Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret.
TERENCE MCKENNAHow do we fight back? By creating art.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
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Reality is made of words.
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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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The absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.
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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 the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
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Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.
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Who is to say what is real and what is not?’Real’ is a distinction of a naïve mind.
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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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For all we know, we know nothing.
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Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
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No one knows enough to worry.
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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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Don’t worry. You don’t know enough to worry. . . . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin’ out loud. It’s a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.
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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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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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People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.
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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
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The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.
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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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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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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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Every click of the cosmic clock brings us closer to the process for which the planet called us into existence.
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Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.
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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.
TERENCE MCKENNA