One of the 20th Century's Brightest Lights Was "Schizophrenic"

August 16, 2020

In 2015, Terence McKenna gave my healing journey new meaning. I knew "schizophrenia" had a major mystical component, but I had never heard someone put words to it quite like this.

In case you aren't familiar with Terence, he was a hugely influential ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, and author, known by some as the "Timothy Leary of the '90's" and by others as one of the leading authorities on shamanism in the West.

Like a true alchemist, Terence had a penchant for upending people’s realities. The man was a walking and talking psychedelic, a bard the world rarely sees. I get the sense he was ahead of his time by, oh, I dunno, a century or so, a gargantuan fish in the relatively small pond of ’70’s, ’80’s, and ’90’s transformation culture.

It’s time I gave him the ol’ Sacredphrenia treatment. I overlaid one of Terence’s speeches with stock footage (shout-out to Cottonbro who shot so many of these beautiful clips) and music from Ave Air. The song is Sat-Chid-Ananda and the speech is from the workshop "We Are at the Cutting Edge" in August, 1991.

And yes, you will hear Terence say that he considered himself "schizophrenic." It may just raise your impression of what we sacredphrenics are capable of.

Thank you, Terence, for your ageless wisdom. Your words live on inside so many of us.