Terence McKenna’s Final Earthbound Interview

Director John Hazard

http://www.hazarddp.com/

October 1998

TMK: Well, novelty theory is something I’ve been working on since the early 70’s 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 this has been a wild intellectual ride leading to some pretty easily
stated conclusions. One is that novelty - which is my term for complexity or advanced organization -
novelty increases as we approach the present moment. The universe you and I are living in is a far more
novel and complicated place than the early universe was. Well, some people would say “that’s just a
consequence of the unfolding of developmental processes,” but this asks the question, “What are
developmental processes - why should the universe have a preference for order over disorder”?
Especially when we have something called the second law of thermodynamics which tells us exactly the
opposite? Physicists believe the universe is running down ultimately into a state of disorder, but what I
see is everywhere the emergence of more and more complex forms, languages, organisms, technologies
always building on the previously achieved levels of complexity.

So that was one of my insights…coming out of that insight was the further understanding that
this process of complexification through time is not proceeding at a steady rate. It actually follows a
kind of Asimptotic curve, in other words it’s happening faster and faster… and this was a revelation to
me because it allowed me, philosophically, to contextualize the human world. And to understand that
human technologies, languages, migrations, art movements, ideologies, are not something different
from nature, they are the same download of process that we see in the movement of continents, the
evolution of new species of animals, except that these human novel emergent situations are happening
much more quickly. So I see the cosmos, if you will, as a kind of novelty producing engine, a kind of
machine which produces complexity in all realms - physical, chemical, social - whatever, and then uses
that achieved level of complexity as the platform of further complexity.

Well this explains our present circumstance, it explains the rush towards all forms of new
technology and social organization in the new millennium, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to
understand that if the universe is complexifying faster and faster…an epoch, a time, will come when this
rate of complexification is occurring so rapidly that it will become itself the overwhelming phenomena in
the world of 3-dimensional space and time, and I call this the omega point, or the transcendental object
at the end of history - and I believe it is not that far off - that with the emergence of a global internet, a
human population of several billions, an electronic noosphere, that we are now within the shadow of
this transcendental 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 woman in the street sense a kind of built in
acceleration to time itself. Well rather than dismissing that or treating it as a psychological perception
or something unique to our society, I took it as a basic perception about physics and have built elaborate
mathematical theories around this idea. And then have found to my astonishment incredible
congruencies with other work, I’m thinking of the Mayan calendar and its curious countdown-like quality
to an extremely unique event that the Maya felt would occur in the same time frame that my own
equations predicted even though at the time I was unaware of the Maya. So what we have here is a
new model of time based on a very real intuition that I think most people share, which is that time is
speeding up, that human beings are part of that process, and that the culmination of that process is now
within the vin (?) of historical time. In other words, I believe it will happen in 2012, in December,
coincident with the same events that the Mayan’s placed at the end of their calendar. Even if I’m
wrong, even if its 100 years or 500 years later, these are still spans of time, that when compared to the
life of the planet are fractions of a percentage. So whether you believe as I do that we can know the
precise moment of the transformation of the world of time or whether you believe it is simply coming
soon and fast really doesn’t make that much difference we are all gathered here at the end game of
developmental processes on this planet – we are about to become unrecognizable to ourselves as a
species. Our technologies, our religions, our science has pushed us towards this for thousands of years
without us awakening to what the dénouement would be. Now, we stand close enough to it, and I think
that all but all the most lumpen among us must feel the tug of the transcendental and transformative.

John Hazard: I am very perplexed when you say that time is speeding up – as far as I can tell, such
things as crystal oscillators, things which keep time…clocks, the relationship of the Earth turning to the
calendar…the full moon, all of the things which are symptoms of our passage through time don’t seem
to be throwing themselves out of kilter. So…how, what do you really mean about time speeding up?

