Terence McKenna Quotes
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The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.
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Earth is a place where language has literally become alive. Language has infested matter; it is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.
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There is no hierarchy of elder knowledge in my social region of things. There are only people learning and sharing in a very complex environment.
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The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we've all been hungering for.
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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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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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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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The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.
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Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.
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People are concrescences of ambiguity.
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The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind.
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One has, you know, a window of opportunity somewhere between zip and a hundred to solve, or understand, or penetrate, or appreciate, or come to terms with the conundrum of being, this amazing circumstance in which we find ourselves, both individually and collectively.
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One way to think about what psychedelics are is as catalysts for language development. They literally force the evolution of language. You cannot evolve faster than your language because the language defines the culture of meaning. So if there's a way to accelerate the evolution of language then this is real consciousness expansion and it's a permanent thing. The great legacies of the 60's are in attitudes and language. It boils down to doing your own thing, feeling the vibe, ego-trip, blowing your mind.
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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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Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.
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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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Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind.
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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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Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.
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Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's some kind of gnostic demon. It's some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected.
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Let's not underrate cannabis, for cryin' out loud. Cannabis should be the glue of the community.
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I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.
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We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
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We can understand first of all that what is happening in the world of becoming, the world we all experience as beings, is that novelty is entering into being, and it is changing the modalities of the real world toward greater and greater levels of integration.