Terence McKenna Title: Terence McKenna's Final Earthbound Interview File Information: Director John Hazard interviews Terence

McKenna about Novelty Theory File Location: http://www.hazarddp.com/?page_id=2 Total Video Time [01:03:38] McKenna: Well, Novelty Theory is something I've been working on since the early 70s, inspired by psychedelic plant experiences in the Amazon. To attempt to look at time and really deconstruct it and attempt to understand what it is. And thi s has been a wild intellectual ride leading to some pretty easily stated conclus ions. One is that novelty, which is my term for complexity, or advanced organisation nov elty increases as we approach the present moment. The universe you and I are liv ing in is a far more novel and complicated place than the early universe was. We ll, some people would say, Well that's just a consequence of the unfolding of dev elopmental processes. But, this asks the question, What are development processes? Why should the universe have a preference for order over disorder especially wh en we have something like the second law of thermodynamics which tells us exactl y the opposite? Physicists believe the universe is running down, ultimately, into a state of dis order. But what I see, is everywhere the emergence of more and more complex form s, languages, organisms, technologies; always building on the previously achieve d levels of complexity. So that was one of my insights. Coming out of that insig ht was the further understanding that this process of complexification through t ime is not proceeding at a steady rate. It actually follows a kind of axiomatic curve. In other words, it's happening faster and faster, and this was a revelati on to me because it allowed me, philosophically, to contextualise the human worl d and to understand that human technologies, languages, migrations, art movement s, ideologies, are not something different from nature. They're the same downloa d of process that we see in the movement of continents, the evolution of new spe cies of animals except that these human novel emergent situations are happening mu ch more quickly. So, I see the cosmos, if you will, as a kind novelty producing engine. A kind of machine which produces complexity in all realms: physical, chemical, social, w hatever, and then uses that achieved level of complexity as the platform for fur ther complexity. Well, this explains our present circumstance. It explains the rush toward all fo rms of new technology and social organisation in the new millennium. But you don 't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that if the universe is complexif ying faster and faster, an epoch, a time will come when this rate of complexific ation is occurring so rapidly that it will become itself the overwhelming phenom ena in the world of three dimensional space and time and I call this the Omega Poi nt, or the transcendental object at the end of history and I believe it is not tha t far off. That with the emergence of global internet ,a human population of several billio ns, an electronic noosphere, that we are now within the shadow of this transcend ental object at the end of time. Our religions sense it, that's what gives them their apocalyptic intuitions. And I think the ordinary man and women in the stre et sense a kind of built in acceleration to time itself. Well, rather than dismi ssing that, or treating it as psychological perception, or something unique to o ur society, I took it as a basic perception about physics and have built elabora te mathematically defined theories around this idea and then have found, to my a stonishment, incredible congruences with other work.

I'm thinking of the Mayan calender and its curious countdown like quality toward an extremely unique event that the Maya felt would occur in the same timeframe that my own equations predicted even though at the time I was unaware of the May a. So what we have here is a new model of time based on a very real intuition th at I think most people share, which is, that time is speeding up, that human bei ngs are part of that process, and that the culmination of that process is now wi thin the van of historical time. In other words, I believe it will happen in 201 2, in December, coincident with the same events that the Maya placed at the end of their calender. Even if I'm wrong, even if it's 100 years or five hundred yea rs later, these are still spans of time that when compared to the life of planet are fractions of a percentage. So, whether you believe, as I do, that we can kn ow the precise moment of this transformation of the world of time, or whether yo u believe it is simply coming soon and fast really doesn't make that much differ ence. We are all gathered here at the end game of development processes on this planet we about to become unrecognisable to ourselves as a species. Our technologies, our religions, our science, has pushed us toward this for thousands of years wit hout us awakening to what the (?)demeanor would be. Now we stand close enough to it, and I think that all but the most lumpen amongst us must feel the tug of th e transcendental and the transformative. JohnH: I am very perplexed when you say that time is speeding up? As far as I ca n tell: such things like crystal oscillators, things which keep time, clocks, th e relationship of the Earth turning to the calender, the full moon, all the thin gs which are symptoms of our passage through time don't seem to be throwing them selves out of kilter. So how, what do you really