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The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.

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
Nature
Inspection
Immense
Tool
Tools

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.
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There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.
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To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.
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We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
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The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.
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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.
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We are going through the eye of the needle make sure you leave what you don't need behind
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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.
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There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules
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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.
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Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
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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.
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There is no mundane dimension really, if you have the eyes to see it, it is all transcendental.
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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.
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No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.
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No one knows enough to worry.
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Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.
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The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.
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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.
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A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.
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