Terence McKenna

Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was an American writer mainly on the subject of psychedelic drugs and their role in society, and existence beyond the physical body. He was also a public speaker, psychonaut, ethnobotanist, art historian, and self-described anarchist, anti-materialist, environmentalist, feminist, Platonist and skeptic. During his lifetime he was noted for his knowledge of psychedelics, metaphysics, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, mysticism, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, biology, geology, physics, phenomenology, and his concept of novelty theory.


Terence McKenna -- Why Drugs Are Illegal




Terence McKenna -- End Times




Terence McKenna -- Birthing of the Soul




Terence McKenna -- State of the Stone

Terence talks about how the teachings of science compares with those of Alchemy and the psychedelic experience. Recorded in 1995.




Terence McKenna -- Culture Is Not Your Friend




Terence McKenna -- The Psychedelic Experience




Terence McKenna --Dreaming Awake at the End of Time 1998




Terence McKenna -- Reclaim Your Mind




Terence McKenna -- The Last Word
This film is dedicated to the work and play of Terrence McKenna, on the fractal edge of time, 1946 - 2000.




The "Stoned Ape" hypothesis of human evolution

McKenna hypothesized that as the North African jungles receded and gave way to savannas and grasslands near the end of the most recent ice age, a branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the forest canopy and began to live in the open areas outside of the forest. There they experimented with new varieties of foods as they adapted, physically and mentally, to their new environment. McKenna also called last glacial period hominids "fruit eating" in what he calls a gender-equal "paradise [...] the golden age of humanity" that he dated as ending 10,000 years ago. However, the most recent ice age, also known as the Last glacial period that stretched from 110,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, when meat-eating, biologically evolved Homo-Sapiens were already in Europe. Capability for language, present in the human FOXP2 gene was already developed.

According to McKenna's hypothesis, among the new food items found in this new environment were psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing near the dung of ungulate herds that occupied the savannas and grasslands at that time. To support this hypothesis, McKenna referenced the research of Roland L. Fisher. The cited work by Fischer does not mention paleo-anthropology, Africa, or the ice ages. Echoing Fisher on the effects of psychedelics, McKenna claimed that enhancement of visual acuity was an effect of psilocybin at low doses, and supposed that this would have conferred an adaptive advantage. He also argued that the effects of slightly larger doses, including sexual arousal, and in still larger doses, ecstatic hallucinations and glossolalia — gave selective evolutionary advantages to members of those tribes who partook of it. There were many changes caused by the introduction of this psychoactive mushroom to the primate diet. McKenna hypothesizes, for instance, that synesthesia (the blurring of boundaries between the senses) caused by psilocybin led to the development of spoken language: the ability to form pictures in another person's mind through the use of vocal sounds.

About 12,000 years ago, further climate changes removed psilocybin-containing mushrooms from the human diet. McKenna argued that this event resulted in a new set of profound changes in our species as we reverted to the previous brutal primate social structures that had been modified and/or repressed by frequent consumption of psilocybin.

Novelty theory

One of McKenna's favourite topics is Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, according to which, the universe's matter progresses from the state of disorganized complexity to the state of organized complexity:

...the story of the universe is that information, which I call novelty, is struggling to free itself from habit, which I call entropy... and that this process... is accelerating... It seems as if... the whole cosmos wants to change into information... All points want to become connected... The path of complexity to its goals is through connecting things together... You can imagine that there is an ultimate end-state of that process—it's the moment when every point in the universe is connected to every other point in the universe.
—McKenna, Terence ♦ A workshop held in the summer of 1998

The higher the organized complexity of a particle aggregate, the more pronounced its wave-like component:

I've always felt that biology is a strategy, a chemical strategy, for amplifying quantum-mechanical indeterminacy into macrophysical systems called living organisms, and that living organisms somehow work their magic by opening a doorway to the quantum realm through which indeterminacy can come. And I imagine that all nature works like this, with the single exception of human beings, who have been poisoned by language.
—McKenna, Terence ♦ Hazelwood House Trialogue

In its wave-like phase, a quantum does not have a spatial position and exists as an omnipresent momentum identical with time itself:

The imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information.
—McKenna, Terence ♦ A Few Conclusions About Life

In sleep, one is released into the real world, of which the world of waking is only the surface in a very literal geometric sense. There is a plenum—recent experiments in quantum physics tend to back this up—a holographic plenum of information. All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere. Information stands outside of time in a kind of eternity—an eternity that does not have a temporal existence about which one may say, "It always existed." It does not have temporal duration of any sort. It is eternity. We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.
—McKenna, Terence ♦ New Maps of Hyperspace

Just like most of us enjoy a much closer relationship with our television sets than we do with our neighbours, parts of the universe become nonlocally interconnected not directly but through the Earth's biosphere, which acts as the informational hub (due to its amplified virtual, wave-like component—information). When the Earth's biosphere will have accumulated the critical amount of information, the universe will become sufficiently interconnected to turn into a reality-warping Elysium. The hyperspace of the universe's nonlocal information (the "superconducting Overmind") is, by definition, in a single quantum state; in order to fuse with that single quantum state and attain absolute psychokinetic control over the universe, the human species needs to become genetically singular by being reduced to a single couple of the most imaginative people, whose tantric union is the ultimate goal of the universe's existence—the Eschaton:

What is happening to our world is ingression of novelty toward what Whitehead called "concrescence," a tightening gyre. Everything is flowing together. The "autopoetic lapis," the alchemical stone at the end of time, coalesces when everything flows together. When the laws of physics are obviated, the universe disappears, and what is left is the tightly bound plenum, the monad, able to express itself for itself, rather than only able to cast a shadow into physis as its reflection. I come very close here to classical millenarian and apocalyptic thought in my view of the rate at which change is accelerating. From the way the gyre is tightening, I predict that the concrescence will occur soon—around 2012 AD. It will be the entry of our species into hyperspace, but it will appear to be the end of physical laws accompanied by the release of the mind into the imagination. <...> The transition from earth to space will be a staggeringly tight genetic filter, a much tighter filter than any previous frontier has ever been, including the genetic and demographic filter represented by the colonization of the New World. <...> The object at the end of and beyond history is the human species fused into eternal tantric union with the superconducting Overmind/UFO.
—McKenna, Terence ♦ New Maps of Hyperspace

According to McKenna, the final period of the universe's informational evolution began on 6 August 1945 and will end with a point of "maximized novelty" by 22 December 2012:

I’ve been talking about it since 1971, and what’s interesting to me is at the beginning, it was material for hospitalization, now it is a minority viewpoint and everything is on schedule. My career is on schedule, the evolution of cybernetic technology is on schedule, the evolution of a global information network is on schedule. Given this asymptotic curve, I think we’ll arrive under budget, on time, December 22, 2012.
—McKenna, Terence ♦ Approaching Timewave Zero November 1994

(Source: Wikipedia)