A Deep Dive into the Mind of Terence McKenna

I really enjoyed it. One thing confuses me though. In an interview last year dennis remarked that him and terence did a lot of shamanic work that summer of 99' after he was diagnosed with cancer..and during this time terence said he couldnt take ayahuasca because the purging might initiate seizures..and also remarked that he had been given pure psilocybin. But, here we learn Terence never took mushrooms after that experience in the 80's... So what the hell were they doing down there all summer??? Lol

Beat writer Jack Keroac also became despondent from his public personna and intial creative radicalism at some point.

Jerry Garcia of "Grateful Dead" fame stopped beliving in "cosmic consciousness" also at a certain point {became much more conventional in his personal conscious revelations} even though to this day many still consider him as a promoter of such a more lofty premise.

Creative inspiration itself always seems to come in spurts. Most of us in the entheogenic world, including those coming from more indigenous traditions, surely understand at some point that such high and rare enlightening states are never meant to be confusingly mingled with our more day-to-day struggles ... not meant to be a "solution" of any kind ... beyond offering a glimpse into "infinite possibility"

As it is forever only our own "familiarity breeds contempt" mind set that attempts to make reasonable and rational that which of more "transcendental" nature.

Same with religions who seem to forever try to contain the unfathomable mystic experience into more conventional ritual and dogma.

Even in pop culture we try to project and perpetuate initial creative spurts of the given artist into ongoing personifications to worship and/or follow.

Especially in this age of mass media where there is so much scope for public adulation and/or scrutiny, many a now "public figure" has had to sometimes go to extremes just to again find or protect their more local and indigenous "sense of self" .. often with great difficulty and expense ... and there obviously have been many casualties along the way from such "mass exposure"

Trying to perpetuate "peak experience" or make it "the norm" has always been a potential problem for all of us, as creative and inspirational consciousness will always have more mystery than convention no matter how hard we try to make perpetuating lifestyles out of sporadic moments of ingenuity.

I'm still processing the revelations about Terence which so far have increased my sense of the complexity of the man and increased my fascination with his enigmatic character. Jung once said, "The larger the man, the larger the shadow." and no doubt 6'6" Jung, who had an often brutal personality, hoped the aphoristic principle would be applied to him. I can imagine Terence, who always revered Marshall McLuhan, rationalizing that the "messenger was the message" and therefore that he was justified in making his public persona an edited performance art that combined authentic and inauthentic elements. Although my love and fascination with Terence is increased by the revelation, I don't feel a need to gloss over it in a hagiographical blur of idealization either.

Shadow material, in my experience, is often the most revelatory. To mine the depth of meaning offered by this revelation, however, we need to step through the thousand petaled chrysanthemum, brush aside the self-transforming machine elves and their Faberge egg like creations for a moment and take an unflinching look at the shadow side.

First, it seems so appropriate that 2012, which so far has not been apocalyptic in either the conventional sense or in revelatory sense that the etymology of the word implies, would at least give us a somewhat dark revelation about the "man of 2012." The timing is perfect and works with the sense of Terence's life as performance art with a new act being revealed twelve years after he leaves the stage. When your life is performance art, and you really are inspired as Terence certainly was, you should expect that the performance will be beyond your control. Since Terence was such a great bard whose eloquence and story telling ability shimmered with alchemical brilliance, it is warranted to view the arc of his public life as a story structure with a key denouement delayed till 2012.

To appreciate the depth of the denouement, however, we first need to look at it in an unflattering light. Imagine this analogy---a celebrity is the official spokesperson for a neuropharmaceutical, say an antidepressant, and for years he extols its virtues and talks every chance he gets about how it changed his life. Prospective customers are urged to take it in heroic doses. Human evolution may depend on it. The endorser, however, fails to mention that a dozen years ago, the last time he took it, it sent him into a bout of suicidal despair. Since most of us don't like big pharma and its celebrity spokespersons we wouldn't hesitate to call such a person a liar and a hypocrite. If the spokesperson then died of a prozac-shaped brain tumor we might even call it poetic justice.

Although I've praised Terence, and continue to, as a visionary genius in a number of writings, I've also pointed out a flaw in his approach to esoteric research in those same writings. I pointed out some of the flaws in his reality testing to Terence's face on a few occasions and he responded to my challenges graciously and in a way that showed his large character and capacity for self-criticism. Terence, like so many, underestimated the trickster side of the unconscious. Even though he described the trickster nature of the self-transforming machine elves, he didn't quite realize that the voice of a mushroom goddess speaking in his head should be taken with as many grains of salt as the voice of God the Father speaking in the head of George W. Bush. This is why Timewave 2000 became his obsessive Bête noire. In the last public talk I ever saw him give, in Denver, about a year before he passed, Terrence said that if Timewave turned out to be wrong he would spend the next twenty years of his life trying to figure out why. As it turned out, he didn’t have those twenty years, but we do, and we need to integrate this other side of his character into everything he represents.

