We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
TERENCE MCKENNAThe 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.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
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Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?
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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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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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Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness
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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
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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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We are told No, you’re unimportant, you’re peripheral – get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you’re a player.
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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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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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Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window.
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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.
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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.
TERENCE MCKENNA