Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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We are like caterpillars contemplating pupation.
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The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.
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Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.
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We are living in a very pivotal time. The time that we inherit from science is a time to humble you, to dwarf you. It tells you that the sun will not fluxuate for another billion years, that species come and go, and, in other words, on a temporal scale you don't matter. And that now doesn't matter. But when you look at the release of energy, the asymptotic speeding up of processes, we tend to be xenophobically oriented toward the human.
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Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I'm noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating.
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We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables.
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The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.
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Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.
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Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.
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I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I'm forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.
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What they psychedelics cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction.
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I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky.
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History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.
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You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.
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It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know... You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You'll have that!
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We don't have to look far for miracles because they're all around us. Everything is astonishing. The universe on it's surface is alive with mystery.
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Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism.
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I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.
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Memory training is great psychedelic training.
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Our task is to create memes... Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate.
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History is rooted in the future
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No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it's a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.
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This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you're taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience.