"Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet"
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Quote collection
Terence McKenna quotes (page 14 of 36)
705 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The Truth doesn't need your cooperation to exist. All forms of cult, all forms of hype, all forms of delusion do require your participation in order to exist. I've looked into marginal areas of human experience -historical and otherwise- with a rational mind, and what I've found is that doorways into the miraculous are far fewer than the publicists of the New Age would have us believe. On the other hand, they are not as rare as the proponents of radical reductionism and materialism would have us believe. There are doorways out of the mundane."
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"We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary."
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"The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us."
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"In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can't be told."
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"When your time is turned into money, the felt presence of immediate experience is analogous to being enslaved. I mean, let's be frank about it, it is enslavement."
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"The current operating system [culture] is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions. We're cutting the earth from beneath our own feet. We're poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe. This is not intelligent behaviour. This is a culture with a bug in its operating system that's making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behaviour. Time to call a tech! And who are the techs? The shamans are the techs."
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"No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it's a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night."
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"There is a morphological enfoldment occurring on this planet. It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being. We are a privileged part of this."
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"What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine."
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"Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything."
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"Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy."
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"The other night I searched (the Web) for 'self-transforming elf machines.' There were 36 hits! It surprised me. I sort of use the search engine like an oracle. I've used the phrase for DMT, 'Arabian hyperspace.' So I thought of this, and then I searched it, 'Arabian hyperspace,' in quotes. And it took me right to a transcript of the talk in which I'd said the thing! You can find your own mind on the Internet. I'm very grateful to the people who type up my talks and then post them at their websites."
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"What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance."
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"The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis."
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"I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of."
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"Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton."
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"We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place."
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"History is the siren song of the soul."
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"We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it."
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