Terence McKenna Quotes
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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 nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves.
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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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We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years.
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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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Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.
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There is no knowledge without risk taking.
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Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.
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The thing that is so powerful about the psychedelics is that they perform on demand, which almost in principle you cannot expect of a mystical experience because that would be essentially man ordering God at man's whim, which is not how it's supposed to work.
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What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.
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What I'm talking about is actually is the Mystery of Being as existential fact. That there is something that haunts this world that can take apart and reduce every single one of us to a mixture of terror and ecstasy, fear and trembling. It is not an idea, that's the primary thing to bear in mind. It's an experience.
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All time is is how much change you can pack into a second.
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Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.
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The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.
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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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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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To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.
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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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Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.
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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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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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Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.
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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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Apparently there is a great discovery or insight which our culture is deliberately designed to suppress, distort, and ignore. That is that nature is some kind of minded entity. That nature is not simply the random flight of atoms through electromagnetic fields. Nature is not the empty, despiritualized , lumpen matter that we inherit from modern physics. But it is instead a kind of intelligence, a kind of mind.