mean about time speeding up? McKenna: Well, let me answer in the form of a question. Which lasts longer? A mil lion years in which nothing happens, or 10 seconds with 50000 events crammed int o it? In other words, really, time is only experienced by the events which occur within it; and I maintain that the early universe had very little going on and c onsequently time moved very, very slowly. The character of time as we approach t he present is that there are more and more physical domains, and energetic domai ns in which change can occur. For example, the early universe was a pure plasma, a pure swarm of unassociated electrons. You didn't even have atomic systems, le t alone chemistry, molecular chemistry, life, complex speciated life, and dynami cally balanced planetary ecosystems. Each one of those more complex phenomena cr ystallised out, or emerged, if you will, from the previous systems that had come into existence. So when I say time is speeding up, what I mean really is, more and more is happening. And if you ask the question, Well, what would be the ultim ate state of connectivity, or of happening? It's when all points are connected to all other points. Somehow this concept of connectivity is intimately linked to the concept of comp lexity, and so really what I'm saying is that the universe is getting its act to gether. It's connecting the dots. It's bringing everything into co-relationship with everything else. And somehow it does this through the production of conscio usness. Consciousness is this integrative function in biology which takes data, which may appear profoundly unrelated, and in fact brings it into some kind of a congruent relationship. We say, an organism coordinates a point of view. Well, in a way, what's happening over time is that the universe is coordinating a point of view, and as it does this it becomes somehow more aware, more self-conscious, more being-like and less thing-like and, as I said, this process is not proceed ing at a steady pace, it is proceeding faster and faster. More connectivity occu rs now in a calender year than occurred in a million years, a billion years ago. So, somehow, as we approach the present, we find ourselves in an ever denser re alm of activity, inter-relationship, connectivity, and the result of this, is mo re of the same, producing a shrinking globe, ever more immersive technologies, d issolution of political, social, gender, and class boundaries of all sorts.

So that's what I mean when I say the universe is speeding up. You know, before t he advent of man, of human beings, the fastest changes on this planet of any con sequence were genetic changes. Changes in the genomes of plants and animals. Wel l, biologists know that for a fruit fly to add a spur to its leg, for a bird to change its plumage, you need hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of years of evolutionary time. With the advent of human beings, using spoken language, a new kind possibility was born. It's called epigenetic change, in other words, ch ange which is not about genes but which is about languages, customs, behaviours of human beings. Epigenetic change reaches its dramatic culmination in speech, w riting, and communication of all sorts. And so the carriers of epigenetic change , the human beings, are automatically then the carriers of accelerated novelty. And so when you look at, let's say, evolution on a coral reef and you compare it , let's say, to the evolution of political ideas in modern Europe, obviously, mo dern Europe's rate of change in this domain is thousands of times faster. So by moving from the genetic to the epigenetic realm we have vastly accelerated all k inds of processes. Now we appear to be about to move from the strictly human dom ain to the human machine symbioses domain, and of course, machines process infor mation, make connections, and do their work at a rate thousands of times faster than any human being can work. So we see, again, a progressive acceleration of t he process of creating and maintaining varieties of connectivity. And that's wha t I mean by time is speeding up. JohnH: Your description of the process by which you developed the time wave theo ry: I understand, I read, True Hallucination, so I understand it took you some y ears to, kind of, work it all out? McKenna: Yes. In the Amazon all was chaos and mythic revelation but I knew that you couldn't bring that back as a scientific theory and my bias has always been towards science and out of these many intuitions and revelations I discerned a t hread which was about time. It began with a conversation with this Logos entity where it said to me, Did you know, every day is composed of four other days? And I said, no, I not only didn't know that, it's never even occurred to me, what a bi zarre idea. Well, so this idea then of a time being a resonance created by other times not immediately before or after it, as in scientific causality, but someho w a day centuries ago, centuries in the future, come together to create an inter ference pattern that creates the unique moment. So, that was one of the basic assumptions and then the structure on which this a ll was hung was the I Ching, which may seem exotic to American and European audi ences but which is, of course, as familiar to any one in Chinese society as the Declaration of Independence is to us. And what is the I Ching? Well, it's a very ancient method of divining and predicting the future based on the idea that eve ry moment can be symbolised by a unique ideogram which