The top two most popular hits on google if you search 'Terence McKenna philosophy' for people trying to deduce an underlying philosophy from McKenna's works are wikipedia and a small wordpress. After that it is just a ton of psychoactive drug forums discussing his drug taking and one reddit post discussing what it means to be accepted as a philosopher.
If you think there's one part of a book of his or a short video which is a good summary of his philosophy I'll happily transcribe it when I get home, otherwise you can respond to Saul Newman's critique of a "prelinguistic state of jouissance" which McKenna claims is attainable.
Books:
The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching. 1975
Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide. 1976
The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. 1992.
Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge – A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution. 1992.
Synesthesia. 1992
Trialogues at the Edge of the West: Chaos, Creativity, and the Resacralization of the World. 1992
True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise. 1993
The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination & Spirit. 1998
Speaking (too many to list, but AMPs videos, can we narrow down further?):
What Has Science Overlooked?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdaCTcC4RXo
Let's Talk About Science
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFFZrnVMi8
My Take On Science
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBS1BCwAiRs
Science
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TERFfGQaW0
What Is Science?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYhTHs60eZ0
Science vs. Reality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MQGy1smtH8
Science Is An Art
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-_Qnyubjng
The UFO's Are Eroding Faith In Science
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbhLFwJT93s
Terence McKenna vs. Stephen Hawking vs. Straight Science
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hxi8rEJtNQ
Religion & Science In A Nutshell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fli4h6sJqnQ
Science Doesn't Deal With Subjective Experience
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygQyy2icYh8
BONUS: What If UFO's Appeared On Earth?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MjX4D6uOzI
___________________________
Terence McKenna - Thought
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna#Thought
Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was an American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. He was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s",[1][2] "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism",[3] and the "intellectual voice of rave culture".[4]
McKenna formulated a concept about the nature of time based on fractal patterns he claimed to have discovered in the I Ching, which he called novelty theory,[3][5] proposing this predicted the end of time in the year 2012.[5][6][7][8] His promotion of novelty theory and its connection to the Maya calendar is credited as one of the factors leading to the widespread beliefs about 2012 eschatology.[9] Novelty theory is considered pseudoscience.[10][11]
Thought
Psychedelics
Terence McKenna advocated the exploration of altered states of mind via the ingestion of naturally occurring psychedelic substances;[5][31][42] for example, and in particular, as facilitated by the ingestion of high doses of psychedelic mushrooms,[25][52] ayahuasca and DMT,[6] which he believed was the apotheosis of the psychedelic experience. He was less enthralled with synthetic drugs,[6] stating, "I think drugs should come from the natural world and be use-tested by shamanically orientated cultures...one cannot predict the long-term effects of a drug produced in a Laboratory."[3] McKenna always stressed the responsible use of psychedelic plants, saying, "Experimenters should be very careful. One must build up to the experience. These are bizarre dimensions of extraordinary power and beauty. There is no set rule to avoid being overwhelmed, but move carefully, reflect a great deal, and always try to map experiences back onto the history of the race and the philosophical and religious accomplishments of the species. All the compounds are potentially dangerous, and all compounds, at sufficient doses or repeated over time, involve risks. The library is the first place to go when looking into taking a new compound."[53] He also recommended, and often spoke of taking, what he called 'heroic doses',[31] which he defined as five dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms,[6][54] taken alone, on an empty stomach, in silent darkness and with eyes closed.[25][26] He believed that when taken this way one could expect a profound visionary experience,[25] believing it is only when "slain" by the power of the mushroom that the message becomes clear.[52]
