Terence McKenna Quotes
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Time will perfect matter.
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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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We're not going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience.
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History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.
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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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The race isn't to the swift, it's to the thoughtful.
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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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What is needed, is an awakening.
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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 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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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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The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.
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So the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That's why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in.
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People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.
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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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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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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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Apparently, in the Avesta classical period no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.
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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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Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.
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I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into on a psychedelic experience was somebody's idea of a playpen.
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I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.
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Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
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Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.