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 MCKENNAPsychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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Reality is made of words.
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Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness
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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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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 was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.
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Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
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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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The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.
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I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety. Anxiety sells.
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If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.
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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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Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies.
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To realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.
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There is no knowledge without risk taking.
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The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.
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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.
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The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
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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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Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret.
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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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The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.
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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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What happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds. Unlike mushrooms where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the mandala, DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightening.
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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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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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