Win Food Of The Gods: The Search For The Original Tree Of Knowledge Drafted By Terence McKenna Ebook

Terence, i'm gonna go do shrooms now, . .

But seriously, on second reading I applaud how concise and descriptive this book truly is, It might take a few times to get into it, but you'll come away with a very interesting perspective, Fanciful ideas and interesting concepts, but at the end of the day chuckfull of new age psychobabble,
Some of the things he asserts are interesting and engaging to think about and entertain, but most of what he says seems to be fueled by his own adventures as a psychonaut and not concepts that are based in any measurable reality.
Sometimes I ask myself some weird questions like what would a new color look like Or what exists outside the universe Or what happens when I die And sometimes I wonder about the existence of reality itself.



Psychedelics are super interesting, Society considers them as drugs

in a similar way as cigarettes or some other stimulants, But this book shows that they are quite different, For a start, these things are naturally occurring in plants and in our bodies, plus, current and archaic societies have been using them for a long time.
The fact that these plants are strictly prohibited and culturally discouraged without any serious reasons related to health tells me that these things have the potential/ability to destroy/transform the assumptions upon which our culture is based.



I am not saying that I think everything the author says is right all I am saying is that even if some of it is correct, it might be something worth considering.
These plants might contain the things that are able to reveal what lies beyond the impenetrable edge of the universe within which I exist.



I thought I would givebut the last section of the book changed my mind,



"Like sexuality, altered states of consciousness are taboo because they are consciously or unconsciously sensed to be entwined with the mysteries of our originwith where we came from and how we got to be the way we are.
Such experiences dissolve boundaries and threaten the order of reigning patriarchy and domination of society by unreflecting expression of ego, "


"The effect of these compounds is largely psychological and is only partially culturally conditioned in fact, the compounds act to dissolve cultural conditioning of any sort.
They force the corrosive process of reform of community values, Such compounds should be recognized as deconditioning agents, " "But now, Daddy's special medicine, which you must never use because it will ruin your life, lets Daddy see and hear magical things you will never experience.
EVER!!"

Homer Simpson This book is greatmuch more than a treatise on "shrooms" and dope, Have you ever thought about the mind altering power of purified sugar, the politics of coffee, and the parallels between these and what we consider to be more dangerous drugs like cocaine I did not care for this book.


There were a few parts I did like, including a wealth of historical information about the use of psychedelics in various cultures throughout history, and some interesting theories about their role in the development of both ancient and modern religions.
In fact, there are many interesting theories throughout the book, the most famous of these being the "stoned ape" theory, Unfortunately, that theory, and likely many of the others McKenna presents, is nothing more than speculation unsupported by any real scientific evidence, In fact, part of his argument for the stoned ape theory is based on misrepresentation of one particular study,

I can handle crackpot theories if they're interesting enough to contemplate, which McKenna's are, But what I can't handle is his constant, tiresome moralizing, I support the legalization of all drugs, and especially cannabis and psychedelics, but those of us who oppose prohibition have to be realistic about the likely benefits and drawbacks of such a policy change.
McKenna is anything but he literally believes that widespread use of psychedelics is the only thing that can save the planet from imminent apocalypse caused by human greed and egoism.


And yet, for someone who almost literally worships psychedelics, he actually is actually highly judgmental of the use of drugs other than marijuana and psychedelics.
In fact, he seems to imply some distinction between plantbased hallucinogens and other drugs a category in which he also includes TV, caffeine and sugar.
Having thus redefined "drugs" to mean things that he thinks have a negative cultural influence, he is more or less flatly antidrug,

In building a case for the harms of "drugs," he propagates the same kind of misinformation that he decries when government agencies employ it against his preferred substances.
For instance, he repeatedly claims that crack cocaine is more addictive and therefore more dangerous than powder cocaine, but as Dr, Carl Hart demonstrates in his book, this is not true,

Maybe it's unfair to judge McKenna on this point, as this book is more thanyears old, so he didn't have access to the same information we do today.
But his distaste of drugs such as caffeine and sugar is partly a consequence of his condemnation of "patriarchal dominator culture," in favor of "partnership" cultures.
This divide, which McKenna also represents as being entirely black and white, is yet more baseless idealism, and a clear example of the "noble savage" trope.
Although McKenna explicitly acknowledges that trope as something to be avoided, he continually represents modern civilization as corrupted if not outright evil, while literally referring to archaic societies as "paradise.
"

There are numerous individual paragraphs that could be excerpted from this book and would be good reading on their own, but the work as a whole is deeply flawed, and ultimately I felt like reading it was a waste of my time.
I first encountered McKenna in a New Age bookshop in Brighton, whilst perusing for material to flesh out an essay on Shamanism I was writing.
I came home with 'The Archaic Revival', which introduced me to ideas such as the Logos a rather more funky formulation than the Christian use of the word, the Mayan Calendar and prophecies about.
My humanistic psychology professor, Brian Bates, suggested that McKenna was rather difficult to deal with academically, but nevertheless I proceeded to give a talk on how I was starting to perceive that The Logos was gleaming out of the faces of the homeless on the streets of Brighton in my case, my visionary awakening was due to rather large amounts of skunkweed being consumed.


I later read 'The Invisible Landscape' on a Buddhist retreat inventing my own programme which supplemented meditation with copious amounts of time spent reading other people's books in the dormitory.


I had been aware of 'The Food of the Gods' for many, many years, but had avoided this book due to its explicit dealing with drugs I had rather gone off them, though had lodged in my head a recommendation by a poetry teacher Tom Sherrin to give it a go, so a month or two ago I ordered the book, basically to get it out of the way.


I must say my perception of McKenna has changed now, and although the subject material covers all kinds of substances most of which I abstain from now or use very infrequently, but most of which I have experimented with to various degrees, the writing style pleasingly mixes academic knowledge and language with a technicolour vision and writing style.
I am very happy to engage with this kind of writer, who steers a multidimensional route between the dangers of a too dry, arid manner, and completely losing himself in gushy poetry.


McKenna traces the evolution of humanity's relationship with drugs, according to his own historical understanding, from our early 'archaic' roots, where he posits a polyamorous, tribal, cattlerearing psychedelic culture, which was supplanted by a more patriarchal, horseriding, dominator society.
The history of the world becomes one not of class struggle, but of substance use and repression, He is clearly down on our presentday reliance on alcohol, tobacco and TV and looks forward to a revival of the archaic period, where people, embracing a pluralistic, democratic spirit, will break through into a wider, better, more exciting and celebratory culture, in communion with a resacralised nature and awakened to buried dimensions of spiritual intelligence, whether in our own being, or that of elves, angels and so forth.


He ends the book with a manifesto and political blueprint for how to get there, which surprisingly, from my perspective, relies on taxation in large part.
He would have alcohol and tobacco taxed at, with more warning of their dangers, cannabis legalised, and the rest legalised a year later, McKenna thinks popular fears of the consequences of the legalisation of drugs are analogous to Establishment fears of the eradication of slavery or emancipation of women in the past.


On a philosophical note, one of my criticisms of the book is his insistence that the modern belief in the meaninglessness of the world, and also the belief that meaning is contextdependent, are both wrong.
He posits God as a Wholly Other and presumably bearer of a fixed, pregiven Meaning, as revealed perhaps in psychedelic experience, I would suggest, that on analysis, it is hard to argue that meaning is not, to some degree, contextdependent, but I certainly have experienced an archetypal substratum to existence, that he may be hinting at, in which certain patterns seem to be playing out, behind the surface veil of people's lives.
This would suggest that there is a structure that is pregiven, but the meaning attributed to that structure would presumably be constructed through an interactive process between the perceiver and the perceived.
So, for example, a tree has a structure and pattern behind it, but different people might interpret the meaning of it, in stories or art, depending on their own perspective and the context in which the tree was presented.
The World Tree or Axis Mundi is a common motif in mythological sequences, from Norse tales of Odin, to the awakening of the Buddha at the foot of the Bodhi tree, to the crucifixion of Christ which takes him down into hell and then up into heaven, spanning a vertical spectrum of consciousness all use a similar metaphor to describe dramatic transformations and a vertical wooden presence, but framed in different ways according to the culture.
My feeling is that McKenna has been so seduced by the beauty of his own psychedelic experience and the rush of information received through sometimes overwhelming revelation see 'The Invisible Landscape' that he let his own academic rigour be swayed by the poetry of the vision.
What we see, how we interpret what we see, and then how we present what we see, are three different things and tricky, if not impossible, to tease apart the three.
Brian Bates may have been correct in his warnings of McKenna's visionary glow obscuring a paucity of analytical thinking,

I would also query the prehistory that he talks about, as being a rough sketch of something much more complex and varied.
These things are hard to prove, but no doubt, some of early humanity liked to get high, just as many animals do, whether by accident or intention.
It must be a temptation though, to project experiences of postmodern psychedelic culture and aspirations, onto a premodern template, On his treatment of more recent history, he doesn't really do justice to the dangers of psychedelic use, though he does recommend the establishment of a contemporary neoshamanism which would guide people through their experimentation, and I wonder if his inference that intelligence services were hand in glove with criminal drug distribution cartels is quite as black and white as he states.
Something I would like to research myself I've often heard this accusation, and don't know to what extent it is true,

Finally, McKenna does not talk of other methods, some explicitly shamanic/religious, such as trancedance, fasting or meditation others perceived as more universal, such as art and exercise, to achieve 'altered' states of consciousness.
These things may be used in an ascetic culture or as compliments to drug experience, We are clearly moving into a more visual culture, a shift which has its roots in the development of photography and then film and TV, which has happened, as far as I know, independently of, or at least in parallel to, psychedelic use.
The explosion in thes of psychedelic use will have certainly fueled a momentum which was already happening, which has always been latent in the human psyche, and will have had periods of flourish cavepainting, Dionysian celebration, Renaissance art, and then repression Protestant smashing of the stained glass windows and insistence on scripture over sacraments, Taliban destruction of Buddhist statues, ISIL destruction of Palmyra, and the rest.
But I think McKenna makes too strict an association between the use of drugs and visionary experience, There are more ways to crack open the egg of consciousness than he gives credit to in his book, and I wonder if he is leading people down a hippy cul de sac/deadhead end, rather than relativising drug use into just one possibility for entrance into the Age of Imagination which he prophecises.


McKenna does deserve applause for his positive vision and affirmation of the value of expansion of consciousness, He is a pleasure to read and preferable to the YouTube videos which filter his rather nasal, monotonous psychedelic guru voice into your living room.
A book which I imagine will be read for a long time henceforth, as different cultures work out their own balance on intoxicating substances.
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