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

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.
Terence McKenna
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The race isn't to the swift, it's to the thoughtful.
Terence McKenna
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The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
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The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt.
Terence McKenna
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What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.
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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Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.
Terence McKenna
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As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.
Terence McKenna
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Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.
Terence McKenna
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Everything appears to me to be authored, in some strange way. And I wonder if this is not the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion/delusion/revelation that life is in fact art.
Terence McKenna
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If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
Terence McKenna
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History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.
Terence McKenna
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The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.
Terence McKenna
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The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it.
Terence McKenna
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Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.
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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This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite.
Terence McKenna
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When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward toward the futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within the paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.
Terence McKenna
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Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair.
Terence McKenna
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LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.
Terence McKenna