Terence McKennaCríticas

Just nonsense.. people describing epiphemomema of substances that are damaging or at least hacking conscious experience.. but why should one care? And their methodology is all over the place, nothjng controlled for…

Picked up this book after a friend's advice. Since I've got no interest in drugs, and am skeptical of any claims that aren't supported by data, this book didn't keep me for long. Verdict: lost me. Sorry, friend interested in psychedelics.

Good history of drug use and McKenna's theories of how it shaped human evolution in fundamental ways -- essentially that mushroom or psychedelic drugs were part of cooperative culture (found among hunter gatherers, initially in Africa), and that grain, fermentation, and alcohol (and sugar) were the tools of a competing "dominator culture" which out-competed and destroyed them, while also being self-destructive and possibly unsustainable. He is making a case for a return to the earlier way of being.

This would have been an easy 5-star audiobook if Terence McKenna had narrated it himself. Sadly he passed away a few years ago, so this isn't possible, but I have some mp3s of earlier books/speeches of his which wonderful (and often end up set to music).

Amazing book! The way that Terence tells the story and connects the events within, makes this book both a deep study into the almost uncharted realms of consciousness and psychedelics, as well as a great and entertaining reading experience!

You wanna see something really, really interesting about Novelty Theory? Take a look at the chronological history of the universe. So we have the big bang, rapid inflation, then re-normalization, and a very long period of very very little expansion in the universe, like 14 billion years, right? At some point around 1-2 billion years ago, the solar system started to form, and suddenly the expansion of space begins speeding up again, for the first time in 8 billion years. Then you have life emerge here on earth, about 3.5-4 billion years ago...and suddenly the expansion accelerates again. And since the emergence of life here on earth, the universe has been expanding exponentially, so much so that the disc is getting flatter and flatter and wider and wider. Terence would talk about this relationship of density of the universe vs. amount of information that had been articulated, or how much complexity it had achieved at any point. The more complexity brought into being, the thinner and more stretched out the universe would get. And of course the complexifying would start to increase exponentially at some point, leading to an inevitable singularity moment. His model said it would be 2012, just like the Mayans (his model also showed repeating fractal time but that's another story). Others have said 2017. The Hermetic tradition has said 2020 for a very long time. You can even look at a deck of Hermetic tarot cards, card XX (card 20, and it's 2020), the Aeon... it's called judgement day. I know we're talking science here, but credit where credit is due. The point being people have been pointing to this decade for thousands of years as being when the next universal singularity would occur. And the blueprint to understanding perpetual repeating cycles on countless levels in the universe. And it would take me a month to list out all of the different belief groups form antiquity til now that all believe in different cycles of varying lengths of time having a finish/restart point right now. Carl Jung said this decade would be when his Aeon took shape. People have known this would happen for longer than we probably have records of. I just hope people understand, all of this shit is interconnected, everything is interconnected, all of us, all matter, all space, and all time. The modern world forgot this and its held us back scientifically for 3 centuries. I said held back...lol, I guess really, we're right on time.

I’m going to take 4g of mushrooms then meditate alone in a safe place to prepare myself for enlightenment.

An interesting look at the relationship between plants and human evolution, both past and future. I especially enjoyed the idea that as wild plants became less important parts of our lives, the more patriarchal, and controlling, human cultures became. There is a relationship between the foods cultures consume and the amount of equality between the sexes.

It is past time for us to work to create healthy human cultures, and perhaps the foods we consume is a more important part of that work than I thought.

This book is a compilation of interviews of Terence McKenna as he is being asked by different people about the plethora of ideas McKenna was known to joust for. As a transcription of said interviews, these lose quite bit by being rendered in text, since Mckenna was mostly a very good conversationalist — the spoken word was his most unique quality; the text presented here becomes much drier than any recording on the same topic.

In any case, this is a good showcase of McKenna’s inventiveness and ease with making new and surprising connections. Since this book is organized by interviews standing for chapters, even if the book lacks some overall coherence making it a bit harder to take it as a whole work, this also allows you to read it as what it is, a compilation, something to be read in many sits, not necessarily tying the whole reading together.

