True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise by Terence McKenna is a classical journey of the psychonaut, an intentional exploration of one’s conceptual understanding through a psychedelic drug that conduces radical shift in perspective through direct first-person insights into the nature of reality and one’s place within it. The most famous journey took place in the Colombian Amazon with his brother Dennis McKenna, which they referred to as the ‘La Chorrera Experiment’ that entailed a heroic dose of the psilocybin-containing mushroom — Stropharia cubensis — enhanced by MAO inhibitory effects of Banisteriopsis caapi. After re-analyzing this experience, after its first publication in ‘The Invisible Landscape’, McKenna implies that the nature of his investigation has greater philosophical implications, beyond the existentialism of one’s personal experience, that entail meaning and structure of the Self within the world at large.
Publisher Summary
“Like a lovely psychedelic sophist, McKenna recounts his adventures with psychoactive plants in the Amazon Basin. Either a profoundly psychotic episode or a galvanizing glimpse into the true nature of time & mind, McKenna is a spellbinding storyteller, providing plenty of down-to-earth reasons for preserving the planet.”