Psychedelic Quotes
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The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.
Terence McKenna
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I believe that the totemic image for the future is the octopus. This is because the squids and octopi have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic; a model for the human communications of the future. In the not-too-distant future men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea.
Terence McKenna
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To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.
Terence McKenna
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Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy.
Terence McKenna
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There is no contradiction between technology and spirit. There is no contradiction between the search for intellectual integration and understanding and the psychedelic experience. There is no contradiction between ultra-advanced hyperspacial cyber culture and Paleolithic archaic culture. We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness.
Terence McKenna
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The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity.
Terence McKenna
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The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip.
Terence McKenna
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It's my belief that one of the unconscious reasons which underlies the odd attitude of the establishment toward hallucinogens is the fact that they bring the mystery to the surface as an individual experience. In other words, you do not understand the psychedelic experience by getting a report from Time magazine or even the Economist. You only understand the psychedelic experience by having it.
Terence McKenna
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The psychedelic universe, whatever it is, is the major datum of experience. It's larger than this planet. Nobody knows how large it is. The further in you go the bigger it gets. We don't know what to make of something like that. It's the reverse of our expectations.
Terence McKenna
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The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is?
Terence McKenna
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And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.
Terence McKenna
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We're not going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
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The quality of rhetoric emanating from the psychedelic community must improve radically. If it does not, we will forfeit the reclamation of our birthright and all opportunity for exploring the psychedelic dimension will be closed off.
Terence McKenna
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We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.
Terence McKenna
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The way out then is personal responsibility, new operating systems downloaded from outside of culture, which means from the deeper wisdom of the psychedelic plants and then a commitment to community and a motto of "To the future, without fear!" Without fear!
Terence McKenna
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Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair.
Terence McKenna
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Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.
Terence McKenna
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Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness. . . . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities. . . . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.
Terence McKenna
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I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.
Terence McKenna
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I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into on a psychedelic experience was somebody's idea of a playpen.
Terence McKenna
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Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
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The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it.
Terence McKenna
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Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree.
Terence McKenna
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One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.
Terence McKenna