People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.
TERENCE MCKENNAThe problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
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Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you’re talking about.
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The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.
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I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It’s not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.
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Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.
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How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
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When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.
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Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
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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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How do we fight back? By creating art.
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The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.
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We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.
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Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.
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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.
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What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what’s real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.
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Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.
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If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.
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Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image.
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Worrying is betting against yourself.
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The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.
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To the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is.
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Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
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What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation.
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Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you’re gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough,
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Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.
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Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it’s not necessarily some kind of ‘Be Here Now’ feel-good thing because it doesn’t always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It’s primary.
TERENCE MCKENNA