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Terence Mckenna and his ideas today

"And anyone with the inability to separate the literal from fiction have built some pretty nasty jail cells around themselves. That kind of rigidity kills."

Doesn't anyone else see the contradiction in that?
 
I'm looking forward to Dennis McKenna's speech at EGA this year. Seems like an interesting chap; though I would dearly have loved to hear Terence talk. His voice- I used to find it unbelievably annoying (too much shpongle :)) but after listening to heaps of his oratories and reading his books, it grew on me- he has a strange hypnotic ccadence to his voice.
 
I think some of McKenna's ideas are absolutely brilliant. And I think some of his ideas are completely stupid and ridiculous. He's the only guy I have this opinion about! (most of the time everything a smart person says is more or less smart, and everything a stupid person says is more or less stupid)

I'll start with the one I think is stupid, TimeWave Zero and the acceleration of time and the end of the world at 2012 and all this stuff. Basically everything he was working on the last 5 years of his life. All this stuff is totally irrational and not based on evidence, a real departure from his previous genius that I find regrettable because it stops people from finding out about his really interesting ideas. It's still hard for me to believe a man whose intelligence I admire championed a doomsday hypothesis... how embarrassing. And sadly this idea has enjoyed some success in the psychedelic community. Other people have written books connecting psychedelics to a 2012 apocalypse, such as Daniel Pinchbeck. In an area of life so important for human health, and so crippled by lies and superstitions, another piece of irrationality was really the last thing we needed.

Now for what I like about him. First his ability to cogently describe the experience and give "Trip Reports" is very, very impressive, especially to someone who reads a lot of trip reports on Erowid and sees how incoherent most of them are. Absolutely classic is his description of his first DMT experience. And all of his descriptions of his interactions with "The Mushroom" as he calls it are edifying.

The best thing he did, in my view, is the theory about the origin of human consciousness that he puts forth in his book Food of the Gods. The idea that mushrooms, with their remarkable tendency to increase neuronal connectivity and engender creative expression, were responsible for the sudden explosion in the size of hominid brains (the single biggest mystery in evolutionary biology), is an idea that has occurred to many people, but the way McKenna put it down and supported it with archaeological evidence was a tremendous contribution. I don't know any mainstream biologist who has put forth an explanation even remotely plausible for the sudden swelling of the human brain, which happened in just a few seconds in evolutionary time scales, McKenna's is the only one that is consistent with the evidence. And of course his theory is completely ignored by mainstream evolutionary biology. Which is really astonishing when you think about it - just because the government made a certain plant illegal, scientists with less courage than McKenna simply refuse to even consider it in their theories! I defy any biologist to look at his evidence and not be convinced.

I've also gotten a ton of interesting other ideas from him about drugs and society. The idea that culture essentially brainwashes you and controls you and psychedelics are the way to free yourself from cultural programming. The idea of foods and drugs not being separate categories, but just different phases along the same spectrum, different types of the same thing, substances that interact with the body. And lots of other interesting ideas! McKenna is my favorite psychedelic writer, I like how his approach is scientific yet openminded. But my favorite thing about him is just the clarity with which he describes the completely strange and unusual experiences he's had with psychedelics.
 
^^^^Hmm..

In regards to the 2012 such and such...

Pinchbeck (whom I have had a few conversations with) does not believe the world is coming to an end but rather that 2012 is an effective framework through which to pursue personal transformative experiences and to attempt to bring about a shift in consciousness (both yours and those around you). Very much a disciple of Leary and Wilson's concept of "reality tunnels", you choose your experiences/perceptions and the 2012 framework is one such "tunnel" if that makes any sense.

Dennis McKenna (in a recent lecture I saw) did not claim 2012 was the end but rather a stage of transformation for the human race. These are not doomsday scenarios or proclamations that time will terminate but rather a proposal for a global shift in human consciousness.

I may be wrong but this is what i have gleamed by the lectures/conversations I have heard by these two. Both realize the absurdity, but they view it as a functional framework, they believe in the ideas of rational science but tinker with various perceptive modes in order to alter themselves and the world around them. Like Robert Anton Wilson I think they recognize the inherent absurdity of any "belief system" or as Wilson abbreviated B.S. Don't take anything seriously but follow many things passionately has been my personal philosophy, and one I think these fantastic thinkers engaged in.
 
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Didn't Terence and/or Dennis have harmaline permanently fused to their neurons (according to them) by some kind of sound-wave machine?
 
demons said:
I think some of McKenna's ideas are absolutely brilliant. And I think some of his ideas are completely stupid and ridiculous. He's the only guy I have this opinion about! (most of the time everything a smart person says is more or less smart, and everything a stupid person says is more or less stupid)

.
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Some of the most intelligent people I know know can be very stupid sometimes, usually when it comes to things that dont need intelligence8)
 
ControlDenied said:
Didn't Terence and/or Dennis have harmaline permanently fused to their neurons (according to them) by some kind of sound-wave machine?
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Allegedly Dennis merged harmine to his DNA in La Chorrera- I cN'T remember the exact specirfics of the machine they used, but I know a living mushroom was kind of like the rocket fuel. He also went completely insane for two weeks. A brilliantly weird psychedelic tale, but.....??
 