TMK: Well let me answer in the form of a question. Which lasts longer, a million years in which
nothing happens or ten seconds with fifty thousand events crammed into 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 consequently time moved very, very slowly. The character of time as we approach
the present is that there are more and more physical domains and energetic domains in which change
could occur. For example the early universe was pure plasma…a pure swarm of unassociated electrons;
you didn’t even have atomic systems, lets alone chemistry, molecular chemistry, life, complex speciated
life and dynamically balanced planetary ecosystems. Each one of those more complex phenomena
crystallized out or emerged, if you will, from the previous systems that had come into existence. So
when I say that time is speeding up, what I mean really is that more and more is happening – more and
more is happening. And if you ask the question, “well what would be the ultimate 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 complexity. So really what I’m saying is that the
universe is getting its act together, it’s connecting the dots, its bringing everything into co-relationship
with everything else. And somehow it does this through the production of consciousness.
Consciousness is this integrative function in biology which takes data which may appear profoundly
unrelated and in fact brings it into some kind of 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 proceeding at a steady pace, its proceeding faster and faster.
More connectivity occurs now in a calendar 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 realm of activity, inter-
relationship, connectivity, and the result of this is more of the same - producing a shrinking globe, ever
more immersive technologies, dissolution 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 the advent of man - of human beings - the fastest changes on this planet of
any consequence were genetic; changes in the genome of plants and animals. Well, biologists know
that for a fruit fly to add a bur 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 of possibility was born, it’s called epigenetic change, in other words change
which is not about genes, but which is about languages, customs, behaviors of human beings.
Epigenetic change reaches its dramatic culmination in speech, writing, and communication of all sorts.
And so the carriers of epigenetic change, the human beings, are automatically then the carriers of
accelerated novelty. So when you look at evolution on a coral reef and compare it to the evolution of
political ideas in Modern Europe…obviously Modern 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
kinds of processes. Now we appear to be about to move from the strictly human domain to the human-
machine symbiosis domain. And of course machines processes information and make connections and
do their work at a rate thousands of times faster than any human being can work. So again we see a
progressive acceleration at the process of creating and maintaining varieties of connectivity. And that’s
what I mean by time is speeding up.

John Hazard: Your description of the process by which you developed the Time Wave theory – I
understand, I read True Hallucinations, so I understand it took you some years to work it all out.

TMK: Yes in the Amazon all was chaos and mythic revelation, but I knew you that couldn’t bring
that back as a scientific theory and my bias has always been toward science. Out of these many
intuitions and revelations I discerned a thread 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, its never occurred to me, what a bizarre idea!” Well so this idea of
time being a resonance created by other times not immediately before or after it as in scientific
causality, but somehow a day, centuries ago, centuries in the future, come together to create an
interference pattern that creates the unique moment. So that was one of the basic assumptions and
then the structure on which this all was hung was the I-Ching - which may seem exotic to American and
European audiences but which is of course as familiar to anyone in Chinese society as the Declaration of
Independence is to us. And what is the I-Ching? It a very ancient method of divining and predicting the
future based on the idea that every moment can be symbolized by a unique ideogram which is
somehow its essence…much in the way science believes you can explain all nature with 108 elements.
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 propose - a

