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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
Drug
Advocate
Drugs

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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Certainly neo-Platonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology, which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics.
Terence McKenna
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In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.
Terence McKenna
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Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants
Terence McKenna
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A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.
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 whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.
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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The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it, because you can't predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place.
Terence McKenna
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You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.
Terence McKenna
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DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don't want to know about it.
Terence McKenna
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The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.
Terence McKenna
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Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.
Terence McKenna
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What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.
Terence McKenna
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Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order.
Terence McKenna
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Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.
Terence McKenna
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The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
Terence McKenna
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Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins they are only different in degree.
Terence McKenna
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Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.
Terence McKenna
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We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event.
Terence McKenna
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We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it.
Terence McKenna