Terence McKenna Quotes
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History is rooted in the future
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Plants seem like an excellent model for the kind of future that we should be building.
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You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.
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Our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us.
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Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.
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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.
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History is a series of approximations of the final singularity.
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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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Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief- and if it's not there why should you believe in it?
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Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.
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You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.
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Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.
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What they psychedelics cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction.
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Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
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You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.
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We psychonauts are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it's too early for us to be anything else. There's no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That's why it's so important to try and share our stories.
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Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
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I discovered early in life a stunning truth that's made my life very complicated in its wake, but that I still think is true, and it's that people are very easy to love.
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What blinds us, or makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness that our beliefs have grown obsolete and should be put aside.... This is I think much of the problem of the modern dilemma: Direct experience has been discounted, and in its place all kinds of belief systems have been erected.... If you believe something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite; which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of committing yourself to this belief.
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I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.
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How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
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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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Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.
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Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy.