Quote

This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well, you don't want to clench, you don't want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe, and sing, and sing it back, and it will step back. You can take control of your situation ... most of the time.

Terence McKenna

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Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Wells
Steps
Substance
Well
Position
Assuming
Take
Control
Straight
Psilocybin
Time
Stop
Breathe
Clench
Situation
Sing
Fetal
Water
Keys
Substances
True
Step
Assume
Back
Deep
Breathing

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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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
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Well, you could almost say, I suppose, that the scientist seeks what is similar between any two days, or bluebirds, or glaciers. And the poet seeks what is different. The artist seeks to celebrate the unique.
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In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept.
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It's a product of the fractal laws that govern the world at an informational level. There is no deeper truth.
Terence McKenna
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Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.
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I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.
Terence McKenna
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Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.
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I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.
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I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety. Anxiety sells.
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We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.
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And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude. Philosophy not made around the camp fire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That's how you figure out what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience.
Terence McKenna
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Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.
Terence McKenna
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The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind.
Terence McKenna
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This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.
Terence McKenna
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We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.
Terence McKenna
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The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.
Terence McKenna
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My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past.
Terence McKenna
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For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.
Terence McKenna
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You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.
Terence McKenna
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You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
Terence McKenna