Jeg er meget optaget af Terence McKenna og hans idéer, og har alle hans bøger og de fleste lydoptagelser. Derfor valgte jeg at crowdfunde hans brors, Dennis', bog, Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, om hvad der skete i La Chorrera og om hans forhold til broren i det hele taget. Den udkommer nok til efteråret. Men jeg har allerede hørt et kapitel fra den på en podcast, som hedder The Psychedelic Salon (Podcast 316 – “A Deep Dive Into the Mind of McKenna”). Den podcast blev dog hurtigt pillet ned og kommer ikke op igen, fordi Dennis McKenna har givet final cut til Kat Harrison og Terence's børn, og dette kapitel åbenbart afslører for meget af Terences mindre smigrende sider. Derfor har jeg tilladt mig at transskribere det omtalte kapitel:
A Symbiosis Shattered
By Dennis McKenna
(The Psychedelic Salon Podcast #316, 45:40 – 1:01:56)
By this time, Terence was getting a lot of attention for his ‘rap’, as he called it. He had been a featured speaker at a landmark conference on psychedelics held at UC, Santa Barbara in May, 1983 that featured a number of established and emerging luminaries, including Albert Hofmann, Sasha Shulgin, Andrew Weil, Ralph Metzner, Karl Ruck, Walter Houston Clark and others.
Terence’s edgy talk was titled: “Hallucinogens: Monkeys Discover Hyperspace A.K.A. Return to the Logos. It was quite unlike anything else presented there, and it was an important catalytic event in his emergence as a public persona. People loved hearing these wild ideas, and Terence’s mesmeric voice and articulate presentation made him the perfect spokesman.
It didn’t matter that much that what he said was incomprehensible or nonsensical, his audience was uncritical and most did not have the education to challenge him, and few did. People just listened slack-jawed in fascination. I used to kid him that it didn’t matter what he said; he could stand up and read the phonebook and people would hang on every word, because it wasn’t what he said, it was that he said it so darned well. His rap was not science, it was not exactly philosophy, either, it was poetry and Terence was inventing himself as the Irish bard of the psychedelic zeitgeist.
By the time the 80’s faded into history, Terence was well ensconced in his iconic role as the chief spokesman for the new psychedelic culture, along with the timewave and the impending end of history, all thoroughly embellished with the collection of bizarre notions that we had dragged back from the jungles of La Chorrera twenty years previously. He had found his schtick and it was paying the bills, and he was out there on the public stage and there were growing legions of fans who loved to hear his rap.
There was no real competition for the niche he had carved out for himself; Leary was still around, but by this time old and boring. The original 60’s psychedelic message was about peace, free love, eastern wisdom and back to nature, Terence’s audience was mostly younger; genuine inhabitants of the global village predicted by McCluhan and rapidly morphing into reality. They had grown up bathed in the cool glow of television and far from being Luddite back-to-landers, these were world-spanning tech-nomads of an emerging global tribalism, the enthusiastic vanguard of the new, post-historical, archaic revival.
But even as Terence played out the role that destiny and fate had carved out for him, there were darker forces at work, well hidden from the glare of public adulation. As Terence became more visible as a public figure and began to accumulate a devoted following, on a personal level he became plagued by doubts about his ideas that he had vigorously espoused for years; and doubts about the role that the world had thrust upon him.
A strong, cognitive dissonance emerged between his public persona as the shaman guru and his own self-understanding that he was anything but an enlightened being. He didn’t want to be the wise man guru telling people what to think, he wanted people to think for themselves, like Timothy Leary. That was the whole thrust of his message, he was human while others wanted him to be a bodhisattva.
Terence's pivotal, existential crisis came abruptly, some time in '88 or '89. Everything that happened after that event was fallout. I don't know exactly when it happened, and I don't know exactly what happened; I am piecing it together from what Kat has told me, and she has volunteered few details and I am reluctant to probe.
It happened when they were living for a time on the big island, and it was a mushroom trip they shared that was absolutely terrifying for Terence. It was terrifying because, for some reason, the mushroom turned on him. The gentle, wise, humorous mushroom spirit, that he had come to know and trust as an ally and teacher, ripped back the facade to reveal an abyss of utter existential despair. Terence kept saying, so Kat told me, that it was "a lack of all meaning, a lack of all meaning."
