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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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Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.
Terence McKenna
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I regard these people who are peddling angst and peddling pessimism and all that stuff as so 'two minutes ago'.
Terence McKenna
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We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it's too early for us to be anything else. There's no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That's why it's so important to try and share [our stories].
Terence McKenna
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The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.
Terence McKenna
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Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins they are only different in degree.
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 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.
Terence McKenna
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What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is.
Terence McKenna
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You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise.
Terence McKenna
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I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.
Terence McKenna
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Ultimately what we're touching is the invisible, all-pervasive intelligence that surrounds us and penetrates us. It is grooming us to be able to tolerate its splendor. It can't just reveal itself openly because we would be forfeited we'd never know what hit us.
Terence McKenna
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Memory training is great psychedelic training.
Terence McKenna
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It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems.
Terence McKenna
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I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
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Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe.
Terence McKenna
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We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
Terence McKenna
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People have a right to get stoned. They have a right to think and explore their own minds. This is as intimate a part of their being as their sexuality. Any culture which mitigates that is clearly afraid of a full and fair and open dialogue about what reality is and what real human values ought to be.
Terence McKenna
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I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you hate them, and that's because they dissolve world views. And if you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you, if you think that's a thrill, you'll probably love psychedelics.
Terence McKenna
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I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.
Terence McKenna
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The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.
Terence McKenna