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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
Culture
Real
Confining
Memes
Ideologies
Cultural
Ideology
Ugly
Gets

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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What is needed, is an awakening.
Terence McKenna
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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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It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas. . . . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.
Terence McKenna
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Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.
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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By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.
Terence McKenna
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You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.
Terence McKenna
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The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.
Terence McKenna
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Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it's not necessarily some kind of 'Be Here Now' feel-good thing because it doesn't always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It's primary.
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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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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We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
Terence McKenna
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There is a sort of fair play, and if you can get in touch with that in your life, if you can have that perception, the world will begin to work for you, it will begin to move toward you... Nature loves courage, and it shows you that loves courage because it will remove obstacles.
Terence McKenna
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Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.
Terence McKenna
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You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise.
Terence McKenna
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I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That's not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky.
Terence McKenna
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The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and creativity.
Terence McKenna
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Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.
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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Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.
Terence McKenna