The Power of Story, Myth, and Belief with John O’Connor

What do Bigfoot and psychedelics have in common? Both have lived on the outskirts of societal norms. Both have been called “taboo,” and both have been the subject of much debate. It’s exactly these kinds of topics that interest a writer like John O’Connor.

John’s books, originally about topics like Bigfoot and the psychonaut Terence McKenna, morph over the course of his research into stories about human nature, complexities of living, and the muddling of truth with opinion, and at times, of author with subject. 

The Paradox of “Beliefs”

Travel writer turned investigative journalist into the obscure, O’Connor’s writing style evolved as he worked, finding himself more of a philosopher as he investigated the “somewhat obscure, marginal microcultures of American experience.” 

For example, through his work on the Bigfoot legend, John realized that “beliefs” are more complex than he previously thought, and often at the mercy of the situation at hand. 

“I think when I began that book I thought about belief insofar as I really thought about it as this sort of monolithic thing of what you believe and on the other side is what you disbelieve and never the two shall meet, but, I really came to see them, at times, as intimately entwined and entangled and it can be hard even to separate at sometimes what we believe and and disbelieve. They’re sort of strangely polyamorous, if you will. 

A perfect example is ghosts. Every couple of years there are surveys of American paranormal and supernatural belief, one from the Pew Institute Research Center and the other from Chapman University, and ghosts are always really high at the top of that list, as you can imagine. 

The binary ‘yes or no’ answers of those questionnaires fail to capture the complexity of people’s beliefs. A lot of times they know what the ‘right’ answer is or what the expected answer is. ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ ‘No, of course not. But you know, when my grandma died, I had this strange premonition and I woke up in the middle of the night, she was standing at the end of my bed,’ or something like that. So, make of that what you will.” — John O’Connor

Insights like this one make his books more philosophical than strictly biographical or investigative, as his unique topics prompt him to ponder humanity and its actions.

John began his introduction into the obscure after realizing that Peter Matthiessen, a true, hands-on journalist best known for his book The Snow Leopard, about his journey to Nepal, realized that true journalism and investigative writing required travel, and not just theorizing. 

“I found out in a kind of roundabout way that he (Peter Matthiessen) had been a Bigfooter for much of his life and literally left an unfinished Bigfoot novel on his desk when he passed away. I thought that was really interesting and kind of surprising, and it gave me permission, in a sense, to invest in that.” — John O’Connor

During the Pandemic in 2019, John O’Connor fell upon a new topic: Terence McKenna. 

Having lived through the same decades as luminaries like Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, and Alexander Shulgin, McKenna passed away at only 53 years old in 2000 from brain cancer, but before his death, he was dedicated to all things psychedelic, particularly psilocybin-containing mushrooms.

Eating mushrooms, writing and theorizing about them, visiting where they came from—a true ethnobotanist, psychonaut, and philosopher, and gone much too soon. 

Luckily, his brother Dennis McKenna has been carrying on his legacy. Still, even while Terence was alive he managed to stay hidden in the shadows while having a major influence on the psychedelic sphere as a whole.

A Short, Strange, Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon

“Terence McKenna is a somewhat forgotten or maybe misunderstood mystic and psychonaut of the psychedelic 60s, 70s, and 80s. I argue in the book that he gave us some important ideas, was a big evangelizer and proselytizer for many of the most prominent features of our current ‘psychedelic renaissance.’ 

He and his brother Dennis and a kind of motley gang of friends journeyed to the Columbian Amazon (the village of La Chorrera) in 1971 in search of a indigenous hallucinogen called oo-koo-hé, which they had read about in an obscure leaflet at the Harvard Botanical Museum here in Cambridge, MA, written by the founding father of ethnobotany named Richard Evan Schultes, who is an an amazing guy. 

Dennis had found this leaflet, and found mention of oo-koo-hé, which is a DMT-containing Virola. Virolas are like flowering shrubs in the nutmeg family, and Terence simultaneously was on the run from the law, or at least thought he was. 

Terence had spent the previous few years in the Far East traveling and taking drugs and sort of writing and reading and also shipping hash to Colorado to his brother. And this is right at the sort of the beginning of Nixon’s drug war in 1970/1971. 

One of those shipments was intercepted. Terence felt as though the cops were looking for him, which was never actually established, and spent many years sort of living underground. But he was all over the map. 

And one of the things I really admired about Terence is he was not afraid to travel. You know, back fifty years ago it wasn’t as easy to travel as it is today. He would take tramp steamers places just to get to La Chorrera back then. 

