Terence McKenna Quotes
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I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.
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My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past.
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What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.
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Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste.
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I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster.
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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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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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Time will perfect matter.
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Our culture difinitely takes an egocentric dominator view. The fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control. Dominator types today don't understand that it's not important to maintain control if you are not in control in the first place.
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Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.
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The truth for sure, when it arrives, will make you smile. If it doesn't, you should seek a deeper truth.
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Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.
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The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip.
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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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The 'hard swallow' built into science is this business about the Big Bang. ... This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. ... Notice that this is the limit test for credulity. . . . It's the limit case for likelihood.
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Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
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The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
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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 think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.
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Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. And its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff. And things normally experienced as acoustically experienced becomes visibly beheld, and it's quite spectacular.
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The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.
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I think transcending our cultures is going to be extraordinarily necessary for our survival. I don't think we can carry our cultures through the keyhole of the stretch of the next millennium
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The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.
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The race isn't to the swift, it's to the thoughtful.