In celebration of the movie 'Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations' being released on March 4th, here's a collection of quotes about the philosopher's stone, articulated by Terence McKenna, who was greatly influenced by the mysterious John Dee and other alchemists of the 16th century.
"The central conception of alchemy is the conception of the philosopher’s stone. What is it? It’s the universal panacea at the end of time. It’s the chocolate cake that your mother made once a week when you were a child. It is the pana supersubstantialis. It’s all things to all men and all women. If you’re hungry, you eat it. If you’re dirty, you shower under it. If you need to go somewhere, you sit on it and you fly there. If you have a question, it answers it. It’s something that the human mind senses in itself and is related to, invoked and worshiped over centuries, before the slow rise of the patriarchy, rationalism and materialism turned it into a myth and a fairy tale."
- Terence McKenna
"So, DMT, like all things in this world, has a physical body – a presence and a presentation. In this case, it looks rather like earwax. It is orange. It is crystalline. It smells vaguely of moth balls. And for my money, it is the lapis, the quintessence, the universal panacea at the end of time, that has sent a reflection back through the temporal labyrinth, and wherever this touches, wherever this concresses, the mystery is fully present. So what is it, then? Well, it’s an experience, and I maintain it’s the most intense experience you can have this side of the yawning grave, without doubt. "
- Terence McKenna
"But after the DMT experience, I realized that there is unclaimed stuff out in those dimensions. James Joyce says in Finnegan's Wake, "Up n'ent, prospector, you sprout all your worth and you woof your wings" Well, the key word is prospector. A prospector is a rock hunter. I wanted to prospect for the alchemical stone, for the lapis philosophorum. And I conceived it as an idea: The TimeWave - I think it would come differently for each of us - for me it was an incredibly formal, aesthetically symmetrical, and, therefore satisfying idea about what time is."
- Terence McKenna
"Fixing is the culmination of alchemy, and if you can bring off this trick then you possess our stone, the philosopher's stone, the lapis, the Sophic Hydrolith of the Wise, Aranius Philalith calls it. There were hundreds of control words for naming the secret, difficult to attain.
Alchemical gold, in short this is what we're after. If you possess it, nothing else is worth anything because it is psychic completion, peace of mind, Jung called it the self. It's the self that we are trying to recover, and remember we talked about the Gnostic myth of the light trapped in matter. Well, this is the luminae de luminae, the light of light, the lux natura, the light drawn out of nature and condensed into a fixed form which then becomes the universal panacea. And I'm using as many of these alchemical terms as I can draw out of my memory to give you a feeling for it. This is the universal medicine. It cures all ills, you know, it brings you riches, fame, wealth, self-respect. It's the answer, it's what everyone is looking for and no one can find."
- Terence McKenna
"We'll see that this impulse toward an alchemical kingdom returns again and again... It's a kind of diffuse idea of the philosopher's stone, but it's a society in perfect harmony with fully realized beings living within it, practicing a cosmic religion that frees them from the impulses of cosmic fate."
- Terence McKenna
"You’re involved in a mysterious engagement where every living moment presents you with mystery, opportunity, and wonder. There is no mundane dimension, really. If you have the eyes to see it, it’s all transcendental. Every object, a leaf, a bird, a pebble, everything leads back to the basic questions. Everything is the stone. The stone is present. It’s a matter of you being present for the stone."
- Terence McKenna
Seek the stone in this more than 3-hour long movie about the ideas of Terence McKenna.
"And in the final moment, the Unspeakable stands revealed. There are no more reflections of the Mystery. The Mystery in all its nakedness is seen, and nothing else exists."
- Terence McKenna