Quote

No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.

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
Earth
Crisis
Heavily
West
Industrial
Terms
Contradiction
Inured
Behavior
Usual
Irreconcilable
Attitude
Consequences
Mounting
Term
Atmosphere
Crises
Culture
Pursue
Contradictions
Business
Consequence
Surreal

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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We are going through the eye of the needle make sure you leave what you don't need behind
Terence McKenna
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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
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I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
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The Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to evolve.
Terence McKenna
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I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed, I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn't mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing.
Terence McKenna
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I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.
Terence McKenna
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Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.
Terence McKenna
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This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine.
Terence McKenna
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The only real experience that counts, is your own.
Terence McKenna
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The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.
Terence McKenna
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Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we're working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of.
Terence McKenna
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History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.
Terence McKenna
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[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body.
Terence McKenna
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If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.
Terence McKenna
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The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it, because you can't predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place.
Terence McKenna
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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
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Nature is actually the goal at the end of history.
Terence McKenna
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The quality of rhetoric emanating from the psychedelic community must improve radically. If it does not, we will forfeit the reclamation of our birthright and all opportunity for exploring the psychedelic dimension will be closed off.
Terence McKenna
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When your time is turned into money, the felt presence of immediate experience is analogous to being enslaved. I mean, let's be frank about it, it is enslavement.
Terence McKenna
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Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
Terence McKenna