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Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.

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
Somebody
Path
Actually
Experience
Psychedelic
Thought
Revelation
Nothing
Revelations
Work
Basically
Would
Worked

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well, you don't want to clench, you don't want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe, and sing, and sing it back, and it will step back. You can take control of your situation ... most of the time.
Terence McKenna
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I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.
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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Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.
Terence McKenna
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All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion.
Terence McKenna
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The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery.
Terence McKenna
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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
Terence McKenna
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The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.
Terence McKenna
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I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.
Terence McKenna
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Let's not underrate cannabis, for cryin' out loud. Cannabis should be the glue of the community.
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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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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Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
Terence McKenna
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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.
Terence McKenna
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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.
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
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By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other.
Terence McKenna
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Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made.
Terence McKenna
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Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of rationalist culture, we discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising presence of this intelligent Other, that beckons us out of history, and says, you know: 'The galaxy lies waiting.'
Terence McKenna
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And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.
Terence McKenna