Posted by kovacs
on 8/27/2009, 4:14 pm, in reply to "Re: What do all of you think about Terence McKenna?"
Oh, certainly he was a very intelligent man who touched on a variety of subjects, even when he was talking about drugs. I wouldn't have listened to him speak about Joyce and McLuhan for three hours yesterday if I didn't hold his thinking in high esteem.
I don't think that he was actually stoned when he spoke, but I do think it was very obvious that he often expounded on ideas conceived while stoned. It's not exactly some astonishing revelation to say so, since he talked quite frequently about his drug use, but I'm talking more about a certain qualitative sense his ideas had.
Take, for instance, his Novelty Theory. It's very interesting and all, but what am I really supposed to make of it? Aspects of it ring true, and humanity certainly seems to be facing major change in the relatively near future, but does that mean McKenna's formulation is correct? I visited Tikal over Christmas and I was very impressed with the apparent spiritual profundity of the Mayans, but does that mean they could tell the future and that they were predicting this sort of singularity? I also saw the remains of some of their human sacrifices. Similarly, how should I know whether to put stock in the I-Ching, much less a mathematical equation based around it?
This is not to be taken as an attack on McKenna, because I highly respect him. He was a very nimble thinker who pushed conceptual boundaries in interesting ways. It's just that I tend to question how correct or useful some of this stuff is, in the same way I question the full-blown pantheistic vision of the world that was presented to me the first time I shroomed.
I'll be the first to agree with you that he advocated responsible tripping and was nothing if not self-aware.
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