Terence McKenna Quotes
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Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind.
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Psychedelics can carry you farther and faster than most people care to go. Once you get to psychedelics, it's no longer a matter of seeking the answer, you have found the answer. Now the issue changes dramatically, you must face the answer.
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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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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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There is a belief that there is a hyperobject called Overmind, or God, that casts a shadow into time. History is our group experience if this shadow. As one draws closer and closer to the source of the shadow, the paradoxes intensify, the rate of change intensifies. What is happening is that the hyperobject is beginning to ingress into three-dimensional space.
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There’s light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don’t go to the back side of your mind you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people. Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven, God is some kind of lost continent IN the human mind.
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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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I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.
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One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.
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We love to congratulate ourselves on the forward-leaning liberal society that we live in, and the truth is it's a bunch of rattle snake-handling fundamentalists that are much closer to Stalin than they are to FDR or anybody else like that.
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Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.
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Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.
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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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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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What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.
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Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening
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But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space.
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Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree.
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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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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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It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.
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I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.
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The party impulse is a very subversive impulse. I mean, you know, a lot of artists have too much integrity to sell their art as a brand; but who has so much integrity that they would turn down a party?
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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.