Terence McKenna (Terence Kemp McKenna) Quotes
Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind.
Quotes to Explore
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The shaman is a person who is able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence. They know more than the people they serve. The people they serve are like children within the game of culture. Only the shaman knows that culture is a game. Everyone else takes it seriously. That's how he can do his magic.
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The psychedelic experience is simply a compressed instance of what we call understanding, so that living psychedelically is trying to live in an atmosphere of continuous unfolding of understanding, so that every day you know more and see into things with greater depth than you did before. This is a process of education.
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Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what's going on.
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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.
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We are, in fact, hyper-dimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter, and the shadow in matter is the body. And at death, what happens basically, is that the shadow withdraws, or the thing which cast the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases, and matter which had been organized into a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustaining itself against entropy by cycling material in and degrading it and expelling it, that whole phenomenon ceases, but the thing which ordered it is not affected by that.
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If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.
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And what we're looking toward is a moment when the artificial language structures which bind us within the notion of ourselves are dissolved in the presence of the realization that we are a part of nature. And when that happens, the childhood of our species will pass away, and we will stand tremulously on the brink of really the first moment of coherent human civilization.
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The surface of things is not where attention should rest.
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The engineers of the future will be poets.
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Inside the boundaries of the old paradigm there's no hope, there's no way out of the box of capitalism, monogamy, consumer fetishism, egoism, money worship, no way out. No way. No way out!
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Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination.
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Nobody should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together.
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Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.
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Language betrays, in order to mean.
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That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with.
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The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.
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No more do we create cultural artifacts that are simply our furniture, but now it's our thoughts, our values, are embodied in this digital stuff.
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Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you're gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.
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For me it's an issue of are we afraid of ourselves? And we inherit a huge bunch of idealogical baggage, not only Christianity, but Freudianism, and Marxism . . . We inherit all kinds of idealogical baggage designed to make us fear ourselves.
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I believe in extraterrestrials, but I believe that real extraterrestrials are so peculiar that the job is to recognize them.
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The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together.
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The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.
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There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.
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My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises