I doubt I could have written Sound Effect Infinity if Terence McKenna hadn’t been a real person.
McKenna was a self-taught maverick intellectual ethnobotanist, philosopher, and psychologist (among other things). He explored some of the wildest parts of the world and the deepest levels of his mind. Many vistas of the psychedelic landscape would certainly not have opened up so fulsomely without McKenna’s poetic imagination and his attempts to leap-frog science and our basic, mundane materialistic model of reality.
Even today, most people think that taking psilocybin mushrooms is about entertainment and recreation. McKenna was committed to the idea of the visionary experience and answering puzzles that the psychedelic experience presents. He died of brain cancer in 2000 at the age of 53.
McKenna was a consummate real-life swashbuckling pioneer of cosmic consciousness. There have been many like him over the years, I suppose. But Terence was on a new path that presented extraordinarily unique insight and questions about human consciousness and how it connects to the universe. He conjured up ideas of inter-dimensional connective reality, machine elf alien contact with humans, timewave zero, and dialog with an inner voice that he called the logos.
I want to be honest, though. My thinking after listening to many of McKenna’s lectures and interviews on cassette tape back in the 1980s and in reading his writings and several of his most famous books, is that we shouldn’t discount or ignore the simple power of the unconscious creative imagination that each of us has.
My personal take from Terence is that creativity and imagination are not even remotely understood by science—and virtually everyone in Western culture. We have so much more power and talent to tap into, but that power and talent isn’t necessarily outside of our minds or even beaming in from other dimensions or time slots, it’s all right there in our capacity as thinkers and creators. Our biggest failing for thousands of years is in not understanding the true depth and breadth of creative human thought. Nothing about our minds is simple or easy to scientifically comprehend. We can’t continue to be so limited in how we think about ourselves. Terence McKenna opened a lot of doors and windows. And they remain open, which is how and why I was able to write Sound Effect Infinity.
A truly detailed and informative book on McKenna came out in 2025 called Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna, by cultural anthropologist Graham St. John.
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