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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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Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.
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I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
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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.
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What you call man is time.
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Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.
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My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.
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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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The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.
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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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This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you're taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience.
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The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.
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Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair.
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I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing.
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We don't have to look far for miracles because they're all around us. Everything is astonishing. The universe on it's surface is alive with mystery.
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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.
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The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.
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All time is is how much change you can pack into a second.
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No one knows enough to worry.
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There is no mundane dimension really, if you have the eyes to see it, it is all transcendental.
Terence McKenna
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We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.
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