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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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Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Falls
Cultural
Influence
Question
Fall
Doesn
Conditioning
Matter
Psychedelic
People
Frightening

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
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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The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you don't know is what your personal unconscious is made out of.
Terence McKenna
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Modernity is a desert, and we are jungle monkeys. And so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation, new ideas are coming to the fore. Psilocybin is a selective filter for this. The wish to go to space is a selective filter for this. Just the wish to know your own mind is a selective filter for this.
Terence McKenna
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I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.
Terence McKenna
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We don't have to look far for miracles because they're all around us. Everything is astonishing. The universe on it's surface is alive with mystery.
Terence McKenna
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Memory training is great psychedelic training.
Terence McKenna
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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.
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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We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it.
Terence McKenna
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It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.
Terence McKenna
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[DMT] raises all the questions in a hurry. It's so intense and so oriented toward the other and the visual and the hallucinogenic that it isn't really like a drug. It's more like an event that you ran into. You just came around a corner and there was the unspeakable.
Terence McKenna
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How do we fight back? By creating art.
Terence McKenna
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The psychedelic sets you at the beginning of the path, and then people do all kinds of things with it.
Terence McKenna
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I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.
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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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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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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This is the nature of going forward into being: A series of self-transforming ascents of level.
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