“To make the world comprehensible, you have to selectively filter what gets in. You inhabit this filtered—you could almost use the word curated—version of reality. Otherwise, it would just be a blooming, buzzing confusion you wouldn’t be able to navigate. And then you can take a psychedelic. You can disable those mechanisms. You can disable this default mode mechanism, open the gates of the reducing valve, and that can be very beneficial in terms of helping you get outside of your reference frame.”
— Dennis McKenna
Dennis McKenna (@DennisMcKenna4) has spent more than 40 years researching the interdisciplinary study of Amazonian ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. He has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon.
His doctoral research at the University of British Columbia focused on the ethnopharmacology of ayahuasca and oo-koo-he, two tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon.
He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute and was a key organizer and participant in the Hoasca Project, the first biomedical investigation of ayahuasca used by the UDV, a Brazilian religious group. He is the younger brother of Terence McKenna.
From 2000 to 2017, he taught courses on ethnopharmacology as well as Plants in Human Affairs at the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. In 2019, in collaboration with colleagues, he incorporated a nonprofit, the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy. Currently, the Academy has several projects underway, with the most immediate being preparations for an upcoming conference in the UK May 23rd–26th, ESPD55, which will cover a wide range of topics related to psycho-ethnopharmacology and feature an exclusive, pre-release screening of the McKenna Academy’s first short documentary, BioGnosis, Bridges to Ancestral Wisdom.
Dennis emigrated to Canada in the spring of 2019 with his wife Sheila and now resides in Abbotsford, British Columbia.
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