You are on page 1of 11

We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR.

Create your
own roadshow. 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

Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant
archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of
control.
Terence McKenna

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. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted,
who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the
waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather
bed.
Terence McKenna

If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your
own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
Terence McKenna

The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if
you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.
Terence McKenna

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


Terence McKenna

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.
Terence McKenna

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.
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

Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.


Terence McKenna

Only psychos and shamans create their own reality


Terence McKenna

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.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

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

You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and
light, and you will return to those realms.
Terence McKenna

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

We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we
have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow
together.
Terence McKenna

If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.
Terence McKenna

Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life
trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.
Terence McKenna

My technique is dont believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded
from believing its opposite.
Terence McKenna

The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the
planet and its 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

Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
Terence McKenna

Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and
explored.
Terence McKenna

Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is
transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish
for contact with this other universe.
Terence McKenna

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.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

There is a transcendental dimension beyond language... It's just hard as hell to talk about!
Terence McKenna

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

Ill try to be around and about. But if Im not, then you know that Im behind your eyelids, and Ill
meet you there
Terence McKenna

We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long.
Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the
first place.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power,
the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the
intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years
of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.
Terence McKenna

Half the time you think your thinking youre actually listening
Terence McKenna

My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon
meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises
Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival

The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer
Terence McKenna

It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of
the World's Soul into all of us.
Terence McKenna

Time will perfect matter.


Terence McKenna

History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as
the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture
gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the
last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the
Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property,
before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the
future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of
the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body
piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century
mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the
plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-
making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it
shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the
psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in
eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the
community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a
new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true
story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human
experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the
materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the
importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can
buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience,
but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the
infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in
the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the
self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like
going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The
mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival means
is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the
three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run
you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected, and getting
it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish.
Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're 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, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self
through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence,
INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.
Terence McKenna
The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.
Terence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens & the I Ching

Alcohol is used by millions of people, both men and women, and I will make no friends by taking the
position that alcohol culture is not politically correct. Yet how can we explain the legal toleration for
alcohol, the most destructive of all intoxicants, and the almost frenzied efforts to repress nearly all
other drugs? Could it not be that we are willing to pay the terrible toll that alcohol extracts because it is
allowing us to continue the repressive dominator style that keeps us all infantile and irresponsible
participants in a dominator world characterized by the marketing of ungratified sexual fantasy?
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.
Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival

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.
Terence McKenna

Human history is a Gaian dream.


Terence McKenna

We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we dont matter. And in the act of taking
that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.
Terence McKenna

You see, a secret is not something untold. Its something which cant be told.
Terence McKenna

No one knows enough to worry.


Terence McKenna

A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or


anything else that falls through your life.
Terence McKenna

Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually
listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it.
Terence McKenna

The ufo is nothing more than an assertion of herself by the Goddess into history, saying to science and
paternalistically governed and driven organizations: You have gone far enough. We are going to turn
the world upside down. Your science is going to be shown up for what it is, nothing more than a
pleasant metaphor usefully extrapolated into the production of toys for healthy children. That's what
science is good for. It is not some meta-theory at whose feet every point of view from astrology to
acupressure to channeling need be laid to have the hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs
down.
Terence McKenna

The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.
Terence McKenna

Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of
introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood.
In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors.
Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations

Ecstasy is a complex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph, surrender, and
empathy. What has replaced our prehistoric understanding of this complex of ecstasy now is the word
comfort, a tremendously bloodless notion. Drugs are not comfortable, and anyone who thinks they are
comfortable or even escapist should not toy with drugs unless theyre willing to get their noses rubbed
in their own stuff.
Terence McKenna

Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.


Terence McKenna

I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we
should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think
literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one
dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I
imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book,
what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.
Terence McKenna

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.
Terence McKenna

Theres light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if
you dont go to the back side of your mind you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And
once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people. Spread it as a reality.
God did not retire to the seventh heaven, God is some kind of lost continent IN the human mind.
Terence McKenna

Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing a golem. And, indeed, this image,
sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial
democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are
conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are
condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a
living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

The artists task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.
Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists
cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.
Terence McKenna

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

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, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

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

It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These are the two things that the
psychedelics attack. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure
disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our
minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.
Terence McKenna

The race isn't to the swift, it's to the thoughtful.


