The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching by Terence Mckenna

Product Description

A thoroughly revised edition of the much-sought-after early work by Terence and Dennis McKenna that looks at shamanism, altered states of consciousness, and the organic unity of the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.
Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #20366 in Books
Published on: 1994-04-22
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
256 pages
Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Terrence McKenna has spent twenty-five years exploring "the ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation" and is a specialist in the ethnomedicine of the Amazon basin. He is coauthor, with his brother Dennis, of The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching, and the author of Food of the Gods.
Customer Reviews

Nice!
The beggining of this book is too technical and sometimes hard to understand for people who doesnt know much about neuroscience,etnobiology and chemistry.However,the rest of the book is very interesting,specially the part about the relation between the Tao The Ching and time.

MYSTICISM STRUCTURALLY DEMONSTRATED
the book is a true gem of cognitive philosophy. there is an energy and excitment in its reading. the mckennas demonstrate a tour de force of the lucid mind(mond).

"laborious theory".
Ploughing through "the Invisible Landscape" was quite a chore. I can appreciate the effort they went to with this but has little appeal for me. I should probably have started with one of their other works. I am not sure I want to do a lengthy review. The long and short of it is it has three parts:::
First part covers the nature of memory, and the accessing of it in terms of human brain chemistry. That psychedelics might amplify its ability to access memory, reaching beyond that of day-to-day; to yester-year, to pre-natal, to previous incarnation even...?
Second part really briefly covers the brothers experience in the Amazon with some psychedelics - I found this contribution seriously lacking - like perhaps they were embarrassed to mention it even.
Third part delves into the I-Ching, the conversion of it into a time-wave, which indicates with its dips and peaks the impact of events in terms of "novelty". This culminates in the most novel event coinciding with an end of time per the Mayan calendar?
Um. Yeah. The whole book in six lines. The emphasis is in spelling out in seriously uninteresting terms how the conclusions were arrived at in parts one and three. Because these conclusions would be quite hard to pin down normally, the detail involved in explaining how they were arrived at is quite, um, what's a nice word for it; lengthy? The book does flirt with Shamanism, which is a pity really - I think the read would have proven more worthwhile if the ideas in it were translated into where they impact/ have impacted in this and other practices/ traditions...
I guess it is a good book in terms of explaining how the "far-reaching" ideas were arrived at, but I for one would have appreciated it being punted more as laborious theory and not as a must read...