Terrence McKenna - His Life & Ideas - Explorer, Philosopher and Wordweaver Extraordinaire!

[Peter Lemkin]

Terrence was a friend, a guide, an enlightening voice in my life. Strange that Ruppert's death has pushed my old friend's voice to the fore again in my mind. I'll post further on Terrence McKenna who most of you likely do not know or have never heard of. He died of brain cancer quite a few years ago now, just as he was about to come to Prague to give a two week-long series of lectures and meetings in a medieval castle. I was the lead planner of that trip. Enter this thread at your own risk! I think a good introduction to Terrence and his unique ways of thinking is a cut from one of his famous [there are SO many] talks [I have them all!] that Ruppert used on his next to last show. It can be found in minutes ~ 18:45 to 33:45 here: http://tunein.com/radio/Lifeboat-Hour-p381819/

Do Listen. It is not what many have ever heard before.....As Herman Hesse wrote: "Magic Theatre - Do Not Enter - Not For Everyone".

Feel free to add to the thread, if you have anything to say about Terrence and his ideas.

More on Terrence shortly......this thread, I hope, will be a very long and good trip.....McKenna was the brightest and most unique mind I ever met in my life. At the end of his life he was incorporating into his talks the Deep State and its actions....then he developed a rare kind of brain cancer and died in Hawaii.

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[Peter Lemkin]

"We have to createculture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen toNPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where youare now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you'reworrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, thenyou are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons whichare maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress likeX or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking.That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and yourfriends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes,your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant,we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.'And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game.You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of thecultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moronconsuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bonesof a dying world."
― Terence McKenna


"Chaos is whatwe've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It isfeared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, whichclenches because its existence is defined in terms of control."
― Terence McKenna


"Nature lovescourage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to thatcommitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossibledream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up.This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosopherswho really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this iswhat they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall.This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss anddiscovering its a feather bed."
― Terence McKenna


"If the words'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the rightto experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration ofIndependence isn't worth the hemp it was written on."
― Terence McKenna


"The syntacticalnature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world ismade of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of,you can make of it whatever you wish."
― Terence McKenna


"The cost ofsanity in this society, is a certain levelof alienation"
― Terence McKenna


"Psychedelics areillegal not because a loving government is concerned that you mayjump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal becausethey dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models ofbehaviour and information processing. They open you up to thepossibility that everything you know is wrong."
― Terence McKenna


"You have to takeseriously the notion that understanding the universe is yourresponsibility, because the only understanding of the universe thatwill be useful to you is your own understanding."
― Terence McKenna


"You are anexplorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good youcan do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangeredby the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of theabsence of consciousness."
― Terence McKenna


"Westerncivilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet."
― Terence McKenna


"Only psychos andshamans create their own reality"
― Terence McKenna


"Television is bynature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content,uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably atool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"The creative actis a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean ofchaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of itideas. It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropicalsea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, somethingtears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row forshore, and put your head under your bed and pray. At other times whatslips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyologicalmetaphor of idea chasing. But, sometimes, you can actually bring homesomething that is food, food for the human community that we cansustain ourselves on and go forward."
― Terence McKenna


"You are a divinebeing. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginablepower and light, and you will return to those realms."
― Terence McKenna


"Ego is astructure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member ofa neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture,which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensusabout what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable."
― Terence McKenna


"We have been tothe moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart ofthe atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves becausewe sense that is where all the contradictions flow together."
― Terence McKenna


"If you don't havea plan, you become part of somebody else's plan."
― Terence McKenna


"Life lived in theabsence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism isbased on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego."
― Terence McKenna


"My technique isdon't believe anything. If you believe in something, you areautomatically precluded from believing its opposite."
― Terence McKenna


"The apocalypse isnot something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in majorportions of the planet and it's only because we live within abubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we stillhave the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse."
― Terence McKenna


"Nobody is smarterthan you are. And what if they are? What good is their understandingdoing you?"
― Terence McKenna


"Nature is not ourenemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to becherished and explored."
― Terence McKenna


"Right here andnow, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of activeintelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremelyalien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish forcontact with this other universe."
― Terence McKenna


"Even as thenineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of humandescent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that thoseapes were stoned apes."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"There is atranscendental dimension beyond language... It's just hard as hell totalk about!"
― Terence McKenna


"The imaginationis the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literallyrealize our collective dreams."
― Terence McKenna


"I'll try to bearound and about. But if I'm not, then you know that I'm behindyour eyelids, and I'll meet you there"
― Terence McKenna


"We can begin therestructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have deniedfor so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion ofillegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"It's clearly acrisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have thetechnological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, tocure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack theintellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We mustdecondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it'snot easy."
― Terence McKenna


"Half the time youthink your thinking you're actually listening"
― Terence McKenna


"My voice speakingis a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carryingagree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without themeaning one has only little mouth noises "
― Terence McKenna,The Archaic Revival


"The problem isnot to find the answer, it's to face the answer"
― Terence McKenna


"It is theimagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. Itis literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us."
― Terence McKenna


"Time will perfectmatter."
― Terence McKenna


"History is endingbecause the dominator culture has led the human species into a blindalley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look formetaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble itcasts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment itever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains ofAfrica 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great HornedMushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, beforeslavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets andmonotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future istaking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is notmodernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia forthe archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us bodypiercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll andcatastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for theparadise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africawhere the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of theanimal body and into the tool-using, culture-making,imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter?It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that thefuture is a forward escape into the past. This is what thepsychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and intothe wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this becauseif the community understands what it is that holds it together thecommunity will be better able to streamline itself for flight intohyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a newtrue story that tells us where we're going in the universe and thattrue story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and whenpsilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego issupressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of thedominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelicsreturn us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of thefeeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you andnobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is notinterested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that'swhat holds the community together. And as we break out of the sillymyths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplacewhat we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in thebody, IN THE BODY, there are Niagras of beauty, alien beauty, aliendimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. Ithink of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experiencelike going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that younever figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the bodyand the way the body works itself into nature. What the ArchaicRevival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and thedefeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies ofthe people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get themon the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that meansyour getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected meansputting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition throughthing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaianmind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelicexperience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy ofthe planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert ofbogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the selfcan be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset thecompass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance,through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This iswhat we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace."
― Terence McKenna


