I've never taken DMT, a short-acting psychedelic, even though Terence McKenna said the only danger in taking it is that you might "die from astonishment." While much of this book is about the ideas generated from McKenna's DMY experiences, I don't need the drug to appreciate the far-reaching speculation on "Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History" presented here. Every page has at least one mind-bender. McKenna (who died several years ago) was a true visionary.
(Here's a great article about McKenna that Erik Davis wrote for Wired in May 2000, called "Terence McKenna's Last Trip")
Excerpt:
Evolutionary biologists consider humans to be an unevolving species. Some
time in the last fifty thousand years, with the invention of culture, the
biological evolution of humans ceased and evolution became an epigenetic,
cultural phenomenon. Tools, languages, and philosophies began to evolve, but
the human somatotype remained the same. Hence, physically, we are very much
like people of a long time ago. But technology is the real skin of our
species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred
years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a
low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude
jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. Rhis is what we do. We are like coral
animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our
tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying
saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space. The body can
become an internalized holographic object embedded in a solid-state,
hyperdimensional matrix that is eternal, so that we each wander through a true
Elysium.
This is a kind of Islamic paradise in which one is free to experience all
the pleasures of the flesh provided one realizes that one is a projection of a
holographic solid-state matrix that is microminiaturized, superconducting, and
nowhere to be found: it is part of the plenum. All technological history is
about producing prototypes of this situation with greater and greater closure
toward the ideal, so that airplanes, automobiles, space shuttles, space
colonies, starships of the nuts-and-bolts, speed-of-light type are, as Mircea
Eliade said, "self-transforming images of flight that speak volumes about
man's aspiration to self-transcendence."
$12.21 on Amazon
A true visionary indeed, and one sorely missed.
His language romps are beauties to behold and his voice is a must-hear.
Thanks for reminding us of such an original thinker.
That is such a great book! Do you know where the Mckenna media library has gone? It had like 100 mp3s of his lectures for download but none of the links seem to work anymore. :(
Nice post. One criticism, though. I'm an evolutionary biologist. Almost everyone I know is an evolutionary biologist (which is a little sad to admit, but so goes academia). Not a single one of us would condone the statement that humans aren't evolving. not only is it false to state that evolutionary biologists think that in the trivial sense that I can provide a counter-example, but quite frankly, finding a positive example will prove exceedingly difficult. Evolutionary biologists will nearly unanimously agree that humans, like all other self-replicating organsims with varying, heritable traits, evolve.
but hasnt natural selection been replaced with unnatural selection? we control reproduction and survival to some extent.
also, http://deoxy.org/mckenna.htm
has a lot of mckenna things.