Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)

https://psychedelics.community/cultural-icons/terence-mckennas-mega-bad-trip

by Dimmiwoah • 3 days ago

121 110 3 days ago

psychedelics.community

fraywing• 3 days ago

Their server was sleep paralyzed by the HN egregore

niwtsol• 3 days ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20260719160409/https://psychedel...

cj17382• 3 days ago

It's important to have a spiritual practice to go alongside psychedelics to weather the ontological shock.

feoren• 3 days ago

"Atheists are mentally incapable of handing psychedelics" is certainly a take.

carljungslabtek4• 3 days ago

I really don’t think the word spiritual precludes atheists, you could even read it as “the human spirit”. The point is just that you need some framework to ground yourself. Plenty of people have “spiritual” beliefs based purely around the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or even simulation theory.

crent3• 3 days ago

Equating a belief in gods with spiritual discovery is also a take.

nathan_compton• 3 days ago

I'm an absolute atheist and philosophical nihilist and I have done psychedelics and I've never had a problem with them. Typically find the experiences positive. So we have at least one counter-example.

bobbiebarker2• 3 days ago

Good crutch for the weak. I've tripped plenty of times; I'm an atheist; it was great. Next time you trip, you should reflect on your need for "spirituality" and what it says about whatever is going on or not going on between your ears. One of the most amazing things about humans is their imagination and ability to convince themselves of almost anything. In my opinion, one of the points of doing psychedelics is to recapture your own imagination and flush out all the BS that other people have put in there to capture your mind. And here you are telling people to pour more programming back in there in the form of "spirituality."

poncho_romero• 3 days ago

I'm surprised someone as enlightened as yourself can't imagine a person coming to spirituality themselves.

hankbond• 3 days ago

one of the points of doing psychedelics is to recapture your own imagination

this also is my takeaway as to the primary utility. its so easy to accumulate ideas about how things _must_ be represented over time. every so often (maybe 5-10 years?) its probably good to have a way to shave them off and re-expose the surface.

pfannkuchen• 3 days ago

I’m also an atheist, but just looking at the huge amount of anthropological information we have, from hunter gatherer bands to large scale civilizations, I am quite sure that a perception of god-like and spirit-like entities is built into the hardware layer in humans. That doesn’t make them “real”, of course, but it doesn’t seem to matter much whether or not they are real, and deleting them from life because they aren’t literally real is an ongoing experiment.

colordrops• 3 days ago

What does "spirituality" mean exactly and why is it so offensive to you?

crent3• 3 days ago

The bastardization of the term “spiritual”/“spirituality” has done deep damage to the collective psyche. The view that spirituality is following dogma rather than an exploration of the ineffable from your own subjective experience is a widespread failure of communication.

sjs3822• 3 days ago

You define "spiritually" differently (more narrow, for one) than the person you're replying to.

tekla• 3 days ago

What? No you don't.

This kind of talk is how you get tech Bros paying 10 grand for some rando to be a "shaman" during a "retreat"

Loughla5• 3 days ago

We used to call them trip sitters and it was a friend who helped keep you grounded. Rich people will always find a way to buy their way into a subculture.

Loughla5• 3 days ago

Spiritual doesn't mean religious, is my opinion.

It means being grounded in something firm, whether that's inner strength or a reliance on an external deity.

Religion is not required for psychedelics, but a strong grounding in something is, in my opinion.

People have bad trips because there's something inside them that they haven't identified or dealt with properly. Anxiety and/or depression will ALWAYS flare up during your trip. It's best to deal with those properly (meaning change things in your life, not just medication) beforehand.

stringfood2• 3 days ago

I feel that looking for God is spiritual but saying you've already found Him, know Him, know His kids, etc - that is religious

SoftTalker• 3 days ago

But we see people promoting psychedelics specifically to "reset" your brain and get rid of depression and anxiety.

vitro• 3 days ago

Right, there can be a religion without spirituality and there can also be a spirituality without religion.

