What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.
TERENCE MCKENNAWe 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.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image.
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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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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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We’ve painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare – triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights – or a leap to an entirely different level. We’ve taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom.
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The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.
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The overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it’s not treated – if there’s not pharmacological intervention – it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality.
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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.
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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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Every click of the cosmic clock brings us closer to the process for which the planet called us into existence.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
TERENCE MCKENNA