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"I speak for the trees for the trees cannot talk"

~the Lorax by Dr. Seuss

One of the things Terence noted about psychedelics is that they break down control structures in the mind, such as the consumer/worker paradigm which keeps most people trapped in the pattern of capitalist society. By listening to Terence talk about his experiences with ‘the mushroom’ you get carried away in his visionary experience, it’s the closest thing to actually taking some.

A Terence McKenna talk which I liked…

One other thing I feel I should add to this thread is the influence that Terence McKenna had on my starting to learn about the plant medicine path. I first came across him on YouTube, where there are many lectures by him, and a community of avid fans. Terence was a very erudite man who could talk for hours at the drop of a hat, and he was trained as an ethnobotanist, someone who goes out to indigenous populations around the world to find out what plants they use and what is important about these plants.

So Terence specialised in psychedelic plants, and had wide knowledge and experience of them which he liked to share lecturing to select groups at places like Esalen. He had a talent for funny and interesting turns of phrase, but stayed pretty humble. He was the psychedelic prophet of the 1990’s, and died of an aggressive form of brain cancer in 2000 at the age of 53.

Terence for me was the gateway into a different way of thinking about psychedelic use, that it was something with a long heritage in human history and should be respected, not vilified. The war on drugs actually makes no sense when you think of it; whoever thought a plant might be illegal? But in fact long propaganda by world governments showing shocking images of ‘your brain on LSD’ (which later turned out to be completely fabricated and unsupported by science) has instilled a fear of psychedelics in much of the population.

As far as I have been able to tell, plants have been doing mankind a favour by providing these substances. Psychedelics reduce activity in something called the ‘default mode network’ in the brain, which seems to be responsible for creating a coherent internal narrative central to a sense of self, which may be why psychedelics sometimes cause ego death experiences.

The Guardian published an article in it’s Long Read series with an extract of Michael Pollan’s new book on consciousness, for those of you who are interested in getting a taste. It seems to contain a lot of material on the mind, as well.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/feb/19/inside-voice-what-can-our-thoughts-reveal-about-the-nature-of-consciousness

When you’re deeply looking at something, you’re loving it. And I think that when you do that, whether it’s with a person or a nonhuman animal or a plant or a tree, it is a way of witnessing and being witnessed.

Ada Limón, “Decentering the Self”