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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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Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Form
Access
Firsts
Planet
First
Million
Shamanism
Kind
Sacred
Anthropologists
Years
Planets
Attained
People
Concern
Practiced
Millions
Obscure
Religion
Cultural

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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].
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It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.
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I regard these people who are peddling angst and peddling pessimism and all that stuff as so 'two minutes ago'.
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What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is.
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Psychedelics can carry you farther and faster than most people care to go. Once you get to psychedelics, it's no longer a matter of seeking the answer, you have found the answer. Now the issue changes dramatically, you must face the answer.
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Psychedelics are not flashlights into the chaos of the Freudian unconscious, they are tools for mathematically unpacking your mind into a higher dimensional space. In the Newtonian and print created space that we are walking around in you, are like a self extracting archive, that hasn't self extracted itself yet.
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Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
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I would argue that it's almost better to do heroin than to watch TV. At least when you're doing heroin you're responsible for your own reveries and thought processes. When you're mainlining TV what is it but endless messages to fetishize products?
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Our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts.
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Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.
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In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.
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It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.
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I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.
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