Terence McKenna Quotes
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Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors.
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If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.
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Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.
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All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.
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The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation.
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This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.
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Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.
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There is no contradiction between technology and spirit. There is no contradiction between the search for intellectual integration and understanding and the psychedelic experience. There is no contradiction between ultra-advanced hyperspacial cyber culture and Paleolithic archaic culture. We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness.
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And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self.
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The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and creativity.
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Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.
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To my mind this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because these are the only force in nature that actually dissolve linguistics structures; lets the mechanics of syntax to be visible, allows the possibility for rapid introduction and spread of new concepts; gives permission for new ways of seeing; and this is what we have to do, we have to change our minds.
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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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The sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago. . . . Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting.
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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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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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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 reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is?
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We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event.
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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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I would argue that it's almost better to do heroin than to watch TV. At least when you're doing heroin you're responsible for your own reveries and thought processes. When you're mainlining TV what is it but endless messages to fetishize products?
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A long long time ago I took an oath to tell all secrets that came my way. Don't tell me a secret, I won't keep it. I'm against secrets, I'm against hierarchies, lineages, all assumption of special knowledge on the part of anyone in the presence of anyone else is abhorrent to me. I mean, I am a true anarchist first and foremost.
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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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What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all.