"Going through life without ever having a psychedelic experience is like going through life without ever having sex."
- Terence McKenna
The great technoshaman and psychedelic Columbus merged with the infinite at 2:15am Pacific on April 3, 2000.
Terence, I'll see you December 21, 2012.
Creator of various wacky/revolutionary ideas:
Related nodes:
Further reading:
General:
http://deoxy.org/mckenna.htm - Terence McKenna Land
http://nepenthes.lycaeum.org/McKenna/ - online texts
http://www.levity.com/eschaton/ - Terence's homepage
http://www.cmays.net/tmbib.shtml - Complete bibliography
Eschaton (End of the world):
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/index.html - The Singularity
http://www.levity.com/eschaton/finalillusion.html - Probabilities
DMT:
http://leda.lycaeum.org/?Table=Trips&Ref_ID=11 - Trip Reports
http://deoxy.org/hs_cehn.htm - Chemical Experiences of a Hyperspatial Nature
Books:
The Invisible Landscape
The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide
The Archaic Revival
True Hallucinations
Food Of The Gods
Obituary
On April 3, 2000 at 2:15 AM, Pacific Time, Terence McKenna, author, visionary, psychonaut, mathematician and rancanteur succumbed to brain cancer. One of the most vital of the 20th centuries' psychedelic proponents, McKenna had been ill since March 1999, when tests performed following a series of brain seizures revealed a malignant tumor in his brain. After what appeared to be a successful operation to remove the tumor last November, reports began to circulate that he was recovering with the help of both conventional Western and alternative therapies, but the illness was simply too catastrophic to overcome.
Born in 1946, McKenna, whom Timothy Leary himself once called "the Timothy Leary of the 90s," first came to public attention in 1976, when he and his brother Dennis published Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Growers' Guide, which remains one of the standards on the subject. He also authored, again with Dennis, The Invisible Landscape (1975), as well as The Archaic Revival (1992), Trialogues at the Edge of the West (with Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake) 1992; Food of the Gods (1992), a study of the impact of psychotropic plants on human culture and evolution, and True Hallucinations (1993) an account of his time in the Colombian Amazon. A native of Paonia, Colorado, and a graduate of Los Altos High School and the University of California at Berkeley, McKenna traveled extensively in Asia, Europe and South America.
In addition to writing, McKenna was a well-known and truly admired speaker at think tanks, conferences and universities around the world. He often worked as a live pundit at all-night rave parties and was a "scholar-in-residence" at the counterculture Esalen Institute on the Big Sur coast. Among his theories was the idea that consciousness, awareness of self, initially occurred when African protohumans, forced to forage on land after the Sahara Forest disappeared, consumed magic mushrooms. The self-awareness engendered by the mushrooms in turn needed expressing, which led to the development--in what would become the human branch of the primate family tree--of language.
Though his theories were always complex and frequently over-the-heads of his audience, he had a natural Irish wit and sense of communication that absolutely charmed those listening, whether they understood him or not. So profound was his belief in the importance of psychedelics to the development of human spirituality and evolution that with his first wife, Kathleen (Kat) McKenna, he started a preserve on Hawaii in the early 1990s with the intent of collecting and growing as many of the world's known psychotropic plants as possible, a project she continues to this day.
He is survived by his longtime companion, Christy Silness, of Kona, Hawaii, and by children Klea McKenna of Santa
Cruz, California and Finn McKenna of Jersey City, New Jersey.
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