Tao Lin on Terrence McKenna
- He insisted the world was made of language. Not the thoughts of God, quarks, electromagnetic wave packets, planets, or the stars but language. He called this “the primary fact that has been overlooked.”
- He’d been attracted, since he was a small child, to the weird, which led him to psychedelics--the ultimate, he felt, in weird.  “Weird is the compass heading,” he said.
- He called himself “a hardheaded rationalist” and seemed more earnest and sophisticated and undeluded than anyone I’d absorbed this much information from on nonmaterial topics like consciousness and imagination. He had arrived at his conclusions--that there was “confounding, paranormal material” in the psychedelic experience, that humans were near the end of time--through skepticism and disbelief.
- He distinguished himself from the New Age, which he called “a flight from psychedelic experience,” and various other contemporary groups attracted to occult and mystical topics.  “I say this is as a reasonable person,” he said in 1992.  “I want to keep stressing that. I wont sit at the same table as channelers, and the people who have good news about Atlantis, and ll of this stuff.”
- Despite being extra-rational, he was also optimistic. This surprised me because I associated rational thinking with pessimism, or at least a wan, slightly feigned sort of optimism. McKenna was energetically optimistic. He called himself “a resolute optimist of a complicated sort.” In one talk, he asked if there was “any reason why people of analytical intelligence, who are connected up to the facts of the matter about the state of the world, should hope.” He observed that the conventional wisdom was “basically no,” then explained why, in his view, “yes.”
- He went to the gym as “psychedelic training”--to improve his ability to explore the unknown and bring back useful information.
- He’d “soured on India and other places” and been underwhelmed in terms of spiritual teachers--no one had shown him anything close to what psychedelics delivered reliably--and he was “not willing to climb aboard the Buddhist ethic because Buddhism says suffering is inevitable,” which was “not a psychedelic point of view.” Religions that had “made meditation the centerpiece of their ontology,” like Mahayana Buddhism, were, he felt, nihilistic. This surprised me, because, at first mindlessly associating McKenna with the term “hippie,” I had expected him to automatically regard Eastern Philosophies--in a manner belying, I had always vaguely felt, some amount of mindlessness--as wise and praiseworthy.
- He argued in a manner I found compelling and revelatory, that nature was not, as Satre said, “mute,” but that. obviously, it was people who were deaf.  “The myth of our society is the existential myth that we are cast into matter, that we are lost in a universe that has no meaning for us, that we must make our meaning,”he said in a 1998 workshop on alchemy.  “This is what Satre, Kierkegaard, all those people are saying, that we must make our meaning. It reaches its most absurd expression in Satre’ statement that nature is mute.”
- He seemed to exclude nothing from his model building--the early internet and prehistoric shamanism, quantum, physics and romantic love, Saharan rock art and the Hubble Space Telescope, Taoism and Riane Eisler.
