It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it. - Terence McKenna

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It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.

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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.

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Also Known As

Native Name: Terence Kempes McKenna
Alternative Names: Terence Kemp McKenna
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Additional quotes by Terence McKenna

What you see, I think, is the morphogenetic field. The invisible world that holds everything together. Not the net of matter and light, but the net of casuistry—of intentionality, of caring, of hope of dream—of thought. That all is there, but it has been hidden from us for centuries because of the exorcism of the spirit that took place in order to allow science to do business. And that monotonous and ill-considered choice has made us the inheritors of a tradition of existential emptiness. But that has impalded to us to go back to the jungles and recover this thing. … The question is: can we dream a dream that is sufficiently noble that we give meaning to the sacrifices that have been made to allow the 20th century to exist? … I am convinced that if there were no shamanic pipeline, there would be no higher life, as we know it, on this planet. … We are all cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body, it is hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern of the whole of what is happening. And yet, we can sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern …

Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.

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What is important is to understand the true boundaries of reality, not the probable boundaries of possible future events. Although boundary conditions operate on the future, they are probabilistic constraints, not absolutely determined fact. We assume that ten minutes hence, the room we are in will still exist. It is a boundary condition that will define the next ten minutes in our space/time coordinate. But we cannot know who will be in the room ten minutes hence; that is free to be determined. One may ask if we can really know that the room will exist at any future moment. This is where induction enters the picture, since in truth we cannot know with certainty. There is no absolutely rigorous way of establishing that. But we can make the inductive leap of faith that has to do with accumulated experience. We project that the existence of the room will remain a boundary condition, but in principle in the next ten minutes there could be an earthquake and this building might not be left standing. However, for that to happen, the boundary condition will have to be radically disrupted in some unexpected and improbable manner. What is so curious is that such a thing could occur.

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