"The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas."
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Quote collection
Terence McKenna quotes (page 17 of 36)
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"Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything."
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"It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us."
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"And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism."
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"We can understand first of all that what is happening in the world of becoming, the world we all experience as beings, is that novelty is entering into being, and it is changing the modalities of the real world toward greater and greater levels of integration."
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"The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination."
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"It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening."
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"My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past."
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"The state in the matter of drugs should not, any more than in the matter of sex, act as the secret agent for the agenda of the church."
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"What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is."
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"Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it."
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"Let's not underrate cannabis, for cryin' out loud. Cannabis should be the glue of the community."
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"The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news."
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"Nature is actually the goal at the end of history."
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"In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum."
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"So I submit to you that what we represent is a Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that represents the best aspirations that human community is capable of, a Fifth Column that is willing to look at the structure of the psyche in contrast to the mess of society, and willing to dream."
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"It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough."
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"Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable."
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"If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code."
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"The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don't see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It's beautiful."
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