Voto:
Terence McKenna grew up in a small, very religious town in western Colorado. A rare vision impairment forced him to wear bifocal lenses from an early age. This fact, combined with his non-athletic build, made him an isolated being, leading to a solitary childhood. He was introduced to geology by his uncle and developed a solitary hobby for fossils, hunting in the arroyos not far from his home. Thus, his deep artistic and scientific attachment to nature was born. McKenna encountered psychedelic substances by reading the writings of Aldous Huxley. His first direct experience with them was when he ate several commercially produced “morning glory” seed packets, an experience he said would determine the course of his life. After finishing high school, McKenna enrolled at U.C. Berkeley. He moved to San Francisco during the “Summer of Love” before classes began and was introduced to cannabis and LSD by Barry Melton, who lived in the apartment across from his. In 1969, Terence received a B.S. in Ecology and Conservation from the Tussman Experimental College, a short-lived branch of the Berkeley campus. He spent the subsequent years after graduation teaching English in Japan, traveling in India and South Asia, smuggling hashish, and collecting butterflies for biological supply companies. After the death of his mother in 1971, Terence, his brother Dennis, and three others traveled to the Colombian Amazon in search of oo-koo-hé, a derivative of a plant containing DMT. In La Chorrera, urged by his brother, he underwent a psychedelic experiment that he said connected him with Logos: an instructive, hallucinatory voice he believed to be universal for a visionary religious experience. The revelations of this voice propelled him to explore the structure of a primordial form of I Ching, which led him to his Novelty Theory. For most of the 1970s, McKenna maintained a low profile, living in an anonymous suburban house, surviving on the royalties from the Magic Mushroom Grower Guide, and the cultivation and sale of psilocybin mushrooms. He said he was forced to work this way and speak in public by the heavy penalties that the war on drugs had imposed on his peers. At one point, he was even sought by Interpol for drug trafficking. McKenna was a contemporary and colleague of Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake, and Riane Eisler, participating in collaborations and symposiums with them. He was a personal friend of Tom Robbins and influenced the thinking of numerous scientists, writers, artists, and entertainers. In his later years, he became a mainstay of the counterculture. Timothy Leary once introduced him as the “real Tim Leary.” He contributed to psychedelic and “goa trance” albums by The Shamen, Spacetime Continuum, Alien Project, Zuvuja, and Shpongle, and his speeches were adopted by many others. In 1993, he was a speaker at the “Starwood Festival,” an event documented in the book Tripping by Charles Hayes (his lectures were produced on audio cassette and CD). He was a skilled speaker admired by his fans for his eloquence. While some of his presentations were verbatim repeatings of previous material, his gift for improvised speeches allowed him to deliver flawless performances that ranged from audience to audience. His responses to unexpected questions were as sophisticated and sharp as those in his prepared talks. In addition to psychedelic drugs, McKenna explored virtual reality (which he regarded as a means to artistically communicate the psychedelic experience), techno-paganism, artificial intelligence, evolution, extraterrestrials, ancestor cults (or, as he claimed, contacting “the dead”), and aesthetic theory (artistic/visual experience as “information,” hence the nature of the hallucinations experienced under the influence of psychedelic substances). He advised taking psychedelic substances in medium to extremely high doses (asserting that those who took low doses had missed their full potential), preferably in solitude, in a dark place,