If you are deeply interested in McKenna’s ideas and you’re looking to dig deeper to their origins and developments, inevitably you have to go through this book. However, if you’re just curious and not very prone to waste your time away reading, you’ll be much more satisfied by listening/watching to the many McKenna’s lectures available online, where you’ll not only learn about his ideas, but you’ll the get the full package of having the bard himself saying them, where he’ll delight you with his unmatchable skill in guiding your imagination through the power of his mastery of words.

The Invisible landscape: Mind hallucinogens and the I Ching. My review.

The Invisible landscape by Terence and Dennis McKenna is a very original and unusual book. From a daring shamanistic experiment with hallucinogenic compounds they arrived at insights about a holographic temporal wave (called "time wave zero") based on a fractal of cycles which they could derive from the I Ching.

The first part of the book is about the experiment the brothers McKenna undertook in La Chorrera in the Amazon in which they took a mixture of Ayahuasca and hallucinogenic mushrooms. This led to an enhanced perception of the so-called audible effect during such experiences. Interestingly the book attacks the induction based method of science to replace it with a holographic theory of mind and existence. This is a necessary step to come to their speculative theories about how the audible effect could have been generated by intercalation of neurotransmitter-like hallucinogenic tryptamine compounds in DNA or RNA in conjunction with ESR signals thereby generated, which might have been the cause of the sounds.

The second part of the book is about the insights gathered during this experiment in relation to how the I Ching pattern is related to a nested fractal of time waves.

Although the present day understanding how neurotransmitters and their hallucinogenic mimics has shown that these interactions occur via protein based receptors in the synaptic membrane, effects of intercalation in nucleic acids are not to be excluded. Unfortunately as of yet nobody has tested whether the proposed ESR effect does occur in vivo.

The idea of recurrent waves of novelty in a kind of nested time fractal is plausibly explained and demonstrated on the basis of key events in evolution and history. The calibration point of 21-12-2012 as end point of time wave zero apparently seems to have been too much of a wishful thinking association, as our current state of affairs shows that novelty waves are continuing as usual and have not yet culminated in a singularity.

Interestingly, the book shows how hallucinogenic compounds from plants and mushrooms can reveal archetypical information which relays the collective unconscious via the neurological level to the genetic level and vice versa. This strongly reminds me of Leary's "neurogenetic circuit" and the more modern insights disclosed in Tsang's "Fractal Brain Theory".

Finally, not the least important, this book not only speaks about the Eschaton as a universal and fractal morphogenetic field, which unfolds the predispositions of space and time, but also as the Eschatological scheme in which the advent of a final time, a time of concrescence of the density of novelty ingression results in the culmination of the human process resulting in the completion of the perfect artifact in which spirit and matter achieve a perfect union whereby the Transcendent object at the end of time stands revealed as the transcendent subject, which is also the Eschaton, thus implicitly arriving at the union of knower, knowing and known (in my interpretation). A challenging denial of simple materialistic reductionism, in which matter is merely a standing wave form of all-encompassing light of spirit, leading to a visionary apotheosis where matter and spirit/mind are no longer mutually exclusive grounds of existence but different sides of the same coin.

A fascinating journey through the realms of shamanism, showing that the insights of the shaman are not schizophrenic or psychotic rantings but a true mastery, a supra normal level of ability where the adept has conquered the demons of the multiplicity of forms and emerges as a messenger between the realms of spirit and matter.

Insights, which will make you travel through biology, chemistry, physics, general systems theory, psychology, evolution, history, semiotics and semantics.

From insectoid cybernetics to hypercomplex technology showing us a foretaste of the inner divinity we may one day reveal in ourselves.

A book I will not easily forget. Into the concrescence towards the perfect artifact.

Though the main subject of this book is the psychedelic mushroom, he elaborates extensively on modern culture and its "Dominator" mindset. He mentions the book "The Chalice and the Blade" by Riane Eisler, which describes how there was a culture that existed around the area of Greece that was a Matriarchal society. This society lived without war or poverty for around a thousand years. McKenna uses this culture as an example of how humans can and did live in perpetual peace, while at the same time not having a hierarchical system like our culture has now, which is of course Patriarchal.

The mushroom, he explains, helps humans really "see" reality for what it is, and in that state is able to both communicate with the environment and with our fellow humans, in harmony. He also puts forth a theory that psychedelic mushrooms contributed directly to human cognitive evolution, that they changed our brains to what they are now. The mushroom gave us an edge in our survival hundreds of thousands of years ago by being able to, like I said before, "see" the real world better, and therefore giving us an advantage in survival and changing our brain structure in the process.

