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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.
Terence McKenna -
There is a belief that there is a hyperobject called Overmind, or God, that casts a shadow into time. History is our group experience if this shadow. As one draws closer and closer to the source of the shadow, the paradoxes intensify, the rate of change intensifies. What is happening is that the hyperobject is beginning to ingress into three-dimensional space.
Terence McKenna
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Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.
Terence McKenna -
Science does not deal with subjective experience... Well that's too bad because that is all any of us ever have.
Terence McKenna -
History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.
Terence McKenna -
What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.
Terence McKenna -
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.
Terence McKenna -
You're immortal as long as you live.
Terence McKenna
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The current operating system culture is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions. We're cutting the earth from beneath our own feet. We're poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe. This is not intelligent behaviour. This is a culture with a bug in its operating system that's making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behaviour. Time to call a tech! And who are the techs? The shamans are the techs.
Terence McKenna -
One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.
Terence McKenna -
The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.
Terence McKenna -
One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.
Terence McKenna -
Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.
Terence McKenna -
Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.
Terence McKenna
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In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.
Terence McKenna -
Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it's not necessarily some kind of 'Be Here Now' feel-good thing because it doesn't always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It's primary.
Terence McKenna -
I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.
Terence McKenna -
If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately.
Terence McKenna -
It's a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.
Terence McKenna -
I think that's the job of each of us - to show our best toys and our best tricks that lift us and our friends to higher and higher levels. There is no end to this bootstrapping process. The future of the human mind and body and the future of humans together is endlessly bright.
Terence McKenna
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If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.
Terence McKenna -
Mind conjures miracles out of time.
Terence McKenna -
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.
Terence McKenna -
In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.
Terence McKenna