Picked up this book after a friend's advice. Since I've got no interest in drugs, and am skeptical of any claims that aren't supported by data, this book didn't keep me for long. Verdict: lost me. Sorry, friend interested in psychedelics. ( )

Good history of drug use and McKenna's theories of how it shaped human evolution in fundamental ways -- essentially that mushroom or psychedelic drugs were part of cooperative culture (found among hunter gatherers, initially in Africa), and that grain, fermentation, and alcohol (and sugar) were the tools of a competing "dominator culture" which out-competed and destroyed them, while also being self-destructive and possibly unsustainable. He is making a case for a return to the earlier way of being.

This would have been an easy 5-star audiobook if Terence McKenna had narrated it himself. Sadly he passed away a few years ago, so this isn't possible, but I have some mp3s of earlier books/speeches of his which wonderful (and often end up set to music). ( )

You wanna see something really, really interesting about Novelty Theory? Take a look at the chronological history of the universe. So we have the big bang, rapid inflation, then re-normalization, and a very long period of very very little expansion in the universe, like 14 billion years, right? At some point around 1-2 billion years ago, the solar system started to form, and suddenly the expansion of space begins speeding up again, for the first time in 8 billion years. Then you have life emerge here on earth, about 3.5-4 billion years ago...and suddenly the expansion accelerates again. And since the emergence of life here on earth, the universe has been expanding exponentially, so much so that the disc is getting flatter and flatter and wider and wider. Terence would talk about this relationship of density of the universe vs. amount of information that had been articulated, or how much complexity it had achieved at any point. The more complexity brought into being, the thinner and more stretched out the universe would get. And of course the complexifying would start to increase exponentially at some point, leading to an inevitable singularity moment. His model said it would be 2012, just like the Mayans (his model also showed repeating fractal time but that's another story). Others have said 2017. The Hermetic tradition has said 2020 for a very long time. You can even look at a deck of Hermetic tarot cards, card XX (card 20, and it's 2020), the Aeon... it's called judgement day. I know we're talking science here, but credit where credit is due. The point being people have been pointing to this decade for thousands of years as being when the next universal singularity would occur. And the blueprint to understanding perpetual repeating cycles on countless levels in the universe. And it would take me a month to list out all of the different belief groups form antiquity til now that all believe in different cycles of varying lengths of time having a finish/restart point right now. Carl Jung said this decade would be when his Aeon took shape. People have known this would happen for longer than we probably have records of. I just hope people understand, all of this shit is interconnected, everything is interconnected, all of us, all matter, all space, and all time. The modern world forgot this and its held us back scientifically for 3 centuries. I said held back...lol, I guess really, we're right on time.

I’m going to take 4g of mushrooms then meditate alone in a safe place to prepare myself for enlightenment. ( )

An interesting look at the relationship between plants and human evolution, both past and future. I especially enjoyed the idea that as wild plants became less important parts of our lives, the more patriarchal, and controlling, human cultures became. There is a relationship between the foods cultures consume and the amount of equality between the sexes.

It is past time for us to work to create healthy human cultures, and perhaps the foods we consume is a more important part of that work than I thought. ( )

Though the main subject of this book is the psychedelic mushroom, he elaborates extensively on modern culture and its "Dominator" mindset. He mentions the book "The Chalice and the Blade" by Riane Eisler, which describes how there was a culture that existed around the area of Greece that was a Matriarchal society. This society lived without war or poverty for around a thousand years. McKenna uses this culture as an example of how humans can and did live in perpetual peace, while at the same time not having a hierarchical system like our culture has now, which is of course Patriarchal.

The mushroom, he explains, helps humans really "see" reality for what it is, and in that state is able to both communicate with the environment and with our fellow humans, in harmony. He also puts forth a theory that psychedelic mushrooms contributed directly to human cognitive evolution, that they changed our brains to what they are now. The mushroom gave us an edge in our survival hundreds of thousands of years ago by being able to, like I said before, "see" the real world better, and therefore giving us an advantage in survival and changing our brain structure in the process.

All this leads to the idea of how the "Tree of Knowledge" was actually the mushroom. Since the downfall of the Matriarchal mindset, or true harmony, we have become the violent, Patriarchal, God-fearing, we-are-above-nature-so-therefore-it's-ours, system. Mentioning, of course, how the mushroom and all the other mind-altering compounds like LSD, DMT, and the like, are extremely illegal in our society. How these ideas of harmony, the sacred feminine aspects, have been and still are being suppressed, and that a return to these more ideal ideas will save us from future violence and destruction. ( )