Terence McKenna Quotes
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If you sit down with a person, or a watermelon for that matter, when you're stoned and sing into it, the quality of the hallucination is such that there is a way of thinking about it where you could say, 'This is an acoustical hologram of the interior of their body.'" I don't say that.I just say, "My goodness isn't it strange that I seem to be able to see inside of the watermelon when I'm doing this.'
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Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.
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You are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. And in that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, ‘What is it?’ In that moment art can be created.
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The other night I searched (the Web) for 'self-transforming elf machines.' There were 36 hits! It surprised me. I sort of use the search engine like an oracle. I've used the phrase for DMT, 'Arabian hyperspace.' So I thought of this, and then I searched it, 'Arabian hyperspace,' in quotes. And it took me right to a transcript of the talk in which I'd said the thing! You can find your own mind on the Internet. I'm very grateful to the people who type up my talks and then post them at their websites.
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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
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I mean everybody knows there's something wrong with the world and if you read left wing politicians or deconstructionists or thoughtful historians they will offer thoughtful critiques of our situation. But the question is, you know, the Tolstoyian question; 'What is to be done?'
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If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.
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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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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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By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.
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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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One of the things that's so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness.
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Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.
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The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment.
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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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If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
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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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The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.
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Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.
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Time will perfect matter.
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Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
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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.
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Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.