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The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.

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
Self
Molecule
Releasing
Structured
Molecules
Property
Unique

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.
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All time is is how much change you can pack into a second.
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Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.
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Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug.
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Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
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We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
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What is needed, is an awakening.
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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.
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It's a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.
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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 western mind, because of it's unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics.
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Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.
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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.
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And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.
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Time is a series of fluctuating variables.
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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Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.
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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.
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The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind.
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Everything appears to me to be authored, in some strange way. And I wonder if this is not the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion/delusion/revelation that life is in fact art.
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