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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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Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Hallucinations
Culturally
Call
Fact
Facts
Linguistically
Reality
Sanctioned
Nothing
Reinforced
Hallucination

More quotes by 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.
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It is the people who are 'far out' who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.
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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.
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Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.
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I discovered early in life a stunning truth that's made my life very complicated in its wake, but that I still think is true, and it's that people are very easy to love.
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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The only evil that associates itself with mushrooms is taking too little.
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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Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.
Terence McKenna
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Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.
Terence McKenna
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We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what's going on or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on?
Terence McKenna
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The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.
Terence McKenna
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I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they're about time, and they somehow make all time co-present.
Terence McKenna
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That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
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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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
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Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief- and if it's not there why should you believe in it?
Terence McKenna
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It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.
Terence McKenna
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What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.
Terence McKenna
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All time is is how much change you can pack into a second.
Terence McKenna