Terence McKenna Quotes
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Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism.
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We are reaping the fruits of ten thousand, fifty thousand years of sowing of the fields of mind. And it is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition of social reality, re engineering of languages, revisioning of the planetary ecology, all these things fall upon us.
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We must look to the native healers all over the world and study their methods... Their methods are chemical and personal. It's a combination of care, attention, intention and chemistry that allows consciousness to be made malleable and recast in other forms.
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The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.... Or we can SAY the world is made of tiny wave mechanical packets of matter hurling through space at near the speed of light.... But notice that what we get each time are WORDS.
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If you play the cultural game, it's like playing only with clubs or something, or playing only with the red marked cards. You have to play with a full deck, and that includes this pre-linguistic surround in which we are embedded.
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We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.
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You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.
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We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.
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How do we fight back? By creating art.
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Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.
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It culture invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.
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Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together.
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This is the message of your life and my life - it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children - nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is.
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What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.
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All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it's very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you're lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact.
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The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward, into metabolism. The human body is a knot in time.
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Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.
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The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.
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Part of what the psychedelic point of view represents is living a certain portion of your life without answers. Just accepting that certain dilemmas will never resolve themselves into some kind of a complete answer. That's why psychedelics are so different from any system being sold, from one of the great elder systems like Christianity, to the latest cult out of Los Angeles.
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There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.
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It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.
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I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.
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I think our intelligence is a source of toxicity to nature and discomfort to ourselves unless our values are based on planetary values, are linked to the values of the rest of nature. Intelligence is not a license to trample. The proper role of intelligence in a planetary ecology is that of gardener, caregiver and maintainer of balance.
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I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I'm completely hopeful. . . . This is how it should be. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace.