Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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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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What you call man is time.
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All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.
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Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.
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The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.
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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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I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.
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I'm not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time.
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Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.
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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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These things which are made of light and grammar and sound that come chirping and squealing and tumbling toward you. 'Hooray! Welcome! You're here!', and in my case, 'You send so many and you come so rarely!'
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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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But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it.
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Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant.
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Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
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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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By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.
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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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The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.
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What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.
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Human history is a Gaian dream.
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Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.