Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that there exists an advanced intelligence in a parallel universe, and our religious sentiments arise from a desire to connect with it.
Terence McKenna's quote reflects on the notion that there is a vast, intelligent universe beyond our comprehension, which is 'transhuman' and 'hyperdimensional.' He posits that human beings have an innate yearning for a connection with this alien intelligence, which he links to modern religious feelings. This perspective invites contemplation about the nature of reality, spirituality, and our place within the cosmos.
In practice
In a lecture about consciousness and spirituality, one could use this quote to illustrate the quest for higher understanding.
We want freedom. We want freedom from the constraints of the cycles of the sun and the moon. We want freedom from drought and weather, freedom from the movement of game, the growth of plants, freedom from control from mendacious popes and kings, freedom from ideology, freedom from want. This idea of freeing ourselves has become the compass of the human journey.
LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.
A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.
Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.
If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age.
Without history we are the prisoners of the accident of where and when we were born.
Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid.
He whose intellect overcomes his lust is higher than the angels; he whose lust overcomes his intelligence is less than an animal.
Tis Man's to explore up and down, inch by inch, with the taper his reason.
The universe (he said) offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain — although it may think it can — the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.
The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.
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