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And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.
Terence McKenna -
Certainly neo-Platonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology, which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics.
Terence McKenna
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That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with.
Terence McKenna -
It's getting funnier because everybody's categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don't make sense.
Terence McKenna -
What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.
Terence McKenna -
Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality.
Terence McKenna -
The thing that seemed to me so important about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me. I wasn't reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart. And so I assumed that I am a very ordinary person, therefore, if it happened to me it could happen to anyone.
Terence McKenna -
The psychedelic sets you at the beginning of the path, and then people do all kinds of things with it.
Terence McKenna
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The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety.
Terence McKenna -
The thing that excites me about these informational technologies is I think we are going to be able to use virtual reality to show each other the insides of our own heads.
Terence McKenna -
I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously.
Terence McKenna -
We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.
Terence McKenna -
Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed
Terence McKenna -
I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That's not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky.
Terence McKenna
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We're not dropping out here, we're infiltrating and taking over.
Terence McKenna -
I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs. ... I think that these plants 'take people' as much as people take the plants. ... When you take one of these ancient, ancient hallucinogens you are locking in to the morphogenetic fields of all the people who ever took it.
Terence McKenna -
So you know what we have to do is stop looking for leadership from the top, because the least among us make their way into those positions of power... So what we have to do is knock off this fantasy of being citizens inside a democratic state, I mean, what we are, are the propagandized masses inside a fascist dictatorship.
Terence McKenna -
And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings.
Terence McKenna -
The felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor.
Terence McKenna -
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.
Terence McKenna
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DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don't want to know about it.
Terence McKenna -
You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.
Terence McKenna -
The world is mental in some way that we do not yet understand, but that which we're edging toward understanding. And the world is made of language. I can't say that enough. Whenever we get into these discussions about reality, or effects in space and time, we are operating outside this assumption that the world is made of language.
Terence McKenna -
To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances.
Terence McKenna