Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language.
Interpretation
Closure is an unrealistic expectation that seeks definitive answers in an unpredictable world.
This quote by Terence McKenna suggests that the desire for closure is a form of psychological immaturity. It implies that seeking clear and final resolutions in complex situations, relationships, or communication with others can lead to disappointment, as reality often defies neat conclusions and certainties. Rather than demanding closure, we should be open to the ambiguities and uncertainties of life.
In practice
During a therapy session, a counselor might use this quote to illustrate the complexities of human emotions.
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.
I'm not much like myself any more.
The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learned to cultivate the olive and the vine.
All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.
No one who errs unwillingly is evil.
The relationship between violence and nonviolence in this country is interesting. The fact of the matter is, you know, people do respond to riots. The 1968 Housing Act was in large response to riots that broke out after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. They cited these as an actual inspiration.
All law is situational law. The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision.
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