If you underestimate the trickster side of the unconscious you get tricked and especially you fall into the principle I coined years ago: “Wherever you cast your obsessive attention, there shall you find weird patterning.” Conspiracy types are especially prone to falling prey to this effect, which is rife in every area of esoteric research. Also, if you gain access to the energetic contents of the collective unconscious you are likely to have ego inflation, and will feel filled with a sense of special destiny, a sense of messianic purpose and a feverish desire to proselytize. Typically you will find that the gods and mystical forces seem to endorse your sexual agenda. Terence’s final mushroom experience, however, was humbling and disenchanting and perhaps that helped him to avoid some of those excesses.

If you underestimate the trickster side of the unconscious, if you think every synchronicity is a divine revelation, than you become tricked and ultimately you become a trickster. The archetype you didn’t understand and integrate functions in you as an autonomous complex and you trick yourself and others.

For more on the many trickster pitfalls and blind spots of esoteric research see: http://www.zaporacle.com/carnival-2012-a-psychological-study-of-the-2012... An account of a trickster laden encounter with Terence in 1996: http://www.zaporacle.com/a-mutant-convergence-how-john-major-jenkins-jon... Also everyone should read my friend George Hansen’s seminal work on the subject, The Trickster and the Paranormal http://www.tricksterbook.com/

Jonathan begins by saying, "I'm still processing the revelations about Terence ..." I doubt that 'revelations' is a correct description.

It should be noted that the claim that Terence never did mushrooms after a bad trip in 1988 or 1989 is based on an unauthorized public reading by Bruce Damer of an extract from an early version of an unfinished and unpublished book by Dennis McKenna, and the claimant is not identified, so we cannot make an estimate of reliability.

This claim has been used by some to attempt to discredit Terence, and Jonathan does him no service by assuming that it is true without waiting for the final version in Dennis's forthcoming book.

In any case, whether or not Terence did mushrooms much in the 1990s is irrelevant to the value of what he had to say to us. Terence is mainly regarded as a psychedelic advocate, which is why some people may be disappointed that his use of psychedelics (in the latter part of his life) was less than they had supposed, but his real value to us was as a trenchant critic of a (modern Western) civilization which has become insane and thereby diabolical (and which thus does not deserve our support) and (as I said in my earlier message) as a genuine prophet speaking to us by means of something like divine illumination, and pointing us toward a level of truth which psychedelics can enable some of us to know for ourselves by direct experience. For this he will long be remembered.

Jonathan Zap of zaporacle.com

Someone just sent me this youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ih4Fg6P730 of Terence talking with Ram Dass in Prague. There are a few minutes at the end that are so eerie, because they are so synchronistically relevant to this exact moment of Terence's career. It almost felt like Terence and Ram Dass (as psychologist and spirit guide) were doing a therapy session in the afterlife. During the dialogue, Terence seems a bit vulnerable. A trick of the lighting also seems to parallel their positions. Ram Dass seems adept at being in the spotlight and Terence appears to be shadowed.

At 35:55 Ram says, "My mantra is the Ghandi line: 'My life is my message.'

At 36:10 Terence says, "I think I'm at a little lower level because I'm very aware that I have to struggle to say that my life is my message. I would almost rather say my message is my message please don't look at my life because I'm a fallible human being and I'm constantly----"

Ram Dass (interrupting) "But you see how that weakens you, doesn't it? You see how that quality means that the message doesn't come from the root, the center. There is a way in which it waffles---"

Terence: "True"

Ram Dass: "Once I saw the possibility of that I said, 'Why waffle, what is worth holding on to that is worth waffling about?'"

Terence: "Well I once said to Leo Zeff...'Leo, you're finished, you're completed, you're baked. Me, I'm half baked. And I hope the rest of my life will finish the baking."

A few seconds later Terence raises his glass and says, "Here's to Mercurius!"

And perhaps this is Terence assigning his own epitaph. He shall remain a mercurial figure whose life waffled in relationship to message. And perhaps he was taken from us too soon, before the baking was finished.

Terence's prophetic statements are not over, however, at 39:28, the last half minute of the exchange he says,

"I think you are a prophet to be. I think we all are." Then he adds, "As Bilbo Baggins once said, 'The greatest adventure still lies ahead.' I believe that. I'll believe that when they lower my box."

There is a moment of farewell in which Ram Dass confesses, "I was afraid of you, up until now, now I'm delighted."

Terence responds with the very last line of the exchange,

"No, no, don't be afraid of me. The people who are afraid of me, don't know me, or they know me better than you ever will!"

As the honorable Peter Meyer said above, the final conclusion in Dennis book may reveal the source, but I for one know it is an 'impeccable source', according to Dennis. Get Part 7 of TMOM2012 - "The Vaudevillian Impulse" in the cinema of the Cognition Factor site; http://cognitionfactor.net best, Schwann Cybershaman Producer: TMOM2012 series