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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

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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
Useful
Seriously
Notion
Responsibility
Understanding
Universe
Take

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.
Terence McKenna
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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
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As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.
Terence McKenna
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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
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Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's some kind of gnostic demon. It's some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected.
Terence McKenna
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All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.
Terence McKenna
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I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.
Terence McKenna
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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
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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
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Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together.
Terence McKenna
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If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.
Terence McKenna
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I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.
Terence McKenna
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The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.
Terence McKenna
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I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.
Terence McKenna
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We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.
Terence McKenna
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That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
Terence McKenna
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You're immortal as long as you live.
Terence McKenna
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When we really understand time travel we may find out it's as common as dirt and has been going on all around us is all kinds of physical processes.
Terence McKenna
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In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.
Terence McKenna
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What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.
Terence McKenna