Terence McKenna advocated the exploration of altered states of mind via the ingestion of naturally occurring psychedelic substances. For example, and in particular, as facilitated by the ingestion of high doses of psychedelic mushrooms, and DMT, which he believed was the apotheosis of the psychedelic experience. He spoke of the "jeweled, self-dribbling basketballs" or "self-transforming machine elves" that one encounters in that state.
Although he avoided giving his allegiance to any one interpretation (part of his rejection of monotheism), he was open to the idea of psychedelics as being "trans-dimensional travel"; literally, enabling an individual to encounter what could be aliens, ancestors, or spirits of earth. He remained opposed to most forms of organized religion or guru-based forms of spiritual awakening.
Philosophically and religiously, he expressed admiration for Marshall McLuhan, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Gnostic Christianity, Alfred North Whitehead, Alchemy, and James Joyce (calling
Finnegans Wake "the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature of the 20th century").
The "Stoned Ape" hypothesis of human evolution
McKenna hypothesized that as the North African jungles receded and gave way to savannas and grasslands near the end of the most recent ice age, a branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the forest canopy and began to live in the open areas outside of the forest. There they experimented with new varieties of foods as they adapted, physically and mentally, to their new environment.
Among the new food items found in this new environment were psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing near the dung of ungulate herds that occupied the savannas and grasslands at that time. McKenna, referencing the research of Roland L. Fisher, claimed that enhancement of visual acuity was an effect of psilocybin at low doses, and supposed that this would have conferred an adaptive advantage. He also argued that the effects of slightly larger doses, including sexual arousal, and in still larger doses, ecstatic hallucinations and glossolalia ... gave selective evolutionary advantages to members of those tribes who partook of it. There were many changes caused by the introduction of this psychoactive mushroom to the primate diet. McKenna hypothesizes, for instance, that synesthesia (the blurring of boundaries between the senses) caused by psilocybin led to the development of spoken language: the ability to form pictures in another person's mind through the use of vocal sounds.
About 12,000 years ago, further climate changes removed psilocybin-containing mushrooms from the human diet. McKenna argued that this event resulted in a new set of profound changes in our species as we reverted to the previous brutal primate social structures that had been modified and/or repressed by frequent consumption of psilocybin.
Novelty theory
One of McKenna's favourite topics is Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, according to which, the universe progresses from the state of entropy (disorganized complexity) to the state of information (organized complexity):
...the story of the universe is that information, which I call novelty, is struggling to free itself from habit, which I call entropy... and that this process... is accelerating... It seems as if... the whole cosmos wants to change into information... All points want to become connected... The path of complexity to its goals is through connecting things together... You can imagine that there is an ultimate end-state of that process...it's the moment when every point in the universe is connected to every other point in the universe.
- ...McKenna, Terence ? A workshop held in the summer of 1998
Information is nonlocal interconnectedness:
The imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information.
- ... A Few Conclusions About Life Terence McKenna's podcast
Just like most of us enjoy a much closer relationship with our television sets than we do with our neighbours, parts of the universe become instantaneously interconnected not directly but through the universe's centre, which acts as the informational hub. When the informational hub of the universe...the Earth's biosphere...will have accrued the critical amount of information, the universe will become sufficiently interconnected to shed its objectivity and turn into the "cosmic body" of the most imaginative man (Terence McKenna himself):
What is happening to our world is ingression of novelty toward what Whitehead called "concrescence," a tightening gyre. Everything is flowing together. The "autopoetic lapis," the alchemical stone at the end of time, coalesces when everything flows together. When the laws of physics are obviated, the universe disappears, and what is left is the tightly bound plenum, the monad, able to express itself for itself, rather than only able to cast a shadow into physis as its reflection. I come very close here to classical millenarian and apocalyptic thought in my view of the rate at which change is accelerating. From the way the gyre is tightening, I predict that the concrescence will occur soon...around 2012 AD. It will be the entry of our species into hyperspace, but it will appear to be the end of physical laws accompanied by the release of the mind into the imagination...
- ...McKenna, Terence ? New Maps of Hyperspace
The last period of the universe's evolution...Timewave Zero...begins with Terence McKenna's birth (16 November 1946) and ends with Terence McKenna's ascent to omnipotence on 16 November 2012 (the 66th anniversary...66 is the truncated number of the Antichrist from the Book of Revelation). To avoid accusations of the theory's subjectivity and his own megalomania, McKenna shifted Timewave Zero's start and finish dates away from his birthday (to 6 August 1945 and 22 December 2012, respectively) and camouflaged the naked arbitrariness of the timing with such fig leaves as I-Ching and the Mayan calendar.
Although Terence McKenna was not destined to become the Antichrist, he has turned out to be a great prophet of the latter...his timing of the informational singularity and the reality-warping Antichrist's advent has so far proven to be strikingly correct:
- In 2005, information was doubling every 36 months. Source
- In June 2008, information was doubling every 11 months. Source
- On 4 August 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said: "Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003." Source
- By the end of 2010, information will be doubling every 11 hours. Source
I’ve been talking about it since 1971, and what’s interesting to me is at the beginning, it was material for hospitalization, now it is a minority viewpoint and everything is on schedule. My career is on schedule, the evolution of cybernetic technology is on schedule, the evolution of a global information network is on schedule. Given this asymptotic curve, I think we’ll arrive under budget, on time, December 22, 2012.
- ...McKenna, Terence ? Approaching Timewave Zero November 1994
See also:
- Omega Point
- 2012 phenomena
