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What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.

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
Find
Essentially
Way
Balance
Control
Effort
State
History
States
Careening
Back
Primordial

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.
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What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.
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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.
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I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
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There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.
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No one knows enough to worry.
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The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of.
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Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.
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The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery.
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For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined.
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There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.
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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
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The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.
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Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
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It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening.
Terence McKenna
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Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.
Terence McKenna
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For all we know, we know nothing.
Terence McKenna
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At the interface of the say-able and the unsay-able is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. And that's what I think it's important to try and bring out, ideas. Because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas.
Terence McKenna
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The Gaian mind is what were calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set.
Terence McKenna
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Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together.
Terence McKenna