Is The Psychedelic Lens A Theoretical Framework? When I came across the work of Terence McKenna, it was the first time I heard someone speak about the psychedelic experience from that subjective first person perspective. The articulation was lucid and kaleidoscopic in tenor. His language ushered forth with a kind of passion and sureness that only fundamentalist preachers and dictators usually possess and yet his tone was not authoritarian, but revolutionary. This was academic speak dimmed, morphed and changed for the ears of the eager everyman who was looking to know more, or perhaps find some assurance that the experience they had, or were about to have on psychedelics was indeed important. Important, valid, real, worthwhile, shocking and revelatory; these are the kinds of words that those who experience psychedelics use, but can’t prove to a diametrically interested and critical world of non-initiates. This is the great contribution that Terence brought to the psychedelic movement. Many have criticized him for his haste in considering odd notions and following them through to the point of folly, but those who do so have not understood the Theoretical Framework that Terence was operating under. You see, Terence, like his predecessors committed one of the greatest crimes to the academic thinkers of the world; he messed with the formula and decided to take his message to the non-academic world. I’m sure there were many reasons for this,but the most direct reason might have been that he couldn’t say what needed to be said in academia, because academia wasn’t ready. Timothy Leary had led the new religion and John C. Lilly went off the deep end and the lid was clamped down tight on psychedelic research. For McKenna, rhetoric and mystically infused tropes of reality construction served as a launching pad for his quest to catapult us into his dream of Archaic Revival. Perhaps McKenna was unaware, but he was helping to put the finishing touches on an incubating theoretical framework; The Psychedelic Lens. At this point you may be wondering what The Psychedelic Lens entails and I have to admit, I’m not the one who decides that. I can tell you that it is built on direct experience that expresses its subjective weirdness through rhetoric. Presently, we can map the brain in wonderful ways, see what portions light up under stimuli, but we cannot see what the mind sees while under the influence of LSD, DMT, or other psychedelics. For this, we must rely on whatever the person having the experience says. This is the foundation of The Psychedelic Lens. In order to find some kind of baseline within this framework, I needed an established interdisciplinary scholar and I found exactly what I needed in the work of Michel Foucault. The work of Michel Foucault provides a unique set of tools that can be used in critique of rhetorical claims. By using Foucaultian analysis I am looking to demonstrate the existence ofThe Psychedelic Lens through the rhetoric of Terence McKenna in an attempt to see what remains once the rhetoric is stripped away. I want to know if there is something we can draw from the psychedelic experience that truly does contribute to the pursuit of knowledge, understanding of power, language and the self, or is it a fantastic distraction, no different to Foucault than a madman’s life observed by the general public, “only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and