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

More quotes by 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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Plants seem like an excellent model for the kind of future that we should be building.
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.
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The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.
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You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise.
Terence McKenna
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The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.
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 way out then is personal responsibility, new operating systems downloaded from outside of culture, which means from the deeper wisdom of the psychedelic plants and then a commitment to community and a motto of To the future, without fear! Without fear!
Terence McKenna
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'Drugs' and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.
Terence McKenna
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I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.
Terence McKenna
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It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.
Terence McKenna
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In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.
Terence McKenna
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Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism. It was Hinduism that did the dirty work for Buddhism, by the time Buddha came along priest-craft was an ancient tradition in India.
Terence McKenna
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Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
Terence McKenna
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The felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor.
Terence McKenna
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Because this is the world that science built, with the henchmen of capitalism and Christianity.
Terence McKenna
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I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
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History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.
Terence McKenna
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Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's some kind of gnostic demon. It's some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected.
Terence McKenna
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But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it.
Terence McKenna