alt Hacker NewsTerence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)
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> A further factor was cannabis. Attempts to quit left him feeling stranded in a “horribly profane” world, with a “tremendous narrowing of consciousness.” Substances that once served exploration soon functioned as psychological maintenance. “He just needed to be high on cannabis,” Harrison said. “That was his medicine… what drove everything,” keeping him from “bouncing off the ceiling.”
Clearly there were a number of factors contributing to his difficulties, but this sounds like it may be an underestimated one, maybe more than the mushrooms even. Cannabis dependency really can sneak up on people, and for some it’s quite difficult to get off it, with real physical and emotional symptoms.
Mixing mushrooms and cannabis can lead to some seriously weird places, just read some reports on erowid.org. And Terrance did that repeatedly.
I did this once and ended up completely languageless for a moment, like unable to write and speak at all. Then I would have very intense visions so I would try to close my eyes but alas! my eyes have been closed this whole time. Then there were black holes eating up my field on vision, like clusters of dead pixels on a computer screen, spreading.
Also, I think Terrance suffered from a brain tumour which eventually killed him - I wonder if his migraines and experiences were influenced by that too.
And then there’s this quote from Leary, I think: “Hang up the phone once you got the message”. Psychedelics are no joke. I do advocate for them as sporadic psychological aide because they truly do loosen up the rigid structures in your mind and allow for a lasting change and improvement. But each session should be treated with utmost respect. There should be an understanding that each has the potential to be the best or the worst experience of your life.
I am sure that it was only one real trip that he had during all life. From different facts it seems that he were just re-telling the stories of other people trips.
Yeah... this made me reflect on my own bad trips decades past. I havent done4 many psychedelics only a handful, but I did have what one could call a bad trip or 2... maybe. It didn't look like it on the outside but internally it was profound. One in particular stood out that had me inhabit this universe but all semblance of emotional ties were cut from that reality, I am sure I would have felt pure terror if i was able to feel anything at the time. odd thing for sure as I am describing a horrible experience from memory but at the time i was unable to feel anything at all. An emotional echo of sorts i guess.... well anyways I do think that experience had a profound affect as the "nothing matters" sentiment stuck around since then. For a long time now I thought I peered in to "the void of reality" but thinking on it objectively now, maybe that was a assumption wrongfully borrowed from a bad trip. After all why should the natural state of things be so bereft of anything. If anything the universe is capable of being witnessed only through the eyes of a subjective observer... Bah anyways ive rambled for long enough. Good read.
Don't incapacitate yourself during a major weather event.
It's important to have a spiritual practice to go alongside psychedelics to weather the ontological shock.
> Terence told friends, “history’s going to end any day now.” Friends worried they’d “gone off the rails,” and Dennis later conceded they had a point.
I always imagine the recklessness of psychonauts like McKenna as something like dragging a high powered electromagnet across the skull to force altered states while doing who knows what to the membrane.
I tried lsd with friends in undergrad. It was to me a very interesting experience. Not spiritual in any way - it was like I could tell that my neurons were firing off all over and incorrectly. It was fun and I enjoyed it very much and I've never had the desire to do it again.
My friends from that night did still continue doing lsd after that. For one of them he stopped when he had what sounds like a horrible trip where a pool table opened up to a portal to hell and dragged him in. Lol.
Wonderfully captivating article about a loquacious man that like the rest of us, wrestled with his demons and even sometimes machine elves.
I remember discovering McKenna in the late 90’s when I first got internet access at home. The comparison with Alex Jones is a good one: he was initially very interesting, sparking the imagination that whole worlds existed out there that I didn’t know about. But quickly it fell apart and I understood it was just horseshit, a form of fantasy.
I’ve never tripped but it sounds similar to fever dreams I had a few times when I was sick as a child, running high temperatures. Why anyone would choose to experience that is another question.
Reading that McKenna was just another for-profit bullshit artist at the end of the day is the sad part. Exploring ideas and possibilities is a noble pursuit, but only if you can admit to mistakes and failures. Deciding to carry on to make money is weak and undermines everything. His legacy could have been as someone who dedicated his life to understanding psychedelics and gave an honest, well-researched evaluation at the end of it all. Money and celebrity status ruined all of that.
And he had even more regret when he thought that his (terminal) brain tumor was caused by all the psychedelics he had done (though doctors assured him that was unlikely in the extreme).
I didn't know chemically deep-frying your brain could be a bad thing
Classic psychedelic community. Preach about ego death while maintaining a huge ego.
Guy goes through traumatic experiences because he abused the hell out of psychedelics (5g weekly, wtf?) but continues to encourage people to do the same because he doesn't want to be seen as weak
I have so many problems with McKenna. Guy was a drug addict but because he was one of the first to write about drugs during an era of taboo, he gets a pioneers deference. That would be fine if people still didn't glorify his absurd doses and bull shit about "knowledge downloads" or whatever it is.
Anyways, pardon my rant
Their server was sleep paralyzed by the HN egregore
The famous story of La Chorrera is that Dennis is the one that went seriously off the rails but it's Dennis in some of his public statements and book that cast skepticism on a few of Terence's ideas
What you shouldn't do is just willy nilly tell people to take things. If the article is right about that, it's disappointing. I always saw him as being very academic and quite in tune with the dangers of outright recommendation (perhaps in contrast to Leary but I don't want to misinterpret Leary)
i think his theory on novelty diminishing is bunk we are seeing more and more of it
This movement had a movement but now it's over. They failed to stop capitalism and effective altruists from taking over the cultural lexicon.
Now I can't go anywhere without hearing about Roko's Basilisk.
I wouldn't know what to tell someone about what entering a (the?) void is like, but the closest i can imagine is a situation where you're 1000 nautical miles out to sea in a small sailboat on a pitch dark cloudy moonless night, far away from anyone. A storm is brewing and the seas are getting large, though you can't see them, it's too dark for your eyes, though you feel the force as it throws your small boat around. It's more than you bargained for, but there isn't anything you can do about it. You're in it now. You're losing control of the boat. You're afraid of what will happen if you lose control, the seas grow larger... The rains and the lightning and thunder are here and it's just too much too bear, so you go down below and lay ahull, surrendering to the sea and forces beyond your control. The sea will make of you what it will, you're fate rests with something larger than yourself. A part of you dies that night, and what emerges the next day is different from what was swallowed by the storm. Your old self at the helm, somewhat unrecognizable. And a part of you never made it out of the storm, remembering that you're always out to sea, and that you needed to come out here to remember that.