Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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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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To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.
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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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The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an antidrugs position. Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive behavior; these are precisely the tendencies in our psychological makup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric, and more grounded point of view within the individual.
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The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.
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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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We have outlived this embryo, this human cradle, and now it's time to be up and about the great business of becoming citizens of the galaxy and at home with our own heart.
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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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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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Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It's a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure.
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We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it.
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What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.
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What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all.
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I sort of see cannabis as the pilot light of Gian consciousness.
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There is no knowledge without risk taking.
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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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Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.
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If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately.
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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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I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.
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Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.
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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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History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.