"The shaman is notmerely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healedhimself."
― Terence McKenna,The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens & the I Ching


"Alcohol is usedby millions of people, both men and women, and I will make no friendsby taking the position that alcohol culture is not politicallycorrect. Yet how can we explain the legal toleration for alcohol, themost destructive of all intoxicants, and the almost frenzied effortsto repress nearly all other drugs? Could it not be that we arewilling to pay the terrible toll that alcohol extracts because it isallowing us to continue the repressive dominator style that keeps usall infantile and irresponsible participants in a dominator worldcharacterized by the marketing of ungratified sexual fantasy?"
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"It is not easy tomeasure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and bein it."
― Terence McKenna,The Archaic Revival


"The purpose oflife is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that theact of dying will not create confusion in the psyche."
― Terence McKenna


"Human history isa Gaian dream."
― Terence McKenna


"We tend todisempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don't matter. Andin the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything awayto somebody else, to something else."
― Terence McKenna


"You see, a secretis not something untold. It's something which can't be told."
― Terence McKenna


"No one knowsenough to worry."
― Terence McKenna


"A hallucinationis a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotapeabout Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life."
― Terence McKenna


"Nothing comesunannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's veryimportant to actually listen to your own intuition rather thandriving through it."
― Terence McKenna


"The ufo isnothing more than an assertion of herself by the Goddess intohistory, saying to science and paternalistically governed and drivenorganizations: You have gone far enough. We are going to turn theworld upside down. Your science is going to be shown up for what itis, nothing more than a pleasant metaphor usefully extrapolated intothe production of toys for healthy children. That's what science isgood for. It is not some meta-theory at whose feet every point ofview from astrology to acupressure to channeling need be laid to havethe hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs down."
― Terence McKenna


"The bigger youbuild the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
― Terence McKenna


"Our selfdiscoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern ofhistory. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, foronly through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In thefact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors."
― Terence McKenna,True Hallucinations


"Ecstasy is acomplex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph,surrender, and empathy. What has replaced our prehistoricunderstanding of this complex of ecstasy now is the word comfort, atremendously bloodless notion. Drugs are not comfortable, and anyonewho thinks they are comfortable or even escapist should not toy withdrugs unless they're willing to get their noses rubbed in their ownstuff."
― Terence McKenna


"Ideology alwayspaves the way toward atrocity."
― Terence McKenna


"I often like tothink that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centeredphysics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphorthat we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupiesthe same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book islife with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something thatlacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be akind of release into the imagination in the sense that for charactersin a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension offreedom."
― Terence McKenna


"Reality is, youknow, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed todrag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip backinto the sea of the unreal."
― Terence McKenna


"There's lightat the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the backof your mind. And if you don't go to the back side of your mind youwill never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you seeit, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people.Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven, Godis some kind of lost continent IN the human mind."
― Terence McKenna


"Not to know one'strue identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing a golem. And,indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass ofhuman beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies.Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow massstyle changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junkfood, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned totoxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted dailytelevision fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act ofconsuming."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"The artist'stask is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a ditheringwhile Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, forbeing able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find theway, then the way cannot be found."
― Terence McKenna


"What civilizationis, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standingon each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's nota pleasant situation."
― Terence McKenna


"No culture onearth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms ofbeing inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue abusiness-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crisesand irreconcilable contradictions."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"We are told 'no',we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get athis, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to evenplay in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out ofthe hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into ahalf-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufacturedout of the bones of a dying world." -"
― Terence McKenna


"It's clearly acrisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These arethe two things that the psychedelics attack. We have thetechnological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, tocure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack theintellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We mustdecondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it'snot easy."
― Terence McKenna


"The race isn't tothe swift, it's to the thoughtful."
― Terence McKenna


"It's prettysimple, the ethical life. It's just demanding."
― Terence McKenna


"This is why theshaman is the remote ancestor of the poet and artist. Our need tofeel part of the world seems to demand that we express ourselvesthrough creative activity. The ultimate wellsprings of thiscreativity are hidden in the mystery of language. Shamanic ecstasy isan act of surrender that authenticates both the individual self andthat which is surrendered to, the mystery of being. Because our mapsof reality are determined by our present circumstances, we tend tolose awareness of the larger patterns of time and space. Only bygaining access to the Transcendent Other can those patterns of timeand space and our role in them be glimpsed."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"Our culture,self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology andegocentric ideology, is the unhappy inheritor of the dominatorattitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants orsubstances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. Iwill argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance andinsistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us oflife's meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, andour grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intactthe wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style."
― Terence McKenna


"The monkey bodyhas carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more andmore to exist in a world made by the human imagination."
― Terence McKenna


"We live incondensations of our imagination"
― Terence McKenna


"But technology isthe real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the contextof the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technologicalmaterial. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; weput it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, spaceshuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in atechnological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool makingimplies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flyingsaucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space."
― Terence McKenna,The Archaic Revival


"Feminism is atremendously underestimated force, viewed in the present contextprimarily as a woman's concern. The understanding has not yetpercolated throughout society that the advancement of women is aprogram vitally connected to the survival of human beings as aspecies. The reason for this is simply that institutions take on thecharacter of the atoms which compose them, and what we are mostmenaced by in the twentieth century are dehumanized institutions. Ifwomen played a major role in policy formation and execution on thepart of these institutions, I think they would have a far more benignand ecologically sensitive kind of character. So I see feminism notas a kind of war between the sexes or any of these stereotypicimages, but as actually a kind of effort to shift the ratios of ouremphasis that is expressed through our institutions."
― Terence McKenna


