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We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses.

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
Bizarre
Disguise
Hallucinogens
Dimensions
Encompasses
Truly
Extraterrestrial
Order
Alienated
Self
Alarm
Must
Alarms
Psychedelic

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.
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To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back.
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What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news!
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Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.
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There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.
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So I submit to you that what we represent is a Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that represents the best aspirations that human community is capable of, a Fifth Column that is willing to look at the structure of the psyche in contrast to the mess of society, and willing to dream.
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Human history is a Gaian dream.
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The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.
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That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
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The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us.
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There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.
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I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself.
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Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order.
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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.
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Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?
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The felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor.
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.
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No one knows enough to worry.
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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.
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Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.
Terence McKenna