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Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Terence McKenna Quotes

“I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.”

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“It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.”

YearsMindTwoWarEndsEasyAbilityConsciousnessVisionPlanetsSkillsDiseaseBehaviorIntellectualCrisisHungryCuresTwo ThingsEngineeringTechnologicalOur PlanetConditioningMind BlowingBad BehaviorAbility To ChangeBlowing ItSave Our Planet
Author:Terence McKenna
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“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. 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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“But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space.”

YearsRealSoulMatterLastsHumanityThreeBeliefSpaceAnimalTechnologyFiveObjectsMaterialsDegreesLowsHundredToolsSkinsUltimateOrganizationSpeciesFlyingTechnologicalPsychicsJewelryFiltersEmbeddedReefsSpace ShuttleFlying Saucers
Book:True Hallucinations: And, the Archaic Revival
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“There’s light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don’t go to the back side of your mind you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people. Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven, God is some kind of lost continent IN the human mind.”

PeopleIfsMindHumansKindEndsProblemRealityLightLostHeavenSidesTasksSpreadEmpoweringHuman MindRetiringContinentsTunnelsLight At The End Of The TunnelEnd Of The TunnelBack SideSeventh Heaven
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“Ecstasy is a complex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph, surrender, and empathy. What has replaced our prehistoric understanding of this complex of ecstasy now is the word comfort, a tremendously bloodless notion. Drugs are not comfortable, and anyone who thinks they are comfortable or even escapist should not toy with drugs unless they’re willing to get their noses rubbed in their own stuff.”

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“Meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction - the coincidencia apositorum. That’s what we really feel, not these rational schemes that are constantly beating us over the head with the “thou shalts” and “thou should”, but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity of being and an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak, noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing.”

FeelsShouldRealPastLyingAbilityPowerfulWeakNobleRationalRecoveryContradictionSchemesAmbiguityConfrontationAbility To SeeIgnoble
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“Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.”

KnowsHumansLyingLostHuman BeingsAbilityDemocracyAwarenessMediaStyleIdentityTelevisionMassLowsSickMadAuthenticityToxicTrashConsumingJunkJunk FoodOrwellianTrue Identity
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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. 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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“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.”

HumansDifferentRealChoicesLevelsTakenRightsPossibilityDiseaseHuman RightsCornersExtremesNightmareLeapUsualFascismCollapseHippieFamineEpidemicsMenusDifferent LevelsTriage
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“I think the real test of psychedelics is what you do with them when you're not on them, what kind of culture you build, what kind of art, what kind of technologies... What's lacking in the Western mind is the sense of connectivity and relatedness to the rest of life, the atmosphere, the ecosystem, the past, our children's future. If we were feeling those things we would not be practicing culture as we are.”

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“What blinds us, or makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness that our beliefs have grown obsolete and should be put aside.... This is I think much of the problem of the modern dilemma: Direct experience has been discounted, and in its place all kinds of belief systems have been erected.... If you believe something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite; which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of committing yourself to this belief.”

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Author:Terence McKenna
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