Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.
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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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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 tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.
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The only real experience that counts, is your own.
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History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense.
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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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Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.
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The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an antidrugs position. Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive behavior; these are precisely the tendencies in our psychological makup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric, and more grounded point of view within the individual.
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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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Eschaton comes from the Greek word 'echatos', which just means the end.
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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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At still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst.
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I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.
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For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.
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People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.
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I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.
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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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I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.
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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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As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.
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It is the people who are 'far out' who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.
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The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.