Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
TERENCE MCKENNAScience does not deal with subjective experience… Well that’s too bad because that is all any of us ever have.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.
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Every click of the cosmic clock brings us closer to the process for which the planet called us into existence.
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The surface of things is not where attention should rest.
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You are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. And in that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, ‘What is it?’ In that moment art can be created.
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If you actually look at the etymology of the word ‘hallucination’, what it’s come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That’s the meaning of ‘hallucination’, to wander in the mind.
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There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.
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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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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 see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can’t have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.
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Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.
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Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness
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Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
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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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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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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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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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The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer
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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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Don’t worry. You don’t know enough to worry. . . . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin’ out loud. It’s a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.
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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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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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Who is to say what is real and what is not?’Real’ is a distinction of a naïve mind.
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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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Science does not deal with subjective experience… Well that’s too bad because that is all any of us ever have.
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How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
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The absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.
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