Terence McKenna Quotes
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Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.
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For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.
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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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The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future.
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We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what's going on or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on?
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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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Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.
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The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.
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Well, you could almost say, I suppose, that the scientist seeks what is similar between any two days, or bluebirds, or glaciers. And the poet seeks what is different. The artist seeks to celebrate the unique.
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Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.
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Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
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I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.
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At still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst.
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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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Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.
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I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster.
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The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.
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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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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 western mind, because of it's unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics.
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Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
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What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.
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History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it.