Quote

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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No one knows enough to worry.
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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The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.
Terence McKenna
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Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.
Terence McKenna
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The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
Terence McKenna
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The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.
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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I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.
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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This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well, you don't want to clench, you don't want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe, and sing, and sing it back, and it will step back. You can take control of your situation ... most of the time.
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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You put two egos together and you've either got a conflict, which is always interesting, or better yet, a love affair.
Terence McKenna
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Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made.
Terence McKenna
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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.
Terence McKenna
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What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.
Terence McKenna
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Death is the black hole of biology. It's an event horizon, and once you go over that event horizon, no information can be passed back out of the hole.
Terence McKenna
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Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.
Terence McKenna
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I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.
Terence McKenna
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I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.
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