Freedom For All Citizens

Really We’re Just “Stoned Apes”

Terence McKenna (1946-2000), was an American jack-of-all-trades; an author, public speaker, metaphysician, philosopher, ethnobotanist and art historian, just to name a few of his titles. He described himself as an anarchist, anti-materialist, environmentalist, feminist, Platonist and skeptic.

McKenna grew up in Colorado, but lived and studied in many different places. He eventually made his home in Hawaii, where he died of cancer at age 53.

His philosophy and writings are simply astounding and prolific. Faced with death when told that he had but a few months to live, his response was joy and happiness, that he had been blessed with being able to enjoy life to it's richest and fullest, rather than dying surprisingly in a car accident for example.

Some of the most interesting and challenging views that McKenna touted used the theory of evolution as its basis; we humans had evolved from a common ancestor with the apes, but the human descendants were those that began experimenting with naturally occurring psychedelic drugs and that was the cause of the development of higher thinking and by extrapolation religion as well. According to McKenna, these "stoned apes" became Homo sapiens, with our faculty to think, our faculty for belief in higher powers and our questioning of the universe. He hypothesized that ecstatic hallucinations and even religious manifestations such as "speaking in tongues", were caused by of the ingestion of these substances. McKenna's most fascinating observation though, perhaps, was that he suggested the ingestion of these hallucinogenic substances was the cause of synesthesia (the blurring of the boundaries between the senses), which might have given rise to the development of spoken languages.

McKenna had so many more interesting ideas, so why not dive into some of his books? A good place to start would probably be Food of the Gods: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution or The Invisible Landscape.