Entrance to Magic Theatre - Not For Everyone - Terrence McKenna, My Friend

[Peter Lemkin]

Some few here or 'out there' will resonate to this and some other posts I'll add to this thread. Suffice it to say, I had the honor and privilege to meet and know and communicate with Terrence for a while before his very sad death. In fact, I was in the processes of making the final arrangements for him to give a week-long seminar and experiential week in a middle-ages castle here in CZ when I received word he had developed a brain tumor and had to postpone. The postponement was permanent - but Terrence's ideas and meta-ideas live on. Few can understand them, fewer want to; those who do, are much the richer for it. A brilliant mind on all subjects was he and a wordsmith extraordinaire. At the end of his life he was also weaving the political assassinations and march of neo-fascism into his work, writings and talks....I discussed this issue with him specifically. He was fully aware - on all fronts.... Miss you Terrence!

http://deoxy.org/mckenna.htm

[Magda Hassan]

Love Terrence too. Met him here in Sydney. He was a good friend of one of my exes who helped him with a passport when he was having some troubles with his. A great man. A generous man. An amazing explorer of all worlds. RIP.

[Peter Lemkin]

Love Terrence too. Met him here in Sydney. He was a good friend of one of my exes who helped him with a passport when he was having some troubles with his. A great man. A generous man. An amazing explorer of all worlds. RIP.

Small world. Here are two of about 50 books, papers, musings and audio/videos I have on T.McK.

[Peter Lemkin]

Terence McKenna
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the Canadian documentary filmmaker, see Terence McKenna (film producer). This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. The talk page may contain suggestions. (November 2010)
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Terence Kemp McKennaFull name Terence Kemp McKenna
Born November 16, 1946
Paonia, Colorado, United States
Died April 3, 2000 (aged 53)
San Rafael, California, United States
Era 20th century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Metaphysics, phenomenology
Main interests shamanism, ethnobotany, metaphysics, psychedelic drugs and plants, futurism, primitivism, environmentalism, consciousness, phenomenology, historical revisionism, evolution, ontology, Mind at Large, virtual reality, dominator culture, criticizing science, the Logos
Notable ideas novelty theory, "stoned ape" hypothesis, Machine elf, psychedelic exopheromones, the "felt presence of direct experience"
Influenced by[show]


Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 April 3, 2000) was an American writer mainly on the subject of psychedelic drugs and their role in society, and existence beyond the physical body. He was also a public speaker, psychonaut, ethnobotanist, art historian, and self-described anarchist, anti-materialist, environmentalist, feminist, Platonist and skeptic.[1] During his lifetime he was noted for his knowledge of psychedelics, metaphysics, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, mysticism, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, biology, geology, physics, phenomenology, and his concept of novelty theory.[2]Contents [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Early life
1.2 Adult life
1.3 Last interview
1.4 Death
1.5 The library fire
2 Ideas
2.1 The "Stoned Ape" hypothesis of human evolution
2.2 Novelty theory
3 Bibliography
4 Spoken word
5 Discography
6 See also
7 References
8 External links
8.1 Writings online
8.2 Audio and video resources

[edit]
Biography
[edit]
Early life

Terence McKenna grew up in Paonia, Colorado.[3] He was introduced to geology through his uncle and developed a hobby of solitary fossil hunting in the arroyos near his home.[4] From this he developed a deep artistic and scientific appreciation of nature.

At age 16, McKenna moved to, and attended high school in, Los Altos, California.[3] He lived with family friends because his parents in Colorado wished him to have the benefit of highly rated California public schools. He was introduced to psychedelics through The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley[3] and the Village Voice.[5]

One of his early experiences with them came through morning glory seeds (containing LSA), which he claimed showed him "that there was something there worth pursuing."[3]

In 1964, circumstances required McKenna to move to Lancaster, California, to live with a different set of family friends. In 1965, he graduated from Antelope Valley High School.

McKenna then enrolled in U.C. Berkeley. He moved to San Francisco during the summer of 1965 before his classes began, was introduced that year to cannabis by Barry Melton[6] and tried LSD soon after.

As a freshman at U.C. Berkeley McKenna participated in the Tussman Experimental College, a short-lived two-year program on the Berkeley campus. He graduated in 1969 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Ecology and Conservation.
[edit]
Adult life

He spent the years after his graduation teaching English in Japan, traveling through India and South Asia collecting butterflies for biological supply companies.[7]

Following the death of his mother in 1971, Terence, his brother Dennis, and three friends traveled to the Colombian Amazon in search of oo-koo-hé, a plant preparation containing DMT. Instead of oo-koo-hé they found various forms of ayahuasca (also known as "yagé") and gigantic psilocybe cubensis which became the new focus of the expedition.[7] In La Chorrera, at the urging of his brother, he allowed himself to be the subject of a psychedelic experiment which he claimed put him in contact with Logos: an informative, divine voice he believed was universal to visionary religious experience.[7] The revelations of this voice, and his brother's peculiar experience during the experiment, prompted him to explore the structure of an early form of the I Ching, which led to his "Novelty Theory".[7] These ideas were explored extensively by Terence and Dennis in their 1975 book The Invisible Landscape - Mind Hallucinogens and The I Ching.

In the early 1980s, McKenna began to speak publicly on the topic of psychedelic drugs, lecturing extensively and conducting weekend workshops. Though somewhat associated with the New Age or human potential movement, McKenna himself had little patience for New Age sensibilities, repeatedly stressing the importance and primacy of felt experience as opposed to dogmatic ideologies.[8] Timothy Leary once introduced him as "one of the five or six most important people on the planet".[9]" It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These are the two things that the psychedelics attack. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy. "

Terence McKenna, "This World...and Its Double", [10]


He soon became a fixture of popular counterculture, and his popularity continued to grow, culminating in the early to mid 1990's with the publication of several books such as True Hallucinations (which relates the tale of his 1971 experience at La Chorrera), Food of the Gods and The Archaic Revival. He became a popular personality in the psychedelic rave/dance scene of the early 1990s, with frequent spoken word performances at raves and contributions to psychedelic and goa trance albums by The Shamen, Spacetime Continuum, Alien Project, Capsula, Entheogenic, Zuvuya, Shpongle, and Shakti Twins. His speeches were (and continue to be) sampled by many others. In 1994 he appeared as a speaker at the Starwood Festival, which was documented in the book Tripping by Charles Hayes (his lectures were produced on both cassette tape and CD).[11]

McKenna was a contemporary and colleague of chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham and biologist Rupert Sheldrake (creator of the theory of "morphogenetic fields", not to be confused with the mainstream usage of the same term), and conducted several public debates known as trialogues with them, from the late 1980s up until his death. Books which contained transcriptions of some of these events were published. He was also a friend and associate of Ralph Metzner, Nicole Maxwell, and Riane Eisler, participating in joint workshops and symposia with them. He was a personal friend of Tom Robbins, and influenced the thought of numerous scientists, writers, artists, and entertainers, including comedian Bill Hicks, whose routines concerning psychedelic drugs drew heavily from McKenna's works. He is also the inspiration for the Twin Peaks character Dr. Jacoby.[12]

In addition to psychedelic drugs, McKenna spoke on the subjects of virtual reality (which he saw as a way to artistically communicate the experience of psychedelics), techno-paganism, artificial intelligence, evolution, extraterrestrials, and aesthetic theory (art/visual experience as information-- representing the significance of hallucinatory visions experienced under the influence of psychedelics).

McKenna also co-founded Botanical Dimensions with Kathleen Harrison (his colleague and wife of 17 years), a non-profit ethnobotanical preserve on the island of Hawaii, where he lived for many years before he died. Before moving to Hawaii permanently, McKenna split his time between Hawaii and a town called Occidental, located in the redwood-studded hills of Sonoma County, California, a town unique for its high concentration of artistic notables, including Tom Waits and Mickey Hart.
[edit]
Last interview

Erik Davis, author of the book TechGnosis, conducted what would be the last interview with McKenna in October and early November 1999. This interview was held in preparation for a profile featured in Wired Magazine in 2000, entitled "Terence McKenna's Last Trip."[13] Erik Davis later published larger excerpts from this interview at his site, techgnosis.com, and the recorded interview has also been released on CD. Commenting on the reality of his own death, McKenna said during the interview:"
I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it's a kind of blessing. It's certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you're going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights. ... It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears.[14] "

[edit]
Death

A longtime sufferer of migraines, in mid-1999 McKenna returned to his home on the big island of Hawaii after a long lecturing tour. He began to suffer from increasingly painful headaches. This culminated in three brain seizures in one night, which he claimed were the most powerful psychedelic experiences he had ever known. Upon his emergency trip to the hospital on Oahu, Terence was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. For the next several months he underwent various treatments, including experimental gamma knife radiation treatment. He died on April 3, 2000, at the age of 53, with his loved ones at his bedside. He is survived by his brother Dennis, his son Finn, and his daughter Klea.
[edit]
The library fire

On February 7, 2007, McKenna's library of rare books and personal notes was destroyed in a fire which burned offices belonging to Big Sur's Esalen Institute storing the collection. An index maintained by his brother Dennis survives, though little else.
[edit]
Ideas" There are these things, which I call "self transforming machine elves," I also call them self-dribbling basketballs. They are, but they are none of these things. I mean you have to understand: these are metaphors in the truest sense, meaning that they're lies! [...] I name them 'Tykes' because tyke is a word that means to me a small child, ... and when you burst into the DMT space this is the Aeon - it's a child, and it's at play with colored balls, and I am in eternity, apparently, in the presence of this thing. "

Terence McKenna, "Time and Mind", [15]


Terence McKenna advocated the exploration of altered states of mind via the ingestion of naturally occurring psychedelic substances. For example, and in particular, as facilitated by the ingestion of high doses of psychedelic mushrooms, and DMT, which he believed was the apotheosis of the psychedelic experience. He spoke of the "jeweled, self-dribbling basketballs" or "self-transforming machine elves" that one encounters in that state.

Although he avoided giving his allegiance to any one interpretation (part of his rejection of monotheism), he was open to the idea of psychedelics as being "trans-dimensional travel"; literally, enabling an individual to encounter what could be ancestors, or spirits of earth.[8] He remained opposed to most forms of organized religion or guru-based forms of spiritual awakening.

Either philosophically or religiously, he expressed admiration for Marshall McLuhan, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Gnostic Christianity, Alfred North Whitehead and Alchemy.

He also expressed admiration for the works of James Joyce (calling Finnegans Wake "the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature of the 20th century")[16] and Vladimir Nabokov: McKenna once said that he would have become a Nabokov lecturer if he never met psychedelics.
[edit]
The "Stoned Ape" hypothesis of human evolution

McKenna hypothesized[citation needed] that as the North African jungles receded and gave way to savannas and grasslands near the end of the most recent ice age, a branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the forest canopy and began to live in the open areas outside of the forest. There they experimented with new varieties of foods as they adapted, physically and mentally, to their new environment. McKenna also called last glacial period hominids "fruit eating" in what he calls a gender-equal "paradise [...] the golden age of humanity" that he dated as ending 10,000 years ago.[17] However, the most recent ice age, also known as the Last glacial period that stretched from 110,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, when meat-eating, biologically evolved Homo-Sapiens were already in Europe. Capability for language, present in the human FOXP2 gene was already developed.[citation needed]

According to McKenna's hypothesis, among the new food items found in this new environment were psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing near the dung of ungulate herds that occupied the savannas and grasslands at that time. To support this hypothesis, McKenna referenced the research of Roland L. Fisher.[citation needed] The cited work by Fischer does not mention paleo-anthropology, Africa, or the ice ages.[18][19][20][21] Echoing Fisher on the effects of psychedelics, McKenna claimed that enhancement of visual acuity was an effect of psilocybin at low doses, and supposed that this would have conferred an adaptive advantage. He also argued that the effects of slightly larger doses, including sexual arousal, and in still larger doses, ecstatic hallucinations and glossolalia gave selective evolutionary advantages to members of those tribes who partook of it. There were many changes caused by the introduction of this psychoactive mushroom to the primate diet. McKenna hypothesizes, for instance, that synesthesia (the blurring of boundaries between the senses) caused by psilocybin led to the development of spoken language: the ability to form pictures in another person's mind through the use of vocal sounds.

About 12,000 years ago, further climate changes removed psilocybin-containing mushrooms from the human diet.[citation needed] McKenna argued that this event resulted in a new set of profound changes in our species as we reverted to the previous brutal primate social structures that had been modified and/or repressed by frequent consumption of psilocybin.
[edit]
Novelty theory

One of McKenna's favourite topics is Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, according to which, the universe progresses from the entropy-dominated state of disorganized complexity to the information-dominated state of organized complexity:[22][23]

...the story of the universe is that information, which I call novelty, is struggling to free itself from habit, which I call entropy... and that this process... is accelerating... It seems as if... the whole cosmos wants to change into information... All points want to become connected... The path of complexity to its goals is through connecting things together... You can imagine that there is an ultimate end-state of that processit's the moment when every point in the universe is connected to every other point in the universe.
McKenna, Terence ♦ A workshop held in the summer of 1998

Entropy (disgregation) is the particle-like aspect of the universe. Information is the universe's wave-like aspect. In its wave-like phase, a quantum does not have a spatial position and exists as an omnipresent momentum identical with time itself:

The imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information.
McKenna, Terence ♦ A Few Conclusions About Life
In sleep, one is released into the real world, of which the world of waking is only the surface in a very literal geometric sense. There is a plenumrecent experiments in quantum physics tend to back this upa holographic plenum of information. All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere. Information stands outside of time in a kind of eternityan eternity that does not have a temporal existence about which one may say, "It always existed." It does not have temporal duration of any sort. It is eternity. We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.
McKenna, Terence ♦ New Maps of Hyperspace

The higher the organized complexity of a particle aggregate, the more pronounced its wave-like component:

I've always felt that biology is a strategy, a chemical strategy, for amplifying quantum-mechanical indeterminacy into macrophysical systems called living organisms, and that living organisms somehow work their magic by opening a doorway to the quantum realm through which indeterminacy can come. And I imagine that all nature works like this, with the single exception of human beings, who have been poisoned by language.
McKenna, Terence ♦ Hazelwood House Trialogue

Just like most of us enjoy a much closer relationship with our television sets than we do with our neighbours, parts of the universe become nonlocally interconnected not directly but through the Earth's biosphere, which acts as the informational hub (due to its amplified virtual, wave-like componentinformation). When the Earth's biosphere will have accumulated the critical amount of information, the universe will become sufficiently interconnected to turn into a reality-warping Elysium. The hyperspace of the universe's nonlocal information (the "superconducting Overmind") is, by definition, in a single quantum state; in order to fuse with that single quantum state and attain absolute psychokinetic control over the universe, the human species needs to become genetically singular by being reduced to a single couple of the most imaginative people, whose tantric union is the ultimate goal of the universe's existencethe Eschaton:

What is happening to our world is ingression of novelty toward what Whitehead called "concrescence," a tightening gyre. Everything is flowing together. The "autopoetic lapis," the alchemical stone at the end of time, coalesces when everything flows together. When the laws of physics are obviated, the universe disappears, and what is left is the tightly bound plenum, the monad, able to express itself for itself, rather than only able to cast a shadow into physis as its reflection. I come very close here to classical millenarian and apocalyptic thought in my view of the rate at which change is accelerating. From the way the gyre is tightening, I predict that the concrescence will occur soonaround 2012 AD. It will be the entry of our species into hyperspace, but it will appear to be the end of physical laws accompanied by the release of the mind into the imagination. <...> The transition from earth to space will be a staggeringly tight genetic filter, a much tighter filter than any previous frontier has ever been, including the genetic and demographic filter represented by the colonization of the New World. <...> The object at the end of and beyond history is the human species fused into eternal tantric union with the superconducting Overmind/UFO.
McKenna, Terence ♦ New Maps of Hyperspace

According to McKenna, the final period of the universe's informational evolution began on 6 August 1945 and will end with a point of "maximized novelty" by 22 December 2012:

I've been talking about it since 1971, and what's interesting to me is at the beginning, it was material for hospitalization, now it is a minority viewpoint and everything is on schedule. My career is on schedule, the evolution of cybernetic technology is on schedule, the evolution of a global information network is on schedule. Given this asymptotic curve, I think we'll arrive under budget, on time, December 22, 2012.
McKenna, Terence ♦ Approaching Timewave Zero November 1994

See also:
Omega Point
2012 phenomena
[edit]
Bibliography
1975 - The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching (with Dennis McKenna) (Seabury; 1st Ed) ISBN 0-8164-9249-2.
1976 - The Invisible Landscape (with Dennis McKenna, and Quinn Taylor) (Scribner) ISBN 0-8264-0122-8
1976 - Psilocybin - Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide (with Dennis McKenna: credited under the pseudonyms OT Oss and ON Oeric) (2nd edition 1986) (And/Or Press) ISBN 0-915904-13-6
1992 - Psilocybin - Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide (with Dennis McKenna: (credited under the pseudonyms OT Oss and ON Oeric) (Quick American Publishing Company; Revised edition) ISBN 0-932551-06-8
1992 - The Archaic Revival (HarperSanFrancisco; 1st edition) ISBN 0-06-250613-7
1992 - Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge - A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Bantam) ISBN 0-553-37130-4
1992 - Synesthesia (with Timothy C. Ely) (Granary Books 1st Ed) ISBN 1-887123-04-0
1992 - Trialogues at the Edge of the West: Chaos, Creativity, and the Resacralization of the World (with Ralph H. Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake and Jean Houston) (Bear & Company Publishing 1st Ed) ISBN 0-939680-97-1
1993 - True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise (HarperSanFrancisco 1st Ed) ISBN 0-06-250545-9
1994 - The Invisible Landscape (HarperSanFrancisco; Reprint edition) ISBN 0-06-250635-8
1998 - True Hallucinations & the Archaic Revival: Tales and Speculations About the Mysteries of the Psychedelic Experience (Fine Communications/MJF Books) (Hardbound) ISBN 1-56731-289-6
1998 - The Evolutionary Mind : Trialogues at the Edge of the Unthinkable (with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph H. Abraham) (Trialogue Press; 1st Ed) ISBN 0-942344-13-8
1999 - Food of the Gods: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Rider & Co; New edition) ISBN 0-7126-7038-6
1999 - Robert Venosa: Illuminatus (with Robert Venosa, Ernst Fuchs, H. R. Giger, and Mati Klarwein) (Craftsman House) ISBN 90-5703-272-4
2001 - Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness (with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph H. Abraham) (Park Street Press; revised ed) ISBN 0-89281-977-4 (Revised edition of Trialogues at the Edge of the West)
2005 - The Evolutionary Mind: Trialogues on Science, Spirit & Psychedelics (Monkfish Book Publishing; Revised Ed) ISBN 0-9749359-7-2
[edit]
Spoken word
TechnoPagans at the End of History (transcription of rap with Mark Pesce from 1998)
Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1999) 90 minutes video
Alien Dreamtime with Spacetime Continuum & Stephen Kent (Magic Carpet Media) (CD) video
Conversations on the Edge of Magic (1994) (CD & Cassette) ACE
Rap-Dancing Into the Third Millennium (1994) (Cassette) (Re-issued on CD as The Quintessential Hallucinogen) ACE
Packing For the Long Strange Trip (1994) (Cassette) ACE
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell, broadcast on May 22, 1997, Five hour interview covering various topics
Global Perspectives and Psychedelic Poetics (1994) (Cassette) Sound Horizons Audio-Video, Inc.
The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (1992) (Cassette) Sounds True
[edit]
Discography
Re : Evolution with The Shamen (1992)
Alien Dreamtime with Spacetime Continuum & Stephen Kent (Magic Carpet Media) (DVD)
2009 - Cognition Factor (2009)
[edit]
See also
Dominator culture
Ethnomycology
Exopheromone
List of notable brain tumor patients
Machine Elf
Wade Davis
[edit]
References
^ McKenna, Terrence (1992). The Archaic Revival. Harper Collins Publishers. p. 12. ISBN 9780062506149.
^ Watkins, Matthew. "Autopsy for a Mathematical Hallucination?".
^ a b c d Terence McKenna Interview, Part 1. Tripzine.com. Accessed on April 26, 2007.
^ McKenna, Terence. "Under The Teaching Tree" Ojai Foundation, Upper Ojai, California (Unknown (1985)).
^ Erowid Terence McKenna Vault: The High Times Interview. Accessed on April 26, 2007.
^ "Terence McKenna, 53, Dies; Patron of Psychedelics". Cannabis News. 2000-04-09.
^ a b c d True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise. Terence McKenna, 1993.
^ a b "The Invisible Landscape (lecture)". Terence Mckenna.
^ Introduction by Timothy Leary to "Unfolding the Stone" lecture by Terence McKenna
^ Terence McKenna. (1993-09-11). This World...and Its Double. Mill Valley, California: Sound Photosynthesis.
^ Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures by Charles Hayes. Accessed on April 26, 2007.
^ "Twin Peaks (1990) - Trivia". IMDB.
^ Wired 8.05: Terence McKenna's Last Trip
^ Terence McKenna Vs. the Black Hole: by Erik Davis
^ McKenna, Terence (May 1990). "Time and Mind". - Partial transcription of a taped workshop held in New Mexico. The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension (deoxy.org).
^ "Surfing Finnegans Wake". Terence Mckenna.
^ Stoned Ape Theory Part One of Two Lecture Audio
^ Fischer, Roland & Richard M. Hill - "Interpretation of visual space under drug-induced ergotropic and trophotropic arousal" - Journal: Inflammation Research Issue Volume 2, Number 3 / November, 1971 (Publisher Birkhäuser Basel) ISSN 1023-3830 (Print) 1420-908X (Online), PDF
^ Fischer, Roland & R. Hill, K. Thatcher & J. Scheib - "Psilocybin-induced contraction of nearby visual space" - Journal Inflammation Research Issue, Volume 1, Number 4 / August, 1970 (Publisher Birkhäuser Basel) ISSN 1023-3830 (Print) 1420-908X (Online) PDF
^ Fischer, Roland L. (Ph.D.) "The Realities of Hallucinogenic Drugs: A Compendium" - Criminology, Volume 4 Issue 3 Page 2-15, November 1966 (Blackwell Publishing Ltd) PDF
^ Fischer, Roland L. (Ph.D.) - "A Cartography of the Ecstatic and Meditative States" - Science, November 26th, 1971 link PDF
^ Whitehead, Alfred North ♦ Process and Reality Simon and Schuster, 1979, p. 21
^ Novelty & Concrescence A page from Terence McKenna's website ♦ "I have elaborated Whitehead's notion of novelty into a formal mathematical speculation concerning the fundamental architecture of time."
[edit]
External links Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Terence McKenna

