More Quotes by Terence McKenna
What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.
This is the message of your life and my life - it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children - nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is.
Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.
Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you're gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.
Worrying is betting against yourself.
The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer
Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.
The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.