Although McKenna avoided giving his allegiance to any one interpretation (part of his rejection of monotheism), he was open to the idea of psychedelics as being "trans-dimensional travel". He proposed that DMT sent one to a "parallel dimension"[8] and that psychedelics literally enabled an individual to encounter 'higher dimensional entities'[55] or what could be ancestors or spirits of the Earth,[56] saying that if you can trust your own perceptions it appears that you are entering an "ecology of souls."[57] McKenna also put forward the idea that psychedelics were "doorways into the Gaian mind",[42][58] suggesting that "the planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being" and that the psychedelic plants were the facilitators of this communication.[59][60] In a more radical version of biophysicist Francis Crick's hypothesis of directed panspermia, McKenna speculated on the idea that psilocybin mushrooms may be a species of high intelligence,[3] which may have arrived on this planet as spores migrating through space[8][61] and which are attempting to establish a symbiotic relationship with human beings. He postulated that "intelligence, not life, but intelligence may have come here [to Earth] in this spore-bearing life form". He said, "I think that theory will probably be vindicated. I think in a hundred years if people do biology they will think it quite silly that people once thought that spores could not be blown from one star system to another by cosmic radiation pressure," and also believed that "few people are in a position to judge its extraterrestrial potential, because few people in the orthodox sciences have ever experienced the full spectrum of psychedelic effects that are unleashed."[3][17][7]
McKenna was opposed to Christianity[62] and most forms of organized religion or guru-based forms of spiritual awakening, favouring shamanism, which he believed was the broadest spiritual paradigm available, stating that:
"What I think happened is that in the world of prehistory all religion was experiential, and it was based on the pursuit of ecstasy through plants. And at some time, very early, a group interposed itself between people and direct experience of the 'Other.' This created hierarchies, priesthoods, theological systems, castes, ritual, taboos. Shamanism, on the other hand, is an experiential science that deals with an area where we know nothing. It is important to remember that our epistemological tools have developed very unevenly in the West. We know a tremendous amount about what is going on in the heart of the atom, but we know absolutely nothing about the nature of the mind."[63]
Either philosophically or religiously, he expressed admiration for Marshall McLuhan, Alfred North Whitehead, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Carl Jung, Plato, Gnostic Christianity and Alchemy, while regarding the Greek philosopher Heraclitus as his favorite philosopher.[64]
McKenna also expressed admiration for the works of writers including Aldous Huxley,[3] James Joyce, whose book Finnegans Wake he called "the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature of the 20th century,"[65] science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who he described as an "incredible genius,"[66] fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, with whom McKenna shared the belief that "scattered through the ordinary world there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth"[8] and Vladimir Nabokov; McKenna once said that he would have become a Nabokov lecturer if he had never encountered psychedelics.
During the final years of his life and career, McKenna became very engaged in the theoretical realm of technology. He was an early proponent of the technological singularity[8] and in his last recorded public talk, Psychedelics in The Age of Intelligent Machines, he outlined ties between psychedelics, computation technology, and humans.[67] He also became enamored with the Internet, calling it "the birth of [the] global mind",[16] believing it to be a place where psychedelic culture could flourish.[26]
Machine elves
McKenna spoke of hallucinations while on DMT in which he claims to have met intelligent entities he described as faceless, "self-transforming machine elves".[3][8][68][69]
"Stoned ape" theory of human evolution
In his book Food of the Gods, McKenna proposed that the transformation from humans' early ancestors Homo erectus to the species Homo sapiens mainly had to do with the addition of the mushroom Psilocybe cubensis in its diet,[25][70][71] an event that according to his theory took place in about 100,000 BCE (which is when he believed that the species diverged from the Homo genus).[21][72] McKenna based his theory on the main effects, or alleged effects, produced by the mushroom[3] while citing studies by Roland Fischer et al. from the late 1960s to early 1970s.[73][74]
McKenna stated that due to the desertification of the African continent at that time, human forerunners were forced from the increasingly shrinking tropical canopy in search of new food sources.[6] He believed they would have been following large herds of wild cattle whose dung harbored the insects that, he proposed, were undoubtedly part of their new diet, and would have spotted and started eating Psilocybe cubensis, a dung-loving mushroom often found growing out of cowpats.[6][7][42][75]
