Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was an American
ethnobotanist, philosopher,
psychonaut, researcher, teacher, lecturer and writer on many subjects, such as human
consciousness, language, psychedelic substances, the evolution of civilizations, the origin and end of the universe,
alchemy, and
extraterrestrial beings.
Biography
Early life
Terence McKenna was born and raised in
Paonia, Colorado.
[1] McKenna's father was of
Irish ancestry and his mother was of
Welsh descent.
[2] He was introduced to
geology through his uncle and developed a hobby of solitary fossil hunting in the
arroyos near his home.
[3] From this he developed a deep artistic and scientific appreciation of nature.
At age 16, McKenna moved to
Los Altos, California to live with family friends for a year. He finished high school in Lancaster, CA.
[1] 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 Voice that talked about psychedelics.
[1][4]
McKenna claimed that one of his early psychedelic experiences with
morning glory seeds showed him "that there was something there worth pursuing."
[1]
In an audio interview Terence Mckenna claims to have started smoking
cannabis regularly during the summer following his 17th birthday.
Studying and traveling
In 1965, McKenna enrolled in the
University of California, Berkeley[5] to study art history.
[1] In 1967, while in college, he discovered and began studying
shamanism through the study of Tibetan folk religion.
[6] That year, which he called his "
opium and
kabbala phase"
[7] he also traveled to
Jerusalem, where he met
Kathleen Harrison, who would later become his wife.
[7]
In 1969, McKenna traveled to Nepal led by his "interest in Tibetan painting and hallucinogenic shamanism."
[7]
During his time there, he studied the Tibetan language and worked as a
hashish smuggler, until "one of his Bombay-to-Aspen shipments fell into
the hands of U. S. Customs." He was forced to move to avoid capture by
Interpol.
[7]
He wandered through Southeast Asia viewing ruins, collected butterflies
in Indonesia, and worked as an English teacher in Tokyo. He then went
back to Berkeley to continue studying biology, which he called "his
first love".
[7]
After the partial completion of his studies, and his mother's death from cancer in 1971,
[8] McKenna, his brother
Dennis, and three friends traveled to the Colombian Amazon in search of
oo-koo-hé, a plant preparation containing
dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Instead of
oo-koo-hé they found various forms of
ayahuasca, or
yagé, and gigantic
Psilocybe cubensis which became the new focus of the expedition.
[7] In
La Chorrera, at the urging of his brother, he was 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 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".
[7] During their stay in the Amazon, McKenna also became romantically involved with his interpreter, Ev.
[7]
In 1972, McKenna returned to Berkeley to finish his studies.
[5]
There he decided to switch majors to a Bachelor of Science in ecology
and conservation, in a then new experimental section of the same
university called the Tussman Experimental College.
[1] During his studies, he would also develop techniques for cultivating psilocybin mushrooms with Dennis.
[7]
In 1975, he parted with his girlfriend, Ev, when she left him for one
of his friends from Berkeley. Their parting left him "tormented with
migraines and living alone".
[7] He graduated in 1975.
[9] That same year, he began a relationship with Kathleen Harrison, whom he had met in Jerusalem.
Soon after graduating, McKenna and Dennis published a book inspired by their Amazon experiences,
The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching. He also began lecturing.
[5] The brothers' experiences in the Amazon would later play a major role in McKenna's book
True Hallucinations, published in 1993.
[7] In 1976, the brothers published what they had learned about the cultivation of mushrooms in a book entitled
Psilocybin - Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide under the pseudonyms "OT Oss" and "ON Oeric".
[10]
Later life
In the early 1980s, McKenna began to speak publicly on the topic of
psychedelic drugs, lecturing extensively and conducting weekend
workshops. Though associated with the
New Age and
human potential movements,
McKenna himself had little patience for New Age sensibilities. He
repeatedly stressed the importance and primacy of felt experience, as
opposed to dogma.
[11] Timothy Leary once introduced him as "one of the five or six most important people on the planet."
[12]
| “ |
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", [13] |
He soon became a fixture of popular counterculture. His growing
popularity culminated in the early-to-mid-1990s with the publication of
several books:
True Hallucinations, relating the tale of his 1971
La Chorrera experience;
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 are, sampled by many. 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.
[14]
McKenna was a 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. He conducted several public debates known as
trialogues
with them from the late 1980s until his death. Books containing
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 many
scientists,
writers,
artists, and
entertainers.
[citation needed] Comedian
Bill Hicks' routines about psychedelic drugs drew heavily from McKenna's works.
[citation needed] He also may have been the inspiration for the
Twin Peaks character Dr. Jacoby.
[15]
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, specifically about art/visual experience as
information representing the significance of hallucinatory visions experienced under the influence of psychedelics.
In 1985,
[9] McKenna co-founded Botanical Dimensions with his then-wife Kathleen, a nonprofit
ethnobotanical preserve in
Hawaii, where he lived for many years before he died. In 1997 he and Kathleen divorced.
[5] Before moving to Hawaii permanently, McKenna split his time between Hawaii and
Occidental, located in the
redwood-studded hills of
Sonoma County, California.
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. According to
Wired
magazine, McKenna was worried that his tumour was caused by his
35-years of smoking cannabis; though his doctors assured him there was
no causal relation.
[5]
In late 1999,
Erik Davis conducted what would be the last interview of McKenna.
