The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (2 page)

It has been a real treat for me to read
The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.
I had heard Terence and Dennis relate fragments of their stories here and there, but it is not the same as experiencing the continuous chronological narrative presented in these pages. I gained new insights into their background and development. Dennis’s narrative is lively, often humorous, and at times brutally frank. He gives his straightforward opinion about people and events, as well as astute observations about political, ethical, and transcendent questions. This book is not only a biographical account, but also a portrait of the counterculture of the sixties, seventies, and eighties in certain regions of the United States, an era with a marked global impact, avidly scrutinized by segments of today’s youth in these times of planetary crisis, and renewed interest in modified states of consciousness and alternative worldviews. In reading this book, I have learned a great deal that I did not know about the lives of my two great friends. In addition, I got the chance to relive and reflect on my generation’s time in history.

Dennis convinced me to write this preface by saying that I was there pretty much at the beginning of Terence’s career as a bard, and also at the end. In the summer of 1999, Dennis and I decided to spend some days with Terence in Hawaii. His brain tumor had been diagnosed, and he was considering what path to follow while dealing with his emotions. Dennis and I would have liked to pull the plug on all electronic communication and work on Terence’s health with the tools to which we have dedicated our lives. Much to our chagrin, Terence continued to work furiously on the preparations for what became the AllChemical Arts Conference dedicated to psychedelics and creativity that took place in September that year in Hawaii. On March 20, 2000, following a conference entitled “Ayahuasca: Amazonian Shamanism, Science, and Spirituality” organized by Ralph Metzner in San Francisco, Dennis and I went to see Terence, who was spending the last weeks of his life in the home of friends in California. He was in a wheelchair, barely able to speak. At some point he said: “I am having hallucinations.” Dennis asked: “Do you mean psychedelic hallucinations?” He said: “What are psychedelic hallucinations?” At the end of our visit, I embraced Terence and thanked him for all he had given me. As I was leaving, just a few steps from him, he suddenly said with a faint voice: “Buena suerte.” I knew I would not see him again. I was back home in Brazil when the phone rang on April 3. It was Dennis. He was crying as he told me that Terence had just passed away. Later, I went outside to contemplate the sky. As Dennis put it, Terence was by then traveling up and down the genetic ladder, becoming his parents and his children at one and the same time. Perhaps he is waiting for us now in the mystery of eternity.

Luis Eduardo Luna

Wasiwaska

Florianópolis, Brazil

August 3, 2012

Preface

For those who lived through what is sometimes called the Psychedelic Revolution, Terence McKenna is a legend. Once referred to as “the intellectual’s Timothy Leary,” Terence attained iconic status as a radical philosopher, futurist, cultural critic, and raconteur. His unorthodox ideas about the evolutionary and cultural impact of psychedelic drugs shocked many and resonated with many others. In 1971, we embarked on an expedition to the Amazon, bent on uncovering the real mystery behind the psychedelic experience. As chronicled in his book
True Hallucinations,
that journey has become the stuff of contemporary myth. Our adventures inspired many of Terence’s unorthodox ideas about time and the nature of history, which in turn became fertile ground for certain apocalyptic beliefs about the year 2012.

Terence died in 2000, never to learn if his predictions about the end of the world, in his particular sense, were true. Since then, he has achieved a kind of virtual immortality, his voice and image as near as the click of a mouse. Ghost-like, he haunts the Internet, a talking head on YouTube, the articulate prophet of an end time he didn’t live to see. In addition to
True Hallucinations
, Terence authored or coauthored several books, including
Food of the Gods, The Archaic Revival,
The Evolutionary Mind,
and
The Invisible Landscape
, among others. His wide-ranging thoughts and observations remain as fresh and timely as though uttered yesterday. He lives on as the beloved paterfamilias of a younger generation of psychedelic seekers, though most were still in diapers when Terence was at the peak of his career.

As Terence’s younger brother and only sibling, I grew up with him in a small town in western Colorado during the fifties and sixties. Traveling together in the Colombian Amazon in 1971 with a few other kindred spirits, we called our band “the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.” Even on the cusp of uncovering the mysteries of existence, my brother and I managed to keep a sense of humor; it helped to be Irish. We didn’t know what we were searching for beyond the conviction it was a profound insight, and that it would change us, and everything, forever. We were right on both counts, though not in the ways we imagined.

Terence was twenty-four at the time; I was only twenty. In 1975, we co-wrote
The Invisible Landscape
, our first attempt to construct a rational explanation for what happened to us on that trip. In 1993, Terence recounted our experiences more directly in
True Hallucinations,
but still with important elements elided or omitted. What has since been memorialized in the annals of psychedelia as “the experiment at La Chorrera” was a pivotal moment for both of us. The curious events that overtook us in that primeval rainforest haunted Terence until the end of his life, and surely the same will someday be said of me.

As Terence’s brother, I helped him create and develop many of “his” ideas. Our adventures—intellectual and otherwise—spanned the turbulent decades of the late twentieth century. Driven by a shared passion, novelty and a yearning for answers to the ultimate questions, we traveled to the ends of the earth and explored the outer limits of the psychedelic experience. The quest that seized both of us at an early age was to discover insights into the astonishing mysteries of time, mind, and the improbable reality of existence.

