Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
TERENCE MCKENNAWhat we call imagination is actually the universal library of what’s real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
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Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret.
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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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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 you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.
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You’re immortal as long as you live.
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You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.
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There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.
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I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing.
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Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image.
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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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How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
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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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We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
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The overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it’s not treated – if there’s not pharmacological intervention – it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality.
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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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We are told No, you’re unimportant, you’re peripheral – get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you’re a player.
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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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The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.
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It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
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If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.
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I don’t believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.
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Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.
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Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
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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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The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.
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