Terence McKenna Quotes
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Culture is your operating system.
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In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones.
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Thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations.
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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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There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.
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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.
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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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The western mind, because of it's unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics.
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To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.
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What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.
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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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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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The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.
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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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The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.
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Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.
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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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Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.
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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.
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Inform yourself, inform your children, talk to your friends! And let's try to make a better, stonier world than the one we inherited!
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The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.
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The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.
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The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.
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Art's task is to save the soul of mankind.. anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.