is somehow its essence, m uch in the way that science believes you can explain all nature with 108 element s, the ancient Chinese took the position that time itself was made of elements. My style of thinking is scientific enough that if I were to say to somebody, I pr opose a revolution in physics based on what I know about an ancient Chinese divi nitory system that would seem foolish to me, it seems a cult, it seems unscientif ic. Why should an ancient Chinese book of divination hold any insight whatsoever for modern physics? But, the uncanny thing about the I Ching is that it seems t o work, even in the hands of its critics it seems to work. So let me try out a m etaphor on you which I think makes much more clear what's going on here. Visualise for a moment sand dunes and notice when you look at these sand dunes i n your mind that they look like wind. Sand dunes look like wind in some sense. W ell, then analyse the situation. What is wind? Wind is a pressure variant phenom ena that fluctuates over time. Ah, in a way, the sand grains moved about by the wind are like a lower dimensional slice of the wind itself. And from photographi

c analysis of dunes you can calculate the speed and duration of the wind that ma de them. So, the dune is a lower dimensional slice of time, of the wind ebbing a nd flowing that made it. Well now, let's change the metaphor a little bit. Inste ad of grains of sand, let's think of genes, instead of a wind storm, let's think of a billion years of evolution. It moves the genes around in a pattern which i s a lower dimensional slice of the force which created the situation. In other w ords, on every living organism there is the imprint of the higher dimensional fo rce which made it. Now somebody could say, Well, that's God. Well, but in a scient ific context we don't speak like that. But whatever it is that made blind matter into whales, squirrels, and human beings, it left its calling card inside each human being, each squirrel, each whale. That's the DNA. Well, the DNA codons are based on a system of 64, exactly like the I Ching. So, my belief is that someon e, some group of people thousands of years ago, looked into human organism, look ed by meditative techniques into the center of their own beings, and they were n ot mystics, nor were they empiricists, they were simply curious. But at the cent re of the meditative experience they saw an ebb and flow; an energy field that w as in a constant state of flux and they asked themselves: How many elements are n ecessary to describe this energy field? And the answer was, more than 10, less th an a thousand, more than 20, less than 500. And when they finally got it worked out, low and behold, 64 situations are all the possible potential situations the re are. Out of 64 sub-types of time you can create everything from the coronation of Que en Mary to the resignation of Madonna. Out of 64 types of time. So really, what the I Ching is, it's not a book of Chinese mysticism, it's a book of molecular d ynamics that sees through biology to the physics that allowed biology to come in to existence. And I'll argue this with anybody in the field regardless with how hard core an empiricist they claim themselves to be because, er, the coincidence between the structure of the I Ching and the structure of the DNA is staggering . It's not a simple corresponse between 64 and 64 all the processors that occur in DNA can be easily modelled with the 6 line hexagrams that make up the I Ching. It's almost as though western science was fascinated by energy. For five thousan d years we pursued understanding energy and this process ends with thermonuclear explosions in the deserts of the American south-west. We can light the fire tha t burns in the heart of the distant stars, we know how to do that. That's what t he western mind achieved, political issues aside. The eastern mind was not inter ested in energy, it was interested in time, and they spent 5000 years deconstruc ting it, looking at it and you don't use atom smashers, you don't use enormous phy sical pressure; it's a different problem and you bring different tools to bear. You meditate, you look inside yourself, you study the movement of water around p ebbles. You consider the situation, you study history. In any case, the bottom l ine is, the people who pursued this understanding of time achieved as sophistica ted a relationship to time as the western relationship to matter expressed throu gh our ability to trigger fusion and fission. So there's a great deal for us to learn in the west from these oriental efforts to understand time, and it is not necessarily mystical. What I did was entirely mathematical. It's not transparent to a person who has not studied mathematics b ut to a professional mathematician it's utterly trivial. There's nothing occult about it and I think true understanding can be communicated and formally describ ed with mathematics. And that's what we have here; we're on the brink of a fusio n of western science with quote, unquote, eastern mysticism. Nothing mystical a bout it, except that we call it mysticism, but the fusion of these two viewpoint s is going to give us a complete understanding of the universe of space, time, m atter and energy. [23:40:00] JohnH: I want to go to this step about the strange attractor at the end of histo ry. We never ever, you know, considered that notion that we are being pulled, as opposed to simply just going on for ever and ever and that's, for sure, somethi

ng that people are going to go:

Huh?

