Continued from Part 1. Quotes taken from End All Disease.
McKenna also encourages us to turn our backs on our defunct culture and create something new with the imagination.
“You simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead and get with the program of a living world and the imagination.”
The imagination, he believes, “is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”
Nature will reward us for having courage, he tells us.
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up.
“This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.”
Anything is possible for the person who tries their hardest, and the obstacles that seem impossible are the ones that help us grow the most.
Courage comes from love, so if we want the courage to keep on, we only need to look in the heart. We only need to open the mind (but not too much, as McKenna also famously said), and let the courage and wisdom of the heart pour through.
Then, we’ll realize that the obstacles in our way are easily solvable if we approach them from the heart and we have the courage to keep working on them when they challenge us the most.
As long as we wholeheartedly commit, we’ll be granted the power we require and little helpful serendipities will occur to make the mission easier. We’ll do fine as long as we have love, and again, in love we find courage and various other qualities, like compassion, that are crucial on the spiritual path.
According to McKenna and pretty much anyone else who’s in the know, our governments don’t keep psychedelics illegal to protect us, but to keep us from deconstructing their illusion.
“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.”
Along with psychedelics, he tells us that artists – painters, musicians, writers, and plenty of others – can save mankind’s soul.
“The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. If artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.”
The artist has a responsibility to share their light and awaken people, and if you’re a creative person, you’ve been gifted with a great opportunity to contribute something real and valuable to the world. You might want to take it, because art is arguably the best way for the lightworker or spiritual warrior to contribute to humanity’s evolution.
In one of my favorite quotes, McKenna tells us that words make up the world.
“The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”
This is an exciting quote for a writer, because it acknowledges the power of words. Along with music, words give us the power to express our souls, thereby bringing the content of our inner reality to the physical world.
They allow us to merge the physical and spiritual by giving us an outlet with which to express our creative side, and their power is evident in the way they can either crush or uplift people.
Though I have to admit, I do enjoy this quote from poet Scroobius Pip, taken from Songlyrics.com:
“In the end they are just words. You give them power when you cower, man, it’s so absurd.”
In our final two quotes, McKenna encourages self-empowerment.
“We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.”
“If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.”
It’s crucial to know what we want to do with our life, and if we don’t follow our dreams, we’ll be forced to help someone else bring theirs into reality.
I think everyone should be able to make a living at something they’re passionate about if they’re willing to work hard, but we can’t expect to get too far if we don’t have that inner fire. It consists of love and intense passion for our work, and it allows for amazing accomplishments in the struggle to heal the world.
It inspires us to work hard enough to make a real, positive mark on the world and encourage people to live with purpose, and if we aren’t willing to look deep in ourselves for this crucial inner flame, we’ll be stuck working for someone else.
There are plenty more profound and insightful quotes from Terence McKenna to be found here on the internet, and personally, I enjoy his teachings because they’ve forced me to reevaluate what I thought I knew.
You don’t have to agree with psychedelic use to see that Terence McKenna had a lot of great things to say about humanity’s evolution, and the day will eventually come when psychedelics are taken seriously and their power is understood.
Society’s starting to change its views on marijuana, so that day could come sooner than we think.
By Wes Annac, Culture of Awareness, January 15, 2016 – https://tinyurl.com/j55axvv