The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching

Terrence McKenna’s first novel, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching, acts as a literary preface to a vivid life of psychedelic exploration as well as a potent foundation for the philosophies and experiences of the ‘Timewave’ philosophy. With his brother, Dennis McKenna, Terrence unwraps with child-like giddiness the profoundly novel “self-coherence” of the tryptamine experience. Walking a self-proclaimed fine line between visionary scholars and shamanic madmen, the brothers delve deep into the psychology of noospheric predications, lunar cosmology, and the validity of discovery within the altered state. Drawing on sources both ancient and modern, the ensuing introspective journey flowers into a cacophony of realization in which Terrence acts as a lightning-rod recipient for visions of the cosmic network. A penchant for literary revival and invention provides an austere landscape of language, occasionally impenetrable, but more often intoxicatingly poetic. The forerunner for modern psychedelic exploration, Terrence leaves in The Invisible Landscape a trove of psychonautic jewels to be explored in their entirety in the ensuing philosophical expositions, both endogenous and extraterrestrial. He acts as a genuine neo-shaman, animating with garish lust and modernity a long-lost art of consciousness dissection. He draws inspiration from experience and education to describe in lurid detail the inner workings of the universal perception, personifying the endless void of the cosmos as a mycelial entanglement of man, consciousness, and the orderly amplification of ‘machine-elves’, creating in the process a literal landscape for the torch-runner Daniel Pinchbeck and his exploration of enlightenment, crop circles, and Mayan cosmology. Straddling the altered-states experience, Terrence dives full-force into a brilliant dissertation on the potential illumination of awareness, preparing even the most experienced psychonaut for a distillation of psychedelic ideology, and in the process sketching (albeit chaotically) a revised road map for investigation.