Essay/Term paper: The trip: journey to the center of terence mckenna's inner self.

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Society

The Trip: Journey to The Center of Terence McKenna's Inner Self.

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!