For all we know, we know nothing.
TERENCE MCKENNAThe surface of things is not where attention should rest.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
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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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There is no knowledge without risk taking.
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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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The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
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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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We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle
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Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image.
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We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
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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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Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
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If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.
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The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.
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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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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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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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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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Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
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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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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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We are told No, you’re unimportant, you’re peripheral – get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you’re a player.
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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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I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety. Anxiety sells.
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This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.
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