Terence McKenna Explores the Invisible Landscape

The McKenna brothers’ amazing experiment in La Chorrera

In February 1971 five young Americans travelled into Columbia’s Amazon jungle to find a psychoactive plant used by tribal shamans. The group was led by Terence McKenna, then just twenty-four year old, subsequently heralded as the twentieth century’s most intellectually adventurous psychonaut.

What are psychonauts? Adventurers who use psychedelics to energetically boost their awareness in order to explore the normally hidden realms of inner reality.

The experiences Terence McKenna underwent with his brother Dennis at La Chorrera, and the ideas their experiences sparked, led Terence to theorise on what psychedelics open up to us, the nature of reality, and the possibilities of human consciousness. The brothers recorded their experiences in The Invisible Landscape (1975/1994). This essay primarily draws on their book — all quotations are from it unless noted otherwise.

The evolution of a psychonaut

Terence McKenna reached adulthood in the 1960s, joining the countercultural movement as it began agitating for Western civilisation to be restructured politically, sexually, socially and ecologically. However, he soon realised that this goal was “practically impossible, given the intransigence of the power elites and the lack of direction evinced by putative revolutionaries.”

Terence then shifted his focus onto the task of transforming the world from the inside. The means for transformation was provided by one of the counterculture’s crucial ingredients: psychedelics.

By his early twenties Terence was precociously well-read in the fields of botany, biochemistry, ethnopharmacology and neuroscience, as well as in the mystical traditions of Gnosticism, alchemy, Tibetan Buddhism and Bön-po shamanism. Driving his research into psychedelics was the idea that chemical activity in the brain opened mental gateways that gave human awareness access to other dimensions.

While researching ethnographic literature he found a reference to oo-koo-hé, a plant containing dimethyltryptamine (DMT) that was exclusively harvested by the Witoto tribe living in the Amazon. What drew his attention was that researchers noted Witoto shamans who ingested oo-koo-hé reported talking to little men.

“The mention of little men rang a bell, because during my own experiences smoking synthesised DMT in Berkeley, I had the impression of bursting into a space inhabited by merry elfin, self-transforming, machine creatures. Dozens of these friendly fractal entities, looking like self-dribbling Fabergé eggs on the rebound, had surrounded me and tried to teach me the lost language of true poetry … This happened on several occasions.”

Terence persuaded his brother Dennis that they had to experiment with oo-koo-hé. With three other adventurers they travelled to La Chorrera, a small village in the heart of the Witoto’s territory. To reach La Chorrera they flew to a Colombian town inaccessible by road, sailed three days down the Rio Putumayo, then trekked one hundred and ten kilometres along an old rubber harvesting trail.

They found La Chorrera was an earthly paradise. High above the village a river surged dramatically over rocks, emptying into the lake below, around which Spanish missionaries had cleared the jungle and established pastures for grazing cattle. Peaceful and beautiful, with multi-coloured butterflies and no biting insects, they found an idyllic setting for their investigations. In an intriguing hint of what was to come, Terence even found elves with pointed ears painted on the walls of several buildings.

On the very first afternoon the adventurers made an unexpected discovery. The Witoto farmed white cattle. Growing on the cattle’s dung were mushrooms containing psychoactive psilocybin. To celebrate their arrival they harvested the mushrooms and the following day ate half a dozen each. Terence hadn’t previously experimented with mushrooms. They proved a revelation. In his journal he excitedly described them as being “a transdimensional doorway which sly fairies have left slightly ajar for anyone to enter.”

Over the following days the mushrooms became even more important. The week before the group arrived a shaman had killed another shaman’s family member, and because oo-koo-hé was central to the murder, enquiries about the plant had become impossible. With the reason for their journey eliminated from enquiry, and wanting not to waste their effort getting there, Terence pragmatically shifted his attention from oo-koo-hé to the psilocybin mushrooms. What followed was more compelling than he ever hoped.

A machine-like buzzing language

Three days after settling into two houses on the edge of the village, the group obtained ayahuasca, a DMT-containing vine most commonly used by Central and South American shamans to induce heightened states. After receiving instructions on how to prepare it, the explorers decided to experiment with ayahuasca and mushrooms together. They found that smoking slivers of ayahuasca vine enhanced the effect of the psilocybin. On the sixth day of their jungle sojourn this led to a surprising experience.

