“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.”
“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.”
“Psychedelics dissolve into the greater feeling of connectedness that underlies our being here,
and to my mind that’s the religious impulse. It’s not a laundry list of moral dos and don’ts, or a set
of dietary prescriptions or practices: it’s a sense of connectedness, responsibility for our fellow
human beings and for the earth you walk on, and because these psychedelics come out of that
plant vegetable matrix they are the way back into it.”
“I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave
without ever having sex.”
“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.”
“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of
a third storey 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.”
“When you shed the cultural operating system, then, essentially you stand naked before the
inspection of your own psyche…and it’s 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 life’s 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Not to know one’s true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing. And, indeed, this image,
sickeningly 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.”
“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?”
“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…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.”
McKenna genuinely believed that the psychedelic experience was a vital path to find a way out of
the destruction humanity has caused for itself
“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.”
“The idea that you could achieve a spiritual insight without suffering, soul-searching, flagellation,
and that sort of thing, is abhorrent to people because they believe that the vision of these higher
dimensions should be vouchsafed to the good, and probably to them only after death. It is
alarming to people to think that they could take a substance like psilocybin or DMT and have
these kinds of experiences.”
“You don’t go on bended knee to petition the official culture for your rights. You have to take
them.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Our individuality, as people and as a species, is an illusion of bad language that the psychedelics
dissolve into the greater feeling of connectedness that underlies our being here, and to my mind
that’s the religious impulse. It’s not a laundry list of moral dos and don’ts, or a set of dietary
prescriptions or practices: it’s a sense of connectedness, responsibility for our fellow human
beings and for the earth you walking around on, and because these psychedelics come out of
that plant vegetable matrix they are the way back into it.”
McKenna believed in exploring the inner, the private, the unseen. He advised people to create
their own culture, their own reality, and to understand the world through direct experience.
“A hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously could not be imagined, and if it
previously could not be imagined then there is no grounds for believing that you generated it out
of yourself.”
“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…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.”
“When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward
toward the futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We
should look within; the paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for
humanity.”
“From a historical point of view, restricting the availability of addictive substances must be seen
as a peculiarly perverse example of Calvinist dominator thought – a system in which the sinner is
to be punished in this world by being transformed into an exploitable, of his cash, by the
criminal/governmental combine that provides the addictive substances.”
“It’s very important that people take back their minds and that people analyse our dilemma in the
context of the entire human story from the descent onto the grassland to our potential destiny as
citizens of the galaxy and the universe. We are at a critical turning point…it’s up to each one of us
to relate to this situation in a fashion that will allow us to answer the question that will surely be
put to us at some point in the future, which is: What did you do to help save the world?”
“When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward
toward the futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We
should look within; the paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for
humanity.”
“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.”