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 MCKENNATo 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.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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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.
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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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It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know… You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You’ll have that!
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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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Reality is made of words.
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Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you’re gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough,
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Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
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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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The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
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When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.
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No one knows enough to worry.
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If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.
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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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There is no knowledge without risk taking.
TERENCE MCKENNA