revolution in physics based on what I know about an ancient Chinese divinatory system…that would
seem foolish to me, it seems occult, it seems unscientific. 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 to work, even in the hands of critics it seems to work. So let me try out a metaphor on you
which I think makes much more clear what’s going on here. Visualize for a moment sand dunes and
notice when you look at these sand dunes in your mind that they look like wind. Sand dunes look like
wind in some sense. Well analyze the situation. What is wind? Wind is a pressure variant phenomena
that fluctuates over time. In a way the sand grains moved about by the wind are like a lower
dimensional slice of the wind itself. From photographic analysis of dunes you can calculate the speed
and duration of the wind that made them. So the dune is a lower dimensional slice of time, of the wind
ebbing and flowing that made it. Well now let’s change the metaphor a little bit, instead 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 is a lower dimensional slice of the force which created the situation. In
other words on every living organism there is an imprint of the higher dimensional force which made it.
Somebody might say well that’s God! But in a scientific 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. The DNA codons are based on a system of 64
exactly like the I-Ching. So my belief is that someone, some group of people thousands of years ago
looked into human organism, looked by meditative techniques into the center of their own beings and
they were not mystics nor were they empiricists, they were simply curious. But at the center of the
meditative experience they saw the ebb and flow, an energy field that was in a constant state of flux.
And they asked themselves how many elements are necessary to describe this energy field? And the
answer was more than ten less than a thousand; more than 20 less than 500. When they finally got it
worked out lo and behold 64 situations are all the possible situations there are. Out of 64 subtypes of
time you can create everything from the coronation of Queen Mary to the resignation of Madonna out
of 64 types of time. So really what the I-Ching is…is not a book of Chinese mysticism, it s a book of
molecular dynamics that sees through biology to the physics that allowed biology to come into
existence. And I’ll argue this with anybody in the field regardless of how hardcore an empiricist they
claim themselves to be because I think the coincidence between the structure of the I-Ching and the
structure of DNA is staggering. It’s not a simple correspondence between 64 and 64 - ALL the processes
that occur in DNA can be easily modeled with the six line hexagrams that make up the I-Ching.

It’s almost as though Western science was fascinated by energy. For five thousand years we
pursued understanding energy and this process ends with thermonuclear explosions in the deserts of
the American Southwest. We can light the fire that burns in the heart of the distant stars – we know
how to do that, that’s what the Western mind achieved, political issues aside. The Eastern mind was not
interested in energy it was interested in time and they spent five thousand years deconstructing it,
looking at it – and you don’t use atom smashers, you don’t use enormous physical 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 pebbles, you consider the situation, you study history. In any case
the bottom line is the people who pursued this understanding of time achieved as sophisticated a
relationship to time as the Western relationship to matter expressed through our ability to trigger fusion
and fission. So there is 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, but to a professional mathematician its
utterly trivial there’s nothing occult about it. I think true understanding can be communicated and
formally described with mathematics. That’s what we have here, we’re on the brink of a fusion of
Western science with “Eastern mysticism” – nothing mystical about it except that we call it mysticism.
But the fusion of these two viewpoints is going to give us a complete understanding of the universe of
space, time, matter, and energy.

John Hazard: I wanna go to the stuff about the strange attractor at the end of history – I’ve never ever
considered that notion that we are being pulled as opposed to simply going on forever and ever and
that’s for sure where people are going to go “huh?”.

TMK: Well you know in the nineteenth century if you spoke of nature as having a purpose 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 purpose or God. All these things they were trying to
eliminate from evolutionary theory 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. In other
words if you ask the question what is the most important in terms of or moment in terms of shaping this
moment the answer would be the moment just before this 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 not pushed by causal
necessity from behind, but it’s pulled by a point in the future. You could almost say, for example, if you
release a ball bearing up near the rim of a bowl that its attractor is the bottom of the bowl and the ball
bearing will roll down to the bottom then half way up the side then up the side in shorter and shorter
cycles until it finally comes to rest in the exact bottom of the bowl. From the point of view of the new
mathematics the bottom of the bowl is a basin of attraction and the ball bearing has fallen under its
influence. I have always doubted that evolutionary theory without purpose – without teleology – could
produce as complex a world as we see around us in as short a time – 5 billion years – as the life of the
Earth. It seemed more as though these processes were not just wandering across a flat genetic
landscape, the process of biological evolution was actually being channeled between high walls. In
other words it could move with some motion this way and that but its forward direction was inevitable.
This is the idea of an attractor. 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-connectivity that it would be
perfect novelty. All nature aspires for this state of perfect novelty. You could almost say that nature
abhors habit. So it seeks the novel by producing various kinds of phenomena at every level in biology,
chemistry, and society. So there really is a purpose to the universe – its purpose is this state of hyper
complexification in which all of its points become related to each other – what mathematicians call co-
tangent. It gives the universe the feeling of being imbued with a caring presence, it makes it appear as
though nature is tending towards something and it changes our own ethical and moral position in the
universe because you know science tells us we are the product of a cosmic accident…we’re at the edge
of an ordinary galaxy in an ordinary star system and we’re damn lucky to be here, that’s it, that’s our
place a very existential notion of our place in the cosmos. But if you take this other point of view that
processes under the influence of an attractor and that the value the attractor is maximizing is novelty…
then suddenly for the first time in five hundred years, human beings are moved back to the center of the
stage because we are the most novel thing on this planet. We are everything biology is plus technology
language, politics, philosophy, art and so on. Suddenly human beings become important, not mere
cosmic witnesses to a meaningless cosmos, but the cutting edge of a cosmos that glories in order and is
moving toward higher states of order and at the present moment we are the carriers. Once it was the
volcanic processes that shaped this planet, 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.
What is man’s purpose? To advance and preserve novelty - this is an ethical position, it means you don’t
replace rain forests with pastures, you don’t censor 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 on a more diverse, more complicated, more multi-phasic universe to our children. When this
process of complexification reaches the omega point it will fulfill, I believe, the expectations of all these
religions – but it will fulfill it in a mature, scientific and universal way that these religions all lack because
they all reflect their parochial origins.

