Mind Food of the Gods

collected works by and about

Terence McKenna

	The Mushroom Speaks -- from Oss & Oeric's Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Growers Guide. "The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing, my true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections than the number in a human brain."

The High Times Interview -- by David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen, published in the April 1992 issue of High Times. "At still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst."

The High Times Interview -- by David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen, published in the April 1992 issue of High Times. "At still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst."

	Re: Evolution -- the spoken word portion of track ten of the "Boss Drum" CD from Shamen. "What shamans have to do is act as exemplars, by making this cosmic journey to the domain of the Gaian ideas, and then bringing them back in the form of art to the struggle to save the world."

Time and Mind -- the transcript of a McKenna workshop in New Mexico in May of 1990. "They proceed to sing objects into existence. Amazing objects. Objects that are Fabergé Eggs, things made of pearl, and metal, and glass, and gel, and you, when you're shown one of these things, a single one of them, you look at it and you know, without a shadow of a doubt, in the moment of looking at this thing, that if it were right here, right now, this world would go mad. It's like something falling out of the mind of God -- such objects do not exist in this universe, and yet, you're looking at it."

Time and Mind -- the transcript of a McKenna workshop in New Mexico in May of 1990. "They proceed to sing objects into existence. Amazing objects. Objects that are Fabergé Eggs, things made of pearl, and metal, and glass, and gel, and you, when you're shown one of these things, a single one of them, you look at it and you know, without a shadow of a doubt, in the moment of looking at this thing, that if it were right here, right now, this world would go mad. It's like something falling out of the mind of God -- such objects do not exist in this universe, and yet, you're looking at it."

	Alien Dreamtime -- a transcript of Terence McKenna's spoken word performance with Spacetime Continuum at the Transmission theater in San Francisco, February 1993. "The psychedelic experience is an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet, and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies, but with that experience, the compass of the self can be set."

New Maps of Hyperspace -- a talk given at the invitation of Ruth and Arthur Young of the Berkeley Institute for the Study of Consciousness in 1984. "We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism."

New Maps of Hyperspace -- a talk given at the invitation of Ruth and Arthur Young of the Berkeley Institute for the Study of Consciousness in 1984. "We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism."

	The Oversoul as Saucer -- what was to be chapter twenty of True Hallucinations. "The saucer, no matter how alien it appears, no matter how advanced its demonstrations of power, is not a vehicle from some other star system, it is the oversoul of humanity up to its oldest trick. If one knows this one can live through the revelation and the destruction of our scientific world and yet evade the immense power of this most powerful of all transference phenomenon and thereby maintain the integrity of one's own soul and spirit."

The Oversoul as Saucer -- what was to be chapter twenty of True Hallucinations. "The saucer, no matter how alien it appears, no matter how advanced its demonstrations of power, is not a vehicle from some other star system, it is the oversoul of humanity up to its oldest trick. If one knows this one can live through the revelation and the destruction of our scientific world and yet evade the immense power of this most powerful of all transference phenomenon and thereby maintain the integrity of one's own soul and spirit."

Open Ending -- what was to be chapter twenty-one of True Hallucinations. "Indeed, the vast and dreamy world that we call imagination, or the unconscious, may merge imperceptibly into autonomously existing worlds we would call 'hyperdimensional,' indicating the paradox of their simultaneous invisibility and their here-and-nowness in the psilocybin trance with a presence which belies the term hallucination."

Open Ending -- what was to be chapter twenty-one of True Hallucinations. "Indeed, the vast and dreamy world that we call imagination, or the unconscious, may merge imperceptibly into autonomously existing worlds we would call 'hyperdimensional,' indicating the paradox of their simultaneous invisibility and their here-and-nowness in the psilocybin trance with a presence which belies the term hallucination."

	Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness -- A talk given at the Lilly/Goswami Conference on Consciousness and Quantum Physics at Esalen, December 1983. "We are going to discover the plasticity, the mutability, the eternal nature of the mind and, I believe, release it from the monkey. My vision of the final human future is an effort to exteriorize the soul and internalize the body, so that the exterior soul will exist as a superconducting lens of translinguistic matter generated out of the body of each of us at a critical juncture at our psychedelic bar mitzvah."

Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness -- A talk given at the Lilly/Goswami Conference on Consciousness and Quantum Physics at Esalen, December 1983. "We are going to discover the plasticity, the mutability, the eternal nature of the mind and, I believe, release it from the monkey. My vision of the final human future is an effort to exteriorize the soul and internalize the body, so that the exterior soul will exist as a superconducting lens of translinguistic matter generated out of the body of each of us at a critical juncture at our psychedelic bar mitzvah."

Terence McKenna interviewed by Gracie & Zarkov -- from Mondo 2000 "You've heard me talk about meme wars, and how, if we could have a level playing field, these ideas would do very well. The theory I'm putting forth -- to disprove it you would have to get your feet wet and get stoned. Anybody who doesn't want to do that should rule themselves off the case."

	The Non-Ordinary Conhibition Rhetoric of Terence McKenna -- an excerpt from Non-Ordinary States Through Vision Plants. "We're playing with half a deck as long as we tolerate that the cardinals of government and science should dictate where human curiosity can legitimately send its attention and where it cannot. What we're talking about here is the repression of a religious sensibility. In fact not 'a' religious sensibility, the religious sensibility. Not built on some con game spun out by eunuchs, but based on the symbiotic relationship that was in place for our species for 50,000 years before the advent of history riding priestcraft and propaganda."

The Non-Ordinary Conhibition Rhetoric of Terence McKenna -- an excerpt from Non-Ordinary States Through Vision Plants. "We're playing with half a deck as long as we tolerate that the cardinals of government and science should dictate where human curiosity can legitimately send its attention and where it cannot. What we're talking about here is the repression of a religious sensibility. In fact not 'a' religious sensibility, the religious sensibility. Not built on some con game spun out by eunuchs, but based on the symbiotic relationship that was in place for our species for 50,000 years before the advent of history riding priestcraft and propaganda."

Richard Evans Schultes reviews Food of the Gods -- from American Scientist September/October 1993. "It is, without question, destined to play a major role in our future considerations of the role of the ancient use of psychoactive drugs, the historical shaping of our modern concerns about drugs and perhaps about man's desire for escape from reality with drugs."

	The DMT Experience -- an excerpt from Food of the Gods. "The world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one's own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio."

The DMT Experience -- an excerpt from Food of the Gods. "The world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one's own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio."

