"Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience."
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Terence McKenna quotes (page 33 of 36)
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"This is where I think the psychedelics come in because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds."
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"I'm meeting my obligations, somehow, always have, without ever truly working, without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for the man. Of course I had to deal dope to do this!"
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"I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed, I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn't mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing."
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"The Gaian process is more than a process. It is s self-reflecting entelechy of some sort."
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"Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience."
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"We are living in a very pivotal time. The time that we inherit from science is a time to humble you, to dwarf you. It tells you that the sun will not fluxuate for another billion years, that species come and go, and, in other words, on a temporal scale you don't matter. And that now doesn't matter. But when you look at the release of energy, the asymptotic speeding up of processes, we tend to be xenophobically oriented toward the human."
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"This rising global humanism is, in fact, the rising into consciousness of a tribal god similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in these pre-Hellenic societies."
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"And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self."
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"Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone."
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"Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works."
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"Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it."
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"For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is."
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"The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place."
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"Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully."
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"The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model."
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"In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones."
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"On these matters of specific fact, like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that sort of thing, I haven't the faintest idea. The mushroom itself is such a mercurial, elusive, Zen sort of personality that I never believe a word it says. I simply entertain its notions and try and sort through them, and I found that to be the most enriching approach to it."
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"The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed. The present cultural crisis on the surface of the planet is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater for the exercise of imagination. It wrecks the planet. The planet has its own Eco-systemic dynamics, which are not the dynamics of imagination."
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"For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity."
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