McKenna's hypothesis was that low doses of psilocybin improve visual acuity, meaning that the presence of psilocybin in the diet of early pack hunting primates caused the individuals who were consuming psilocybin mushrooms to be better hunters than those who were not, resulting in an increased food supply and in turn a higher rate of reproductive success.[3][7][25][42] Then at slightly higher doses, he contended, the mushroom acts to sexually arouse, leading to a higher level of attention, more energy in the organism, and potential erection in the males,[3][7] rendering it even more evolutionarily beneficial, as it would result in more offspring.[25][42][71] At even higher doses, McKenna proposed that the mushroom would have acted to "dissolve boundaries," promoting community bonding and group sexual activities.[12][42] Consequently, there would be a mixing of genes, greater genetic diversity, and a communal sense of responsibility for the group offspring.[76] At these higher doses, McKenna also argued that psilocybin would be triggering activity in the "language-forming region of the brain", manifesting as music and visions,[3] thus catalyzing the emergence of language in early hominids by expanding "their arboreally evolved repertoire of troop signals."[7][25] He also pointed out that psilocybin would dissolve the ego and "religious concerns would be at the forefront of the tribe's consciousness, simply because of the power and strangeness of the experience itself."[42][76]
Therefore, according to McKenna, access to and ingestion of mushrooms was an evolutionary advantage to humans' omnivorous hunter-gatherer ancestors,[25][75] also providing humanities first religious impulse.[75][77] He believed that psilocybin mushrooms were the "evolutionary catalyst"[3] from which language, projective imagination, the arts, religion, philosophy, science, and all of human culture sprang.[7][8][26][75]
Later on this idea was given the name "The 'Stoned Ape' Hypothesis."[42][70]
McKenna's "stoned ape" theory has not received attention from the scientific community and has been criticized for a relative lack of citation to any of the paleoanthropological evidence informing our understanding of human origins. His ideas regarding psilocybin and visual acuity have been criticized by suggesting he misrepresented Fischer et al., who published studies about visual perception in terms of various specific parameters, not acuity. Criticism has also been expressed due to the fact that in a separate study on psilocybin induced transformation of visual space Fischer et al. stated that psilocybin "may not be conducive to the survival of the organism". There is also a lack of scientific evidence that psilocybin increases sexual arousal, and even if it does, it does not necessarily entail an evolutionary advantage.[78] Others have pointed to civilisations such as the Aztecs, who used psychedelic mushrooms (at least among the Priestly class), that didn't reflect McKenna's model of how psychedelic-using cultures would behave, for example, by carrying out human sacrifice.[12] Although, it has been noted that psilocybin usage by the Aztec civilisation is far removed from the type of usage on which McKenna was speculating.[42] There are also examples of Amazonian tribes such as the Jivaro and the Yanomami who use ayahuasca ceremoniously and who are known to engage in violent behaviour. This, it has been argued, indicates the use of psychedelic plants does not necessarily suppress the ego and create harmonious societies.[42]
Archaic revival
One of the main themes running through McKenna's work, and the title of his second book, was the idea that Western civilization was undergoing what he called an "archaic revival".[3][25][79]
His notion was that Western society has become "sick" and is undergoing a "healing process", in the same way that the human body begins to produce antibodies when it feels itself to be sick, humanity as a collective whole (in the Jungian, sense) was creating "strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease" and trying to cure itself, by what he termed as "a reversion to archaic values." McKenna pointed to phenomena including surrealism, abstract expressionism, body piercing and tattooing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, rock and roll and catastrophe theory, amongst others, as his evidence that this process was underway.[80][81][82] This idea is linked to McKenna's "stoned ape" theory of human evolution, with him viewing the "archaic revival" as an impulse to return to the symbiotic and blissful relationship he believed humanity once had with the psilocybin mushroom.[25]
In differentiating his idea from the "New Age", a term that he felt trivialized the significance of the next phase in human evolution, McKenna stated that: "The New Age is essentially humanistic psychology '80s-style, with the addition of neo-shamanism, channeling, crystal and herbal healing. The archaic revival is a much larger, more global phenomenon that assumes that we are recovering the social forms of the late neolithic, and reaches far back in the 20th century to Freud, to surrealism, to abstract expressionism, even to a phenomenon like National Socialism which is a negative force. But the stress on ritual, on organized activity, on race/ancestor-consciousness – these are themes that have been worked out throughout the entire 20th century, and the archaic revival is an expression of that."[3][17]
Novelty theory and Timewave Zero
"Timewave Zero" redirects here. For album by Dutch Aggrotech band, Grendel, see Timewave Zero (album).
