Terence McKenna's really BAD shroom trip

[Magical Realist]

"Terence’s pivotal existential crisis came abruptly. Sometime in ’88 or ’89. Everything that happened after that event was fallout. I don’t know exactly when it happened and I don’t know exactly what happened. I am piecing it together from what Kat has told me and she has volunteered few details and I am reluctant to probe. It happened when they were living for a time on the Big Island and it was a mushroom trip they shared that was absolutely terrifying for Terence. It was terrifying because, for some reason, the mushroom turned on him. The gentle, wise, humorous mushroom spirit that he had come to know and trust as an ally and teacher ripped back the facade to reveal an abyss of utter existential despair. Terence kept saying, so Kat told me, that it was, “a lack of all meaning, a lack of all meaning.” And this induced panic in Terence and probably, I speculate, a feeling that he was going mad. He couldn’t deal with it. Kat’s efforts to reassure him were fruitless. After that experience, he never again took mushrooms and he took other psychedelics such as DMT and Ayahuasca only on rare occasions and with great reluctance."

As for credible sources, I can’t think of what his brother would be seeking to gain by making this up. What’s funny is that I actually listened to several podcasts he did promoting the book and he never even mentioned this as a selling point (although I haven’t actually read the book yet, which I am now going to bump to the top of my reading list). Apparently the bad trip can be confirmed by his wife as well, not that I’ve checked. Anyway, here’s an amazing podcast from the Psychedelic Salon about the whole thing that I highly recommend.----http://disinfo.com/2015/09/terence-mcken...mushrooms/

[Image: deathbeddd.jpg]

[C C]

The gentle, wise, humorous mushroom spirit that he had come to know and trust as an ally and teacher ripped back the facade to reveal an abyss of utter existential despair. Terence kept saying, so Kat told me, that it was, “a lack of all meaning, a lack of all meaning.”

Can't recall exactly, but toward the end of "Altered States" (the film), Edward Jessup said something to that effect after the aborted venture to become an amorphous mass of "proto-consciousness". Perhaps similarly what is actually intended here is lack of direction or purpose rather than literally no signifying or relational correspondences occurring.

Otherwise, a total nihilism of significance in both a phenomenal, conceptual and semantic (language / thought) context would seem to just be equivalent to the absence of everything prior to life or after death (or non-consciousness). To arrive at a conclusion of "lack of meaning" while the "trip" was transpiring (rather than retrospectively attributing such to it) would have required manipulation of meaningful input at the time (affairs or states of some kind that were recognized) to arrive at that judgement. Even a presence of and identification of "nothing" would thereby have been a meager event of understanding.

We’re so prone as a culture to think of psychedelics as pleasurable escapism like every other recreational drug, when there’s so very much more to them than that. The failure of the modern psychedelic movement is now and has always been the failure to take shamanism seriously.

So not so much the West's capitalistic / materialistic engine fully dismissing another ancient cultural tradition and role, but instead its division of illicit trade stripping shamanism of the veneration it had in the original context, so that its "magical fetish" is a more marketable "candy item" for superficial or "immediate gratification" consumers.

[Magical Realist]

All mystics encounter this abyss of utter despair and chaos. Jesus has his Gethsemane. And Buddha his battle with the demons of Mara. St. John of the Cross's "dark night of the soul". It is part of the maddening dissolution of everything you take to be yourself for the presence of an infinite transpersonal cosmicity. I think McKenna would have been helped with a more Buddhist rendering of his inner experiences. There's also this take--McKenna died of a mushroom shaped brain tumor in 1998. Perhaps the psychedelic aliens were scaring him away to get him to stop using so much. If in fact the tumor was brought on by hallucinagenic usage. His doctors say not likely, but the possibility remains.