"I guess I shouldsay a little bit about my method - I really am a fence sitter. I*loathe* Science and am always keen to attack it in most situations,though not here, because I love Reason and I'm perfectly aware of thedifference. I also know what a concept means like Rules of Evidence.I'm not sure that's a concept as widely circulated in these circlesas it needs to be - in other words, how *do* you tell shit fromshinola? That's very critical. I think reason can only take us acertain distance, and then we have to go with the divine imagination,but with all safety systems fully in operation, or the divineimagination will lead us into complete paranoia."
― Terence McKenna


"There's only theintegrity of doing and having done."
― Terence McKenna


"Human beings areco-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis ofall magic."
― Terence McKenna


"Meaning lies inthe confrontation of contradiction - the coincidencia apositorum.That's what we really feel, not these rational schemes that areconstantly beating us over the head with the "thou shalts" and"thou should", but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity ofbeing and an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak,noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing."
― Terence McKenna


"I believe thatthe use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa gaveus the model for all religions to follow. And when, after longcenturies of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, theknowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish tradedpartnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape ofnature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, wetraded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind ofthe planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis,and-if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament-planetarycatastrophe."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"We are theinheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable."
― Terence McKenna


"Monotheismstrenuously denies the need to return to a cultural style thatperiodically places the ego and its values in perspective throughcontact with a boundary-dissolving immersion in the Archaic mysteryof plant-induced, hence mother-associated, psychedelic ecstasy andwholeness, what Joyce called the "mama matrix most mysterious."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"Neither Bwitistsnor Fang felt they could eradicate ritual sin or evil in the world.This incapacity means that men have to celebrate. Good and bad walktogether. As Fang frequently enough told missionaries, "We havetwo hearts, good and bad." Early missionaries, aware of theseself-confessed contradictions, evangelized with the promise of "oneheartedness" in Christianity. But Fang by and large did not findit there. For many, Christian one heartedness was a constriction oftheir selves. While "one heartedness" is celebrated inBwiti, it is a one heartedness which is coagulated out of a flow ofmany qualities from one state to another. It is goodness achieved inthe presence of badness, an aboveness achieved in the presence ofbelowness. It is an emergent quality energized in the presence of itsopposite."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"If the ego is notregularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of theTranscendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from thesense of self as part of nature's larger whole. The ultimateconsequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeatesWestern Civilization."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"From one point ofview the Transcendent Other is nature correctly perceived to be aliveand intelligent. From another it is the awesomely unfamiliar union ofall the senses with memory of the past and anticipation of thefuture. The Transcendent Other is what one encounters on powerfulhallucinogens. It is the crucible of the Mystery of our being, bothas a species and as individuals. The Transcendent Other is Naturewithout her cheerfully reassuring mask of ordinary space, time, andcausality."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"I think of goingto the Grave without having a Psychedelic Experience is like going tothe Grave without ever having Sex. It means that you never Figuredout what it is all about. The Mystery is in the Body and the way theBody Works itself into Nature."
― Terence McKenna


"Like the octopi,our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts becomeour bodies and our bodies become our thoughts. This is the essence ofthe more perfect Logos envisioned by the Hellenistic polymath PhiloJudaeusa Logos, an indwelling of the Goddess, not heard butbeheld. Hans Jonas explains Philo Judaeus's concept as follows:
A more perfectarchetypal logos, exempt from the human duality of sign and thing,and therefore not bound by the forms of speech, would not require themediation of hearing, but is immediately beheld by the mind as thetruth of things."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"You are not nakedwhen you take off your clothes. You still wear your religiousassumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, yourdelusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then,essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your ownpsyche…and it's from that position, a position outside thecultural operating system, that we can begin to ask real questionsabout what does it mean to be human, what kind of circumstance are wecaught in, and what kind of structures, if any, can we put in placeto assuage the plan and accentuate the glory and the wonder thatlurks, waiting for us, in this very narrow slice of time between thebirth canal and the yawning grave. In other words we have to returnto first premises."
― Terence McKenna


"The ArchaicRevival is a clarion call to recover our birthright, howeveruncomfortable that may make us. It is a call to realize that lifelived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon whichprimordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, lifeenslaved to the ego and its fear of dissolution in the mysteriousmatrix of feeling that is all around us. It is in the Archaic Revivalthat our transcendence of the historical dilemma actually lies."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"We are asked byscience to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness,and at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion isthe limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believethis, you can believe anything."
― Terence McKenna


"Part of whatpsychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This iswhat makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is akind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is onewhich causes people to start questioning the rules of the game."
― Terence McKenna


"It was warm andsalty, chalky and bittersweet. It tasted like the blood of some old,old thing. I tried not to think about how much at the mercy of thesestrange people I now was. But in fact my courage was failing. BothDona Catalina and the guide's mocking eyes had slowly gone cold andmantislike. A wave of insect sound sweeping up the river seemed tosplatter the darkness with shards of sharpedged light. I felt my lipsgo numb. Trying not to appear as loaded as I felt, I crossed to myhammock and lay back. Behind my closed eyelids there was a flowingriver of magenta light. It occurred to me in a kind of dream mentalpirouette that a helicopter must be landing on top of the hut, andthis was the last impression I had. When I regained consciousness Iappeared to myself to be surfing on the inner curl of a wave ofbrightly lit transparent information several hundred feet high.Exhilaration gave way to terror as I realised that my wave wasspeeding toward a rocky coastline."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"The war on drugswas never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long aspossible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wringthe last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits fromthe global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared. "Defeat"will mean, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War, that the mediawill correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation and thereal players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidityand venality of the Establishment's role will force a policy review."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"The globaltriumph of Western values means we, as a species, have wandered intoa state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a connectionto the unconscious. Gaining access to the unconscious through planthallucinogen use reaffirms our original bond to the living planet.Our estrangement from nature and the unconscious became entrenchedroughly two thousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of theGreat God Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression ofthe pagan mysteries and the rise of Christianity. The psychologicalshift that ensued left European civilization staring into twomillennia of religious mania and persecution, warfare, materialism,and rationalism.
The monstrous forcesof scientific industrialism and global politics that have been borninto modern times were conceived at the time of the shattering of thesymbiotic relationships with the plants that had bound us to naturefrom our dim beginnings. This left each human being frightened,guilt-burdened, and alone. Existential man was"
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"Our estrangementfrom nature and the unconscious became entrenched roughly twothousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of the Great GodPan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression of the paganmysteries and the rise of Christianity. The psychological shift thatensued left European civilization staring into two millennia ofreligious mania and persecution, warfare, materialism, andrationalism.
The monstrous forcesof scientific industrialism and global politics that have been borninto modern times were conceived at the time of the shattering of thesymbiotic relationships with the plants that had bound us to naturefrom our dim beginnings. This left each human being frightened,guilt-burdened, and alone. Existential man was born."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge


