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.
TERENCE MCKENNAFor 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.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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To realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.
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We are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.
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The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.
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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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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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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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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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Reality is made of words.
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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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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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The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
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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 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 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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The surface of things is not where attention should rest.
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Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
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Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.
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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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When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.
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Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It’s the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.
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The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.
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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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We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
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If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.
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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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