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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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Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Attends
Decadence
Freedom

More quotes by 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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Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.
Terence McKenna
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And I don't mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.
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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We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it's too early for us to be anything else. There's no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That's why it's so important to try and share [our stories].
Terence McKenna
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As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.
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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The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.
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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Our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas
Terence McKenna
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I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.
Terence McKenna
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Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we're working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of.
Terence McKenna
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If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind.
Terence McKenna
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The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.
Terence McKenna
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For all we know, we know nothing.
Terence McKenna
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Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view.
Terence McKenna
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I think that's the job of each of us - to show our best toys and our best tricks that lift us and our friends to higher and higher levels. There is no end to this bootstrapping process. The future of the human mind and body and the future of humans together is endlessly bright.
Terence McKenna
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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.
Terence McKenna
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Inform yourself, inform your children, talk to your friends! And let's try to make a better, stonier world than the one we inherited!
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