"There is noquestion that a society that sets out to control its citizens' use ofdrugs sets out on the slippery path to totalitarianism."
― Terence McKenna,Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

[Peter Lemkin]

One of many websites, built by friends of his, about his life and works....not an easy introduction, but hidden on and in it are many of his writings, thoughts, speeches and videos of his talks, etc. http://deoxy.org/mckenna.htm

[Peter Lemkin]

Terence McKenna Bibliography
The Web's largest list of references to books, articles, audio,
video, interviews and translations by and about Terence
McKenna (19462000). Many links and lots of cover art.
Read more about this [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna"]Visionary Philosopher, Shamanologist
and Psychedelic Raconteur[/URL]
[ go to low bandwidth version ]

1. Books, Pamphlets & Computer Software [ updated 02/26/13 ]
   
2. Books with Contributions [ updated 07/25/13 ]
   
3. Journals & Magazines with Contributions [ updated 02/26/13 ]
   
4. Interviews [ updated 07/22/13 ]
   
5. Translations of Books & Articles [ updated 07/22/13 ]
   
6. Audio Media [ updated 07/22/13 ]
   
7. Video Media [ updated 02/26/13 ]
   
8. Unpublished Writings & Talks [ updated 02/26/13 ]
   
9. Books, Articles about [ updated 07/22/13 ]
   
10. Miscellanea, including bootleg items [ updated 02/26/13 ]
    
11. Selected Internet Sources [ updated 02/26/13 ]
    
12. Blurbs by McKenna [ updated 03/18/13 ]
    

• Author Index [ updated 02/26/13 ]
  
• Journal Index [ updated 02/26/13 ]
  

[TABLE]
[TR]
[TD]

photo © Kathleen Thormod Carr
[TABLE]
[TR]
[TD]Legacy Library: Terence Kemp McKenna
A listing of Terence's own library will gradually
appear at LibraryThing. From Agrippa & Dee to
Wasson & Leary, find out what Terence read!

[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

[/TD]
[TD]

• Year Index [ updated 02/26/13 ]
  

[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

[Keith Millea]

But wait...Archaic Revival equals serfdom.It's true I read it.

"The artist's task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found."
― Terence McKenna

Only some understand.....Only some are experienced



Happy Trails

[Peter Lemkin]

Terence McKenna

[FONT=sans-serif][COLOR=#545454]




[TABLE="class: infobox vcard, width: 22"]
[TR]
[TH="colspan: 2, align: center"]Terence McKenna[/TH]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="colspan: 2, align: center"][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH]Born[/TH]
[TD]November 16, 1946
Paonia, Colorado, United States[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH]Died[/TH]
[TD]April 3, 2000 (aged 53)
San Rafael, California, United States[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH]Occupation[/TH]
[TD="class: role"]Author, lecturer[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH]Language[/TH]
[TD]English[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH]Nationality[/TH]
[TD="class: category"]American[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH]Education[/TH]
[TD]B.S. in ecology, resource conservation and shamanism[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH]Alma mater[/TH]
[TD]University of California, Berkeley[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH]Period[/TH]
[TD]20th[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH]Subjects[/TH]
[TD]Shamanism, ethnobotany,metaphysics, psychedelic drugs,alchemy[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH]Notable work(s)[/TH]
[TD]The Archaic Revival, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge - A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise,The Invisible Landscape[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH]Spouse(s)[/TH]
[TD]Kathleen Harrison[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH]Children[/TH]
[TD]Finn McKenna & Klea McKenna[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH]Relative(s)[/TH]
[TD]Dennis McKenna[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 April 3, 2000) was an American philosopher, psychonaut, ethnobotanist, lecturer, and author. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, culture, technology and the theoretical origins of human consciousness.
He was called the "Timothy Leary of the 90's",[SUP][1][/SUP][SUP][2][/SUP] "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism"[SUP][3][/SUP] and the "intellectual voice of Rave culture".[SUP][4][/SUP] He also formulated a concept about the nature of time based on fractal patterns he claimed to have discovered in the I Ching, which he called novelty theory,[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP] proposing this predicted the end of time in the year 2012.[SUP][6][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP][SUP][8][/SUP] His promotion of novelty theory and its connection to the Mayan calendar is credited as one of the factors leading to the widespread beliefs about 2012 eschatology.[SUP][9][/SUP] Novelty theory is considered pseudoscience.[SUP][10][/SUP][SUP][11][/SUP]

Contents

• 1 Biography
  • 1.1 Early life
    
  • 1.2 Studying and traveling
    
  • 1.3 Psilocybin mushroom cultivation
    
  • 1.4 Mid- to later life
    • 1.4.1 Public speaking
      
    • 1.4.2 Botanical dimensions
      
    
    
  • 1.5 Death
    
  • 1.6 Library fire
    
  
  
• 2 Thought
  • 2.1 Psychedelics
    • 2.1.1 Machine elves
      
    
    
  • 2.2 "Stoned ape" theory of human evolution
    
  • 2.3 The archaic revival
    
  • 2.4 Novelty theory and Timewave Zero
    
  
  
