More Quotes by Terence McKenna
If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
I don't believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.
You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.
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.
You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.
We are told No, you're unimportant, you're peripheral - get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.
We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle
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.
What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.