An hour after ingesting mushrooms Dennis became aware of an uncomfortable buzzing sound in his head, in which he felt an unknown language was almost inaudibly embedded. Terence had had the same experience several years earlier, under the influence of DMT. He encouraged Dennis to try reproducing the sound. He did so and “gave forth, for a few seconds, a very machine-like, loud, dry buzz.”

To the others, Dennis was merely making a strange sound, but from his own perspective the experience was striking. At first the buzzing was a distant static. Then, when he repeated the buzzing, the sound and his voice became interlocked. Energy surged through his body and his voice distorted to create what he felt was the sound of a giant insect. He found the experience both empowering and alarming — empowering because it connected him to a source of intense energy, which he suggested was some kind of deep shamanic power; alarming because he feared the insect sound was so intense it would take over his awareness.

This buzzing effect is widely reported by those who have ingested DMT-related tryptamines. When, like Dennis, Terence had previously perceived the insect-like buzzing, and then tried vocalising it, he felt he had become tuned into a secret alchemical language that gave him insights into hidden relationships that underpin the world. When he repeated the sound he found it shifted into a visual phenomena.

The brothers theorised that the sound carried some kind of translinguistic material that could condense to become visible. What was striking was they felt the material was conscious and contained information that was released when their awareness interacted with it, which it actively sought to share.

Translinguistic shamanic liquid

Shamans have perceived this material in other forms. Ethnographer (and later shamanic teacher) Michael Harner studied the Jívaro tribes people of Ecuador and Peru during the late 1950s. Harner reported that after ingesting ayahuasca Jívaro shamans produced a liquid that came out of their body, which they used for healing and to transform into spirit animals. This substance was invisible to everyone except those who had also ingested ayahuasca. [See The Way of the Shaman.]

Terence experienced this shamanic liquid himself during a trip to Nepal he had undertaken two years earlier. He was there to learn Tibetan so he could study pre-Buddhist Bön-po art and local shamanism. One evening he followed his then current prescription for exploring shamanic reality, which involved swallowing a tab of LSD and, as the psychedelic peaked, intensifying its effect by smoking DMT.

Presently he and a woman friend — she had ingested ground datura seeds — went up onto the roof of the building where he was staying. There they initiated an erotic encounter. This created a sensory overload, in which McKenna found his perceptual field was radically transformed.

“I saw that where our bodies were glued together there was flowing, out of her, over me, over the floor of the roof, flowing everywhere, some sort of obsidian liquid, something dark and glittering, with colour and lights within it. After the DMT flash, after the seizures of orgasms, after all that, this new thing shocked me to the core. What was this fluid and what was going on? I looked at it. I looked right into it, and it was the surface of my own mind reflected in front of me. Was it translinguistic matter, the living opalescent excrescence of the alchemical abyss of hyperspace, something generated by the sex act performed under such crazy conditions?”

All this set the brothers thinking about what DMT was doing to their bodies and brains to make such perceptions possible. They began by analysing their experiences in the light of current scientific knowledge. As Terence put it:

“Our task was to create a credible model of how such a phenomena could operate without leaving the known or suspected laws of physics and chemistry far behind.”

Does a standing wave open a door into the beyond?

“Far behind” is the key phrase in the above sentence. Because given the radical nature of the brothers’ experiences, and that the sciences don’t readily accommodate elven alchemical languages or shamanic fluids, their theorising understandably took them beyond the rationally defined limits of scientific naturalism. Being young, and seeking to push boundaries, this did not unduly trouble them. Dennis was more scientifically trained than Terence, so he offered a theory that blended chemistry, physics and neuroscience:

· The buzzing sound was due to the electron spin resolution (ESR) of the mushrooms’ psilocybin alkaloids as they were metabolised within the body.

· The tryptamines within ayahuasca functioned as an antenna that amplified the mushroom’s ESR wave function.

· When the human voice imitated the ESR, a harmonic overtone was created that froze the mushroom’s ESR wave function, creating a standing wave that became superconductive.

· This superconductive standing wave, generated by the bonding of tryptamine and psilocybin with the body’s DNA, created a door that provided access to higher dimensions.

