Ask Terence McKenna

...nopharmacology of spiritual transformation. His books include Food of gods and The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide and most recently, The Archaic...

... come when men will no longer care for the earth, and at that day the gods will depart and everything will be thrown into primal chaos. This pr...

...r hole, “if” I take my sharpened arrows, “if” I lay in wait, “if” the gods favor me, I will bring down dinner. The sexual game is played the sa...

... than an artifact of European languages, and yet we take it to be how god made the world, basically, because we are so embedded in our language...

... talking about things being true enough rather than the revelation of god’s truth. I mean, good grief, if you met a termite wandering across th...

... saw driving down here, and the bumper sticker said, uh, “Man thinks. god knows.” And, then, someone had bought a second copy of the bumper sti...

...ions, that they would have to explore the mind of the vegetable plant goddess who was the only force contending with them for control of the pl...

...it is because there is a kind of hand extended to you from a merciful god who is willing to overlook your wormy nature and draw you up in spite...

..., and by a certain religion which covered the entire planet. It was a goddess religion; sometimes the triple-headed goddess, the goddess trinit...

...has been taken away from us. You may read 1984 and think "well, thank god it isn't that bad yet!" Well, the only difference between us and 1984...

...tion of cattle became a major concern of human beings. Uh, this great goddess, uh, religion that was worldwide in prehistory is inevitably, uh,...

...you know. -“You wanna know where people came from? Well, when the sky god got out of his canoe at first waterfall and took a leak then we, the ...

...able metaphor jung on the other hand offered a vast uh pantheon of uh gods and archetypes and psychic complexes forgotten or abandoned i mean i...

... of moving man off the stage and saying, 'no, man is not the image of god, man is not the beloved of the creator, we are on a small planet arou...

... shaman and mystics and seers have been hearing voices and talking to gods and demons since the paleolithic and probably before. That doesn't m...

...n this world has! And so you’re trying to wrap your mind, and say, My god, you know, what is it? Because in spite of the fact that it’s just a ...

..., call it Zeta Reticulians who came here a million years ago, call it god Almighty, it doesn't matter what you call it, the fact of the matter ...

...forcing cycle of consciousness, language arose, religion arose of the goddess oriented variety, and the connection of the cow to the goddess is...

...s agenda in the last, uh, 15 years or so. But this enthusiasm for the goddess, this enthusiasm for the seamless web of life, has not yet clarif...

...g about returning to the era of Isis, Assarte [sp?], the great horned goddess of the high Paleolithic. In other words, this program of material...

... thrust here – the notion that man could somehow bootstrap himself to godhead without reference to nature seems to me highly peculiar and simpl...

...nd, uh, this phenomenon is, uh, not new - people have been talking to gods and demons for millennia. In fact, people have been talking to gods ...

...merge in a dimension where human beings are each and all some kind of god and the imagination and physics can flow together, and the art that i...

...e, not; or almost not. I mean, in term of religion it simple, I mean: god made us from the clay of the earth. In terms of science, the best sho...

...mes and places, only one person every touched the incorporeal body of god. Thomas the doubter touched because he doubted. It was not necessary ...

...ll, ordinary human beings; the king is the divine appointed regent of god in Heaven! So this was a severe boundary dissolution, within the cont...

... translation was "all things being reversed, the great Hla (the great god) appears instantly". You see, the precondition for magic is the rever...

... thinkers and the corpus hermeticum actually uses the phrase; “Man is god’s brother.” We have no idea what it would mean in our own lives if we...

...probably know Phil K. Dick’s book Valis, where he talks about the mad god. He isn’t the first one to talk about the mad god, and all I can say ...

...en and mystics and seers have been hearing voices and, uh, talking to gods and demons, uh, since the paleolithic and probably before. That does...

...ur own apartment! That's my idea of an encounter with the incredible. god knows, the worst thing you can say about any drug is that it's subtle...

...s, but not require the second coming of Christ or the intercession of god Almighty into history or all these other extreme unlikelihoods. And, ...

...alogous if any of you are familiar with Robert Graves book “The White goddess” wherein a series of continuing revelation he grains, gains great...

... days....So there's always an effort to, to eat off the land. And, my god, you know if you've never been in a tropical jungle. People have a no...

...e. Once you start talking about race pride, loyalty, our destiny, our god, our mission, it’s like building virtual realities, and people begin ...

...e been an author? TM: I've written a number of books, uh, Food of the gods, Invisible Landscape, Archaic Revival, just to mention 3 of them. RH...

...now, a man, uh, doing a task on one level is on another level a Greek god completing a task and on another level some other figure of some more...

...a place where the laws are set by the imagination. The imagination is god in the dream. If there is a way for us to mirror our highest aspirati...

...re instances of what anthropologists call successful copulations, and god knows we need that. So, if you have more successful copulations you h...

...ich is Niels Bohr and all -- Heisenberg and all those untouchable and god-like figures to admit that they were actually wrong about something f...

...f primary poetic languages such as the one that goes on in 'The White goddess' by...by, uh, Robert Graves, where he wants to suggest that there...

.... Thought is a similar phenomenon, but it is an interior dialogue and god help us lets hope that we understand our thoughts better than what pe...