[16] During the interview McKenna also talked about the announcement of his death:
| “ |
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.[17]
|
” |
McKenna 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.
Library fire
On February 7, 2007, McKenna's library of rare 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
index maintained by his brother Dennis survives, though little else.
[18]
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", [19] |
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.
[11] 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. McKenna always regarded the Greek philosopher
Heraclitus as his favorite philosopher.
[12]
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")
[20] 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 has advocated the
idea of a
technological singularity.
[21] In his last recorded public talk,
Psychadelics in The Age of Intelligent Machines, he outlined strong ties between psychedelics, computation technology, and humans.
[22]
"Stoned Ape" theory of human evolution
In his book
Food of the Gods,
[23] 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 mushroom
Psilocybe cubensis
in its diet - 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). He based his theory on the main effects, or alleged effects,
produced by the mushroom. One of the effects that comes about from the
ingestion of low doses, which agrees with one of scientist Roland
Fischer's findings from the late 1960s-early 1970s,
[24]
is it significantly improves the visual acuity of humans - so
theoretically, of other human-like mammals too. According to McKenna,
this effect would have definitely proven to be of evolutionary advantage
to humans' omnivorous
hunter-gatherer ancestors that would have stumbled upon it "accidentally"; as it would make it easier for them to hunt.
In higher doses, McKenna claims, the mushroom acts as a sexual
stimulator, which would make it even more beneficial evolutionarily, as
it would result in more offspring. At even higher doses, the mushroom
would have acted to "dissolve boundaries", which would have promoted
community-bonding and group sexual activities-that would result in a
mixing of genes and therefore greater genetic diversity. Generally
McKenna believed that the periodic ingestion of the mushroom would have
acted to dissolve the
ego in humans before it ever got the chance to grow in destructive proportions. In this context, he likened the ego to a cancerous
tumor that can grow uncontrollable and become destructive to its host. In his own words:
Wherever and whenever the ego function began to
form, it was akin to a cancerous tumor or a blockage in the energy of
the psyche. The use of psychedelic plants in a context of shamanic
initiation dissolved-as it dissolves today-the knotted structure of the
ego into undifferentiated feeling, what Eastern philosophy calls the
Tao.
—Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods
The mushroom, according to McKenna, had also given humans their first
truly religious experiences (which, as he believed, were the basis for
the foundation of all subsequent religions to date). Another factor that
McKenna talked about was the mushroom's potency to promote linguistic
thinking. This would have promoted vocalisation, which in turn would
have acted in cleansing the brain (based on a scientific theory that
vibrations from speaking cause the precipitation of impurities from the
brain to the cerebrospinal fluid), which would further mutate the brain.
All these factors according to McKenna were the most important factors
that promoted evolution towards the
Homo sapiens species. After this transformation took place, the species would have begun moving
out of Africa to populate the rest of the planet
[23] Later on, this theory by McKenna was given the name "The 'Stoned Ape' Theory of Human Evolution".
[25]
Novelty theory
According to McKenna the universe has a
teleological attractor at the
end of time that increases interconnectedness, eventually reaching a
singularity
of infinite complexity in 2012 at which point anything and everything
imaginable will occur simultaneously, what he referred to as the
Eschaton. He conceived this idea over several years in the early to mid-1970s while using psilocybin mushrooms and
DMT.
[26]
McKenna viewed the universe as a swarm of
matter waves, spiralling down the
gradient of their
synergetic (energetically favourable)
constructive interference.
He saw the universe as being "pulled from the future toward a goal that
is as inevitable as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you
release it up near the rim...it comes to rest at the lowest energy
state, which is the bottom of the bowl. That’s precisely my model of
human history."
[27]
In novelty theory, when two matter waves become connected by mutual constructive interference (
quantum entanglement,
rapport), they
imagine or
grok
each other. Mc Kenna believed that imagination was capable of
interconnecting matter waves instantaneously, stating that "the
imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information,"
[28] and "novelty is density of connection."
[29]
A screenshot of the "Timewave Zero" software
"What is happening to our world is ingression of novelty toward what
Whitehead called "concrescence", a tightening gyre. Everything is
flowing together. The "autopoietic 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 soon—around 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."[30]
McKenna expressed "novelty" in a computer program which purportedly
produces a waveform known as "timewave zero" or the "timewave".
"Timewave zero" is a
numerological formula that purports to calculate the ebb and flow of "novelty", defined as increase over time in the
universe's interconnectedness, or
organized complexity.
[26] Based on McKenna's interpretation of the
King Wen sequence of the
I Ching,
[5] the graph appears to show great periods of novelty corresponding with major shifts in humanity's
biological and
sociocultural evolution. He believed that the events of any given time are
recursively related to the events of other times, and chose the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima
as the basis for calculating his end date of 16 November 2012. When he
later discovered that the end of the 13th baktun in the Maya Calendar
had been correlated by Western Maya scholars with December 21, not far
from his own hypothesized end date, he decided that the Maya were more
likely to be right on this subject and he adopted their end date.
[31] The 1975 first edition of Mc Kenna's
The Invisible Landscape
refers to 2012 (but no specific day during the year) only twice. In the
1993 second edition, McKenna employed the 21st of December 2012
throughout, the date arrived at by the
Mayanist researcher
Robert J. Sharer's.
[Note d][32]
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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