Novelty theory is a pseudoscientific idea[10][11] that purports to predict the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe as an inherent quality of time. Proposing that time is not a constant but has various qualities tending toward either "habit" or "novelty".[5] Habit, in this context, can be thought of as entropic, repetitious, or conservative; and novelty as creative, disjunctive, or progressive phenomena.[8] McKenna's idea was that the universe is an engine designed for the production and conservation of novelty and that as novelty increases, so does complexity. With each level of complexity achieved becoming the platform for a further ascent into complexity.[8]
The basis of the theory was originally conceived in the mid-1970s after McKenna's experiences with psilocybin mushrooms at La Chorrera in the Amazon led him to closely study the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.[5][6][26]
In Asian Taoism philosophy the concept of opposing phenomena is represented by the Yin and Yang. Both are always present in everything, yet the amount of influence of each varies over time. The individual lines of the I Ching are made up of both Yin (broken lines) and Yang (solid lines).
When examining the King Wen sequence of the 64 hexagrams, McKenna noticed a pattern. He analysed the "degree of difference" between each successive hexagram and claims he found a statistical anomaly, which he believed suggested that the King Wen sequence was intentionally constructed,[5] with the sequence of hexagrams ordered in a highly structured and artificial way, and that this pattern codified the nature of time’s flow in the world.[27] With the degrees of difference as numerical values, McKenna worked out a mathematical wave form based on the 384 lines of change that make up the 64 hexagrams. He was able to graph the data and this became the Novelty Time Wave.[5]
Peter J. Meyer (Peter Johann Gustav Meyer) (born 1946), in collaboration with McKenna, studied and improved the foundations of novelty theory, St out a mathematical formula and developing the Timewave Zero software (the original version of which was completed by July 1987),[83] enabling them to graph and explore its dynamics on a computer.[5][7] The graph was fractal, it exhibited a pattern in which a given small section of the wave was found to be identical in form to a larger section of the wave.[3][5] McKenna called this fractal modeling of time "temporal resonance", proposing it implied that larger intervals, occurring long ago, contained the same amount of information as shorter, more recent, intervals.[5][84] He suggested the up-and-down pattern of the wave shows an ongoing wavering between habit and novelty respectively. With each successive iteration trending, at an increasing level, towards infinite novelty. So according to novelty theory, the pattern of time itself is speeding up, with a requirement of the theory being that infinite novelty will be reached on a specific date.[3][5]
McKenna suspected that notable events in history could be identified that would help him locate the time wave's end date[5] and attempted to find the best-fit placement when matching the graph to the data field of human history.[7] The last harmonic of the wave has a duration of 67.29 years.[85] Population growth, peak oil, and pollution statistics were some of the factors that pointed him to an early twenty-first century end date and when looking for an extremely novel event in human history as a signal that the final phase had begun McKenna picked the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.[5][85] This worked out to the graph reaching zero in mid-November 2012. When he later discovered that the end of the 13th baktun in the Maya calendar had been correlated by Western Maya scholars as December 21, 2012,[Note a] he adopted their end date instead.[5][86][Note b]
