From Publishers Weekly
McKenna's ( Invisible Landscape ) wild theories about how hallucinogenic experiences are the last best hope of a world gone mad are at the center of these essays and interviews, most previously published. McKenna interprets three decades of flying through the deepest and highest levels of consciousness, encountering extraterrestrials, unknown languages and "the Other," the self seeking new levels of interior human existence. Much of his experience comes from trips--physical and drug-induced--to and with Amazonian Indian shamans. McKenna is best when he describes the multicolored landscapes and backgrounds of his visions and their settings. Such description, though, is rare; the author serves mostly as millenarian missionary, predicting an apocalypse for the year 2012. He gives short shrift to the demonstrable healing properties of the Amazon drugs, neglecting the most persuasive data as to why natural hallucinogens ought to be taken more seriously. He opts instead to promote hallucination as a messianic panacea for the individual psyche, not unlike the New Agers and pop psychologists against whom he rails incessantly. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
McKenna has been exploring the "Wholly Other" for 25 years. In this spiritual journey, he ponders shamanism, buddhism, and enthnopharmacology. By the phrase "archaic revival," McKenna refers to a return to shamanism, which he believes can be enhanced by current scientific practices. The next level of spiritual transformation, he explains, is achieved by the intelligent use of psychedelics and should be performed only by thoughtful explorers rather than experimenters, scientific or otherwise. The ideas presented in this collection of interviews, speeches, and articles are radical even now, and will challenge the reader. There are many insights on current spiritual movements such as goddess worship, deep ecology, space beings, and virtual reality. Recommended.- Gail Wood, Montgomery Coll. Lib., Germantown, Md.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
Cited by the L.A. Weekly as "the culture's foremost spokesman for the psychedelic experience," Terrence McKenna is an underground legend as a brilliant raconteur, adventurer, and expert on the experiential use of mind-altering plants.In these essays, interviews, and narrative adventures, McKenna takes us on a mesmerizing journey deep into the Amazon as well as into the hidden recesses of the human psyche and the outer limits of our culture, giving us startling visions of the past and future.


About the Author
Terrence McKenna has spent twenty-five years exploring "the ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation" and is a specialist in the ethnomedicine of the Amazon basin. He is coauthor, with his brother Dennis, of The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching, and the author of Food of the Gods.

ANNOTATION

A student of Tibetan shamanism, virtual reality, and the botany of the Amazon, McKenna is a legendary raconteur, adventurer, and proponent of the use of the psilocybin mushroom who claims that hallucinogenic plants are a key to our evolution as a language-using species. 25 collages by Satty.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Cited by the L.A. Weekly as "the culture's foremost spokesman for the psychedelic experience," Terrence McKenna is an underground legend as a brilliant raconteur, adventurer, and expert on the experiential use of mind-altering plants.In these essays, interviews, and narrative adventures, McKenna takes us on a mesmerizing journey deep into the Amazon as well as into the hidden recesses of the human psyche and the outer limits of our culture, giving us startling visions of the past and future.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

McKenna's ( Invisible Landscape ) wild theories about how hallucinogenic experiences are the last best hope of a world gone mad are at the center of these essays and interviews, most previously published. McKenna interprets three decades of flying through the deepest and highest levels of consciousness, encountering extraterrestrials, unknown languages and ``the Other,'' the self seeking new levels of interior human existence. Much of his experience comes from trips--physical and drug-induced--to and with Amazonian Indian shamans. McKenna is best when he describes the multicolored landscapes and backgrounds of his visions and their settings. Such description, though, is rare; the author serves mostly as millenarian missionary, predicting an apocalypse for the year 2012. He gives short shrift to the demonstrable healing properties of the Amazon drugs, neglecting the most persuasive data as to why natural hallucinogens ought to be taken more seriously. He opts instead to promote hallucination as a messianic panacea for the individual psyche, not unlike the New Agers and pop psychologists against whom he rails incessantly. (May)

Library Journal