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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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Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Impulse
Philosophy
Show
Business
Shows
Shamanism
Branch
Branches

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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We have outlived this embryo, this human cradle, and now it's time to be up and about the great business of becoming citizens of the galaxy and at home with our own heart.
Terence McKenna
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The psychedelic sets you at the beginning of the path, and then people do all kinds of things with it.
Terence McKenna
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Time is a series of fluctuating variables.
Terence McKenna
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You're immortal as long as you live.
Terence McKenna
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Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?
Terence McKenna
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We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses.
Terence McKenna
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Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there the path is known you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.
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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History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.
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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It's a product of the fractal laws that govern the world at an informational level. There is no deeper truth.
Terence McKenna
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Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together.
Terence McKenna
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I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.
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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We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.
Terence McKenna
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Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.
Terence McKenna
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DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.
Terence McKenna
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In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept.
Terence McKenna
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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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Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.
Terence McKenna