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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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You're immortal as long as you live.
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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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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What good is a theory of how the universe works if it’s a series of tensor equations that, even when understood, come nowhere tangential to experience? The only intellectual or noetic or spiritual path worth following is one that builds on personal experience
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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.
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I think institutions will inevitably substitute a rite or a ritual for the authentic, for the real McCoy, because then priests can control the pipeline to god, and the parishioner can approach with offerings. But if everybody can have a pipeline to deity, why then the whole priest scam is put out of business.
Terence McKenna
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In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, painted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.
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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Ultimately what we're touching is the invisible, all-pervasive intelligence that surrounds us and penetrates us. It is grooming us to be able to tolerate its splendor. It can't just reveal itself openly because we would be forfeited we'd never know what hit us.
Terence McKenna
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Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew.
Terence McKenna
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This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine.
Terence McKenna
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Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism. It was Hinduism that did the dirty work for Buddhism, by the time Buddha came along priest-craft was an ancient tradition in India.
Terence McKenna
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We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.
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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Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?
Terence McKenna
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We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what's going on or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on?
Terence McKenna
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We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
Terence McKenna
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This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you're taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
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What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.
Terence McKenna
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The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer
Terence McKenna