Terence agreed that Dennis’s theory offered a scientific explanation for an ancient shamanic process. He just wasn’t sure his brother’s theory was correct.

By definition, scientific theories need to be falsifiable, i.e. they need be tested before they can be accepted. To decide whether Dennis’ theory was valid, a testable prediction was required. Dennis provided one. He predicted that when he made the buzzing sound, if a standing wave was in fact generated then the temperature in the immediate vicinity would fall. The brothers had no measuring equipment, but decided they could use their skin to judge temperature change.

Still in a heightened state, they walked up a jungle path, found a place where they wouldn’t be disturbed, and sat on the ground opposite one another. Dennis then recreated the low, mechanical buzzing. As the sound reached its peak, Terence felt the hair on his arms rise and goose-flesh form. Shocked, he yelled at his brother to stop.

“I was quite disoriented. I frankly could not tell whether a real wave of very cold air had swept over me or whether the particular sound had somehow made my body react as though it was being exposed to very cold air. It was not lost on me that if the effect had truly generated a blast of cold air, then it had violated the known laws of physics. … The whole thing seemed absurd and yet compelling, like a hypnotic game into which one becomes absorbed in spite of oneself.”

Despite the fact their adventure was now sliding towards the bizarre, the brothers agreed they should continue exploring the phenomena, which Dennis was now calling hypercarbolation, a process in which tryptamines alter the body’s neural DNA and so make usually subliminal perceptions accessible to the everyday mind. Terence’s ecstatic description of hypercarbolation was that it transformed “homo sapiens into galaxy-roving bodhisattvas, the culmination and quintessence of the highest aspirations of star-coveting humanity, changing man into an eternal hyper-dimensional being.”

So it was that the brothers, as high on intellectual curiosity as on hallucinogens, initiated their experiment in La Chorrera.

The Experiment

After several days of not ingesting any hallucinogens, on the evening of 4 March 1971 Terence, Dennis and their fellow experimenter Ev each ate two mushrooms and drank half a cup of boiled ayahuasca. When they felt they were entering a heightened state of awareness, they extinguished the candle, sat in darkness, and Dennis reproduced the mechanical insect sound. After the third effort his voice died into silence.

Dennis had theorised that the mushroom would fuse with the DNA of one of them, a standing wave would follow, and that person would become a lens through which insights into the cosmos would become available to all.

Terence had symbolically left a single mushroom standing in the middle of the hut. As they sat there, for a fleeting moment Terence saw “not a mature mushroom but a planet, the earth, lustrous and alive, blue and tan and dazzling white.” Dennis saw the exact same image and concluded the experiment had been a success. Terence was not convinced.

To think through what had happened, the brothers took a walk across the pasture. By now dawn was approaching, the effects of the hallucinogens had largely worn off, and Terence’s mind was racing. Unexpectedly, a new phenomena occurred. A mental link formed between the two brothers, with questions Terence was considering in his mind being answered by Dennis before he voiced them.

Stunned, Terence asked Dennis if he had developed telepathic powers. Dennis said there was more to it. He suggested the psychoactive harmines had bonded with his DNA and given him access to a huge store of cybernetically stored information. Moreover, anyone could access it. The kicker? They had to preface their question with his name, “Dennis”.

“The absurdity of the second half of this proposition struck me as utterly too much. But naturally, at his insistence, I made the test. I picked a small plant growing at my feet, closed my eyes, and asked: ‘Dennis, what is the name of this plant?’ Immediately and without any effort of my own that I was aware of, a scientific name, now forgotten, popped into my head. I tried the same thing again with a different plant and to my amazement received a different answer. The experiment seemed to secure that something was giving answers in my head, but I could not tell if they were correct or not.

“I was shaken. When we left the hut I was sure we had failed and that we had to talk over revising our approach. But now as we walked along and I could hear a voice in my head that was answering, however inanely or inaccurately, any question I put to it, I was less sure.”

While Terence wondered if a hyper-object would now appear to provide access to multi-dimensional reality, Dennis was convinced that a wave of hypercarbolation was at that moment sweeping the planet, launching the human race into the ocean of telepathic communication.

