Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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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 you call man is time.
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It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate inter dimensionally and telepathically.
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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
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You know what, I'm stoned, and I'm proud.
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We've painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare - triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights - or a leap to an entirely different level. We've taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom.
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To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.
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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.
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The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.
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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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Thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations.
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Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of rationalist culture, we discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising presence of this intelligent Other, that beckons us out of history, and says, you know: 'The galaxy lies waiting.'
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Culture is your operating system.
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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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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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The only real experience that counts, is your own.
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It is the people who are 'far out' who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.
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The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.
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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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Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.
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A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing. It's changed before, but not for a long time in our lives, not since before our lives. But now it's changing, and there are many many possibilities.
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We live in condensations of our imagination
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If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it's an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.