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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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Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Great
Edge
Edges
Terror
Emotion
Joy
Simply
Hovers
Almost
Ecstasy
Sometimes
Complexity

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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For talking monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a racoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe, the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.
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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For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.
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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Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made.
Terence McKenna
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The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.
Terence McKenna
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This is the nature of going forward into being: A series of self-transforming ascents of level.
Terence McKenna
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The sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago. . . . Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting.
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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To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.
Terence McKenna
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What we drug people have, that you don't, is repeatability.
Terence McKenna
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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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What they [psychedelics] cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction.
Terence McKenna
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You will ride the Tao toward the concrescence and will be able to live in the light of its anticipation.
Terence McKenna
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What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy.
Terence McKenna
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In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, painted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.
Terence McKenna
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The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.
Terence McKenna
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Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.
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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For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.
Terence McKenna