The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
TERENCE MCKENNAAnything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
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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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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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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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Who is to say what is real and what is not?’Real’ is a distinction of a naïve mind.
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Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.
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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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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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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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I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing.
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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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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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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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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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The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.
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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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How do we fight back? By creating art.
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People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.
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Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.
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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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Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you’re talking about.
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Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies.
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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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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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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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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