Tao Lin

October 2042, Central Park. The ripples on the lake seem to distend and pulse and become silvery orbs momentarily. “DMT,” he thought.

A chronological list of 30 McKenna-related books, ideas, people, and other things that combine Terence McKenna's attraction toward history, his focus on memes, and his perspective that "the world is made of language."

I talked to Terence McKenna's son, Finn, about a wide range of topics including LSD, H.P. Lovecraft, London, visionary art, and "a revolutionary musical video game that will immerse players in a psychedelic experience."

When Terence McKenna died in 2000, his belongings included his art, his books, and, among other things, an insect collection. In 2008, his daughter, Klea McKenna, published a book featuring 122 insects that Terence collected between 1969 and 1972.

In 1970, Terence McKenna and his brother, Dennis, traveled to the Colombian Amazon in search of a DMT-containing plant.

Terence McKenna viewed cannabis, psilocybin, DMT, LSD, and other psychedelics as "catalysts of intellectual dissent."

"I wish in a way that I could get a slightly better grip on my cannabis use, because I think the real way to do cannabis is like once a week, by yourself, in silent darkness, with the strongest stuff you can get, and then immense amounts of it."

"The mushroom speaks, and our opinions rest upon what it tells eloquently of itself in the cool night of the mind."

"Why this is not four-inch headlines on every newspaper on the planet I cannot understand, because I don't know what news you were waiting for, but this is the news that I was waiting for." —Terence McKenna on DMT

This installment of Tao of Terence presents a collection of McKenna's thoughts on death and the imagination, presented in the style of one of his lectures.

The public story of Terence McKenna's life—in my view, and by my estimates—is a 450-page book, which could be titled 'One Version of Terence McKenna's Life.' The following is my 8-page, fractal-inflected, short-story-esque version of that biography.

Last week, in the first installment of this series, I told the story of how I first encountered Terence McKenna. This week, I've organized a list of my 30 favorite Terence McKenna memes.