McKenna: Well, you know, in the 19th century, if you spoke of nature having a pu rpose, you were thought to be anti-evolution. Because in the 19th century there was great pain to eliminate anything like pre-formation, or teleology, or purpos e, or God. All these things they were trying to eliminate from evolutionary theo ry and until very recently in scientific thought, the idea has been that events are pushed by the causal necessity embedded in the events which preceded them. I n other words, if you asked the question, What is the most important event, momen t, in terms of shaping this moment? The answer would be, the moment just before th is moment, because it hands on the energy, the space, the time. Recently mathematicians have evolved what they call the notion of attractors. Or strange attractors in some cases, and these are processes where a dynamic is no t pushed by causal necessity from behind but it's pulled by point in the future. You could almost say, for example, if you release a ball bearing up near the ri m of a bowl, that its attractor is the bottom of the bowl and the ball bearing w ill roll down to the bottom, then halfway up the side, then up the side in short er and shorter cycles until it finally comes to rest in the exact bottom of the bowl. Well, from the point of view of the new mathematics, the bottom of the bow l is a basin of attraction and the ball bearing has fallen under its influence. So, I have always doubted that evolutionary theory without purpose, without tele ology, could produce this complex a world as we see around us in as short a time , five billion years as the life of the Earth. It seemed more as though these pr ocesses were not just wandering across a flat epigene(tic)... a flat genetic lan dscape. The process of biological evolution was actually being channelled betwee n high walls, in other words, it could move it had some motion this way, some this , but its forward direction was, ah, inevitable, and this is the idea of an attr actor. That what the universe is doing is: it is under the sway of what I call, the transcendental object at the end of time, and that is this domain of hyper-c onnectivity. That it would be perfect novelty. And all nature aspires for this s tate of perfect novelty. You could almost say that nature abhors habit, and so i t seeks the novel by, ah, producing various kinds of phenomena at every level in biology, chemistry and society. And so there really is a purpose to the universe. Its purpose is this state of h yper-complexification in which all its points become related to each other, beco me what mathematicians call co-tangent and it gives the universe the feeling of being imbued with a caring presence. It makes it appear as though nature is tend ing toward something and that... And it changes our own ethical and moral positi on in the universe because, you know, science tells us that we're the products o f a cosmic accident: we're at the edge of a ordinary galaxy in an ordinary star system and we're damn lucky to be here and that's it, that's our place. A very e xistential notion of our place in the cosmos; but if you take this other point o f view, that process is under the influence of an attractor, and that the value the attractor is maximising is novelty, then suddenly, for the first time in 500 years, human beings are moved back to the centre of the stage because we are th e most novel thing on this planet. We are everything biology is, plus, technology, language, politics, philosophy, art, so forth, and so on. So, suddenly human beings become important, not mere c osmic witnesses to a meaningless cosmos but the cutting edge of a cosmos that gl ories in order and is moving towards higher states of order and at the present m oment we are the carriers. Once it was the volcanic processes that shaped this p lanet. Once it was the life of the early oceans. Once it was the great dinosaurs , but today, humanity represents the cutting edge of complexity and this process of moving towards complexification. So, without invoking God, or any sort of myth, you give meaning to human life, Wh

at is man's purpose? To advance and preserve novelty, you know, this is an ethica l position. It means you don't replace rain forests with pastures, you don't cen sor books, you don't lean on people who make gender choices different from yours . No, the purpose of being a human is to complexify reality even more. To hand o n a more diverse, more complicated, more multifaceted (sic: multifaceic) univers e to our children, and when this process of complexification reaches the omega p oint, ah, it will, it will fulfil, I believe, the expectations of all of these r eligions but it will fulfil it in a mature, scientific, and, and universal way t hat these religions all lack because they all reflect their parochial origins.