Terence McKenna (Terence Kemp McKenna) Quotes
So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.
Quotes to Explore
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So we're going to keep getting mega-hits like this?" Tomas's dark brown eyes sparkled as they landed on Sienna's down-bent head. "Not that I don't appreciate it, sugar, but it did make me 'hyper,' according to my mother.
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My ideas were confused. In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.
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There is a wealth of information built into us ... tucked away in the genetic material in every one of our cells ... without some means of access, there is no way even to begin to guess at the extent and quality of what is there. The psychedelic drugs allow exploration of this interior world, and insights into its nature.”
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We went through the records and we found over five hundred of his patients who were alive and well five years after their treatment, with no cancer. And Dr. Burton didn't selectively give us these. These were "take what you want. Here are the patients I treated." So there was statistical improvement - more so than any cancer institution in the United States could show.
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I know it was harder for me taking care of my dad during his cancer than it was going through my own. You feel more helpless as a caregiver.
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The obligation on us is to communicate the truth so that it is understood. The belief will take care of itself.
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The overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it's not treated - if there's not pharmacological intervention - it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality.
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I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.
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In other words, I have no truck for anyone who goes out and does an eclectic building.
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And I think that the environment is one very strong way to counterbalance the chaotic nature of our life.
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I love watching faces as they grow up. It's the difference between so many strong British actresses compared to what America does to women. I like a face that hasn't been tampered with.
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In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones.
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Capitalism has been fully restored in Yugoslavia, as is well-known, but this capitalism knows how to disguise. Yugoslavia portrays itself as a socialist state, but of a special kind, as the world has never seen it before! The Titoites even boast that their state has nothing in common with the first socialist state which emerged from the socialist October Revolution and which was founded by Lenin and Stalin on the basis of the scientific theory of Marx and Engels.
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To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
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That is just the charge, which he brings against God, and it is only at his suggestion that men have adopted it. Leaving aside the matter of evolution in its most extreme phase, considered for a minute the very common idea that in the beginning God did indeed set the universe in motion; but that He then endowed matter with a certain amount of force, and subjected it to certain definite laws, so that everything should run for ever after much the same as a clock that has been wound up and left to itself. With what confidence can one who holds such a view offer prayer? What can he expect to receive? No wonder that people complain that their prayers are not answered. The god that they worship is too far off to hear their prayers, and too indifferent, or too rigidly circumscribed by the laws which He has laid down, to interfere in their behalf if He has laid down, to interfere in their behalf if He should hear. Such a God is not the God of the Bible.
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And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.
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The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it.
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So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.