All this leads to the idea of how the "Tree of Knowledge" was actually the mushroom. Since the downfall of the Matriarchal mindset, or true harmony, we have become the violent, Patriarchal, God-fearing, we-are-above-nature-so-therefore-it's-ours, system. Mentioning, of course, how the mushroom and all the other mind-altering compounds like LSD, DMT, and the like, are extremely illegal in our society. How these ideas of harmony, the sacred feminine aspects, have been and still are being suppressed, and that a return to these more ideal ideas will save us from future violence and destruction.

This comes awfully close to what Hunter Thompson once called 'bad craziness.' One probably shouldn't use the I Ching to predict the end of the world. (One probably shouldn't predict the end unless one sees a way of possibly avoiding it). Did you ever notice how prophecy (any prophecy) has a disturbing tendency to be self-fulfilling? Nevertheless:

Neste interessante livro, o autor passa a história da relação do homem com as plantas de poder (medicinais e xamânicas) e suas transformações na busca do conhecimento e a própria consciência.

Terence McKenna describes The Archaic Revival as “my explorer’s notebook, my journey of travel through time and ideological space.” The book is comprised of interviews, essays, and articles that DO in fact map out the landmarks in a strange and adventurous life lived in the pursuit of knowledge via psychoactive substances. Try to imagine a weird, psilocybin-fueled, hyperdimensional roadtrip, and you may begin to pick up on the hazy, outer edges of McKenna’s mental landmarks: a billboard advertising the role of mushrooms in the evolution from monkey to man, shiny neon lights etching out the spikes and plummets of McKenna’s timewave zero graph (software he developed with the help of the I Ching to chart novelty in time, which ominously drops off the chart in 2012, when the Mayans predicted the end of times), a monstrous body of water populated with octopi representative of McKenna’s theory about the development of language with the help of psychedelics (which will become visual as well as audible), self-transforming machine elves lining the road all the way. These are only a few of the many ideas The Archaic Revival introduces (in fact, this book is most likely the most comprehensive introduction to Terence McKenna). McKenna’s ideas are out there, to say the least, but they are brilliant in their creativity, scope, and implications. No one can read these essays without having their perspective deeply affected if not wholly altered.

[Edit] Note that I do not suggest that this book is to be read and believed wholeheartedly. Clearly most of McKenna's theories are completely and totally implausible. I think his ideas do, however, provide an outlet for thought experiments and broadening conventional perceptions of reality. And there are a few things he suggests here and there that I believe without hesitation.

No, I didn't like this book at all! Therefore I stopped reading it at about 50 pages. Thinking at the edge maybe .. but ... I don't need to read a discussion of some people about the dreams of Gaia and some mixed theories. Such things are ok and a lot of fun when doing them with friends. But it's sooo boring to read this!

For me, there is no life in this discussion, no inspiration at all! Probably it's typically end 80ths beginning 90ths, where psychedelic was so in. I remember a lot of pop literature and cyberpunk that talked about those amazing new point of views one gets through psychedelic meds.

For me, reading any more sentences would be more waste of time! I prefer talking about "the edges of our thinking" with my friends myself :))½

A good lecture by McKenna but totally destroyed by "enhancements" of irrelevant music and graphics. I doubt that most people will even try to get through to McKenna's ideas because of the distractions! Pity!

McKenna was crazy at times, but always crazy awesome. This was the birth of the modern entheogen movement.

This is a recent edition of the original published in 1974 by Terence McKenna (deceased) who among other things was a proponant of the re-discovery of an ecology of the mind that he termed the Archaic Revival. The brilliant Mr. McKenna, who could puncuate conversation with detailed references to any subject imaginable has written what has been deemed the most provocative and mind bending book ever written. It could be either one of the most important book ever written about the nature of human conscousness or the delusions of a very bright young scientist. It's written in the dry, objective style of scientific journals that Terence has admitted he used as a Trojan horse for his unorthadox ideas. What he claims to have done during experiments in the Amazon is to have inculcated his neural DNA with tryptamines in order to bring DNA encoded information into counscious awareness. The idea that manipulation of one's own neurotrasmitters could be the key to bridging the somatic and the semantic is a highly intriguing one that deserves further investigation even though to do so is considered so dangerous that this type of research has been almost completly prohibited for over thirty years, consequently these ideas have never been properly tested. Some of Terence's insights into the I Ching he supported by mathmatical explanations that he backed away from after they were challenged, fascinating nonetheless. (Link to mathmatical critique.) http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/autopsy.html

An eye-popping history of mind-altering plants.
McKenna eloquently advocates a new type of relationship with psychedelics: one of wonder, mystery and discovery. I was profoundly inspired and changed by this book.

