25 years ago, my great friend and mentor, Terence McKenna, passed on from this world. I met him in the spring of 1997 and was so fortunate to have had him in my life for 3 short years...he taught me more in those three years than I had learned in the decades before and continued to teach me long after his death. He was a true shaman...a true medicine man.
His memory lives on all over the internet - and certainly in my heart and mind - but I'm not sure people really know how and why he became such an advocate of psilocybin.
Below is a snippet from Terence's journal, written in the amazon jungle 54 years ago. He and his brother Dennis (who remains with us and continues to do remarkable work) and a small band of friends embarked on an adventure that would shape all of their lives.
It is accounted in the book True Hallucinations and is an amazing story...If you've never heard of Terence, I'm happy to make this introduction.
RIP my friend.
February 23, 1971
Are we indeed now in some way camped on the edge of another dimension? Yesterday afternoon Dave discovered Stropharia cubensis in the damp pastures behind the house where we had hung our hammocks. He and I gathered thirty delicious psilocybin-saturated specimens in about a half an hour. We each ate about six and spent last night on an enormously rich and alive, yet gentle and elusive, trip. In between strange lights in the pasture and discussion of our project, I am left with the sense that by penetrating the local psychedelic flora this way we have taken a giant step toward deeper understanding. Multifaceted and benevolent, as complex as mescaline, as intense as LSD - the mushroom, as is said of peyote, teaches the right way to live. This particular mushroom species is unclaimed, so far as I know, by any aboriginal people anywhere and thus is neutral ground in the tryptamine dimension we are exploring. Through this unclaimed vegetable teacher one can gain entry into the world of the elf chemists. The experience of the mushroom is subtle but can reach out to the depth and breadth of a truly intense psychedelic experience. It is, however, extremely mercurial and difficult to catch at work. Dennis and I, through a staggered description of our visions, noticed a similarity of content that seemed to suggest a telepathic phenomenon or some sort of simultaneous perception of the same invisible landscape. A tight headache accompanied the experience in its final stages, but this was quick to fade, and the body strain and exhaustion often met with in unextracted vegetable drugs such as peyote and Datura was not present.
This mushroom is a transdimensional doorway which sly fairies have left slightly ajar for anyone to enter into who can find the key and who wishes to use this power—the power of vision— to explore this peculiar and naturally occurring psychoactive complex.
We are closing distance with the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter.
The emergence of life from the dark chrysalis of matter.