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.
TERENCE MCKENNAOne thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.
More Terence McKenna Quotes
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Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.
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Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image.
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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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Cultures are virtual realities made of language.
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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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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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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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Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.
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