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History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.

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
Call
Story
History
Duration
Stories
Complexes
Kind
Complex
Years
Conscious
Becoming
Animal

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.
Terence McKenna
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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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Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug.
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We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.
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How do we fight back? By creating art.
Terence McKenna
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Human history is a Gaian dream.
Terence McKenna
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The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.
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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I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing.
Terence McKenna
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We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future.
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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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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Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.
Terence McKenna
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The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.
Terence McKenna
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The only real experience that counts, is your own.
Terence McKenna
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We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.
Terence McKenna
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Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed
Terence McKenna
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Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.
Terence McKenna
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And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude. Philosophy not made around the camp fire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That's how you figure out what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience.
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