Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.
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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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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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As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.
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It's a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.
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The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is?
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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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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 thing that is so powerful about the psychedelics is that they perform on demand, which almost in principle you cannot expect of a mystical experience because that would be essentially man ordering God at man's whim, which is not how it's supposed to work.
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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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The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us.
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In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.
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I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.
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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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Time is a series of fluctuating variables.
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The western mind, because of it's unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics.
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What WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe.
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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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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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Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it's not necessarily some kind of 'Be Here Now' feel-good thing because it doesn't always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It's primary.
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I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.
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I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.
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The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.