True Hallucinations: Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise

True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise
by Terence McKenna

McKenna makes a few claims that he alleges to be true but doesn't provide citations for them. I was hoping somebody could help me locate sources which verify his claims.

The first is:

Destruction of up to 95 percent of the brain does not impair memory function. It appears that memory isn't stored anywhere; memory seems to permeate the brain. Like a hologram, all of the memory seems to be in each part...

Secondly:

I will summarize the state of the art thus: current thinking concludes that the peak of the emergence of intelligence in the galaxy was achieved ten to one hundred million years ago, that most races in the galaxy are very old and sophisticated.

Can anybody help me verify these claims? I'd like to read more about them, and don't have any idea where to start. Any help?

Thanks.


Score: B+
Reviewed: "True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise"
Reviewer: OAC aka mouthwater
Review: This book outlines McKenna's adventures in La Chorrera, located in Amazonian Columbia. There with his brother and three friends to investigate DMT-containing plants, they end up staying in a village that has copious amounts of Stropharia cubensis. The more time they spend with the precious, sweet Stropharia, the further they get from researching DMT-containing plants.

Terence's brother, Dennis, after attempting to help cause "a molecular aggregate of hyperdimensional, superconducting matter that receives and sends messages transmitted by thought, that stores and retrieves information in a holographic fashion in neural DNA, and that depends on superconductive harmine as a transducer energy source and superconductive RNA as a temporal matrix..." while under the influence of psiloc(yb)in and DMT, undergoes experiences akin to schizophrenia, telepathy, and the mystical.

To this day, the brothers (nor the rest of the group) can adequately explain the strange experiments and the results that supposedly took place back in March of 1971. This journey to Amazonian Columbia, wherein the group ingested sufficient amounts of Stropharia cubensis (and later cultivated them upon their return to the states), led to Terence's "I Ching time-wave theory" (which later turned into the Timewave Zero computer software).

Filled with excellent trip reports and arcane experiences, "True Hallucinations" is a thoroughly entertaining read (not to mention it is filled with bits of drug/cultural trivia/information). I refuse to give this book more than a "B+" rating due to it's somewhat outlandish theories and chapters. I can only take so much, of what appeared to be useless, banter about how neutralizing the Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) of psilocybin alkaloids by singing it's particular pitch/frequency will cause the alkaloids to cool down to absolute zero and therefore bond with DNA to create superconductive harmine-psilocybin-DNA due to harmine complexes acting as antennas which amplify the ESR and voice frequencies so the RNA can act as a superconductive temporal matrix. Errr, well, it was something to that extent!

I underlined great quotes and information, and will certainly be referring to it in the future. Perhaps the only thing a potential reader needs to know about this book is outlined in the opening dedication:

To

Dennis McKenna,
who realized that
"A stitch in Time saves nine."

Reputation Comments on this post:

Good review, thank you.