As it turned out, the brothers somewhat overestimated their experiment’s outcome. The world’s populace was not transformed. Telepathically communicated information did not flow from mind to mind. In fact, after questioning their fellow adventurers, Terence realised that the telepathy involved only the two brothers, not the other three.

Moreover, Dennis was clearly not himself. He had become lost in his inner world, disconcertingly insisting that soon the dead would appear, led by Carl Jung, Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce, to share their perceptions of hyper-reality.

The others now understandably became concerned about Dennis’ psychological state. On one occasion he entered the village’s church and started ringing the bells, attracting the attention of the police. Another day Dennis threw everything out of the hut, including a window frame that he ripped out of the wall. It wasn’t clear whether his disassociated state was temporary or permanent — and Terence had seen enough people in San Francisco burnt out on LSD to know the hazards of the latter. Accordingly, he agreed they needed to get Dennis back to civilisation so he could be medically cared for.

Is that a shape-shifting UFO?

Realising they would all be leaving the next day, Terence decided to spend his last night in the Amazon sitting on a flat rock overlooking the river. He then reviewed key events from his life.

“All night long strange vistas and insights poured through me. I saw gigantic forms on scales inconceivably vast. Time, agatised and glittering, seemed to pour by me like living superfluids inhabiting dream regions of terrible pressure and super cold. And I saw the plan, the mighty plan. At last. It was an ecstasy, an ecstasis, that lasted hours and placed the seal of completion on all my previous life. At the end I felt reborn, but as what I knew not.”

As the grey predawn light faded, the inner imagery vanished with it and Terence directed his gaze onto the glowing landscape around him. The sky was clear and half a mile away he saw a line of fog hanging just above the treetops. As he stood and stretched he watched the fog darken, roll, and then split into two clouds. Each then split again.

Terence felt a wave of excitement pass through him as four lens-shaped clouds of the same size moved into a line and hovered above the treetops. After several minutes the four clouds rejoined into a single cloud. The cloud then swirled into a shape resembling a waterspout. At this point Terence heard a high-pitched whine coming from the cloud and it grew darker and larger. It then began moving towards him.

By now Terence was gripped by fear. Legs shaking, he shrank onto the ground and anxiously watched as the cloud rapidly approached. It flew two hundred feet over his head. As it did he very clearly saw “a saucer-shaped machine rotating slowly, with unobtrusive soft blue and orange lights. As it passed over me I could see symmetrical indentations on the underside. It was making the whee, whee, whee sound of science fiction flying saucers.”

Terence was alone, so no one else could confirm what he had seen. On the one hand, the perception was so vivid he was convinced that anyone present would have perceived what he had. On the other, there was an incongruous detail that rendered the experience absurd. The flying machine was identical with a UFO depicted in a photograph taken by George Adamski in 1952. The photo was widely declared a hoax, a judgement Terence accepted.

What was surprising was that Terence watched the aerial phenomena shape-shift four times into forms already well known to him: a bank of fog, clouds, a waterspout, and a UFO as depicted in a debunked 1950s photo. What was responsible for the shape-shifting? Was every form merely a projection from his own mind? Terence couldn’t accept this. Something was present. But what?

Later he considered the possibility that it was the result of atmospheric lensing, an effect in which events occurring in different distant places are blended into a complex single perception seen over the horizon. Yet even if the effect was due to atmospheric lensing — a theory McKenna knew was yet unproven — that didn’t explain the sound that accompanied the event.

A more suggestive line of analysis is psychological. Whatever the airborne object was, it shape-shifted, yet the shapes were not random. All were already known to Terence. That the object’s final shape was a hoax UFO, drawn from Terence’s childhood memories, is as intriguing as it is incongruous. Terence had a term to describe events that were simultaneously unlikely, intriguing and absurd. He identified them as the cosmic giggle.

Laughing with the cosmic giggle

One way to approach Terence’s cosmic giggle phenomena is to consider the ways in which our perceptions are socially, ideologically and psychologically constructed. If we allow the possibility that Terence did perceive an aerial phenomena of some kind — whether a craft or an insubstantial mutating energy wave — then there are two possibilities.

