Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window.
TERENCE MCKENNAScience does not deal with subjective experience… Well that’s too bad because that is all any of us ever have.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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Reality is made of words.
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Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image.
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How do we fight back? By creating art.
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If you actually look at the etymology of the word ‘hallucination’, what it’s come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That’s the meaning of ‘hallucination’, to wander in the mind.
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The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.
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The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
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People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.
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This is the message of your life and my life – it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children – nothing lasts.
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