"Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there."
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Terence McKenna quotes (page 13 of 36)
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"Part of what the psychedelic point of view represents is living a certain portion of your life without answers. Just accepting that certain dilemmas will never resolve themselves into some kind of a complete answer. That's why psychedelics are so different from any system being sold, from one of the great elder systems like Christianity, to the latest cult out of Los Angeles."
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"Well, you could almost say, I suppose, that the scientist seeks what is similar between any two days, or bluebirds, or glaciers. And the poet seeks what is different. The artist seeks to celebrate the unique."
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"But a mature humanity could get into a place where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings from messiahs and flying saucers that come along every thousand years or so to mess up the mess that has been created and try and send people off on another tack. And the way to do this is to look at the abysses that confront man as species and individuals and try to unify them. And I think that psilocybin offers a way out because it allows a dialogue with the over-mind. You won't read about it in "Scientific American" or anywhere else. You will carry it out."
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"Marcel Eliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent, and Gordon Wasson, very rightly I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit."
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"Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes."
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"The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche."
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"Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together."
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"What you call man is time."
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"Human history is a Gaian dream."
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"There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules"
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"The surface of things is not where attention should rest."
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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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"There is no knowledge without risk taking."
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"The Internet is light at the end of the tunnel. I don't care if it's being used to peddle pornography, I don't care if it's being trivialized in a thousand ways. Anything can be trivialized. The important point is that it is leveling the playing field of global society. It is creating de-facto an entirely new set of political realities. None of the constipated, oligarchic structures that are resisting this were ever asked. Their greed betrayed them into investing in this in the first place without ever fully grasping what the implications of it were for their larger agenda."
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"All time is is how much change you can pack into a second."
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"The question is being asked, 'Are we alone?' And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we're not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?"
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"Patanjali specifically says that there are three paths to the goal of yoga. And they are, control of the breath, control of posture, and light-filled herbs. It says it right there. Stanza 6 of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali."
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"The way out then is personal responsibility, new operating systems downloaded from outside of culture, which means from the deeper wisdom of the psychedelic plants and then a commitment to community and a motto of "To the future, without fear!" Without fear!"
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"Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug."
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