This was uploaded a few days ago and is taken from a workshop this year called Terence Mckenna: Beyond 2012. It includes excerpts from Dennis McKenna's Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss and sheds light on the dark side of Terence's personal life regarding an existential crisis and rejection of psychedelics in the last decade of his life. Personally, it in many ways makes me appreciate some of his ideas even more, but I think it will help us to avoid the mistakes of someone who it now seems was an ironic, tragic figure.

http://www.youtube.com/w...YzQU4g&feature=g-u-u

It's always good to check the active topics at the bottom of the forum

Same topic: https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=34162

Oh, sorry!

Yeah I suppose. There is certainly a comedic aspect to it, but that was always present. You don't think it's sad at all that he lost faith in his ideas and only kept talking about them because it was the only thing he could do to pay the bills, and that the only way he could open up to his emotions was to die of brain cancer? Depends on how you look at it, but that's certainly his brother's perspective, the man who knew him best.
Doesn't diminish my appreciation for most of what he talked about, of course.

Well, yeah, you should listen to it, otherwise you won't know what I'm talking about. Even with his self-deprecating humor and admonition against belief he clearly took the timewave and his theory of evolution seriously, at least until a few years before his death. It may not be as bad as I made it sound, as the years after he apparently stopped tripping contain arguably his best material. But Dennis comes across as rather harsh in his claim that Terence deliberately misled people by passing off what was supposed to be performance art as prophetic revelation, and Dennis is a pretty smart guy, so I have mixed feelings. I think that even Terence became confused as to which he REALLY was doing, and I think there is some element of tragedy in that, as well as in the fact that the substance he extolled "betrayed" him, which really means it showed him something he did not want to look at.

What about that are you "what the fuck"-ing? Simply paraphrasing the feelings of the people closest to him, not my own judgement. But I agree with you, it isn't really tragic from a spiritual perspective, if that's what you're saying. In the end it seems he realized what needed to be realized.

A scientist, but an open-minded one.

It doesn't particularly matter how you (or I) see him, he was both, to different people. He was forced into the position of celebrity because other people wouldn't talk about what he did, or couldn't do it as well. It doesn't help that he took his ideas and inflated them into what he would call "epistemological cartoons," like the Timewave. He would have said his works stood on their own - "my life isn't my message. my message is my message," but realistically, this isn't possible due to the highly idiosyncratic nature of psychedelics, in my opinion (take it with a grain of salt because I'm not that experienced).

Personally, I intuit that when Terence said "My life is a mess. My message is my message." he was pointing out his fatal flaw. He was so obsessed with 'the other', that when the mushroom forced him to take a hard look at himself, Terence couldn't handle that everything he had built up was less important than his own personal development which he had clearly neglected.

I've had the insight he had on his deathbed that 'it's all about love'. With that being the case, I think Terence lamented the fact that for all of this psychedelic work, he had not progressed spiritually much at all. You can look at his life from his early childhood and the emotional wall he put up to defend himself from his father (I very much relate to this) and how that emotional wall never really came down. It took brain cancer and impending death for him to finally realize what he was supposed to be focusing on via his psychedelic use; his own personal development.

I'm actually really relieved that this information is just now coming out, in Terence's year as the talk says. It makes me understand him so much more, and how for all his crazy insights and how cool he made them sound, it was really only scratching at the surface of what psychedelics try to teach us. Rest in peace Terence.

Yes, this is exactly how I feel. Is there any source that talks more about his relationship with his father? Normally I don't care to look that much into personal details of someone's life, but I see so many aspects of myself reflected in Terence, in some strange way the more I understand him, the more I understand myself.

Ironic that you say that. Certain psychedelic sessions have caused me to question just what sort of relationship I have with this man whom I've never met. At times its seemed to me that he is more meme than man.

I'm hoping that Dennis's new book The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss will go into their childhood further. Terence rarely discussed his upbringing, but I recall a few statements scattered throughout hundreds of hours of talks where he gives a few hints about having a difficult time in his younger years.

One last comment. During one of his talks (I wish I could remember which), Terence does go into this horrible trip he experienced, but he never gave any inclination that this was the last time he did mushrooms (so it may not have been that exact trip). He actually talked about it more from Kat's perspective, that at a certain time during this trip they were outside looking up at the sky and Kat started to become psychically oppressed by what she had described at the time as insectoid beings. Terence ended up dumping a huge vat of water on her to try and snap her out of it, but no matter what he tried it was just an awful night. He didn't go into at all what he had experienced, but he so rarely discussed having negative experiences I had logged this one in my memory bank and after hearing the talk I started wondering if this was the trip that ended all trips for him.

Yeah I've heard the talk that he mentions that in.

A comment on YouTube brought an interesting, and fairly obvious, question to my mind - why didn't Terence go to a shaman in the Amazon when he was diagnosed with brain cancer? Why did he seemingly reject the notion of shamanic healing in the end? Was it because he didn't want to possibly face a similar experience to that last trip?

i think his work stands on its own regardless of the messenger, but it is sad to realize how being a public figure can cloud the issue personally. I think it really is all about love, but of course "god" and the "devil" are in the details..in a way, as long as there is an "observer" separate from what is being observed, there will always be that type of duality.

