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
This is the message of your life and my life - it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children - nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is.
If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
Astonishment is the proper response to reality.
The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
Worrying is betting against yourself.
The only real experience that counts, is your own.
We are told No, you're unimportant, you're peripheral - get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.
Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.
The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.
