Subject: The works of Terence McKenna on the WWWeb

From: [email-masked] (dogmas rivals chide)
Date: 26 Feb 1996 22:41:32 GMT

A WWWeb page devoted to the works of Terence McKenna:

	http://www.nepenthes.xo.com/McKenna/index.html

Featuring:

	* The Mushroom Speaks -- from Oss & Oeric's "Psilocybin: The Magic
	  Mushroom Growers Guide</CITE></a>.  "The mushroom which you see is
	  the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing, my true
	  body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These
	  networks may cover acres and may have far more connections than the
	  number in a human brain."

	* The High Times Interview -- by David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen,
	  published in the April 1992 issue of High Times.  "At still higher
	  doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming
	  capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision.  Psilocybin
	  may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic
	  organization out of primitive protohuman animals.  It can be seen as
	  a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst."

	* Re: Evolution -- the spoken word portion of track ten of the "Boss
	  Drum" CD from Shamen.  "What shamans have to do is act as exemplars,
	  by making this cosmic journey to the domain of the Gaian ideas, and
	  then bringing them back in the form of art to the struggle to save
	  the world."

	* Time and Mind -- the transcript of a McKenna workshop in New Mexico
	  in May of 1990.  "They proceed to sing objects into existence.
	  Amazing objects. Objects that are Faberg&eacute; Eggs, things made
	  of pearl, and metal, and glass, and gel, and you, when you're shown
	  one of these things, a single one of them, you look at it and you
	  know, without a shadow of a doubt, in the moment of looking at this
	  thing, that if it were right here, right now, this world would go
	  mad.  It's like something falling out of the mind of God -- such
	  objects /do/ not exist in this universe, and yet, you're looking at
	  it."

	* Alien Dreamtime -- a transcript of Terence McKenna's spoken word
	  performance with Spacetime Continuum at the Transmission theater in
	  San Francisco, February 1993.  "The psychedelic experience is an
	  experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet, and
	  without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies,
	  but with that experience, the compass of the self can be set."

	* New Maps of Hyperspace -- a talk given at the invitation of Ruth and
	  Arthur Young of the Berkeley Institute for the Study of
	  Consciousness in 1984.  "We are not primarily biological, with mind
	  emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the
	  higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial
	  objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in
	  matter is our physical organism."

	* The Oversoul as Saucer -- what was to be chapter twenty of True
	  Hallucinations.  "The saucer, no matter how alien it appears, no
	  matter how advanced its demonstrations of power, is /not/ a vehicle
	  from some other star system, it is the oversoul of humanity up to
	  its oldest trick. If one knows this one can live through the
	  revelation and the destruction of our scientific world and yet evade
	  the immense power of this most powerful of all transference
	  phenomenon and thereby maintain the integrity of one's own soul and
	  spirit."

	* Open Ending -- what was to be chapter twenty-one of True
	  Hallucinations.  "Indeed, the vast and dreamy world that we call
	  imagination, or the unconscious, may merge imperceptibly into
	  autonomously existing worlds we would call 'hyperdimensional,'
	  indicating the paradox of their simultaneous invisibility and their
	  here-and-nowness in the psilocybin trance with a presence which
	  belies the term hallucination."

	* Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness -- A talk given at the
	  Lilly/Goswami Conference on Consciousness and Quantum Physics at
	  Esalen, December 1983.  "We are going to discover the plasticity,
	  the mutability, the eternal nature of the mind and, I believe,
	  release it from the monkey. My vision of the final human future is
	  an effort to exteriorize the soul and internalize the body, so that
	  the exterior soul will exist as a superconducting lens of
	  translinguistic matter generated out of the body of each of us at a
	  critical juncture at our psychedelic bar mitzvah."

	* Terence McKenna interviewed by Gracie & Zarkov -- from Mondo 2000
	  "You've heard me talk about meme wars, and how, if we could have a
	  level playing field, these ideas would do very well. The theory I'm
	  putting forth -- to disprove it you would have to get your feet wet
	  and get stoned. Anybody who doesn't want to do that should rule
	  themselves off the case."

	* The Non-Ordinary Conhibition Rhetoric of Terence McKenna -- an
	  excerpt from "Non-Ordinary States Through Vision Plants."  "We're
	  playing with half a deck as long as we tolerate that the cardinals
	  of government and science should dictate where human curiosity can
	  legitimately send its attention and where it cannot.  What we're
	  talking about here is the repression of a religious sensibility. In
	  fact not 'a' religious sensibility, /the/ religious sensibility. Not
	  built on some con game spun out by eunuchs, but based on the
	  symbiotic relationship that was in place for our species for 50,000
	  years before the advent of history riding priestcraft and
	  propaganda."

	* Richard Evans Schultes reviews "Food of the Gods" -- from "American
	  Scientist" September/October 1993.  "It is, without question,
	  destined to play a major role in our future considerations of the
	  role of the ancient use of psychoactive drugs, the historical
	  shaping of our modern concerns about drugs and perhaps about man's
	  desire for escape from reality with drugs."

