Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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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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As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.
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People have a right to get stoned. They have a right to think and explore their own minds. This is as intimate a part of their being as their sexuality. Any culture which mitigates that is clearly afraid of a full and fair and open dialogue about what reality is and what real human values ought to be.
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I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.
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Time will perfect matter.
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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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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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Worrying is betting against yourself.
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Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.
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The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it.
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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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The only evil that associates itself with mushrooms is taking too little.
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And I want to thank all the women that support me. I have wonderful support systems from women of all types who seem dedicated to the notion that Terence McKenna can always be improved. I'm extremely grateful for that. The frontiers are enormous in that dimension.
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Impressionism is simply twenty minutes into LSD.
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History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.
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Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view.
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The human imagination, which is our great glory, has grown so powerful that we can barely unleash it on the surface of the planet.
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The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention. It's just not a coincidence that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality.
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All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.
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No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.
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One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.
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There is this persistent theme in all of these notions that death is made more easy, whatever that means, if you've learned the territory before you get there. And you know, in the Mahayana Buddhist situation it even becomes as extreme as saying; 'life is essentially a preparation for death, a studying of the maps of a learning of the skills a packing of your picnic basket so that when you get out there and demons are sniffing you up one side and down the other you don't bungle your mantras'.
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Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.