Novelty theory
Terence McKenna Land at Deoxy.org
Terence McKenna at Levity.com
Terence McKenna Bibliography
Erowid's Terence McKenna Vault
Orichalcum Workshop (hun)
Botanical Dimensions
Rotten.com bio
FloatingWorldWeb's McKenna Pages
Terence McKenna's Last Trip 2000 Wired Magazine article by Erik Davis
"Mind contagions" (2001) at disinfo.com
Psychedelics, Evolution & Fun 2008 essay by Patrick Lundborg
McKenna's Timewave Zero analysis in R-Environment by Mariano Tomatis
Machine Elves 101, or Why Terence McKenna Matters - Reallity Sandwish by Daniel Moler
[edit]
Writings online
DataChurch Library of McKenna Media (click on People >Terence McKenna)
[edit]
Audio and video resources
Audio and video archive at Deoxy.org
Terence McKenna media archive at EROCx1.com
Terence McKenna Audio Archive - Lectures and Public Talks
FutureHi.net MP3 Downloads - Terence McKenna, Albert Hoffman, Robert Anton Wilson, and more
McKenna at the 1999 Entheobotany Seminar - Audio Podcast
Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines - Video samples from the 1999 DVD
McKenna Video on FloatingWorldWeb - McKenna Video Portal
Over 100 podcasts of Terence McKenna talks - Audio Podcast

[Peter Lemkin]

Terence McKenna's Last Trip

The "altered statesman" emerged from Leary's long shadow to push a magical blend of psychedelics, technology, and revelatory rap. He had less time than he knew.

By Erik Davis

In May 1999, the psychedelic bard Terence McKenna returned to his jungle hideaway on Hawaii's Big Island after six weeks on the road. He was relieved to be home. Since claiming the mantle of Tripster King from Timothy Leary, McKenna has earned his keep as a stand-up shaman on the lecture circuit, regaling groups of psychonauts, seekers, and boho intellectuals with tales involving mushrooms, machine consciousness, and the approaching end of history. Weird stuff, and wonderfully told. But the teller was getting tired of the routine. A recluse at heart, McKenna wanted nothing more than to surf the Web, read, polish up some manuscripts, and enjoy the mellow pace of Hawaii with his new girlfriend, Christy Silness, a kind young woman he had met the year before at an ethnobotanical conference in the Yucatán.

Soon after McKenna arrived home, however, he was hit with ferocious headaches. He'd long suffered from migraines, but nothing in his 52 years could match the ice picks now skewering his skull. On May 22, after dragging himself to the john to vomit, McKenna's mind exploded. Hallucinations cut in like shards of glass; taste and smell were bent out of shape; and he was swallowed up by a labyrinth that, as he later put it, "somehow partook of last week's dreams, next week's fears, and a small restaurant in Dublin." Then his blood pressure dropped and he collapsed, the victim of a brain seizure.

When McKenna came to, he was flat on his back, staring at the ceiling as his extremely agitated girlfriend called 911. Then he swooned again. In addition to being much younger than McKenna, Silness is also much shorter, but somehow she managed to load his lanky, 6'2" frame into their truck and drive down the mountain to meet an ambulance. To keep McKenna awake, she coaxed him into reciting a poem his grandfather used to chant, "The Cremation of Sam McGee." But then a grand mal hit, and McKenna was out cold.

The ambulance guys knew McKenna's rep and were convinced he had OD'd. But a CAT scan in Kona revealed the presence of a walnut-sized tumor buried deep in McKenna's right frontal cortex. The growth was diagnosed as a glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most malignant of brain tumors. To McKenna's amazement, his doctor described the thing as a "fruiting body" that sent "mycelia" throughout the surrounding tissue - mycological lingo straight out of theMagic Mushroom Grower's Guide that McKenna had published in 1975 with his brother, Dennis, an ethnobotanist. The rest was less amusing: Without treatment, McKenna would die within a month. With treatment, the prognosis was six months. "No one escapes," said the doctor.


McKenna was facing something that no shaman's rattle or peyote button was going to cure. With barely time to breathe, he had to choose from among chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and the gamma knife - a machine that could blast the tumor with 201 converging beams of cobalt radiation.

At the same time, friends and comrades were stalking more ethereal treatments. On the Big Island, Hali Makua, a Grand Kahuna of Polynesia, hiked up the side of the Mauna Loa volcano. He meditated about McKenna and was illuminated with a handful of Hawaiian power words, words that he later phoned in to his ailing friend.

