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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
Around
Essentially
Existentialism
Hard
Birth
Sometime
World
Cold
Roman
Rest
Thrust
Modern
Womb
History
Empire
Expelled
Fall
Torn
Canal
Science
Empires
Canals

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it's very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you're lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact.
Terence McKenna
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What we drug people have, that you don't, is repeatability.
Terence McKenna
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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.
Terence McKenna
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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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The psychedelic experience is the beginning of the spiritual path. That's why it's not important that yogas' claim that they can deliver you the psychedelic experience, because it begins with the psychedelic experience, and then you go from there.
Terence McKenna
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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
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The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip.
Terence McKenna
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I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.
Terence McKenna
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We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.
Terence McKenna
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It's getting funnier because everybody's categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don't make sense.
Terence McKenna
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Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
Terence McKenna
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To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.
Terence McKenna
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Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism.
Terence McKenna
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...situations evolve as matter responds to the conditioning of time and space...If you know what is contained in time from its beginning to its end you are somehow no longer in time. Even though you still have a body and still eat and do what you do, you have discovered something that liberated you into a satisfying all-at-oneness.
Terence McKenna
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Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence with ourselves, is that we consume images, we don't produce them. We need to produce, not consume, media.
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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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
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What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.
Terence McKenna
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We live in condensations of our imagination
Terence McKenna
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One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available.
Terence McKenna