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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.

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
Made
Figures
Shamanism
World
Based
Forcing
Attitude
Acquisition
Philosophy
Camp
Fire
Camps
Experience
Extreme
Hands
Extremes
Around
Figure
Bicycling

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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I'm meeting my obligations, somehow, always have, without ever truly working, without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for the man. Of course I had to deal dope to do this!
Terence McKenna
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I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.
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By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other.
Terence McKenna
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Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.
Terence McKenna
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What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.
Terence McKenna
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The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of.
Terence McKenna
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Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.
Terence McKenna
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What I've observed, and I think it's fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I've observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity.
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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We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses.
Terence McKenna
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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.
Terence McKenna
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I regard these people who are peddling angst and peddling pessimism and all that stuff as so 'two minutes ago'.
Terence McKenna
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Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.
Terence McKenna
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I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky.
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.
Terence McKenna
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The content of the dialogue with 'the Other' is a content that indicates that man's horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, 'the body is the placenta of the soul'
Terence McKenna
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Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck.
Terence McKenna
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I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
Terence McKenna
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Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants
Terence McKenna
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The quality of rhetoric emanating from the psychedelic community must improve radically. If it does not, we will forfeit the reclamation of our birthright and all opportunity for exploring the psychedelic dimension will be closed off.
Terence McKenna