TRUE HALLUCINATIONS and THE ARCHAIC REVIVAL
Tales and Speculation About the Mysteries of the Psychedelic Experience
Two Classics in One Volume by Terence McKenna
MJF Books New York (in arrangement with HarperCollins)
Copywrited by the author in 1991 and 1993 the material in these two books was written in the early-mid 1970's.
QUICK BOOK REVIEW by Christine Trzyna
I've never read Terence McKenna before, having only heard him on the old Art Bell Coast to Coast AM show being interviewed by Art, prior to his death from a brain cancer. I find that it interesting that his avocation was hallucinogens and their effect on the brain and that he died of brain cancer.
These two books reveal McKenna to be extremely sophisticated in his thinking about his hallucinogenic experiences particularly with mushrooms. McKenna seems to have suffered from not being an academic. I hasten to remember when I was taking an Anthropology course about the Native Americans and wished to produce a spectacular paper on the local Tongva and rock art and /or the use of local hallucinogens - which proved to be Jimsonweed. There wasn't enough time for the research I wanted to do, but when I mentioned the name of Terence McKenna as a possible resource to a grad student, she urged me that my research would not be acceptable to academia if I referenced him.
The excerpts chosen below have to do with memory, a subject that I as a memoirist like to explore.
EXCERPT :
Page 135
(Re his brother Dennis McKenna circa about 1971)
..."Dennis announced a new teaching. He said that one could see any point in time by closing ones' eyes, visualizing an eight, turning it on its side so that it approximated the sign for infinity, and then mentally sliding the two closed rings over each other to form a circle,. shrinking the circle to a dot, and thinking the word "please." and target the point in space-time. Usually I knew not whence these images came to him; however, this time I was amazed. I recalled with perfect clarity that six weeks before, shortly before I left Vancouver, British Columbia, I had gone to a dentist as pat of the standard pre-travel tune up. While int he waiting room, I had read a several-months old journal of some Canadian education association. In that journal, which I had not discussed with anyone, was a very short article about teaching machines and very young children. The "Picture This" scenario with which the article opened was of a child looking at a figure-eight on a television screen, rolling it on its side, squeezing it together, etc. It was a bit of media flotsam that my brother, or something working through my brother, was lift right out of my mind weeks after I had forgotten it. Something was able to refashion and use our memories in whatever absurd way that it wished."
page 196
"...Destruction of up to 95% of the brain does not impair memory function. It appears that memory isn't stored anywhere; memory seems to permeate the brain. Like a hologram, all of the memory seems to be in each part. Similarly, one can take a holographic plate of Mount Fuji and cut it in half; when a half is illuminated, the entire image is present. One can do this again and again: the holograph is made up of a nearly infinite number of tiny images, each of which in combination with its fellows presents one image."
