Terence McKenna was a psychedelic author, explorer, and showman. He was born in 1946 and grew up in Paonia, Colorado. In high school he moved to Los Altos, California and from there attended U.C. Berkeley for two years before setting off to travel. He travelled widely in Asia, South America, and Euro

Biomorphic, Enigmatic, Experimental, Hallucinatory, Layered, Mythic, Pioneering, Primal, Psychedelic, Spiritual, Trippy

Plato was a divided soul. Torn between reason and passion, he gave birth to a philosophy marked by disconcerting duality. On the one hand, Plato was an artist and a poet: he encased his concepts in mystifying myths and slippery metaphors, worked out arguments in the form of dialogues rather than dry

Classical rhetoric, Clever, Contemplative, Homoerotic, Ironic, Mythic, Pioneering, Spiritual

Bei Dao is a dangerous man. After long days working his state-assigned construction job outside Beijing, he would spend his nights writing poetry. While other citizens slept, he and his friends would secretly meet to discuss poetry and then sneak out to paste up their poems throughout the city. Bei h

Angry, Dystopic, Lyrical, Misty poets, Spare, Spiritual

Descartes isolated himself in a cabin, set a ball of wax in front of himself, and set about determining what he could know. Martin Heidegger, some 300 years later, saw this thought experiment as all wrong: Descartes should have picked up the wax, used it, molded it. For Heidegger, the truth is reveal

Contemplative, Deconstruction, Ecstatic, Illusive, Phenomenology, Repetition, Spectral, Spiritual