Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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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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We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.
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Cultural conditioning is like bad software. Over and over it's diddled with and re-written so that it can just run on the next attempt. But there is cultural hardware, and it's that cultural hardware, otherwise known as authentic being, that we are propelled toward by the example of the shaman and the techniques of the shaman. ... Shamanism therefore is a call to authenticity.
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It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
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The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.
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Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.
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We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it.
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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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I'm fascinated by hallucinations. I mean, to me that is the sina qua non that you're getting somewhere.
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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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No one knows enough to worry.
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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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I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.
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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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I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.
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Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.
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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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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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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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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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What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.
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The Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to evolve.
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The only difference between a drug and a computer is that one is slightly too large to swallow. ... And our best people are working on that problem, even as we speak.