A Quote by Terence McKenna

The shaman is a person who is able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence. They know more than the people they serve. The people they serve are like children within the game of culture. Only the shaman knows that culture is a game. Everyone else takes it seriously. That's how he can do his magic.

Terence McKenna

Quote Topics

Able Children Confines Cultural Culture Else Everyone Everyone Else Existence Game His How Know Knows Like Magic More Only People Person Seriously Serve Takes Than Transcend Within

Quote Author

Terence McKenna
American - Writer
November 16, 1946 - April 3, 2000

Cultural conditioning is like bad software. Over and over it's diddled with and re-written so that it can just run on the next attempt. But there is cultural hardware, and it's that cultural hardware, otherwise known as authentic being, that we are propelled toward by the example of the shaman and the techniques of the shaman. ... Shamanism therefore is a call to authenticity.

Terence McKenna

In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.

Terence McKenna

Ken Griffey changed the game, but he also represented pop culture and the youth - how he wore his hat backwards, how he swung the bat and walked off...he brought energy to the game, class to the game. He was kind of the first person I really watched. He was a big influence.

Russell Wilson

It takes a lot of work to do this every day, every day, but I feel, as a sheriff, I should get to know my people. I serve them. They don't serve me. I serve them. They're my bosses, and the more people I can see and talk to, I love it.

Joe Arpaio

At the present moment in our culture this yearning for meaning and consciousness, this yearning to give and serve something higher than ourselves, is breaking through the hard crust of our widespread cultural materialism and pseudo-scientific underestimation of what a human being is meant to be together with an equally tragic overestimation of what we human beings are capable of in our present everyday state of being. The intensity of the present confusion about the nature and existence of God is a symptom of this yearning within the whole of our modern culture.

Jacob Needleman

The experience of going to a theater and seeing a movie with a lot of people is still part of the transformational power of the film, and it's equivalent to the old shaman telling a story by the campfire to a bunch of people. That is a remarkable thing, if you scream and everyone else in the audience screams, you realize that your fears are not just within yourself, they're in other people as well, and that's strangely releasing.

Wes Craven

Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization's makeup and success - along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like... I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.

Lou Gerstner

Politics is a game and a profession. It doesn't really serve the people the politicians are supposed to serve.

Kit Harington

...culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.

Muhammad Yunus

Look upon every man, woman, and everyone as God. You cannot help anyone, you can only serve: serve the children of the Lord, serve the Lord Himself, if you have the privilege.

Swami Vivekananda

A lot of what I do around Houston is to find ways to lift people through literacy. It's become part of our family culture. Everyone in our family has found some way and capacity to serve. You don't necessarily need to be President or First Lady to serve and help.

Neil Bush

It is not just the Great Works of mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.

Laurie Colwin

The profession of shaman has many advantages. It offers high status with a safe livelihood free of work in the dreary, sweaty sense. In most societies it offers legal privileges and immunities not granted to other men. But it is hard to see how a man who has been given a mandate from on High to spread tidings of joy to all mankind can be seriously interested in taking up a collection to pay his salary; it causes one to suspect that the shaman is on the moral level of any other con man. But it is a lovely work if you can stomach it.

Robert A. Heinlein

I mean loyalty - you know, look, first we serve the people. I've always looked at that. You serve the people first. But having said that, you never forget who's in charge. You never forget who the CEO of a country is when you decide to serve. And so everyone works at the pleasure of the president. And that's what, you know, we have to remember is if he doesn't feel comfortable, he can do something about it.

Nikki Haley

There is nothing more important to our survival, nothing more dignified than learning how to take care of others, how to serve and teach people with kindness and openness. Mothers are experts in these fields. I hope people can learn to listen to them, learn to be like them and acknowledge the wisdom there before it is too late. I hope people can learn how to serve others.