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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
Much
Wander
Victim
Across
Thermostat
Room
Rouse
Rooms
Barely
Earth
Abstraction
Look
Victims
Looks
Flames
More quotes by Terence McKenna
Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.
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
There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.
Terence McKenna
Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
Terence McKenna
That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with.
Terence McKenna
The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
Terence McKenna
The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.
Terence McKenna
No one knows enough to worry.
Terence McKenna
This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite.
Terence McKenna
I think that's the job of each of us - to show our best toys and our best tricks that lift us and our friends to higher and higher levels. There is no end to this bootstrapping process. The future of the human mind and body and the future of humans together is endlessly bright.
Terence McKenna
The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.
Terence McKenna
Don't diddle the dose. Once you have done your homework, go for it.
Terence McKenna
The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you don't know is what your personal unconscious is made out of.
Terence McKenna
I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they're about time, and they somehow make all time co-present.
Terence McKenna
The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.
Terence McKenna
As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.
Terence McKenna
The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.
Terence McKenna
I discovered early in life a stunning truth that's made my life very complicated in its wake, but that I still think is true, and it's that people are very easy to love.
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
The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.
Terence McKenna
