Terence McKenna Quotes
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To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.
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Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.
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The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.
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Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.
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If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately.
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The imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information
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I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.
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Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.
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It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is.
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And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self.
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The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of.
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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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But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it.
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Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.
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There is nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves.
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If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind.
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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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For all we know, we know nothing.
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Culture is your operating system.
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It puts people who are into this psychedelic thing in an entirely different stance from all other spiritual seekers, because all other spiritual seekers are furiously seeking. Psychedelic people are holding it back with all their power, because they are in the presence of the mystery. And then the trick is to get a spigot on it so that it can be turned on and off rather than coming at you like a tidal wave a mile high and twenty miles wide.
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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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It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us.
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Eschaton comes from the Greek word 'echatos', which just means the end.
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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.