Terence McKenna Quotes
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The Germans take quite a knock for the holocaust, but the Catholic church manages to push more people into death, disease, and degradation every year than the holocaust managed in its entire show. And it's thought rather crass to even mention the fact. It seems to me that as long as these Catholic bishops can show their face in public that we are in complicity with mass murder.
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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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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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We are all cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body it is hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern of the whole of what is happening, and yet we can sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern.
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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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Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.
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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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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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The same organizational principles which called us forth into self-reflection have called forth self-reflection out of the planet itself. And the problem then is for us to suspect this, act on our suspicion, and be good detectives, and track down the spirit in its lair. And this is what shamans are doing. They are hunters of spirit.
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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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If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance.
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Ultimately what we're touching is the invisible, all-pervasive intelligence that surrounds us and penetrates us. It is grooming us to be able to tolerate its splendor. It can't just reveal itself openly because we would be forfeited; we'd never know what hit us.
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Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants
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Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.
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We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects...All our tool-making implies our belief in an ultimate tool.
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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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Everything will come true in cyberspace. That's the whole idea. What cyberspace is, on one level, it's simply the human imagination vivified, hardwired.
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The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.
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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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These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.
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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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If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.
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Plants seem like an excellent model for the kind of future that we should be building.
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Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.