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.

Born
November 16, 1946
Quotes
705
Rank
#563

Quote collection

Terence McKenna quotes (page 7 of 36)

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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom."

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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality."

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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic."

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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine."

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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves."

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"Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it."

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"I think the real test of psychedelics is what you do with them when you're not on them, what kind of culture you build, what kind of art, what kind of technologies... What's lacking in the Western mind is the sense of connectivity and relatedness to the rest of life, the atmosphere, the ecosystem, the past, our children's future. If we were feeling those things we would not be practicing culture as we are."

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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it."

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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance."

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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"...the mind is more powerful than any imaginable particle accelerator, more sensitive than any radio receiver or the largest optical telescope, more complete in its grasp of information than any computer: the human body- its organs, its voice, its powers of locomotion, and its imagination- is a more-than-sufficient means for the exploration of any place, time or energy level in the universe."

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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"Drugs are about dulling perception, about addiction and about behavioral repetition...What *psychedelics* are about is pattern- dissolving experiences of an extraordinarily high or different awareness. They are the exact opposite of drugs. They promote questioning , they promote consciousness, they promote value examinations, they promote the reconstruction of behavioral patterns."

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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste."

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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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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."

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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."

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"There is no dualism in the world of light. The conventions of relativity say that time slows down as one approaches the speed of light, but if one tries to imagine the point of view of a thing made of light, one must realize that what is never mentioned is that if one moves at the speed of light there is no time whatsoever... One exists in eternity, one has become eternal... One is then apart from the moving image; one exists in the completion of eternity."

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"For me it's an issue of are we afraid of ourselves? And we inherit a huge bunch of idealogical baggage, not only Christianity, but Freudianism, and Marxism . . . We inherit all kinds of idealogical baggage designed to make us fear ourselves."

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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"The only difference between a drug and a computer is that one is slightly too large to swallow. ... And our best people are working on that problem, even as we speak."

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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
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"What blinds us, or makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness that our beliefs have grown obsolete and should be put aside.... This is I think much of the problem of the modern dilemma: Direct experience has been discounted, and in its place all kinds of belief systems have been erected.... If you believe something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite; which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of committing yourself to this belief."

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"Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence with ourselves, is that we consume images, we don't produce them. We need to produce, not consume, media."

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"Everything will come true in cyberspace. That's the whole idea. What cyberspace is, on one level, it's simply the human imagination vivified, hardwired."

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