Terence McKenna Quotes
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Eschaton comes from the Greek word 'echatos', which just means the end.
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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
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I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself.
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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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Culture is your operating system.
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Art's task is to save the soul of mankind.. anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.
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I'm not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time.
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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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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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What you call man is time.
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The shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a way he is always peripheral to it. He lives at the edge of the village. He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis. He is feared and respected. And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances.
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It seems to me that it is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language.
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I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.
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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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Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It's a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure.
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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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The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.
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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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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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We need a metaphor that can contain the daemon of the future that we have conjured into being.
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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 intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.
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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 human brain is the god of technological innovation.