Terence McKenna Quotes
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Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.
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But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space.
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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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Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made.
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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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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 testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls.
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Nature is actually the goal at the end of history.
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Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.
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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
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Reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we're embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion.
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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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I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.
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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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There is no mundane dimension really, if you have the eyes to see it, it is all transcendental.
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What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.
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What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.
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I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn't for that.
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When we really understand time travel we may find out it's as common as dirt and has been going on all around us is all kinds of physical processes.
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Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.
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To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.
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The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.
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Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.
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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.