Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.
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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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The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.
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You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.
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I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
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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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We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years.
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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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There’s light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don’t go to the back side of your mind you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people. Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven, God is some kind of lost continent IN the human mind.
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Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.
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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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In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can't be told.
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So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.
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In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones.
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The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.
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What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.
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Our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts.
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One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.
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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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You aren't an object. You're a process of some sort.
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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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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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I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.