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

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn't for that.
Terence McKenna
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You're immortal as long as you live.
Terence McKenna
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Look at the reputation they gave him. [Giordano] Bruno without the pyre is a whiskey priest laying waste to the maids of Umbria.
Terence McKenna
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The Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to evolve.
Terence McKenna
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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.
Terence McKenna
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All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.
Terence McKenna
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What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.
Terence McKenna
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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.
Terence McKenna
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To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.
Terence McKenna
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The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you don't know is what your personal unconscious is made out of.
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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In cyberspace things are built out of light.
Terence McKenna
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It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening.
Terence McKenna
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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
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It is the people who are 'far out' who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.
Terence McKenna
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I'm meeting my obligations, somehow, always have, without ever truly working, without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for the man. Of course I had to deal dope to do this!
Terence McKenna
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You put two egos together and you've either got a conflict, which is always interesting, or better yet, a love affair.
Terence McKenna
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I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.
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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The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.
Terence McKenna