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.
TERENCE MCKENNAI see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can’t have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.
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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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There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.
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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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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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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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If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.
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Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image.
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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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The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
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Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
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Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies.
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You’re immortal as long as you live.
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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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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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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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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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Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window.
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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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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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Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.
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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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And what is the primary datum? It’s the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.
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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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Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it’s not necessarily some kind of ‘Be Here Now’ feel-good thing because it doesn’t always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It’s primary.
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