“And so, acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem, and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar – that I forgive an insult – that I love my enemy in the name of Christ – all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all – the poorest of all beggars – the most impudent of all offenders – yea the very fiend himself – that these are within me? And that I myself stand in need of the arms of my own kindness. That I myself am the enemy that must be loved. What then?
Then, as a rule, the whole truth of Christianity is reversed. There is then no more talk of love and long suffering. We say to the brother within us: Rocca, and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide him from the world. We deny ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves. And had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed.” – Carl Gustav Jung
After the Beatles got into grass, they began to think of themselves as artists, not just performers. The herb triggered a creative surge that altered their approach to writing and recording songs.
The concept was conceptualised in the mid-1960s and adopted by hippies, psychonauts and future countercultural icons. Now, it’s coming back, in the form of a massive party in the South Yorkshire Woodland.
“One of my earliest experiences with LSD was also one of my most powerful and transformative. At the peak, I was unable to tell whether I had my eyes open or closed, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘If there is no difference between the inside and the outside, where am I?'” – Alan Watts
Terence Kemp McKenna was an author, lecturer, philosopher and shamanic explorer of the realm of psychedelic states. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including metaphysics, alchemy, language, culture, technology, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. He has been described by some as being “so far out, nobody knows what he’s talking about”, and by others as “the most innovative thinker of our times”.
To shake us out of our perceptual torpor, McKenna played the holy fool, the crazy wisdom sage. He pushed our faces in the most exotic, lurid inventions of modern science and technology. What elevated him above most other prophets was that he delivered his prophesies with a wink, an implicit acknowledgement that ultimately reality is stranger than we CAN suppose.
McKenna’s métier was the spoken word — stand-up philosophy that meme-splices Alfred North Whitehead, Marshall McLuhan, James Joyce, William Blake and many others, delivered in a reedy, insinuating voice. Available throughout the Internet with titles like “Having Archaic and Eating it Too” and “Shedding the Monkey,” his lectures are tours de force of verbal virtuosity and pack-rat polymathy, leaping trippingly (in both senses of the word) from quantum mechanics to medieval alchemy, from the chaos theory of Ilya Prigogine to the neo-Platonism of Philo Judaeus.
This movie was created to present and collect (some of) his most profound thoughts, and to possibly show glimpses of the alchemical angel that Terence pursued throughout his life. It does not serve as a biography, (at least) three very important themes were left out for the simple reason that they take hours to unfold themselves: the experiment at La Chorrera, the relationship between the McKenna brothers, and the Trialogues with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham. And so, three books are essential to anyone who’d like to dive deeper into the life and mind of Terence McKenna:
True Hallucinations by Terence McKenna
The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss by Dennis McKenna
Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness by Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, and Ralph Abraham
Created by Peter Bergmann, this is a movie/documentary/project/amalgamation made from everything Terence McKenna left us with, mixed with the music of We Plants Are Happy Plants.
Peer 2 Peace 