55 Facts About Terence McKenna

Terence Kemp McKenna was an American ethnobotanist and mystic who advocated for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants.

Terence McKenna spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, ethnomycology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness.

Terence McKenna was born and raised in Paonia, Colorado, with Irish ancestry on his father's side of the family.

At the age of 14, Terence McKenna first became aware of magic mushrooms when he read the article "Seeking the Magic Mushroom" from the May 13,1957 edition of LIFE magazine.

At age 16 Terence McKenna moved to Los Altos, California to live with family friends for a year.

Terence McKenna said that one of his early psychedelic experiences with morning glory seeds showed him "that there was something there worth pursuing", and in interviews he claimed to have smoked cannabis daily since his teens.

In 1965, Terence McKenna enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley and was accepted into the Tussman Experimental College.

In 1969, Terence McKenna traveled to Nepal led by his interest in Tibetan painting and hallucinogenic shamanism.

Terence McKenna sought out shamans of the Tibetan Bon tradition, trying to learn more about the shamanic use of visionary plants.

In La Chorrera, at the urging of his brother, Terence McKenna was the subject of a psychedelic experiment in which the brothers attempted to "bond harmine DNA with their own neural DNA", through the use of a set specific vocal techniques.

Terence McKenna claimed the experiment put him in contact with "Logos": an informative, divine voice he believed was universal to visionary religious experience.

Terence McKenna often referred to the voice as "the mushroom", and "the teaching voice" amongst other names.

Terence McKenna began lecturing locally around Berkeley and started appearing on some underground radio stations.

Terence McKenna's main focus was on the plant-based psychedelics such as psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, cannabis, and the plant derivative DMT.

Terence McKenna conducted lecture tours and workshops promoting natural psychedelics as a way to explore universal mysteries, stimulate the imagination, and re-establish a harmonious relationship with nature.

Terence McKenna repeatedly stressed the importance and primacy of the "felt presence of direct experience", as opposed to dogma.

Terence McKenna soon became a fixture of popular counterculture with Timothy Leary once introducing him as "one of the five or six most important people on the planet" and with comedian Bill Hicks' referencing him in his stand-up act and building an entire routine around his ideas.

Terence McKenna published several books in the early-to-mid-1990s including: The Archaic Revival; Food of the Gods; and True Hallucinations.

Terence McKenna was a colleague and close friend of chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham, and author and biologist Rupert Sheldrake.

Terence McKenna conducted several public and many private debates with them from 1982 until his death.

In 1985, Terence McKenna founded Botanical Dimensions with his then-wife, Kathleen Harrison.

Terence McKenna was involved until 1992, when he retired from the project, following his and Kathleen's divorce earlier in the year.

Terence McKenna was a longtime sufferer of migraines, but on 22 May 1999 he began to have unusually extreme and painful headaches.

Terence McKenna was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer.

In late 1999, Terence McKenna described his thoughts concerning his impending death to interviewer Erik Davis:.

An index of Terence McKenna's library was preserved by his brother Dennis.

Terence McKenna studied Lepidoptera and entomology in the 1960s, and his studies included hunting for butterflies, primarily in Colombia and Indonesia, creating a large collection of insect specimens.

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, ayahuasca, and DMT, which he believed was the apotheosis of the psychedelic experience.

Terence McKenna always stressed the responsible use of psychedelic plants, saying:.

Terence McKenna recommended, and often spoke of taking, what he called "heroic doses", which he defined as five grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms, taken alone, on an empty stomach, in silent darkness, and with eyes closed.

Terence McKenna believed that when taken this way one could expect a profound visionary experience, believing it is only when "slain" by the power of the mushroom that the message becomes clear.

Terence McKenna put forward the idea that psychedelics were "doorways into the Gaian mind", suggesting that "the planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being" and that the psychedelic plants were the facilitators of this communication.

Terence McKenna spoke of hallucinations while on DMT in which he claims to have met intelligent entities he described as "self-transforming machine elves".

Terence McKenna was opposed to Christianity and most forms of organized religion or guru-based forms of spiritual awakening, favouring shamanism, which he believed was the broadest spiritual paradigm available, stating that:.

Terence McKenna was an early proponent of the technological singularity and in his last recorded public talk, Psychedelics in the age of intelligent machines, he outlined ties between psychedelics, computation technology, and humans.

Terence McKenna became enamored with the Internet, calling it "the birth of [the] global mind", believing it to be a place where psychedelic culture could flourish.

Terence McKenna once said that he would have become a Nabokov lecturer if he had never encountered psychedelics.

Terence McKenna based his theory on the effects, or alleged effects, produced by the mushroom while citing studies by Roland Fischer et al.

Terence McKenna stated that, due to the desertification of the African continent at that time, human forerunners were forced from the shrinking tropical canopy into search of new food sources.

Terence McKenna believed they would have been following large herds of wild cattle whose dung harbored the insects that, he proposed, were undoubtedly part of their new diet, and would have spotted and started eating Psilocybe cubensis, a dung-loving mushroom often found growing out of cowpats.

Terence McKenna's hypothesis was that low doses of psilocybin improve visual acuity, particularly edge detection, meaning that the presence of psilocybin in the diet of early pack hunting primates caused the individuals who were consuming psilocybin mushrooms to be better hunters than those who were not, resulting in an increased food supply and in turn a higher rate of reproductive success.

At these higher doses, Terence McKenna argued that psilocybin would be triggering activity in the "language-forming region of the brain", manifesting as music and visions, thus catalyzing the emergence of language in early hominids by expanding "their arboreally evolved repertoire of troop signals".

Terence McKenna believed that psilocybin mushrooms were the "evolutionary catalyst" from which language, projective imagination, the arts, religion, philosophy, science, and all of human culture sprang.

Terence McKenna's "stoned ape" theory has not received attention from the scientific community and has been criticized for a relative lack of citation to any of the paleoanthropological evidence informing our understanding of human origins.

Terence McKenna's ideas regarding psilocybin and visual acuity have been criticized as misrepresentations of Fischer et al.

Terence McKenna's idea was that the universe is an engine designed for the production and conservation of novelty and that as novelty increases, so does complexity.

When examining the King Wen sequence of 64 hexagrams, Terence McKenna noticed a pattern.

Terence McKenna analysed the "degree of difference" between the hexagrams in each successive pair and claimed he found a statistical anomaly, which he believed suggested that the King Wen sequence was intentionally constructed, with the sequence of hexagrams ordered in a highly structured and artificial way, and that this pattern codified the nature of time's flow in the world.

Terence McKenna was able to graph the data and this became the Novelty Time Wave.

Terence McKenna called this fractal modeling of time "temporal resonance", proposing it implied that larger intervals, occurring long ago, contained the same amount of information as shorter, more recent, intervals.

Terence McKenna suggested the up-and-down oscillation of the wave shows an ongoing wavering between habit and novelty respectively.

Terence McKenna believed that events in history could be identified that would help him locate the time wave end date and attempted to find the best-fit of the graph to the data field of human history.

Population growth, peak oil, and pollution statistics were some of the factors that pointed him to an early twenty-first century end date and when looking for a particularly novel event in human history as a signal that the final phase had begun Terence McKenna picked the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Terence McKenna saw the universe, in relation to novelty theory, as having a teleological attractor at the end of time, which increases interconnectedness and would eventually reach a singularity of infinite complexity.

Judy Corman, vice president of the Phoenix House of New York, attacked Terence McKenna for popularizing "dangerous substances".