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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.

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
Thousand
Seen
Experience
Past
Poisonous
Years
Lens
Think
Lenses
Thinking
Ideology
World
Limited

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects...All our tool-making implies our belief in an ultimate tool.
Terence McKenna
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Human history is a Gaian dream.
Terence McKenna
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I regard these people who are peddling angst and peddling pessimism and all that stuff as so 'two minutes ago'.
Terence McKenna
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It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening.
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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We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
Terence McKenna
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Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.
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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...situations evolve as matter responds to the conditioning of time and space...If you know what is contained in time from its beginning to its end you are somehow no longer in time. Even though you still have a body and still eat and do what you do, you have discovered something that liberated you into a satisfying all-at-oneness.
Terence McKenna
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I'm meeting my obligations, somehow, always have, without ever truly working, without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for the man. Of course I had to deal dope to do this!
Terence McKenna
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The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.
Terence McKenna
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The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.
Terence McKenna
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The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together.
Terence McKenna
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In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept.
Terence McKenna
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Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness. . . . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities. . . . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.
Terence McKenna
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The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.
Terence McKenna
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Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.
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
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We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.
Terence McKenna
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Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism.
Terence McKenna