Terence McKenna Quotes
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You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.
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Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism.
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The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.
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The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.
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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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Because this is the world that science built, with the henchmen of capitalism and Christianity.
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These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.
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Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. And its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff. And things normally experienced as acoustically experienced becomes visibly beheld, and it's quite spectacular.
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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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History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.
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Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
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For talking monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a racoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe, the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.
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Time is a topological manifold. It is a surface. Events flow across it like water over land and like water flowing over land, when the land is flat, the water becomes reflective and moves slowly. When the landscape becomes disrupted, the water moves faster and chaotic attractors appear and new kinds of activity emerge and out of that new activity, there comes the new states that define the future.
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Memory training is great psychedelic training.
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The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.
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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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Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored. Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies. These allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late.
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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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What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.
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Once you get to this place on what we might metaphorically call your spiritual quest, once you get to the place where you hear about psychedelics, the issue is no longer then about where is the gas peddle on the spiritual vehicle. The issue suddenly becomes, where is the brake? Because this is the fuel to go where you want to go. This is the power to lift you where you want to be lifted.
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If you're truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.
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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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That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
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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.