Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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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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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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Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.
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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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Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.
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The psychedelic universe, whatever it is, is the major datum of experience. It's larger than this planet. Nobody knows how large it is. The further in you go the bigger it gets. We don't know what to make of something like that. It's the reverse of our expectations.
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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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And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.
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Liberate yourself from the illusion of culture. Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.
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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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Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.
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Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's some kind of gnostic demon. It's some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected.
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Time is a series of fluctuating variables.
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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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Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
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Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree.
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Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
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A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.
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The only evil that associates itself with mushrooms is taking too little.
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And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.
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Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
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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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History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.