r/terencemckenna

"Fix your course on a star and you'll navigate any storm."

- Leonardo da Vinci

wayfinder. 18x24''. pencil drawing. adam sturch

Sage Francis, Runaways (live)

https://youtu.be/qJi8OT7uNjM

🎨🌞🎞️🐸🌎

Terence McKenna, parody. redux@

July 1990. The World Could be Anything.

various artists assembled by adam sturch.

thank you.

🎨

HD youtube link.

https://youtu.be/RwwkiI0tOsw

"Psychedelic telepathy is you 'see' what I mean."

- Terence McKenna

see. 24x30''. oil on canvas. adam sturch

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Terence McKenna, colorful lot. c@

oil and acrylic paintings by adam sturch

thank you.

HD youtube link.

https://youtu.be/dyvE6zekULc

"Language betrays, in order to mean."

- Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna, Carpe Diem. the blue one@

1,385 paintings and drawings from, the blue one. a visual poetry novel by adam sturch.

thank you.

💙

HD youtube link.

https://youtu.be/kvfzJC2pyD8

terence mckenna portrait 2. 11x14''. water color. adam sturch

I Smoked for 40 Years. Then I Hit 5-MeO. Now I Just Watch the Cigarette Go Out.

Forty years of smoking. Not just addiction—ritual. A way to pause time. Breathe in silence. Feel something move in my chest when nothing else would.

I never realized how often I held my breath. I just… didn’t breathe. Like my body was always bracing for something. Maybe everything.

Recently, I had the chance to work with 5-MeO-DMT. I live in Canada, where access is more possible than it is in the U.S. (where it’s Schedule 1). I won’t go into sourcing or promotion. Just the experience.

It dissolved everything.

Not in some blissed-out escape way—but in a way where depression… just wasn’t there. Like I literally didn’t understand where it had been living in me all this time.

And now, something strange is happening: I still light a cigarette. But more and more often, I don’t finish it. It goes out on its own. And for the first time in my life, I’m okay with that.

I’m not saying I’ve quit. I’m not preaching anything. I’m just sharing that something shifted. Like my body started remembering breath before my mind caught up.

No pressure. No judgment. Just presence.

seasons present. 11''x14'' graphite on paper. adam sturch

"This is the message of your life and my life - it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children - nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is."

- Terence McKenna

Between Heartbeats: A Limit-Case of Human Consciousness (5-MeO-DMT)

Last night, the world stopped being a story.

Two friends and I procured 5-MeO-DMT. For the uninitiated: this is not DMT’s cousin; it is its shadow. Where DMT builds vivid, symbolic cities, 5-MeO performs a clean, surgical strike on the structures that generate identity, time, and ego.

People call this “ego death.” That language is sloppy. What actually occurs is reference death — the suspension of the “I” from which experience is organized.

It is sometimes called the God Molecule, and not casually. It occupies a strange position culturally and legally — rare, difficult to access, and treated as forbidden almost everywhere — which only amplifies the mythology around it. But mythology misses the point.

It is not recreational. It is not symbolic. It is a limit-case.

Philosophy points toward this state. Physics sketches its boundaries. Meditation approaches it asymptotically. 5-MeO-DMT executes it directly.

Not metaphorically. Structurally.

For a moment, time does not merely slow — it becomes observable. Like Neo in The Matrix, cause and effect appear exposed, layered, almost reversible. Not as spectacle, but as structure.

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The Removal of the Machine

This is not an experience that adds content to the mind. It removes the machinery that insists you are inside the story. What emerges is perspective without narrative pressure — consciousness observing its own conditions from outside the loop.

My friends wandered the room, stunned, repeating some version of the same sentence: “This is it. Whatever ‘it’ is — this is it.”

At the apex, I closed my eyes and felt oxygen leave my mind.

Not air — ordering.

It was as if the equation that normally balances thought, breath, and identity simply let go of one variable. Cognition didn’t collapse; it released. I sat there and observed, with the cold neutrality of a stone:

“I am dead. Alive yet dead watching myself.”

I was looking at my body from the inside, as though it were composed of a trillion tiny stars loosening their bonds and drifting into a larger sky.

I remember thinking: if there is a God, this is the moment to bow. The ego evacuates, and what remains is a distilled sense of self and others — stripped of posture, fear, and ambition.

This was not a metaphor. It was a measurement.

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The Whitespace Between Numbers

I waited for a heartbeat to reassert continuity. Instead, the interval between heartbeats expanded. It didn’t stretch — it opened. The gap became navigable. I stepped into the whitespace between numbers on a page and discovered it had depth.

