Quote

People have a right to get stoned. They have a right to think and explore their own minds. This is as intimate a part of their being as their sexuality. Any culture which mitigates that is clearly afraid of a full and fair and open dialogue about what reality is and what real human values ought to be.

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
People
Part
Minds
Stoned
Human
Afraid
Explore
Humans
Ought
Sexuality
Right
Full
Intimate
Real
Open
Dialogue
Mind
Values
Fairs
Think
Culture
Clearly
Thinking
Reality
Fair
Mitigates

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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What I've observed, and I think it's fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I've observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity.
Terence McKenna
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Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.
Terence McKenna
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Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?
Terence McKenna
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It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.
Terence McKenna
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There is a sort of fair play, and if you can get in touch with that in your life, if you can have that perception, the world will begin to work for you, it will begin to move toward you... Nature loves courage, and it shows you that loves courage because it will remove obstacles.
Terence McKenna
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In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.
Terence McKenna
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It seems to me that it is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language.
Terence McKenna
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Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.
Terence McKenna
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The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.
Terence McKenna
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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.
Terence McKenna
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I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.
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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What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.
Terence McKenna
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It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
Terence McKenna
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It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us.
Terence McKenna
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It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know... You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You'll have that!
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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Human history is a Gaian dream.
Terence McKenna
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We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects...All our tool-making implies our belief in an ultimate tool.
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