Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
TERENCE MCKENNAKnowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you’re talking about.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.
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And what is the primary datum? It’s the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.
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This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else’s being you can’t be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism.
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You don’t even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
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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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We’ve painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare – triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights – or a leap to an entirely different level. We’ve taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom.
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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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How do we fight back? By creating art.
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You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.
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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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Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
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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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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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Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image.
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Reality is made of words.
TERENCE MCKENNA