Who sleeps in your skin?
Who thinks in your mind?
Who controls space & time?
Surely it's not I

I really like this lil poetic line, which comes from this ongoing poetic discussion that I have with my friend Rose. She asked me one day if I ever read the book Who Sleeps In Your Skin. I said no but really enjoy the title. The title echoed in my consciousness, I began to play with that line. And the lines above is what came out. This poetic expression captures what I often think after having a really 'weird' dream. Who's writing this stuff, surely it's not I.

I had this really interesting Dream last week. My Dreams are always entertaining and they have this real cinematic quality to it. The main part of the dream was that I was in a class and I was giving this report on The Invisible Landscape and the Nature of Reality. I was blending I Ching, Pyramid of Fire: Lost Aztec Codex & the teachings of Terence Mckenna. As I gave my lecture on my research the professor who looked like Terence Mckenna, didn't seem too pleased with me. He was grilling me, on that I kept saying this is how it is, instead of this is my best suspicion and I was tainting my research with my own BS (Belief System).

My technique, which I recommend to you, is, don't believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite -Terence Mckenna "Under the Teaching Tree".

That Dream planted the seed that I should make a post for Psychedelic Sundays on Terence Mckenna. I already posted a Video MashUp: Language is Evolving feat. Terence Mckenna. Full disclosure I have a bias toward Terence Mckenna, which I think my dear readers have picked up on by now.

Terence Mckenna, A Brief Introduction

Image: Classic Mesoles Terence Merged with Timothy C. Ely's Synesthesia Artwork

Psychedelics are not suppressed because they are dangerous to users; they’re suppressed because they provoke unconventional thought, which threatens any number of elites and institutions that would rather do our thinking for us. ―Dennis McKenna

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Terence McKenna, he was one of the pioneers in the research of plant entheogens and the mystical connections with consciousness which arise out of a psychedelic initiation. A writer, philosopher, ethnobotanist, psychonaut, a modern-day shaman, among the many titles McKenna earned as he set adrift on his adventures. While he is most well known for being one of the pioneers of the psychedelic movement during the early 80s, Terence also dipped his toe in a plethora of other topics — things like philosophy, culture, science, VR and AI, the nature of time, evolution… and much more. Much of his thoughts are still incredibly thought-provoking, fun to research and ponder.

Let's take a deeper look at Terence and some of his work.

Reading

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution by Terence McKenna. His Modern Classic on History of Plants, Drugs & Human Evolution.

Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.

This is why the shaman is the remote ancestor of the poet and artist. Our need to feel part of the world seems to demand that we express ourselves through creative activity. The ultimate wellsprings of this creativity are hidden in the mystery of language. Shamanic ecstasy is an act of surrender that authenticates both the individual self and that which is surrendered to, the mystery of being. Because our maps of reality are determined by our present circumstances, we tend to lose awareness of the larger patterns of time and space. Only by gaining access to the Transcendent Other can those patterns of time and space and our role in them be glimpsed.

I believe that the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa gave us the model for all religions to follow. And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis, and-if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament-planetary catastrophe. ― Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna by Dennis McKenna. In his memoir, Dennis shares his memories about his brother and their common quest.

Dennis McKenna on the book:

This title has multiple origins. Partly, it’s a reminder of an abyss that was important to me and my brother when we were children: the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument, which was near the town where we grow up - Paonia, Colorado. It’s the deepest gorge in Western US, much deeper than the Grand Canyon. My family used to go there all the time; we would drive over and take a picnic lunch, and spend the day looking into the abyss from all areas. It was more than 3000 feet deep in places. The cover of the book is a picture of my brother and me gazing into that abyss, a photo taken by our mother in 1957. And the frontispiece of part 1 is another picture, taken by me in 2011. The ‘screaming’ part of the abyss harkens back to a favorite sci-fi/horror author of ours, H. P. Lovecraft. His horror stories were often about ancient aliens from beyond the stars: ‘the unspeakable, gibbering horrors from the screaming abyss’, which always appealed to us as young teenagers obsessed with science fiction. So when it was time for us to travel to South America in search of the ‘Secret’, we called ourselves ‘the brotherhood of the screaming abyss’. It was tongue in cheek, making light of our quest which we actually took very seriously. But we were Irish, and had a twisted Irish sense of humor. So although we were seeking the Ultimate Secret, it was healthy to have a bit of humor about it. And then finally, on some unconscious level I think it also refers to the DMT experience. Taking DMT is kind of like stepping off into an abyss; and if you did that, you’d scream!

