During the 1990s Carolyn and I attended around a half dozen workshops together at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur that were conducted by the late ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, and we also visited him together at his home, when he was living in Occidental, California. It was such a thought-provoking, mind-expanding delight to be around Terence.

Terence was an accomplished world explorer, renowned author, and the most eloquent public speaker and engaging storyteller that I ever met. His lively talks covered a wide range of fascinating topics — from the I-Ching and alchemy, to Novelty Theory, plant medicines, and human evolution. His mesmerizing words carried us to the outer edges of reality, and despite how improbable some of Terence’s more outlandish theories sounded when I tried to explain them, somehow, when Terence spoke, it all made jaw-dropping sense.

With his brother Dennis, Terence explored the La Chorrera region of the upper Amazon basin in the early 1970s, and collected valuable shamanic and botanical knowledge. Upon returning, Terence co-founded Botanical Dimensions — a botanical garden based in Hawaii, devoted to collecting and propagating plants of ethno-pharmacological interest and preserving the shamanic lore which accompanies their use. The garden is growing there to this day, run by Terence’s previous wife Kat Harrison, who co-founded it with him.

Terence is the author or coauthor of seven books, including True Hallucinations and The Invisible Landscape. He also engaged in a series of public debates, or “trialogues,” with mathematician Ralph Abraham and biologist Rupert Sheldrake, and these extraordinary conversations were collected in three published volumes.

Terence passed away in 2000, but he seems more popular now than ever, as a whole new generation has discovered his recorded talks and they’re posted regularly all over social media these days. I interviewed Terence McKenna in 1988, at the Esalen Institute, with Carolyn present. Terence was the first person that I ever interviewed. My interview with him appears in my book Mavericks of the Mind” which also includes an interview with Carolyn. Here is an excerpt from my interviews with Terence:

David: What do you think the ultimate goal of human evolution is?

Terence: Oh, a good party.

David: Do you have any thoughts on what happens to human consciousness after biological death?

Terence: I’ve thought about it. When I think about it I feel like I’m on my own. The logos doesn’t want to help here, has nothing to say to me on the subject of biological death. What I imagine happens is that for the self time begins to flow backwards; even before death, the act of dying is the act of reliving an entire life, and at the end of the dying process, consciousness divides into the consciousness of one’s parents and one’s children, and then it moves through these modalities, and then divides again. It’s moving forward into the future through the people who come after you, and backwards into the past through your ancestors. The further away from the moment of death it is, the faster it moves, so that after a period of time, the Tibetans say 42 days, one is reconnected to everything that ever lived, and the previous ego-pointed existence is defocused, and one is you know, returned to the ocean, the morphogenetic field, or the One of Plotinus, you choose your term. A person is a focused illusion of being, and death occurs when the illusion of being can be sustained no longer. Then everything flows out and away from this disequilibrium state that life is. It is a state of disequilibrium, and it is maintained for decades, but finally, like all disequilibrium states, it must yield to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and at that point it runs down, its specific character disappears into the general character of the world around it. It has returned then to the void/plenum.

by David Jay Brown