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 MCKENNANature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
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What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation.
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Reality is made of words.
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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
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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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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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One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.
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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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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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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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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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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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Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
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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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How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
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