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For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.

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
Glory
Activity
Animal
Human
Humans
Cognitive

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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What is needed, is an awakening.
Terence McKenna
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And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.
Terence McKenna
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We are going through the eye of the needle make sure you leave what you don't need behind
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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If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.
Terence McKenna
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For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined.
Terence McKenna
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It seems to me that it is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language.
Terence McKenna
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It's a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.
Terence McKenna
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I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.
Terence McKenna
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Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness. . . . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities. . . . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.
Terence McKenna
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The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.
Terence McKenna
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I'm not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time.
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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The western mind, because of it's unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics.
Terence McKenna
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There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.
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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I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
Terence McKenna
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There is a morphological enfoldment occurring on this planet. It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being. We are a privileged part of this.
Terence McKenna
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The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.
Terence McKenna
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In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.
Terence McKenna