Terence McKenna Quotes
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What people notice about when they are on LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is.
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What I'm talking about is actually is the Mystery of Being as existential fact. That there is something that haunts this world that can take apart and reduce every single one of us to a mixture of terror and ecstasy, fear and trembling. It is not an idea, that's the primary thing to bear in mind. It's an experience.
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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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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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In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can't be told.
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It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.
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People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.
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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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We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.
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I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.
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Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.
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I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.
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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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You will ride the Tao toward the concrescence and will be able to live in the light of its anticipation.
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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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One of the things that's so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness.
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Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.
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You aren't an object. You're a process of some sort.
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A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing. It's changed before, but not for a long time in our lives, not since before our lives. But now it's changing, and there are many many possibilities.
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So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.
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Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.
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Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.
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You're immortal as long as you live.
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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.