00:20

McKenna

Well, novelty theory is something I’ve been working on since the early seventies—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: well, 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 asymptotic 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’re 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 for further complexity.

Well, this explains our present circumstance. It explains the rush toward 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 three-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 global internet, a human population of several billions, an electronic noösphere—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 mathematically defined theories around this idea, and then have found, to my astonishment, incredible congruences with other work—I’m thinking of the Mayan calendar and its curious countdown-like quality toward 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 Venn of historical time. In other words, I believe it will happen in 2012, in December, coincident with the same events that the Maya placed at the end of their calendar. Even if I’m wrong—even if it’s a hundred years or five hundred 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 this 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 endgame 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 toward this for thousands of years without us awakening to what the denouement would be. Now we stand close enough to it, and I think all but the most lumpen among us must feel the tug of the transcendental and the transformative.

07:58

McKenna

Well, let me answer in the form of a question. Which lasts longer? A million years in which nothing happens, or ten seconds with 50,000 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 can occur.

For example, the early universe was a pure plasma, a pure swarm of unassociated electrons. You didn’t even have atomic systems—let 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 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.

And so, really, what I’m saying is that the universe is getting its act together. It’s connecting the dots. It’s 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 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 proceeding at a steady pace, it’s 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, interrelationship, 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.

Before the advent of man, of human beings, the fastest changes on this planet of any consequence were genetic changes: changes in the genomes of plants and animals. Well, 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 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. 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 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 process information, 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 the process of creating and maintaining varieties of connectivity. And that’s what I mean by time is speeding up.

14:18

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 toward science. And out of these many intuitions and revelations I discerned a thread which was about time. It began with a conversation with this lógos 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 occurred to me. What a bizarre 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 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? Well, it’s 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 that 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 its 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, then 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. And 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 windstorm, 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 the imprint of the higher-dimensional force which made it. Now, somebody could say, “Well, that’s God.” Well, but in a scientific context, we don’t speak like that. But whatever it is that made blind matter into quail, 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 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 an 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 twenty, less than five hundred. And when they finally got it worked out, lo and behold, 64 situations are all the possible potential 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 and empiricist they claim themselves to be, because I think the coincidence between the structure of the I Ching and the structure of the 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’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, but to a professional mathematician it’s utterly trivial. There’s nothing occult about it. And I think true understanding can be communicated and formally described with mathematics. And 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 spacetime, matter, and energy.

23:57

McKenna

Well, you know, in the nineteenth century, if you spoke of nature having a purpose, you were thought to be anti-evolution. Because in the nineteenth century there was great pain to eliminate anything like pre-formation, or teleology, or purpose, or God—all these things that were 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 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 halfway 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. Well, 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.

So I have always doubted that evolutionary theory without purpose, without teleology, could produce as complex a world as we see around us in a short of time—five 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 had some motion this way, some this, but its forward direction was inevitable. And 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 hyperconnectivity; that it would be perfect novelty. And all nature aspires for this state of perfect novelty. You could almost say that nature abhors habit. And so it seeks the novel by 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 hyper-complexification in which all of its points become related to each other; become what mathematicians call cotangent. And it gives the universe the feeling of being imbued with a caring presence. It makes it appear as though nature is tending toward something. And it changes our own ethical and moral position in the universe. Because, you know, science tells us that we’re the products of a cosmic accident. We’re at the edge of an ordinary galaxy and an ordinary star system, and we’re damn lucky to be here, and 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 process is 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, so forth and so on. So 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 toward 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 rainforests 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 multiphasic universe to our children. And when this process of complexification reaches the Omega Point, it will fulfill, I believe, the expectations of all of 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 origin.

30:51

McKenna

It’s certainly true that we see a limited slice of reality. And your example from Flatland—yes, anything which moves as 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.