The first is that the craft was present in some form, but those (presumably) on board extracted images from Terrence’s memory and presented their craft to him in those four forms. This explanation involves psychic projection from beings (or AI?) on the craft, which in turn introduces the idea that UFOs are as much, or more, an energetic and psychological phenomena as they are a physical one. Jacques Vallee has written extensively on this.

The second possibility is that in his fright Terrence’s own mind, attempting to make sense of something very strange, itself projected known images onto the object. Psychologically, his mind transformed an anomalous perception, something it couldn’t recognise, into forms it did recognise. In this explanation, Terrence’s mind shuffled through remembered objects — fog, cloud, waterspout, hoax UFO photo — to normalise a phenomena it otherwise found confusing and frightening.

What Terence experienced was absurd — from our everyday perspective. Yet it is also too intriguing to dismiss. Terence certainly didn’t. Did his mind use what it knew to interpret what it didn’t know? Or did something unknown intentionally use imagery drawn from his mind to initiate communication with him? Beyond that giggle, Terence had no answer.

An alien insect teacher?

Just hours later Terence’s UFO encounter a small aircraft arrived and the group flew out. Dennis soon recovered in Bogotá, then they all flew back to the United States.

Over the following months Terence grappled with why, at La Chorrera, his usual sceptical attitude had been swept away. Scouring psychological literature, he concluded that he and his brother had experienced a form of schizophrenia. However, their experience could not be dismissed as only schizophrenic. After much self-questioning, he concluded that the experiment had opened up a gateway to an independently existing nonhuman entity of some kind.

“After the first mushroom experience at La Chorerra, Dennis and I were involved with two ideas in particular. These were the motifs of the “teacher” and the insect. We could feel the overwhelming presence of some unseen, intelligent entity that seemed to be observing and sometimes exerting influence to keep us moving gently towards a breakthrough.”

While they still in La Chorrera the five adventurers debated this idea. Two among them were not persuaded. Their interpretation was consistent with the materialist scientific view, which is that there is no non-physical hyperspace inhabited by aliens, so everything the brothers perceived had to be imagined.

In contrast, the brothers were convinced that something overwhelmingly real had occurred. That they had indeed encountered an intelligent nonhuman entity. But they had no clear idea of what.

Adding weight to this discussion, their experience of an entity presence is commonly reported by those who use ayahuasca to achieve heightened states of awareness. [For one example, see Graham Hancock’s Visionary.] Entities were also perceived by those who participated in a medical experiment involving DMT.

Meeting the alien

In 1990 Rick Strassman M.D. obtained official approval and funding to undertake what became a five year study. He used DMT (the psychoactive chemical in ayahuasca), which he tested on volunteers by injecting them intravenously in laboratory conditions at the University of New Mexico.

At that time Strassman was a professor of psychiatry and had been intrigued by experiments conducted in the 1950s that used LSD to treat depression and addiction (see Stanislav Grof’s LSD: Doorway to the Numinous). LSD was declared an illegal drug in the 1960s, which meant Strassman’s 1990s experiments were the first to pick up on the earlier research and to continue examining the possible beneficial psychiatric use of psychedelics. Strassman chose DMT because it has a very short duration compared to LSD, so each session and its analaysis could be completed in half a day.

Strassman found that volunteers who had previously tried psychedelics such as LSD or had smoked DMT were surprised at the intensity of experiences that resulted when DMT was injected. Essentially, the effect on the subjects was to blast their awareness beyond their body and into strange — usually very strange — non-bodily realms. The effect lasts fifteen to thirty minutes, and when subjects return to everyday awareness they do so rapidly, with no negative or ongoing physical or psychological effects — apart from having their ideas regarding what is real seriously questioned.

One of the most challenging results of Strassman’s research was the frequency with which non-human beings appeared to the experimental subjects.