Collection of interviews, transcribed speeches, and other oddments from our culture's point-man for the psychedelic experience. More of an extended appendix to Invisible Landscape and Food of the Gods than anything else; still worthy reading for anyone who wants to familiarize themselves with McKenna's worldview, which even now, over a decade after its publication, still falls far outside of consensus reality.

Terrence and Dennis McKenna take a crew of Merry Pranksters to the Colombian Amazon in order to seek out a possibly mythic hallucinogen used by shamans of the Witoto tribe. In a run-down remote mission town called La Chorrera they find instead a plethora of mushrooms growing from cow-flops, said mushrooms positively drenched in psylocybe. After eating these, smoking hash, and downing baanisterius caapi, Dennis McKenna turns into the Victor Frankenstein of psychonauts, and attempts to immanetize the eschaton by using vocal tonality modulation techniques to merge shroom DNA permanently into his own. After this experiment the McKenna brothers go a bit off the rails. Nora and James Joyce visit in the guise of chickens. UFOs form from clouds, rivers stand frozen, a voice in Terrence's head teaches him the workings of time. Dennis attempts to manifest a blue protoplasmic goo he thinks might be the lapis philosophorum.

In other words, things go a bit haywire.

The McKennas are fascinating cats because they are obviously hyper-educated geniuses, but are also burnt-to-a-crisp wastrels spawned in the '60s. If Terrence is telling the truth and he actually read Jung's Psychology and Alchemy at age 14, well, then his intellectual curiosity must be off the charts, including those charts he describes in this book, the ones which list all possible future and past events as a predictable waveform of novelty injections into the universe.

Many of the experiences Terrence describes I myself wrestled during a brief and lush psylocybe cyclotron ride in my early twenties. I never, however, quite felt manifest the alien intelligence he encounters, which claims galactical omnipresence. Vast neural networks of underground fungal strands never spoke to me personally--and if they exist as McKenna describes them they deemed me worthy only of scintillating light-shows and dripping wood grain patterns, not of messianic missions to usher in the final stage of human evolution. For some reason the idea of an omnipotent fungal entity reminded me of Karl Rove.

Part sci-fi novel, part hippie memoir, part manifesto for the New Shamanism--True Hallucinations is a lot of mind-bending fun crammed into a slim paperback.½

Terrence McKenna weaves a new kind of story about the human adventure, out of a collection of facts that he has gleaned from his prodigious research into the hidden history of human psychedelic use. He makes a strong case that psychedelic use played a role in the evolution of spiritual consciousness as well as perhaps even human language. He also argues persuasively about the roles that various kinds of drugs and foods have played within societies of the past and present, correlating the chemicals we ingest and have ingested, with apparent changes in our individual and collective consciousness.½

This isn't a conventionally written book. It consists of a three-way dialogue among Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham and Terrence McKenna. It's deliberately and honestly speculative in nature. It introduces a lot of ideas that are interesting to ponder, ideas having to do with the possible history and possible future of the cosmos, the earth and human beings. Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance comes into play, while Abraham brings chaos theory into the mix. McKenna brings imagination to it, imagination enriched from his lifelong psychedelic explorations. I found it worth reading, but I would warn other potential readers that everything in it is completely raw and freewheeling. Also, I think it would be hard to develop the ideas it contains very much, since they're so very vague and nebulous. A little more effort put into defining many of the terms would have helped.½

Totally incomprehensible, but maybe there is genius contained within. You'd prolly have to do a lot more drugs than I have to know for sure.

Park your discernment down the block, and ignore the glioblastoma in the attic, but do bring a grain of salt the size of a cowlick... You'll need it! Quite the whirl. (Update: One of the great crackpot books, in my estimation. Some things I only want to *read* about!)

theory that psychoactive plants guided human evolution

Just why are cattle so important to humans worldwide? Is it really all about mushrooms?