From the wilds of Nevada, paranormal radio jock Art Bell was planning a different kind of intervention. Bell went on the air and asked his 13 million listeners to participate in "great experiment no. 8." At 2 pm Pacific time on Sunday, May 30, Bell's listeners sent McKenna a mass blast of good vibrations. "It's not something I really believe in," says McKenna. "But I am much more sympathetic to the idea of a huge morphogenetic field affecting your health than the idea that one inspired healer could do it."

Even after he went under the gamma knife, McKenna couldn't quite believe what was happening to him. "There are only about 1,000 of these GBMs a year, so it's a rare disease. I never won anything before - why now?" Like everybody else, he suspected a lifetime of exotic drug use may have been to blame.

"So what about it?" he asked his doctors. "You wanna hammer on me about that?" They assured him there was no causal link.

"So what about 35 years of daily dope smoking?" he asked. They pointed to studies suggesting that cannabis may actually shrink tumors.

"Listen," McKenna told them, "if cannabis shrinks tumors, we would not be having this conversation."



Word of McKenna's condition spread like taser fire through the listservs that are the backbone of the psychedelic community. The suddenness of his illness freaked these folks out. "It was almost like the night when Howard Cosell came onMonday Night Football and said John Lennon had been shot," says Jordan Gruber, an attorney who works at NASA and the founder of Enlightenment.com, a Web site devoted to spiritual psychology. "It was a similar sort of terrible shock to the nervous system." Within 36 hours of his seizure, 1,400 messages poured into McKenna's email box. (A typical missive: "I love you for who you are and are becoming and all of what you have meant to so much of humanity.") Over the next week, almost 1,000 emails came in each day.

This flood of digital well-wishing is testament to McKenna's stature in the world of psychedelics, a largely underground realm that includes the ravers, old hippies, and New Agers one might expect, but also a surprising number of people who live basically straight lives, especially when compared with the users of the '60s. Psychedelics are far more controversial than Prozac or even pot - LSD and mushrooms are illegal, of course, and the government regulates them as closely as it does heroin and cocaine - but they have nonetheless wormed their way into many mainstream lives. According to Scott O. Moore, CEO of Slam Media and managing editor of the psychedelic journalThe Resonance Project, "Today's users are surgeons, bankers, physicists, computer programmers. They are productive members of society. You can't point your finger at them and say they've dropped out."

McKenna serves as this hidden world's most visible "altered statesman." He has written five books - two with his brother - and has developed a worldwide following. Brainy, eloquent, and hilarious, McKenna applies his Irish gift of gab to making a simple case: Going through life without trying psychedelics is like going through life without having sex. For McKenna, mushrooms and DMT do more than force up the remains of last night's dream; they uncover the programming language of mind and cosmos.

"The psychedelic experience is not the equivalent of a dust bunny under your psychic bed," says McKenna. "It's a product of the fractal laws that govern the world at an informational level. There is no deeper truth."

McKenna is the most loved psychedelic barnstormer since Timothy Leary, the self-appointed guru of LSD who died in 1996 amid a flurry of digital hype about online euthanasia and his plans - which he scrapped - to undergo cryonic preservation. Like McKenna, Leary was an intellectual entertainer, a carny barker hawking tickets to the molecular mind show. McKenna calls it "the harlequin role." At the same time, McKenna is a far mellower man than Leary. "I don't seek to live forever," he says, "and I don't want the removal of my head to become a Net event."

Leary spent the late '60s attempting to gather a hippie army under the notorious battle cry of "turn on, tune in, drop out." Taking his advice, McKenna headed east to India, where he bought Mahayana art and smuggled hashish until a stateside bust forced him into hiding in the wilds of Indonesia. In 1971, he and his brother went to the Amazon to hunt for ayahuasca, a legendary shamanic brew. But when they arrived at the Colombian village of La Chorera that spring, what they found were fields blanketed with Stropharia cubensis, aka magic mushrooms.

Within 36 hours of his seizure, 1,400 messages poured into McKenna's email in-box. The flood is testament to his underground stature.

In some ways, it was a turning point in American psychedelic culture. Back home, Leary's LSD shock troops had already disintegrated into harder drugs and bad vibes, and Leary himself was hiding out abroad after escaping from a US jail. Serious heads knew all about the psilocybin mushroom from scholarly books on shamanism, but no one in the US was eatingS. cubensis in the early '70s because no one had figured out how to cultivate them. After returning from South America, the McKennas discovered the secret, which they promptly published. Magic mushrooms were on the menu.

McKenna farmed 'shrooms into the 1980s. He could turn out 70 pounds of them every six weeks, like clockwork. The trade financed the middle-class existence of a relatively settled man. Then a good friend of his, an acid chemist, got busted. "They fucked him so terrifyingly that I saw I couldn't do this anymore. I had to work something else out." What McKenna worked out was "Terence McKenna," a charismatic talking head he marketed, slowly but successfully, to the cultural early adopters.

McKenna got his 15 minutes of fame when four of his books came out in rapid succession. His 1991 collection of essays,The Archaic Revival, is particularly influential, especially among ravers and other alternative tribes attracted to the idea that new technologies and ancient pagan rites point toward the same ecstatic truths.Food of the Gods, published in 1992, aims directly at the highbrows. In it, McKenna lays out a solid if unorthodox case that psychedelics helped kick-start human consciousness and culture, giving our mushroom-munching ancestors a leg up on rivals by enhancing their visual and linguistic capacities.

Though anthropologists ignored his arguments, the time was right for McKenna's visions. He was tempted with movie deals, got featured in magazines, and toured like a madman. He hobnobbed with Silicon Valley hotshots like interface gurus Brenda Laurel and Jaron Lanier and performed at raves with techno groups like the Shamen. Timothy Leary called him "the Timothy Leary of the 1990s."

McKenna also was a popularizer of virtual reality and the Internet, arguing as early as 1990 that VR would be a boon to psychedelicists and businesspeople alike. But unlike Leary, who planned to use the Net as a stage for his final media prank, McKenna realized that the Internet would be the place where psychedelic culture could flourish on its own. "Psychedelics were always about information," McKenna observes. "Their very existence was forbidden knowledge at one point. You had to be Aldous Huxley to even know about them."

To his great satisfaction, McKenna has lived to see the psychedelic underground self-organize online. Sites like the Lycaeum and the Vaults of Erowid now provide loads of information on chemistry, legal status, dosage effects, and - perhaps most important to the uninitiated - experiential feedback. Other groups like the Heffter Research Institute and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) use the Web to further their advocacy efforts. But to McKenna the Net is more than just an information source. He is convinced that an unprecedented dialog is going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge.

"The Internet is an oracle for anyone in trouble," McKenna explains, using his illness as an example. "Within 10 minutes I can be poring through reams of control studies, medical data, and personal reports. If anything, my cancer has made me even more enthusiastic about the idea that through information, people can take control of and guide their own lives."

Unfortunately, by last October, five months after the initial diagnosis and treatment, he needed much more than just information. Despite the radiation therapy, the tumor was still spreading. McKenna traveled to the medical center at UC San Francisco, where a team of specialists surgically removed the bulk of the tumor. They then soaked the cavity with p53, a genetically altered adenovirus meant to scramble the hyperactive self-replication subroutines of the remaining tissue's DNA. Gene therapy is highly experimental; as Silness put it, McKenna became "a full-on guinea pig."