Timewave Zero and Language. "Each one of us is a word of approximately 700,000,000 characters, and this word is made flesh when the sperm and the egg form a zygote and the DNA textural message is downloaded into matter. Now we are on the brink of decoding the human genome, and the end result of this is that the flesh will be made word."
Dream Matrix Telemetry. "Jewelled, self-dribbling basketvalls that bound forward, Chirping fractal denizens of the unconscious. They surround you, singing in a visible language and they use that language to produce objects."
Live in New York. "We have to stop waiting for the revelation to come from CNN or Time Magazine, and get lives! And what getting lives means is ignoring the idiotic laws that would dictate to us the kind of states of mind that we can entertain."
Mushrooms, Sex, and Society. "Basically, I think of the ego like a tumor in the psyche that will form unless there is the presence of psilocybin. For a hundred thousand years, nobody went longer than a month without having this boundary-dissolving experience. After the psilocybin faded, the ego was able to get hold and then eventually redefine the whole personality around it."
The Camden Centre Talk. "These psychedelic substances are not private, peripheral, ancillary, cultish, esoteric, meaningless, self-indulgent, narcissistic, or obscure; they are in fact central to understanding how what we call 'human-ness' actually came to be in the first place."
A Weekend With Terence McKenna. "What's right here, and from here out is this thing which, no matter how much science fiction you've done, no matter how much William Burroughs you've read, no matter how much time you've spent in the company of the weird, the bizarre, the outre, and the peculiar, you weren't ready. And it's completely real."
A Weekend With Terence McKenna (opening lecture). "Science is excellent at doing what it was designed to do, but it has expanded its province into all reality and seeks to pass judgment in areas where it has no real business going. It's a very limited method that achieves its claim to universality by wildly exaggerating its accomplishments."
The Great Timestream Bifurcation, from Psychedelic Illuminations #6. "Psychedelic compounds amplify the very slight leakage of information from this other dimension. In the same way that they found us, we can find them by taking psychedelic mushrooms and opening ourselves to the information pouring through from the alternative time stream."
Ordinary and Visible Language and Virtual Reality. "The starships of the future, which will explore the high frontier of the unknown will be syntactical. The engineers of the future will be poets. This is what virtual reality holds out to us -- the possibility of walking in to the constructs of the imagination."
The Satanic Spirit of Science (an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Trialogues at the Edge of the West by McKenna, Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake). "Linearity in print and thought has made language unable to deal with the invisible world in any meaningful way, except as pathology. Now this invisible world is returning to the language through people like us with one foot in each world."
Spacetime Tsunami, an interview with Terence McKenna from bOING bOING #10. "It's going to happen -- the egg shell is breaking. The womb is ruptured, and there is no way out now but some kind of journey down the very frightening birth-canal of experience. The next 30 years will stand your hair on end, guaranteed, because it's barely begun."
Terence McKenna Interviewed at entheogen.com. "The future of the human race lies in the exploration and making explicit of the contents of the human imagination."
The Approaching Timewave Zero. "Time, like light, may best be described as a union of opposites. Time may be both wave and, ultimately, particle, each in some sense a reflection of the other. The same holographic properties that have long been an accepted part of the phenomenon of the perception of three-dimensional space also suggest that interference patterns are characteristic of process."
Derivation of the Timewave from the King Wen Sequence of Hexagrams. "The idea that time is experienced as a series of identifiable elements in flux is highly developed in the I Ching. Indeed the temporal modeling of the I Ching offers an extremely well-developed alternative to the 'flat-duration' point of view."
Terence McKenna interviewed by OMNI. "The overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it's not treated -- if there's not pharmacological intervention -- it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality."
Highlights of Swiss UFO Conference by Michael Lindemann. "If you heard there's a 20% chence you'll see UFOs if you fly right now to New Zealand, I bet quite a few of you would drop everything and just go. Give me 15 minutes of your life and I'll give you a 20% chance of meeting aliens -- and the odds go up to maybe 40% if you increase the dose!"
Lectures on Alchemy
Terence McKenna vs. the Black Hole
Live at Wetlands Preserve, 28 July 1998
Plan/Plant/Planet - excerpts from The Archaic Revival
Understanding and the Imagination in the Light of Nature
Live at The Lighthouse, 23 April 1997
"Mavericks of the Mind" interview
Live at St. John the Divine's Cathedral, Synod Hall, 25 April 1996
Live at The Fez in New York City, 20 June 1993
Sustainability Consciousness - from Esalen
Seeing Beyond the Invisible Landscape - an Interview
Terence McKenna on the Art Bell Show, 22 May 1997
ORFEO: A Dialog Between Robert Hunter and Terence McKenna
Thinking Allowed - The Human Future

A short Terence McKenna biography

Other pages of interest:

Books & tapes available from amazon.com:

Terence McKenna's own Alchemical Garden at the Edge of Time.
http://www.levity.com/eschaton/hyperborea.html

Terence McKenna Land

A marvelous collection of McKenna-related material.
http://deoxy.org/mckenna.htm

Sound Photosynthesis' Complete Terence McKenna. Audio tapes of McKenna's live presentations.
http://sound.photosynthesis.com/Terence_Mckenna.html

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