	* The DMT Experience -- an excerpt from "Food of the Gods."  "The
	  world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible
	  Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with
	  complex and wordless awe.  Color and the sense of a
	  reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience.  There is a
	  sense of other times, and of one's own infancy, and of wonder, wonder
	  and more wonder.  It is an audience with the alien nuncio."

	* Timewave Zero and Language. -- "Each one of us is a word of
	  approximately 700,000,000 characters, and this word is made flesh
	  when the sperm and the egg form a zygote and the DNA textural
	  message is downloaded into matter.  Now we are on the brink of
	  decoding the human genome, and the end result of this is that the
	  flesh will be made word."

	* Dream Matrix Telemetry.  -- "Jewelled, self-dribbling basketballs
	  that bound forward, Chirping fractal denizens of the unconscious.
	  They surround you, singing in a visible language and they use that
	  language to produce objects."

	* Live in New York.  -- "We have to stop waiting for the revelation to
	  come from CNN or Time Magazine, and get lives!  And what getting
	  lives means is ignoring the idiotic laws that would dictate to us
	  the kind of states of mind that we can entertain."

	* Mushrooms, Sex, and Society. -- "Basically, I think of the ego like
	  a tumor in the psyche that will form unless there is the presence of
	  psilocybin.  For a hundred thousand years, nobody went longer than a
	  month without having this boundary-dissolving experience.  After the
	  psilocybin faded, the ego was able to get hold and then eventually
	  redefine the whole personality around it."

	* The Camden Centre Talk. -- "These psychedelic substances are not
	  private, peripheral, ancillary, cultish, esoteric, meaningless,
	  self-indulgent, narcissistic, or obscure; they are in fact central
	  to understanding how what we call 'human-ness' actually came to be
	  in the first place."

	* A Weekend With Terence McKenna. -- "What's right here, and from here
	  out is this thing which, no matter how much science fiction you've
	  done, no matter how much William Burroughs you've read, no matter
	  how much time you've spent in the company of the weird, the bizarre,
	  the outre, and the peculiar, you weren't ready.  And it's completely
	  real."

	* A Weekend With Terence McKenna (opening lecture). -- "Science is
	  excellent at doing what it was designed to do, but it has expanded
	  its province into all reality and seeks to pass judgment in areas
	  where it has no real business going.  It's a very limited method
	  that achieves its claim to universality by wildly exaggerating its
	  accomplishments."

	* The Great Timestream Bifurcation -- from Psychedelic Illuminations
	  #6.  "Psychedelic compounds amplify the very slight leakage of
	  information from this other dimension.  In the same way that they
	  found us, we can find them by taking psychedelic mushrooms and
	  opening ourselves to the information pouring through from the
	  alternative time stream."

	* Ordinary and Visible Language and Virtual Reality. -- "The starships
	  of the future, which will explore the high frontier of the unknown
	  will be syntactical.  The engineers of the future will be poets.
	  This is what virtual reality holds out to us -- the possibility of
	  walking in to the constructs of the imagination."

	* The Satanic Spirit of Science -- (an excerpt from Chapter 6 of
	  "Trialogues at the Edge of the West" by McKenna, Ralph Abraham and
	  Rupert Sheldrake).  "Linearity in print and thought has made
	  language unable to deal with the invisible world in any meaningful
	  way, except as pathology.  Now this invisible world is returning to
	  the language through people like us with one foot in each world."

	* Spacetime Tsunami -- an interview with Terence McKenna from bOING
	  bOING #10.  "It's going to happen -- the egg shell is breaking.  The
	  womb is ruptured, and there is no way out now but some kind of
	  journey down the very frightening birth-canal of experience.  The
	  next 30 years will stand your hair on end, guaranteed, because it's
	  barely begun."

	* Terence McKenna Interviewed on CompuServe. -- "The shaman has pretty
	  much the same function in all times and places; that of a
	  go-between, someone who can actually leave behind the conventions of
	  the group, the conventionalized linguistic space, and journey
	  instead into the supramundane world, a kind of hyperspace where
	  'real' power is available."

	* The Approaching Timewave Zero. -- "Time, like light, may best be
	  described as a union of opposites.  Time may be both wave and,
	  ultimately, particle, each in some sense a reflection of the other.
	  The same holographic properties that have long been an accepted part
	  of the phenomenon of the perception of three-dimensional space also
	  suggest that interference patterns are characteristic of process."

	* Derivation of the Timewave from the King Wen Sequence of Hexagrams.
	  -- "The idea that time is experienced as a series of identifiable
	  elements in flux is highly developed in the I Ching.  Indeed the
	  temporal modeling of the I Ching offers an extremely well-developed
	  alternative to the 'flat-duration' point of view."

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From: [email-masked] (Stamets 1)
Date: 29 Feb 1996 11:25:51 -0500

Terence McKenna is far from being a moron. 

paul stamets

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From: [email-masked] (Don Wheeler)
Date: 1 Mar 1996 16:31:25 -0800

Terrence Mckenna does have some pretty far out theories, but I think 
calling the guy a "moron" is unjustified.  He's actually quite intelligent.