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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.

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
Mirror
Mirrors
Destroy
Image
Save
Ability

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.
Terence McKenna
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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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What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.
Terence McKenna
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Ultimately what we're touching is the invisible, all-pervasive intelligence that surrounds us and penetrates us. It is grooming us to be able to tolerate its splendor. It can't just reveal itself openly because we would be forfeited we'd never know what hit us.
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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You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.
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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The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.
Terence McKenna
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It's getting funnier because everybody's categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don't make sense.
Terence McKenna
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This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.
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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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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Culture as we're practicing it is causing a lot of pain.
Terence McKenna
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The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
Terence McKenna
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The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind.
Terence McKenna
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The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
Terence McKenna
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The imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information
Terence McKenna
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Let's not underrate cannabis, for cryin' out loud. Cannabis should be the glue of the community.
Terence McKenna
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The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.
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