At first, the doctors at UCSF were extremely pleased with the results, and for four months the tumor cooled its heels. But in February, an MRI revealed that it had returned with a vengeance, spreading so thoroughly throughout McKenna's brain that it was deemed inoperable. He retreated to a friend's house in Marin County, and his family began to gather. By the time you read this, Terence McKenna will likely have died.



It is the end of 1999, and I am visiting McKenna at his jungle home while he's recovering from brain surgery. He lives a mile or so up a rutted road that winds through a gorgeous subtropical rain forest an hour south of the Kona airport. His house - a modernist origami structure topped with a massive antenna dish and a small astronomy dome - rises from the green slopes of Mauna Loa like something out ofMyst. There's a small garden and a lotus pond, and the structure is surrounded by a riot of vegetation, thick with purple flowers and mysterious vines.

McKenna has owned land on this mountainside since the 1970s but didn't start building the house until 1993. Every morning, I ascend a spiral staircase decorated with blue LEDs to get to the study. It's here that McKenna spends the majority of his time during my visit, either staring into his Mac or sitting cross-legged on the floor before a small Oriental carpet, surrounded by books, smoking paraphernalia, and twigs of sage he occasionally lights up and wafts through the air. With his widely set and heavy-lidded eyes, McKenna looks like a seasoned nomad merchant.

Silness has shorn McKenna's usually full head of hair down to gray stubble, and the upper right side of his forehead is gently swollen and graced with a Frankensteinian scar. Though he is desperately ill, his spirits are as alive as ever: gracious and funny, brilliant and biting. But he tires quickly, and seems intensely energized only when the prospect of chocolate cookies or ice cream arises. He is also very skinny, having lost a lot of muscle in his thighs, and he moves painfully slowly when he moves at all.

McKenna and Silness have hosted a regular stream of visitors and well-wishers over the last months, but the scene is definitely not Learyland. They are living life as close to normal as possible - which is how McKenna prefers it. "There are various options when you are faced with a terminal disease," he says in his unforgettable voice, a slightly nasal singsong. "One is cure-chasing, where you head off to Shanghai or Brazil or the Dominican Republic to be with these great maestros who can save you. The other thing is to do what you always wanted to do. So that means head to Cape Canaveral to see a shuttle launch, on to sunrise over the pyramids, on to a month in the Grand Hôtel de Paris. I wasn't too keen on that, either. My tendency was just to twist another bomber and think about it all."

An early popularizer of virtual reality and the Internet, he argued that VR would be a boon to psychedelicists and businesspeople alike.

There's a lot to think about in McKenna's lair. An altar lies on top of a cabinet over which hangs a frightening old Tibetan tangka. With McKenna at my side, the altar's objects are like icons in a computer game: Click and a story emerges. Click on the tangka and get a tale of art-dealing in Nepal. Click on the carved Mayan stones and hear about a smoking god who will arrive far in the future. Click on an earthen bowl and wind up in the stone age. "Back then," he says, tapping the vessel, "this was advanced technology."

Gamers know that the most interesting objects usually lie near the obvious ones, and indeed, the real prizes here lurk inside the narrow cabinet drawers: butterflies. Click on these hummingbird-sized beauties and you'll be transported back 30 years to the remote islands of Indonesia, where McKenna dodged snakes and earthquakes in order to capture prize specimens for the butterfly otaku of Japan.

The most prominent feature of the room are the 14 large bookcases that line the walls, stuffed with more than 3,000 volumes: alchemy, natural history, Beat poetry, science fiction, Mayan codexes, symbolist art, hashish memoirs, systems theory, Indian erotica, computer manuals. Deeply attuned to the future of consciousness, McKenna remains a devoted Gutenberg man. "The majority of my fans could not conceive of this room," he says. "They would have no idea that a printhead could push so hard against electronic culture."



McKenna derives great pleasure from pushing the envelope of the human mind, but he is equally turned on by technology. On the one hand, the house, which was only finished last year, is completely off the grid, irrigated with rainwater collected in a large cistern up the hill, and powered by solar panels and a gas generator. There are no phone lines. At the same time, Ethernet connections are built in everywhere, even out on the deck. The computers in his office - a 7100 Power Mac, a dual-processor NT, a G3 PowerBook, and Silness' PC laptop - jack into cyberspace at 2 Mbps through the 1,500-pound high-gain dish on his roof. Using spread-spectrum radio technology, McKenna's dish swaps packets with a similar rig on the roof of CTI, his ISP, 30 miles north. The $20,000 system carries voice traffic as well. His plan was to eventually stream lectures over the Net, thus eliminating the need to travel in order to "appear" at conferences and symposia.

McKenna normally spends four or five hours a day online, devouring sites, weeding through lists, exploring virtual worlds, corresponding with strangers, tracking down stray facts. Sometimes he treats the Net like a crystal ball, entering strange phrases into Google's search field just to see what comes up. "Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind," says McKenna. "That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with."

As our society weaves itself ever more deeply into this colossal thinking machine, McKenna worries that we'll lose our grasp on the tiller. That's where psychedelics come in. "I don't think human beings can keep up with what they've set loose unless they augment themselves, chemically, mechanically, or otherwise," he says. "You can think of psychedelics as enzymes or catalysts for the production of mental structure - without them you can't understand what you are putting in place. Who would want to do machine architecture or write software without taking psychedelics at some point in the design process?"

It's a typical McKenna question: simultaneously outrageous and, in some twisty way, true. For obvious reasons, hard statistics on the extent of psychedelic use in the high tech industry are tough to come by. But Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, will tell you that both MAPS and the Heffter Research Institute have raised more than 50 percent of their funding from Silicon Valley heads.

"There's a sense," says Doblin, "that the creative chaos and visionary potential that people have gotten from some of their psychedelic experiences have played a role in their accomplishments in the computer industry." Steve Jobs is on record calling his first LSD experience "wonderful."Mitch Kapor credits "recreational chemicals" with inspiring crucial programming insights. "Psychedelics have infiltrated the computer industry," says McKenna, "because psychedelic use is a response to the environment that's been found to actually work."

Psychedelics have certainly left their mark on computer graphics, virtual reality, and animation. From fractals to Kai's Power Tools to Hollywood f/x, digital imagery has often been inspired by the mutations in perception brought on by certain drugs. As VRML cocreator Mark Pesce notes, "How often do you go to a Web site and say, 'This is really trippy!'? Well, why? C'mon - it's because it was created by tripsters."

McKenna learned about computer animation from his son, Finn, who studied at the San Francisco Academy of Art and now works in New Jersey. Together father and son would get high and go to museums to analyze the objects. "How would you CAD this? How would you get this Minoan vase, this Etruscan statue, up on the screen in 3-D? If you look at a seashell or a glass vase as a modeling problem, then everything is an animation."

