The Philosopher
Terence McKenna
The face
The background
- Nationality:
- American
- Schools:
- Shamanism
- Branchs:
- Ethnobotany, Ethnomycology, Metaphysics, Psychedelic drugs, Alchemy, Shamanism, Language, Philosophy, Culture, Technology, Environmentalism, Consciousness
- Period:
- 20th century
The synopsis
The works
The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching
Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide
The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History
Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge – A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution
Synesthesia
True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise
The quotes
In fact, I think when we carry out a complete analysis of time, I think what we're going to discover is that like matter, time is composed of elemental, discrete types.
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.
The discs which haunt the skies of Earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever. These things are going to have to be dealt with.
What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.
Without sounding too cliche, the Internet really is the birth of global mind.
History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.
The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
Nature conserves, prefers novelty.
There are times when everything seems to go right, and times when everything seems to go wrong.
I live up at about the 2000 feet level on a five acre piece of forest that I built a small house on.
That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with.
Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.