IncreasePosts• 3 days ago

No, it isn't. What's important is "set", and "setting".

Set is your mental mindset. Setting is where you're tripping. If you're mentally in a good place, and you're comfortable in your surroundings, you will probably have a good trip.

If you're dealing with some shit mentally and you're not comfortable where you're tripping you'll probably have a really bad trip.

kloop• 3 days ago

The article mentions that the "pranksterish" groups who took psychedelics weathered it just fine. They didn't have an expectation to disappoint. Irreverence seems to be just as good

It does sound like the opposite a bit, it sounds like attempting to create a spiritual practice, or assign spiritual significance at all was what did him in

antonvs3• 3 days ago

It's quite the opposite. When a drug trip conflicts with one's "spiritual practice" is exactly when you have a problem. That seems to be McKenna's problem in this case: he tried to assigning meaning to an experience he had while compromising his brain function with chemicals.

All you really need is to understand that there's no magic involved here. If you deliberately compromise your brain function, you're going to have strange experiences. It doesn't "mean" anything except that you compromised your brain function.

quickthrowman• 2 days ago

Not in the slightest. Telling yourself “this is a drug that is altering my perceptions and it will end” is enough for me. That’s all the grounding LSD and mushrooms require and I’ve never had a bad trip, but I have plenty of drug experience so perhaps I’m just used to being in an altered state.

Psychedelics don’t reveal anything profound, they just alter your thinking and perception temporarily.

weezing• 2 days ago

It's important to not do drugs that will fuck up your brain

neuralkoi• 3 days ago

Terence told friends, “history’s going to end any day now.” Friends worried they’d “gone off the rails,” and Dennis later conceded they had a point.

I always imagine the recklessness of psychonauts like McKenna as something like dragging a high powered electromagnet across the skull to force altered states while doing who knows what to the membrane.

CamperBob2• 3 days ago

Every time I read about either tDCS or psychedelics, I'm reminded of altering random hex values in games on my Apple II+ as a kid. One tweak got me a score of 100,000,000 in Falcons, and the screen dump made for nice bragging rights on the school bus the next morning. The next one crashed the game and wrote a bad sector to the floppy.

TZubiri2• 3 days ago

Maybe the first such experimentation actually teaches you something? By destroying a part you get to understand the true shape of the self. But by repeated use I imagine you get diminishing effects on the knowledge, and exponential damage, as you are left unable to self heal or develop adaptations to the missing corrupted sectors

zuzululu2• 3 days ago

i think his theory on novelty diminishing is bunk we are seeing more and more of it

carljungslabtek4• 3 days ago

he didn’t say it would diminish, he said it would increase until we reached a singularity, which he pegged to 2012. not that i’m a mckenna devotee but i always thought it was interesting that he speculated the final push would be a “device that a small group of people use to generate infinite novelty” and then the smartphone really took off exactly around 2012. the “small group” is just you and your buddies making endless memes and new inside jokes.

zuzululu2• 3 days ago

Terence McKenna predicted that the universe's accelerating accumulation of complexity and novelty would hit its absolute maximum, or "zero point," on December 21, 2012

On the contrary we've seen a surge of novelty since.

Smartphone took off before 2012, a few years after iphone's release around 2010 when social media converged on it

antonvs3• 3 days ago

which he pegged to 2012

He picked the date because of the Mayan calendar. Bullshit all the way down.

xvxvx• 3 days ago

I remember discovering McKenna in the late 90’s when I first got internet access at home. The comparison with Alex Jones is a good one: he was initially very interesting, sparking the imagination that whole worlds existed out there that I didn’t know about. But quickly it fell apart and I understood it was just horseshit, a form of fantasy.

I’ve never tripped but it sounds similar to fever dreams I had a few times when I was sick as a child, running high temperatures. Why anyone would choose to experience that is another question.

