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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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Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Thinking
Fair
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Previously
Levels
Builds
Experience
Psychedelic
Nature
Observed
Give
Established
Giving
Complexity
Think
Fairs

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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Culture as we're practicing it is causing a lot of pain.
Terence McKenna
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The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.
Terence McKenna
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Marcel Eliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent, and Gordon Wasson, very rightly I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit.
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When your time is turned into money, the felt presence of immediate experience is analogous to being enslaved. I mean, let's be frank about it, it is enslavement.
Terence McKenna
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Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.
Terence McKenna
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History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.
Terence McKenna
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I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.
Terence McKenna
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Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.
Terence McKenna
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The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us.
Terence McKenna
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Psychedelics can carry you farther and faster than most people care to go. Once you get to psychedelics, it's no longer a matter of seeking the answer, you have found the answer. Now the issue changes dramatically, you must face the answer.
Terence McKenna
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We are reaping the fruits of ten thousand, fifty thousand years of sowing of the fields of mind. And it is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition of social reality, re engineering of languages, revisioning of the planetary ecology, all these things fall upon us.
Terence McKenna
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It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas. . . . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.
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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I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.
Terence McKenna
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Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
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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We can't sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten.
Terence McKenna
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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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We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it.
Terence McKenna
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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.
Terence McKenna