[3 0:52:40] JohnH: That's certainly true. McKenna: It's certainly true that we see a limited slice of reality and your exa mple from Flatland anything that moves as a gradient through time we will not di scern very carefully. I mean, for instance, this is why we have the science of e conomics. Because it keeps track of the behaviour of markets which is something you can't see or feel, but which has become very important to human institutions . It's a fourth dimensional factor that we need to co-ordinate into our planning . So we've created an entire science to study the movement and behaviour of mark ets. One of the things I'm always trying to visualise what the concrescence would be li ke, even though I know in principle it's probably not possible to imagine it but s everal factors are on the horizon which I think can be brought together to, sort of, get a picture of what we're headed towards. One is, for some time now, we'v e been involved in building complex prosthesis, which we call machines and compu ters. They are part of us. We don't perceive them as part of us because we ident ify with the flesh and exteriorise the fabricated metal, but in fact, they are a part of us, as much as our political systems, our agriculture production system s, so forth, and so on... So, we... The animal body has reached the limits of it s evolutionary abilities: a cheetah can run 75 miles an hour, an elephant can li ft three tons and so forth and so on. To go beyond those capacities of the anima l body you have to make a marriage with mechanical things. So, ah, we are extend ing ourselves through the machines. Well, one of the things that these machines do is they're time compressors. You know, you and I sitting here talking, are op erating at about 100 Hertz. If we could be magically downloaded into a top of th e line computer we would run at 800 MHz. That means we could do 800 million more things in this moment than we can do when we're wearing flesh. So, it may be th at we will find a way to technologically stretch time and this will become for us like a false eternity. You may only have 10 minutes left in your life but it may be time enough to pack in all of human history from the fall of Rome to the pre sent moment. So, we are finding ways out of the 3 dimensional Newtonian prison, which says, You know, life is narrow and confined and ends at the grave. Ah, and i t's, we're doing it by becoming information that is freed from material and some how this allows us to make this ascent to the next dimensional modality. Informa tion is not time and space constrained the way we are. We talk about the difficu lty of moving an object at the speed of light. Our entire planetary technology c annot achieve moving a marble at the speed of light but we can move information at the speed of light. Tetrabytes of it. We do this every day. So we see how we stand then like children at the edge of the ocean of information and we're putti ng our feet in and wondering, you know, Could we swim in that? What would it be l ike to be wet in that? What would it be like to go into that new medium? A simila r dilemma must have confronted the early amphibians as they stared at the land a nd said, you know, Could we leave the ocean, could we go up into those places, co uld we breathe air and actually make the transition to such a hostile, an aliena ting environment as the land? And so, these are major cemetery breaks. But in eve ry case the answer has been, you bet, and sooner or later somebody did it and then all succeeding generations have followed suit. What is fascinating about this p articular transition is that we are conscious of the implications, we will who m

ake the transition will in some sense, some limited sense, understand its implic ations, where I don't think that was true for the animals that left the primordi al oceans. They simply were behaving evo... blind instinct, and evolutionary dic tated behaviours but the degrees of freedom accessible to us are so multifarious t hat we can actually appreciate for the first time our circumstance, and our circ umstance is awe inspiring. I mean, we about to take the step out of matter. The planet is on a collision course with the most profound event it's possible to im agine. The freeing of organic life from the chrysalis of matter. For a billion y ears there's been life on this planet but never life that could step outside of matter. But this is obviously what's in the cards and we are privileged to be ce ntral to that [!pauses for watch chime!] event. JohnH: You've just said, We're moving beyond matter? I just can't imagine what yo u mean? Can you try to talk a little bit more about that? McKenna: Well, first of all, I can't quite imagine what we mean either. I think this is the test, to imagine, What could that mean? Maybe the bridge, ah, concept, is virtual reality. Obviously, we're on the brink of building computer assisted worlds that don't, quote, unquote, really exist, but that which we'll experienc e the way we experience dreams or the imagination. And I think this is where psy chedelic substances come in. Shamans have always entered into a non-physical rea lm of information through trance. In a way there's nothing new here... This is p art of the archaic revival. (break: laughing. Will you still love me, will you still feed me when I'm 64... A re we rolling? I've forgotten the thread? What was it? Oh...) Is it a human thing? Is it unique... is this ascent into novelty a human thing? No. Part of what I discern here, though we humans are always ready to suffer gui lt and take blame for everything going on in the universe, I don't believe this is something we're doing. I think that we are as much corks tossed on the ocean of time as are humming birds and prairie dogs. In other words, an event of cosmi c significance and importance is going to occur not far in the future. Are we cau sing it? No. Can we stop it? No. Can we hurry it? No. It's built in to the structure of matter itself. One way of thinking of this is that the laws of physics are ev olving to permit greater freedom, and we are... And people have said to me, Well don't you find it a little strange that such a momentous event would occur, ah, in human history? After all human history is 10 000 years wide, the planet is 5 b illion years old pretty unusual coincidence that human history would be happening when this cosmic event happens. No, that's completely