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The global triumph of Western values means we, as a species, have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a connection… - Terence McKenna
" "The global triumph of Western values means we, as a species, have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis
because of the absence of a connection to the unconscious. Gaining access to the unconscious through plant
hallucinogen use reaffirms our original bond to the living planet. Our estrangement from nature and the
unconscious became entrenched roughly two thousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of the Great God
Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression of the pagan mysteries and the rise of Christianity. The
psychological shift that ensued left European civilization staring into two millennia of religious mania and
persecution, warfare, materialism, and rationalism.
The monstrous forces of scientific industrialism and global politics that have been born into modern times were
conceived at the time of the shattering of the symbiotic relationships with the plants that had bound us to nature
from our dim beginnings. This left each human being frightened, guilt-burdened, and alone. Existential man was
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About Terence McKenna
Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was an American writer, philosopher, and ethnobotanist, who advocated paths of shamanism, and the use of hallucinogenic substances (primarily plant-based psychedelics) as a means of increasing many forms of human awareness. His ideas often revolve around his novelty theory of the universe.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Native Name:
Terence Kempes McKenna
Alternative Names:
Terence Kemp McKenna
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Additional quotes by Terence McKenna
Orient yourself towards the psychedelic experience, towards the psychedelic phenomenon, as a source of information. A mirror image of the psychedelic experience in hardware are computer networks. Computer networks, paradoxically enough, are a deeply feminizing influence on society, where, in hardware, the unconscious is actually being created. It's as though we took the Platonic bon mot about how "if God did not exist, Man would invent him", and say "if the unconscious does not exist, humanity will invent it"—in the form of these vast networks able to transfer and transform information. This is in fact what we are caught up in, is a transforming of information. We have not physically changed in the last 40,000 years; the human type was established at the end of the last glaciation. But change, which was previously operable in the biological realm, is now operable in the realm of culture.
From a historical point of view, restricting the availability of addictive substances must be seen as a peculiarly perverse example of Calvinist dominator thought - a system in which the sinner is to be punished in this world by being transformed into an exploitable, of his cash, by the criminal/governmental combine that provides the addicitve substances. The image is more horrifying than that of the serpent that devours itself - it is once again the Dionysian image of the mother who devours her children, the image of a house divided against itself.
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I believe that the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa gave us the model for all religions to follow. And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis, and-if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament-planetary catastrophe.
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