...na: Pleasure to be here. MJR: Great. Good to have you. Absolutely. So…god, there’s so much that we can really embark upon, to talk about, becau...

...of the plane of cultural assumptions and can look down with a kind of godlike understanding that one obtains when one flies in an airplane over...

...t your ass out of there!" and people interpreted this as the voice of god, or a god. It was a higher function in the psyche that was only trigg...

...But, the revolution going on in China is about consciousness. I mean, god, the notion that, you know, people were selling Jon Stewart Mill in t...

...d since creation so that the soul of man could again be reunited with god, and uh, this stuff made no sense to the Roman authorities and yet it...

...For some people this process produces panic. "Pan”-ic, comes from the god Pan, whose screams caused people to go mad. Panic. For other people, ...

... revolution is just going to become something that everybody is into. god knows - we could use a perestroika. I mean, we, too, are ruled by con...

... at once image of totality that our religions have sensed and called "god," that the shamans have learned to use as a vast kind of computer for...

... what is called for is this sideways attack through hyperspace. Uh... god forbid, I think it was Tim Leary who said we should become ecological...

...ught to be so writ in adamantine are actually merely the moods of the god, if you will, which we happen to be. And the whole thing about human ...

...e are even schemes for time travel that would work, they just require godlike technological abilities. If you could build a cylinder with the d...

...ion in our lifetimes. Because, and I offer this, don’t believe me for god’s sake, don’t believe anybody, just take this stuff in and then measu...

...those brave and, uh, ether highly motivated or completely neurotic or god inspired – who knows? – people, who can be celibate, I don’t think I’...

...tical suggestion, and I, I took this need to the feet of the mushroom-gods, a-being, having been challenged by somebody at a talk like this, th...

...eady supply, in other words if your not putting in social factors, my god these junkies live forever. They just pickle themselves and live fore...

...ic mushrooms, virtual reality, U.F.O.s, evolution, the rebirth of the goddess and the end of history. His numerous books include the recent Arc...

...y and what it really means, you discover that at the center of it is, god forbid, the psychedelic experience. Now, the psychedelic experience i...

...thought to be writ in adamantine are actually merely the moods of the goddess, whose reflection we happen to be. The whole meaning of human his...

...eme through much of mythology. In the Old Testament it says, “And the gods found the daughters of man fair.” And the Persephone myth is a good ...

...h of nature, the human mind seems to be able to understand. I mean my god, instruments are circling around Ganymede based on some guy in a powd...

...largely unknown, and many of these cultures are in the tropics, where god knows, you know, if you cut your thumb you’re septic within 24 hours,...

...r some enormous privilege for which we must genuflect to an invisible god. But rather the human world is seen as inevitably the goal of all the...

... this, uh, uh, point of view is created in the notion that man can be god. That’s it and it is hailed as a tremendous infusion of existential v...

... birch trees and these kinds of trees planted in old sea sand, and my god, this is an amanita ecosystem that you will not believe. I have seen ...

...eated. It's as though we took the Platonic, uh, bon mot about how, if god did not exist, man would invent Him, and say, if the unconscious does...

... place where all myths and all memories were. I think of it as, uh, a god, a kind of god and I think it, it is active in three-dimensional spac...

...ght but were doing the best they could and muddling through and thank god they gave way to us, the people of the 21st century. [laughter] Let m...

...uh, has, uh, become enshrined as a domain of cultural activity -- and god knows I've mined that, you know? Uh, somebody once said -- actually i...

...uld fulfill this whole scenario without requiring the intervention of god almighty or something like that would be time travel. Because if -- i...

...tic states of consciousness.Terence is also the author of Food of the gods, which is a unique study of the impact of psychotropic plants on hum...

...data this is all very chancy stuff. We have to realize that LSD was a god-sent, special, miraculous case. I mean, it was amazing to pharmacolog...

...sky saying that great Pan was dead, that, in other words, the ancient gods had been eclipsed, and in fact in Jungian terms, the ancient god, by...

...known for…Bertrand Russell said Liebniz invented the smallest form of god. Uh, Liebniz invented something called the monad, which was basically...

...s you look at them, as I look at them, I have the impression that, my god, if I could bring just one of these things back, I would never have t...

...osynthesis in Mill Valley is an outlet. Caller: Ok. TM: Um. Uh, oh my god. PB: We have a few in the pacifica radio archive Caller: You have a- ...

... and simple advice, Huxley said the way to overcome the printed bias, god knows, he was a Cambridge-educated gentleman steeped in the tradition...

... of support. I'm not saying everybody should take psilocybin. I mean, god knows, there are plenty of people among us who don't need their bound...

...el again and again, Terence, when I'm with somebody dying of AIDS. My god, my heart's breaking, it's horrible, I mean it's a ghastly, social os...

...f the Eleusinian mysteries, you have an anticipation of, uh, the dark god. These anticipations of an unspeakable transcendent reality, that are...

... from a flying saucer. It's like something falling out of the mind of god - such objects DO not exist in this universe, and yet, you're looking...

... will just be completely swept away! And this is all going to happen, god willing, in our lifetimes. My faith is that if it doesn’t happen then...