Terence McKenna

Its pretty simple, the ethical life. Its just demanding.


Terence McKenna

This is why the shaman is the remote ancestor of the poet and artist. Our need to feel part of the world
seems to demand that we express ourselves through creative activity. The ultimate wellsprings of this
creativity are hidden in the mystery of language. Shamanic ecstasy is an act of surrender that
authenticates both the individual self and that which is surrendered to, the mystery of being. Because
our maps of reality are determined by our present circumstances, we tend to lose awareness of the
larger patterns of time and space. Only by gaining access to the Transcendent Other can those patterns
of time and space and our role in them be glimpsed.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

Our culture, self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology and egocentric ideology, is the
unhappy inheritor of the dominator attitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants or
substances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. I will argue that suppression of
shamanic gnosis, with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us of
lifes meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, and our grandchildren. We are killing
the planet in order to keep intact the wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style.
Terence McKenna

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.
Terence McKenna

We live in condensations of our imagination


Terence McKenna
But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five
hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of
organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is
what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects.
All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul,
exteriorized in three-dimensional space.
Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival

Feminism is a tremendously underestimated force, viewed in the present context primarily as a


woman's concern. The understanding has not yet percolated throughout society that the advancement of
women is a program vitally connected to the survival of human beings as a species. The reason for this
is simply that institutions take on the character of the atoms which compose them, and what we are
most menaced by in the twentieth century are dehumanized institutions. If women played a major role
in policy formation and execution on the part of these institutions, I think they would have a far more
benign and ecologically sensitive kind of character. So I see feminism not as a kind of war between the
sexes or any of these stereotypic images, but as actually a kind of effort to shift the ratios of our
emphasis that is expressed through our institutions.
Terence McKenna

I guess I should say a little bit about my method - I really am a fence sitter. I *loathe* Science and am
always keen to attack it in most situations, though not here, because I love Reason and I'm perfectly
aware of the difference. I also know what a concept means like Rules of Evidence. I'm not sure that's a
concept as widely circulated in these circles as it needs to be - in other words, how *do* you tell shit
from shinola? That's very critical. I think reason can only take us a certain distance, and then we have
to go with the divine imagination, but with all safety systems fully in operation, or the divine
imagination will lead us into complete paranoia.
Terence McKenna

There's only the integrity of doing and having done.


Terence McKenna

Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.
Terence McKenna

Meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction - the coincidencia apositorum. Thats what we
really feel, not these rational schemes that are constantly beating us over the head with the thou shalts
and thou should, but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity of being and an ability to see ourselves
as at once powerful and weak, noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing.
Terence McKenna

I believe that the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa gave us the model for
all religions to follow. And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic
change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for
dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In
short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken
pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis, and-if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament-planetary
catastrophe.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
Terence McKenna

Monotheism strenuously denies the need to return to a cultural style that periodically places the ego
and its values in perspective through contact with a boundary-dissolving immersion in the Archaic
mystery of plant-induced, hence mother-associated, psychedelic ecstasy and wholeness, what Joyce
called the "mama matrix most mysterious.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

Neither Bwitists nor Fang felt they could eradicate ritual sin or evil in the world. This incapacity
means that men have to celebrate. Good and bad walk together. As Fang frequently enough told
missionaries, "We have two hearts, good and bad." Early missionaries, aware of these self-confessed
contradictions, evangelized with the promise of "one heartedness" in Christianity. But Fang by and
large did not find it there. For many, Christian one heartedness was a constriction of their selves. While
"one heartedness" is celebrated in Bwiti, it is a one heartedness which is coagulated out of a flow of
many qualities from one state to another. It is goodness achieved in the presence of badness, an
aboveness achieved in the presence of belowness. It is an emergent quality energized in the presence of
its opposite.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent
Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of natures larger whole. The
ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

From one point of view the Transcendent Other is nature correctly perceived to be alive and
intelligent. From another it is the awesomely unfamiliar union of all the senses with memory of the past
and anticipation of the future. The Transcendent Other is what one encounters on powerful
hallucinogens. It is the crucible of the Mystery of our being, both as a species and as individuals. The
Transcendent Other is Nature without her cheerfully reassuring mask of ordinary space, time, and
causality.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

