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Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed

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
Magic
Name
Special
Names
Unnamed
Science
Prefers
Art
Province
Else
Provinces
Something
Ego

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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The imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information
Terence McKenna
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The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.
Terence McKenna
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The Gaian mind is what were calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set.
Terence McKenna
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We can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind, or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness.
Terence McKenna
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What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.
Terence McKenna
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What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.
Terence McKenna
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Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.
Terence McKenna
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Memory training is great psychedelic training.
Terence McKenna
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In shamanism and certain yogas, Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break.
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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Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants
Terence McKenna
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I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself.
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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The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer
Terence McKenna
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Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.
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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Ultimately what we're touching is the invisible, all-pervasive intelligence that surrounds us and penetrates us. It is grooming us to be able to tolerate its splendor. It can't just reveal itself openly because we would be forfeited we'd never know what hit us.
Terence McKenna
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You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
Terence McKenna
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[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body.
Terence McKenna
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The idea of psychedelic societies is something new. And it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone takes the drug. It merely means that the complexity and the mysteriousness of mind are centered in the consciousness of the civilization as the mystery which it comes from and which it must relate to in order to be relevant.
Terence McKenna