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Astonishment is the proper response to reality.

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
Astonishment
Proper
Response

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.
Terence McKenna
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Well, you could almost say, I suppose, that the scientist seeks what is similar between any two days, or bluebirds, or glaciers. And the poet seeks what is different. The artist seeks to celebrate the unique.
Terence McKenna
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It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.
Terence McKenna
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Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.
Terence McKenna
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I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
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I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing.
Terence McKenna
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The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.
Terence McKenna
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A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.
Terence McKenna
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What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news!
Terence McKenna
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Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.
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
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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
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What you call man is time.
Terence McKenna
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What we drug people have, that you don't, is repeatability.
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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History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.
Terence McKenna
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My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.
Terence McKenna
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We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum the world is something we make through the act of perception.
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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The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.
Terence McKenna