Terence McKenna
The Age of Confusion
I haven’t shared anything from Terence McKenna in almost seven years, and yet few thinkers had a stronger influence on…
The Door of Perception
I haven’t shared anything from Terence McKenna in almost seven years, and yet few thinkers had a stronger influence on…
He calls himself a cosmic illustrator, visual alchemist and psychonaut. All images are from his left hand.
These two visionary tales are written hundred years apart, under very different conditions by very different authors yet they make a great match.
The Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, can be considered the bible of counterculture in the 60s and 70s. It compiles tools that can empower the individual within the global community.
Realistic representations of observable reality altered by invisible mysteries of life made visible.
Apocalyptic landscapes imbued with an ominous presence, that reminds me of the frailty of everything we deem safe and irrefutable.
Lloyd Kahn is arguably the most influential pioneer of the DIY building movement that emerged in the 1960s.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) was a Spanish neuroscientist and pathologist who is considered the father of modern neuroscience.
This book is a New Age classic but just one of many publications in the same spirit springing from the counterculture of the late 1960s.
I have always been drawn to things I found suggestive but couldn’t understand. The tarot is such a theme that speaks to my imagination but I can’t explain what it really is.
Her body of work is an expression of her sensuality as a woman going through the different stages of pregnancy from conception to birth to motherhood.
A numinous, archetypal event that can lead to enhanced consciousness and is therefore crucial to the psyche of modern man.
This book is leading you on travels in a mysterious and visionary world.
There is already another post about Philip Kirkland but these images I’ve just found deserve to stand alone.
Agnes Lawrence Pelton (1881–1961) was a member of the Transcendental Painting Group, dedicated to the principles of creating and promoting a pure abstract painting style imbued with spiritual intent.
Burchfield’s nature scenes strike me as among the most experiential art I know, as he’s able to put you right into his synesthetic experience of nature.
Deep and dark, this film glides through a misty world of forest spirits, dreams, and psychotropic honey.
To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name. There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness.
This seminal book by Stanley Keleman explores the notion that physical human shape is interrelated with one’s emotional and psychological reality — mapping the geometry of somatic consciousness.
Orgyan Chopel translates cryptic Buddhism into a simplified language of symbols, easier to understand and accept.
The following manifesto is a testimony of an awakened youth movement realizing its power. Born from the European rave culture…
We can begin to sense that we are animals too, just one experiment among countless others, shaped in reciprocity with a living world. At first, we might see otherness, but eventually, we can recognize another person staring back at us.
Russell was a visionary — painter, sculptor, architect, musician, and author. But he had no background in science. His cosmogony is based on a revelatory event he experienced at the age of fifty.
Rebel Wisdom uncovers the most rebellious ideas in philosophy, human potential and transcendence to find direction through the chaos of the time.
Or what being present means to me. And why I practice Ashtanga Yoga.
I grew up with Tintin and I just realized how formative Hergé’s ‘ligne claire’ was for me. His distinct visual…
A trialogue on chaos and the world soul, featuring Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham – three brilliant minds sharing their views on life and the structure of reality.
These seekers of the inner spirit in outer things, wanted to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world.
Escher reveals a world far away from our general perception of reality, a world of mathematics, a world of abstractions, anticipating deep features of modern day cosmology.
Joth Shakerley is following the Rainbow Family for over twenty years. The pictures he brought back are beyond words.
Wenzel Hablik is a visionary, an utopian architect of the proverbial crystal castles in the clouds.
This film is based on the 1967 book of the same name. It’s a radical critique of mass marketing and its role in the alienation of modern society.
The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead is an instruction manual intended for use…
In this lecture Terence unfolds an ocean of ideas, a metaphor for the psychedelic dimension you are sailing out onto to cast the net of the human imagination to retrieve novel ideas out of the chaos.
Osho’s discourses on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, given in Pune from 1973-76.
Continuum Movement is a dynamic inquiry into what it is to be a human being, providing a method to consciously explore ourself as an unfolding biological and planetary process.
To me the main characteristics that constitute the human condition are plasticity and the tendency to repeat.
Karolina’s mission is the transmutation of reality, her work far more than mere adornment — she weaves the umbilical thread that reminds us of dimensions we have just forgotten about.
This little chapter from The Center of the Cyclone by John C. Lilly turned out to be a piece of wisdom that stood the test of time.
A series of films about how humans have been colonized by the machines we have built. Although we don’t realize it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.
Robert Beatty’s artworks are exceptionally peculiar and seem impossible to pin down.
The art of dying, the experience of letting go all that is known is almost forgotten in our culture.
This book isn’t a novel but rather a manifesto. The final work of Huxley is a sociological blueprint, a manual for living, loving and dying.
Today I picked up one of my favorite books, Island by Aldous Huxley, his radical blueprint for a better world.…
Michael O’Neill’s quest to capture the essence of yoga spans time, space, and peoples.
Back in the early 1970s, Phil Kirkland created surreal textbook illustrations, mostly for psychology and health books.
Artists, scientists, spiritual leaders and economists gathered in Amsterdam in 1990 to explore the emerging paradigm of a holistic world view and the implications for a global economy.
This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.
