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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
Experience
Ecstatic
Years
Psychedelic
Terrifying
Reducing
Awesome
Quantity
Progress
Known
Irreducible

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Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
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Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.
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I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.
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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
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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'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.
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To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.
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Ultimately what we're touching is the invisible, all-pervasive intelligence that surrounds us and penetrates us. It is grooming us to be able to tolerate its splendor. It can't just reveal itself openly because we would be forfeited we'd never know what hit us.
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We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it's too early for us to be anything else. There's no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That's why it's so important to try and share [our stories].
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Let's not underrate cannabis, for cryin' out loud. Cannabis should be the glue of the community.
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I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.
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Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.
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It's a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.
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We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.
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We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event.
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I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they're about time, and they somehow make all time co-present.
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There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.
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It's as important to be well informed in this area, if you're going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you're going to do that.
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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.
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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
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