Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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In cyberspace things are built out of light.
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The only evil that associates itself with mushrooms is taking too little.
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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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Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order.
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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.
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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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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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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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My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart just one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.
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This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well, you don't want to clench, you don't want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe, and sing, and sing it back, and it will step back. You can take control of your situation ... most of the time.
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In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.
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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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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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It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind.
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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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Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.
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Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant.
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I think what's really happening is that a dialogue opens up between the ego and these larger, more integrated parts of the psyche that are normally hidden from view.
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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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Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
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This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.
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You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
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The Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to evolve.