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LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality.

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
Personality
Different
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More quotes by Terence McKenna

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I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed, I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn't mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing.
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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Plants seem like an excellent model for the kind of future that we should be building.
Terence McKenna
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All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it's very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you're lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact.
Terence McKenna
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What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible.
Terence McKenna
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Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
Terence McKenna
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You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.
Terence McKenna
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The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.
Terence McKenna
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The engineers of the future will be poets.
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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Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
Terence McKenna
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History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.
Terence McKenna
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Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's some kind of gnostic demon. It's some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected.
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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And I don't mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.
Terence McKenna
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Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?
Terence McKenna
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The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer
Terence McKenna
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What they [psychedelics] cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction.
Terence McKenna
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Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
Terence McKenna
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I think that's the job of each of us - to show our best toys and our best tricks that lift us and our friends to higher and higher levels. There is no end to this bootstrapping process. The future of the human mind and body and the future of humans together is endlessly bright.
Terence McKenna