Quote

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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Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Wish
Desert
Filter
Ideas
Bear
Pressures
Human
Bears
Modernity
Humans
Pressure
Filters
Mind
Coming
Selective
Situation
Evolutionary
Space
Monkeys
Psilocybin
Upon
Jungle
Fore

More quotes by 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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In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.
Terence McKenna
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I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they're about time, and they somehow make all time co-present.
Terence McKenna
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There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.
Terence McKenna
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Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.
Terence McKenna
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Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe.
Terence McKenna
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What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible.
Terence McKenna
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So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.
Terence McKenna
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This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine.
Terence McKenna
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Psychedelic telepathy is you 'see' what I mean.
Terence McKenna
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I think that's the job of each of us - to show our best toys and our best tricks that lift us and our friends to higher and higher levels. There is no end to this bootstrapping process. The future of the human mind and body and the future of humans together is endlessly bright.
Terence McKenna
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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.
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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The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
Terence McKenna
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As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.
Terence McKenna
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You're immortal as long as you live.
Terence McKenna
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But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it.
Terence McKenna
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For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.
Terence McKenna
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And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings.
Terence McKenna
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It's a product of the fractal laws that govern the world at an informational level. There is no deeper truth.
Terence McKenna