What are you talking about? Listen to some of the tapes after he was diagnosed. They explored many avenues. He was working with synthetic psilocybin towards the end, and couldt use aya because they thought the purging might bring on seizures. Dennis said they did a lot of shamanic work that summer of 99' after he was diagnosed

I don't know, that's not really what I got out of it. What I understood was Dennis was trying to do this as a way to set the meme of Terence free. Dennis seemed to recognize his brother fell into a tragic situation of having to keep his fan base satisfied by speaking of these wild notions, even if it seemed as if the mushroom teacher was trying to show him that his theories were not the important aspect of psychedelic voyaging.

Just imagine you were Terence for a moment, and for many years you built up this notion that the mushroom was an extraterrestrial and staked your entire reputation on the validity of the things you were so sure you were correct about. Then one day the bottom drops out from under you and the mushroom instead makes you look at how you've lived your own life and I don't think Terence liked what he saw.

This to me was his exestential horror; that he had placed the emphasis on entirely the wrong thing and had promoted it to a large fan base. He couldn't just say he was wrong, or "Wait folks, forget all I've been saying; that's not really important; what's really important is X." Whether his ideas held merit or not, what I think he fell into was "Well, for years I have been thinking it was this one way, and now I'm being directed in an entirely different direction. How can I reconcile this?" So the cognitive dissonance would have really ate at him, so much so that perhaps the stress of that situation brought on his brain tumor.

Terence even said once in a lecture something to the effect of: "The unfortunate thing about being in the public eye is that everything you say is put on record, so if you ever go back and change your ideas some nut will come up to you and wave a tape in your face calling you out on it."

I know nothing of Terence's personal life other than what's on record, but clearly his relationship with Kat didn't work out. I'm not sure who wanted the divorce in that situation, but I have a sneaking suspicion it was probably her, probably for a variety of reasons. Imagine yourself as Terence, realizing you were supposed to spend your life working on your personal relationships, but having spent all of your time in airy fairy ideas that were largely presented just to entertain an audience. An exciting life to be sure, but an empty and lonely one just the same.

Oh, I guess I missed that, my bad.

Right. I definitely don't think Dennis is trying to make money at the expense of his brother's legacy. He's doing the right thing by dispelling the myths, I think its exactly what Terence would have wanted.

Wait, I didn't say any of that. haha.

Why?

You don't understand dennis in the slightest and are confusing yourself throughout this whole thread. the quote about brain cancer you made earlier in this thread wasn't even said by dennis, it was bruce damer

the thing most people don't realize is that both dennis, terence, and several of they're friends have said that dennis is actually the one who fueled "terence's" ideas for decades. A shitload of them were actually dennis's ideas, which is blatantly obvious if you read true hallucination. He just choose not to take the public spokesman route and was interested in the nuts and bolts of how all this stuff they were theorizing about works. But just because he's a scientist doesn't mean he still isn't very much into shamanism.

for example https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=27058

I listened to this today and found myself annoyed. First off, I'd never imagined Mckenna did munch drugs constantly. The fact that he hadn't eaten mushrooms for 12 years means very little; I haven't eaten any for 4 years, no reason, just finding the time. I would encourage others to eat useful doses without feeling any sort of hypocryte whatsoever. 12 years isn't a long time, passes in a heartbeat...
To the podcast: I came to it with an open mind but as it progressed it sounded more and more like a 'hatchet' job on Terence's memory. A more sophisticated- and in a way more unpleasant- version of Ball's article of a couple of years back. The new-age 'therapy' tone and supposed love and concern it was couched in seemed disingenous to say the least. The use of an unpublished chapter from Dennis's book to bolster what was essentialy a character assasination was ugly and nasty. I have the book on pre-order, have really been looking forward to reading it, but am really hoping the extracts aren't representative of the whole finished thing.
Mckenna never claimed any of his 'raps' as revealed, final truths. Anyone who believed otherwise wasn't listening and really didn't get it. The only one- as far as I'm aware- he ever put himself behind was the Timewave; couragously a theory testable with a real date for its proof one way or another.
My annoyance moved to anger towards the end of the podcast. The suggestion that Terence's tumor, being mushroom shaped- whatever that means- was somehow an expression of the mushroom teacher- whatever that is- and a catharsis had me open mouthed and furious. I suggest everyone sits through the thing to see how unpleasant and in what poor taste the 'finale' of Daimers thesis is.
I really hope more people will listen to the podcast and make their displeasure known across the net. Terence Mckenna was neither a saint, prophet or guru but no one deserves this sort of post-mortem assault from supposed former friends.

Many of the ideas(and certainly the ones inspired by La Chorerra) were Dennis's ideas in the first place. This should be quite clear to anyone closely familiar with the Mckenna brothers story. Dennis was also the one who went through the sort of shamanic innitiation at La Chorerra..he just interpreted the events a little differently later on.

Terrence took many of his brothers ideas, wove them in with his own into this beautiful little package with this gift of language he had. The guy was certainly qualified to talk about deep psychedelic experience and I have always been a big fan of Terrence..but his brothers work is also something I very much admire and I think it is quite balancing to have his take on things public..much of the ideas were afterall, his to begin with.

I also really love listening to Kat Harrison talk..I cant get enough of her talks and I hope she puts out a book. She seems very different from Terrence in her approach to this thing as well, so it would be interesting to hear her take on some of Terrences ideas.