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I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I'm forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.

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
Side
Sides
Forever
Cranky
Believe
Puzzled
Things
Seeming
People
Skeptical
Dumb
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More quotes by Terence McKenna

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You will ride the Tao toward the concrescence and will be able to live in the light of its anticipation.
Terence McKenna
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You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise.
Terence McKenna
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If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.
Terence McKenna
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The felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor.
Terence McKenna
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By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.
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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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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Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck.
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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It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.
Terence McKenna
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Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it's not necessarily some kind of 'Be Here Now' feel-good thing because it doesn't always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It's primary.
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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Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?
Terence McKenna
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For all we know, we know nothing.
Terence McKenna
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We live in condensations of our imagination
Terence McKenna
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'Drugs' and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.
Terence McKenna
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All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.
Terence McKenna
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For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.
Terence McKenna
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We're not going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
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The only real experience that counts, is your own.
Terence McKenna