Over half of those who participated reported encountering a non-human entity while they were in a DMT-heightened state. Strassman notes in his book on the experiments, DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2001):

“I was familiar with Terence McKenna's tales of the ‘self-transforming machine elves’ he had encountered after smoking high doses of the drug. Interviews conducted with twenty experienced DMT smokers before beginning the New Mexico research also yielded some tales of similar meetings. Since most of these people were from California, I admittedly chalked up these stories to some kind of West Coast eccentricity.” [Chapter 13]

As a result, Strassman admits he was neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared for the frequency subjects reported encountering beings. Moreover, these beings interracted with the subjects, “manipulating, communicating, showing, helping, questioning. It was definitely a two-way street.” [Chapter 13]

A number of volunteers met McKenna’s mechanical elves. Others encountered animals, reptiles, animal-human hybrids, clowns, and beings who variously acted as observers, as teachers, or whose intent was to play with them, study them, and even have sex or perform experiments on them. During their encounters the subjects experienced a wide range of emotions: fear, love, discomfort, humour, distaste, erotic pleasure, happiness, ecstasy, and clarity due to their minds being downloaded with huge amounts of profound information.

Here is just one example of the many encounters reported to Strassman. The subject is Sara, a forty-two year old married woman who had three children. She had experienced severe depression during her twenties, but had overcome it and hadn’t needed medication for over a decade. During earlier sessions Sara had several times encountered nonhuman entities. These encounters came to a climax in her final DMT session:

“I went directly into deep space. They [the nonhuman entities] knew I was coming back and were ready for me. They told me there were many things they could share with us when we learned how to make more extended contact. Again, they wanted something from me, not just physical information. They were interested in emotions and feelings. I told them, ‘We have something we can give you: spirituality.’ I guess what I really meant was love. I tried to figure out how to do this. I felt a tremendous energy, brilliant pink light with white edges, building on my left side. I knew it was spiritual energy and love. They were on my right, so I reached out my hands across the universe and prepared to be a bridge. I said something like, ‘See, there I did it for you. You have it.’ They were grateful. I was coming down off the DMT, losing altitude, I would have to go back.” [Chapter 14]

Sara was disappointed. She had wanted spiritual enlightenment, but it hadn’t arrived. Nonetheless, she was satisfied that she had performed the role of spiritual emissary. And that act led to a potent realisation:

“I always knew we weren’t alone in the universe. I thought that the only way to encounter them is with bright lights and flying saucers in outer space. It never occurred to me to actually encounter them in our own inner space. I thought the only things we could encounter were things in our own personal sphere of archetypes and mythology. I expected spirit guides and angels, not alien life forms.”

Science fiction narratives regularly depict aliens as existing “out there”, travelling through space on vehicles, and anticipating that one day they will land here so we can meet them. Strassman’s DMT subjects document numerous meetings with aliens — with the caveat that they encountered them in inner, not outer, space.

Journeying beyond boundary conditions

Over the last decade DMT alien encounters have attracted the attention of academics. In 2015 researchers working in the fields of enthography, neuroscience, chemistry, archeology, pharmacology and psychology attended a symposium in England where they presented papers on the effects of DMT on human awareness. Presenters included Dennis McKenna, Rick Strassman, Rupert Sheldrake, Jeremy Narby and Graham Hancock. In 2018 material from the symposium was published in a book, DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule. A follow-up symposium took place in 2017, documented in DMT Entity Encounters (2021).

The presentations have two predominant modes: witness and theory. A number of presenters describe their travel into very strange worlds where they encountered non-human beings who possess intelligence and intentionality. Luis Lucan and Graham Hancock recount their experiences with ayahuasca, Chris Bache the non-embodied teaching presences he encountered during a series of 73 LSD trips, and Whitley Streiber his encounters with beings that share characteristics with ET abduction narratives, but that he refuses to label so simply.

Presenters’ theoretical positions include neurological explanations, explanations that draw on traditional religious and mystical concepts and terminology and their modern iterations, and philosophic and theosophical disquisitions on the nature of perception and reality. Rupert Sheldrake likens DMT encounters to near death experiences. Rick Strassman seeks an explanation in Neoplatonic and Christian mysticism. Ede Frescka theorises DMT entities are quasi-autonomous structures situated in a non-local fields that we may perceive via our intuitive faculties. Peter Mayer suggests we are actually the aliens, genetically germinated extra-terrestrials arriving from the future.

Reading the presentations and the discussions that follow, two observations struck me.

