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The only real experience that counts, is your own.
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
Counts
Experience
Real
More quotes by Terence McKenna
The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of.
Terence McKenna
Certainly neo-Platonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology, which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics.
Terence McKenna
It's as important to be well informed in this area, if you're going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you're going to do that.
Terence McKenna
What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.
Terence McKenna
To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.
Terence McKenna
Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.
Terence McKenna
Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.
Terence McKenna
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.
Terence McKenna
Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair.
Terence McKenna
That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
Terence McKenna
The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt.
Terence McKenna
It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.
Terence McKenna
My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past.
Terence McKenna
We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future.
Terence McKenna
In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept.
Terence McKenna
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
We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event.
Terence McKenna
And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude. Philosophy not made around the camp fire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That's how you figure out what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience.
Terence McKenna
Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness
Terence McKenna
Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
Terence McKenna