Quote

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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Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Amusement
Hard
Marvelous
Believe
Joke
Make
Jokes
Everybody
Working
Edification
Happy
Staged
Reality

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.
Terence McKenna
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I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.
Terence McKenna
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It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know... You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You'll have that!
Terence McKenna
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Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.
Terence McKenna
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Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.
Terence McKenna
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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
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In cyberspace things are built out of light.
Terence McKenna
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We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.
Terence McKenna
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The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us.
Terence McKenna
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If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
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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Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view.
Terence McKenna
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The only evil that associates itself with mushrooms is taking too little.
Terence McKenna
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The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer
Terence McKenna
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Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors.
Terence McKenna
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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
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In a sense, what's happening is that the unconscious mind is a luxury the human species cannot afford at this point in our dilemma, and so the unconscious mind is simply rising into consciousness by being hardwired into this global infrastructure.
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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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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When we really understand time travel we may find out it's as common as dirt and has been going on all around us is all kinds of physical processes.
Terence McKenna