All quotes from Terence McKenna’s

We are, in fact, closing distance with the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter, which is the freeing of life from the dark chrysalis of matter.

Technology is the real skin of our species. Man—correctly seen in the context of the last 500 years—is an extruder of a technological shell. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization, we put it through mental filters, and we extrude Lindisfarne gospels, space shuttles, all of these things. This is what we do. We’re like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects.

My plea to scientists, administrators, and politicians who may be listening to my voice is to look again at psilocybin. To not lump it with the other psychedelics. To realize that it is a phenomenon unto itself and it has an enormous potential for transforming mankind—not simply transforming the people who take it, but it is like an art movement or a mathematical understanding or a scientific breakthrough. It holds the possibility of transforming the entire society simply by virtue of the information that is coming through. This is a source of gnosis. And the voice of gnosis has been silenced in the Western mind for at least a thousand years.

What psilocybin shows you is not colored lights and moving grids, it shows you places: jungles, cities, machines, books, architectonic form of incredible complexity. Just click, click, click. There is no possibility that this could be construed as noise of any sort. It is, in fact, the most highly ordered visual information that you ever experienced. Much more highly ordered than the visual experience I’m having at this moment of this room.