We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle
TERENCE MCKENNAWe 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.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?
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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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We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.
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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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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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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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Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.
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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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Worrying is betting against yourself.
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Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood.
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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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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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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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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 tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.
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How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
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The absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.
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You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.
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I don’t believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.
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The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer
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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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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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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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For all we know, we know nothing.
TERENCE MCKENNA