Everything about Terence Mckenna totally explained
Terence Kemp McKenna (
November 16 1946 –
April 3 2000) was a
writer,
philosopher, and
ethnobotanist. He is noted for his many speculations on the use of
psychedelic, plant-based
hallucinogens, and subjects ranging from
shamanism, the development of human consciousness, and the
novelty theory.
Biography
Early life
Terence McKenna grew up in
Paonia, Colorado. He was introduced to
geology through his uncle and developed a hobby of solitary fossil hunting in the
arroyos near his home. 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.
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." 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.
After college
He spent the years after his graduation
teaching English in
Japan, traveling through
India and
South Asia collecting
butterflies for biological supply companies, and smuggling
hashish into the
United States.
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.
Timothy Leary once introduced him as "one of the five or six most important people on the planet". 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).
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.
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). He advised the taking of
psychedelic mushrooms, in both low and high doses, alone and with others. Philosophically and religiously, he expressed admiration for
Marshall McLuhan,
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
Gnostic Christianity,
Alfred North Whitehead,
Alchemy, and
James Joyce (calling
Finnegans Wake "the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature of the 20th century"). He remained opposed to most forms of
organized religion or
guru-based forms of spiritual awakening. He believed
DMT was the of the psychedelic experience and 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
aliens,
ancestors, or
spirits of earth. Erik Davis later published excerpts from this interview at his site,
(External Link
), and the 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've to say, its 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."
Ideas
The "Stoned Ape" hypothesis of human evolution
Perhaps the most famous of Terence McKenna's theories and observations is his explanation for the origin of the human mind and culture. McKenna theorized that as the North African jungles receded toward the end of the most recent ice age, giving way to grasslands, a branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the branches and took up a life out in the open — following around herds of
ungulates, nibbling what they could along the way.
Among the new items in their diet were psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing in the dung of these ungulate herds. McKenna, referencing the research of Roland L. Fisher Ph.D. (College of Optometry and Departments of Psychiatry and Pharmacology, College of Medicine, The Ohio State University) , claimed enhancement of visual acuity as 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 a physical sexual arousal (again, not reported as a typical effect in scientific studies) — and in still larger doses, ecstatic hallucinations and
glossolalia — gave evolutionary advantages to those tribes who partook of it. There were many changes caused by the introduction of this psychoactive mushroom to the primate diet. McKenna theorizes, 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 the mushroom from the human diet, which McKenna argued to result in a new set of profound changes in our species as we reverted to pre-mushroomed and brutal primate social structures that had been modified and/or repressed by frequent consumption of psilocybin.
McKenna didn't attempt to defend his hypotheses through rigorous scientific evidence; he consciously self-identified as a type of shaman, or
ethnobotanist. McKenna and his followers view his theories as speculation that's at a minimum scientifically feasible and arguably gifted by special knowledge due to psychedelic plants. His hypothesis that psilocybin induced a
phase change in human evolution is necessarily based on a great deal of supposition interpolating between the few fragmentary facts we know about hominid and early human history, but he argued that the ability to metabolize any dietary component could, in principle, confer a selective advantage. Many find this explanation implausible, as it commits McKenna to a Lamarckian interpretation of evolution wherein
acquired characteristics (for example an adaptave advantage resulting from consuming a hallucinogen) are assumed to be propagated
genetically. This view is widely rejected in contemporary evolutionary biology. A live recording of his "Stoned Ape" hpothesis can be found on the CD
Conversations on the Edge of Magic (recorded live at the
Starwood Festival).
Novelty theory and "Time Wave: Zero Point"
One of McKenna's ideas is known as
Novelty theory. It predicts the ebb and flow of novelty in the
universe as an inherent quality of time. McKenna developed the theory in the mid-1970s after his experiences in the
Amazon at
La Chorrera led him to closely study the
King Wen sequence of the
I-Ching. Novelty theory involves
ontology,
extropy, and
eschatology.
The theory proposes that the universe is an engine designed for the production and conservation of novelty. Novelty, in this context, can be thought of as newness, or
extropy (a term coined by
Max More meaning the opposite of
entropy). According to McKenna, when novelty is graphed over time, a
fractal waveform known as "timewave zero" or simply the "timewave" results. The graph shows at what time periods, but never at what locations, novelty increases or decreases.
Considered by some to represent a model of history's most important events, the universal algorithm has also been extrapolated to be a model for future events. McKenna admitted to the expectation of a "singularity of novelty", and that he and his colleagues projected many hundreds of years into the future to find when this singularity (runaway "newness" or
extropy) could occur.
Millenarians give more credence to Novelty theory as a way to predict the future (especially regarding
2012) than McKenna himself. The graph of
extropy had many enormous fluctuations over the last 25,000 years, but amazingly, it hit an
asymptote at exactly December 21, 2012.
In other words, entropy (or habituation) no longer exists after that date. It is impossible to define that state. The
technological singularity concept parallels this, only at a date roughly three decades later. According to leading expert
Ray Kurzweil), another concept called
cultural singularity (essentially cultural dissolution, or language dissolution, as in the novel
Just a Couple of Days), parallels this as well.
Terence claimed to have no knowledge of the
Mayan calendar, which
ends one day before the Timewave graph does, on December 21, 2012. This claim is likely to be true, as McKenna's timewave theory was published in
The Invisible Landscape 12 years before
José Argüelles's
The Mayan Factor, the book which brought the Mayan calendar into public consciousness.
The library fire
On
February 7,
2007, Terence McKenna's library of rare books and personal notes was destroyed in a fire started in an Alvarado Street
Quizno's sandwich shop in
Monterey, California. The fire moved on to include
Goomba’s Italian Restaurant, a
Starbucks, and some storage offices belonging to Big Sur’s
Esalen Institute, a human potential movement and upscale New Age resort.
Esalen lost little of their own archives, the vast bulk of which were residing elsewhere, but the offices did store the library of Terence McKenna, awaiting plans for their installation and integration to McKenna's favored Esalen. An
index of McKenna’s collection (maintained by his brother
Dennis) survives, though little else.
In the words of Erik Davis:
"But even this valuable document won't replace the body of knowledge itself — a body that had become, in the weird ways of the memetic world, a kind of second body for Terence’s fabulous and fascinating mind. No budding head will ever be able to poke through this collection again, with its faintly perfumed volumes on
Chinese alchemy and
butterflies and
hash."
Also among the lost library were:
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
Spoken Word
TechnoPagans at the End of History (transcription of rap with Mark Pesce from 1998)
Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1999)
Alien Dreamtime with Spacetime Continuum & Stephen Kent (Magic Carpet Media) (CD & DVD)
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) ACEFurther Information
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