Terence McKenna Quotes
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But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space.
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Television, introduced at the close of World War II, has become a form of electronic heroin, and it isn't even your trip. They don't even let you go on your own trip, you get a trip designed by Madison Avenue.
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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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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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Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind.
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The truth for sure, when it arrives, will make you smile. If it doesn't, you should seek a deeper truth.
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I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.
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It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind.
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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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You will ride the Tao toward the concrescence and will be able to live in the light of its anticipation.
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I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.
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Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort.
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What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.
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You put two egos together and you've either got a conflict, which is always interesting, or better yet, a love affair.
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The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.
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Psychedelics can carry you farther and faster than most people care to go. Once you get to psychedelics, it's no longer a matter of seeking the answer, you have found the answer. Now the issue changes dramatically, you must face the answer.
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There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.
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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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There is nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves.
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The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future.
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The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.
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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 state in the matter of drugs should not, any more than in the matter of sex, act as the secret agent for the agenda of the church.
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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.