Its certainly true that we see a limited slice of reality and your example from flat land, yes
anything that moves like a gradient through time we will not discern very carefully. For instance this is
why we have the science of Economics, because it keeps track of the behavior 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 coordinate into our planning, so we’ve created an entire
science to study the movement and behavior of markets. I’m always trying to visualize what the
concrescence would be like even though I know that in principle that it’s probably not possible to
imagine it, but several 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’ve been involved in building
complex prostheses which we call machines and computers. They are a part of us, we don’t perceive
them as part of us because we identify with the flesh and exteriorize the fabricated metal, but in fact
they are a part of us as much as our political systems, our agricultural productions systems and so on.
We, the animal body, has reached the limits of its evolutionary abilities – a cheetah can run 75 miles per
hour, an elephant can lift three tons, but to go beyond those capacities of the animal body you have to
make a marriage with mechanical things. We are extending ourselves through the machines. One of
the things which these machines do is they’re time compressors. You and I sitting here talking are
operating at about a hundred hertz, if we could be magically downloaded into a top of the line computer
we would run at 800 megahertz, that means we could do 800 million more things in this moment than
we could do when we’re wearing flesh. So it may be that we will find a way to technologically stretch
time and this will become for us like a false eternity. You may have only ten 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 present moment.
We are finding ways out of the 3dimensional Newtonian prison which says that life is narrow, confined,
and ends at the grave. We are doing it by becoming information that is freed from material and
somehow this allows us to make this ascent to the next dimensional modality. Information is not time
and space constrained the way we are, we talk about the difficulty of moving an object at the speed of
light – our entire planetary technology cannot achieve moving a marble at the speed of light, but we can
move information at the speed of light, tetrabytes (terabytes) of it, we do this every day. We see, ah-
hah! we stand then like children at the edge of the ocean of information and we’re putting our feet in
and wondering could we swim in that? What would it be like to be wet in that? What would it be like to
go into that new medium? A similar dilemma must have confronted the early amphibians as they stared
at the land and said “could we leave the ocean, could we go up into those places, could we breathe air
and actually make the transition to such a hostile and alien environment as the land?” These are major
symmetry breaks, but in every 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 particular
transition is that we are conscious of the implications – we who will make the transition will in some
sense, some limited sense, understand its implications, where I don’t think that was true for the animals
that left the primordial ocean. They simply were behaving with blind instinct and evolutionarily dictated
behaviors. But the degrees of freedom accessible to us are so multiferous that we can actually
appreciate for the first time our circumstance. Our circumstance is awe inspiring, we are about to take
the step out of matter. The planet is on a collision course with the most profound event it’s possible to
imagine - the freeing of organic life from the chrysalis of matter. For a billion years 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 central at that event.

