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.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of individual freedom in exploring consciousness as a fundamental right.
In this quote, Terence McKenna argues that the foundational principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, are incomplete if they do not allow for personal experimentation with one's own consciousness. He suggests that true freedom must encompass the right to explore and understand one's mind, highlighting the significance of personal autonomy in the pursuit of happiness.
In practice
Discussing the importance of personal freedoms at a philosophy club meeting.
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.
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.
The engineers of the future will be poets.
American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting.
The word of God hidden in the heart is a stubborn voice to suppress.
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.
I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.
You say I have the most wicked face of any woman. You say my hair is like the serpent locks of Medusa, that my eyes have the cruel cunning of Borgia, that my mouth is the mouth of the sinister scheming Delilah, that my hands are like the talons of a Circe or the blood-bathing Elizabeth Bathory. And then you ask me of my soul—you wish to know if it is reflected in my face.
Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a Great War, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one.
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