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Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Terence McKenna Quotes

“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
Author:Terence McKenna
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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'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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“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.”

IfsThinkingShouldBelieveHumansKindMeanHas BeensProblemFaithBeliefDifficultProgressModernAwarenessDegreesDirectOppositesHistoricalAll KindsIf You BelieveDilemmaObsoleteBelief SystemsHuman Freedom
Author:Terence McKenna
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“What WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe.”

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“I believe that the totemic image for the future is the octopus. This is because the squids and octopi have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic; a model for the human communications of the future. In the not-too-distant future men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea.”

MenBelieveHumansMayBodyFormI BelieveSeaCommunicationModelsMen And WomenSwimmingShedMonkeysPsychedelicSiliconOctopusSquids
Book:True Hallucinations: And, the Archaic Revival
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“If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.”

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Book:Food Of The Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
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“The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind.”

MindHumansIndividualReligiousLibertyPracticeIssuesRightsConcernedCivil RightsPrivacyPsychedelicCivil LibertiesHuman FreedomReligious Practices
Book:Food Of The Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
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“It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age.”

HumansKindUseAgeTogetherOrderCultureSpaceVisionPlanetsHappeningsStonesTransformationAcquireExplorationCapabilityTechnologicalCoincidenceRebirthHumaneEmergingPsychedelicSpace ExplorationMushroomsEmergenceSpunStone Age
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“DMT is a reliable method for crossing in to a dimension that human beings have debated the existence of for 50.000 years. Is there an invisible nearby world inhabited by active intelligences with which human beings can communicate? You bet. And if you don't think so, then tell me you don't think so after you've smoked 75mg DMT. Otherwise we just don't have anything to talk about.”

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“We want freedom. We want freedom from the constraints of the cycles of the sun and the moon. We want freedom from drought and weather, freedom from the movement of game, the growth of plants, freedom from control from mendacious popes and kings, freedom from ideology, freedom from want. This idea of freeing ourselves has become the compass of the human journey.”

WantHumansIdeasGamesGrowthSunJourneyMovementKingsMoonPlantWeatherIdeologyCyclesPopeCompassConstraintsDrought
Author:Terence McKenna
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