And this induced panic in Terence, and probably, I speculate, a feeling he was going mad. He couldn't deal with it. Kat's efforts to reassure him were fruitless. After that experience, he never again took mushrooms, and he took other psychedelics, such as DMT and ayahuasca, only on rare occasions and with great reluctance.
Whatever the specific content of the psychedelic experience might have been that triggered the cognitive collapse of Terence's worldview and precipitated his existential crisis, what was most remarkable was that he did not see it coming. He did not see it coming.
When one works deeply, and over long periods, with a particular plant teacher, there inevitably comes a point where the examination of the self comes front and center. One may learn much from psychedelics about archetypes, myths, and other dimensions, shamanic techniques, aliens and the construction of the cosmogonic and cognitive worldview, but sooner or later they hold up a mirror in which one must confront the self.
I believe Terence was not up for that. Up to that point, his existentially terrifying experience, his mushroom encounters had been very much about the Other, about receiving gnosis from a higher wisdom that was seemingly distinct from the self. But the source that originated the funny ideas about time, the extraterrestrial origins of the mushroom, and the entire metaphysics constructed around those ideas that Terence managed to make so appealing to his fans, were almost all entirely cerebral.
There was very little of self-reflection, emotion, or insight in those constructs. As long as it stayed on that level, Terence could handle it. When it became personal, and when it became about heart-related insights having to do with his emotional status and his relationships to others, I think it became very threatening for him. The mushrooms proffered the lesson, but it was not a lesson that Terence wanted to accept or acknowledge. It was too much about the self and no longer about the Other.
Since earliest childhood, ever since the incident in the sandbox, when Terence erected an emotional wall between himself and our father, Terence had been concerned to protect himself from almost all emotional entanglements, as a strategy for self-preservation. When the mushrooms kicked that wall down and forced him to confront his emotional alienation, the old, reactive defense mechanisms were activated and he could no longer bring himself to face it.
This incident also contributed to Terence’s growing doubts about his public role as an advocate of psychedelics, and the constellation of funny ideas that he represented in his role as the sage of hyperspace. The trickster mushroom had betrayed him. He could no longer take them, and the prospect of what they might present to him was too terrifying.
Yet there he was, in the public position of being the new Timothy Leary, the explorer-psychonaut who was supposedly plunging down the rabbit hole every weekend. Even now, many of Terence’s fans assume that during this period of his life he was taking high doses of mushrooms and DMT on a regular basis, and they are shocked to learn that that was not the case. Throughout most of the 90’s, Terence used psychedelics only on extremely rare occasions, and when he did take them the doses were modest.
His fans did not know this, but Terence knew it, and he knew that his public representation was disingenuous and, to his credit, it bothered him. Fundamentally, he wanted to be honest, but he could not be, and his fans would not let him be. Or at least that was his perception. His fans identified with him and, as a group, they were largely uncritical. Terence became so good at doing his schtick that it really didn’t matter whether it made sense or not. It sounded great. It was what people wanted to hear, and it paid the bills, and it became the trap from which he could not escape.
On the rare occasions when someone did rise up to question the tenets of the faith, as the mathematician Matthew Watkins did with Terence and the timewave in 1996, rather than stimulate a thoughtful, productive, intellectual exchange that might have refined and extended the concept, it led to public ridicule in the form of vicious, personal attacks on the questioner, as other members of the fan base piled on. The fan base had become a cult, heretics were censured, mocked and shouted down.
In Terence’s defense, I don’t believe he welcomed this kind of response. He did not lead the charge, he let others do it for him. I think that, in his heart of hearts, Terence would have welcomed honest discussion of some of the presumptions of his ideas, except that to do so would require that he step back from them, perhaps go into seclusion for a time while he conducted a careful reevaluation. But for that there was neither time nor resources nor incentive.
