Why mckenna doesnt like saige

Bell went on the air and asked his 13 million listeners to participate in "great experiment no. Even after he went under the gamma knife, McKenna couldn't quite believe what was happening to him. I never won anything before - why now? They pointed to studies suggesting that cannabis may actually shrink tumors. Word of McKenna's condition spread like taser fire through the listservs that are the backbone of the psychedelic community.

The suddenness of his illness freaked these folks out. A typical missive: "I love you for who you are and are becoming and all of what you have meant to so much of humanity.

This flood of digital well-wishing is testament to McKenna's stature in the world of psychedelics, a largely underground realm that includes the ravers, old hippies, and New Agers one might expect, but also a surprising number of people who live basically straight lives, especially when compared with the users of the '60s. Psychedelics are far more controversial than Prozac or even pot - LSD and mushrooms are illegal, of course, and the government regulates them as closely as it does heroin and cocaine - but they have nonetheless wormed their way into many mainstream lives.

According to Scott O. They are productive members of society. You can't point your finger at them and say they've dropped out. McKenna serves as this hidden world's most visible "altered statesman. Brainy, eloquent, and hilarious, McKenna applies his Irish gift of gab to making a simple case: Going through life without trying psychedelics is like going through life without having sex.

For McKenna, mushrooms and DMT do more than force up the remains of last night's dream; they uncover the programming language of mind and cosmos. There is no deeper truth. McKenna is the most loved psychedelic barnstormer since Timothy Leary, the self-appointed guru of LSD who died in amid a flurry of digital hype about online euthanasia and his plans - which he scrapped - to undergo cryonic preservation. Like McKenna, Leary was an intellectual entertainer, a carny barker hawking tickets to the molecular mind show.

McKenna calls it "the harlequin role. Leary spent the late '60s attempting to gather a hippie army under the notorious battle cry of "turn on, tune in, drop out. In , he and his brother went to the Amazon to hunt for ayahuasca, a legendary shamanic brew. But when they arrived at the Colombian village of La Chorera that spring, what they found were fields blanketed with Stropharia cubensis, aka magic mushrooms.

Within 36 hours of his seizure, 1, messages poured into McKenna's email in-box. The flood is testament to his underground stature. In some ways, it was a turning point in American psychedelic culture. Back home, Leary's LSD shock troops had already disintegrated into harder drugs and bad vibes, and Leary himself was hiding out abroad after escaping from a US jail.

Serious heads knew all about the psilocybin mushroom from scholarly books on shamanism, but no one in the US was eating S. After returning from South America, the McKennas discovered the secret, which they promptly published. Magic mushrooms were on the menu. McKenna farmed 'shrooms into the s. He could turn out 70 pounds of them every six weeks, like clockwork.

The trade financed the middle-class existence of a relatively settled man. Then a good friend of his, an acid chemist, got busted. I had to work something else out. McKenna got his 15 minutes of fame when four of his books came out in rapid succession. His collection of essays, The Archaic Revival, is particularly influential, especially among ravers and other alternative tribes attracted to the idea that new technologies and ancient pagan rites point toward the same ecstatic truths.

Food of the Gods, published in , aims directly at the highbrows. In it, McKenna lays out a solid if unorthodox case that psychedelics helped kick-start human consciousness and culture, giving our mushroom-munching ancestors a leg up on rivals by enhancing their visual and linguistic capacities.

Though anthropologists ignored his arguments, the time was right for McKenna's visions. He was tempted with movie deals, got featured in magazines, and toured like a madman. He hobnobbed with Silicon Valley hotshots like interface gurus Brenda Laurel and Jaron Lanier and performed at raves with techno groups like the Shamen. Timothy Leary called him "the Timothy Leary of the s. McKenna also was a popularizer of virtual reality and the Internet, arguing as early as that VR would be a boon to psychedelicists and businesspeople alike.

But unlike Leary, who planned to use the Net as a stage for his final media prank, McKenna realized that the Internet would be the place where psychedelic culture could flourish on its own. You had to be Aldous Huxley to even know about them. To his great satisfaction, McKenna has lived to see the psychedelic underground self-organize online. Sites like the Lycaeum and the Vaults of Erowid now provide loads of information on chemistry, legal status, dosage effects, and - perhaps most important to the uninitiated - experiential feedback.

But to McKenna the Net is more than just an information source. He is convinced that an unprecedented dialog is going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge. If anything, my cancer has made me even more enthusiastic about the idea that through information, people can take control of and guide their own lives. Unfortunately, by last October, five months after the initial diagnosis and treatment, he needed much more than just information.

Despite the radiation therapy, the tumor was still spreading. McKenna traveled to the medical center at UC San Francisco, where a team of specialists surgically removed the bulk of the tumor. They then soaked the cavity with p53, a genetically altered adenovirus meant to scramble the hyperactive self-replication subroutines of the remaining tissue's DNA. Gene therapy is highly experimental; as Silness put it, McKenna became "a full-on guinea pig.

At first, the doctors at UCSF were extremely pleased with the results, and for four months the tumor cooled its heels.

But in February, an MRI revealed that it had returned with a vengeance, spreading so thoroughly throughout McKenna's brain that it was deemed inoperable. He retreated to a friend's house in Marin County, and his family began to gather. By the time you read this, Terence McKenna will likely have died. It is the end of , and I am visiting McKenna at his jungle home while he's recovering from brain surgery.

He lives a mile or so up a rutted road that winds through a gorgeous subtropical rain forest an hour south of the Kona airport. His house - a modernist origami structure topped with a massive antenna dish and a small astronomy dome - rises from the green slopes of Mauna Loa like something out of Myst. There's a small garden and a lotus pond, and the structure is surrounded by a riot of vegetation, thick with purple flowers and mysterious vines.

McKenna has owned land on this mountainside since the s but didn't start building the house until Every morning, I ascend a spiral staircase decorated with blue LEDs to get to the study.

It's here that McKenna spends the majority of his time during my visit, either staring into his Mac or sitting cross-legged on the floor before a small Oriental carpet, surrounded by books, smoking paraphernalia, and twigs of sage he occasionally lights up and wafts through the air.

With his widely set and heavy-lidded eyes, McKenna looks like a seasoned nomad merchant. Silness has shorn McKenna's usually full head of hair down to gray stubble, and the upper right side of his forehead is gently swollen and graced with a Frankensteinian scar. Though he is desperately ill, his spirits are as alive as ever: gracious and funny, brilliant and biting.

But he tires quickly, and seems intensely energized only when the prospect of chocolate cookies or ice cream arises. He is also very skinny, having lost a lot of muscle in his thighs, and he moves painfully slowly when he moves at all. McKenna and Silness have hosted a regular stream of visitors and well-wishers over the last months, but the scene is definitely not Learyland.

They are living life as close to normal as possible - which is how McKenna prefers it. The other thing is to do what you always wanted to do. I wasn't too keen on that, either. My tendency was just to twist another bomber and think about it all. An early popularizer of virtual reality and the Internet, he argued that VR would be a boon to psychedelicists and businesspeople alike. There's a lot to think about in McKenna's lair. An altar lies on top of a cabinet over which hangs a frightening old Tibetan tangka.

With McKenna at my side, the altar's objects are like icons in a computer game: Click and a story emerges. Click on the tangka and get a tale of art-dealing in Nepal. Click on the carved Mayan stones and hear about a smoking god who will arrive far in the future. Click on an earthen bowl and wind up in the stone age.

Gamers know that the most interesting objects usually lie near the obvious ones, and indeed, the real prizes here lurk inside the narrow cabinet drawers: butterflies. Click on these hummingbird-sized beauties and you'll be transported back 30 years to the remote islands of Indonesia, where McKenna dodged snakes and earthquakes in order to capture prize specimens for the butterfly otaku of Japan.

The most prominent feature of the room are the 14 large bookcases that line the walls, stuffed with more than 3, volumes: alchemy, natural history, Beat poetry, science fiction, Mayan codexes, symbolist art, hashish memoirs, systems theory, Indian erotica, computer manuals.

Deeply attuned to the future of consciousness, McKenna remains a devoted Gutenberg man. McKenna derives great pleasure from pushing the envelope of the human mind, but he is equally turned on by technology. On the one hand, the house, which was only finished last year, is completely off the grid, irrigated with rainwater collected in a large cistern up the hill, and powered by solar panels and a gas generator.

There are no phone lines. At the same time, Ethernet connections are built in everywhere, even out on the deck. His plan was to eventually stream lectures over the Net, thus eliminating the need to travel in order to "appear" at conferences and symposia.

McKenna normally spends four or five hours a day online, devouring sites, weeding through lists, exploring virtual worlds, corresponding with strangers, tracking down stray facts. Sometimes he treats the Net like a crystal ball, entering strange phrases into Google's search field just to see what comes up. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with. As our society weaves itself ever more deeply into this colossal thinking machine, McKenna worries that we'll lose our grasp on the tiller.

That's where psychedelics come in. Placement is definitely key. Throw her height out the window. Her competitiveness comes out, and the Lightning lean on her for her kills and her passing.

She knows that the Saints will be looking for payback. McKenna certainly is driven. Even the final match when Sage came up just short, last year when McKenna was a sophomore, said a lot about her.

She said she suffered a Grade 3 left ankle sprain warming up for the Division 3A championship match against St. She played through the pain as the Lightning lost in five tough sets. She was in a boot for nearly three months, stretching into her club season with Laguna Beach Volleyball Club. In the club season coming up, she said she will switch from outside hitter to libero.

That latter position is also one she plans to play in college. McKenna said she has verbally committed to Stanford University, though she still has to apply for the prestigious school in January. And honestly, I love that too.

Anywhere I am on the court, I take it and run. Thomassen said the results have shown in all aspects of her game. Her decisions have gotten better … this year she definitely had some pressure on her to perform. She stepped up and played at a really high level on a big night [at the CIF title match].

Thomassen said that sometimes McKenna is just in a zone with her hitting, but the passing also is very valuable. And her serving also is a big asset. McKenna stays versatile off the court as well.