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The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation

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
Alienation
Sanity
Cost
Level
Levels
Society
Certain

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
Terence McKenna
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For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.
Terence McKenna
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We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
Terence McKenna
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The way out then is personal responsibility, new operating systems downloaded from outside of culture, which means from the deeper wisdom of the psychedelic plants and then a commitment to community and a motto of To the future, without fear! Without fear!
Terence McKenna
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Psychedelics are not flashlights into the chaos of the Freudian unconscious, they are tools for mathematically unpacking your mind into a higher dimensional space. In the Newtonian and print created space that we are walking around in you, are like a self extracting archive, that hasn't self extracted itself yet.
Terence McKenna
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There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.
Terence McKenna
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It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.
Terence McKenna
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It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas. . . . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.
Terence McKenna
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At the interface of the say-able and the unsay-able is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. And that's what I think it's important to try and bring out, ideas. Because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas.
Terence McKenna
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Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity.
Terence McKenna
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Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.
Terence McKenna
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When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward toward the futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within the paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.
Terence McKenna
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What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.
Terence McKenna
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I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn't for that.
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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The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment.
Terence McKenna
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I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.
Terence McKenna
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The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls.
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
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Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.
Terence McKenna