Terence McKenna Quotes
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In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.
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We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.
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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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There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.
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For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined.
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The Truth doesn't need your cooperation to exist. All forms of cult, all forms of hype, all forms of delusion do require your participation in order to exist. I've looked into marginal areas of human experience -historical and otherwise- with a rational mind, and what I've found is that doorways into the miraculous are far fewer than the publicists of the New Age would have us believe. On the other hand, they are not as rare as the proponents of radical reductionism and materialism would have us believe. There are doorways out of the mundane.
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The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.
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The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.
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Apparently, in the Avesta classical period no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.
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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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If reality is code, then it can be hacked in some way that we had not suspected before.
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Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It's a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure.
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Modernity is a desert, and we are jungle monkeys. And so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation, new ideas are coming to the fore. Psilocybin is a selective filter for this. The wish to go to space is a selective filter for this. Just the wish to know your own mind is a selective filter for this.
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Science does not deal with subjective experience... Well that's too bad because that is all any of us ever have.
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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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What is needed, is an awakening.
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All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.
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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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If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity, you are going to end up with business as usual. The road to hell is paved with good intentions but it is not paved with clarity.
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Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.
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This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite.
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There is a sort of fair play, and if you can get in touch with that in your life, if you can have that perception, the world will begin to work for you, it will begin to move toward you... Nature loves courage, and it shows you that loves courage because it will remove obstacles.
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Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.
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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.