"Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter."
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Quote collection
Terence McKenna quotes (page 16 of 36)
705 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we're working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of."
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"As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves."
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"The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined."
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"It is the people who are 'far out' who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies."
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"The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity."
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"Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe."
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"It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems."
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"...situations evolve as matter responds to the conditioning of time and space...If you know what is contained in time from its beginning to its end you are somehow no longer in time. Even though you still have a body and still eat and do what you do, you have discovered something that liberated you into a satisfying all-at-oneness."
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"Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness. . . . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities. . . . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away."
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"We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event."
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"The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension."
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"The felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor."
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"The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time."
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"Culture as we're practicing it is causing a lot of pain."
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"The 'hard swallow' built into science is this business about the Big Bang. ... This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. ... Notice that this is the limit test for credulity. . . . It's the limit case for likelihood."
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"History is a series of approximations of the final singularity."
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"Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us."
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"One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug is how do you feel the next day?"
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"The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.... Or we can SAY the world is made of tiny wave mechanical packets of matter hurling through space at near the speed of light.... But notice that what we get each time are WORDS."
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