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I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.

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
Advocate
Drugs
Drug

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.
Terence McKenna
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Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.
Terence McKenna
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The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together.
Terence McKenna
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The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt.
Terence McKenna
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What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.
Terence McKenna
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Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.
Terence McKenna
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I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
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All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.
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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We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects...All our tool-making implies our belief in an ultimate tool.
Terence McKenna
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The sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago. . . . Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting.
Terence McKenna
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Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.
Terence McKenna
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We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.
Terence McKenna
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Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.
Terence McKenna
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Our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas
Terence McKenna
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A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing. It's changed before, but not for a long time in our lives, not since before our lives. But now it's changing, and there are many many possibilities.
Terence McKenna
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But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it.
Terence McKenna
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The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.
Terence McKenna
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The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.
Terence McKenna
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Death is the black hole of biology. It's an event horizon, and once you go over that event horizon, no information can be passed back out of the hole.
Terence McKenna