Terence McKenna

6 articles
SC 3 UP 3
SC consciousness

The Consciousness Thread: How Graham Hancock Connects Archaeology to the Spirit World

There is a moment in Graham Hancock's intellectual journey where the trail splits. Follow one fork and you find the lost civilization researcher -- the man chasing underwater ruins, precession codes, and comet impacts.

10 min · 4 researchers · 11 concepts
SC consciousness

Plants as Teachers: The Shamanic Science of Botanical Intelligence

Here is a question that has haunted me for years: How did indigenous people in the Amazon, with no laboratories, no chemistry, no peer review, figure out that combining the bark of one specific vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) with the leaves of one specific shrub (Psychotria viridis) — out of...

11 min · 3 researchers · 17 concepts
UP entheogen history

Terence McKenna's Stoned Ape Theory: How Psilocybin Mushrooms May Have Catalyzed Human Consciousness

Terence Kemp McKenna (1946-2000) was many things: ethnobotanist, psychonaut, author, lecturer, and the most eloquent spokesperson for the psychedelic experience that the English language has ever produced. But his most enduring contribution was a single hypothesis — an idea so radical that...

14 min · 3 researchers · 14 concepts
UP entheogen history

Soma and Haoma: The Divine Plant That Built Two Civilizations and Then Vanished

In the oldest sacred text of the Indo-European world — the Rigveda, composed between approximately 1500 and 1200 BCE — 120 hymns are dedicated to a single substance. Not a god in the conventional sense, though it is addressed as a deity.

11 min · 1 researchers · 12 concepts
UP indigenous science systems

The I Ching as the World's First Binary Code: From Yin-Yang to DNA

In 1703, the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz published "Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire" — the paper that formalized binary arithmetic, the number system that would eventually become the language of every digital computer on Earth. Leibniz had been working on...

15 min · 2 researchers · 5 concepts
SC tryptamine consciousness

DMT: The Endogenous Spirit Molecule Your Brain Produces Every Day

N,N-Dimethyltryptamine — DMT — occupies a unique position in the landscape of psychedelic compounds. It is the most powerful naturally occurring psychedelic known, producing effects that depart from ordinary consciousness more radically than any other substance.

11 min · 3 researchers · 22 concepts