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Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.

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
Memes
Ideologies
Cultural
Ideology
Ugly
Gets
Culture
Real
Confining

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.
Terence McKenna
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I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.
Terence McKenna
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It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.
Terence McKenna
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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.
Terence McKenna
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So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.
Terence McKenna
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I regard these people who are peddling angst and peddling pessimism and all that stuff as so 'two minutes ago'.
Terence McKenna
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I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.
Terence McKenna
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We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.
Terence McKenna
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The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.
Terence McKenna
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The way out then is personal responsibility, new operating systems downloaded from outside of culture, which means from the deeper wisdom of the psychedelic plants and then a commitment to community and a motto of To the future, without fear! Without fear!
Terence McKenna
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Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.
Terence McKenna
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Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.
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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The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip.
Terence McKenna
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If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
Terence McKenna
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I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn't for that.
Terence McKenna
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Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity.
Terence McKenna
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You will ride the Tao toward the concrescence and will be able to live in the light of its anticipation.
Terence McKenna
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Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.
Terence McKenna
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Marcel Eliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent, and Gordon Wasson, very rightly I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit.
Terence McKenna