I didn't get to meet Terrence McKenna while he was alive. I was, however, a grateful recipient of his writing, placing me squarely in the path of influence of his immense linguistic facility and playfulness, which was deployed in service to a vision of consciousness that was as deeply strange as it was plant-inflected. In the lineage of the great ethno-botanist Richard Evans Schultes, and like Shultes' student Wade Davis, McKenna made his way to the Amazon, in addition to other places around the world, to apprentice himself to plants. In 1992, in a book called Food of the Gods, he promulgated a theory, which became known as the Stoned Ape theory, which was Mckenna's claim that the deep origin of the human species, the transition from Homo Erectus to Sapiens, and the concomitant revolution in consciousness that he proposed was of a cognitive nature, occurred as a result of earlier humans ingesting Psilocybe cubensis, a type of psilocybin-containing mushroom that likes to grow in cow dung. McKenna proposed that sometime around 100,000 years ago, when our Homo Erectus ancestors were following herds across the savannah, we began eating psychedelic mushrooms that grew in the dung in their wake. This, he proposes, is the origin of human consciousness.
I didn't know McKenna personally, but I have friends who did. The stories I have been told about him, including a number of stories that he, as well as his brother Dennis wrote about, make numerous mentions of him taking what is probably an unfortunate choice of words to describe this activity, but is nonetheless known as taking heroic doses of hallucinogens. A heroic dose, which I would propose to you that without proper guidance is more likely to be a foolish, dose of psychedelics, is one large enough, generally speaking, to dissolve the containment structure that has become known to most of us through therapy-speak as ego.
McKenna, by his own admission, had a propensity to take extraordinarily large doses of psychedelics without guidance. He was a self-described psychonaut, fearless, perhaps to his own detriment. One of the problems, for someone who is deeply cerebral, in taking immense doses of hallucinogens outside of the context of a wisdom lineage, and without proper guidance, is that it is somewhat like getting into a rocket ship that you cannot steer, and blasting off, and we have a hard time not attributing significance to what passes by the window of such a cosmological transit. Yet you could end up literally anywhere in the universe on such a trip.
The structure of consciousness can be so altered, in these experiences– what we sense, feel, see, and interpret as a result of them so deeply otherwordly and potent- that it is not difficult to believe what we have experienced is real. I have been told stories about people who traveled to the Amazon to drink Ayahuasca with shamans there, and encountered, in consciousness, a type of lizard being that announced itself as a sovereign force in the universe, and then explained, in vivid and minute detail, how nothing in the universe is real. At the end of this experience, rather profoundly shaken, the traveller shares it back to the shaman in detail as a kind of quasi-revelatory apocalyptic celestial reportage. The shaman's response: Ah, you met the lizards. This is the same thing they say to everyone. None of it is true.
How reassuring. The most vivid experience of your life a hallucination. You can't believe everything you think, or everything you are told. I am the lizard king, I can do any thing. No, in fact you are not.
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