Reading that McKenna was just another for-profit bullshit artist at the end of the day is the sad part. Exploring ideas and possibilities is a noble pursuit, but only if you can admit to mistakes and failures. Deciding to carry on to make money is weak and undermines everything. His legacy could have been as someone who dedicated his life to understanding psychedelics and gave an honest, well-researched evaluation at the end of it all. Money and celebrity status ruined all of that.

vanillax• 3 days ago

Pretty terrible take if you compare tripping to a bad fever dream.

shlant2• 3 days ago

as someone who has a good amount of experience with psychedelics - there is actually a surprising amount of overlap between the two experiences, but mostly in a generalized "how they can feel" way, and not in the sense that they are the same type of experience.

carljungslabtek4• 3 days ago

Tripping is pretty different from even the wildest dreams, mostly because it changes how you think. Usually when I have a bizarre dream the non-euclidean reality is frustrating, because my mind in the dream is still the same as my mind when I’m awake.

But psychedelic drugs can trigger an openness to new ideas that is incredibly difficult to achieve while sober.

They’re also dangerous though, like the article notes. It’s like working (or playing) with fire. Even people who have decades of experience with it can suddenly get viciously burned. So I don’t really recommend it at all — intensive meditation can still be dangerous for people who are unprepared for what can come up but it’s a much more sustainable practice than drugs and can achieve similar (but better, if done correctly) states.

The article did make me pretty sad for the same reasons you called out. I used to look up to him a LOT in college. I moved past it when I discovered meditation but reading this piece really shut down the goodwill I still had for him. It also makes it hard not to view him as a weak person who never did any real personal development and just got lucky with his first few decades of tripping. I had nightmarish nihilistic mushroom trips that made me want to off myself even as a college student lol.

sibeliuss3• 3 days ago

McKenna to Alex Jones? That is an offensively bad comparison for someone as philosophically astute and well-rounded as he was.

And tripping to a fever dream... You know, sometimes it's best to just not respond if you know nothing about a subject at all.

tpm• 3 days ago

someone as philosophically astute and well-rounded as he was

Just my general observation having never read anything from him: many people with generally good qualities but also with a bit of narcissism and self-importance have, when exposed to psychedelics, gone off the rails and became truth-owning preachers or outright abusers. This is to me interesting in so far as this is not the case generally for others groups of psychedelic users.

In that aspect I can understand the analogy, although I have no idea if it's correct.

joenot443• 2 days ago

I’ve never tripped but it sounds similar to fever dreams

This sounds a bit like someone who’s never played a video game being disappointed in John Carmack.

When you’re that far removed from a certain subculture it shouldn’t be surprising when you’re unable to understand it.

comrade12342• 3 days ago

I tried lsd with friends in undergrad. It was to me a very interesting experience. Not spiritual in any way - it was like I could tell that my neurons were firing off all over and incorrectly. It was fun and I enjoyed it very much and I've never had the desire to do it again.

My friends from that night did still continue doing lsd after that. For one of them he stopped when he had what sounds like a horrible trip where a pool table opened up to a portal to hell and dragged him in. Lol.

pixel_popping3• 3 days ago

You might want to consider retrying it in a "spiritual/meditative setting", i.e cozy with headset on, music pre-curated (nothing off-tune and so-on) and closed eyes then get lost to eventually breakthrough, strictly only with people you deeply trust.

comrade12342• 3 days ago

I don't think it's a spiritual experience, in any way. It's just your neurons going crazy. Any spiritual result that you have had fits with how your brain is wired. The majority of the population is spiritual because in the past atheists were killed. I'm atheist and this experience was not spiritual in any way. It just enforced my atheism.

TZubiri2• 3 days ago

I remember feeling that once with cannabis, I was feeling some sensations and emotions and initially I tried to explain them rationally, but eventually I came to the theory that some brain areas were just being activated by the drug.

Don't do drugs kids.

brcmthrowaway• 3 days ago

This movement had a movement but now it's over. They failed to stop capitalism and effective altruists from taking over the cultural lexicon.

