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
Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.
You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.
I don't believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.
To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.
What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.
