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.
TERENCE MCKENNAThe drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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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 surface of things is not where attention should rest.
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I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing.
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No one knows enough to worry.
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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 no knowledge without risk taking.
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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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Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
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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.
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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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Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.
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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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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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The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.
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We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
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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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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.
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We’ve painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare – triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights – or a leap to an entirely different level. We’ve taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom.
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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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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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The overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it’s not treated – if there’s not pharmacological intervention – it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality.
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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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Every click of the cosmic clock brings us closer to the process for which the planet called us into existence.
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What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.
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The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.
TERENCE MCKENNA