Terence McKenna Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

• 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.

  Terence McKenna

  Losing Control, Views, Important

  Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham (2001). “Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness”, p.50, Inner Traditions / Bear & Co

• 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.

  Terence McKenna

  Ego, Mind Blowing, Culture

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

  Terence McKenna

  Life, Dream, Collective Effort

  Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham (2001). “Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness”, p.48, Inner Traditions / Bear & Co

• Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.

  Terence McKenna

  Expansion, Plot, Culture

• 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.

  Terence McKenna

  Civilization, People, Mind Blowing

• 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.

  Terence McKenna

  Silly, People, Mind Blowing

• Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.

  Terence McKenna

  Light, Imagination, Empowerment

• The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.

  Terence McKenna

  Real, Adventure, Giving

• Apparently there is a great discovery or insight which our culture is deliberately designed to suppress, distort, and ignore. That is that nature is some kind of minded entity. That nature is not simply the random flight of atoms through electromagnetic fields. Nature is not the empty, despiritualized , lumpen matter that we inherit from modern physics. But it is instead a kind of intelligence, a kind of mind.

  Terence McKenna

  Discovery, Mind, Atoms

• I think the real test of psychedelics is what you do with them when you're not on them, what kind of culture you build, what kind of art, what kind of technologies... What's lacking in the Western mind is the sense of connectivity and relatedness to the rest of life, the atmosphere, the ecosystem, the past, our children's future. If we were feeling those things we would not be practicing culture as we are.

  Terence McKenna

  Life, Art, Children

• Culture is your operating system.

  Terence McKenna

  Culture, Programming, Operating Systems

• 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.

  Terence McKenna

  Children, Games, People

• Cultures are virtual realities made of language.

  Terence McKenna

  Reality, Culture, Language

• There is no contradiction between technology and spirit. There is no contradiction between the search for intellectual integration and understanding and the psychedelic experience. There is no contradiction between ultra-advanced hyperspacial cyber culture and Paleolithic archaic culture. We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness.

  Terence McKenna

  Technology, Understanding, Intellectual

• 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.

  Terence McKenna

  Hero, Heart, Together

  Terence McKenna (1998). “True Hallucinations: And, the Archaic Revival”, M J F Books

• Our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us.

  Terence McKenna

  Loyalty, Political, Inanimate Objects

• This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being you can't be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.

  Terence McKenna

  Emotional, Long, Culture

• One way to think about what psychedelics are is as catalysts for language development. They literally force the evolution of language. You cannot evolve faster than your language because the language defines the culture of meaning. So if there's a way to accelerate the evolution of language then this is real consciousness expansion and it's a permanent thing. The great legacies of the 60's are in attitudes and language. It boils down to doing your own thing, feeling the vibe, ego-trip, blowing your mind.

  Terence McKenna

  Attitude, Real, Thinking

• Liberate yourself from the illusion of culture.
  Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.

  Terence McKenna

  Responsibility, Thinking, Culture

• It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age.

  Terence McKenna

  Order, Mushrooms, Space

• 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.

  Terence McKenna

  Spiritual, Emotional, Mind Blowing

• The current operating system [culture] is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions. We're cutting the earth from beneath our own feet. We're poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe. This is not intelligent behaviour. This is a culture with a bug in its operating system that's making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behaviour. Time to call a tech! And who are the techs? The shamans are the techs.

  Terence McKenna

  Cutting, Intelligent, Feet

• No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.

  Terence McKenna

  Attitude, Atmosphere, West

• The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.

  Terence McKenna

  Culture, Path, Language

• 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.

  Terence McKenna

  Jobs, Thinking, Class

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