La Chorrera: What Actually Happened

“Five young Americans went to the Colombian Amazon looking for an indigenous hallucinogen. They found psilocybin mushrooms instead.”

The La Chorrera expedition of February-March 1971 has been told so many times that the actual event has become difficult to see beneath its legend.

What happened: five Americans arrived at a remote Colombian mission station, found an abundant supply of Psilocybe cubensis growing in cattle pastures, and attempted a homemade experiment in which Dennis McKenna would vocalize during a high-dose mushroom session in a way that the brothers theorized would bond tryptamines in his nervous system into a permanent altered state.

Dennis spent the following two weeks in an extended altered state. He spoke in complex patterns, made predictions, appeared to be in contact with something. He was also, by his own retrospective account, undergoing a drug-induced psychosis, though a lucid one, from which he recovered fully.

Terence observed and documented. He heard, during his own sessions, what he described as sustained communication from the mushroom, a monologue about time, consciousness, and human destiny that became the basis of the Timewave Zero theory.

Whether what happened at La Chorrera was a breakdown, a revelation, or both simultaneously is the question True Hallucinations raises and declines to fully answer. Dennis has said: something real happened, and I am cautious about what 'real' means. Terence spent thirty years trying to articulate what he received. The two positions are not as far apart as they appear.

Sources

• McKenna, True Hallucinations (1993)
• D. McKenna, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (2012)