True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise

It’s like listening to a snake oil salesman using pseudoscientific gobbeldygook : “this bracelet stabilizes you using the quantum”. Quantum what? “You know, quantum. The cat in the box. Multiple realities, this bracelet will send you to the right dimension making life better!”. Oh sure.
You’ll get howlers like “psilocybin is superconductive” and how it acts like an antenna to "sensitize" the electron spin resonance of the molecule.
All the self absorbed ramblings of the nature of the universe literally revolving around a group of drug taker’s experiences now seem trite, as does the pseudoscience nonsense but one has to remember that McKenna is the reason why. A thousand imitators of his babble makes the original now show more sound derivative. It's been laundered into culture by osmosis. Was he more successful than more spiritual seekers because he uses vague allusions to a Tao of Physics misunderstanding of science? McKenna can't even keep Einstein's spacetime straight on a highschool level of understanding.
There's something admirable about making the effort to actually go into wilderness to experience ayahuasca, but at the same time there's the complete refusal to deal with the "primitive" ideas surrounding native use, and this memoir obliviously records their own hippie drug tourism and being obnoxious and disruptive about it to the point they're advised to see a doctor, which they refuse because they're obviously on the cusp of some major breakthrough and not having a temporary psychosis episode. show less

I don't care if it is ultimately to me a bunch of over-educated hippies tripping and mythologizing near the Putumayo River in South America. I love hearing Mckenna courageously objectify the psychedelic experience into "vegetable TV" and intelligent mushrooms propagating themselves through the galaxy by opening doors to other dimensions to fortunate species as ourselves. Plus: bonus cameos from UFOs and absolute zero.

Thus audiobook includes songs and sounds from Nomad Band (probably a one-off project as individual musicians including Roy Tuckman are credited at the end), cheesy hallucinogenic sound effects, and a few guest voices.

Terrence and Dennis McKenna take a crew of Merry Pranksters to the Colombian Amazon in order to seek out a possibly mythic hallucinogen used by shamans of the Witoto tribe. In a run-down remote mission town called La Chorrera they find instead a plethora of mushrooms growing from cow-flops, said mushrooms positively drenched in psylocybe. After eating these, smoking hash, and downing baanisterius caapi, Dennis McKenna turns into the Victor Frankenstein of psychonauts, and attempts to immanetize the eschaton by using vocal tonality modulation techniques to merge shroom DNA permanently into his own. After this experiment the McKenna brothers go a bit off the rails. Nora and James Joyce visit in the guise of chickens. UFOs form from show more clouds, rivers stand frozen, a voice in Terrence's head teaches him the workings of time. Dennis attempts to manifest a blue protoplasmic goo he thinks might be the lapis philosophorum.

In other words, things go a bit haywire.

The McKennas are fascinating cats because they are obviously hyper-educated geniuses, but are also burnt-to-a-crisp wastrels spawned in the '60s. If Terrence is telling the truth and he actually read Jung's Psychology and Alchemy at age 14, well, then his intellectual curiosity must be off the charts, including those charts he describes in this book, the ones which list all possible future and past events as a predictable waveform of novelty injections into the universe.

Many of the experiences Terrence describes I myself wrestled during a brief and lush psylocybe cyclotron ride in my early twenties. I never, however, quite felt manifest the alien intelligence he encounters, which claims galactical omnipresence. Vast neural networks of underground fungal strands never spoke to me personally--and if they exist as McKenna describes them they deemed me worthy only of scintillating light-shows and dripping wood grain patterns, not of messianic missions to usher in the final stage of human evolution. For some reason the idea of an omnipotent fungal entity reminded me of Karl Rove.

Part sci-fi novel, part hippie memoir, part manifesto for the New Shamanism--True Hallucinations is a lot of mind-bending fun crammed into a slim paperback. show less

Surely one of the most bizarre books ever written, one that the author himself probably didn't understand (also the inspiration for the biopic starring Jim Carrey which never got made). Love the Esquire blurb: "It would be hard to find a drug narrative more compellingly perched on a baroquely romantic limb than this passionate Tom-and-Huck-ride-Great-Mother-river-saga of brother bonding."

Amazing book! The way that Terence tells the story and connects the events within, makes this book both a deep study into the almost uncharted realms of consciousness and psychedelics, as well as a great and entertaining reading experience!

Just nonsense.. people describing epiphemomema of substances that are damaging or at least hacking conscious experience.. but why should one care? And their methodology is all over the place, nothjng controlled for…