In fact, there was every incentive not to do that. After all, he was on the circuit. If the fans wanted to hear the schtick, the last thing they wanted to hear was Terence announce either that he had only been kidding and didn’t really take any of it very seriously and never had, or that he had been overcome by doubts and needed some time to reconsider and take a harder look at the foundations of the theories. Either one of these responses would have been more honest; neither would have been well-tolerated by his fans. The one would have incurred their hostility on the dawning realization they had been duped, and the other would have severely interrupted cash-flows as the concepts were reworked and retooled.
Whatever had driven him in the months and years following La Chorrera to write extended screeds in cramped, microscopic script, and to construct the heavily annotated, hand-drawn graphs of time had long since left; he was no longer in the grip of the Logos. After all, he was on the circuit and there were plenty of adulating fans, many attractive, young women, a circuit of pleasing venues, good money, good food, love and admiration. All in response to what came naturally and effortlessly: the rap, the schtick – what’s not to like, why piss away a good gig?
The problem with this is that he didn’t really believe much anymore, in the schtick or the concepts he purported to represent. He couldn’t or wouldn’t take psychedelics again to get recharged, perhaps to recover thereby some of the belief and passion. As a result, he became disillusioned with himself and with his fans. He could no longer be honest with either himself or his fans, and this led to a further cognitive dissonance. He began to feel even more like a fraud than ever; he became quite depressed. He became trapped in his own public persona like a caged performer on stage, and in response gradually lost respect for his fans.
In rereading the passage above, I have to say it comes off as a bit harsh and critical in a way that is perhaps unfair to Terence or to his fans. Not everything that Terence said in his public utterances was nonsense or made-up fabrications that sounded good and that had no real, logical validity, but not all or even most of Terence’s fans were gullible, unquestioning disciples.
Terence was at his best when he spoke on topics that were not directly related to the timewave or psychedelics. He was an astute observer and an incisive commentator on contemporary culture. He was prescient about many of the social, historical and technological forces that were creating, and are creating, our post-millennial world. This is the reason, I think, that the great body of Terence’s lectures survive in audio form on the net.
And twelve years after his death, people are still listening. Even though they date back to the 80’s and mid-90’s, they sound as fresh and as timely as if they were uttered yesterday. Terence’s genius was that he could envision the future that was imminent in current events. He could see that future and he could articulate it for the rest of us. He may have gotten the details wrong, and then hobbled by the assumptions of the metaphysics he constructed, but one only has to look around to realize that basically he got it remarkably right.
If Terence were resurrected tomorrow, he would be unsurprised by most of the events that have transpired since he left the corporeal realm in 2000. He were to have equally incisive observations and speculations about the future and how it is manifesting now, and how it will unfold over the decades of the 21st century.
Over the years since Terence died, I’ve been contacted by many people, most of them young, who tell me they owe Terence for everything they have learned, and that the subjects he discussed were more relevant to them than any other part of their educations. This is an enormous compliment for Terence and his talents. He had every right to feel proud of that and I hope he did. Terence gave people permission to think and to explore consciousness and to entertain funny ideas.
Terence, by example, taught it was fun to exercise the imagination; he taught that astonishment and wonder are the forces that drive our efforts to understand ourselves and the marvelous universe we inhabit. No matter how much we think we understand there is always infinitely more to be understood.
One of his favorite quotes from J. B. S. Halding, who said: “My suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” Terence reveled in this insight, and it is more true today than when Halding first wrote it back in 1927.
