Subject: Terence McKenna annotated bibliography (+ sources)
From: [email-masked] (Peter Davidson)
Date: 24 Mar 94 12:06:41 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.activism,alt.consciousness,alt.slack,alt.alien.visitors,alt.drugs,alt.save.the.earth,alt.pagan

(This is in response to a posting on the Fringeware mailing list.
Feel free to repost it to anywhere the message should go.)
 
>Subject: PHILOS - singularity (McKenna)
>
>Sent from: [email-masked] ("D. Ronan Hallowell")
>
>Regarding Terence McKenna.
>
>Bibliography  [Typographical errors corrected.]
 
>The Invisible Landscape - 1975? [yes]    Seabury Press NY
>(This is an analysis of the King Wen sequence of the I Ching. This
>knowledge was revealed to Terence during an extended high bandwidth
>connection with the GAIAN MIND in the early '70's in Central America.
>This work forms the basis of his Timewave Zero theory which deals with the
>ingression of novelty and the end of HIStory in 2012 (coincidentally? also
>the end of the Mayan calendar).
 
Actually the King Wen Sequence is not mentioned until the 2nd half
of the book.  The first deals with shamanism, neurochemistry, eschatology,
hallucinogens, schizophrenia, etc., etc., and with the Experiment at
La Chorrera (which is described in much more detail in True Hallucinations).
As to whether it was the Gaian Mind, extraterrestrials, time-travelling elfs
or the Goddess, that's not known for sure.
 
The Invisible Landscape is being reprinted by HarperSanFrancisco.
It should be hitting the bookstores RSN, maybe April.
 
>Magic Mushroom Growers Guide- (With Dennis McKenna)
>(Published under a pseudonym in late '70's early '80's. Require botanical
>skills and could be detrimental to your well being in Police State America)
 
The authors were, pseudonymously, O.T.Oss and O.N.Oeric ("otiose" and
"oneiric").  Could also be detrimental to Police State America.
 
>The Archaic Revival-        Harper S.F.1991
>(This is the best intro to Mckenna's thought. It is a collection of
>articles and talks from various mags and lectures. The text could have
>been edited a bit better but it is still a pleasure to read and packed
>with compelling stories/information/knowledge.)
 
Contains a chapter on the Timewave Zero theory.
 
>Food Of The Gods-   ? 1992 [Bantam]
>(This is a radical history of the relationship between psychedelic plants
>and the evolution of conscioussness.)
 
Politically relevant.  Closest thing we have so far to a Psychedelic
Manifesto.  Calls for legalization of all drugs and the overthrow of
the dominator form of society.
 
>Trialogues At The Edge of The West: Chaos Creativity and The
>Resacralization of the World (w/ Rupert Sheldrake & Ralph Abraham)
>(This text is highly recommended. A very interesting discussion between
>three of the most important and hopeful contemporary thinkers.)
>Bear & Co., Santa Fe 1992
 
>True Hallucinations     Harper S.F. 1993
>(This should be read like literature. It is a rant. Not his best text but
>worthwhile none the less.)
 
The original version, 8 audio tapes, originally published by the
venerable and now-dormant Lux Natura, is currently available from Sound
Photosynthesis, Mill Valley, 415-383-6712.  If you get the tapes, don't
lend them out, you'll likely never get them back (I've lost two sets this
way).  Sound Photosynthesis also has other McKenna tapes.  Audio tapes
also available from Big Sur Tapes, Box 4, Tiburon, CA 94920 (415-435-5511).
 
>Sound Video
>
>I recommend the Space/Time Continuum CD. Very good intro which I find
>entertaining. The video is the shit!!! very well done & "trippy"
>Available from Rose X Media House S.F. email me for more info)
>There is also a film version available. It is playing in S.F. now tell
>your local independent cinema to pick this up.
 
Also there's the video "Seeking the Stone" available from Lightworks
Audio & Video, P. O. Box 661593, Los Angeles, CA 90066.
 
And at last it seems there's actually a Macintosh version of the Timewave
Zero software available (in addition to the MS-DOS version which has been
available since 1990 and has been undergoing incremental improvements ever
since).  Info on this from Dolphin Software, 510-464-3009.
 
