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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.

Terence McKenna

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.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Actual Billionaraire Create Destroy Economic Hundred Masses People Standard Year
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.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Actual Delusion English Look Mean Mind
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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Assumption Cultural Die Engineer Manufacture Religious Turn World
We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
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Birth Children Culture Nature World
Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
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Culture Language Made Reality Virtual
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.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Animal Begin Imagination Mind Psychedelic Substance
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.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Art Dimension Freed Ourselves Void
Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
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Deaf Environment Men Mute Nature
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.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Children Last Life Message Moving Nothing Pain
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.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Apocalypse Blow Blowing Coming Luxury Mind Something
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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Degree Highest Hubris Money Sea Self Speak Talk Truth
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.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Bad Good Ideology Life One Thinking Toxic
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.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Afraid Culture Emotional Long Psychedelic Suppressed Understand
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 MCKENNA

Against Blowing Culture Ego Fact Member Mind Neurotic Structure
What happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds. Unlike mushrooms where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the mandala, DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightening.
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Barrier Dmt Few First Happen might Mushrooms Second
Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
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Doing Good Nobody Smart Smarter Understanding
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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Astronaut Before Being Fact Human Psychedelic Seen
Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window.
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Concern Government Information Processing Jump Loving Oilligal Psychedelics
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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Act Degree Everything Experience Literally Moment Movement Potential Present Truth
Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Against Consciousness Culture Expansion Pilot Plot
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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Archetype Chaos Dominant Fera Lost Name Our Our World
Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Astonishment Proper Reality Response
For all we know, we know nothing.
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All Know Nothing
Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies.
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Always Authentic Expression Knowm Shamanism
These allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late.
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Allies Beauty Dimension Late Mysterious Nearly Understand Understanding
The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
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Everywhere Golden Imagination Pathways
Who is to say what is real and what is not?’Real’ is a distinction of a naïve mind.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Distinction Mind Native Psychedelic Real Say

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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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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