Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)

fraywing

Their server was sleep paralyzed by the HN egregore

niwtsol

https://web.archive.org/web/20260719160409/https://psychedel...

cj17382

It's important to have a spiritual practice to go alongside psychedelics to weather the ontological shock.

neuralkoi

> 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.

zuzululu

i think his theory on novelty diminishing is bunk we are seeing more and more of it

xvxvx

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.

comrade1234

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.

brcmthrowaway

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.

state_less

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.

sjs382

Don't incapacitate yourself during a major weather event.

alex1138

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)

thisisauserid

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).

jebronie2

I didn't know chemically deep-frying your brain could be a bad thing

DantesKite

Wonderfully captivating article about a loquacious man that like the rest of us, wrestled with his demons and even sometimes machine elves.