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I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.

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
Comfortable
Without
Believe
Hallucinogens
Shamanism
Authentic

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
Terence McKenna
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I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.
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The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.
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I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed, I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn't mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing.
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The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt.
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The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.
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Don't diddle the dose. Once you have done your homework, go for it.
Terence McKenna
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Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.
Terence McKenna
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It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
Terence McKenna
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I'm not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time.
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 can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.
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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Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.
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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Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there the path is known you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.
Terence McKenna
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What good is a theory of how the universe works if it’s a series of tensor equations that, even when understood, come nowhere tangential to experience? The only intellectual or noetic or spiritual path worth following is one that builds on personal experience
Terence McKenna
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The imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information
Terence McKenna
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Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.
Terence McKenna
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I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.
Terence McKenna