John Hazard: You just said we are moving beyond matter…I just can’t imagine what you mean…can you
try to talk a little more about that?

TMK: 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 concept is virtual reality, obviously we’re on the brink of
building computer assisted worlds that don’t “really exist” but that which we experience the way we
experience dreams or the imagination. I think this is where psychedelic substances come in – shamans
have always entered into a non-physical realm of information through trance – in a way there is nothing
new here…this is a part of the Archaic Revival!

(edited cut) Hahahaha! Will you still love me, will you still feed me when I’m 64? Ummm are
we rolling? I‘ve forgotten the thread…what was it…Oh! Is it a human thing? Is this ascent into novelty a
human thing? No, part of what I discern here, though we humans are always ready to suffer guilt and
take blame for everything going on in the universe - I don’t believe this is something we are doing, I
think we are as much corks tossed on the ocean of time as are hummingbirds and prairie dogs. In other
words an event of cosmic significance and importance is going to occur not far in the future. Are we
causing it? No. Can we stop it? No. Can we hurry it? No! It’s built into the structure of matter itself;
one way of thinking of this is that the laws of physics are evolving to promote greater freedom. People
have said to me, “well, don’t you find it a little strange that such a momentous event would occur in
human history, after all human history is ten thousand years wide, the planet is five billion years old,
pretty unusual coincidence that human history would be happening when this cosmic event happens”.
No, that is completely wrong, human history is being 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
influence reach so far back in time that they drag life out of the primitive oceans. Some of its shells of
influence reach so far back in time that they define the emergence of the hominid line out of the higher
primates. Some shells reach back to Egypt, some to medieval times, as you approach the present it
becomes stronger and stronger but I would argue that the presence of human civilization on this planet
is that strongest evidence we have that matter and organizational processes are about to make some
kind of leap to a new order of being. What history is, is the 25,000 year transition zone - before you
enter the zone you’re an animal, after you leave the zone you’re a god. But for 25,000 years you’re kind
of an animal and kind of a god. You’re constantly being swamped by your animal nature and then great
teachers are appearing and dragging people back to the right line. We are schizophrenic in history. A
friend of mine once said “history is the shockwave which precedes the Eschaton,” and I absolutely
believe that. I believe that as historical processes intensify its 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, given the propagation of ordinary historical and scientific rates of unfoldment and discovery?
Can you imagine this planet in a thousand years? “ No, no one can imagine that because processes are
now in play which so totally rewrite the script that no one can imagine a hundred years or two hundred
years in the future, because the discoveries which will be made in that span of time will so totally
rewrite the human experience of itself and the environment that we cannot see deep into the future.
This indicates to me that the future is exploding in an asymptotic unfoldment into a kind of cultural
super-space. Our own bafflement at the impossibility of conceiving any real future given the political
and social and technological forces in play is proof of that.

John Hazard: Before we go further I would like for you to attempt to give me a definition of
concrescence and Eschaton.

TMK: Let’s go backwards, 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 more materialist bent it might be something else, but the
Eschaton is the last thing. Eschatology is the study of the time of the last thing. Now what was the
other one?

John Hazard: Concrescence.

TMK: Concrescence, this is a little trickier concept, I took it from Alfred North Whitehead.
Concrescence is the idea of something that grows together, it concresces, it becomes more dense, more
connected, more defined in space and time. When I talk about the transcendental object at the end of
time or the coming 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 exists 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 definitely places us outside the world of biological intent, the animal mind, but
history does not bring us into the presence of the Eschaton, it’s a partial process and concrescence is
what waits at the end. The Eschaton is the concrescence.

John Hazard: So we really can’t have any way of knowing what the experience of that will be like?
 TMK: No. The reason why is because asking that question is like asking a man looking east at
two a.m. to describe the coming sunrise – he can’t because it is literally over the event horizon of the
future. When we look into the future, we see that the east is streaked with rosy dawn, but we cannot
conceive of the day that is about to come, all we can see is the dim glow of some kind of Eschatological
promise. Ask me this question in 2010 and I will have a different answer.

