Terence McKenna
Terence McKenna
Terence Kemp McKennawas an American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. He was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s", "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism", and the "intellectual voice of rave culture"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth16 November 1946
CityPaonia, CO
CountryUnited States of America
Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence. A situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land all were in dynamic balance and not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed, poetry may have been at its climax, dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy. There's no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today and it was under the boundary dissolving influence of psilocybin.
What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.
So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.
The thing that is so powerful about the psychedelics is that they perform on demand, which almost in principle you cannot expect of a mystical experience because that would be essentially man ordering God at man's whim, which is not how it's supposed to work.
One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available.
History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.
To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back.
One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.
Memory training is great psychedelic training.
The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.
Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination.
Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.
Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.
Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I'm noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating.