"Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated."
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Quote collection
Terence McKenna quotes (page 30 of 36)
705 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined."
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"The danger is [in using psychedelic drugs], just to put it out there, is madness."
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"The shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a way he is always peripheral to it. He lives at the edge of the village. He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis. He is feared and respected. And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances."
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"What good is a theory of how the universe works if it’s a series of tensor equations that, even when understood, come nowhere tangential to experience? The only intellectual or noetic or spiritual path worth following is one that builds on personal experience"
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"Apparently, in the Avesta classical period no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs."
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"People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century."
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"The party impulse is a very subversive impulse. I mean, you know, a lot of artists have too much integrity to sell their art as a brand; but who has so much integrity that they would turn down a party?"
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"History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified."
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"No more do we create cultural artifacts that are simply our furniture, but now it's our thoughts, our values, are embodied in this [digital] stuff."
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"Look at the reputation they gave him. [Giordano] Bruno without the pyre is a whiskey priest laying waste to the maids of Umbria."
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"The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it."
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"Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies."
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"We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables."
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"In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade."
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"The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman."
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"Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved."
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"We love to congratulate ourselves on the forward-leaning liberal society that we live in, and the truth is it's a bunch of rattle snake-handling fundamentalists that are much closer to Stalin than they are to FDR or anybody else like that."
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"Because this is the world that science built, with the henchmen of capitalism and Christianity."
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"A glacier rattles in the cupboard, the desert sighs in the bed, and the crack in the teacup opens a door to the land of the dead. The Maya call this Xibalba (Shibalba), the road to the dimension of the dead."
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