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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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Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Self
Like
Propelling
Medium
Mediums
Recognition
Reflection
Language
History

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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No one knows enough to worry.
Terence McKenna
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Modernity is a desert, and we are jungle monkeys. And so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation, new ideas are coming to the fore. Psilocybin is a selective filter for this. The wish to go to space is a selective filter for this. Just the wish to know your own mind is a selective filter for this.
Terence McKenna
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It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.
Terence McKenna
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Language betrays, in order to mean.
Terence McKenna
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There is no knowledge without risk taking.
Terence McKenna
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The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.
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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What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.
Terence McKenna
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The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.
Terence McKenna
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The quality of rhetoric emanating from the psychedelic community must improve radically. If it does not, we will forfeit the reclamation of our birthright and all opportunity for exploring the psychedelic dimension will be closed off.
Terence McKenna
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It is the people who are 'far out' who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.
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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I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.
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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Well, you could almost say, I suppose, that the scientist seeks what is similar between any two days, or bluebirds, or glaciers. And the poet seeks what is different. The artist seeks to celebrate the unique.
Terence McKenna
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That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
Terence McKenna
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It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know... You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You'll have that!
Terence McKenna
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The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery.
Terence McKenna
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There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.
Terence McKenna
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Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.
Terence McKenna