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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.

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
Terrifying
Reducing
Awesome
Quantity
Progress
Known
Irreducible
Experience
Ecstatic
Years
Psychedelic

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.
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How do we fight back? By creating art.
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What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.
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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.
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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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DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.
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The Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to evolve.
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I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.
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The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward, into metabolism. The human body is a knot in time.
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You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.
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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.
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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.
Terence McKenna
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The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.
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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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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I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there
Terence McKenna
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Reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we're embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion.
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No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it's a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.
Terence McKenna
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It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us.
Terence McKenna
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We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.
Terence McKenna