Terence McKenna Quotes
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We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.
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I believe that the totemic image for the future is the octopus. This is because the squids and octopi have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic; a model for the human communications of the future. In the not-too-distant future men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea.
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Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.
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History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.
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The 'person' is not an interchangeable part. The 'citizen' is. ... The person is harking back to a pre-print model. It's what the hippies were.
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We have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a direct pipeline to the unconscious and we have then fallen victim to priestcraft of every conceivable sort.
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The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.
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Alcoholism isn't a disease. It's a failure of self-image.
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Human history is a Gaian dream.
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You aren't an object. You're a process of some sort.
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The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity.
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There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.
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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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Obviously, it's some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious.
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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 imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information
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There is nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves.
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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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In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.
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Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.
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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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The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.
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To me, the most amazing the most amazing transformation in my lifetime is not the revolution of the Sixties but the counter revolution of the Seventies, where they managed to put the cuckoo clock back together again
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The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of.