We were contemptuous of the counterculture’s approach to psychedelics. It seemed very superficial to us. Once we had discovered and experienced DMT, we realized that it was more astounding than any other drug we’d ever encountered; indeed, more astounding than any other thing we had encountered! And DMT was rare in those days, almost nobody was talking about it. And it was just clear to us that Timothy Leary, the only spokesman for psychedelics in the 60s, was as baffled and clueless about the true nature of psychedelics as everyone else. Then we discovered that psychedelics were quite ancient, nothing new, and that they figured prominently in many shamanic traditions, especially in South America. So we figured that if we wanted to understand psychedelics, we had to go talk to indigenous people who knew how to use them, had been doing so for thousands of years. That was partly why we decided to set out for South America in search of the ‘Secret’. We weren’t ‘joiners’ and we weren’t interested in joining a cult, which is what the Leary-inspired social phenomenon was becoming. So we rejected that. We wanted to find out for ourselves just what was going on.

The short answer is we were both driven by curiosity which is the human trait that drives all science, all discovery.
We wanted to understand these ultimate questions: the nature of existence and consciousness, the place of our species in nature and the destiny of our species. My brother and I had a very similar approach to finding out about these questions. The main difference between us was that Terence was more of a philosopher and speculator; my approach was more scientific. I was interested in the ‘nuts and bolts’ of how things worked, while he was more interested in the metaphysical and philosophical side of things. These two approaches overlapped and were very complementary in many ways. Neither one of us were interested in the pat, standard ‘answers’ handed out by religion. We rejected that early on. We were big believers in thinking for ourselves and not accepting belief systems designed mostly to make people stop being curious, stop asking questions. Tripseeker’s Guide to the Galaxy : Interview with Dennis McKenna

Listening

Psychedelic Salon Podcast Archive: Terence Mckenna

One thing about psychedelics, you don’t have to be predisposed. It doesn’t work for those who believe it work. It works for those who think it doesn’t work

Terence McKenna with Art Bell — A series of four interviews recorded between 1997- 1999.

All of our institutions have been built upon the assumption of ego and dominance hierarchies, and deconstructing that is really what the future is all about.

Watching

Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations is an experimental documentary about the chaos at La Chorrera, the imagination, time, the Logos, belief, hope, madness, and doubt.
Created by Peter Bergmann, this project is an expansion of ideas first presented in "The Transcendental Object At The End Of Time".

Joe Rogan Experience with Dennis McKenna

Botanical Dimensions

In 1985, McKenna founded Botanical Dimensions with his then-wife, Kathleen Harrison. Botanical Dimensions is a nonprofit ethnobotanical preserve on the Big Island of Hawaii,[3] established to collect, protect, propagate, and understand plants of ethno-medical significance and their lore, and appreciate, study, and educate others about plants and mushrooms felt to be significant to cultural integrity and spiritual well-being.

Quotes

What a gene is to biology, a meme is to ideology... Madonna is a meme, Catholicism is a meme, Marxism is a meme, yellow sweaters are a meme... rainbow-colored dreadlocks are a meme. Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate—just like genes replicate, and infect, and move into the organism of society. And, believing as I do that society operates on a kind of biological economy, then I believe these memes are the key to societal evolution "Memes, Drugs, and Community"

I have been vehemently accused by people who didn't understand me of not believing in anything. I don't believe in anything. This is not a statement of existential hopelessness for which you should light a candle for me at night. It's a strategy for not getting bogged down in some weird trip. After all, what is the basis for believing anything? I mean, you have to understand: You're a monkey. In some kind of a biological situation where everything has been evolved to serve the economy of survival—this is not a philosophy course. So belief is a curious reaction to the present at hand. It isn't to be believed, it's to be dealt with—experienced and modeled "Gathering Momentum for a Leap".

