The Trip: Journey to the center of Terence McKenna's inner elf.
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!