"The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient."
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Quote collection
Terence McKenna quotes (page 26 of 36)
705 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science."
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"This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about."
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"Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent."
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"That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind."
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"What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news!"
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"Although whenever you have intelligent life in the presence of large explosions, a safe bet is that the intelligent life is responsible for the large explosion."
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"But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space."
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"There's only the integrity of doing and having done."
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"Ecstasy is a complex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph, surrender, and empathy. What has replaced our prehistoric understanding of this complex of ecstasy now is the word comfort, a tremendously bloodless notion. Drugs are not comfortable, and anyone who thinks they are comfortable or even escapist should not toy with drugs unless they’re willing to get their noses rubbed in their own stuff."
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"We must look to the native healers all over the world and study their methods... Their methods are chemical and personal. It's a combination of care, attention, intention and chemistry that allows consciousness to be made malleable and recast in other forms."
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"If I can paraphrase Teilhard de Chardin for a moment, he said, or I will paraphrase in this way, 'When the human race understands the potential of the hallucinogenic drug experience, it will have discovered fire for the second time.'"
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"Could any symbol be any more appropriate of the ambiguity of human transformation? What mushroom is it that grows at the end of history? Is it Stropharia cubensis, or is it the creation of Edward Teller? This is an unresolved problem."
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"Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy."
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"I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience."
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"What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things."
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"The thing that seemed to me so important about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me. I wasn't reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart. And so I assumed that I am a very ordinary person, therefore, if it happened to me it could happen to anyone."
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"I'm not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time."
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"Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors."
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"A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age."
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