Terence McKenna Quotes
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I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.
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The question is being asked, 'Are we alone?' And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we're not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?
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The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.
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Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
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Everything will come true in cyberspace. That's the whole idea. What cyberspace is, on one level, it's simply the human imagination vivified, hardwired.
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I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I'm completely hopeful. . . . This is how it should be. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace.
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Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.
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Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.
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There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.
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Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.
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In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept.
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Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet
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The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery.
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What is needed is a spirit of boundary dissolution, between individuals, between classes, sexual orientations, rich and poor, man and woman, intellectual and feeling toned types. If this can happen, then we will make a new world. And if this doesn't happen, nature is fairly pitiless and has a place for us in the shale of this planet, where so many have preceded us.
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It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.
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Marcel Eliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent, and Gordon Wasson, very rightly I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit.
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I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time.
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DMT is a reliable method for crossing in to a dimension that human beings have debated the existence of for 50.000 years. Is there an invisible nearby world inhabited by active intelligences with which human beings can communicate? You bet. And if you don't think so, then tell me you don't think so after you've smoked 75mg DMT. Otherwise we just don't have anything to talk about.
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To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back.
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The "just say no" campaign at this point is a lot like drawing sea-monsters over certain unexplored areas of the map and expecting people to stay away. It may work for some, but explorers live for this kind of thing.
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Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.
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I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.
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Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.
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The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.