Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.
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All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.
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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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Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.
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Escape into the dream. Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists. I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapist.
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Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair.
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The quality of rhetoric emanating from the psychedelic community must improve radically. If it does not, we will forfeit the reclamation of our birthright and all opportunity for exploring the psychedelic dimension will be closed off.
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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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I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.
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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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Perhaps, you know, new laws, new domains of potential openness are occurring as the universe ages, and complexity previously disallowed is now possible, and we are that complexity. We are nature moving out of its genetic phase - a phase under the control of chemical genes, which are physical structures, in to an epigenetic phase, a phase of culture ruled by codes, transformable culturally confined codes - mathematics, religion, philosophy, art, dance, humor.
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Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness. . . . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities. . . . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.
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Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
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What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.
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What good is a theory of how the universe works if it’s a series of tensor equations that, even when understood, come nowhere tangential to experience? The only intellectual or noetic or spiritual path worth following is one that builds on personal experience
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What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news!
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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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Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.
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I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.
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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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Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.
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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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Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.