"My method, my style, has always been to be open-minded, to be critical, to be rational, but to seek the weird. And to seek it seriously. Now, if you seek the weird without a critical intelligence, it will find you faster than you can lock your apartment behind you! The number of squirrelly ideas on the market these days is truly alarming. I coined a phrase (I hope), "the balkanization of epistemology". This is what we're dealing with now. You understand what I mean? It means people can't tell shit from Shinola, but they wanna talk about it, a lot! This is a place where you have to bring to bear what are called razors, logical razors. One is: hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity. Another is: equations should not be multiplied without necessity. Razors always seek what is called the principle of parsimony. In other words, keep it simple, stupid. The simplest explanation is always to be preferred first."
- Terence McKenna
Ugh.
"We have perfected politeness. We have perfected the ability to listen to damn foolishness."
Argh.
Eh.
“The fact that an idea is preposterous has never held it back from making zealous converts.”
- Terence McKenna
David 'AllAboutAdMoneyFromClicksOnHisWebsite' Wolfe
"So, my thing has always been, whether you present me with a diet, a social arrangement, a sexual conundrum, a work of art, my criteria is ‘is it shit, or is it Shinola?’"
- Terence McKenna
"I won't sit at the same table with the channellers and the people who have good news about Atlantis and all of this stuff."
"The problem with all these religions, and it affects flying saucer cults, and it affects occult schools of magic, and everywhere, is people claim to know too much. They are not willing to live in the light of ignorance and in the absence of closure. So you know, my God, you go to these UFO conferences and you know, you've got the people talking to the Plebeians in Booth 1. Next to them people are talking to Commander Zamo of the Antares system, and then number 3 something else. No cognitive dissonance between these groups. They all have coffee together and are dating heavily and it doesn't ever seem to enter anybody's mind that this is a little odd. [audience laughter] In occult stuff, you know, you say 'what's that?' and they say 'well, that's the eleventh Amethystine Ray that was brought by the great white fathers of the Eleventh Lodge who came from the Galactic Center at the fall of Atlantis and established the [audience laughter]- you say, 'how the hell do you know all this stuff?'"
- Terence McKenna
Ad money on websites has never been more easily generated by gullible audiences.
"I have this trouble with channeling and flying saucer people and with the fans of great Atlantis and the people who believe that lantern job Neanderthal visages ten miles high are gracing the deserts of Mars. All of this, the attraction of this kind of thing completely puzzles me because it’s so hokey. If you want the real thing, it’s just five dried grams away. The real thing! So that you will be done with anecdotes by the denizens of trailer camps in Florida or all of this other stuff – it’s not that the woo-woo isn’t out there. It’s that it’s so much more woo-woo than the beady-eyed peddlers of it assume. They just have no idea with what they’re playing with."
- Terence McKenna
"If you want the real thing, it’s just five dried grams away."
"My method, if method is the word, that I would share with you since this question about the New Age came out, is not to embrace things that are simply to outrage bourgeois sensibilities but to explore edges. To test edges yourself, that’s the important part. Yourself! You don’t learn about Tantra by reading about Tantra, or ibogaine by reading about ibogaine. You have to go and do these things. What you will discover is you will be fleeced a few times in your youth with this method. You’ll get in with some flying saucer cult or some beady-eyed guru and his fanatical devotees but eventually you’ll learn the neighborhood and you’ll become street smart. You won’t be a mark – that’s the goal of real spiritual method – is to not be a mark. You would think this would lead to cynicism because you say, well I went and stayed with Baba Ji and he was a jackass, and then I joined the Unitarian Uniformitarian Unifunctionalists and that was just a scam, and so forth and so on. You would think it would lead to cynicism. Not if you keep to the edges because eventually, you’re going to come to psychedelics, and then - lo and behold – jackpot! The real thing! Weirdness beyond all possibility to comprehend. You have just won the publisher clearing sweepstakes of peculiarity."
- Terence McKenna
"Eventually, you’re going to come to psychedelics, and then - lo and behold – jackpot! The real thing!"
"The mushrooms said to me in the Amazon, when they were revealing all this information and deputising us to do all these things... We said, 'Why us? Why should WE be the ambassador of an alien species into human culture?' And they said 'Because you have never believed anybody. Because you have never given over your belief to anyone.'"
- Terence McKenna
"And when you say it's shit and they tell you it's Shinola;
you have to vote with your own side..."
- Terence McKenna