McKenna saw the universe, in relation to Novelty theory, as having a teleological attractor at the end of time,[5] which increases interconnectedness and would eventually reach a singularity of infinite complexity. He also frequently referred to this as "the transcendental object at the end of time."[5][7] When describing this model of the universe he stated that: "The universe is not being pushed from behind. The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal that is as inevitable as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release it up near the rim. If you do that, you know the marble will roll down the side of the bowl, down, down, down – until eventually it comes to rest at the lowest energy state, which is the bottom of the bowl. That's precisely my model of human history. I'm suggesting that the universe is pulled toward a complex attractor that exists ahead of us in time, and that our ever-accelerating speed through the phenomenal world of connectivity and novelty is based on the fact that we are now very, very close to the attractor."[87] Therefore, according to McKenna's final interpretation of the data and positioning of the graph, on December 21, 2012 we would have been in the unique position in time where maximum novelty would be experienced.[3][5][26] An event he described as a "concrescence",[12] a "tightening 'gyre'" with everything flowing together. Speculating that "when the laws of physics are obviated, the universe disappears, and what is left is the tightly bound plenum, the monad, able to express itself for itself, rather than only able to cast a shadow into physis as its reflection...It will be the entry of our species into 'hyperspace', but it will appear to be the end of physical laws, accompanied by the release of the mind into the imagination."[88]
Novelty theory is considered to be pseudoscience.[10][11] Among the criticisms are the use of numerology to derive dates of important events in world history,[11] the arbitrary rather than calculated end date of the time wave[25] and the apparent adjustment of the eschaton from November 2012 to December 2012 in order to coincide with the Maya calendar. Other purported dates do not fit the actual time frames: the date claimed for the emergence of Homo sapiens is inaccurate by 70,000 years, and the existence of the ancient Sumer and Egyptian civilisations contradict the date he gave for the beginning of "historical time". Some projected dates have been criticised for having seemingly arbitrary labels, such as the "height of the age of mammals"[11] and McKenna's analysis of historical events has been criticised for having a eurocentric and cultural bias.[6][25]
The Watkins Objection
In 1994, the British mathematician Matthew Watkins of Exeter University (then a Cambridge PhD student) conducted a mathematical analysis of the Time Wave. Watkins claimed there were various mathematical flaws in the construction of the wave. He stated that when the mathematics was accurately performed a more trivial and uninteresting waveform was created, which was not fractal but a complex piecewise linear progression.[25]
Critical reception
One expert on drug treatment attacked McKenna for popularizing "dangerous substances". Judy Corman, vice president of Phoenix House of New York, a drug treatment center, said in a letter to The New York Times in 1993: "Surely the fact that Terence McKenna says that the psilocybin mushroom 'is the megaphone used by an alien, intergalactic Other to communicate with mankind' is enough for us to wonder if taking LSD has done something to his mental faculties."[16]
Others had trouble with his self-consciously cosmic literary style. "I suffered hallucinatory agonies of my own while reading his shrilly ecstatic prose," Peter Conrad wrote in The New York Times in a 1993 review of Mr. McKenna's book True Hallucinations.[16]
But some praised his "scholarly" approach. Biologist Richard Evans Schultes, of Harvard University, wrote in American Scientist in a 1993 review of McKenna's book Food of the Gods, that it was; "a masterpiece of research and writing" and that it "should be read by every specialist working in the multifarious fields involved with the use of psychoactive drugs." Concluding that "It is, without question, destined to play a major role in our future considerations of the role of the ancient use of psychoactive drugs, the historical shaping of our modern concerns about drugs and perhaps about man's desire for escape from reality with drugs."[89]
