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The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.

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
Revival
Central
Figure
Figures
Shaman
Archaic

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Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind.
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What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible.
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History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.
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That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with.
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What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.
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No one knows enough to worry.
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We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary.
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There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.
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By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.
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The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation.
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We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum the world is something we make through the act of perception.
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This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.
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What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.
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Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness. . . . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities. . . . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.
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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.
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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.
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I discovered early in life a stunning truth that's made my life very complicated in its wake, but that I still think is true, and it's that people are very easy to love.
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I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky.
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The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech.
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Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck.
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