It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These are the two things that the psychedelics attack. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must de-condition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy. "This World... and Its Double"

The myths of science and religion and shamanism all represent a polarity between the mystery of the Self and the mystery of the Other—and remember a mystery is not to be confused with an unsolved problem; a mystery is by its nature mysterious and will not collapse into solution. We are unfamiliar with that kind of thing. We think that if there's a mystery, then experts of whatever kind can get it straightened out and issue a report. But this approach only works for trivia The Archaic Revival.

"The mushroom said to me once, 'For one human being to seek enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach seeking enlightenment from another'" "Appreciating Imagination".

A single species, ourselves, has broken from the ordinary constraints of animal nature and created a new world, an epigenetic world—meaning a world not based on gene transfer and chemical propagation and preservation of information, but a world based on ideas, on symbols, on technologies, on tools, on ideas downloaded out of the human imagination and concretised in three-dimensional space as choppers, arrowpoints, particle accelerators, gene sequencers, spacecraft, what have you—all of this complexification occurring at a faster and faster rate "Eros and the Eschaton".

The way in which [the internet] will dissolve boundaries is by making us transparent. To each other. I mean, I can imagine a child of the future, we all bring home our drawings to stick on refrigerators, and things like that—in the future we won't stick them on refrigerators, we will stick them in our website. And everything will go into our website. And by the time we're 25, or something, our website will be the size of the American Museum of Natural History. And you can wander through it. And as a gesture of intimacy you can invite someone else to wander through it. Well that's who you are—it's your imagination. And, I think, in a sense, I've said, at times, that: The cultural enterprise is an effort to turn ourselves inside out. We want to put the body into the imagination, and we want the imagination to replace the laws of physics. "Evolving Times".

Conspiracy theory is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. Isn't it so simple to believe that things are run by the Greys, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them and we can solve our technological problems? Or isn't it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party, or the Catholic Church, or the Masons? ...I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying, that the real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one. You don't understand Monica? You don't understand Netanyahu? It's because nobody is in control "Terence McKenna on Who's in Control".

"My life is a mess. My message is my message" A conversation between Terence McKenna and Ram Dass.

Dennis McKenna, in The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (2012), provides context/insight on this

One of [Terence's admirers] told me a story that revealed Terence's healthy perspective on his celebrity. The moment occurred at an appearance he made with the spiritual leader Ram Dass, who has had his own issues with guru worship and cult followers. It happened during the nineties, at a time when Terence was dealing with his share of personal setbacks. In their dialog, Ram Dass said, "Your life is your message," a typical guru-esque pronouncement; Terence replied, "My life is a mess. My message is my message."

Commenting on the reality of his own death, McKenna said during the interview:

I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it's a kind of blessing. It's certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you're going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights.... It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears.

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Also, check out my other work that has been in this recent creative vibe:

Appreciating a Terence McKenna Dream

All of sudden I find myself in unidentifiable room, standing in front of an unfaced class. I was giving this report On the Invisible Landscape and The Nature of Reality. I began speaking,

Psychedelic Sundays: Language Is Evolving (feat. Terence Mckenna)

The mystery of Language is central to understand what psychedelics are. In this week's Psychedelic Sunday we are featuring Terence Mckenna, talking about Language, DMT, what psychedelics are and consciousness.

The Shamanic Call to Artists feat. Terence McKenna(CutUp Song)

Song, dance, sculpture, poetry… out of the domain of a genuine relationship to the transcendent. shamans in all times and places gain their power through relationships with helping spirits,
the acquisition of a relationship to a disincarnate
intelligence is the precondition for authentic shamanism.

The Imagination Must Serve The Ideal Of The Beautiful(CutUp Song)

By slicing into messages of McKenna from books,
images, articles & lectures, mind-bending coincidences emerge
that otherwise would have remained invisible
Cut Up audio from Appreciating Imagination
and Music: Lou Reed - A Walk On The Wild Side (Instrumental Edit)