John Horgan in a 2012 blog post for Scientific American also commented that, Food of the Gods was "a rigorous argument...that mind-expanding plants and fungi catalyzed the transformation of our brutish ancestors into cultured modern humans."[8]
His outpouring of unique thoughts was a marvel to many. "To write him off as a crazy hippie is a rather lazy approach to a man not only full of fascinating ideas but also blessed with a sense of humor and self-parody," Tom Hodgkinson wrote in The New Statesman and Society in 1994.[16]
Some found his writing captivating. Mark Jacobson said of True Hallucinations, in a 1992 issue of Esquire Magazine that, "it would be hard to find a drug narrative more compellingly perched on a baroquely romantic limb than this passionate Tom-and-Huck-ride-great-mother-river-saga of brotherly bonding," adding "put simply, Terence is a hoot!"[6]
Wired called him a "charismatic talking head" who was "brainy, eloquent, and hilarious"[26] and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead also said that he was "the only person who has made a serious effort to objectify the psychedelic experience."[16]
___________________________________
2012: Prophet of nonsense #8: Terence McKenna– Novelty theory and timewave zero
https://haecceities.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/2012-prophet-of-nonsense-8-terence-mckenna%E2%80%93-novelty-theory-and-timewave-zero/
Posted by: Johan Normark | June 16, 2009
Why is it so difficult for the prophets of nonsense to even get some basic facts correct? As shown in my post on Calleman, his cycles do not fit world history. Here is yet another example of pseudo-scientists. Terrence McKenna was an ethnobotanist who loved numerology and as we have seen before, numerology is one these prophets main tools. They constantly claim that they have come up with an exact formula of cyclic repetition and the like, but as any person with basic knowledge of world history can see, these cycles never fit the data.
What was McKenna’s “great” idea then? According to McKenna’s novelty theory (apparently inspired by the important philosopher Alfred Norton Whitehead which definitely should not be associated with this New Age mumbo jumbo). Like Whitehead, McKenna argues that the world is constantly changing, creating novelty. I have no problem with that idea so far, but then McKenna goes astray and his association to spiritualism, shamanism, and pseudoscience is revealed. When “novelty” is graphed over time, a fractal waveform known as timewave zero emerges. The graph shows at what times novelty is supposedly increasing or decreasing.
The timewave itself is a mathematical formula created from McKenna’s interpretation and analysis of numerical patterns in the I Ching, an oracular tool based on Chinese philosophy and associated with magic. McKenna used I Ching to show that the events of any given time are recursively related to the events of other times Things change at an increasing speed and reach a point where change is all that exist and when will this occur? What do you think? Of course, on the 21st of December 2012. However, apparently McKenna’s followers claim that since he and his brother came up with the 2012 date from another source than the Maya calendar this supposedly support the idea that the world ends or is transformed on this date, since having proof from more than one source is better.
I-Ching is composed of 64 hexagrams, which are six-line figures. Here we run into numbers, numbers and more numbers, just to confuse or amaze the reader. If you multiply 6 and 64 you get 384 which is very close (but not exact…) to 13 lunar months (383.8978 days). Well, if you multiply 64 with 384 (not 383.8978) you get 67 years, 104.25 days which supposedly is the length of 6 minor sunspot cycles (11.2 years each). But, for what reason are 13 lunar months associated with sunspot cycles? They are clearly different astronomical phenomena. Of course, multiply the last period by 64 and you get roughly 4306 years (2 Zodiac ages). This must then be multiplied by 6 (not 64) to reach the time period of 25836 years which is the precession of the equinoxes (which is popular among other 2012 prophets).
