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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
Astonishment
Proper
Response
Reality

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
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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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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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I'm not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time.
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Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins they are only different in degree.
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We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future.
Terence McKenna
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Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief- and if it's not there why should you believe in it?
Terence McKenna
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Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.
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Culture as we're practicing it is causing a lot of pain.
Terence McKenna
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Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.
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.
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We must look to the native healers all over the world and study their methods... Their methods are chemical and personal. It's a combination of care, attention, intention and chemistry that allows consciousness to be made malleable and recast in other forms.
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Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.
Terence McKenna
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The only evil that associates itself with mushrooms is taking too little.
Terence McKenna
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We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.
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I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
Terence McKenna
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The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
Terence McKenna
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We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.
Terence McKenna
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The sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago. . . . Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting.
Terence McKenna
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The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment.
Terence McKenna