John Hazard: Umm, back to this issue of physics and your description of the two things that are left out
of their models. The way you describe it is so self evident and simple…the complexification the further
you get away from the big bang and the fact that complexification is speeding up. Can you talk just a
little bit about the relationship of those observations 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.

TMK: The main reason they aren’t friendly to our model – a progressive concrescent model like
this is because you would have to look at, you would have to give credit to biology for being a stage
higher than chemistry and give credit to human history as a stage higher than biology. 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 well received in physics or
biology. So physicists are attend to discount biology even though life on this planet is 4.83 billion years
old, physicists just discount it, they call it an epiphenomenon. When you talk to sociologists they give no
credit to physics. Science has compartmentalized nature in order to analyze it – there is no theory of
nature as such. That’s really what I’m 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 divisions, but over the entire domain of known phenomena
this tendency to complexify through time and be faster and faster can be discerned. We need a theory
of everything. Physics talks about physics of everything but none of these theories address biology let
alone sociology, linguistics and you know, the phenomenon of human beings.

The Archaic Revival – there is a way of looking at the entire 20th century beginning with Pablo
Picasso binging back masks from Africa and showing them around in French cafes in 1915; beginning
with Freud’s discovery of the unconscious 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 n roll, sexual permissiveness, psychedelic drug taking, rave culture, body piercing,
jazz, the list is endless. What do all these things have in common? They are reversions to archaic
behaviors, they represent rejections to the Edwardian gentleman with his white man’s burden, and
represent instead a realization that for us to survive and live with ourselves we have to re-empower
archaic values. As the century unfolded the understanding of what this re-empowering 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 that that inner wilderness is accessible to people through chemistry. Then still later it
was understood that the key ingredient in active shamanism is psychedelic plants, psychedelic
experiences - and in a way that closed the loop between the impulse towards the archaic and the
impulses of modern science and medicine. The key is the psychedelic experience, that’s what makes the
shaman a shaman, that’s what made the archaic in fact archaic, so people like Freud and Jung and the
Surrealists and Dadaists and Abstract expressionists all of these people were very close to the mark. The
shaman is the paradigmatic figure and the psychedelic experience seems to be the anticipatory
experience of this Eschaton that we’re headed toward.

When psychedelics were first being discussed it was thought that they would prepare people for
death, in a sense they probably do, but in the same way they prepare people for death they prepare
people for transformation. It gets you used to the idea that the world is not what it appears to be, it
gets you used to the idea that the world is somehow animate, intelligent and proceeding along its own
agenda. In a way, shamans have always been anticipations of some future state of mankind – they are
the masters of language, they are the ones who are telepathic with the animals, they are the ones who
can see into the future. This archaic nostalgia gets real focus once you realize that it is the shaman and
his or her shamanic techniques that confers on them the extra historical dimension. 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 Newtonian serial time.

John Hazard: We have fourteen years until this event measured on the calendar and a really common
ordinary way to describe the times that we’re living in is that they are very very chaotic, filled with acts
of unspeakable evil and at the same time there is this buzz and thrust of optimism – everything from a
guy like Peter Schwartz talking about the long wave, the big booming economy, breakthroughs in
educational 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.

