Very Fortunate Incarnation, I Think, To Be In A Culture, In A Place, In A Time When Psychedelic Knowledge Is Available.
Thinking
Culture
Psychedelic
Earth Is A Place Where Language Has Literally Become Alive. Language Has Infested Matter; It Is Replicating And Defining And Building Itself. And It Is In Us.
Alive
Earth
Matter
What I'm Talking About Is Actually Is The Mystery Of Being As Existential Fact. That There Is Something That Haunts This World That Can Take Apart And Reduce Every Single One Of Us To A Mixture Of Terror And Ecstasy, Fear And Trembling. It Is Not An Idea, That's The Primary Thing To Bear In Mind. It's An Experience.
Talking
Ideas
Mind
We Are Living In A Very Pivotal Time. The Time That We Inherit From Science Is A Time To Humble You, To Dwarf You. It Tells You That The Sun Will Not Fluxuate For Another Billion Years, That Species Come And Go, And, In Other Words, On A Temporal Scale You Don't Matter. And That Now Doesn't Matter. But When You Look At The Release Of Energy, The Asymptotic Speeding Up Of Processes, We Tend To Be Xenophobically Oriented Toward The Human.
Humble
Dwarves
Years
I Have A Skeptical And Cranky Side, And I'm Forever Puzzled Why People Believe The, Seeming To Me, Dumb Things That They Choose To Believe.
Believe
People
Forever
Shamanism Is Not Some Obscure Concern Of Cultural Anthropologists. Shamanism Is How Religion Was Practiced For Its First Million Years. Up Until About 12,000 Years Ago There Was No Other Form Of Religion On This Planet. That Was How People Attained Some Kind Of Access To The Sacred.
Years
People
Firsts
The Central Point About The Psychedelic Experience Is The Content Of The Experience. And This Has Been Occluded Or Obfuscated By The Behavioral And Statistical And Scientific Methods That Have Been Brought To Bear To Study Hallucinogenic Experience.
Scientific Method
Bears
Psychedelic
I Believe That What Makes The Psychedelic Experience So Central Is That It Is A Connection Into A Larger Modality Of Organization On The Planet, Which Is A Fancy Way Of Saying It Connects You Up To The Mind Of Nature Herself.
Believe
Organization
Mind
Only Responsible Human Beings Can Exist In An Anarchistic Society.
Responsible
Humans
Human Beings
Think About Our Dilemma On This Planet. If The Expansion Of Consciousness Does Not Loom Large In The Human Future, What Kind Of Future Is It Going To Be?
Thinking
Expansion
Doe
What Foods Are, Essentially, Are Idea-neutral Drugs.
Ideas
Drug
The Apocalypse Is The Millennium, And The Psychedelics Move You Into The Future.
Moving
Apocalypse
Millennium
The Way I Think Of The Psychedelics Is, They Are Catalysts To The Imagination.
Thinking
Imagination
Way
There Is A Belief That There Is A Hyperobject Called Overmind, Or God, That Casts A Shadow Into Time. History Is Our Group Experience If This Shadow. As One Draws Closer And Closer To The Source Of The Shadow, The Paradoxes Intensify, The Rate Of Change Intensifies. What Is Happening Is That The Hyperobject Is Beginning To Ingress Into Three-dimensional Space.
Space
Shadow
Groups
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.
Confusion
Mind Blowing
Dying
No More Do We Create Cultural Artifacts That Are Simply Our Furniture, But Now It's Our Thoughts, Our Values, Are Embodied In This [digital] Stuff.
Stuff
Digital
Furniture
We Don't Have To Look Far For Miracles Because They're All Around Us. Everything Is Astonishing. The Universe On It's Surface Is Alive With Mystery.
Miracle
Looks
Alive
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.
Dmt
Drug
Mind Blowing
The Overriding Problems Are Brought On By The Existence Of The Ego, A Maladaptive Behavioral Complex In The Psyche That Gets Going Like A Tumor. If It's Not Treated - If There's Not Pharmacological Intervention - It Becomes The Dominant Constellation Of The Personality.
Personality
Ego
Problem
Psychedelic Experiences Are Beyond The Reach Of Cultural Manipulation, And Discovering This And Exploring It Is Somehow The Frontier Of Maturity. Culture Is A Form Of Enforced Infantilism. It's The Last Nursery, And Most People Never Leave It.
Maturity
People
Lasts
In A Way, This Is A Definition Of Shamanism. A Shaman Is A Person Who By Some Means Has Gotten Out Of Their Own Culture.
