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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
Real
Confining
Memes
Ideologies
Cultural
Ideology
Ugly
Gets
Culture

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news!
Terence McKenna
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The same organizational principles which called us forth into self-reflection have called forth self-reflection out of the planet itself. And the problem then is for us to suspect this, act on our suspicion, and be good detectives, and track down the spirit in its lair. And this is what shamans are doing. They are hunters of spirit.
Terence McKenna
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At the interface of the say-able and the unsay-able is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. And that's what I think it's important to try and bring out, ideas. Because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas.
Terence McKenna
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Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.
Terence McKenna
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We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.
Terence McKenna
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For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.
Terence McKenna
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If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
Terence McKenna
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We can't sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten.
Terence McKenna
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The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety.
Terence McKenna
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We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future.
Terence McKenna
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It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.
Terence McKenna
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Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.
Terence McKenna
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What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy.
Terence McKenna
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For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.
Terence McKenna
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For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined.
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
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Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.
Terence McKenna
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Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet
Terence McKenna
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Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.
Terence McKenna
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In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can't be told.
Terence McKenna