Psychedelic Gleam said:
^^^^Hmm..

In regards to the 2012 such and such...

Pinchbeck (whom I have had a few conversations with) does not believe the world is coming to an end but rather that 2012 is an effective framework through which to pursue personal transformative experiences and to attempt to bring about a shift in consciousness (both yours and those around you). Very much a disciple of Leary and Wilson's concept of "reality tunnels", you choose your experiences/perceptions and the 2012 framework is one such "tunnel" if that makes any sense.

Dennis McKenna (in a recent lecture I saw) did not claim 2012 was the end but rather a stage of transformation for the human race. These are not doomsday scenarios or proclamations that time will terminate but rather a proposal for a global shift in human consciousness.

I may be wrong but this is what i have gleamed by the lectures/conversations I have heard by these two. Both realize the absurdity, but they view it as a functional framework, they believe in the ideas of rational science but tinker with various perceptive modes in order to alter themselves and the world around them. Like Robert Anton Wilson I think they recognize the inherent absurdity of any "belief system" or as Wilson abbreviated B.S. Don't take anything seriously but follow many things passionately has been my personal philosophy, and one I think these fantastic thinkers engaged in.
Click to expand...

I may be wrong on Pinchbeck. I don't know about Dennis. I just know I saw a Terence lecture where he said time would end a few seconds after jan 1 2012 or something, and it sounded like a doomsday prediction to me. This was just so laughable for me and it made me feel bad someone so smart had fallen down. I mean, this is what people have been saying continuously throughout history. Every ten years or so has been a date marked off by some cult or other narrowminded person for the apocalypse. It's such a dim view of the universe. The fact is YOU are going to die and end and be no more, not the universe. The universe shows no sign of stopping, but people can't accept their own forlorn deaths. I remember in one talk McKenna saying with all sincerity "I mean can you possibly imagine what the world will be like in 50 years? It's inconceivable!" He was implying this means the world will end, just because he can't imagine what it will be like! Could a 5th-century peasant have imagined the world as it is? And yet here we are.

As for the idea you describe, a mass shift in consciousness. It seems to me changes are usually incremental and slowly build on each other. There is nothing special about 2012 or any other calender date that means sudden change. The calender is a human contrivance. All date/time designations are completely arbitrary, made by human decisions.
 
^The date was 21 Decmeber 2012. His theory, while its pretty harebrained, had a bit more merit then time ending a few sensonds after... not much more, but a bit. :). I think Terence should be regarded as a inovative and provocative thinker- reading and listening to him has certainly given me much food for thought, and some of it is substantial and nourishing.
 
holy shit they just talked about Terence Mckenna and time wave zero on this history channel show "Decoding the Past"

big ups to mr. mckenna!!!
 
I personally love Terence and feel he was a genius.

When I went to Peru, one of my intentions was to try to find out if there was something to the 2012 ideas (for a comprehensive and serious look at all the theories I suggest the book "Beyond 2012" by Geoff Stray )

While I don't pretend my personal experiences are applicable to anyone else, one of my ayahuasca experiences was directly related to these ideas. It was a bit like a technological singularity, with information/technology doubling on a logarithmic scale. If there ever was to be a "dimensional shift in consciousness" whether in 2012 or otherwise, I think DMT could be a catalyst or correlate.

This is from an email I sent to my friend while I was in Peru describing the experience related to 2012:

The second time I dosed lower as the first time was crazy intense
and this time I felt almost sober for the longest time and then
like a theif in the night it hit me. The ayahuasca reality
overlayed with the normal one and I couldnt seperate the two. It
was the end of the world, 2012 came early and everything
(technology, time) was doubling on itself every second. Computer
screens materializing in mid-air, asian androids popping out of
nowhere and disintegrating. There is no way to explain how
completely visually intense and crazy this reality was. Its still a
blur. It was probably the most difficult thing I have every been
through, because I felt I had "missed the boat" and the universe I
was in was set to disintegrate my soul with it (forget ego or
physical death, this was to be the end of my very soul). This is
very much like the end of the second matrix movie now that I think
of it. The scary part was that I was still convinced of this AFTER
the ceremony was over! Talk about pain and sadness, but it was good
to go through it. It wasnt until I woke up the next day that things
were back to "normal".
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One thing I know, if 2012 rolls around and its business at usual, on 12/21/12 at 11:11 am, the exact minute of the solstice, I'm going to load up a huge hit of DMT/5-MeO-DMT and create my own singularity, the rest of the world be damned! :p ;)


*edit, I just noticed this was my 666th post and at exactly 11:11, cue twilight zone music :)
 
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^As an interesting statistic about Terence- he only smoked DMT about 30 times in his life (he was too intimidated by it) and would use mushrooms (5 gram doses-dry of course) once or twice a month. He advocated higher, less freqeusnt dosing. Incidentally, these facts were heard in some psy torrent speech ABOUT mckenna, so these facts could be utter bullshit. Probably are, I should probably warn and ban myself for mentioning them. But there you have it, I and most PD DMT-elves have probably smoked more then the Nasal gnosis himself.
 
If anyone on here is a McKenna fan with some free time, I urge you to read Doors of Perception. And if you are a McKenna hater, maybe this book will help you appreciate him just a little bit more.
 
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