Falling Through The Rabbit Hole: Who Knew It Could Feel So Good

It's 1967 and Berkeley is a hip place to be-- all sorts of "cool cats" with Cheshire grins roaming about. Now let's not be meek and naive, or pull a Catholic school girl blush: we all know why they are smiling. An aromatic fog is wafting through the dorm rooms: Sally is dancing with Jesus, Berry is talking to the trees, Joe and Angela are giving their minds and bodies to yogi Krishna Rickshawallah. With all that fluid exchange, even Wall Street feels a bit upstaged. Somewhere, a hop and skip between hoopla and hallucinations, there is an exceptionally cool cat rattling and scratching up the academic tin roof: Terence McKenna. Amid the avid drug culture and the laundry list of revolutions brewing, McKenna is setting out on his own spiritual and psychedelic expeditions deep into the Colombian Amazon. He is in search of alien mushrooms, talking elves, and a portal into higher consciousness. He is the guy that Timothy Leary referred to as "the original Timothy Leary".

For those not yet familiar with Terence McKenna, he is most noted for his Timewave Zero theory and his DMT trips, as well as his extensive writings on the topic. What did Terence McKenna major in while he was at Berkeley, you may ask? Ecology and shamanism, of course. Back in the good'ol days, before Berkeley became overpopulated with skinny Asian girls sporting A&F and Bebe apparel, shamanism rather then electrical engineering was considered the more respectable, more practical major.
Mckenna's claim to fame, as I mentioned above, was his Timewave Zero theory. The theory uses fractals based on the Mayan calendar and I Ching to calculate the "ebbs and flows" of history. The crux of the theory being that time moves in waves with periods of static habituation punctuated with periods of greater and greater novelty. The Industrial Revolution, World II, the telecommunication era, and the discovery of DNA are events that can be classified as novel. According to McKenna, we are fast approaching a era of increasing novelty or complexity; with this increasing complexity, we human beings are losing our cohesiveness as a unit. The signifying year for McKenna is December 21, 2012 the year the Mayan calendar ends; this is when novelty reaches a critical mass and the year which we human beings enter hyperspace. Hyperspace represents a new plane of conscious, or more appropriately, a complete shift of consciousness on a global scale.

Now back to those pesky alien mushrooms also known as psilocybin. These mushrooms were consumed by many ancient cultures: the Egyptian, the Mayans, the Olmec. The mushrooms contain a molecule called DMT,also commonly referred to as
the spirit molecule. Unlike other hallucinagenic drugs like LSD, DMT is unique because it is endogenous to the human brain, it is found in small amount in the pineal gland, the speculated location of the psychic third eye. According to McKenna, we too can get a favoring of the after-life without having to cross the threshold by consuming DMT.

Here is how Terence describes a DMT trip: I am baffled by what I call "the black hole effect" that seems to surround DMT. A black hole causes a curvature of space such that no light can leave it, and, since no signal can leave it, no information can leave it. Let us leave aside the issue of whether this is true in practice of spinning black holes. Think of it as a metaphor. Metaphorically, DMT is like an intellectual black hole in that once one knows about it, it is very hard for others to understand what one is talking about. One cannot be heard. The more one is able to articulate what it is, the less others are able to understand. This is why I think people who attain enlightenment, if we may for a moment comap these two things, are silent. They are silent because we cannot understand them. Why the phenomenon of tryptamine ecstasy has not been looked at by scientists, thrill seekers, or anyone else, I am not sure, but I recommend it to your attention. -Terence McKenna


As far as my personal experience with DMT goes, well this author hasn't tried it. I 'm the sort of gal that has never tried mary jane, coke, heroin, so DMT would be a huge leap for me. As a college student studying biochemistry, you would think I would be ready to jump into another dimension, but I have such a low tolerance for drugs in general that the mere thought of consuming DMT would knock me out cold. I once took 3 tablets of Tylenol instead of the recommended two tablets on the label, big mistake. That night I woke up on my friend's couch screaming, "I'm dying, I'm dying". So Terence, you are a cool cat for trying out dimensions, the way some women try on new shoes, but this gal will stick to taking her recommend 2 tablets of Tylenol.

And guys, if we are all alive by the time 2012 rolls by, the champagne will be chillin in my fridge. So stop by, the party is at my place. We will be partying like it's the apocalypse.