Excerpts from The Archaic Revival
by Terence McKenna
Published by HarperCollins
ISBN 0-06-250613-7

"My vision of the final human future is an effort to exteriorize the soul and interiorise the body, so that the exterior soul will exist as a superconducting lens of translinguistic matter generated out of the body of each of us at a critical juncture at our psychedelic bar mitzvah."

"The purpose of life is to familiarise oneself with [the] after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche."

"As an anarchist and a skeptic, i saw India basically as a very stratified kind of con-game. I am no fan of gurus. I think they have done quite enough of us, thank you, and that it is nothing that sophisticated people need to have anything to do with. Now i am not saying that there aren't people who have the wizdom that life confers, who can tell you how to live, how to die, how to carry on a relationship, have a child and so forth and so on. But psychedelics address the unseen side of reality, the utterly Other,the transcendentally alien, and that is what interests me. Because if you look at classical descriptions of God, whether you're talking about the Kabbalah or Christian mysticism, or Sufi mysticism what you're always talking about is the unspeakable. And psychedelics propel you through your local language and into this unimaginable realm.

   People need to be empowered and you're not empowered by placing your spiritual development in the hands of a guru. You're spiritually empowered by taking responsibility for your spiritual development, by looking around and seeing what can be done. In a way,i see the entire New Age as a flight from the psychedelic experience. People will do anything other than take a psychedelic compound . Be rebirthed , Rolfed, this , that,and the other thing. Because they instinctively sense that the psychedelic experience is real.It puts you on the line. It isn't like a drumming session or deep-tissue work."

"There are three questions you should ask yourself about a drug you're considering taking. Number one, does it occur naturally in a plant or an animal? Because nature has use-tested these compounds over millions and millions of years. Something that came out of the laboratory four or five years ago-who knows? So it should be a product of the natural world. Number two, does it have a history of human usage? Mushrooms do. Mescaline does. LSD doesn't. Ecstasy doesn't. And number three, and most important, it should have some affinity to brain chemistry. It shouldn't be just like landing on the moon; it should be related to what is driving ordinary consciousness. This last criteria is the most narrow, because mescaline won't get through that. LSD won't get through that . I think that drugs should be as non-invasive as possible and i know i'm on the right track because the strongest psychedelic drugs there are are the ones that last the shortest amount of time. Now, what does that mean? It means that your brain recognises the compound and within a few minutes it can completely neutralise it. DMT is the strongest psychedelic there is, yet it lasts only five minutes. Twenty minutes after you do it, it's like you never did it at all.
 Nature is the great guide in all of this. The natural chemistry of the brain. The natural history of the planet. The naturally evolved shamanic institutions of small groups of people in touch with reasonable social values."

" I think there's a very strong Calvinistic bias against a free lunch.The idea that you could achieve a spiritual insight without suffering, soul-searching, flagellation, and that sort of thing is abhorrent to people because thy believe that the vision of these higher dimensions should be vouchsafed for the good , and probably to them only after death. It is alarming to people to think that they could take a substance like psilocybin or DMT and have these kinds of experiences. Nevertheless, it is a fact of reality that we are only now beginning to come to terms with. I don't believe that these things are a substitute for spiritual practice. On the other hand, i don't believe that spiritual practice could ever be a substitute for these experiences .... These things are going to have to be integrated into the culture without a sense of guilt and with a sense that they point toward something. I think Aldous Huxley called them "gratuitous graces", explaining that they were neither necessary, nor sufficient for salvation, but they were, nevertheless, a miracle. "

"The elves are saying" Don't get a loop of wonder going that quenches your ability to understand. Try not to be so amazed. Try to focus and look at what we're doing" "

"As nervous systems evolve to higher and higher levels , they come more and more to understand the true situation in which they are embedded . And the true situation in which we are embedded is an organism, an organisation of active intelligence on a galactic scale".

"We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial so as not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses. When we can love the alien, then we will have begun to heal the psychic discontinuity that has plagued us since the sixteenth century, possibly earlier".

"The alien-partner is like the angelic tetramorph. It is androgynous, hermaphroditic, transhuman; it is all these things that the unconscious chooses to project upon it until we have enough information to define what it might actually be for itself.
  Eventually this contact will occur. We are now in the pubescent stage of yearning, of forming an image of the thing desired. This image of the thing desired will eventually cause that thing to come into being."

"What it is leading towards is some kind of transcendental transformative flowing together of everything that is beyond our language system. It is the umbilicus of being; it is where it's all tied together, and, therefore, it's very hard to describe"

" A mystery is not to be confused with an unsolved problem; a mystery is by its nature mysterious and will not collapse into solution"

"The One Mind contains all experiences of the Other. There is no dichotomy between the Newtonian universe,deployed throughout light-years of three-dimensional space,and the interior mental universe. They are adumbrations of the same thing.
  We perceive them as unresolvable dualisms because of the low quality of the code we customarily use. The language we use to discuss these problems has built-in dualisms...The dualism built into our language makes the death of the species and the death of the individual appear to be opposed things"  (!!!)

"I am left to conclude that we must remain our own guides into these still-elusive dimensions, more unexplored than we have previously imagined. This is what i have done for years , since each effort to find a preexisting tradition that made complete sense of the shamanic dimension as i personally know it has been less than successful"

""My testimony is that magic is alive in hyperspace. It is not necessary to believe me, only to form a relationship with these hallucinogenic plants"

Excerpts from The Archaic Revival
by Terence McKenna
Published by HarperCollins
ISBN 0-06-250613-7

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