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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
Freedom
Attends
Decadence

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.
Terence McKenna
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Reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we're embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion.
Terence McKenna
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The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you don't know is what your personal unconscious is made out of.
Terence McKenna
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The content of the dialogue with 'the Other' is a content that indicates that man's horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, 'the body is the placenta of the soul'
Terence McKenna
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DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.
Terence McKenna
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So I submit to you that what we represent is a Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that represents the best aspirations that human community is capable of, a Fifth Column that is willing to look at the structure of the psyche in contrast to the mess of society, and willing to dream.
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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So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.
Terence McKenna
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I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.
Terence McKenna
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One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available.
Terence McKenna
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Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.
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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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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Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of rationalist culture, we discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising presence of this intelligent Other, that beckons us out of history, and says, you know: 'The galaxy lies waiting.'
Terence McKenna
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Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.
Terence McKenna
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All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.
Terence McKenna
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The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don't see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It's beautiful.
Terence McKenna
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It's a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.
Terence McKenna
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What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.
Terence McKenna
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Memory training is great psychedelic training.
Terence McKenna