McKenna choose the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as the starting point for his last 67.29 year cycle (as you know, all prophets believe they live in the final era, so it is and has always been). At the end of this final cycle the novelty should reach a singular point beyond which we do not know what will happen. This should happen in mid November 2012. But since this was close enough to the end of Baktun 12 in the Long Count calendar (December 21, 2012) he decided to adjust the end date so that it fit this calendar! This means than that the last of these 67.29 years periods did not begin with a major event like the atomic bomb, but with a more general idea, such as the end of WWII…
McKenna used the fractal pattern on the rest of the world history as well. By subtracting fractals of 67.29 years from 2012 he claimed to reveal the important phases of world history. As mentioned 2012-67 is 1945 (the end of WW II). OK, so far it roughly fits, but that is about it. The next period must be 64 times longer: 2012-4,306 (67×64) is 2294 BC, when historical time is assumed to have begun. Not really, historical figures and dates are known several centuries earlier in Sumer and Egypt. The next date is 2012-(4,306×64) and here we reach the date of 273,572 BC, supposedly when Homo sapiens emerged. Current estimates place the emergence of Homo sapiens to around 200,000 BC. McKenna’s estimate is over 70,000 years wrong. The next phase is 64 times longer and here we end up at roughly 17,6 million years ago, which he claims is the height of the age of mammals. But, why is such a “height” of relevance? How do you measure this height? The age of mammals is for sure a mammalcentric perspective. There are and were far more species of birds, fish, not to mention insects than there were mammals 17,6 million years ago. Would not the extinction of dinosaurs 64 million years ago be a more relevant “date” since it has number 64 in it? Anyway, the next fractal began 1,128 billion years ago and this he claims is when life began on Earth. This is not even near…
Why do these prophets of nonsense not fit the actual major “events” in the universe or on Earth into their numbers? Why is not the Big Bang included, the formation of the Earth, the Cambrian explosion of life forms, the first terrestrial tetrapods, the first mammals, the extinction of dinosaurs, early hominids, emergence of Paleolithic art, agriculture, urbanization, industrialization, etc.? Some prophets may include one of these “events” but will exclude others since they may not fit their formula.
One could of course argue that at the time when McKenna wrote this nonsense, some of the dates mentioned above were accepted knowledge by science (which they were not, but let us just believe so for a moment). But since he based his fractal timewave on ancient wisdom, he should have gotten it right from the start, and not adjust it. The ancients are always right, remember that…
---
By: Brian Akers on May 10, 2011
Wow, a significant, apparently enduring discussion (of a “prophet of nonsense”).
I’m sure you know of McK’s “time wave” (a faux, or purported, theory) link to 2012ism. And its dissection by mathematician Watkins (if not, see:
http://www.realitysandwich.com/watkins_objection).
In case of possible interest, may I alert you to a more recent, related article at Reality Sandwich: CONCERNING TERENCE MCKENNA’S STONED APES. If you don’t know of it you might enjoy.
---
By: triwx on November 22, 2011
It was fascinating for me to read this discussion because I am a great McKenna fan despite my conviction that 2012 prophecies (as well as other McKenna ideas such as stoned ape hypothesis, mushrooms being aliens, songs of shamans on ayuhaska vibrating DNA etc..) are pure nonsense. I can therefore identify with both sides of the argument. This post is my humble attempt to establish middle ground.
There are few maxims summing up his philosophy.
Three Maxims of Terence McKenna's Philosophy
Maxim 1: Culture is your operating system and it is not your friend.
This is elementary experience of everyone who has done enough psychedelics. Whenever one is high enough there comes a moment of crystal clear realization that: religions are full of shit, government is full of shit, schools are full of shit, boss at work is full of shit, parents are full of shit, TV is full of shit, american dream is full of shit and activist groups saying that it all can be fixed if we just … are full of shit. We are all to some degree hypnotized into not-thinking by ordinary unquestioned cultural assumptions and prejudices. Out of laziness and conformity we outsource our consciousness to society which does not manage it to our interests but to the interests of whoever has money to pay for commercial time. McKenna was not a conspiracy theorist. He did not believe that this is the result of deliberate attempt to dumb us down by some malevolent force. He simply articulated realization that our believes, institutions and habits of behavior are not divinely revealed or carefully thought out by enlighten sages but the result of impersonal forces of memetical evolution shaped by political propaganda, product marketing and old religions. The task is to liberate oneself from this matrix into full human consciousness.
Epistemology corresponding to this view is the idea that the data stream of culture is poisoned, so one should distrust what one is told and rely on immediate individual experience.