While our lives were entangled as only the lives of brothers can be, after the events at La Chorrera we later found ourselves on separate paths. Terence became the spokesman for the alien dimensions accessed through psychedelics, a philosopher of the unspeakable, a beloved and sometimes reviled bard of the marvels and occasional terrors waiting in the recesses of human consciousness. By choice and inclination, I stayed in the background, pursuing a scientific career in disciplines that ranged from ethnopharmacology and ethnobotany to neuroscience.

Since Terence’s death, we’ve witnessed the first decade of a new era that by all early indications will be as strange and disturbing, as full of hope and despair, as any period that humanity has yet endured. The closer I’ve gotten to his predicted end date for the world, however, the more I’ve been drawn to look back at how our personal world began. I wanted to retrace the journey that took us from childhood to our separate destinies, stopping to revisit the people and ideas that shaped us. Surely our lives were destined to be unique in many ways, as all lives are, and yet I’ve also realized how much Terence and I were the products of our age and its dreams. My hope is that many others will see their own experiences reflected in those that befell us. This is our story.

Part One - Beginnings

Black Canyon, Colorado.

Chapter 1 - Beginnings

Terry and Denny, 1952.

In many respects this book is about time. Its very structure relies on a particular understanding of time borrowed from the view of it that prevails in our culture. From Judeo-Christian perspective, time is a linear arrow with a beginning, middle, and end. For good or ill, and whether “true” or not, this linear conception of time permeates the Western worldview. It certainly influenced the idea of time that Terence and I shared while growing up. In fact, had we lived in a culture that viewed time as cyclical, this tale could have ended very differently, or never been told at all. I’ll have a lot more to say about middles and ends later, but right now let’s look at beginnings.

I say “beginnings” because any single point of origin for this book is hard to nail down. In the narrowest sense, the project began in the spring of 2011 when, having decided to undertake it, I took steps to make it happen. The story I wanted and needed to tell was summed up by its subtitle: “My Life with Terence McKenna.” I knew, of course, that many of those who were familiar with Terence’s work had already heard or read about me before. As the brother of a controversial and charismatic cultural icon, a renowned teller of tall tales, I was already the character in a narrative that a man known as the Irish bard of psychedelia had told and retold many times. But that was Terence’s account, not mine. There existed another version of those events known only to me.

Having made the decision to share my side of our story, I had to create a way to actualize it. Past experience had taught me that authors are rarely well compensated for their efforts; purely mercenary reasons led me to an alternative approach that would maximize my return. Somehow I needed to find the resources to self-publish the book and to “buy” the time to complete the task. “Time is money,” our father often reminded us, and was he ever right! After consulting with a number of people in the publishing industry, I turned to “crowd funding,” a new fundraising strategy best exemplified by the website Kickstarter. And it worked, beyond my wildest expectations. I made Kickstarter history by raising more money for a book project than ever before on the site. The window for the fundraising effort closed on June 6, 2011. What I wrote a few days later, condensed below, reflects my dread and elation at realizing the means to undertake my task had just been dropped into my lap:

Well, here I am. These are the first words I’ve committed to paper for what is supposed to be my magnum opus,
The
Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss
. After a successful Kickstarter campaign, I now have the funds to cover self-publishing, and (hopefully) to secure the time to write this screed. And time is short! During the Kickstarter appeal, I plumbed the depths of social media, putting myself “out there” in numerous podcasts, websites, and webinars. In doing so I’ve discovered a vast community of friends I never knew I had. These friends have shown great faith in me, but they also have great expectations: they expect me to deliver!

Right now I am sitting at my kitchen table with that sort of “uh-oh” queasy feeling that one gets when starting a new project that is likely to be all-consuming for months, and even emotionally traumatic at times. So now to work! I will revisit this intro in a few days, after I’ve started to generate text, and report how things are going.

A few days turned into a few weeks, and then into a couple of months. It was not until early September that various commitments allowed me to begin in earnest. During the summer, I had traveled to California to attend a wedding in the family. In October I was off again, this time to Colorado, where the ninety-seventh birthday of a beloved aunt brought me back to many of my boyhood haunts on the Western Slope. What seemed like interruptions at the time were actually part of the process, a chance to reflect on what, and whom, my story was really about.

The longest pause was a trip that August to Iquitos, Peru. Reality had intervened in the form of a three-week intensive course in the jungle for fourteen pharmacy students, most from the University of Missouri–Kansas City. To call it a “course in the jungle” is a bit of an exaggeration; much of it took place in and around dirty, noisy, chaotic, vibrant Iquitos, with occasional day trips to the surrounding forest. The kids had a cushy B&B to return to every night, a swimming pool, good food, Wi-Fi, and plenty of bandwidth for the ubiquitous iPhones and iPads. Hardly roughing it. We later spent three days at a camp on the Napo River north of Iquitos. Overall, it was pleasant work, and the compensation for a few lectures too good to pass up.