Terence McKenna Quotes
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There is nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves.
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Liberate yourself from the illusion of culture. Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.
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If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
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The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future.
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The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.
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What is needed, is an awakening.
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The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.
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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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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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Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
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Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
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People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.
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The momentum now is inevitable. Now it's about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable.
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I don't believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.
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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 mind is more powerful than any imaginable particle accelerator, more sensitive than any radio receiver or the largest optical telescope, more complete in its grasp of information than any computer: the human body- its organs, its voice, its powers of locomotion, and its imagination- is a more-than-sufficient means for the exploration of any place, time or energy level in the universe.
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There is a morphological enfoldment occurring on this planet. It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being. We are a privileged part of this.
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The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.
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It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems.
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Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.
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There is a sort of fair play, and if you can get in touch with that in your life, if you can have that perception, the world will begin to work for you, it will begin to move toward you... Nature loves courage, and it shows you that loves courage because it will remove obstacles.
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Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.
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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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We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as we seem to be able to move through metamorphosis into our own imaginations - a super civilization spread throughout space and time. Our future is a mystery, our destiny is to live in the imagination.