>My Two Cents On T.M.
>
>Many people try to discredit Terence by saying he's a wacked out crazy
>druggy.Well he is not. He is a very talented philosopher and poet who is
>trying to help our species wake up and celebrate the wonder of chaos and
>gnosis instead of annhilating each other in a patriarchal bloodbath of
>ecological degradation, social decay and political violence.
 
Well said.  I suspect those who criticise Terence are actually
attacking the psychedelic position.  Some want to keep us on our knees
at the churches, mosques, etc. (not to mention slumped nightly in
front of the idiot box when not laboring as wage-slaves to enrich the
corporate capitalists) and don't like people getting into direct
experience of psychological/spiritual/metaphysical realms and finding
out things for themselves (which may be different from what the priest,
minister, rabbi, swami, etc., have learned to tell them is so).
 
As is well known to anyone who has explored the subject, psychedelics
are deconditioning agents, and are immediately opposed and attacked by
anyone who has a stake in keeping people believing things they've been
conditioned to believe.  Amazing what a few good acid trips will do
for your belief in the authority of the government, sanctity of the
church and divinely-ordained superiority of the country you grew up
in. The best thing to do with the established power-structures is to
subvert them, since they benefit only the ruling class (that's not us).
Refuse to cooperate with them, throw sand in their gears, disable their
lines of communication, trash their records, confuse their bureaucracies,
render them nugatory and lead them into oblivion quickly so we and future
generations can live our lives in whatever way we choose, as we see fit,
based on our own direct experience interpreted by means of our own innate
intelligence.
 
Here's a taste of the authentic McKenna, from a 1992 talk at the
Camden Center in London:
 
]These psychedelic substances cause hysterical psychoses in people who have
]not taken them, and how then do you talk them down out of their tree and
]attempt to convince them that this is all well and good.  Well, it isn't
]easy.  It isn't going to come from the upper echelons of the establishment,
]this revolution in thinking, it's going to come from youth, it's going to
]come from people who stand outside the system and can see its
]contradictions.  Well, is it simply a political evolution, revolution, a
]desire for more freedom, less entanglement with bureaucracy and restriction
]of civil rights?  I don't think so.  I think that when we analyze carefully
]the content of the psychedelic experience we have to leave our previous
]models behind.  The psychedelic experience is far more than instant
]psychotherapy or instant regression to infantile traumatic situations, far
]more than simply a kind of super-aphrodisiac, far more than simply an aid
]in formulating ideas or coming up with artistic concepts.  What the
]psychedelic experience really is is opening the doorway into a lost continent
]of the human mind.  A continent that we have almost lost all connection to,
]and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian
]entelechy.  It turns out, if we can trust the evidence of the psychedelic
]experience, that we are not the only intelligent life forms on this planet,
]that we share this planet with some kind of conscious mind - call it Gaia,
]call it Zeta Reticulans who came here a million years ago, call it God
]Almighty, it doesn't matter what you call it, the fact of the matter is
]that the claims of religion that there is some kind of higher power can be
]experientially verified through psychedelics.  Now this is not, in Milton's
]wonderful phrase "The God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven" - it
]doesn't have to do with that, in my opinion - it isn't cosmic in scale,
]it's planetary in scale.  There is some kind of discarnate intelligence.
]It's in the water, it's in the ground, it's in the vegetation, it's in the
]atmosphere we breath, and our unhappiness, our discomfort, arises from the
]fact that we have fallen into history and history is a state of benighted
]ignorance concerning the real facts of how the world works.
 
>I'm open for further discussion and would be interested in starting a
>small study group in the Bay Area.
>
>                        Ronan Hallowell
>                    dada epistemologist/DJ
 
I'm told that Dolphin Software, the publisher of the Mac and MS-DOS
Timewave Zero software packages, is able to facilitate the formation
of such discussion groups.  They have ways of connecting people who
wish to be connected.  Mysterious ways.  Call them at 510-464-3009 if
you want to start a McKenna study group or be part of one.