The first is the degree of uncertainty regarding what is being encountered. As the McKenna brothers discovered, a significant psychological factor is involved in psychedelic perceptions. How certain can we be that what is perceived is actually the case? What does actually define? The FBI has shown that eye-witnesses often misperceive what occurs in front of them during a crime. Equally, a person in a dissociated psychedelic or schizophrenic state may hallucinate a shadow into a malevolent being they are convinced is there. Equally, they may perceive a person who is indeed present, but then interpret that person as being an angel or demon.

The human psychological interpretative factor — such as occurred during Terence’s supposed UFO sighting — means perceptions cannot be taken at face value. In the 2017 symposium Michael Winkleman goes so far as to propose nothing is actually present in a DMT encounter, that DMT entities are false perceptions emanating from the stimulated reptilean brainstem. Most participants disagreed with him. Nonetheless, it is clear that a sophisticated, nuanced approach to claimed entity perceptions of any and all kinds is required.

This leads to my second observation: how do we make intellectual sense of entity encounters? What conceptual frameworks are useful? The empirical methodologies and conceptual frameworks of the academy and laboratory are grounded in scientific naturalism. The problem is …

Psychonauts whose awareness is blasted into non-physical realms where they engage in translinguistic communication with fractal elves have journeyed well outside any standard scientific conceptual frameworks.

On the other hand, investigations of entity encounters depend on our gathering relevant data. Winkleman suggests that to be useful data gathering should be extended to include all entity encounters, in all contexts, of any kind. We need the widest ranging data sets we can accumulate before we will have a useful basis for theorising.

Of course, in the meantime researchers (and those who deny the research is valid) will offer over-arching theories. The challenge is to avoid automatically falling back into the standard scientific naturalist interpretation of DMT encounters, which is that they are only hallucinations. Terence has an eloquent response to this position:

“I am not an occultist. I am spiritual only to the degree I have been forced to by experience. I came into it a reductionist, a rationalist, a materialist, an empiricist — and I say no reductionist, no empiricist could experience what I have experienced without having to seriously retool their philosophy.” [The Archaic Revival, p 241]

Rick Strassman’s DMT experients and the two academic symposia highlight this issue of needing to retool philosophies. Presenters naturally draw on their fields of expertise when grappling with DTM encounters. But is drawing on what we already know to understand what we don’t know an adequate approach? The attempt is inevitable — what else can we do? Yet our understanding still falls far short. Which brings us back to Terence’s suggestion that we need to “retool our philosophy”.

Journeying into magical modalities

In the 2017 symposium Dennis McKenna observed that what happened to him and Terence in La Chorrera was a form of contactee experience. Except it wasn’t contact with an alien being. Instead it was with a trans-terrestrial intelligence, which they accessed via the mushrooms.

“We went down there looking for some drug, and we didn’t find it. We found another drug, which happened to be psilocybin. We ate far too much of it in a short period of time. We started downloading information about how to build our own bodies and DNA and minds into a UFO. That was exactly what it was. It was downloading the blueprints for an experiment that would cause this transformation.” [DMT Entity Encounters, Chapt 10 discussion]

Dennis concludes that La Chorrera gave the brothers a number of complex ideas that they needed a long time to digest. Frustratingly, Terence’s contribution to that process was cut short. He died of cancer in 2000, aged fifty-three.

As a psychonaut, Terence fearlessly leaped over perceptual and conceptual boundaries, seeking to understand the situations he experienced, and offering numerous thoughts — some profound, some filled with the cosmic giggle — on what the implications could be for humanity. His approach was phenomenological, open, and motivated by curiosity regarding our relationship with the mysterious interactive invisible landscape, so near and yet so far, which in the end he simply called the Other:

“The Other plays with us and approaches us through the imagination and then a critical juncture is reached. To go beyond this juncture requires abandonment of old and ingrained habits of thinking and seeing. At that moment the world turns lazily inside out and what was hidden is revealed: a magical modality, a different mental landscape than one has ever known.”

Entering this mental landscape is not to be taken lightly.; journeying into it demands all we possess:

“This is not a reality for the menopausal mystic, the self-hypnotised or the soft-headed. This is for real.”

Essays by Keith Hill that explore related ideas:

Jane Roberts, Seth and the matrix What is our identity — really?medium.com

Ghosts of Japan’s tsunami How close are life and death — really?medium.com