wrong. Human history is be ing caused by the nearby presence of this event. In other words, if you think of the event as something which has shells of influence: some of its shells of inf luence reach so far back in time that they drag life out of the primitive oceans . Some its shells of influence reach so far back in time that they define the em ergence of the hominid line out of the higher primates. Some shells reach back t o Egypt. Some to medieval time. As you approach the present it becomes stronger and stronger but I would argue that the presence of human civilisation on this p lanet is the strongest evidence we have that matter and organisational processes are about to make some kind of a leap to a new order of being. What history is, is the 25 thousand year transition zone. Before you enter the z one you're an animal. After you leave the zone you're a god. But for 25 thousand years you're kind of an animal and kind of a god. And you're constantly being s wamped by your animal nature and then great teachers are appearing and dragging people back to the right line and we are schizophrenic in history. A friend of m ine once said, he said, History is the shockwave which precedes the eschaton. And I absolutely believe that, and I believe that as historical processes intensify it's reasonable to believe that we are ever closer to the eschaton. If my ideas seem strange to someone, I ask them, Can you imagine this planet in 500 years giv en the propagation of ordinary historical and scientific rates of unfoldment and

discovery? Can you imagine this planet in a 1000 years? No, no one can imagine t hat because processes are now in play which so totally rewrite the script that n o one can imagine a 100 years or 200 years in the future because the discoveries which will be made in that span of time will so totally rewrite the human exper ience of itself and the environment that we cannot see deep into the future. And this indicates to me that the future is exploding in an asymptotic unfoldment i nto a kind of cultural superspace and our own bafflement at the impossibility of conceiving any real future given the political and social and technological for ces in play is proof of that. [42:39:40] JohnH: Before we go farther I would like you attempt to give me a definition of concrescence and eschaton? McKenna: Well, let's go backward. Eschaton first. Eschaton is a good word out of theology. It simply means the last thing. The last thing is the eschaton and it is everything become one thing. For theologians it's God, for somebody of a mor e materialist bent it might be something else. But the eschaton is the last thin g. Eschatology is the study of the time of the last thing. Now, what was the othe r word? JohnH: Concrescence? McKenna: Concrescence? This is a little trickier concept. I took it from Alfred North Whitehead. Concrescence is the idea of something that grows together. It c oncreases. It becomes more dense, more connected, more defined in space and time . And when I talk about the transcendental object at the end of time, or the com ing of the eschaton, or hyper novelty, I mean, that the process of the human and biological concrescence of intent reaches some kind of maximum. Concrescence is the end of the process of becoming. Becoming is not true being. True being exis ts at the concrescence. The kind of being we experience, becoming, is a partial state of being much like history is a partial state of concrescence. History def initely places us outside the world of biological intent, ah, the animal mind, b ut history does not bring us into the presence of the eschaton, it's a partial p rocess, and concrescence is what waits at the end. The eschaton is the concresce nce. JohnH: But we really can't have any way of knowing what that is, that experience of that is going to be like? McKenna: No, and the reason why is because asking that question is like asking a man looking east at 2am to describe the coming sunrise. He can't because it is literally over the event horizon of the future and when we look into the future we see that the east is streaked with rosy dawn but we cannot conceive of the da y that is about to come. All we can see is the dim glow of some kind of eschacol ogical promise. Ask me this question in 2010 and I'll have a different answer. JohnH: Um, back to this issue of physics and your description of the two things which are left out of their models? The way that you describe it is so self evid ent and simple. The complexification the further away that you get away from the Big Bang and the fact that everything... The complexification is speeding up? W ould you talk just a little bit about, um, the relationship of those observation s to the world of the physicist and their efforts to define reality and why they 're not using, including, in their models these aspects that you're pointing to? McKenna: The main reasons they aren't friendly toward a model... The main reason s physicists are not friendly to a progressive, concrescent model like this is b ecause you would have to look at, you would have to give credit to biology for b eing a stage higher than chemistry and you would have to give credit to human hi story as a stage higher than biology. And physicists study physics. If you study physics there is no biology. You don't have to deal with issues of biology when

