Terence McKenna Quotes
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There is no mundane dimension really, if you have the eyes to see it, it is all transcendental.
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What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.
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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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If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately.
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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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You will ride the Tao toward the concrescence and will be able to live in the light of its anticipation.
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Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.
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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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I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.
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Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
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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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I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.
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What is needed, is an awakening.
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This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite.
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You aren't an object. You're a process of some sort.
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Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
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When we really understand time travel we may find out it's as common as dirt and has been going on all around us is all kinds of physical processes.
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I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.
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Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
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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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The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it, because you can't predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place.
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The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.
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If you sit down with a person, or a watermelon for that matter, when you're stoned and sing into it, the quality of the hallucination is such that there is a way of thinking about it where you could say, 'This is an acoustical hologram of the interior of their body.'" I don't say that.I just say, "My goodness isn't it strange that I seem to be able to see inside of the watermelon when I'm doing this.'
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The shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a way he is always peripheral to it. He lives at the edge of the village. He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis. He is feared and respected. And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances.