Terence McKenna Quotes
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The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.
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Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it's not necessarily some kind of 'Be Here Now' feel-good thing because it doesn't always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It's primary.
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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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I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.
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Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.
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To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.
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Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.
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What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.
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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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Time is a series of fluctuating variables.
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What is happening, I think, it's really bigger than psychedelics, it's bigger than human evolution. We are not making the waves in this ocean. We are corks, riding the waves of the ocean. But we are privileged, by perhaps chance alone, to occupy a unique moment in the history of the universe. A moment when the universe goes through some kind of self-transforming, evolutionary, inflationary expansion. That's what's happening.
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The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.
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People are concrescences of ambiguity.
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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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For all we know, we know nothing.
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The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls.
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Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.
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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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The only real experience that counts, is your own.
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Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret.
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I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.
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Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.
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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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I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.