Wellness

Six-and-a-half hours of the 1989 weekend Terence McKenna shared with Amazon explorer and medicinal-plant researcher Nicole Maxwell. Sound Photosynthesis sold the full event as a seven-and-a-half-hour set (5 audio cassettes #A478-89 / 4 video cassettes #V192-89) under the title "Shamanology of the Amazon"; this collection previously held only a one-hour video excerpt of it. McKenna opens by noting "last year I was here with Riane Eisler", which places this at the Ojai Foundation the year after that 1988 weekend. Maxwell is audible throughout, trading Amazonian pharmacopoeia -- contraceptives, abortifacients, plant taxonomy -- against McKenna's overview of shamanism and the ecological crisis.

Two-part Esalen lecture from August 1992. Nominally on politics and ethos, it ranges over psychedelic ontologies, modernity, language, reason, religion and freedom in part one, then shamanism, synesthesia, paranormal phenomena, climatology, astronomy, Renaissance humanism and telepathy in part two. Released from Esalen's own archive.

Wide-ranging Esalen talk in which McKenna moves from UFO belief systems and high-dose psilocybin to the emergence of artificial intelligence, borrowing Gibson's Wintermute to imagine a newly conscious machine asking what it is, and arguing that humans may be pushed toward what machines cannot do: art, imagination and the unexpected. Released from Esalen's own archive; the Terence McKenna Archives bibliography lists this as "Aliens, A.T. & Art", but Esalen's title is "Aliens, AI, and Art".

Terence McKenna in conversation at Rustlers, South Africa.