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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The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.
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These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.
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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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We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
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There is this persistent theme in all of these notions that death is made more easy, whatever that means, if you've learned the territory before you get there. And you know, in the Mahayana Buddhist situation it even becomes as extreme as saying; 'life is essentially a preparation for death, a studying of the maps of a learning of the skills a packing of your picnic basket so that when you get out there and demons are sniffing you up one side and down the other you don't bungle your mantras'.
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The danger is in using psychedelic drugs, just to put it out there, is madness.
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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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I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.
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I mean everybody knows there's something wrong with the world and if you read left wing politicians or deconstructionists or thoughtful historians they will offer thoughtful critiques of our situation. But the question is, you know, the Tolstoyian question; 'What is to be done?'
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It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.
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'Drugs' and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.
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It's possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s as a wish to continue the inward quest without having to put yourself on the line in the way you had to when you took 250 gamma of LSD. And I think all these other methods are efficacious, but I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off.
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It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.
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If you sit down with a person, or a watermelon for that matter, when you're stoned and sing into it, the quality of the hallucination is such that there is a way of thinking about it where you could say, 'This is an acoustical hologram of the interior of their body.'" I don't say that.I just say, "My goodness isn't it strange that I seem to be able to see inside of the watermelon when I'm doing this.'
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Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.
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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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Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
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We are like caterpillars contemplating pupation.
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Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.
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Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.
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Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.
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The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention. It's just not a coincidence that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality.
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The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.