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

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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What good is a theory of how the universe works if it’s a series of tensor equations that, even when understood, come nowhere tangential to experience? The only intellectual or noetic or spiritual path worth following is one that builds on personal experience
Terence McKenna
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The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries.
Terence McKenna
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There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.
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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Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view.
Terence McKenna
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LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality.
Terence McKenna
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The race isn't to the swift, it's to the thoughtful.
Terence McKenna
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The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.
Terence McKenna
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To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.
Terence McKenna
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If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.
Terence McKenna
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There is no knowledge without risk taking.
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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Psychedelic telepathy is you 'see' what I mean.
Terence McKenna
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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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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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Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew.
Terence McKenna
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We must look to the native healers all over the world and study their methods... Their methods are chemical and personal. It's a combination of care, attention, intention and chemistry that allows consciousness to be made malleable and recast in other forms.
Terence McKenna
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The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don't see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It's beautiful.
Terence McKenna
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Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
Terence McKenna
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In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept.
Terence McKenna