The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure. That's the honest position, given that you are some kind of a talking monkey, some kind of a primate, some kind of creature, on a planet, in an animal body, incarnate in a time and space. In the face of that, life without closure is the only kind of intellectual honesty there is. If you have to inoculate yourself against the various memes of closure that are around, psychedelics do that. That's why they are so politically controversial and potent because—more than any other single act that you may voluntarily undertake—they pull the plug on the myth of cultural meaning. They show that these things are provisional, and that beneath the level of culture there is lurking this erotic, time-andspace-bound, feeling-defined, pre-linguistic mode of being, which is real being. Not becoming, not caught in the various fetishistic forms of tension that commodification of culture and delayed gratification and all these other buzzwords create, but a deeper level of authentic feeling. And it was there all the time, but is denied by the culture.

More from Terence McKenna

View all quotes →