The Virtue of Honest Uncertainty

“The most intellectually honest thing McKenna ever wrote was the sentence about being either an unsung Newton or completely nuts.”

'Because I am either an unsung Newton or completely nuts, there is very little room to maneuver between these two positions.'

This is the most intellectually honest sentence in McKenna's entire body of work. The Timewave theory was either a genuine discovery about the nature of time or a very elaborate confabulation. There was no comfortable middle ground.

McKenna often performed certainty. The lectures are full of confident assertions about the nature of the universe, the intentions of mushroom consciousness, the trajectory of human evolution. The performance was compelling and was, for most audiences, indistinguishable from genuine certainty.

In True Hallucinations, he dropped the performance. He wrote about La Chorrera from a position of genuine uncertainty, not the rhetorical uncertainty of the thinker who knows the answer but graciously acknowledges he might be wrong, but real uncertainty about an experience he could not account for.

This uncertainty is what makes the book more valuable than his lectures. In the lectures, he explains. In the book, he reports. The reporting, accurate phenomenological description of an experience without predetermined interpretation, is what the field of consciousness studies most needs and most rarely gets.

Sources

• McKenna, True Hallucinations (1993)