What is The Imagination?

The imagination is in fact a kind of organ of perception. Not an organ of creative, uh, uh, unfoldment, but actually an organ of perception. And that what is perceived in the imagination is that which is not local. And never can be.

So, uh, I-I myself am up in the air about this, or as you get to know me better I don’t see the need to believe or disbelieve to proclaim this true or untrue, uh, but it is useful at this stage for understanding, uh, our mental life. Uh, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people and thinking about the origins of consciousness and in one sense asking the question “What is the imagination?” is a different way of asking the same question “What is the origin of consciousness?” Uh, and as some of you know to ex- distraction, I believe psilocybin mushrooms played the role of kick-starting human evolution. I don’t want to repeat all that, here, it’s been stated many times. But, uh, what I want to point out is that we can see in nature, I think, the declension from the full-blown human imaginative capacity back into the organization of the animal mind. We can see these stages through which this must have unfolded. -Terence Mckenna