I think of going to the Grave without having a Psychedelic Experience is like going to the Grave
without ever having Sex. It means that you never Figured out what it is all about. The Mystery is in the
Body and the way the Body Works itself into Nature.
Terence McKenna

Like the octopi, our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and
our bodies become our thoughts. This is the essence of the more perfect Logos envisioned by the
Hellenistic polymath Philo Judaeusa Logos, an indwelling of the Goddess, not heard but beheld.
Hans Jonas explains Philo Judaeus's concept as follows:
A more perfect archetypal logos, exempt from the human duality of sign and thing, and therefore not
bound by the forms of speech, would not require the mediation of hearing, but is immediately beheld
by the mind as the truth of things.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

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 psycheand its from that
position, a position outside the cultural operating system, that we can begin to ask real questions about
what does it mean to be human, what kind of circumstance are we caught in, and what kind of
structures, if any, can we put in place to assuage the plan and accentuate the glory and the wonder that
lurks, waiting for us, in this very narrow slice of time between the birth canal and the yawning grave. In
other words we have to return to first premises.
Terence McKenna

The Archaic Revival is a clarion call to recover our birthright, however uncomfortable that may make
us. It is a call to realize that life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which
primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego and its fear of
dissolution in the mysterious matrix of feeling that is all around us. It is in the Archaic Revival that our
transcendence of the historical dilemma actually lies.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, and at a single
point and for no discernible reason. This notion is the limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can
believe this, you can believe anything.
Terence McKenna

Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such
a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand
out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.
Terence McKenna

It was warm and salty, chalky and bittersweet. It tasted like the blood of some old, old thing. I tried
not to think about how much at the mercy of these strange people I now was. But in fact my courage
was failing. Both Dona Catalina and the guide's mocking eyes had slowly gone cold and mantislike. A
wave of insect sound sweeping up the river seemed to splatter the darkness with shards of sharpedged
light. I felt my lips go numb. Trying not to appear as loaded as I felt, I crossed to my hammock and lay
back. Behind my closed eyelids there was a flowing river of magenta light. It occurred to me in a kind
of dream mental pirouette that a helicopter must be landing on top of the hut, and this was the last
impression I had. When I regained consciousness I appeared to myself to be surfing on the inner curl of
a wave of brightly lit transparent information several hundred feet high. Exhilaration gave way to terror
as I realised that my wave was speeding toward a rocky coastline.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

The war on drugs was never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long as possible in order
to allow various intelligence operations to wring the last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit
profits from the global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared. "Defeat" will mean, as it did in
the case of the Vietnam War, that the media will correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation
and the real players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidity and venality of the
Establishment's role will force a policy review.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

The global triumph of Western values means we, as a species, have wandered into a state of prolonged
neurosis because of the absence of a connection to the unconscious. Gaining access to the unconscious
through plant hallucinogen use reaffirms our original bond to the living planet. Our estrangement from
nature and the unconscious became entrenched roughly two thousand years ago, during the shift from
the Age of the Great God Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression of the pagan
mysteries and the rise of Christianity. The psychological shift that ensued left European civilization
staring into two millennia of religious mania and persecution, warfare, materialism, and rationalism.
The monstrous forces of scientific industrialism and global politics that have been born into modern
times were conceived at the time of the shattering of the symbiotic relationships with the plants that
had bound us to nature from our dim beginnings. This left each human being frightened, guilt-
burdened, and alone. Existential man was
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

Our estrangement from nature and the unconscious became entrenched roughly two thousand years
ago, during the shift from the Age of the Great God Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the
suppression of the pagan mysteries and the rise of Christianity. The psychological shift that ensued left
European civilization staring into two millennia of religious mania and persecution, warfare,
materialism, and rationalism.
The monstrous forces of scientific industrialism and global politics that have been born into modern
times were conceived at the time of the shattering of the symbiotic relationships with the plants that
had bound us to nature from our dim beginnings. This left each human being frightened, guilt-
burdened, and alone. Existential man was born.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

There is no question that a society that sets out to control its citizens' use of drugs sets out on the
slippery path to totalitarianism.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

You might also like