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We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event.

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
Mere
Chorus
Events
Spectators
Experience
Cosmic
Human
Accident
Humans
Greek
Event
Accidents
Sideshow
Main
Sideshows

More quotes by 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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That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
Terence McKenna
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As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.
Terence McKenna
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All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.
Terence McKenna
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I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.
Terence McKenna
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What good is a theory of how the universe works if it’s a series of tensor equations that, even when understood, come nowhere tangential to experience? The only intellectual or noetic or spiritual path worth following is one that builds on personal experience
Terence McKenna
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Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?
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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The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.
Terence McKenna
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This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.
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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Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.
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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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.
Terence McKenna
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What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.
Terence McKenna
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It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.
Terence McKenna
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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
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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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What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy.
Terence McKenna
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The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward, into metabolism. The human body is a knot in time.
Terence McKenna