Science does not deal with subjective experience… Well that’s too bad because that is all any of us ever have.
TERENCE MCKENNAYour 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.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
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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.
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When we free ourselves we are not freed into a void. When we free ourselves we are freed into a dimension in which Art is an obligation.
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We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
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Reality is made of words.
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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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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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You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.
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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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We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle
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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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To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.
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The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.
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The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer
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We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.
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The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
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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.
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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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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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Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.
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No one knows enough to worry.
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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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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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Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.
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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.
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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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