
Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations
This film is an experimental documentary created by Peter Bergmann and narrated by Terence McKenna.
In 1971, 23-year-old Terence McKenna, his 19-year-old brother Dennis, and three other companions, travelled to the Colombian mission town of La Chorrera, where they hoped to encounter the elusive psychedelic oo-koo-hé.
Before getting to the village they had been warned to be very careful about how the topic of oo-koo-hé would be brought up, because it was a secret. McKenna and his companions had been part of the LSD revolution and had been left wanting more, specifically the kinds of psychedelic visions that others had described.
After spending time in India and facing disappointment for what they perceived as the absence of legitimate spirituality, they decided that what they were looking for was to be found in the Amazon. They had been told that there was still a pristine form of shamanism available there.
This party of five that traveled to Colombia was bound by friendship, an overactive imagination, naiveté, and a deep desire to travel to exotic destinations. The only one in the group that was not a previous acquaintance was their translator, a young American woman who had lived for many years in South America. The other members of the group were Dennis, a botany student, Vanessa, a photographer trained in anthropology, and Dave, a gay meditator and artist.
The McKenna brothers were still grieving the loss of their mother when they embarked on this journey. Most of the members of the group had previously been to India, Indonesia, Japan, and Canada. The Amazon expedition was planned during a reunion in Canada.
As they explored the jungle, their attention turned to the large amounts of Stropharia cubensis, also known as gold cap, that were readily available in large clusters all over the place. Locals informed them that this mushroom was available where there was sebu cattle dung. They knew what the mushrooms were and were very excited to stumble upon them. While they looked for the real mystery, this was a nice distraction.
First they started nibbling on them, but eventually they were eating a lot of the mushrooms since there wasn’t that much of anything else to eat, anyway. They were also smoking a lot of pot during this time and the strange conversations and weird ideas seemed to flow.
One of the things they noticed about the mushroom was that when eaten in high dosage one could perceive a sound inside the head like buzzing or wind chimes. If you listened very closely you could actually imitate the sound or sing the tune.
Before long, Terence and Dennis went to work formulating the psychopharmacological “experiment at La Chorrera.” This eventually gave rise to Terence’s expanded Jungian notion, which described the UFO as human oversoul. Also to appear was his I Ching based TimeWave Theory, which states that history as we know it is accelerating and will come to a major concrescence. Watch this interesting documentary now.