The Net, says McKenna, is "an oracle," fostering an unprecedented dialog between human beings and the sum total of human knowledge.

Ultimately, McKenna wants something more than trippy images. He hopes that computer graphics will blossom into a universal lingo, a language of constantly morphing hieroglyphic information that he claims to have glimpsed on high doses of mushrooms. "There is something about the formal dynamics of information that we do not understand. Something about how we process language holds us back. That's why I encourage everybody to think about computer animation, and think about it in practical terms. Because out of that will come a visual language rich enough to support a new form of human communication."

In McKenna's mind we are not just conjuring a new virtual language. We are also, in good old shamanic style, conjuring the ineffable Other. McKenna argues that the imagery of aliens and flying saucers - which spring up in numerous tripping reports as well as in pop technoculture - are symbols of the transcendental technologies we are on the verge of creating. In other words, we are producing the alien ourselves, from the virtual world of networked information.

"Part of the myth of the alien," says McKenna, "is that you have to have a landing site. Well, I can imagine a landing site that's a Web site. If you build a Web site and then say to the world, 'Put your strangest stuff here, your best animation, your craziest graphics, your most impressive AI software,' very quickly something would arise that would be autonomous enough to probably stand your hair on end. You won't be able to tell whether you've got code, machine intelligence, or the real thing." McKenna thinks this is coming soon, within the next 10 or 20 years.

McKenna ties all this into the Timewave, his kookiest notion. The Timewave is a strange fractal object McKenna pried out of theI Ching, the Chinese book of divination, back in the La Chorera days. He believes that it charts the degree of novelty active at any point in human history. The wave spikes in times of change, coinciding with the Black Death, the Enlightenment, and the birth of Mohammed. A computer program McKenna helped develop predicts the future as well, at least up until December 21, 2012, when novelty spikes to infinity and the Timewave stops cold. For McKenna, all of human history, with its flotsam of books and temples and mechanized battlefields, is actually a backward ripple in time caused by this approaching apocalypse.



Coping with his own personal apocalypse, McKenna spent much of 1999 sorting and answering fan email. As he read, he made an unexpected discovery. "It isn't really me they support," he says. "It's a statement they are making about something that has probably provided them more insight and more learning than anything else in their lives outside of sex and marriage and a few of the other major milestones. My real function for people was permission. Essentially what I existed for was to say, 'Go ahead, you'll live through it, get loaded, you don't have to be afraid.'"

To ensure that folks give psychedelics a proper shake, McKenna has always recommended what he famously calls "the heroic dose." Chew five grams of mushrooms, lie down in darkness and silence, and you'll realize "every man can be a Magellan in his own mind." There now exists a considerable community of people who have taken his advice. They are united in a belief that it's a trip worth taking, but endlessly divided on how, or whether, to tell the world about it.

Though most trippers are highly secretive about their activities, one part of the scene is starting to poke its nose above ground. The last decade has seen the first resurgence of official psychedelic research since the early '60s. Much of this work has been supported by Rick Doblin of MAPS, whose Web site and journal is devoted to the dry, methodical language of protocols, statistics, and action studies. Though the National Institute on Drug Abuse continues to politicize the process with its war on drugs, the MAPS strategy has been surprisingly successful. "Now we can get FDA permission for various studies, and the regulatory system is pretty well open toward rigorously designed protocols," says Doblin, who's studying for a PhD in public policy at Harvard. "The big limiting factor is the shortage of serious researchers and scientists willing to point their careers in this direction. There's still a lot of stigma attached to it."

The approach of organizations like MAPS and the Heffter Institute emphasizes the scientific and therapeutic side of the equation. "It's about as close as you can get to mainstream cultural values," says Doblin, who contrasts this approach with that of the late '60s. "The idea then was that these substances were so liberating that we needed to create a countercultural movement, one inherently at odds with society. The fundamental distinction today is between those people who still have that view and those who recognize that we have to feed this stuff back into the major culture."

McKenna straddles this divide. He believes that psychedelics should be more fully integrated into society, through art, design, and pharmacology. But despite his love of science - he callsScientific American the most psychedelic publication that crosses his desk - McKenna is ultimately a romantic, and romantics rarely shape mainstream values these days. He's no kook, but talk of Timewaves and galactic mushroom teachers speaking a transcendental language may not be what the psychedelic movement needs as it gropes toward legitimacy. As Earth, who runs the Vaults of Erowid site, explains, "Some people would certainly argue that it doesn't help to have the most famous second-generation psychedelicist be another man in a purple sparkly suit. One of the primary criticisms of psychedelic users is that they're loopy as hell, and it can certainly be said that Terence McKenna's ideas are, at their best, controversial and, at their worst, confused and delusional."

Today, the psychedelic community has ripened to a point where it may no longer need a charismatic leader. In a sense, this was McKenna's goal. Because if Aldous Huxley was an aristocrat of psychedelics, and Leary was a populist demagogue, then McKenna is a crunchy libertarian. So it is perhaps fitting that McKenna is the last of his line, that no new harlequin hero waits in the wings. What does remain, however, is a network making sure that psychedelics remain an option, covert or otherwise.

"In the end, all McKenna is asking anyone to do is to become a shaman, journey to the numinous, and draw their own conclusions," says Mark Pesce. Even if the invisible landscapes one discovers hold no more reality than dreams or VR worlds, the trip itself forces a direct confrontation with just how weird life is. And how deeply, profoundly weird dying may prove to be.

"The future I regard as history, but I don't want to miss it. We are on the brink of a posthuman existence. What's it gonna feel like?"

Which means that McKenna is as prepared as anyone can be for the final journey into the dark. As he points out, "Taking shamanic drugs and spending your life studying esoteric philosophy is basically a meditation on death." McKenna calls death the black hole of biology. "Once you go over that event horizon, no messages can be passed back. It represents a limit case in the thermodynamics of information. So what is it?"

McKenna chuckles. "The best answer I've gotten yet is out of Don DeLillo's Underworld, where the nun discovers that when you die you become your Web site."

Like many people staring unblinkingly into the black hole, McKenna has opened up a great deal in the months since his diagnosis. "I'm much more in tune with the Buddhist demand for compassion," he says. "The real dilemma is how to build a compassionate human civilization. If we betray our humanness in the pursuit of civilization, then the dialog has become mad."

In his heart, though, McKenna remains an optimist. "When I think about dying, the thing that surprises me is how much of the future I regard as history, but I don't want to miss it. I want to know how it all comes out. I would like to know how the universe came to be, if extraterrestrials exist, where biotech is going, where the Internet is going. Because this is it. We are on the brink of a posthuman existence. So what's it gonna look like? What's it gonna feel like?"