• 3 Critical reception
  
• 4 Bibliography
  
• 5 Spoken word
  
• 6 Discography
  
• 7 Filmography
  
• 8 See also
  
• 9 Notes
  
• 10 References
  
• 11 External links
  

Biography

Early life

Born and raised in Paonia, Colorado,[SUP][12][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP][SUP][13][/SUP] Terence McKenna had Irish ancestry on his father's side and Welsh forebears on his mother's.[SUP][14][/SUP] Introduced togeology through his uncle, he developed a hobby of solitary fossil-hunting in the arroyos near his home.[SUP][15][/SUP] From this he developed a deep artistic and scientific appreciation of nature. He also became interested in human psychology at a young age, reading Carl Jung's book Psychology and Alchemy at the age of 10.[SUP][6][/SUP]
At age 16 McKenna moved to Los Altos, California to live with family friends for a year. He finished high school in Lancaster, CA.[SUP][13][/SUP] In 1963, McKenna was introduced to the literary world of psychedelics through The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley and certain issues of The Village Voicethat talked about psychedelics.[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][13][/SUP]
McKenna said that one of his early psychedelic experiences with morning-glory seeds showed him "that there was something there worth pursuing",[SUP][13][/SUP] and in interviews McKenna claimed to have smokedcannabis daily since his teens.[SUP][16][/SUP]

Studying and traveling

In 1965, McKenna enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley and was accepted into the Tussman Experimental College.[SUP][16][/SUP] In 1967, while in college, he discovered and began studying shamanism through the study of Tibetan folk religion.[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][17][/SUP][SUP][18][/SUP] That same year, which he called his "opium and kabbala phase"[SUP][19][/SUP][SUP][6][/SUP] he traveled to Jerusalem, where he met Kathleen Harrison, who would later become his wife.[SUP][6][/SUP][SUP][16][/SUP][SUP][19][/SUP]
In 1969, McKenna traveled to Nepal led by his interest in Tibetan painting and hallucinogenic shamanism.[SUP][20][/SUP] He sought out shaman of the Bon tradition, which predated Tibetan Buddhism, trying to learn more about the shamanic use of visionary plants.[SUP][12][/SUP] During his time there, he also studied the Tibetan language[SUP][20][/SUP] and worked as a hashish smuggler,[SUP][6][/SUP] until "one of his Bombay-to-Aspen shipments fell into the hands of U. S. Customs."[SUP][21][/SUP] He then wandered through southeast Asia viewing ruins,[SUP][21][/SUP] spent time as a professional butterfly collector in Indonesia,[SUP][6][/SUP][SUP][22][/SUP][SUP][23][/SUP] and worked as an English teacher inTokyo, before finally returning to Berkeley to continue studying biology, which he called "his first love".[SUP][24][/SUP]
After the partial completion of his studies, and his mother's death[SUP][25][/SUP] from cancer in 1971,[SUP][26][/SUP] McKenna, his brother Dennis, and three friends traveled to the Colombian Amazon in search of oo-koo-hé, a plant preparation containing dimethyltryptamine (DMT).[SUP][5][/SUP][SUP][25][/SUP] Instead of oo-koo-hé they found various forms of ayahuasca, or yagé,[SUP][27][/SUP] and fields full of gigantic Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms, which became the new focus of the expedition.[SUP][6][/SUP][SUP][12][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP][SUP][28][/SUP][SUP][25][/SUP] In La Chorrera, at the urging of his brother, he was the subject of a psychedelic experiment[SUP][5][/SUP] which he claimed put him in contact with "Logos": an informative, divine voice he believed was universal to visionary religious experience.[SUP][29][/SUP] The voice's reputed revelations and his brother's simultaneous peculiar experience prompted him to explore the structure of an early form of the I Ching, which led to his "Novelty Theory".[SUP][5][/SUP][SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][30][/SUP] During their stay in the Amazon, McKenna also became romantically involved with his interpreter, Ev.[SUP][31][/SUP]
In 1972, McKenna returned to U.C. Berkeley to finish his studies[SUP][16][/SUP] and in 1975, he graduated with a degree in ecology, shamanism and conservation of natural resources.[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][22][/SUP][SUP][23][/SUP] In the autumn of 1975, after parting with his girlfriend Ev earlier in the year,[SUP][32][/SUP] McKenna began a relationship with his future wife and the mother of his two children Kathleen Harrison.[SUP][16][/SUP][SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][19][/SUP]
Soon after graduating, McKenna and Dennis published a book inspired by their Amazon experiences, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching.[SUP][16][/SUP][SUP][33][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP] The brothers' experiences in the Amazon would later be the main focus of McKenna's book True Hallucinations, published in 1993.[SUP][12][/SUP] McKenna also began lecturing[SUP][16][/SUP] locally around Berkeley and started appearing on some underground Radio stations.[SUP][6][/SUP]

Psilocybin mushroom cultivation

During McKenna's studies, he also developed a technique for cultivating psilocybin mushrooms with Dennis[SUP][32][/SUP][SUP][28][/SUP] and in 1976, the brothers published what they had learned in a book entitled Psilocybin - Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, under the pseudonyms "OT Oss" and "ON Oeric".[SUP][12][/SUP] McKenna and his brother were the first to come up with a reliable method for cultivating psilocybin mushrooms at home.[SUP][12][/SUP][SUP][28][/SUP][SUP][16][/SUP] As ethnobiologist Jonathan Ott explains, "[the] authors adapted San Antonio's technique (for producing edible mushrooms by casing mycelial cultures on a rye grain substrate; San Antonio 1971) to the production of Psilocybe [Stropharia] cubensis. The new technique involved the use of ordinary kitchen implements, and for the first time the layperson was able to produce a potent entheogen in his own home, without access to sophisticated technology, equipment or chemical supplies."[SUP][34][/SUP] When the 1986 revised edition was published the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide had sold over 100,000 copies.[SUP][35][/SUP][SUP][12][/SUP]

