Description

In this first chapter from Lex Lonehood's forthcoming book, Above and Beyond, Lex revisits his poignant interview with the late Terrence McKenna which was first published in After Dark Magazine in 1999. McKenna, a brilliant "altered statesman," describes the heart of the psychedelic experience, how certain plant substances can put people in touch with their true inner selves, and in some cases, lead to encounters with interdimensional entities.

McKenna candidly discusses his battle with terminal brain cancer and shares his views of life after death. He also explains his fascinating Timewave Zero theory about the "end of time." Updating the material, Lex speaks to Terence's brother, ethno-botanist Dennis, to see how McKenna's legacy is holding up in the four years since his death.

Exerpt

Terence McKenna -- All American Shaman

Terence McKenna's brain was a brilliant playground. Fueled by psychedelic substances, this "altered statesman" had spun a complex web of startling observations and theories about culture, aliens and the end of time. But in 1999, at the age of 52, his one-of-a-kind mind became a battlefield, struck by a fast-growing tumor in his frontal lobe. While initial treatments showed some promise, the condition proved to be terminal and he died in April 2000. Though his legacy, writings and recordings live on, his keenly adventurous intellect is sorely missed.

Terence was our own all-American shaman. A unique blend of witty commentator, gadfly philosopher and ethno-pharmacologist, more than anyone else he had taken up the mantle of Timothy Leary in his daring explorations at the edge of the mind. Not looking to derange his senses, like say, Hunter S. Thompson in his days of Fear and Loathing, McKenna used drugs to study and expand his consciousness.

His countercultural perspective was shaped as a child of the '60s. A veteran of the Berkeley riots and the India/LSD circuit, he was even at one point on the lam from the FBI on drug charges. He hid out in far-flung places like Indonesia, collecting butterflies for a living. But it was his trip to the Amazon in 1971 that set him on his course as the poet laureate of hallucinogenic plants.

Written with 20 years of hindsight, McKenna's spellbinding book True Hallucinations (1993) documents the journey he took, along with his brother Dennis and three other questing friends, to Colombia, where they lived in the jungle and underwent a series of increasingly bizarre experiences. Though they had initially been in search of ayuhuasca and plant mixtures containing DMT, it was the plentiful psilocybin mushrooms innocently growing on cow patties in the fields that became the focus of their odyssey. It was here that Terence's radical revisionist view of prehistory took root: What if magic mushrooms were the missing link in the development of human consciousness and language?

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See Also:

Above and Beyond, Chapter 2

Above and Beyond, Chapter 3

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