Terence McKenna Quotes
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I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.
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We can't sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten.
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Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language.
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What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.
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Apparently, in the Avesta classical period no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.
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The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
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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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Could any symbol be any more appropriate of the ambiguity of human transformation? What mushroom is it that grows at the end of history? Is it Stropharia cubensis, or is it the creation of Edward Teller? This is an unresolved problem.
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I regard these people who are peddling angst and peddling pessimism and all that stuff as so 'two minutes ago'.
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We are living in a very pivotal time. The time that we inherit from science is a time to humble you, to dwarf you. It tells you that the sun will not fluxuate for another billion years, that species come and go, and, in other words, on a temporal scale you don't matter. And that now doesn't matter. But when you look at the release of energy, the asymptotic speeding up of processes, we tend to be xenophobically oriented toward the human.
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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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We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses.
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It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know... You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You'll have that!
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Worrying is betting against yourself.
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Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.
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A glacier rattles in the cupboard, the desert sighs in the bed, and the crack in the teacup opens a door to the land of the dead. The Maya call this Xibalba (Shibalba), the road to the dimension of the dead.
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The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination.
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The only difference between a drug and a computer is that one is slightly too large to swallow. ... And our best people are working on that problem, even as we speak.
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Science does not deal with subjective experience... Well that's too bad because that is all any of us ever have.
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The other night I searched (the Web) for 'self-transforming elf machines.' There were 36 hits! It surprised me. I sort of use the search engine like an oracle. I've used the phrase for DMT, 'Arabian hyperspace.' So I thought of this, and then I searched it, 'Arabian hyperspace,' in quotes. And it took me right to a transcript of the talk in which I'd said the thing! You can find your own mind on the Internet. I'm very grateful to the people who type up my talks and then post them at their websites.
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Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.
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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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What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible.
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People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.