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We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.
Terence McKenna
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Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Looks
Flames
Much
Wander
Victim
Across
Thermostat
Room
Rouse
Rooms
Barely
Earth
Abstraction
Look
Victims
More quotes by Terence McKenna
We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event.
Terence McKenna
Culture as we're practicing it is causing a lot of pain.
Terence McKenna
The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it.
Terence McKenna
If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind.
Terence McKenna
In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, painted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.
Terence McKenna
Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.
Terence McKenna
In shamanism and certain yogas, Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break.
Terence McKenna
You will ride the Tao toward the concrescence and will be able to live in the light of its anticipation.
Terence McKenna
I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there
Terence McKenna
Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.
Terence McKenna
Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck.
Terence McKenna
The felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor.
Terence McKenna
A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing. It's changed before, but not for a long time in our lives, not since before our lives. But now it's changing, and there are many many possibilities.
Terence McKenna
This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.
Terence McKenna
We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.
Terence McKenna
Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.
Terence McKenna
That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
Terence McKenna
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.
Terence McKenna
What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.
Terence McKenna
And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings.
Terence McKenna
