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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
Greater
Overlooked
Universe
Engine
Science
Novelty
Nature
Engines
Complexity
General
Almost
Conserving
Law
Emerges
More quotes by Terence McKenna
Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.
Terence McKenna
Let's not underrate cannabis, for cryin' out loud. Cannabis should be the glue of the community.
Terence McKenna
It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems.
Terence McKenna
Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.
Terence McKenna
The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.
Terence McKenna
We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects...All our tool-making implies our belief in an ultimate tool.
Terence McKenna
No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.
Terence McKenna
The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip.
Terence McKenna
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
The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind.
Terence McKenna
Inform yourself, inform your children, talk to your friends! And let's try to make a better, stonier world than the one we inherited!
Terence McKenna
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
Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness
Terence McKenna
A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.
Terence McKenna
There is a morphological enfoldment occurring on this planet. It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being. We are a privileged part of this.
Terence McKenna
Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
Terence McKenna
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.
Terence McKenna
The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.
Terence McKenna
I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I'm forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.
Terence McKenna
All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion.
Terence McKenna