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Quote by Terence McKenna

“I mean everybody knows there's something wrong with the world and if you read left wing politicians or deconstructionists or thoughtful historians they will offer thoughtful critiques of our situation. But the question is, you know, the Tolstoyian question; 'What is to be done?'”

Quote by Terence McKenna

Author

Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna was a renowned philosopher known for his profound insights into consciousness, botany, and human potential. His ideas were deeply influenced by his family's genetic research and studies on the evolution of human consciousness. more

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“If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.”

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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 Humans Kind I Believe Imagination Human Beings Consciousness Known Theory Evolution Expansion Puzzles Catalyst Cognitive Human Imagination

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“There is no hierarchy of elder knowledge in my social region of things. There are only people learning and sharing in a very complex environment.”

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“A glacier rattles in the cupboard, the desert sighs in the bed, and the crack in the teacup opens a door to the land of the dead. The Maya call this Xibalba (Shibalba), the road to the dimension of the dead.”

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Author:Terence McKenna

“There is this persistent theme in all of these notions that death is made more easy, whatever that means, if you've learned the territory before you get there. And you know, in the Mahayana Buddhist situation it even becomes as extreme as saying; 'life is essentially a preparation for death, a studying of the maps of a learning of the skills a packing of your picnic basket so that when you get out there and demons are sniffing you up one side and down the other you don't bungle your mantras'.”

“The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and creativity.”

Giving Humans Care Artist Creativity Figures Doctors Scientist Notion Human History

Author:Terence McKenna

“Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed”

Art Names Magic Special Ego Provinces

Author:Terence McKenna

“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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“The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip.”

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Author:Terence McKenna

“Cultural conditioning is like bad software. Over and over it's diddled with and re-written so that it can just run on the next attempt. But there is cultural hardware, and it's that cultural hardware, otherwise known as authentic being, that we are propelled toward by the example of the shaman and the techniques of the shaman. ... Shamanism therefore is a call to authenticity.”

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Author:Terence McKenna