The Trip: Journey To The Center Of Terence McKenna’s Inner Self. Essay, Research Paper

The Trip: Journey to The Center of Terence McKenna’s Inner Self.

Terence McKenna has become one of the most (in)famous figures in the exploration

of psychedelia and its impact on society and technology. Here McKenna espouses

his theories on psychedelic mushrooms, virtual reality, shamanism and evolution.

This is definitely one of the strangest and most interesting articles I have

ever read. At first it seems almost totally incomprehensible and inconceivable,

but after reading it over a couple of times with a good dictionary and thesaurus

it begins to make sense. In this article McKenna explains one of his trips on

magic mushrooms. He describes this trip as ?a virtual reality tour of God’s

cerebral cortex, hosted by the Lucky Charms leprechaun?. He then goes on to tell

how this trip affected his life and how it was such a complete shock that it

caused the literal turning inside-out of his intellectual universe. He was

knocked off his feet and set himself the goal of understanding this. His quest

led him all over the world, exploring traditions of magic-religious drug usage.

In the years since his fateful encounter with the self-transforming machine

elves of hyperspace, McKenna has fashioned his mental Merzbau on the New Age

lecture circuit, where he has earned the benediction of the psychedelic High

Priest himself, who dubbed him ?the Timothy Leary of the 90’s?.

McKenna has written several books as well as having rave bands set his

ruminations to billowing techno-trance music.

The main focus of this article is on McKenna’s theory, which is concocted from

psychedelic Darwinism, fringe linguistics, and New Age eschatology. This theory

is based on the notion that ?Hallucinogenic plants may have been the catalysts

for everything about us that distinguishes us from other primates, except

perhaps the loss of body hair?. During one of McKenna’s more memorable trips the

mushroom told him that it is literally not from this world; in fact, it is an

alien symbiote whose spores were borne across the galaxy.

This may all seem a little far fetched to most people, but nothing is

impossible!