Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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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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In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.
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Eschaton comes from the Greek word 'echatos', which just means the end.
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The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an antidrugs position. Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive behavior; these are precisely the tendencies in our psychological makup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric, and more grounded point of view within the individual.
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As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.
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The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.
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The reason for the emphasis on shamanism and on other techniques is, you will need techniques if you go into the deep water. And they can make your life very simple and save you from unnecessary suffering. Not all suffering is necessary. Maybe no suffering is necessary.
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The obligation on us is to communicate the truth so that it is understood. The belief will take care of itself.
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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.
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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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What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.
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I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.
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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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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 Gaian process is more than a process. It is s self-reflecting entelechy of some sort.
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The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.
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Although whenever you have intelligent life in the presence of large explosions, a safe bet is that the intelligent life is responsible for the large explosion.
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No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.
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The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.
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I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.
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One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.
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It's as important to be well informed in this area, if you're going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you're going to do that.