(A typical missive: "I love you for who you are and are becoming and all of what you have meant to so much of humanity.") Over the next week, almost 1,000 emails came in each day. "It was a similar sort of terrible shock to the nervous system." Within 36 hours of his seizure, 1,400 messages poured into McKenna's email box. "It was almost like the night when Howard Cosell came on Monday Night Football and said John Lennon had been shot," says Jordan Gruber, an attorney who works at NASA and the founder of, a Web site devoted to spiritual psychology. The suddenness of his illness freaked these folks out. Word of McKenna's condition spread like taser fire through the listservs that are the backbone of the psychedelic community. "Listen," McKenna told them, "if cannabis shrinks tumors, we would not be having this conversation." They pointed to studies suggesting that cannabis may actually shrink tumors. "So what about 35 years of daily dope smoking?" he asked. "You wanna hammer on me about that?" They assured him there was no causal link. "So what about it?" he asked his doctors. I never won anything before - why now?" Like everybody else, he suspected a lifetime of exotic drug use may have been to blame. "There are only about 1,000 of these GBMs a year, so it's a rare disease. "No one escapes," said the doctor.Įven after he went under the gamma knife, McKenna couldn't quite believe what was happening to him. With treatment, the prognosis was six months. The rest was less amusing: Without treatment, McKenna would die within a month. To McKenna's amazement, his doctor described the thing as a "fruiting body" that sent "mycelia" throughout the surrounding tissue - mycological lingo straight out of the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide that McKenna had published in 1975 with his brother, Dennis, an ethnobotanist. The growth was diagnosed as a glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most malignant of brain tumors. But a CAT scan in Kona revealed the presence of a walnut-sized tumor buried deep in McKenna's right frontal cortex. The ambulance guys knew McKenna's rep and were convinced he had OD'd. To keep McKenna awake, she coaxed him into reciting a poem his grandfather used to chant, "The Cremation of Sam McGee." But then a grand mal hit, and McKenna was out cold. In addition to being much younger than McKenna, Silness is also much shorter, but somehow she managed to load his lanky, 6'2" frame into their truck and drive down the mountain to meet an ambulance. When McKenna came to, he was flat on his back, staring at the ceiling as his extremely agitated girlfriend called 911. Hallucinations cut in like shards of glass taste and smell were bent out of shape and he was swallowed up by a labyrinth that, as he later put it, "somehow partook of last week's dreams, next week's fears, and a small restaurant in Dublin." Then his blood pressure dropped and he collapsed, the victim of a brain seizure. On May 22, after dragging himself to the john to vomit, McKenna's mind exploded. He'd long suffered from migraines, but nothing in his 52 years could match the ice picks now skewering his skull. Soon after McKenna arrived home, however, he was hit with ferocious headaches. A recluse at heart, McKenna wanted nothing more than to surf the Web, read, polish up some manuscripts, and enjoy the mellow pace of Hawaii with his new girlfriend, Christy Silness, a kind young woman he had met the year before at an ethnobotanical conference in the Yucatán. But the teller was getting tired of the routine. Since claiming the mantle of Tripster King from Timothy Leary, McKenna has earned his keep as a stand-up shaman on the lecture circuit, regaling groups of psychonauts, seekers, and boho intellectuals with tales involving mushrooms, machine consciousness, and the approaching end of history. In May 1999, the psychedelic bard Terence McKenna returned to his jungle hideaway on Hawaii's Big Island after six weeks on the road. The "altered statesman" emerged from Leary's long shadow to push a magical blend of psychedelics, technology, and revelatory rap.
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