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The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.

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
Categories
Unconscious
Possibility
Style
Call
Actually
Seems
Motifs
Styles

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.
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Don't diddle the dose. Once you have done your homework, go for it.
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So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.
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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.
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There is no mundane dimension really, if you have the eyes to see it, it is all transcendental.
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The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it, because you can't predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place.
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.
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And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.
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There is no knowledge without risk taking.
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The felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor.
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If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
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Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.
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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.
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The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.
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Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.
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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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
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What is needed, is an awakening.
Terence McKenna
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Our task is to create memes... Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate.
Terence McKenna
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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