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This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.

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
Mean
Walking
Ontological
Fact
Shamanism
History
Psychedelic
Means
Edge
Facts
Transformation
Ends
Drugs
Human
Edges
Humans
Drug

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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.
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You will ride the Tao toward the concrescence and will be able to live in the light of its anticipation.
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The way out then is personal responsibility, new operating systems downloaded from outside of culture, which means from the deeper wisdom of the psychedelic plants and then a commitment to community and a motto of To the future, without fear! Without fear!
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There is no knowledge without risk taking.
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This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you're taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience.
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You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.
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The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech.
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Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
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Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order.
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Language betrays, in order to mean.
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The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and creativity.
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We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
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The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer
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Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.
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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
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This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.
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The Gaian mind is what were calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set.
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Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.
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There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.
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Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.
Terence McKenna