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This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine.

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
Law
Emerges
Greater
Overlooked
Universe
Engine
Science
Novelty
Nature
Engines
Complexity
General
Almost
Conserving

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.
Terence McKenna
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Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet
Terence McKenna
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The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.
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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We're not dropping out here, we're infiltrating and taking over.
Terence McKenna
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Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.
Terence McKenna
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We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.
Terence McKenna
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It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.
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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In shamanism and certain yogas, Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break.
Terence McKenna
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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.
Terence McKenna
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What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.
Terence McKenna
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Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness. . . . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities. . . . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.
Terence McKenna
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LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.
Terence McKenna
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The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.
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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Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.
Terence McKenna
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It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know... You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You'll have that!
Terence McKenna
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It's getting funnier because everybody's categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don't make sense.
Terence McKenna
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This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well, you don't want to clench, you don't want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe, and sing, and sing it back, and it will step back. You can take control of your situation ... most of the time.
Terence McKenna