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We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.

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
Everything
Tend
Matter
Taking
Giving
Somebody
Something
Idea
Believe
Away
Else
Give
Ideas

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.
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There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.
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What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all.
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What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.
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The psychedelic mind is a higher dimensional mind, it is not fit for three dimensional space time.
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Language betrays, in order to mean.
Terence McKenna
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We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum the world is something we make through the act of perception.
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We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
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The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery.
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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.
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We can't sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten.
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I think institutions will inevitably substitute a rite or a ritual for the authentic, for the real McCoy, because then priests can control the pipeline to god, and the parishioner can approach with offerings. But if everybody can have a pipeline to deity, why then the whole priest scam is put out of business.
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I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.
Terence McKenna
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The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
Terence McKenna
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Certainly neo-Platonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology, which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics.
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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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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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Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.
Terence McKenna
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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.
Terence McKenna
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Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.
Terence McKenna