One of the things I’m always trying to visualize what the concrescence would be like—even though I know that in principle 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 toward. One is: for some time now we’ve been involved in building complex prostheses which we call machines and computers. They are 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 agriculture production systems, so forth and so on. So the animal body has reached the limits of its evolutionary abilities. A cheetah can run 75 miles an hour, an elephant can lift three tons, and so forth and so on. To go beyond those capacities of the animal body, you have to make a marriage with mechanical things. So we are extending ourselves through the machines.

Well, one of the things that these machines do is: they’re time compressors. You and I sitting here talking are operating at about 100 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 can 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. So we are finding ways out of the three-dimensional Newtonian prison, which says life is narrow and confined and ends at the grave. We’re 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 of it. We do this every day. So we see: aha, 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 alienating environment as the land? And so 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 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 of a blind instinct and evolutionarily dictated behaviors. But the degrees of freedom accessible to us are so multifarious that we can actually appreciate for the first time our circumstance, and our circumstance is awe-inspiring. I mean, 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 to that event.

37:00

McKenna

Well first of all, I can’t quite imagine what we mean either. I think this is the test; is 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 which we will experience the way we experience dreams or the imagination. And 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’s nothing new here. This is part of the archaic revival.

37:57

McKenna

Will you still love me? Will you still feed me when I’m 64? 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 that 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 permit greater freedom. And 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 10,000 years wide. The planet is 5 billion years old. Pretty unusual coincidence that human history would be happening when this cosmic event happens.” No, that’s 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 time. As you approach the present, it becomes stronger and stronger.

But I would argue that the presence of human civilization on this planet is the strongest evidence we have that matter and organizational processes are about to make some kind of a 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. And you’re constantly being swamped 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 mine once said history is the shockwave which precedes the eschaton. And I absolutely believe that. And I believe 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 five hundred 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. And this indicates to me that the future is exploding in an asymptotic unfoldment into a kind of cultural superspace. And 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.

42:47

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 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 word? 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. And 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.

44:59

McKenna

No. And the reason why is because asking that question is like asking a man looking east at 2 am 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 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’ll have a different answer.

46:25

McKenna

The main reason they aren’t friendly toward a model—

46:28

McKenna

Well, the main reason physicists are not friendly to a progressive, concrescent model like this is because you would have to give credit to biology for being a stage higher than chemistry, and you would have to give credit to human history 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 well received in physics or biology. So physicists tend to discount biology. Even though life on this planet is 4.83 billion years old, physicists just discount it. They call it an epiphenomenon. Well then, when you talk to sociologists, they give no credit to physics. Science has compartmentalized nature in order to analyze it, and there is no theory of nature as such.

And 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 that over the entire domain of known phenomena this tendency to complexify through time (A), and (B) faster and faster, can be discerned. We need a theory of everything. Physics talks about theories of everything, but none of these theories of everything address biology, let alone sociology, linguistics, and the phenomenon of human beings.

48:39

McKenna

Well, the archaic revival. There is a way of looking at the entire twentieth century, beginning with Pablo Picasso bringing masks back 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 twentieth century—fascism, abstract expressionism, rock and 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 of 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 Hofmann’s discovery of LSD demonstrated that that inner wilderness is accessible to most people through chemistry. Well 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 toward the archaic and the impulses of modern science and modern medicine.

The key is the psychedelic experience. That’s what makes the shaman the 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 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.

You know, 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 that 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. 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 are the ones who are telepathic with the animals. They are the ones who can see into the future. So 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 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.

53:40

McKenna

Well, novelty is not necessarily good or nice. Novelty is complex. That’s what it is. And 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. So 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. 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 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-baiting, 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 imagine them ever 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.

So the good news is that, as primates, we’re incredibly adaptable to change. Put us in a desert, we survive. Put us in 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’re going to be tested to the limits. The breakdown of anything—and 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 it’s happening. But they’re quite wrong to conclude that it should be resisted or is 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. And 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.

57:46

McKenna

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

57:55

McKenna

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 holism—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. And 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 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 toward the Gailanic 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, commodification, 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 with which 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!

1:00:29

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 a cell. The galaxy has a nucleus, a 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. And 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’re 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, and 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 on to 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 a 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.