Mean
Culture
Definitions
Part Of What The Psychedelic Point Of View Represents Is Living A Certain Portion Of Your Life Without Answers. Just Accepting That Certain Dilemmas Will Never Resolve Themselves Into Some Kind Of A Complete Answer. That's Why Psychedelics Are So Different From Any System Being Sold, From One Of The Great Elder Systems Like Christianity, To The Latest Cult Out Of Los Angeles.
Views
Different
Answers
There Is No Dualism In The World Of Light. The Conventions Of Relativity Say That Time Slows Down As One Approaches The Speed Of Light, But If One Tries To Imagine The Point Of View Of A Thing Made Of Light, One Must Realize That What Is Never Mentioned Is That If One Moves At The Speed Of Light There Is No Time Whatsoever... One Exists In Eternity, One Has Become Eternal... One Is Then Apart From The Moving Image; One Exists In The Completion Of Eternity.
Moving
Light
Views
Our Culture Difinitely Takes An Egocentric Dominator View. The Fear Of The Psychedelic Experience Is Quite Literally The Fear Of Losing Control. Dominator Types Today Don't Understand That It's Not Important To Maintain Control If You Are Not In Control In The First Place.
Losing Control
Views
Important
I Spend As Many Hours A Day As I Possibly Can Smoking Cannabis
Smoking
Hours
Cannabis
Notice That The Whole Story Of Eden Is The Story Of The Struggle Over A Woman's Relationship To A Psychoactive Plant.
Struggle
Eden
Stories
Thinkers Are Not A Welcome Addition To Most Social Situations.
Thinking
Welcome
Social
We Are Reaping The Fruits Of Ten Thousand, Fifty Thousand Years Of Sowing Of The Fields Of Mind. And It Is Being Dropped Into Our Laps For Us To Create Human-machine Interfacing, Control Of Genetic Material, Redefinition Of Social Reality, Re Engineering Of Languages, Revisioning Of The Planetary Ecology, All These Things Fall Upon Us.
Fall
Reality
Engineering
And What Is The Primary Datum? It's The Felt Presence Of Immediate Experience. In Other Words, Being Here Now Is The Primary Datum.
Data
Felt
Primaries
It Seems To Me That Right Under The Surface Of Human Neurological Organization Is A Mode Shift Of Some Sort That Would Make Language Beholdable.
Organization
Language
Surface
Ideology Always Paves The Way Toward Atrocity.
Inspirational
Life
Mind Blowing
We Now Know Enough To Fantasize Realistically About What The Alien Would Be Like, And I Think That This Then Sets Up Polarities In The Collective Psyche That Previously We Have Only Seen At The Level Of The Individual.
Thinking
Would Be
Levels
Belief Is A Toxic And Dangerous Attitude Toward Reality. After All, If It's There It Doesn't Require Your Belief- And If It's Not There Why Should You Believe In It?
Inspirational
Life
Attitude
We Are The Damaged Heirs Of A Damaged Cultural Style Which Has Been Practiced Now For About Seven Thousand Years.
Years
Style
Heirs
You Know What, I'm Stoned, And I'm Proud.
Proud
Knows
Psychedelics Are Actually A Kind Of Miraculous Reality That Can Stand The Test Of Objective Examination.
Reality
Examination
Tests
The World Is Made Up Of Language. We Can Say That The World Is Composed Of Little Demons Doing Calisthenics, Each One The Size Of A Pissant's Eyebrow.... Or We Can Say The World Is Made Of Tiny Wave Mechanical Packets Of Matter Hurling Through Space At Near The Speed Of Light.... But Notice That What We Get Each Time Are Words.
Eyebrows
Space
Light
If Psychedelics Are Exopheromones That Dissolve The Dominant Ego, Then They Are Also Enzymes That Synergize The Human Imagination And Empower Language. They Cause Us To Connect And Reconnect The Contents Of The Collective Mind In Ever More Implausible, Beautiful, And Self-fulfilling Ways.
Beautiful
Self
Imagination
Nobody Is Smarter Than You Are. And What If They Are? What Good Is Their Understanding Doing You?
Smart
Understanding
What If
The Shaman Is A Person Who Is Able To Transcend The Dimensional Confines Of Cultural Existence. They Know More Than The People They Serve. The People They Serve Are Like Children Within The Game Of Culture. Only The Shaman Knows That Culture Is A Game. Everyone Else Takes It Seriously. That's How He Can Do His Magic.
Children
Games
People
It's As Though A Certain Level Of Intoxication With The Mushroom Is The Precondition For Being Able To Communicate, But Is Not Itself Enough.
Mushrooms
Levels
Able
Trending Author
Debbie Ford
David Copperfield
Clement Freud
George Chapman
Joan Of Arc
Justin Guarini
Category
Information