Terence McKenna Quotes
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So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions.
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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.
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My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness.
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You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.
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Obviously, it's some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious.
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What WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe.
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We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.
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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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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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This rising global humanism is, in fact, the rising into consciousness of a tribal god similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in these pre-Hellenic societies.
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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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The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind
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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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Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind.
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The Internet is light at the end of the tunnel. I don't care if it's being used to peddle pornography, I don't care if it's being trivialized in a thousand ways. Anything can be trivialized. The important point is that it is leveling the playing field of global society. It is creating de-facto an entirely new set of political realities. None of the constipated, oligarchic structures that are resisting this were ever asked. Their greed betrayed them into investing in this in the first place without ever fully grasping what the implications of it were for their larger agenda.
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The traditional manner of taking psilocybin is to take a very healthy dose, in the vicinity of 15 mg. on an empty stomach in total darkness.
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Don't worry. You don't know enough to worry. . . . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin' out loud. It's a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.
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Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.
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Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we're working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of.
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There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules
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It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection.
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We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.
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Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.
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A birth is a death. Everything you treasure, and believe in, and love, and relate to is destroyed for you when you leave the womb. And you are launched into another modality, a modality that perhaps you would not have chosen but that you cannot do anything about.