It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
TERENCE MCKENNAI see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can’t have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.
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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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Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman’s relationship to a psychoactive plant.
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The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.
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When we free ourselves we are not freed into a void. When we free ourselves we are freed into a dimension in which Art is an obligation.
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To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.
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What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.
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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.
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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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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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Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window.
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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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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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Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
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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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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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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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Reality is made of words.
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This is the message of your life and my life – it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children – nothing lasts.
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If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.
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The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.
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Worrying is betting against yourself.
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Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you’re talking about.
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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 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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