Tom Mulder > Tom's Quotes

“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in 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.”
― Terence McKenna

“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 it's a feather bed.”
― Terence McKenna

“Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.”
― Terence McKenna

“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.”
― Terence McKenna

“You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”
― Terence McKenna

“You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.”
― Terence McKenna

“Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.”
― Terence McKenna

“My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.”
― Terence McKenna

“Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?”
― Terence McKenna

“Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.”
― Terence McKenna

“The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer”
― Terence McKenna

“It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.”
― Terence McKenna

“We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.”
― Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

“It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. ”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“We think in generalities, but we live in details.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, 11/1919

“Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.”
― Alfred Whitehead

“Great dreamers' dreams are never fulfilled, they are always transcended.”
― Alfred Whitehead

“The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

“There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“The art of progress is to reserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.

Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only guide it by taking thought.”
― Alfred North Whitehead