TMK: 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 at the end. It’s only going to get weirder; the
level of contradiction is going to rise excruciatingly even beyond the excruciating present levels of
contradiction. (laughs) So uhh I think it’s just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder and finally
it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. And at that point
novelty theory can come out of the woods. Eventually people are going to say “what the hell is going
on?” it’s just too nuts, it’s not enough to say its nuts, you have to explain why it’s so nuts. Between now
and 2012, the next fourteen years, I look for the invention of artificial life, the cloning of human beings,
possible contact with extraterrestrials, possible human immortality and at the same time, appalling acts
of brutality, genocide, race bating, homophobia, famine, starvation, because the systems which are in
place to keep the world sane are utterly inadequate to the forces that have been unleashed. The
collapse of the socialist world, the rise of the internet – these are changes so immense, nobody could
ever imagine them happening and now that they have happened nobody even bothers to mention what
a big deal it is. The fact that there is no such thing as the Soviet Union, people never talk about it
anymore, but when I was a kid the notion that that would ever change was beyond conceiving. The
good news is that as primates we are incredibly adaptable to change! Put us in the desert - we survive,
put us in the jungle - we survive, put us 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 limits. This is why
the right wing is so alarmed, because what they see going on is the breakdown of all tradition, all order,
all sanctioned norms of behavior and they’re quite right that its happening but they’re quite wrong to
conclude that it should be resisted or that its somehow evil. The mushroom 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 conditions; it’s a fire in a madhouse!” That’s what we have – the fire in the
madhouse at the end of time – this is what it’s like when a species prepares to move on 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 the point species on a transformation that will affect every living
organism on this planet at its conclusion.

John Hazard: Let’s pause for a second…umm I see how with Jenkin’s calling it galactic cosmology, our
home continues to expand…we’ve gone from the village to the nation state to the planet….

TMK: …Now we’re ready to take on the big picture.

John Hazard: So let’s just talk about the conclusions of the archaic mind – what it reaches.

TMK: Well…the great watershed difference between the archaic understanding and what is
called scientific materialism is the archaic mind understood – in fact perceived – that nature is
conscious, nature is alive, nature is an organism full of intent. The goal of the archaic mind is to connect
with, communicate with, and align itself to this greater Gaian wholism, which is sometimes called
nature, the great spirit, the realm of the ancestors…but this is what the archaic mind understood and
was comfortable with. In fact it is true! Our own decision to view the universe as dead, as inanimate, as
unintelligent allowed us, permitted us, to dissect it, to use it and to deny its validity outside of human
purpose. Now the consequences of living like that is coming back to haunt us, we have almost
destroyed our home, we have almost cut the earth from beneath our own feet. This impulse towards
the Gaialanic and the archaic is a survival instinct at this point. We must give reverence and credence to
nature and nature’s methods because no other methods will allow us to work our way out of the
present mess we’re in. High temperature, high energy resource extraction, comodification, mega-
agriculture…we’re at the end of the rope for these things. So, the archaic holds answers, but it only
holds answers if we are willing to think of the universe as a living, intelligent entity, in which with we are
in partnership, not set against, but that in fact we are a part of a morphogenetic intent and an unfolding
reality that is larger than human understanding. Imagine! Larger than human understanding….

John Hazard: Sooo, the whole entire Milky Way Galaxy is a being?

TMK: Well, it’s a kind of…it’s an organism, yes. The galaxy is a kind of an organism, you can
think of it as a fractal resonance with a cell. The galaxy has a nucleus of very dense material where very
mysterious processes are going on, then it has a cytoplasmic envelope of stars and gas clouds that
surround that core, then it is an individual very distinctly defined by the vast emptiness 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 are talking about the cell, the solar system, the earth,
the galaxy. In the process of the conservation of novelty, structures are created with cores that are
more complex than their outlying neighborhoods. To my mind, a galaxy hanging in space is a picture of
the time wave. Every star is a data point in an enormous computer simulation of the novelty wave –
that’s why it has that spiral structure. You know…scientists are very puzzled that the galaxies don’t fly
apart, they don’t seem to have enough mass that their gravitation should hold them together. 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 to be a galaxy. In other words, it wants to hold onto the level
of novel morphology 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 with its background or foreground. So everything organizes
itself fractally, spirally, with a dense center in its spatial domain and a dense center in its temporal
domain. We are like this, galaxies are like this, planets, stars, bird flocks, coral reefs, but in the case of
the galaxy it’s particularly easy to observe the structure because the thing is so huge that its forces
dominate and damp out other forces which might distort it.

Terence McKenna
1946-2000

Transcribed with love and hope that these insights may never be lost.