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Terence McKenna Quotes

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Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.

Terence McKenna
Dream, Teacher, Commitment

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

Terence McKenna
Reality, Hallucinations, Facts

You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.

Terence McKenna
Inspirational, Life, Light

The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.

Terence McKenna
World, Tiny, Fractions
"Understanding and Imagination in the Light of Nature". Book by Terence McKenna, 1987.

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

Terence McKenna
Government, Information Processing, Dmt

If reality is code, then it can be hacked in some way that we had not suspected before.

Terence McKenna
Reality, Way, Code

Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you're gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.

Terence McKenna
Years, Games, People

The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.

Terence McKenna
Beautiful, Mind, Duty

Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair.

Terence McKenna
Dmt, Psychedelic, Evolution

We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle

Terence McKenna
Mystery, Caught, Riddle

The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.

Terence McKenna
Art, Kind, Works Of Art

The psychedelic universe, whatever it is, is the major datum of experience. It's larger than this planet. Nobody knows how large it is. The further in you go the bigger it gets. We don't know what to make of something like that. It's the reverse of our expectations.

Terence McKenna
Data, Expectations, Psychedelic

The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer

Terence McKenna
Mind Blowing, Answers, Faces

Escape into the dream. Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists. I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapist.

Terence McKenna
Dream, Thinking, Keys

We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.

Terence McKenna
Ocean, Heart, Moon
"The Archaic Revival". Book by Terence McKenna, 1991.

The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.

Terence McKenna
Darkness, Bigger, Bonfire

Astonishment is the proper response to reality.

Terence McKenna
Reality, Astonishment, Response

The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation

Terence McKenna
Dmt, Mind Blowing, Cost

This is the message of your life and my life - it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children - nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is.

Terence McKenna
Children, Pain, Moving

We are told No, you're unimportant, you're peripheral - get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

Terence McKenna
Jobs, Player, Games
"Reclaim Your Mind". Part of the Terence McKenna's lecture "Eros and the Eschaton", www.youtube.com. 1984.

If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.

Terence McKenna
Mushrooms, Mind Blowing, Psilocybin

For all we know, we know nothing.

Terence McKenna
Knows

What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.

Terence McKenna
Thinking, Long, Singing

DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.

Terence McKenna
Dmt, Magic, Add

Life must be a preparation for the transition to another dimension.

Terence McKenna
Preparation, Transition, Dimensions

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