Mid- to later life

Public speaking

In the early 1980s, McKenna began to speak publicly on the topic of psychedelic drugs, becoming one of the pioneers of the psychedelic movement in the west.[SUP][36][/SUP] His main focus was on the plant based psychedelics like; psilocybin mushrooms (which were the catalyst for his career),[SUP][12][/SUP] ayahuasca, cannabis and the plant derivative DMT.[SUP][6][/SUP] He conducted lecture tours and workshops[SUP][6][/SUP] promoting natural psychedelics as a way to explore universal mysteries, stimulate the imagination and re-establish a harmonious relationship with nature.[SUP][37][/SUP] Though associated with the New Age and human potential movements, McKenna himself had little patience for New Age sensibilities.[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][38][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP] He repeatedly stressed the importance and primacy of the "felt presence of direct experience", as opposed todogma.[SUP][39][/SUP]
In addition to psychedelic drugs, McKenna spoke on a wide array of subjects including; shamanism; metaphysics; alchemy; language; culture; self-empowerment; techno-paganism; artificial intelligence;evolution; extraterrestrials; science and scientism; the web; virtual reality (which he saw as a way to artistically communicate the experience of psychedelics); and aesthetic theory, specifically about art/visual experience as information representing the significance of hallucinatory visions experienced under the influence of psychedelics.
[TABLE="class: rquote floatright, width: 535"]
[TR]
[TD]"[/TD]
[TD]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.[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]"[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: rquotecite, colspan: 3"]

Terence McKenna, "This World...and Its Double", [SUP][40][/SUP]

[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
McKenna soon became a fixture of popular counterculture[SUP][6][/SUP][SUP][37][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP] with Timothy Leary once introducing him as "one of the five or six most important people on the planet"[SUP][41][/SUP] and with comedian Bill Hicks' referencing him in his stand-up act.[SUP][42][/SUP] He published several books in the early-to-mid-1990s including: The Archaic Revival; Food of the Gods; and True Hallucinations (relating the tale of his 1971 La Chorrera experience).[SUP][6][/SUP][SUP][12][/SUP][SUP][22][/SUP]
He also became a popular personality in the psychedelic rave/dance scene of the early 1990s,[SUP][22][/SUP][SUP][43][/SUP] with frequent spoken word performances at raves and contributions to psychedelic and goa trance albums by The Shamen,[SUP][37][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP] Spacetime Continuum, Alien Project, Capsula, Entheogenic, Zuvuya, Shpongle, and Shakti Twins. His speeches were, and are, sampled by many.[SUP][4][/SUP] In 1994 he appeared as a speaker at the Starwood Festival, documented in the book Tripping by Charles Hayes. His lectures were produced on both cassette tape and CD.[SUP][44][/SUP]
McKenna was colleagues and close friends with chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham, and author and biologist Rupert Sheldrake. He conducted several public and many private debates with them from 1982 until his death.[SUP][45][/SUP][SUP][46][/SUP][SUP][47][/SUP] These debates were known as trialogues and some of the discussions were later published in the books: Trialogues at the Edge of the West and The Evolutionary Mind.[SUP][45][/SUP][SUP][3][/SUP]

Botanical dimensions

In 1985, McKenna founded Botanical Dimensions with his then-wife Kathleen Harrison.[SUP][22][/SUP][SUP][48][/SUP] Botanical Dimensions is a nonprofit ethnobotanical preserve on the big island of Hawaii.[SUP][3][/SUP] It was set up to collect, protect, propagate and understand plants of ethno-medical significance and their lore and appreciate, study, and educate others about plants and mushrooms felt to be significant to cultural integrity and spiritual well-being.[SUP][49][/SUP] The 19 acre botanical garden[SUP][3][/SUP] is a repository containing thousands of plants, which have been used by indigenous people of the tropical regions and includes adatabase of information related to purported healing properties of plants.[SUP][50][/SUP] McKenna was involved until 1992 when he retired from the project,[SUP][48][/SUP] following Kathleen and his divorce earlier in the year.[SUP][16][/SUP]Kathleen still manages Botanical Dimensions as its president & projects director.[SUP][49][/SUP] After their divorce, McKenna moved to Hawaii permanently, where he built a modernist house[SUP][16][/SUP] and created a gene bank of rare plants near his home.[SUP][22][/SUP] Previously, he had split his time between Hawaii and Occidental, CA.

Death

Terence McKenna during a panel discussion at the 1999 AllChemical Arts Conference, held at Kona, Hawaii.

In mid-1999, after a long lecturing tour, McKenna returned to his home on the big island of Hawaii. A longtime sufferer of migraines, McKenna had begun to have increasingly painful headaches. His condition culminated in three brain seizures in one night, which he claimed were the most powerful psychedelic experiences he had ever known. McKenna was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer.[SUP][12][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP][SUP][28][/SUP] For the next several months he underwent various treatments, including experimental gamma knife radiation treatment. According to Wired magazine, McKenna was worried that his tumor was caused by his 35 years ofsmoking cannabis, although his doctors assured him there was no causal relation.[SUP][28][/SUP]
In late 1999, Erik Davis conducted what would be the last interview with McKenna.[SUP][28][/SUP] During the interview McKenna also talked about the announcement of his death:
[TABLE="class: cquote"]
[TR]
[TD]"[/TD]
[TD]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.[SUP][51][/SUP]
[/TD]
[TD="width: 20, align: right"]"[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
McKenna died on April 3, 2000, at the age of 53.[SUP][16][/SUP][SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP]

Library fire

On February 7, 2007, McKenna's library of books and personal notes was destroyed in a fire that burned offices belonging to Big Sur's Esalen Institute, which was storing the collection. An indexmaintained by his brother Dennis survives, though little else.[SUP][52][/SUP]

