Terence McKenna
| Date of Birth | : | 16 Dec, 1946 |
| Date of Death | : | 03 Apr, 2000 |
| Place of Birth | : | Paonia, Colorado, United States |
| Profession | : | Ethnobotanist, Writer, Spiritual Teacher |
| Nationality | : | American |
Terence McKenna, who so playfully and persistently pressed his message that psychedelic drugs are mankind's salvation that Timothy Leary himself christened him ''the Timothy Leary of the 90's,'' died on Monday at a friend's home in San Rafael, Calif. He was 53 and lived on the South Kona Coast of Hawaii.
Biography
Terence McKenna was born and raised in Paonia, Colorado, with Irish ancestry on his father's side of the family. McKenna developed a hobby of fossil-hunting in his youth and from this he acquired a deep scientific appreciation of nature. He also became interested in psychology at a young age, reading Carl Jung's book Psychology and Alchemy at the age of 14. This was the same age McKenna first became aware of magic mushrooms, when reading an essay titled "Seeking the Magic Mushroom" which appeared in the May 13, 1957 edition of LIFE magazine.
At age 16 McKenna moved to Los Altos, California to live with family friends for a year. He finished high school in Lancaster, California.[13] In 1963, he was introduced to the literary world of psychedelics through The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley and certain issues of The Village Voice which published articles on psychedelics.
McKenna said that one of his early psychedelic experiences with morning glory seeds showed him "that there was something there worth pursuing", and in interviews he claimed to have smoked cannabis daily since his teens.
Death
McKenna was a longtime sufferer of migraines, but on 22 May 1999 he began to have unusually extreme and painful headaches. He then collapsed due to a seizure. McKenna was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. For the next several months he underwent various treatments, including experimental gamma knife radiation treatment. According to Wired magazine, McKenna was worried that his tumor may have been caused by his psychedelic drug use, or his 35 years of daily cannabis smoking; however, his doctors assured him there was no causal relation. McKenna died on April 3, 2000, at the age of 53.
Quotes
Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.
You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.
What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.
The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.
Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you're gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.
The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.
Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.
The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer
We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle
