Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna

Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer

Terence McKenna was an ethnobotanist and philosopher known for his exploration of consciousness and the use of psychedelics in understanding reality.

Thinking People Psychedelic Mind Drug Mean
Born
November 16, 1946
Quotes
705
Rank
#563

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Terence McKenna quotes (page 27 of 36)

705 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"Inwardness is the characteristic feature of the vegetable rather than the animal approach to existence. The animals move, migrate and swarm, while plants hold fast. Plants live in a dimension characterised by solid state, the fixed and the enduring. If there is movement in the consciousness of plants then it must be the movement of spirit and attention in the domain of vegetal imagination. (...) This is the truth that the shamans have always known and practiced. Awareness of the green side of mind was called Veriditas by the twelfth century visionary Hildegard Von Bingen."

Moving Animal Vegetables
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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face."

Looks Faces Enough
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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination."

Reality Examination Tests
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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."

Technology Impact Frustrating
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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"I think what's really happening is that a dialogue opens up between the ego and these larger, more integrated parts of the psyche that are normally hidden from view."

Thinking Views Ego
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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will."

People Able Dimensions
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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself."

Technology Interaction Humans
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"If you take psychedelics and the Internet and music and put all of that together you have the basis for a new community that is wider and deeper than you know. The people who are building the new machines, who are designing the new circuitry, who are writing the new code are ALL freaks. They work for capitalist dogs, of course, because we all do, but the creative thrust of these technologies is being driven by people just like you and me."

Dog Writing Technology
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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I'm forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe."

Believe People Forever
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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"I think the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous tool for feminizing, and radicalizing, and psychedelicizing the social matrix. I see computers as entirely feminine."

Thinking Tools Computer
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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination."

Believe Imagination Expansion
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"What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a thousand years, the still small voice of the Logos of the planet."

Loyalty Children Years
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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"You may miss the end of the world, but you definitely are going to have a front row seat for the end of your world."

Missing World May
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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"Impressionism is simply twenty minutes into LSD."

Twenties Lsd Minutes
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"This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you're taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience."

Psychedelic Should Threshold
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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"The thing that excites me about these informational technologies is I think we are going to be able to use virtual reality to show each other the insides of our own heads."

Technology Reality Thinking
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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary."

Mean Reflection Self
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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"Obviously, it's some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious."

Mysterious Language Kind
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"I think there's a shamanic temperament, which is a person who craves knowledge, knowledge in the Greek sense of gnosis. In other words, knowledge not of the sort where you subscribe to Scientific American, and it validates what you believe, but cosmologies constructed out of immediate experiences that are found to be always applicable."

Believe Thinking Gnosis
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"There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them."

Years Progress Psychedelic
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