Terence McKenna Quotes
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There is a sort of fair play, and if you can get in touch with that in your life, if you can have that perception, the world will begin to work for you, it will begin to move toward you... Nature loves courage, and it shows you that loves courage because it will remove obstacles.
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For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined.
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In cyberspace things are built out of light.
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Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.
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History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.
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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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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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Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up.
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We are told No, you're unimportant, you're peripheral - get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
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The war on drugs was never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long as possible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wring the last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits from the global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared. "Defeat" will mean, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War, that the media will correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation and the real players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidity and venality of the Establishment's role will force a policy review.
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Drugs are about dulling perception, about addiction and about behavioral repetition...What psychedelics are about is pattern- dissolving experiences of an extraordinarily high or different awareness. They are the exact opposite of drugs. They promote questioning , they promote consciousness, they promote value examinations, they promote the reconstruction of behavioral patterns.
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There is nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves.
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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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In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.
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Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.
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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 message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.
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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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I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
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My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past.
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Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.
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People are concrescences of ambiguity.
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If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind.
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Let's not underrate cannabis, for cryin' out loud. Cannabis should be the glue of the community.