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My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.

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
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Came
Substance
Generalized
Idea
Historical
Substances
Experience
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Slightly

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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I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I'm completely hopeful. . . . This is how it should be. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace.
Terence McKenna
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In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.
Terence McKenna
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Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.
Terence McKenna
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I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky.
Terence McKenna
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Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins they are only different in degree.
Terence McKenna
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Liberate yourself from the illusion of culture. Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.
Terence McKenna
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I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.
Terence McKenna
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Don't diddle the dose. Once you have done your homework, go for it.
Terence McKenna
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What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.
Terence McKenna
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What I've observed, and I think it's fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I've observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity.
Terence McKenna
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The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.
Terence McKenna
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There is no knowledge without risk taking.
Terence McKenna
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There is a sort of fair play, and if you can get in touch with that in your life, if you can have that perception, the world will begin to work for you, it will begin to move toward you... Nature loves courage, and it shows you that loves courage because it will remove obstacles.
Terence McKenna
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And I don't mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.
Terence McKenna
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Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.
Terence McKenna
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I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.
Terence McKenna
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We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
Terence McKenna
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All time is is how much change you can pack into a second.
Terence McKenna
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Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna