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In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, painted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.

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
Use
Exposed
Masks
Might
Cultural
Marxism
Great
Clearly
Catholicism
Good
Ideals
Cling
Things
Democratic
Intent
Rattles
People
Simply
Painted
Assembled
Situation
Grasp
Quaint
Words
Mask
Artifacts

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Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants
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In a sense, what's happening is that the unconscious mind is a luxury the human species cannot afford at this point in our dilemma, and so the unconscious mind is simply rising into consciousness by being hardwired into this global infrastructure.
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Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind.
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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.
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I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.
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The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us.
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This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite.
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I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing.
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So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.
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You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
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In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can't be told.
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It's as important to be well informed in this area, if you're going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you're going to do that.
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The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.
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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.
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The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip.
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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 imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.
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The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries.
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LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality.
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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.
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