terence mckenna

Terence McKenna on translating the Hermetic corpus over Plato:

Near the start of the Renaissance, Jemistus Pletho brought books to the Florentine council for translation. Medici said, “Plato can wait, I’m getting old, do the Hermetic Corpus first, it’s much more important, we’ll do Plato later.” A few years later, 1493, Cosmo Medici died and never s

Terence McKenna on language and contradiction:

Evolve language and understanding to make our way back to the garden, back to Eden… Christ opened the door to paradise, but he closed the door to Eden.. We have to make our way back to the alchemical garden, that’s where meaning is, that’s what we feel, not rational schemas that are rationally beating u

Terence McKenna on the imagination:

The imagination is central to the alchemical opus; the process goes on in the realm of imagination, taken on to be a physical dimension; we cannot understand the history ahead of us until we imagine a journey into the imagination.  We have exhausted the Cartesian paradigm; the future of the human enterprise i

coincidentia positorum : (an alchemical term) the union of opposites; you can’t understand anything unless you simultaneously grok what it is and what it isn’t. By a mere shift in perspective, a thing’s opposite comes into focus, and the opposites melt into a new whole. This has many symbolic expressions: the hermaphrodite, soul/luna, mercury/sulfu

Terence McKenna on the alchemist’s view on nature:

The modern existential myth says we are cast into matter, lost in a universe with no meaning, and we must MAKE it. This is the absurd in Sartre. “Nature is mute,” is as far from alchemical thinking as you can get; for the alchemist, nature was a great, open book'; they put it through processes, to l

WOW! Just found out that even though McKenna was the first person to publish a hypothesis on The Stoned Ape theory, someone else was casually excited about in the 1970s … FRANCIS CRICK, the guy who discovered the DNA double helix (he’s like the polar opposite of McKenna, honored for his contribution on making sense of human genomics).

Crick never pu

Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods, p.9:

"Psychedelic shamans now constitute a worldview and growing subculture of hyper-dimensional explorers, many of whom are scientifically sophisticated. A landscape is coming into focus, a region still glimpsed only dimly, but merging, claiming the attention of rational discourse—and possibly threatening to confo

McKenna and Watts — how come some of the best thinkers aren’t as sharp in their writing?

Surprised the Terence McKenna admitted that Food of the Gods (which introduced the “Stoned Ape Theory”) was consciously a work of propaganda. This doesn’t mean he didn’t believe the theory, it just confirms that the main intention of the work was to change public opinion on drugs:

• “Since I feel pretty much around friends and fringies here, it doesn’