you study physics. I mean, there is something called biophysics, but it's not w ell received in physics or biology. So, physicists are... tend to discount biolo gy, even though life on this planet is 4.83 billion years old, physicists just d iscount it. They call it a epiphenomena. Well, then when you talk to sociologist s, they want, they give no credit to physics. Science has compartmentalised natu re in order to analyse it and there is no theory of nature, as such, and that's really what I offering. I'm offering a theory which covers: physics, chemistry, geology, biology, sociology, linguistics, the whole thing. In other words, not saying man is some special category; not saying that we need artificial division s but that over the entire domain of known phenomena this, ah, tendency to compl exify through time, A, and B, faster and faster, can be discerned. We need a the ory of everything. Physics talks about theories of everything but none of these theories of everything address biology, let alone sociology, linguistics, and ah , you know, the phenomenon of human beings. Well, the archaic revival. There is a way of looking at the entire 20th century, beginning with Pablo Picasso bringing masks back from Africa and showing them a round in French cafes in 1915. Ah, beginning with Freud's discovery of the uncon scious and Jung's elaboration of those discoveries and then every phenomenon of major importance that you care to mention in the 20th century: fascism, abstract expressionism, rock & roll, sexual permissiveness, psychedelic drug taking, rav e culture, body piercing, jazz the list is endless. What do all these things have in common? They are reversions to archaic behaviours. They represent rejections of the Edwardian gentleman with his white man's burden and represent instead, a realisation that for us to survive, and live with ourselves, we have to re-empow er archaic values. As the century unfolded the understanding of what this re-emp owering of archaic values might mean, has changed. Jung and Freud discovered the unconscious, discovered that we are not all ladies and gentlemen but that there is a cannibal lurking within. Albert Hoffman's discovery of LSD demonstrated th at that inner wilderness is accessible to most people through chemistry. Well, t hen still later, it was understood that the key ingredient in active shamism is psychedelic plants, psychedelic experiences. And in a way that closed the loop b etween archaic the impulse toward the archaic and the impulses of modern science a nd modern medicine. The key is the psychedelic experience: that's what makes the shaman a shaman. That's what made the archaic, in fact, archaic, and so people like Freud and Jung and the surrealists and the Dadaists and the Abstract Expres sionists, all of these people were very close to the mark. The shaman is the par adigmatic figure and the psychedelic experience seems to be the anticipatory exp erience of this eschaton that we are headed toward. You know, when psychedelics were first being discussed, it was thought that they would prepare people for de ath. In a sense, they probably do, but in the same way they prepare people for d eath they prepare people for transformation. It gets you used to the idea that t he world is not what it appears to be and it gets you used to the idea that the world is somehow animate, intelligent and proceeding along its own agenda. So in a way, shamans have always been anticipations of some future state of mankind. They're the masters of language, they're the ones who are telepathic with the an imals, they are the ones who can see into the future. So, this archaic nostalgia gets real focus once you realise that it is the shaman and his or her shamanic techniques that confers on them the extra-historical dimension. That that is how you get out of linear history. That's how you visit the realm of the ancestors, that's how you travel into the future, that's how you break up the tyranny of N ewtonian serial time.[52:45:40] JohnH: We have 14 years until this event, measured on the calendar and a really co mmon, ordinary way to describe the times that we're living in is that they're ve ry, very chaotic, filled with acts of unspeakable evil, um, and at the same time there's this sort buzz and thrust of optimism: everything from a guy like Peter Swartz talking about the long wave, the big booming economy, breakthroughs in e ducational levels and qualities of life but it's definitely a dynamic where you' ve got extremes of good and evil in that way. Would you talk a little bit about

the relationship between that dynamic as we go forward and the novelty continues to climax? McKenna: Well, novelty is not necessarily good or nice. Novelty is complex, that 's what it is. So I see, really, a concatenation of tendencies and forces here a t the end. It's only going to get weirder. The level of contradiction is going t o rise excruciatingly, even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradict ion. (laughs) So, I think it's just going to get weirder and weirder, and weirde r, and finally it's going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk a bout how weird it is. And at that point novelty theory can come out of the woods , ah, because eventually people are going to say, What the hell is going on? It's just too nuts, it's not enough to say it's nuts, you have to explain why it's so nuts. So, between now and 2012, the next 14 years, I look for: the invention of artificial life, the cloning of human beings, possible contact with extraterres trials, possible human immortality, and at the same time, appalling acts of brut ality, genocide, race baiting, homophobia, famine, starvation; because the syste ms which are in place to keep the world sane are utterly inadequate to the force s that have been unleashed. The collapse of the socialist world, the rise of the internet. These are changes so immense