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What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.

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
Happy
Billion
Culture
Billions
Trying
Shoulders
Make
Pleasant
People
Teeth
Standing
Civilization
Situation
Kicking

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together.
Terence McKenna
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You put two egos together and you've either got a conflict, which is always interesting, or better yet, a love affair.
Terence McKenna
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The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.
Terence McKenna
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We're not going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience.
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If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
Terence McKenna
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And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.
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.
Terence McKenna
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In a sense, what's happening is that the unconscious mind is a luxury the human species cannot afford at this point in our dilemma, and so the unconscious mind is simply rising into consciousness by being hardwired into this global infrastructure.
Terence McKenna
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The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.
Terence McKenna
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Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew.
Terence McKenna
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We live in condensations of our imagination
Terence McKenna
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The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.
Terence McKenna
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The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.
Terence McKenna
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In shamanism and certain yogas, Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break.
Terence McKenna
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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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Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.
Terence McKenna
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It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems.
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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Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.
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