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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.

Terence McKenna

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.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Assumption Cultural Die Engineer Manufacture Religious Turn World
We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Abstraction Barely Earth Flame Flames Look Mind Blowing Much Ourselves Rouse Victim
Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Alcoholism Disease Failure Image Self
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.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Billion Blowing Civilization Kick Mind People Shoulder Six Stand Themselves
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.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Cryin Enough Loud Out Think Waste Worry
This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Abyss Bed Discover Done Feather Shamanic
The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Everywhere Golden Imagination Pathways
Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Commitment Courage Dream Love Nature Teacher
When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Cultural Inspection Own Psyche Shed
The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer
TERENCE MCKENNA

Answer Face Mind Blowing Problem
We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle
TERENCE MCKENNA

Caught Enigma Inside Lock Mystery Riddle
The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Beautiful Duty Human Inside Mind Thing Universe
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.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Allies Beauty Dimension Late Mysterious Nearly Understand Understanding
The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Engineer Product Psychedelics Terrifying The Message
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.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Degree Highest Hubris Money Sea Self Speak Talk Truth
We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Ingheritor Million Strive Unspeakable Year
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

Adventure Authentic Being Culturally Give Major Real True
If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Else Mind Blowing Mushrooms Plan Somebody
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.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Imagination Library Real Universal
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.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Art Become Divorce Hopeless Kind Million Mind Mystery People Some Suspend Two
The absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.
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Absurdity Assertion Evident Exception Self
Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret.
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Before Behind Secret Unknown
There is no knowledge without risk taking.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Knowledge Risk Take
What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Created Eras Excellent Genocide Gentleman Gentlemen Manner Most Over Proper Surface Table Tables
It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Coax Lives Meaning Need Our Live
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 MCKENNA

Data Datum Experience Felt Immediate Primaries
Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.
TERENCE MCKENNA

Impose Kind Obligation Out Some

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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