Terence McKenna

Terence is today more often associated with pseudo-science and fringe theories, but for a few decades he pushed the frontiers of how we understand life, the universe, and everything. Among his major contributions is the ‘stoned-ape’ hypothesis, which points out the glaring temporal gap between the rise of modern homo sapiens and the advent of higher-order thinking in them - art, music, culture. He was also famously critical of modern culture, going so far as to say that “culture is not your friend.”

He lamented the gradual lose of organic human cultures to the homogenizing effects of global monoculture, and his body of work called for an archaic revival of human systems of meaning-making and culture-transmission. For McKenna, the opening of McDonald’s and Starbucks at markets they were hitherto not present, was not the true barometer of progress and development. Indeed, he saw it as a tragic slide.

Arguably his greatest work was in the field of consciousness itself, where as a psychedelico Terence probed and mapped the psychedelic experience far better than anyone else has - before or after him. But he was not without his blind spots, for despite spending years in Tibet and India he was not only dismissive of Dharmic traditions, he displayed an alarming ignorance as well. For such reasons we think of him as an “almost rishi.” Not a true rishi, but for his transcendent gaze and insights, almost one!

Select Works

• The Invisible Landscape (1975, with Dennis McKenna) – Early synthesis of shamanism, time, and consciousness.
• Food of the Gods (1992) – Thesis on psychedelics’ role in human evolution and culture.
• The Archaic Revival (1992) – Essays on shamanism, technology, and the return to primal wisdom.
• True Hallucinations (1993) – Account of the authors’ Amazonian experiences with ayahuasca and “time-wave zero.”
• The Evolutionary Mind (1998, with Rupert Sheldrake & Ralph Abraham) – Tripartite dialogue on consciousness and novelty.