And what is the primary datum? It’s the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.
TERENCE MCKENNAWhat 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.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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How do we fight back? By creating art.
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Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
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Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
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The surface of things is not where attention should rest.
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The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.
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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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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 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.
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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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The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
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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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The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.
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No one knows enough to worry.
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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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Every click of the cosmic clock brings us closer to the process for which the planet called us into existence.
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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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What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what’s real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.
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You’re immortal as long as you live.
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For all we know, we know nothing.
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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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The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer
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Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.
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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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People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.
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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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Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image.
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