Thought

Psychedelics

Terence McKenna advocated the exploration of altered states of mind via the ingestion of naturally occurring psychedelic substances.[SUP][33][/SUP][SUP][43][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP] For example, and in particular, as facilitated by the ingestion of high doses of psychedelic mushrooms,[SUP][53][/SUP] ayahuasca and DMT,[SUP][6][/SUP] which he believed was the apotheosis of the psychedelic experience. However he was less enthralled with the synthetic drugs[SUP][6][/SUP]stating that "I think drugs should come from the natural world and be use-tested by shmanically orientated cultures...one cannot predict the long term effects of a drug produced in a Laboratory."[SUP][3][/SUP]McKenna always stressed the responsible use of psychedelic plants saying: "Experimenters should be very careful. One must build up to the experience. These are bizarre dimensions of extraordinary power and beauty. There is no set rule to avoid being overwhelmed, but move carefully, reflect a great deal, and always try to map experiences back onto the history of the race and the philosophical and religious accomplishments of the species. All the compounds are potentially dangerous, and all compounds, at sufficient doses or repeated over time, involve risks. The library is the first place to go when looking into taking a new compound."[SUP][54][/SUP] He also recommended and often spoke of taking, what he called, 'heroic doses,'[SUP][33][/SUP] which he defined as five dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms[SUP][6][/SUP] taken in silent darkness.[SUP][28][/SUP] Believing that it is only when you are slain with the power of the mushroom that the message becomes clear.[SUP][53][/SUP]
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"; proposing that DMT sent one to a "parallel dimension"[SUP][8][/SUP] and psychedelics literally, enabled an individual to encounter 'higher dimensional entities'[SUP][55][/SUP] or what could be ancestors, or spirits of the Earth,[SUP][56][/SUP] saying that if you can trust your own perceptions it appears that you are entering an "ecology of souls."[SUP][57][/SUP] McKenna also put forward the idea that psychedelics were "doorways into the Gaian mind"[SUP][43][/SUP][SUP][58][/SUP] suggesting that "the planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being" and that the psychedelic plants were the facilitators of this communication.[SUP][59][/SUP][SUP][60][/SUP] In a more radical version of biophysicist Francis Crick's hypothesis of directed panspermia; another idea McKenna speculated on, was that, psilocybin mushrooms are a species of high intelligence,[SUP][3][/SUP] which may have arrived on this planet as spores migrating through space[SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][61][/SUP] and are attempting to establish a symbiotic relationship with human beings. He postulated that "intelligence, not life, but intelligence may have come here [to Earth] in this spore-bearing life form" pointing out that "I think that theory will probably be vindicated. I think in a hundred years if people do biology they will think it quite silly that people once thought that spores could not be blown from one star system to another by cosmic radiation pressure" and believed that "Few people are in a position to judge its extraterrestrial potential, because few people in the orthodox sciences have ever experienced the full spectrum of psychedelic effects that are unleashed."[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][17][/SUP][SUP][18][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP]
McKenna was opposed to Christianity[SUP][62][/SUP] and most forms of organized religion or guru-based forms of spiritual awakening, favouring shamanism, which he believed was the broadest spiritual paradigm available, stating that:

"What I think happened is that in the world of prehistory all religion was experiential, and it was based on the pursuit of ecstasy through plants. And at some time, very early, a group interposed itself between people and direct experience of the 'Other.' This created hierarchies, priesthoods, theological systems, castes, ritual, taboos. Shamanism, on the other hand, is an experiential science that deals with an area where we know nothing. It is important to remember that our epistemological tools have developed very unevenly in the West. We know a tremendous amount about what is going on in the heart of the atom, but we know absolutely nothing about the nature of the mind."[SUP][63][/SUP]

Either philosophically or religiously, he expressed admiration for: Marshall McLuhan, Alfred North Whitehead, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Carl Jung, Plato, Gnostic Christianity and Alchemy, while regarding the Greek philosopher Heraclitus as his favorite philosopher.[SUP][64][/SUP]
He also expressed admiration for the works of Aldous Huxley,[SUP][3][/SUP] James Joyce; calling Finnegans Wake "the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature of the 20th century,"[SUP][65][/SUP] the science fictionwriter Philip K. Dick who he described as an "incredible genius,"[SUP][66][/SUP] fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, with whom McKenna shared the belief that; "scattered through the ordinary world there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth"[SUP][8][/SUP] and Vladimir Nabokov: McKenna once said that he would have become a Nabokov lecturer if he had never encountered psychedelics.
During the final years of his life and career, McKenna became very engaged in the theoretical realm of technology. He was an early proponent of the technological singularity[SUP][8][/SUP] and in his last recorded public talk, Psychedelics in The Age of Intelligent Machines, he outlined ties between psychedelics, computation technology, and humans.[SUP][67][/SUP] He also became very enamored with the Internet saying it was "the birth of [the] global mind",[SUP][16][/SUP] believing it to be a place where psychedelic culture could flourish.[SUP][28][/SUP]

Machine elves

McKenna spoke of hallucinations while on DMT in which he claims he met intelligent entities he described as "self-transforming machine elves".[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][68][/SUP][SUP][69][/SUP]

"So I did it and...there was a something, like a flower, like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that was sort of spinning, spinning, and then it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind, it seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place aside from the tastefully soffited indirect lighting, and the crawling geometric hallucinations along the domed walls, what was happening was that there were a lot of beings in there, what I call self-transforming machine elves. Sort of like jewelled basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they'd had faces they would have been grinning, but they didn't have faces. And they assured me that they loved me and they told me not to be amazed; not to give way to astonishment."[SUP][70][/SUP]
Terence McKenna, Alien Dreamtime

"Stoned ape" theory of human evolution

In his book Food of the Gods, McKenna proposed that the transformation from humans' early ancestors Homo erectus to the species Homo sapiens mainly had to do with the addition of the mushroompsilocybe cubensis in its diet,[SUP][71][/SUP] an event which according to his theory took place in about 100,000 BC (this is when he believed that the species diverged from the Homo genus).[SUP][22][/SUP][SUP][72][/SUP] McKenna based his theory on the main effects, or alleged effects, produced by the mushroom[SUP][3][/SUP] while citing studies by Roland Fischer et al. from the late 1960s to early 1970s.[SUP][73][/SUP][SUP][74][/SUP]
McKenna stated that due to the desertification of the African continent at that time, man's forerunners were forced from the increasingly shrinking tropical canopy in search of new food sources.[SUP][6][/SUP] He believed they would have been following the large herds of wild cattle whose dung harbored the insects that, he proposed, were undoubtedly part of their new diet and in turn would have spotted and started eating psilocybe cubensis, a dung loving mushroom often found growing out of cowpat.[SUP][6][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP][SUP][43][/SUP]

Psilocybe cubensis: the psilocybin containing mushroom central to McKenna's "stoned ape" theory of human evolution.

