‘If we as a community believe in anything, we believe in feeling good in the moment. The felt presence of immediate experience. This is what has been stolen from you. By capitalism, by religion, by linear thinking, by strategising. We’re always about to be happy. Or we’re always about to be free. And while we’re about to be free and about to be happy, life passes us by. This is because western ideologies are always ideologies of delayed gratification. It comes after death, after retirement, after coitus. It’s always after something that it comes. Well, I’ve got news for you, this kind of thing is chasing your own tail. The felt presence of immediate experience is the only world you will ever know. Everything beyond that is conjecture and supposition.’
Terence McKenna, ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, bibliophile and butterfly collector.‘Can I keep this one?’ I asked.
‘Which one?’
‘The quote by Terence McKenna – I’ve never heard of him before.’
‘He was a bit of a guru figure.’
‘Was?’
She must have detected the disappointment in my voice.
‘He died a few years ago.’
Above quote from:
No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy
Mark Hodkinson