Terence McKenna Quotes
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All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.
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Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.
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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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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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I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.
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Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.
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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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I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.
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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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Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe.
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If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.
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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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To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.
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In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.
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No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.
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If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately.
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If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
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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 Gaian mind is what were calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set.
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The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.
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The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.
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Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.
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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.