Jump to content

Terence McKenna

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Grimlock (talk | contribs) at 14:52, 23 February 2007 (+interwiki). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16 1946 – April 3 2000) was a writer and philosopher[citation needed]. He was notable for his many speculations on subjects ranging from the Voynich Manuscript to the origins of the human species to Novelty theory, which claims time to be a fractal wave of increasing novelty, which culminates dramatically in 2012. His concept appeared to involve a combination of hallucinogenic chemical agents, Gaianism, and shamanism.

Biography

Terence McKenna grew up in a small, highly religious town in western Colorado. Unusually poor eyesight forced him to wear bifocals at an early age. This and his nonathletic nature made him an outcast, and he spent much of his childhood alone. He was introduced to the subject of geology by his uncle and developed a hobby of solitary fossil hunting in the arroyos near his home. From this he developed a deeply artistic and scientific appreciation of nature.

McKenna was first informed of psychedelics by the writings of Aldous Huxley. His first direct experience with them came when he ate several packets of commercially produced morning glory seeds (containing the relatively mild but undoubtedly psychedelic chemical known as LSA or Ergine), an experience he claimed set the direction of his life.

After graduating from high school, McKenna enrolled in U.C. Berkeley. He moved to San Francisco in The Summer Of Love before his classes began, and was introduced to cannabis and LSD by Barry Melton, who happened to be rooming in the apartment opposite his.

In 1969 Terence received a B.S. in Ecology and Conservation from the Tussman Experimental College, a short-lived outgrowth of the Berkeley campus. He spent the years after his graduation teaching English in Japan, traveling through India and south Asia; smuggling hashish and collecting butterflies for biological supply companies.

Following the death of his mother in 1971 Terence, his brother Dennis, and three others traveled to the Colombian Amazon in search of oo-koo-hé, a plant preparation containing DMT. At La Chorrera, at the urging of his brother, he allowed himself to be the subject of a psychedelic experiment which he claimed put him in contact with Logos: an informative, hallucinatory voice he believed was universal to visionary religious experience. The revelations of this voice prompted him to explore the structure of an early form of the I Ching, which led to his Novelty Theory.

For most of the 1970s McKenna maintained a low profile, living in a nondescript suburban home, supporting his lifestyle with the royalties from the Magic Mushroom Growers Guide, and the cultivation and sale of psilocybin mushrooms. He said that he was frightened out of this line of work, and into public speaking by the harsh penalties the war on drugs exacted from his colleagues. He himself was once wanted by Interpol for drug trafficking.

McKenna was a contemporary and colleague of Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, and Riane Eisler and participated in joint workshops and symposiums with them. He was a personal friend of Tom Robbins, and influenced the thought of numerous scientists, writers, artists, and entertainers.

He became a fixture of popular counterculture in his later years. Timothy Leary once introduced him as “the real Tim Leary”. He contributed to psychedelic and goa trance albums by The Shamen, Spacetime Continuum, Alien Project, Zuvuya and Shpongle, and his speeches were sampled by many others. In 1993 he appeared as a speaker at the Starwood Festival, which was documented in the book Tripping by Charles Hayes[1] (his lectures were produced on both cassette tape and CD). He was a skilled orator, and admired by his fans for his eloquence. While some of his presentations included verbatim repetitions of earlier material, his gift for extemporaneous speech allowed him to weave them into seamless performances that varied audience to audience. His responses to novel questions were usually as sophisticated and subtle as his prepared speech.

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, ancestor-worship (or, as he put it, contacting 'dead people'), and aesthetic theory (art/visual experience as 'information,' hence the significance of hallucinatory visions experienced under the influence of psychedelics). He advised the taking of psychedelics in relatively-to-extremely large doses (asserting that those who had only sampled psychedelics in small doses failed to access their full potential), particularly alone, in a dark space, without music or other forms of external stimulation. Philosophically and religiously, he expressed admiration for Marshall McLuhan, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Gnostic Christianity, and James Joyce (calling Finnegans Wake the best literary representation of the psychedelic experience). He remained opposed to all forms of organized religion or guru-based forms of spiritual awakening. He believed DMT was the apotheosis 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 both monotheism and monogamy), he was open to the idea of psychedelics as being 'trans-dimensional travel, literally,' enabling an individual to encounter what could be aliens, ghosts/ancestors, or spirits of the earth.

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

McKenna died in 2000 of glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. He was 53 years old. He is survived by his brother Dennis, his son Finn, and his daughter Klea.

The "Stoned Ape" theory 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 supposed that psilocybin's verified enhancement of visual acuity was instrumental in the human dominance over prey. He also argued that the effects of slightly larger doses, including a physical sexual arousal—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 drug 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. However, in McKenna's theory, the psilocybin-induced dominance of humans over other species remained, despite our supposed devolution.

McKenna did not attempt to defend his hypotheses through rigorous scientific evidence; he self-consciously identified as a type of shaman, or ethno-botanist. McKenna and his followers view his theories as speculation that is 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. In addition, McKenna (who described himself as "an explorer, not a scientist") was also a proponent of much wilder suppositions, such as his "Timewave Zero" theory. His theories are usually disregarded by scientists. A live recording of his "Stoned Ape" theory can be found on the CD Conversations on the Edge of Magic (recorded live at the Starwood Festival).

Bibliography

  • 1975 - The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching (with Dennis McKenna) (Seabury Press; 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 (City of Tribes) (CD & Multi-Media Video)
  • Conversations on the Edge of Magic (1993) (CD & Cassette)
  • Rap-Dancing Into the Third Millennium (1993) (Cassette)
  • Packing For the Long Strange Trip (1993) (Cassette)

See also

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Terence_McKenna&oldid=110334293"