The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.
Interpretation
Our lives can be seen as intricate artworks shaped by our experiences and perceptions.
Terence McKenna's quote suggests that our existence is not merely a series of events or actions, but rather a complex work of art. This perspective encourages us to recognize the beauty and intricacy of our lives, highlighting how our experiences, choices, and interactions contribute to the masterpiece of our existence.
In practice
In a speech about creativity, you might say, 'As Terence McKenna once said, we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art, reminding us that our lives are defined by the creativity and choices we make.'
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.
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.
Being an artist is this kind of occupation in which you have to make people care about your obsession.
The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish.
Our easiest approach to a definition of any aspect of fiction is always by considering the sort of demand it makes on the reader. Curiosity for the story, human feelings and a sense of value for the characters, intelligence and memory for the plot. What does fantasy ask of us? It asks us to pay something extra.
God creates, I do not create. I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it - from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others do.
Sometimes I wish that just solving the plot problems was enough. And then elves would go and do all the actual work moving the words around.
I feel as though I've gotten to a point where I don't really want to set a book in any real place ever again.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.