Now I can't go anywhere without hearing about Roko's Basilisk.

shlant2• 3 days ago

They failed to stop capitalism

good thing, too!

state_less3• 3 days ago

I wouldn't know what to tell someone about what entering a (the?) void is like, but the closest i can imagine is a situation where you're 1000 nautical miles out to sea in a small sailboat on a pitch dark cloudy moonless night, far away from anyone. A storm is brewing and the seas are getting large, though you can't see them, it's too dark for your eyes, though you feel the force as it throws your small boat around. It's more than you bargained for, but there isn't anything you can do about it. You're in it now. You're losing control of the boat. You're afraid of what will happen if you lose control, the seas grow larger... The rains and the lightning and thunder are here and it's just too much too bear, so you go down below and lay ahull, surrendering to the sea and forces beyond your control. The sea will make of you what it will, you're fate rests with something larger than yourself. A part of you dies that night, and what emerges the next day is different from what was swallowed by the storm. Your old self at the helm, somewhat unrecognizable. And a part of you never made it out of the storm, remembering that you're always out to sea, and that you needed to come out here to remember that.

afro88• 3 days ago

Is this a quote from a book? Beautifully written

state_less3• 3 days ago

Thanks afro88. I was inspired by the storm in Terence's story, and my time on my sailboat when it felt like the sea was getting to be too much. Glad to share.

profsummergig2• 3 days ago

Thank you. I was curious about what the experience is like.

Now, can you share what an OBE feels like?

sibeliuss3• 3 days ago

I can. An OBE feels utterly real, minus the "oh shit... this is happening!" aspect of it all. It is not like a dream, even a lucid dream. And like a cliched cinematic experience you lift out of your body intact, as if there were two of you, one there and one here. It is legit and strange and the 'reality' of it is a lot to handle, after the fact.

abstractspoon• 3 days ago

Sounds very much like my breakdown 20 years ago. When I finally emerged 10 years later I was both the same and utterly changed. I liken it to having had my personality deconstructed and then reconstructed from the ground up. I wouldn't wish it on anyone though I'm now in a much better place.

dieselgate• 2 days ago

The boat will usually survive the storm but will you?

wartywhoa23• 2 days ago

Remember the passage of the Argonauts between Scylla and Charibdis?

Scylla would devour the crew alive by its dog heads, leaving the ship intact but drifting on its own - that's a metaphor of madness: for the crew is the mind, and the ship is the body;

Charybdis would suck both the crew and the ship into its whirlpool - that's a metaphor of death.

The goal is to pass in between.

sjs3822• 3 days ago

Don't incapacitate yourself during a major weather event.

pixel_popping3• 3 days ago

Absolutely, Set and setting is critical while using psychs, ensure that no random events can happen, cut off all phones, doorbell and anything that can make abrupt noises to not derail you. Do not do it if you don't feel like it that day, or if the weather is unpredictable.

alex1138• 3 days ago

The famous story of La Chorrera is that Dennis is the one that went seriously off the rails but it's Dennis in some of his public statements and book that cast skepticism on a few of Terence's ideas

What you shouldn't do is just willy nilly tell people to take things. If the article is right about that, it's disappointing. I always saw him as being very academic and quite in tune with the dangers of outright recommendation (perhaps in contrast to Leary but I don't want to misinterpret Leary)

thisisauserid• 3 days ago

And he had even more regret when he thought that his (terminal) brain tumor was caused by all the psychedelics he had done (though doctors assured him that was unlikely in the extreme).

jebronie2• 3 days ago

I didn't know chemically deep-frying your brain could be a bad thing

DantesKite• 3 days ago

Wonderfully captivating article about a loquacious man that like the rest of us, wrestled with his demons and even sometimes machine elves.

burnto• 3 days ago

A further factor was cannabis. Attempts to quit left him feeling stranded in a “horribly profane” world, with a “tremendous narrowing of consciousness.” Substances that once served exploration soon functioned as psychological maintenance. “He just needed to be high on cannabis,” Harrison said. “That was his medicine… what drove everything,” keeping him from “bouncing off the ceiling.”