The problem with this is that it is not easy to even discover all of ones unspoken assumptions and it is much harder to openly critically evaluate them. Our ego and the narratives which we use to rationalize our failings and justify our actions rely on them. If fundamental assumptions of our life are being questioned we feel as if our whole life is being questioned. We hysterically and violently cling to our myths. This is where the second maxim comes useful.
Maxim 2: Unless you are afraid you did to much, you didn’t do enough.
Psychedelics bring about radical questioning of every assumption you hold dear. The elaborate structures of rationalizations melt away. Your religion, politics, and bullshit you convinced yourself about other people dissolve. Your ego dissolves. You are exposed to yourself for who you are. You do not see your-self as Mr. John Smith PhD. employee of the year 2006, citizen number 780323/3287. You see yourself as consciousness incarnate in an ape body. You feel the experience of the present moment and rejoice or despair depending on what you see.
The obvious problem is that psychedelic experience does not only dissolve bad habits but the good ones as well. It cripples discipline, determination, focus and that sort of things. When you question fundamental assumptions, you expose yourself to the danger of being tricked into believing things you would normally never fall for. Psychedelics may liberate you from Christianity but they may also “liberate” you from critical reason which protects you from getting caught into Hare Krishna.
Psychedelics are artificially induced madness that recedes after few hours. The idea of usefulness of madness is similar to the notion of creative destruction in economics, or to the notion of annealing in metallurgy. You introduce temporary chaos into the system to shake it out off lethargy in local optimum.
McKenna used to illustrate this process by parable about a fisherman. Fisherman leaves his island (ordinary culture) and goes to the ocean (madness/psychedelic trip) to catch fish (innovative ideas). He should not bother catching small fish (“did you notice that your little finger fits exactly your nose hole”) nor should he try to catch some behemoth that would tear his nets and wreck his boat (“I am the messiah that has come to save the humanity”) but he should aim for the mid-sized fish, bring them home to his island and prepare the fish diner for his village.
According to McKenna this is precisely the artistic process. True art always contains element of insanity. The artist visits in his inspiration mystical worlds where he communicates with his muses and then he organizes the mater of the real world to create aesthetic extravaganza. What ties this back to the beginning is the third maxim.
Maxim 3: The world is made of language.
The fabric out of which the web of cultural assumptions is made is the same fabric out of which the artist makes his work. Language is the magical capacity which makes humans unique among other animals. It is our contact with transcendence. Language creates artificial realities (fictional worlds that exist only as narratives). Artist is a writer of artificial realities. Ordinary person caught in the culture is a character in artificial reality of someone else. This is the difference between a chess figure and a chess master, between a brick and an architect. The point of McKennas philosophy is not to get caught in the walls you build and when you do to break free with the hammer of psilocybin.
The problem I see with him is that he falsely conceived of science as one of those oppressive forces of society out of which it is desirable to liberate oneself rather then seeing it as an instrument of liberation. Therefore he did not feel to be tied by the canon of science and freely speculated ignoring it whenever it suited him. This accounts for the rotten fish he brought on our island. He believed in astrology, alchemy, aliens and that the world will end in 2012. Serious flaw one might say but I find even the instances of when he was wrong useful as metaphors. The world will not end in 2012 but the growth of novelty to the point of singularity can be understood as a metaphor for technological singularity. Human species did not originate by consumption of psilocybin literally but it originated by apes developing ability to contact the worlds of imagination which can be taken as consumption of psilocybin metaphorically. Mushrooms are not from other planet but they expose one to the out-of-this-world experiences. He did not speak with the mushroom when he ate it but why not personify the hallucinated voice as that of the mushroom speaking to him.
He provided insightful social commentary of the sort you will not find on TV or in newspapers. He was a useful source of solid practical advice on how to take psychedelics properly. He had incredible gift to use precisely appropriate word to make deep point. He indeed was a genius.
Let us celebrate 21.12.2012 in remembrance of him by heroic dose of psilocybin mushrooms.