Terence McKenna Quotes
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The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.
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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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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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There is nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves.
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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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It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.
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Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?
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Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.
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I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
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There is no knowledge without risk taking.
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Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.
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No one yet understands the mysterious intelligence within plants or the implications of the idea that nature communicates in a basic chemical language that is unconscious but profound. We do not yet understand how hallucinogens transform the message in the unconscious into revelations beheld by the conscious mind.
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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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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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Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.
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The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.
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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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What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.
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All time is is how much change you can pack into a second.
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I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself.
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Eschaton comes from the Greek word 'echatos', which just means the end.
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The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.
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You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise.
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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.