Some people who work repeatedly with 5-MeO report encountering similar terrains — not in the narrative sense of DMT entities, but as shared structural features. Geometry here is quieter, less ornamental. You don’t see much; you pass through it. DMT feels like the carnival. 5-MeO feels like the control room.

Time didn’t stop. It factored.

Continuity revealed itself as discrete pulses separated by vast, silent spans. In those spans was a kind of mathematical heaven: pure structure without urgency, order without demand, coherence without effort.

That silence wasn’t empty.

It behaved like light in a cathedral, illuminating rooms I usually never enter — chronic pain, neurological overload, long-carried fatigue. Sealed mental doors became accessible, not through effort but by allowance. Each additional heartbeat felt like permission. Another. And another.

I saw my smoking habit as something I didn’t need entirely, my life was full without it. You can’t see this from inside yourself usually… I can’t ever.

I was outside, in subzero temperature, and my body was warm.

Not numb — warm.

The system had stopped arguing with physics. Resistance briefly dropped to zero. There was a faint, clean bodily glow — reminiscent of alcohol only in warmth, not distortion — but lighter, clearer. The delivery was smooth, frictionless. The sky itself felt in motion, as if a slow arc were turning overhead.

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The Problem with Peaks

This is why the state deserves to be named plainly: it is the apex of human thought experiments.

From that vantage point, debates don’t resolve — they evaporate. Meaning versus nihilism. Free will versus determinism. They collapse not because they are answered, but because the full system is finally visible in proportion.

But you cannot live there.

The problem with peaks is not that they are false. It’s that they are correct in a way ordinary life cannot sustain. Human existence requires bias, urgency, and emotion. The body must reassert its priorities. Time must thicken so that action can occur at all.

Coming down is not a loss of truth. It is a return to function.

If the state could be sustained indefinitely, I doubt many would choose to return.

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The Gift of Proportionality

The real gift of the experience is not transcendence. It is measurement.

You return knowing — not believing — that suffering is real, life is hard, and yet neither owns consciousness entirely. The migraines don’t apologize and leave. The constraints remain. But the relationship changes.

This rush asks nothing from you but presence. No belief. No mythology. You don’t climb toward it — you fall through it.

And what you bring back is not revelation.

It is proportionality.

That is enough to keep going.

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A Short Note on Grounding

This state leaves very little room for drama or trauma — but that doesn’t mean grounding is optional.

Have something to anchor you. A trusted person in the room can help — not to guide or interpret, just to be a quiet witness.

A practical suggestion: put on a nature documentary such as BBC Wildlife with the sound muted, while playing a broad, immersive soundscape (for example, Marconi Union or Gramatik). It gives the nervous system something vast but non-intrusive to rest against.

Loose clothing and water are essential. Dry mouth is common. Expect to misplace objects like phones; ordinary markers of identity are briefly irrelevant.

People often say you must “fully surrender.” I would phrase it differently: yield to the prevailing structural aether. You are not disappearing; you are allowing the larger geometry to carry you for a moment.

Grounding isn’t about control. It’s about knowing you can return.

“I always enjoy making this point in this town, particularly, because this is the city of the graven images. Not in gold and stone, but in film and light. This is the meme engine of the Western world. Those of you who work in media know the power of the word. As it is said, so shall it be. And so, the tool of the revolutionary at the end of the millennium is, to my mind, art.”

- Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna, Understanding & the Imagination in the Light of Nature, 1992. psy@

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Understanding & the Imagination in the Light of Nature, 1992. Philosophical Research Society, Los Angeles.

paintings and drawings by adam sturch.

thank you.

🚫👑

HD youtube link.

https://youtu.be/zGGmqcQN4C8

terence mckenna portrait. 8x10''. pencil drawing. adam sturch

concrescence (terence mckenna portrait). 11x14''. pencil drawing. adam sturch

"The suppression of the natural human fascination with altered states of consciousness and the present perilous situation of all life on earth are intimately and causally connected. When we suppress access to shamanic ecstasy, we close off the refreshing waters of emotion that flow from having a deeply bonded, almost symbiotic relationship to the earth. As a consequence, the maladaptive social styles that encourage overpopulation, resource mismanagement, and environmental toxification develop and maintain themselves. No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions....

Our culture, self-toxified by these poisonous by-products of technology and egocentric ideology, is the unhappy inheritor of the dominator attitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants or substances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. I will argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us of life's meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, and our grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style."

It is time for change...

Extract from the Introduction to 'Food of the Gods' by Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods (complete audiobook). movie meme movie@

movie memes by adam sturch.

thank you.

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https://youtu.be/VNfyr5OPHu0?list=FLbEOnFYNUa7V--BT3RHYR4Q