We want freedom. We want freedom from the constraints of the cycles of the sun and the moon. We want freedom from drought and weather, freedom from the movement of game, the growth of plants, freedom from control from mendacious popes and kings, freedom from ideology, freedom from want. This idea of freeing ourselves has become the compass of the human journey.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the human desire for freedom from various constraints and influences.
Terence McKenna's quote reflects a deep-seated yearning for liberation from both natural and societal constraints. It emphasizes that true freedom encompasses not just liberation from physical and environmental limitations, such as the cycles of the sun and weather, but also from oppressive authority and ideological beliefs. This pursuit of freedom is portrayed as a guiding principle in humanity's quest for a meaningful existence, signaling a broader aspiration for autonomy and self-determination in the face of myriad challenges.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about personal freedom and autonomy.
LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.
A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.
Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.
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.
It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age.
The engineers of the future will be poets.
My faceless neighbor spoke up: “Don’t be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve.” I exploded: “What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet? His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily: “I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.
One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary.
A person is either himself or not himself; is either rooted in his existence or is a fabrication; has either found his humanhood or is still playing with masks and roles and status symbols. And nobody is more aware of this difference (although unconsciously) than a child. Only an authentic person can evoke a good response in the core of the other person; only person is resonant to person.
God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.
It belongs to the very substance of nonviolence never to destroy or damage another person's feeling of self worth, even an opponent's. We all need, constantly, an advance of trust and affirmation.
Arms and laws do not flourish together.
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