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To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.

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
Away
Anything
Thinking
Radically
Date
Enterprise
Moved
Understanding

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins they are only different in degree.
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It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us.
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The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it, because you can't predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place.
Terence McKenna
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Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of rationalist culture, we discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising presence of this intelligent Other, that beckons us out of history, and says, you know: 'The galaxy lies waiting.'
Terence McKenna
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Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
Terence McKenna
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If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind.
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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Time is a series of fluctuating variables.
Terence McKenna
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The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind.
Terence McKenna
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Language betrays, in order to mean.
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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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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For all we know, we know nothing.
Terence McKenna
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I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.
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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Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science.
Terence McKenna
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I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I'm forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.
Terence McKenna
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It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.
Terence McKenna
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And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings.
Terence McKenna
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Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck.
Terence McKenna