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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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Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Ultimately
Surrounds
Invisible
Openly
Intelligence
Splendor
Able
Penetrate
Never
Reveal
Forfeited
Would
Touching
Penetrates
Tolerate
Grooming
Surround
Pervasive

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.
Terence McKenna
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For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.
Terence McKenna
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The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.
Terence McKenna
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And I don't mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.
Terence McKenna
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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
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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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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
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I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
Terence McKenna
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There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules
Terence McKenna
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But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it.
Terence McKenna
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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
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You know what, I'm stoned, and I'm proud.
Terence McKenna
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The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.
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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Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug.
Terence McKenna
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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.
Terence McKenna
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The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.
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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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 started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.
Terence McKenna