Nowadays you can fly. There’s an airstrip and you can fly in. The flights are only a couple of flights a month, but back then you had to basically walk in. It’s an arduous four or five day hike. 

So, Terence felt as though he was on the lamb. He and Dennis concocted this plan to go to La Chorrera with some friends in search of this DMT-containing Virola. 

Ironically, they didn’t really have mushrooms in mind. But that was what they discovered when they arrived there. 

They were sort of put off the scent of oo-koo-hé, probably given a bump steer by a Colombian anthropologist who I think just didn’t like them, and told them that it was taboo to ask about oo-koo-hé. 

Now it was fifty years ago, who knows, but when I was there I was told that there’s nothing taboo about it. So they gave up the search for oo-koo-hé. Which, had they known how to look for it, they would have found it growing all around them, but they sort of gave up and focused on the mushrooms that they found growing in the pastures of La Chorrera. 

They were also able to get some ayahuasca and were smoking the DMT-containing bark of ayahuasca and they were combining the two, the mushrooms and ayahuasca, smoking a lot of weed, and basically just, in brief, trying to break apart the space time continuum. (Yes, you read that right). 

They were exploring the outer reaches of the mind, and things got very crazy. It’s such a kind of remarkable moment in time in psychedelic history that not many people are aware of.” — John O’Connor

Curious about True Hallucinations? Our favorite version can be found on YouTube and is narrated by Terence McKenna himself, complete with mystical background music and immersive sounds, which truly is a gift for any psychonaut. 

Having written books like Food of the Gods and True Hallucinations, with hundreds of hours of interviews, he coined the term “heroic dose,” the idea behind taking 5 grams of dried mushrooms alone in a dark room lying down, which has proven not for the faint of heart, and the “stoned ape” theory hypothesizing on the intermingling of psilocybin mushrooms with our evolution. 

When O’Connor fell upon True Hallucinations, he was amazed at what he was reading, and even more surprised that he had never heard of Terence before. He wanted to give him the attention he deserved, which is what sparked O’Connor’s interest in researching and writing about him.

An explorer by trade, John recognizes the power that immersing yourself into an experience can have. Reading about psychedelics and doing psychedelics couldn’t be more different, and how could someone ever properly write about them without experiencing them? This is the belief that O’Connor applies to his own work, and that’s why he visited La Chorrera.

Why Was John O’Connor Drawn to Terence McKenna?

“True Hallucinations is his (Terence McKenna’s) finest piece of writing. He wrote a lot of books, but none that even approached the very beguiling, kind of linear narrative of True Hallucinations. 

I’d heard of La Chorrera because of Roger Casement, the great Irish patriot who, in the early twentieth century, was sent by the British to investigate rubber atrocities in the Putumayo (Congo), which were headquartered in La Chorrera. 

That’s where the worst of the rubber companies called Casa Arana was headquartered right across the river from where Terence wound up 50 years down the road and 70 years down the road and so I’d heard of La Chorrera but I hadn’t heard of Terence and and and I was just completely floored by that and and completely floored by the book. 

And when I found out that no one had really written about Terence and no one had gone to La Chorrera and that we were simultaneously in the midst of this psychedelic moment. 

My dad had undertaken two kinds of psychedelic therapy, largely at my behest, because I had read the Michael Pollan book and my dad had tried virtually every kind of pharmaceutical intervention, twelve steps, all of that, over the last 30 or 40 years.

So anyway all these kind of tangents sort of came together for me and I didn’t know exactly that I was going to write about my dad, that hadn’t quite figured into things, but I knew I wanted to write about Terence and I knew there was a book there, especially if I went to La Chorrera.” — John O’Connor

An Honest Conversation About Psychedelic Therapy: “It’s Not a Magic Bullet”

“(My father) had been in and out of rehab and the twelve step stuff and all the pharmaceutical interventions, and some of it took for a while, he was sober for long stretches in there, but it always had a very short shelf life.

Around 2016–2017 when Michael Pollan’s book came out I read it and he talked a lot about the work of Roland Griffiths and others at Johns Hopkins and other work at NYU and at University College of London there had been a lot of research into psychedelic intervention and therapies for addiction and end-of-life care, I’m sure your listeners are familiar with the How to Change Your Mind stuff.

So my dad and I just started a conversation about it that lasted a couple of years, and he just sort of agreed to do psychedelic therapy. It started with ketamine because ketamine was legal at licensed clinics in Michigan. 

Ketamine isn’t a typical psychedelic, it’s actually an anesthetic. It was developed as a battlefield anesthetic during Vietnam and it has powerful anesthetic properties. I mean, he slept through most of his 5–6 ketamine sessions. 

