Terence Mckenna — The Message

“My attitude was always if it’s real, it can take the pressure. You don’t have to pussy foot around the real thing. If they’re telling you that you must lower your voice and avert your gaze, then you’re probably in the presence of crap; because the real thing is real. It doesn’t demand that you adjust your opinion to suit it. It’s real, that means it is preeminent, that means it sets the agenda. I studied yoga and I wandered around in the east. I know the whole spiritual supermarket and rigmarole and I find nothing there to interest me on the level of five grams of psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness. That’s where the pedal meets the metal. That’s where the rubber meets the road. And the inspiration for me simply comes from the fact that I cannot believe that this could be kept under wraps, the way it has.

The psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness; as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities or having hopes and dreams. Yet it is illegal. We are infantilized and somehow told we can wander around within the sanctioned playpen of ordinary consciousness where we can use intoxicants such as scotch, tobacco, red meat, some sugar and a little TV. But these boundary dissolving hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden. This is an outrage. It’s a sign of cultural immaturity and the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past. This is about an experience, not my experience but your experience.

It’s about an experience which you have, like getting laid or going to Africa. You must do the experience, otherwise it’s just whistling past the graveyard. And we’re not talking about something like being born again, where good works and prayer are the method. No, if you take a sufficient dose of an active compound it will deliver itself to you on the money. If it doesn’t work, take more. Nobody is in a position to dismiss this just because it didn’t work for them on one or two tries. This is an art, it’s something you coax into existence. You have to learn to make love, you have to learn to speak English. Anything worth doing is…