Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as we seem to be able to move through metamorphosis into our own imaginations - a super civilization spread throughout space and time. Our future is a mystery, our destiny is to live in the imagination.
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A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.
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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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It's my belief that one of the unconscious reasons which underlies the odd attitude of the establishment toward hallucinogens is the fact that they bring the mystery to the surface as an individual experience. In other words, you do not understand the psychedelic experience by getting a report from Time magazine or even the Economist. You only understand the psychedelic experience by having it.
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Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.
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We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.
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A birth is a death. Everything you treasure, and believe in, and love, and relate to is destroyed for you when you leave the womb. And you are launched into another modality, a modality that perhaps you would not have chosen but that you cannot do anything about.
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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 most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.
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My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.
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Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.
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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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The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it.
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Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
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When we really understand time travel we may find out it's as common as dirt and has been going on all around us is all kinds of physical processes.
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We want freedom. We want freedom from the constraints of the cycles of the sun and the moon. We want freedom from drought and weather, freedom from the movement of game, the growth of plants, freedom from control from mendacious popes and kings, freedom from ideology, freedom from want. This idea of freeing ourselves has become the compass of the human journey.
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Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.
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Liberate yourself from the illusion of culture.
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The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.
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I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.
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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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The race isn't to the swift, it's to the thoughtful.
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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.