Ketamine tends to have very relatively mild kind of existential tailwinds, if you will, compared to psilocybin or LSD especially. It’s maybe more like MDMA or something. That’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s closer to that than psychedelics.

So that didn’t take for him and he was, at the time, working with a therapist who was also a trained psychedelic therapist, who suggested a psilocybin session, which we did in November of 2023 I believe. 

I was there, it was my idea so I figured it was only fair that I’d be there with him. And my stepmother kind of insisted on that. So the end result is basically none of it really took for my father, and it might have been kind of too late, you know, he might have been too far along in a way.

It’s also that he did not really do the necessary integration. Psychedelic therapy is supposed to be accompanied by traditional psychotherapy before and after the sessions.

It’s funny when Trump signed that executive order fast tracking the psychedelic therapies for PTSD back in April I believe, there was a lot a lot of press about that and in almost every article I read, in the New York Times and elsewhere, it was Washington Post and so on, the very last paragraph or maybe second or last paragraph would mention, ‘By the way, this supposed stuff is not a magic bullet and is supposed to be accompanied by traditional psychotherapy.’

Recommended Reading: The Different Types of Psychedelic Integration

My dad definitely did not read that last paragraph, figuratively speaking, and so it’s hard to say exactly what happened, but part of my complaint in my book is that in the culture, these drugs are being treated or talked about as a surefire magic bullet for people. They do work that way for some. They don’t for everyone, and they didn’t for my father.” — John O’Connor

The experiences of his father have informed O’Connors opinion on psychedelic medicine, seeing quite clearly the nuances that mainstream psychedelic cheerleaderism fails to address, including the power of integration and a suitable facilitator, guide, or therapist.

Psychotherapy is not a necessity in psychedelic healing, but support before and after the experience is. The type of support is generally up to your own needs, preferences, and goals, and can include psychotherapy or not.

Journalism: The Ultimate Bridge for Community, & Connection

“One of the greatest things about being a journalist, maybe the one of the only great things about being a journalist is you get to insinuate yourself among people and in places that otherwise would have been totally closed off to you. 

There’s no reason for you to get to call somebody, even in the Amazon, and be like, ‘Hey, I heard about this thing that you do, I’m into it, can I come?’ And almost always, people will say yes. 

I mean it’s just a miraculous thing to be able to do and now with that comes responsibility, you give people a platform who are otherwise totally ignored. 

I would say the same thing about Bigfooters and indigenous people in the Amazon, people who really exist in the sort of the margins of our kind of global north ideas about what’s respectable and and what isn’t and and then you sort of show up and show them that they can be a subject who can be worthy of our time and attention.

That their lives are no less interesting and no less meaningful than our own. That’s a really powerful thing, but also it does come with responsibility and you have to be respectful and remember that people are vulnerable and they’re human. 

But again, the great corollary of that is that you you get to have these contacts with people who otherwise would just be a figment of your imagination and that’s a really powerful thing, to say in the same way that I’m friends with some Bigfooters now, people who we probably disagree on like 95% of any hot button political issue, but we still text and share jokes and memes and stuff like that. 

And the same with my friend Ilio Bunah, who’s the chief of Clan Garza. We text almost every day and he sends me pictures of his daughters and so you expand this community but you also just enrich your own experience in ways that are almost impossible to to really do justice to.” — John O’Connor

As a professor of Journalism at Boston College, this is the type of thinking he tries to instill in his students. 

“We are at this very exact precipice in our society now, which is: who has access to these tools, how are these tools used? Who gets to access them and who doesn’t? There’s a ton of people trying to call the shots and make the decisions around it. 

I heard a well-respected colleague of mine, Ismail Ali, who is the co-executive director of MAPS, ask, ‘Should the potential healing for veterans come at the cost of the sovereignty and culture of the Gabonese people? And is that at odds with each other and should there be a way for all of it to be respected? Does that make one important and the other not?’” — Jimmy Nguyen

This crossroads we find ourselves in America right now with psychedelic medicine will determine the future of psychedelic therapy in western society, as we desperately try to find its place in America without sacrificing quality care, accessibility, or indigenous history and culture. 

The War on Drugs was a bipartisan issue, both sides did harm, so at the very least, seeing both sides coming into discussion on legal psychedelic medicine is promising, but we must fight for the kind of future we wish to see, not corporations.

Many questions still remain: should there be synthetic or natural forms? What does the clash of western society and the indigenous stewards of these plant medicines look like? 

Can we respect all opinions and rights moving forward? Will psychedelic medicine be another capitalist venture to line the pockets of billionaires? Only we can ensure the future we wish to see.