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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.

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
Reality
Psychedelic
Stills
Drugs
Used
Flight
Still
Scary
Long
Drug
Think
Started
Thinking
People
Bits

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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And I don't mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.
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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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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Because this is the world that science built, with the henchmen of capitalism and Christianity.
Terence McKenna
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The only real experience that counts, is your own.
Terence McKenna
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I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there
Terence McKenna
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In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.
Terence McKenna
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Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we're working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of.
Terence McKenna
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For all we know, we know nothing.
Terence McKenna
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The only evil that associates itself with mushrooms is taking too little.
Terence McKenna
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People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.
Terence McKenna
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[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body.
Terence McKenna
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We are going through the eye of the needle make sure you leave what you don't need behind
Terence McKenna
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You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.
Terence McKenna
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You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.
Terence McKenna
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Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.
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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Look at the reputation they gave him. [Giordano] Bruno without the pyre is a whiskey priest laying waste to the maids of Umbria.
Terence McKenna
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[DMT] raises all the questions in a hurry. It's so intense and so oriented toward the other and the visual and the hallucinogenic that it isn't really like a drug. It's more like an event that you ran into. You just came around a corner and there was the unspeakable.
Terence McKenna
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What they [psychedelics] cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction.
Terence McKenna