Clearly there were a number of factors contributing to his difficulties, but this sounds like it may be an underestimated one, maybe more than the mushrooms even. Cannabis dependency really can sneak up on people, and for some it’s quite difficult to get off it, with real physical and emotional symptoms.

sid_talks• 3 days ago

Cannabis dependency really can sneak up on people, and for some it’s quite difficult to get off it, with real physical and emotional symptoms.

Throughout my university years, many of my peers smoked cannabis on a daily basis, often several times a day. Most of them seemed oblivious to the fact that they might have developed a dependence; whenever anyone tried to talk to them about it, they dismissed it, claiming cannabis is completely benign and nothing to worry about. Today, I personally know that at least a couple of them developed serious mental and physical problems, and to this day, they are unable to cope with life without being high.

There should be more awareness about safe cannabis use and its risks rather than framing it as a "healthier" alternative to other drugs, with people usually saying "at least I am not doing X, I am just smoking weed".

Xmd5a3• 3 days ago

Ok, now do SSRIs.

Ylpertnodi• 2 days ago

Today, I personally know that at least a couple of them developed serious mental and physical problems, and to this day, they are unable to cope with life without being high.

Perhaps the cannabis helps with the problems, and stops your friends feeling worse.

nowittyusername• 3 days ago

Yeah... this made me reflect on my own bad trips decades past. I havent done4 many psychedelics only a handful, but I did have what one could call a bad trip or 2... maybe. It didn't look like it on the outside but internally it was profound. One in particular stood out that had me inhabit this universe but all semblance of emotional ties were cut from that reality, I am sure I would have felt pure terror if i was able to feel anything at the time. odd thing for sure as I am describing a horrible experience from memory but at the time i was unable to feel anything at all. An emotional echo of sorts i guess.... well anyways I do think that experience had a profound affect as the "nothing matters" sentiment stuck around since then. For a long time now I thought I peered in to "the void of reality" but thinking on it objectively now, maybe that was a assumption wrongfully borrowed from a bad trip. After all why should the natural state of things be so bereft of anything. If anything the universe is capable of being witnessed only through the eyes of a subjective observer... Bah anyways ive rambled for long enough. Good read.

iammjm• 3 days ago

Mixing mushrooms and cannabis can lead to some seriously weird places, just read some reports on erowid.org. And Terrance did that repeatedly.

I did this once and ended up completely languageless for a moment, like unable to write and speak at all. Then I would have very intense visions so I would try to close my eyes but alas! my eyes have been closed this whole time. Then there were black holes eating up my field on vision, like clusters of dead pixels on a computer screen, spreading.

Also, I think Terrance suffered from a brain tumour which eventually killed him - I wonder if his migraines and experiences were influenced by that too.

And then there’s this quote from Leary, I think: “Hang up the phone once you got the message”. Psychedelics are no joke. I do advocate for them as sporadic psychological aide because they truly do loosen up the rigid structures in your mind and allow for a lasting change and improvement. But each session should be treated with utmost respect. There should be an understanding that each has the potential to be the best or the worst experience of your life.

ibackstrom• 3 days ago

I am sure that it was only one real trip that he had during all life. From different facts it seems that he were just re-telling the stories of other people trips.

homeonthemtn• 2 days ago

Classic psychedelic community. Preach about ego death while maintaining a huge ego.

Guy goes through traumatic experiences because he abused the hell out of psychedelics (5g weekly, wtf?) but continues to encourage people to do the same because he doesn't want to be seen as weak

I have so many problems with McKenna. Guy was a drug addict but because he was one of the first to write about drugs during an era of taboo, he gets a pioneers deference. That would be fine if people still didn't glorify his absurd doses and bull shit about "knowledge downloads" or whatever it is.

Anyways, pardon my rant

Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)

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