he book excerpt:
"Terence's pivotal existential crisis came abruptly. Sometime in '88 or '89. Everything that happened after that event was fallout. I don't know exactly when it happened and I don't know exactly what happened. I am piecing it together from what Kat has told me and she has volunteered few details and I am reluctant to probe. It happened when they were living for a time on the Big Island and it was a mushroom trip they shared that was absolutely terrifying for Terence. It was terrifying because, for some reason, the mushroom turned on him. The gentle, wise, humorous mushroom spirit that he had come to know and trust as an ally and teacher ripped back the facade to reveal an abyss of utter existential despair. Terence kept saying, so Kat told me, that it was, "a lack of all meaning, a lack of all meaning." And this induced panic in Terence and probably, I speculate, a feeling that he was going mad. He couldn't deal with it. Kat's efforts to reassure him were fruitless. After that experience, he never again took mushrooms and he took other psychedelics such as DMT and Ayahuasca only on rare occasions and with great reluctance."
I know what he means..
Mckenna found the same place I did I have this wierd sense that I did a "Mckenna Catch up" and got to where he was at in terms of understanding...
I found the same place, the lack of all meaning. Its this despairing area that leaves you hopeless, because when you push past it all, this is all just here because its here, and we never leave the confinements of whatever we encounter in the life and death game.
Maybe thats why so many people seek power and control when they are a human being, they have the sense in the back of their minds that reality ultimately takes control...
That was it? During one of my first trips I experienced what made McKenna terrified of mushrooms? Well, it was pretty fucking bad, but, gee, part of me wonders, if I managed to experience this so early, how much worse could it become? It wasn't even that high a dose, relatively speaking, compared to what can be reached. If I did something like DMT, an MAOI combination, or just a very high dose (like a thumbprint of LSD) what could my mind create?
I genuinely worry that I could become literally catatonic afterward, or severely depersonalized, permanently if medication doesn't manage to treat me. It is a bad place you do not want to go to. It isn't like standard bad trips, delusion or psychosis, believing you're in hell or possessed, unfounded paranoid beliefs, thought loops, misinterpreting or misjudging the importance of something. During the experience, it was clarity, thoughts were perfectly rational, you just don't see things as a human being, every emotion is stripped away and you see things as they really are, as if you were a machine, and it's absolutely cold, empty, meaningless, an expansiveness and unknowing that makes you feel adrift in time and space, completely alienated, a fundamental uncertainty of all, and we are all utterly and hopelessly lost.
But part of me wants to know how bad it can get, what the darkest looks like. The next time I meet the door and feel death coming, I want to be able to overcome the final barrier and accept it, accept the temporary death, temporary, but still the experience of death.
