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Terence McKenna Quotes - Page 19

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What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.

What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.

Terence McKenna
Effort, Balance, Way

We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.

Terence McKenna
Thinking, Would Be, Levels

I regard these people who are peddling angst and peddling pessimism and all that stuff as so 'two minutes ago'.

Terence McKenna
Two, People, Stuff

It puts people who are into this psychedelic thing in an entirely different stance from all other spiritual seekers, because all other spiritual seekers are furiously seeking. Psychedelic people are holding it back with all their power, because they are in the presence of the mystery. And then the trick is to get a spigot on it so that it can be turned on and off rather than coming at you like a tidal wave a mile high and twenty miles wide.

Terence McKenna
Spiritual, People, Twenties

I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.

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

It's possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s as a wish to continue the inward quest without having to put yourself on the line in the way you had to when you took 250 gamma of LSD. And I think all these other methods are efficacious, but I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off.

Terence McKenna
Thinking, People, Growth

History is a series of approximations of the final singularity.

Terence McKenna
Finals, Singularity, Series

Inwardness is the characteristic feature of the vegetable rather than the animal approach to existence. The animals move, migrate and swarm, while plants hold fast. Plants live in a dimension characterised by solid state, the fixed and the enduring. If there is movement in the consciousness of plants then it must be the movement of spirit and attention in the domain of vegetal imagination. (...) This is the truth that the shamans have always known and practiced. Awareness of the green side of mind was called Veriditas by the twelfth century visionary Hildegard Von Bingen.

Terence McKenna
Moving, Animal, Vegetables

If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it's an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.

Terence McKenna
Taken, Historical, Transition

The "just say no" campaign at this point is a lot like drawing sea-monsters over certain unexplored areas of the map and expecting people to stay away. It may work for some, but explorers live for this kind of thing.

Terence McKenna
Sea, Drawing, People

Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's some kind of gnostic demon. It's some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected.

Terence McKenna
Men, Toil, Want

The other night I searched (the Web) for 'self-transforming elf machines.' There were 36 hits! It surprised me. I sort of use the search engine like an oracle. I've used the phrase for DMT, 'Arabian hyperspace.' So I thought of this, and then I searched it, 'Arabian hyperspace,' in quotes. And it took me right to a transcript of the talk in which I'd said the thing! You can find your own mind on the Internet. I'm very grateful to the people who type up my talks and then post them at their websites.

Terence McKenna
Grateful, Night, Self

What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.

Terence McKenna
Decadence

The 'public' has no history, has no future, lives in a golden moment created by credit, which binds them ineluctably to a fascist system that is never criticized. This is the ultimate consequence of having broken off this symbiotic relationship with the vegetable, feminine, maternal matrix of the planet.

Terence McKenna
Vegetables, Broken, Golden

Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed

Terence McKenna
Art, Names, Ego

Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort.

Terence McKenna
Religious, Memories, Thinking

Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity.

Terence McKenna
Hysteria, Trends, Standing Out

But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it.

Terence McKenna
World, End Of The World, Ends

For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.

Terence McKenna
Animal, Glory, Humans

Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.

Terence McKenna
Imagination, Psychedelic, Involvement

Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.

Terence McKenna
Ego, Males, Population

Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.

Terence McKenna
Two, Years, Long

Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.

Terence McKenna
Novelty, Boundaries, Situation

The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.

Terence McKenna
Style, Possibility, Motifs

By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other.

Terence McKenna
People, Expectations, Fundamentals

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