Det, synes jeg, er noget af en mundfuld. Først og fremmest er det selvfølgelig dybt tragisk, at en så intelligent, selvironisk og humoristisk tænker fik samme kranke skæbne som Jack Kerouac, Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, Naser Khader, etc.Der skal åbenbart en hel del til for at holde til at være berømt. Mit bud ville være brug af entheogener, men det var så desværre ikke aktuelt i Terences tilfælde.Jeg må sige, at jeg føler mig ikke så lidt snydt. En fast bestanddel af Terernces rap var jo, hvordan man endelig ikke skulle tage små doser svampe, five dried grams in silent darkness, osv. Fx siger han i foredraget Psilocybin and the Sands of Time:
Fragment of Psilocybin and the Sands of Time (December, 1982)
(The Psychedelic Salon Podcast # 318, 58:46 – 1:03:24)
Question: “What do you think is evil, and can these mushrooms be misused?” Answer: “Well, I think anything can be misused … Ah, most evil is, uh … trivial. And, if I could speak off the top of my head, the only evil,uh, that associates itself with mushrooms is, uh … taking it, but taking too little. (Laughter) In other words … (Laughter) Evil … Evil is, uh … um, there’s a word I want, uh … It isn’t twiddle, but it’s something like that. Evil is when you play at things, not play in the Hindu cosmic sense, but where you fiddle with things, you muck with things, because you don’t want to get your feet wet, you want to be able to say you’ve done these things, but you never want to really place your validity on the line, and I am amazed at the number of people who claim, uh, familiarity with psychedelic drugs, who, when you actually question them closely, it’s very clear that they had a sub-threshold dose, even if they’d taken it 50 or a 100 times, they have managed, through … through low doses and strong defenses, to always keep the daimon at bay, that’s daimon with a d-a-i, to keep the daimon at bay, and they don’t know what they’re talking about. You must take a sufficiently large dose, so that you enter into these places. Not to knock, uh, him personally, because he’s a very nice man, but as an example, uh, Roland Fischer, whose work you may know, I talked to him, and he has given psilocybin, he says, to about 15000 people at NIMH, and now he’s retired to Mallorca, but, uh … and I said to him, I said: “Roland, what do you make of it, I mean: what do you make of it?” And he said: “Well, make of what?” And I said: “Well, what do you make, just specifically, of the hallucinations? You say you gave it to all these people, you took it, uh, six times, what happened when you closed your eyes and looked at the hallucinations?” He said: “I never closed my eyes.” I was highly agitated throughout, and I just realized these things, which seem to me as natural as breathing, just slide right past people. I mean, of course you do not eat for a few hours before you do it; of course you lie down in darkness and compose your mind and look at the darkness behind your eyelids; and of course you invoke it through the wish to have it come to you. These are things as simple as they can be, yet here was a man with a lifelong, professional involvement in it, published dozens of papers, has made contributions in the mapping of consciousness, but he could never just stop fidgeting long enough to, uh, see it. So that – so my idea of that as evil – evil is, uh, anything which trivializes a mystery would be evil, and since this is a mystery, uh, any, uh … dismissing of it or constantly taking it at low doses for hedonic purposes, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not the whole story and nobody should think that that gives you a pedestal from which to, uh, speak about it, you really have to do these heroic amounts and, uh, and integrate them. This is something I haven’t even talked about in this interview, but these things are very state-bounded, a term which Roland Fischer in fact coined, that simply means that they’re very hard to retain and remember; what exactly happened at the peak of the flash, and you come down and you say: “Well, it was very strange, there was information, there were entities, but I just can’t get back to it.” The way to overcome that is to be as psychedelic in your down-life as possible, and by psychedelic I mean: ideas; cognitive activities; you should dance, you should read, you should think, you should paint, you should sculpt, you should converse, you should constantly involve yourself in cognitive activities, because taking these drugs is one of the major cognitive activities (…)”
Interviewet, som dette citat er fra, er optaget i 1982, altså en del år før Terences brud med svampene.Alligevel synes jeg, det er repræsentativt for en mere eller mindre fast bestanddel af hans rap - både før og efter hans krise. Her er fx noget fra et foredrag kendt som både McGreen og History Ends in Green (jeg kan desværre ikke lige finde ud af, hvornår det er fra):
History Ends in Green (McGreen), Part 4, 42:53 - 44:40
"Well, five grams is what I think would destroy most of the resistances of a 145-pound person. A person who weighed 90 pounds could take far less. But a person who weighed 90 pounds [and] who took five grams should be in no physical danger. It is - you can play with it. But at higher doses it gets stranger and stranger ... and stranger and stranger. I mean, anything above eight [grams] you're definitely a pioneer, as far as I'm concerned. But it's a good point. If you weigh 90 pounds, you maybe don't want to chow down on five grams [garbled], but to do more rather than less. Because otherwise you can miss the point, you know?"
[Woman in audience:] "[Garbled] I know I've had the worst trip I've ever ingested is where I've felt like I took too little and it was almost more horrifying than if I'd just stuffed myself over."
