We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
TERENCE MCKENNAWe 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.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.
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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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Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.
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Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
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Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you’re gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough,
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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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Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret.
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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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It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.
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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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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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Every click of the cosmic clock brings us closer to the process for which the planet called us into existence.
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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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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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The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.
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This is the message of your life and my life – it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children – nothing lasts.
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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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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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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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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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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
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How do we fight back? By creating art.
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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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Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
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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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The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
TERENCE MCKENNA