Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
TERENCE MCKENNAYou’re immortal as long as you live.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.
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The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.
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If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.
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Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
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We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle
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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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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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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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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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How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
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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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Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
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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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Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you’re talking about.
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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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Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
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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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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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Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret.
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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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These allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late.
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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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We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
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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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Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.
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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.
TERENCE MCKENNA