Reviews for Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching

The average rating for Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-10-26 00:00:00 Kurt Surber I really wanted to like this book. It's the last one I am reviewing for 2009, and I am a huge fan of Terence McKenna. But this one fell short for me. The Invisible Landscape is a collaborative effort between Terence and Dennis McKenna, known in the psychedelia circuit as the "McKenna brothers." The events of this book took place during 1971, and the inspiration for a lot of the ideas contained within occurred during the La Chorrera experiment, which is explained in Terence's book True Hallucinations. I reviewed that book earlier this year. In my opinion, it is much easier for the layman to trudge through than The Invisible Landscape, which was simply to above-my-head for me to enjoy. The McKenna brothers cover a lot of ground in this one - shamans, schizophrenia, holographic thought, the experiment at La Chorrera, the I Ching, the Timewave hypothesis and the prediction of the eschaton - the end of the world-as-we-know-it that is expected to take place on December 21, 2012. Every topic is thoroughly explained. But it's just all too much. The book is all over the place - it would help greatly to have a doctoral background on all of the topics I have listed above before attempting to read this one. And yet, I still liked the book. The parts that I understood were pretty entertaining and thought-provoking. I enjoyed the graphs and figures of the Timewave hypothesis, something I have read a lot about but not seen very much of. As a fan of most of the topics in the previous paragraph, I found the book very interesting. Luckily I received a copy of this for my birthday this year, so I can hopefully come back to it with a better background later. If you're a fan of the McKenna brothers or any of the above topics, maybe you should give this one the old college try.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-01-17 00:00:00 J. A. Barrons I bought this book at Shaman Drum on State in Ann Arbor during a period of my being on the outs with phonetic language. (RIP Shaman Drum, we miss you). The clerk knew of McKenna's terminal medical condition. (RIP McKenna, though I feel I've gotten to know him better as the internet has gained fidelity). In 1999, I got about 40 pages into the book and could get no further. I shelved the book for 11 years and now I've returned to pick through the dense language for some clue as to what it all means. My intuition is that the brothers were onto something, which was their feeling as well, and all we can say about a talking fungus that told them the I Ching contained a map of time. According to this map, practically the last moment of time sends us spiraling into the concrescence, so time will tell, and we have little way of knowing whether this is true until those last moments. Until then we only have intuitions. The authors are just so sure of themselves. Madness or genius, or a bit of both? I wish their editor would have cleaned up the dense language. Part of the reason this book is so difficult is the way they phrase things. Part of it is just that they didn't even try to explain some of their scientific models, but expected the reader to do lots of background reading. This is a pretty amazing book, given that the brothers McKenna were just in their mid 20s when they wrote it. For a much more entertaining and easy-to-grasp account of the events and experiment at La Chorrera that led to this book, check out True Hallucinations, preferably the original audio book version.