Facing his end, McKenna admits that he doesn't "have a lot riding on my vision of things." But the visions are precisely what make him such an inspiration to so many. Every day another talking head auditions for the role of visionary, trying to convince us that their speculations about the future are true. But real visionaries are more than just futurists. Their power lies less in prophecy than in giving us new perspectives on a constantly mutating world, perspectives that manage to be simultaneously timeless and new. Real visionaries are always dodgy characters, because they embrace strange, heretical, even dangerous ideas. Terence McKenna is a real visionary.

[Peter Lemkin]

HERE

[Peter Lemkin]

http://fusionanomaly.net/ :flypig:
http://fusionanomaly.net/TechNode.html
http://fusionanomaly.net/
2. http://fusionanomaly.net/diotimaofmantinea.html
3. http://fusionanomaly.net/resonance.html
4. http://fusionanomaly.net/perceptions.html
5. http://fusionanomaly.net/dendron.html
6. http://fusionanomaly.net/uncertaintyprinciple.html
7. http://fusionanomaly.net/cydonia.html
8. http://fusionanomaly.net/superstrings.html
9. http://fusionanomaly.net/isomorphism.html
10. http://fusionanomaly.net/cybernetics.html

[David Guyatt]

From the linked website:

Our collective conclusion seems to be that nature, both in whole and in many parts, is magically self-reflecting and aware E N T I T I E S

[Keith Millea]

Peter

Nice posts!Let me add these talks.

Terence McKenna--Lectures on Alchemy

Terence McKenna died on April 3, 2000.




In a talk that Terence gave at Wetlands Preserve in 1998, he said:
"The other night I searched (the Web) for 'self-transforming elf machines.' There were 36 hits! It surprised me. I sort of use the search engine like an oracle. I've used the phrase for DMT, 'Arabian hyperspace.' So I thought of this, and then I searched it, 'Arabian hyperspace,' in quotes. And it took me right to a transcript of the talk in which I'd said the thing! You can find your own mind on the Internet. I'm very grateful to the people who type up my talks and then post them at their websites."

http://www.well.com/user/davidu/tmalchemy.html



"Back in the Day",it was not uncommon in the late fall to find people(Hippies)down on hands and knees searching the pastures here for the psychedelic mushroom known as Liberty Caps.You no longer see this.The world today seems dark and stuffy,will someone please open the doors?

Excerpt from "Mushroom Hunting..." by Andrew Weil in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs. Vol.7(1)Jan.-Mar.,1975.
Re: Liberty caps (in a field in Oregon)

..Soon I had eaten 25 of the tiny mushrooms...

Gradually I became aware of a strange sensation in my stomach, a sort of buzzing vibration that grew slowly in intensity. It was not at all unpleasant, and I knew at once it was the mushrooms. Over the next ten minutes this unusual feeling became stronger, filling my abdomen. Then it began to invade the rest of my body, pushing outward through the muscles to the extremities. I was distinctly aware of a subtle but powerful energy vibrating through the musculature of my whole body. It made me feel warm and strong. As it reached my head, my senses sharpened, and I found myself admiring qualities of the wet pasture I had ignored until then. The green of the grass was of glowing intensity, highlighted by tones of brown and red. The smell of the earth and rain was overpowerin. I had no desire to move. If the ground had been dry, I would have stretched out and rolled on the grass.

Our little group slowly drew together. Obviously, we were all feeling the effects of the mushrooms. We moved slowly and gracefully, swinging our arms and laughing at each other. The laughter seemed to bubble up from inside, and the sound of it echoed inside my chest. I was also very conscious of the taste of mushrooms. It was as strong as if fresh in my mouth but was diffused through my whole body. I felt the taste in my muscles.

The rain picked up in intensity. Clearly we could not stay out in the field much longer. It was late afternoon and turning colder. Slowly we wended our way out of the pasture, across the fence, and up a steep bank to the car. I curled up in a corner of the back seat as we started to move. It was an hours drive south along the caost to Greg and Susan's house.

The mushroom energy continued to course around my body. And now it began to pull me away from ordinary awareness into a realm that bordered on sleep but was not sleep. It was an effort to maintain awareness of the car and my fellow passengers, let alone the scenery outside. Instead, I closed my eyes and began to see visions that were somewhere between images in the mind's eye and actual movies projected on the inside of my eyelids. At first there were shadowy patterns that tended to multiply themselves in infinite regressions, but these soon resolved themselves into very clear images of mushrooms. The mushrooms that appeared to me were of one type, not Liberty Caps. They grew in clustered bunches, the stipes arising from a common point, and lacked the Liberty Cap's distinct peak. They also seemed fleshier and bigger. I had never seen them before. Bunches of these visionary mushrooms appeared out of nowhere, springing up at odd angles, swirling and receding. They occupied my attention completely.

"Are you all right?" someone in the front seat asked.

"Yes, I'm seeing mushrooms." I opened my eyes for a moment, surprised by the brightness of the outside light. I closed them quickly and was instanly back in the comfortable night world of visions. I felt sorry for the driver and other front-seat riders who were attending to the road and could not watch the interior show.

We arrived at the house without difficulty just as it was growing dark.
"Are you still seeing mushrooms?" Greg asked me.
I closed my eyes to make sure. "Yes, they're still there."
"A number of people who eat these things see mushrooms," Greg said.
"The ones I'm seeing aren't the ones we ate. I wonder if I'll ever meet up with them."

I told Greg and Susan that Liberty Caps more than lived up to my expectations and thanked them for introducing me to them. Hallowe'en seemed an especially fitting day on which to meet them.

It was now a stormy Hallowe'en night, and a long ride through the mountains lay between us and Eugene. The visions were subsiding, and I volunteered to drive. It took some concentration to follow the tortuous road through the rain, but we arrived home without incident. I could still feel the vibrational energy in my muscles, though it was fading rapidly. About six hours after I had eaten the mushrooms, I was back to normal, feeling tired. I fell asleep and awoke the next morning refreshed and ready to leave Oregon for the south.

I did not return to the state until April. When I got back I made an effort to find out more about Liberty Caps and eventually got in touch with Jerry, the Oregon state student who had introduced Greg and Susan to the mushrooms. Jerry gave me much useful information about them. He said they appeared to be a species called Psilocybe semilanceata, that like all Psilocybes they had purplish brown spores, and like all psychoactive Psilocybes they tended to stain blue on handling or drying, although less so than other varieties.(I had seen no tinges of blue on the ones I ate.) Jerry said further that they appeared only after the Autumn Equinox and continued to grow until the Winter Solstice, despite low temperatures. Their range extended from the California border north into British Columbia, from the ocean east to the crest of the coastal mountains. Of the active species he had tried, Jerry said Liberty Caps were his favourites.
I have found reference to this species in one European handbook and in no American one. The European book called Psilocybe semilanceata a poisonous species. And, no doubt, persons who ate it unawares, without the proper set, would interpret the dramatic changes as mushroom poisoning.

http://www.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/Shrooms/...berty.html

[Peter Lemkin]

Here

Partial list of audio lectures of McKenna Here.

and Here. [complete lectures for sale]

80 hours of his lectures are free on Pirates Bay in one torrent. Other lectures scattered throughout the Universe.