First published in 1975,
The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching is
Terence McKenna's first, and most radical, book. Along with his brother
Dennis McKenna,
Terence relates the technical results of a
psychedelic experiment in the
Amazon jungle involving
psilocybin mushrooms,
electron spin resonance, the
King Wen Sequence of the
Taoist
I Ching,
the end-date of the
mayan calendar, and the
end of time.
The title refers to the hidden topology of time, a landscape McKenna claims to have revealed in this book with his Timewave Theory. According to him, mark December 21, 2012 on your calendars, kids; it's going to be the end of the world.
Ingestion of Stopharia cubensis, on a number of separate occasions, showed it to be of low toxicity and very nearly ideal for easy manifestation of the interior cerebral tone. We speculated that the tone is directly caused by the metabolism of the tryptamines within the cerebral matrix and might be the electron spin resonance of the metabolizing tryptamine molecules within the nervous system, somehow amplified to audible levels.
As the McKenna brothers claim, they were able to achieve a permanent bond between a
psychoactive molecule and its corresponding
receptor site in the brain; this effectively gave them a
T1 connection to the
collective unconscious. From this they downloaded information about the nature of time and a method for mapping it out using the ancient computer of the
I Ching. This is a dense, technical work detailing the theoretical fundamentals of their experiment and its results. The
autobiographical tale of those fateful three weeks in the
Amazon jungle is contained in
True Hallucinations by the late great
Terence McKenna. If you appreciate a good
mindfuck, check these books out.