McKenna's hypothesis was that low doses of psilocybin improves visual acuity. Meaning that the presence of psilocybin in the diet of early pack hunting primates caused the individuals who were consuming psilocybin mushrooms to be better hunters than those who were not, resulting in an increased food supply and in turn a higher rate ofreproductive success.[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP][SUP][43][/SUP] Then at slightly higher doses, he contended, the mushroom acts to sexually arouse. This leads to a higher level of attention, a certain level of energy in the organism and can lead to erection in the males,[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP] claiming this would make it even more evolutionarily beneficial as it would result in more offspring.[SUP][43][/SUP][SUP][71][/SUP]At even higher doses, McKenna proposed that the mushroom would have acted to "dissolve boundaries," promoting community-bonding and group sexual activities.[SUP][12][/SUP][SUP][43][/SUP]Consequently there would be a mixing of genes, greater genetic diversity and a communal sense of responsibility for the group offspring.[SUP][75][/SUP] At these higher doses McKenna also argued that psilocybin would be triggering activity in the "language forming region of the brain" which manifests as music and visions[SUP][3][/SUP] thus catalysing the emergence of language in early hominids by expanding "their arboreally evolved repertoire of troop signals."[SUP][7][/SUP] Also pointing out that it would dissolve the ego and "religiousconcerns would be at the forefront of the tribe's consciousness, simply because of the power and strangeness of the experience itself."[SUP][75][/SUP][SUP][43][/SUP]
Therefore according to McKenna, access to and ingestion of mushrooms was an evolutionary advantage to humans' omnivorous hunter-gatherer ancestors,[SUP][76][/SUP] also providing the first religious impulse in man.[SUP][77][/SUP] He believed psilocybin mushrooms were the "evolutionary catalyst"[SUP][3][/SUP] from which language, projective imagination, the arts, religion, philosophy, science and all of human culture sprang.[SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP][SUP][28][/SUP]
Later on this idea was given the name "The 'Stoned Ape' Hypothesis."[SUP][43][/SUP]
McKenna's "stoned ape" theory has not received attention from the scientific community and has been criticized on several fronts. His ideas regarding psilocybin and visual acuity have been criticized for lacking evidence and for misrepresenting Fischer et al., who studied medium doses (not low doses) of psilocybin and found that perception (not visual acuity) was changed. Fischer et al. further state that psilocybin "may not be conducive to the survival of the organism". There is also a lack of evidence that psilocybin increases sexual arousal, and even if this were true, it does not necessarily entail an evolutionary advantage. It may even be a disadvantage in the context of the presumed higher sexual competition in Homo Erectus as indicated by its higher sexual dimorphism relative to Homo sapiens.[SUP][78][/SUP] Others have pointed to civilisations, like the Aztecs, who used psychedelic mushrooms (at least among the Priestly class) and they didn't reflect McKenna's model of how psychedelic using cultures would behave, for example, by carrying out horrendous acts of aggression such as human sacrifice.[SUP][12][/SUP] Although, it has been noted that, the usage by the Azec civilisation is far removed from the type of usage McKenna was speculating on.[SUP][43][/SUP] There are also examples of Amazonian tribes such as; the Jivaro and the Yanomami who use ayahuasca ceremoniously and who are known for theirviolence. This, it has been argued, suggests the use of psychedelic plants does not necessarily suppress the ego and create harmonious societies.[SUP][43][/SUP]

The archaic revival

One of the main themes running through McKenna's work, and the title of his second book, was the idea that western civilization was undergoing what he called an "archaic revival".[SUP][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna#cite_note-Maveri...

[Magda Hassan]

Another one that died way too young. Brain cancer too like Bob Marley and Gladys Marin and others. Beautiful man. Met him here in Sydney as he was a hometown friend of boyfriend at the time. Other friends knew him from Hawaii and we corresponded occassionally. Do you know much about his brother? Walked a similar road with him but maybe a bit more corporate in the latter days.

[Peter Lemkin]

Another one that died way too young. Brain cancer too like Bob Marley and Gladys Marin and others. Beautiful man. Met him here in Sydney as he was a hometown friend of boyfriend at the time. Other friends knew him from Hawaii and we corresponded occassionally. Do you know much about his brother? Walked a similar road with him but maybe a bit more corporate in the latter days.

Well, now THAT is an amazing bit of synchrony - that you and I both knew him! His brother is still alive and working. He was never as 'public' a person as Terrence. He is a trained ethnopharmicologist and was much saddened by his brother's death. Another blow [or black op] was the fire that destroyed Terrence's huge collection of books and papers. Once I had his brother's email address and that of his partner....but I think that disk crashed. I believe she still lives in Hawaii and he lives somewhere in CA but goes to S.A. and elsewhere doing his work from time to time. I met his brother just once at one of his rare public talks.

Yes, Terrence died MUCH too young....and while it could have been a 'natural' brain cancer, I have always harbored just a little skepticism - given what I know of assassinations and attempts to derail cultural and counter-cultural heroes. It was a very rare type, and manifested very quickly. He was well aware that the Deep State was keeping an eye on him. He and I talked not only about his usual topics, but about deep political events. He was fully aware of them, and in the two years before his death had begun to incorporate them into his talks. He was fully 'up' on the JFK Assassination and other events like that - fully aware, generally. A brilliant man! One of Vaclav Havel's chief advisers was working with me to secure the castle for his retreat. I believe that Havel had also tried some psychedelics in his life....but can't prove that. One type of magic mushroom grows in one area here, and a small few know about where they can be collected and what they look like. Terrence was very interested to try them in a medieval atmosphere. It was not to be.

[Magda Hassan]

The cultural history of middle Europe is littered with references to magic mushrooms and mushroom collecting is still a favoured past time of many Europens and Russians. Even if mostly for culinary matters these days. Christianity may have reached Europe and Russia but elements of local shamanism still live. Even the otherwise strange and cannibalistic Christian ritual of communion seems to have some shamanic elements to it and might have made it easier for the Catholic church to introduce itself into the Americas where a different type of transunstantiation and enlightenment occurs through the ingestion of hallucinogenics.