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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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Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Path
Language
Culture
Shows
Cannot
Flashlight
Flashlights
Evolve
Faster

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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The idea of psychedelic societies is something new. And it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone takes the drug. It merely means that the complexity and the mysteriousness of mind are centered in the consciousness of the civilization as the mystery which it comes from and which it must relate to in order to be relevant.
Terence McKenna
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The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind.
Terence McKenna
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Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness
Terence McKenna
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Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
Terence McKenna
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Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I'm noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating.
Terence McKenna
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The obligation on us is to communicate the truth so that it is understood. The belief will take care of itself.
Terence McKenna
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Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug.
Terence McKenna
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Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.
Terence McKenna
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What you call man is time.
Terence McKenna
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The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.
Terence McKenna
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Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
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If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind.
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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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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We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.
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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Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.
Terence McKenna
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It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
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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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