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Terence McKenna Quotes - Page 11

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Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.

Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.

Terence McKenna
Reality, Sea, Moments

Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

Terence McKenna
Consistency, Mind, Small Minds

No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.

Terence McKenna
Attitude, Atmosphere, West

The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.

Terence McKenna
Life, Dream, Collective Effort
Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham (2001). “Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness”, p.48, Inner Traditions / Bear & Co

All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.

Terence McKenna
Information
Terence McKenna (1998). “True Hallucinations: And, the Archaic Revival”, M J F Books

I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster.

Terence McKenna
Thinking, Government, Extinction

Only psychos and shamans create their own reality

Terence McKenna
Reality, Psycho

We want freedom. We want freedom from the constraints of the cycles of the sun and the moon. We want freedom from drought and weather, freedom from the movement of game, the growth of plants, freedom from control from mendacious popes and kings, freedom from ideology, freedom from want. This idea of freeing ourselves has become the compass of the human journey.

Terence McKenna
Kings, Moon, Journey

Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.

Terence McKenna
Best Laid Plans, Roving, Able

The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.

Terence McKenna
Men, Sick, Mind Blowing

To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.

Terence McKenna
Two, Rebel, Tasks

The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.

Terence McKenna
Messages, Closure, Coming Back

We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components.

Terence McKenna
Monkeys, Coral Reefs, Kind

In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.

Terence McKenna
Mean, Culture, Definitions

Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet

Terence McKenna
Inspirational, Life, Nature

The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us.

Terence McKenna
Life, Nature, Fall

What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible.

Terence McKenna
Church, Attention, Able

The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.

Terence McKenna
Real, Opaque, Predicaments

In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can't be told.

Terence McKenna
Silence, Darkness, Mind

People have a right to get stoned. They have a right to think and explore their own minds. This is as intimate a part of their being as their sexuality. Any culture which mitigates that is clearly afraid of a full and fair and open dialogue about what reality is and what real human values ought to be.

Terence McKenna
Real, Thinking, People

I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously.

Terence McKenna
Responsibility, Thinking, Issues

A long long time ago I took an oath to tell all secrets that came my way. Don't tell me a secret, I won't keep it. I'm against secrets, I'm against hierarchies, lineages, all assumption of special knowledge on the part of anyone in the presence of anyone else is abhorrent to me. I mean, I am a true anarchist first and foremost.

Terence McKenna
Mean, Long, Secret

Once you get to this place on what we might metaphorically call your spiritual quest, once you get to the place where you hear about psychedelics, the issue is no longer then about where is the gas peddle on the spiritual vehicle. The issue suddenly becomes, where is the brake? Because this is the fuel to go where you want to go. This is the power to lift you where you want to be lifted.

Terence McKenna
Spiritual, Issues, Might

The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.

Terence McKenna
Lying, Men, Imagination

Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence with ourselves, is that we consume images, we don't produce them. We need to produce, not consume, media.

Terence McKenna
Media, Needs, Our Society

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