Judy Chicago has continued to make art a vehicle for intellectual transformation and social change and to women’s right to engage in the highest level of art production.
This is a three and a half hour documentary for every McKenna lover.
“The American literature doesn’t have a more beautiful and more profound book than Walden” commented Hermann Hesse. And I knew…
This film from 1997 pays homage to Aldous Huxley, the seer who was nearly blind. His cultural criticism and social prophecy still remind us of great dangers and infinite potentials.
Pavel Tchelitchew clearly was a seer of the unseen, a true visionary artist.
Wim Hof is a modern-day yogi, a teacher of self-empowerment — not a stuntman.
The presentation of love as as a skill that can be taught and developed is all the more important for modern humans alienated from each other and from nature.
This film is about people who set forth to fully experience life. To shed the false shell and to return home.
Critical thinking in regard to technology isn’t overworked these days and it can’t hurt to reconsider our current course and if it is leading us towards a prosperous future.
In June 2015 Google engineers released a couple of images that caused a stir for everyone who’s able to grasp…
In 1990, a BBC1 documentary film brought global attention to a remote South American people, the Kogi of Colombia, who…
Renzo Martens’ Enjoy Poverty is one of the most provocative films that have been circulating the art world since its release in 2009.
Swiatoslaw Wojtkowiak is a daredevil with a good eye and the guts to go beyond what meets the eye.
R. Buckminster Fuller gave an extraordinary series of lectures concerning his entire life’s work. These thinking out loud lectures span 42 hours and examine in depth all of his major inventions and discoveries.
Yoga: The Art of Transformation was the first major exhibition that explores the visual history of yoga.
Dürckheim’s legacy is psychotherapy in the spirit of Zen. His books are classics of transpersonal psychology.
This account from lalaland is beautifully bridging the gap between science and spirituality to open up our perception of the world.
Tomás Sánchez is best known as a painter of landscapes. These scenes are the sweetest praise of nature and meditation.
Robert Gordon Wasson was an international banker, amateur mycologist, and author. It was him who reintroduced the ‘divine mushrooms’ to the West.
For any culture which is primarily concerned with meaning, the study of death – the only certainty that life holds…
This text is immensely powerful to illuminate death or any transition into the unknown. Remember that you already went through a fantastic metamorphosis before.
Hans Cousto is a mathematician, musicologist and astrologer best known for his work on the Cosmic Octave.
The feelings provoked by Robert Steven Connett’s paintings vary widely. Some will see mostly the beautiful and the interesting, and others will see only the unsettling.
If you think you are a spiritual energetic being then you will heal yourself by merely realizing what you truly are. Shamans are your helpers on this path.
Richard Feynman is one of those rare scientists who win you over with more than their titles and awards.
Doma India is the love of a life applied to working with horses. Being truly connected with yourself and others can move mountains.
Ben Tolman’s ink drawings reflect the fact that there is a subtle world we only perceive in non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Introducing you to Mooji is a matter of the heart for me. His radiance easily dissolves the haunted mind into laughter and leaves you lighter.
This is a simple yet powerful method for clear, empathic communication beneficial for all of us.
Gabor Maté is a Canadian physician who specializes in the study and treatment of addiction. He radiates kindness and a deep understanding of the human condition.
When the substance revealed itself to Albert Hofmann in 1943 he took on the responsibility and changed the world.
At the time when I picked the name The Door Of Perception I didn’t know much about Aldous Huxley and his teachings — because that’s what his writings are, rather than novels.
If the human being is the only animal that knows it lives in time, the movie is about that knowledge, a modern fairy tale about the nature of being alive.
This is a 10 hour weekend workshop given by Terence McKenna in Boulder, Colorado May 29-31, 1992.
Research indicates that shamans access an intelligence, which they say is nature’s, and which gives them information that has stunning correspondences with molecular biology.
In 1912, the pitface miner Augustin Lesage heard a voice telling him that he was going to become a painter…
Published in 1973, The Secret Life of Plants was written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. It is described as…
My appreciation for this lecture is beyond words. Grof’s thoughts basically touch all the areas that I want to explore right now.
Simon G. Powell had no real budget or crew, but he did have a Hi-8 video camera, some music equipment, a computer and lots of inspiration.
A cinematic interpretation of this world’s largest round table gathering, Problema is a visually imaginative, thought-provoking invitation to a world of global dilemmas.
The documentary investigates the origins of modern yoga and presents especially Krishnamacharya’s life and teachings.
Paul Stamets is a mycologist and a true renaissance visionary with a pathbreaking message.
My own infrequent writings are purely experientially and I’m not well-read enough to refer to the spiritual heritage of millenia. However others can.
The mere fact that you exist is quite awesome. The way you came into this existence is a unsurpassable miracle hard to believe.
Dance is not something you do for an audience to entertain, it’s a very real experience. It can heal you.
I had an experience that still resonates and vibrates deep within me. If I can keep just a mere afterglow alive, I will be a changed man.
Most probably I will never look down at mother ship earth from space. But some astronauts did when they set out to explore the final frontier.
Terence’s way of exposing culture as our operating system conveys the idea just perfectly. It’s not as determined as you might think.