nobody could imagine them ever happening , and now that they have happened nobody even bothers to mention what a big deal it is. Ah, the fact that there is no such thing as the Soviet Union, people nev er talk about it anymore but when I was a kid the notion that that would ever chan ge was beyond conceiving. Ah, so the good news is, that as primates we are incre dibly adaptable to change. Put us in the desert, we survive, put us the jungle, we survive, under Hitler we survive, under Nixon we survive. We can put up with about anything and it's a good thing because we are going to be tested to the li mits. The breakdown of anything and this is why the rightwing is so alarmed because what they see going on is the breakdown of all tradition, all order, all sanctio ned norms of behaviour. And they're quite right that it's happening, but they're quite wrong to conclude that it should be resisted or is somehow evil. The mush room said to me once, it said: This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for the stars. You don't depart for the stars under calm and orderly condi tions; it's a fire in a madhouse, and that's what we have, the fire in the madho use at the end of time. This is what it's like when a species prepares to move o n to the next dimension. The entire destiny of all life on the planet is tied up in this; we are not acting for ourselves, or from ourselves; we happen to be th e point species on a transformation that will affect every living organism on th is planet at its conclusion. JohnH: Let's pause for a second, um. I see how with Jenkins calling it Galactic Co smology; it's like our home continues to expand we've gone from the village, to th e nation state, to the planet... McKenna: Now, we're ready to take on the big picture. JohnH: So, let's just talk about the conclusions of the archaic mind. What it re aches? McKenna: Well, the great watershed difference between the archaic understanding and what is called scientific materialism is the archaic mind understood, in fac t, perceived, that nature is conscious, nature is alive, nature is an organism f ull of intent. The goal of the archaic mind is to connect with, communicate with , and align itself to, this greater Gaian holism, which is sometimes called natu re, the Great Spirit, the realm of the ancestors, but this is what the archaic m ind understood and was comfortable with; and in fact it is true. Our own decisio n to view the universe as dead, as inanimate, as unintelligent, allowed us, perm itted us to dissect it, use it, and deny its validity outside of human purpose. Now, the consequences of living like that is coming back to haunt us. You know, we have almost destroyed our home, we have almost cut the earth from beneath our own feet. So, this impulse towards the Gaianic and the archaic is a survival in

stinct at this point. We must give, ah, reverence and credence to nature and nat ures methods because no other methods will allow us to work our way out of the p resent mess we're in. High temperature, high energy resource extraction, commodi fication, mega-agriculture; we're at the end of the rope for these things. So th e archaic holds answers but it only holds answers if we are willing to think of the universe as a living intelligent entity in with which we are in partnership, n ot set against, but that, in fact, we are a part of a morphogenetic intent and a n unfolding reality that is larger than human understanding. Imagine, larger tha n human understanding... (laughs) JohnH: So, the whole entire milky way, galaxy, is a being? McKenna: Well it's a kind of... It's an organism, yes, and the galaxy is a kind of an organism. You can think of it as a fractal resonance with the cell. The ga laxy has a nucleus of very dense material where very mysterious processes are go ing on. Then it has a cytoplasmic envelope of stars and gas clouds that surround that core. And then it is an individual, very distinctly defined by the vast em ptiness that lies between it and the next galaxy. Yes, I think nature builds by fractal intent, and that all organisms have a core, and then a deployed surround , whether we're talking about the cell, the solar system, the Earth, the galaxy. In the process of the conservation of novelty, structures are created with core s that are more complex than their outlying neighbourhoods. To my mind a galaxy hanging in space is a picture of the timewave every star is a datapoint in an enor mous computer simulation of the novelty wave that's why it has that spiral structu re. You know, scientists are very puzzled that the galaxies don't fly apart. They do n't seem to have enough mass that their gravitation should hold them together an d there's been a lot of talk about dark matter or some missing factor. Well, the missing factor is novelty. The galaxy stays together because the galaxy wants t o be a galaxy, in other words, it wants to hold onto the level of novel, ah, mor phology that it has achieved. It has an actual appetite for expressing itself in that form that's why the galaxies are spirals, and in a sense, those spirals are very large pictures of the time wave where we can at last see it, not confused w ith its background or foreground. So, everything organises itself fractically, spirally, with a dense centre in its spatial domain and a dense centre in its te mporal domain. We are like this, galaxies are like this, planets, stars, bird fl ocks, coral reefs; but in the case of the galaxy it's particularly easy to obser ve the structure because the thing is so huge that its forces dominate and damp out other forces which might distort it. [end 01:03:30]