Early Life and Education
Terence Kemp McKenna was born on November 16, 1946, in Paonia, a small town in the North Fork Valley of western Colorado. He grew up in a middle-class household and developed an early passion for geology, butterflies, and the natural world. As a teenager, he discovered the writings of Aldous Huxley and became fascinated by the idea that consciousness could be chemically altered. At the age of 16, he began reading The Doors of Perception and was, in his own words, "swept away."
In 1965, McKenna enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied ecology, conservation, and shamanism within the Tussman Experimental College. During his undergraduate years, he made his first forays into psychedelic experience with LSD and DMT. He graduated in 1969 with a bachelor's degree in ecology and conservation, with a minor in shamanism---an unusual academic trajectory that foreshadowed his later career.
