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There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.

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
Gets
Talk
Trying
Mind
Something
Ontology
Bedrock
Nervous
Western

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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Psychedelic telepathy is you 'see' what I mean.
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.
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The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don't see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It's beautiful.
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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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Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.
Terence McKenna
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You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise.
Terence McKenna
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The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery.
Terence McKenna
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...situations evolve as matter responds to the conditioning of time and space...If you know what is contained in time from its beginning to its end you are somehow no longer in time. Even though you still have a body and still eat and do what you do, you have discovered something that liberated you into a satisfying all-at-oneness.
Terence McKenna
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Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.
Terence McKenna
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By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.
Terence McKenna
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We have outlived this embryo, this human cradle, and now it's time to be up and about the great business of becoming citizens of the galaxy and at home with our own heart.
Terence McKenna
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The same organizational principles which called us forth into self-reflection have called forth self-reflection out of the planet itself. And the problem then is for us to suspect this, act on our suspicion, and be good detectives, and track down the spirit in its lair. And this is what shamans are doing. They are hunters of spirit.
Terence McKenna
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For talking monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a racoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe, the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.
Terence McKenna
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Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
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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DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don't want to know about it.
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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The psychedelic mind is a higher dimensional mind, it is not fit for three dimensional space time.
Terence McKenna
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The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.
Terence McKenna
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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