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Terence McKenna Quotes - Page 17

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We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.

We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.

Terence McKenna
Alarms, Invasion, Ufo

I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs. ... I think that these plants 'take people' as much as people take the plants. ... When you take one of these ancient, ancient hallucinogens you are locking in to the morphogenetic fields of all the people who ever took it.

Terence McKenna
Thinking, People, Drug

No one yet understands the mysterious intelligence within plants or the implications of the idea that nature communicates in a basic chemical language that is unconscious but profound. We do not yet understand how hallucinogens transform the message in the unconscious into revelations beheld by the conscious mind.

Terence McKenna
Ideas, Profound, Mind

LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.

Terence McKenna
Lying, Garden, Heaven

...situations evolve as matter responds to the conditioning of time and space...If you know what is contained in time from its beginning to its end you are somehow no longer in time. Even though you still have a body and still eat and do what you do, you have discovered something that liberated you into a satisfying all-at-oneness.

Terence McKenna
Oneness, Space, Unity

It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind.

Terence McKenna
Mind, Becoming, Understood

And that we cannot go to space with our feet in the mud. Nor can we in fact turn ourselves into an eco-sensitive hallucinogenic-based culture on Earth unless we fuse these dichotomous opposites. It is only in a coincidencia oppositorum, a union of opposites, that does not strive for closure, that we are going to find cultural sanity. And this is the thing that the entheogens, the hallucinogens, deliver with such clarity and regularity. They raise paradox to a level of intensity that no one can evade.

Terence McKenna
Opposites, Feet, Space

The Truth doesn't need your cooperation to exist. All forms of cult, all forms of hype, all forms of delusion do require your participation in order to exist. I've looked into marginal areas of human experience -historical and otherwise- with a rational mind, and what I've found is that doorways into the miraculous are far fewer than the publicists of the New Age would have us believe. On the other hand, they are not as rare as the proponents of radical reductionism and materialism would have us believe. There are doorways out of the mundane.

Terence McKenna
Believe, Hands, Order

Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence. A situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land all were in dynamic balance and not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed, poetry may have been at its climax, dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy. There's no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today and it was under the boundary dissolving influence of psilocybin.

Terence McKenna
Children, Philosophy, Men

The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.

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

To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.

Terence McKenna
Reality, Trying, Psychedelic

Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.

Terence McKenna
Hands, Organization, Mind

Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made.

Terence McKenna
Real, Hands, Choices

And I don't mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.

Terence McKenna
Taken, Mean, Vegetables

We have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a direct pipeline to the unconscious and we have then fallen victim to priestcraft of every conceivable sort.

Terence McKenna
Pipeline, Neurosis, Absence

There is no hierarchy of elder knowledge in my social region of things. There are only people learning and sharing in a very complex environment.

Terence McKenna
People, Hierarchy, Environment

But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space.

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

I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.

Terence McKenna
Men, Thinking, Understanding

The same organizational principles which called us forth into self-reflection have called forth self-reflection out of the planet itself. And the problem then is for us to suspect this, act on our suspicion, and be good detectives, and track down the spirit in its lair. And this is what shamans are doing. They are hunters of spirit.

Terence McKenna
Reflection, Self, Track

By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.

Terence McKenna
Space, Phases, Psychedelic

Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew.

Terence McKenna
Way Forward, People, Simplicity

My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness.

Terence McKenna
Ideas, Ego, Enlightenment

I think institutions will inevitably substitute a rite or a ritual for the authentic, for the real McCoy, because then priests can control the pipeline to god, and the parishioner can approach with offerings. But if everybody can have a pipeline to deity, why then the whole priest scam is put out of business.

Terence McKenna
Real, Thinking, Offering

Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.

Terence McKenna
Culture, Becoming, Language

The world is mental in some way that we do not yet understand, but that which we're edging toward understanding. And the world is made of language. I can't say that enough. Whenever we get into these discussions about reality, or effects in space and time, we are operating outside this assumption that the world is made of language.

Terence McKenna
Reality, Space, Understanding

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