Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
TERENCE MCKENNAWhat we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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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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Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window.
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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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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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One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.
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How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
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Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood.
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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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The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.
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Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
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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 world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.
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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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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.
TERENCE MCKENNA