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Terence McKenna Quotes - Page 13

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I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.

I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.

Terence McKenna
Thinking, People, Imagination

So what needs to be done is to spread the idea that anxiety is inappropriate. It's sort of like we who are psychedelic have to function as sitters for society, because society is going to thrash, and resist, and think it's dying, and be deluded, and regurgitate unconscious material, and so forth and so on. And the role then, I think, for psychedelic people is to try and spread calm.

Terence McKenna
Thinking, Ideas, People

If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity, you are going to end up with business as usual. The road to hell is paved with good intentions but it is not paved with clarity.

Terence McKenna
Political, Usual, Agendas

We're not going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience.

Terence McKenna
Inspiration, Self, Expression

We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary.

Terence McKenna
Intelligent, Mind Blowing, Visionaries

Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.

Terence McKenna
Years, People, Firsts

The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment.

Terence McKenna
Moments, Process, Terror

I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they're about time, and they somehow make all time co-present.

Terence McKenna
Thinking, Circles, Landscape

History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.

Terence McKenna
Animal, Years, Stories

It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas. . . . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.

Terence McKenna
Moving, Ideas, Community

The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation.

Terence McKenna
Manipulation, Prey

When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward toward the futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within; the paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.

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

The question is being asked, 'Are we alone?' And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we're not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?

Terence McKenna
Thinking, Focus, What If

The psychedelic experience is simply a compressed instance of what we call understanding, so that living psychedelically is trying to live in an atmosphere of continuous unfolding of understanding, so that every day you know more and see into things with greater depth than you did before. This is a process of education.

Terence McKenna
Understanding, Atmosphere, Trying

Cultivate an ongoing stream of self-description, telling yourself what is happening. Get used to the idea that mind can penetrate the immediate surface of being and reveal the tactile density of it as a manifold whose measure cannot be immediately taken by the eyes, that it's deep, it's connected, it's complex. Everything holds within itself the anticipation and the memory of everything else.

Terence McKenna
Memories, Taken, Eye

The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery.

Terence McKenna
World, Mystery, Problem

The Gaian mind is what were calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set.

Terence McKenna
Self, Mind, Desert

Television, introduced at the close of World War II, has become a form of electronic heroin, and it isn't even your trip. They don't even let you go on your own trip, you get a trip designed by Madison Avenue.

Terence McKenna
War, Goes On, Television

I think our intelligence is a source of toxicity to nature and discomfort to ourselves unless our values are based on planetary values, are linked to the values of the rest of nature. Intelligence is not a license to trample. The proper role of intelligence in a planetary ecology is that of gardener, caregiver and maintainer of balance.

Terence McKenna
Thinking, Balance, Roles

I sort of see [cannabis] as the pilot light of Gian consciousness.

Terence McKenna
Light, Pilots, Consciousness

We are all cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body it is hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern of the whole of what is happening, and yet we can sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern.

Terence McKenna
Cells, Glimpse, Purpose
"History Ends in Green". Terence McKenna's eight-hour lecture at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, 1989.

A lot of people pass through the thinking I'm a guru and take enough trips to understand that no, I was just a witness. I was just a witness.

Terence McKenna
Thinking, People, Enough

All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.

Terence McKenna
Animal, Anxiety, Feelings

A birth is a death. Everything you treasure, and believe in, and love, and relate to is destroyed for you when you leave the womb. And you are launched into another modality, a modality that perhaps you would not have chosen but that you cannot do anything about.

Terence McKenna
Believe, And Love, Treasure

We have to claim anarchy and realize that systems have a life of their own that is anti-humanist. There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency in all systems.

Terence McKenna
Anarchy, Realizing, Claims
"Psychedelic Society". Terence McKenna's speech at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, February 1984.

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