Terence McKenna Quotes
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Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.
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We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components.
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I think the real test of psychedelics is what you do with them when you're not on them, what kind of culture you build, what kind of art, what kind of technologies... What's lacking in the Western mind is the sense of connectivity and relatedness to the rest of life, the atmosphere, the ecosystem, the past, our children's future. If we were feeling those things we would not be practicing culture as we are.
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For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.
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I'm fascinated by hallucinations. I mean, to me that is the sina qua non that you're getting somewhere.
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The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place.
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We are going through the eye of the needle; make sure you leave what you don't need behind
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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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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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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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Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.
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The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt.
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No one knows enough to worry.
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Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.
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The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.
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DMT raises all the questions in a hurry. It's so intense and so oriented toward the other and the visual and the hallucinogenic that it isn't really like a drug. It's more like an event that you ran into. You just came around a corner and there was the unspeakable.
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And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.
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The psychedelic mind is a higher dimensional mind, it is not fit for three dimensional space time.
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If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.
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In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept.
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Every click of the cosmic clock brings us closer to the process for which the planet called us into existence.
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Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.
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What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a thousand years, the still small voice of the Logos of the planet.
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The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.