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We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it.
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
World
Cold
Roman
Rest
Thrust
Modern
Womb
History
Empire
Expelled
Fall
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Science
Empires
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Essentially
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Hard
Birth
Sometime
More quotes by Terence McKenna
The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.
Terence McKenna
I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I'm completely hopeful. . . . This is how it should be. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace.
Terence McKenna
The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.
Terence McKenna
You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
Terence McKenna
To me, the most amazing the most amazing transformation in my lifetime is not the revolution of the Sixties but the counter revolution of the Seventies, where they managed to put the cuckoo clock back together again
Terence McKenna
Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.
Terence McKenna
Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug.
Terence McKenna
We don't have to look far for miracles because they're all around us. Everything is astonishing. The universe on it's surface is alive with mystery.
Terence McKenna
The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment.
Terence McKenna
Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.
Terence McKenna
We can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind, or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness.
Terence McKenna
Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.
Terence McKenna
[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body.
Terence McKenna
Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.
Terence McKenna
We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what's going on or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on?
Terence McKenna
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
I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety. Anxiety sells.
Terence McKenna
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
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
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