I think that people don't understand. As the Firesign Theater used to say, "Everything you know is wrong." But that is a very liberating understandin… - Terence McKenna

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I think that people don't understand. As the Firesign Theater used to say, "Everything you know is wrong." But that is a very liberating understanding, because if everything you know is wrong, then all the problems you thought were insoluble can be framed differently. And there's a way to take the world apart and put it back unrecognizably. We don't really understand what consciousness is at the really deep levels. With some of the tryptamine hallucinogens, you see into possibilities where questions like "are you alive?", "are you dead?", "are you you?" seem to have been transcended. I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there.

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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

Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe.

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What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.

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