"Yeah, well, I think where the trouble comes is in the sub-threshold doses, where you're neither fish nor fowl, and you're thrashing around in it, and you get into these loops of psychological - uh - abrasive psychological self-examination and stuff like that. And what you want to do is, you just want to blast through all that. It's hard!"
[Woman in audience:] "Can you sing through that?"
"Yeah, you can sing through that. [Garbled] Singing and cannabis are my techniques, and together seem to be able to move it around."
Jeg ved godt, at Terence altid, som alle andre, lige sikrede sin ryg, før han talte om entheogener, ved at sige at man skal tænke sig alvorligt om to gange, før man tager et. Alligevel siger han ligeud, at man er direkte ond, hvis man tager et rekreativt/under-tærskel trip, og at man ingen ret overhovedet har til at hævde sig. Og der føler jeg mig ret så ramt. Jeg har nemlig taget en hel del svampe (et slag på tasken: 30-40 gange) i min ungdom, men alle, på nær en lille håndfuld, har været, hvad Terence ville fnyse af som værende under-tærskel trip (1-3 g.). Især føler jeg mig ramt i forhold til Terences reference til Roland Fischer, som han kritiserer for at tage (og give?) under-tærskel trip uden at lægge sig ned og lukke øjnene.Det har jeg faktisk, indtil videre, kun gjort en gang (sidste gang) og fik da også nogle geometriske CEV.Alligevel synes jeg, at jeg har fået meget mere ud af svampene i en masse, helt anderledes, sammenhænge, selvom jeg åbenbart er direkte ond i Terences optik.Det er heller ikke, fordi jeg ikke vil. Jeg har i lang tid haft lyst til at tage en heroisk dosis, for simpelthen at se, hvad det var, Terence talte så meget om. Han insisterede jo på, at alle vil se fjerne egne af universet og høre svampen tale til dem, bare dosen er høj nok. Han sagde selvfølgelig også om DMT, at alle vil møde the machine elves, men det har jeg heller aldrig, og kender en del andre, som heller ikke har. Godt nok vireker entheogener forskelligt på folk, men jeg kan ikke lade være med at spekulere over, hvor mange af de andre ting, som Terence fortalte om, bare var noget, han fandt på. Men selvfølgelig har jeg altid været klar over, at man skulle tage de fleste af hans udsagn med et gran salt. Fx har jeg aldrig købt hans hypotese om timewave zero. Alligevel føler jeg mig lidt taget ved næsen, men føler også, jeg har lært lidt om verden og mennesker, og hvordan de agerer i den. Stakkels, stakkels Terence! Men jeg tror nu stadig, at han i visse perioder har taget svampe og DMT, og under alle omstændigheder, rigtigt eller ej, ændrer det jo ikke ved disse entheogeners immanente egenskaber. Så jeg har tænkt mig at fortsætte mine eksperimenter, dog nu uden at have dårlig samvittighed over, at alt ikke udspiller sig lige efter Terences bog. Jeg har også tænkt mig at blive ved med at høre hans foredrag og læse hans bøger, for mange af de tanker, han gjorde sig om literatur, historie, kulturkritik, astronomi, matematik og mange andre ting, er stadig aktuelle, i hvert fald for mig. Så jeg er stort set enig med Lorenzo Hagerty, som er manden bag The Psychedelic Salon, når han afslutter Podcast #316 med følgende ord:
“Well, there is, of course a great deal to say about what for you may be some new information about our beloved bard, McKenna, but I think that, for now, we have a lot of information to absorb and new things to think about. And actually, we’re going to have several different ways and different places to talk about how or if this news changes your opinion of Terence McKenna. For me, I was actually relieved to hear that I wasn’t a personal psychedelic failure because I wasn’t taking five dried grams of mushrooms in silent darkness every weekend. Interestingly, that was also the first response of almost everyone at our workshop, as well. And next, I think we mainly all felt a deep sadness for the difficult path that dear Terence was on for the last decade or so of his life, and, in no small measure, because of the pressure we all put on him to entertain us with his wonderful stories.”
_________________ "Turn on, tune in, listen carefully." - Simon G. Powell
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