Why terence mckenna is wrong

You can also see that novelty is winning. As novelty increases, so does complexity. From the big bang on, McKenna elaborated, "the universe has been complexifying, and each level of complexity achieved becomes the platform for a further ascent into complexity.

So fusion in early stars creates heavy elements and carbon. That becomes the basis for molecular chemistry. That becomes the basis for photobionic life. That becomes the basis for eukaryotic stuff. That becomes the basis for multicellular organisms, that for higher animals, that for culture, that for machine symbiosis, and on and on. Modern science often depicts humanity as an accident, a bit player in the universe, but the timewave theory puts us at center stage in the cosmic drama, according to McKenna.

If he had to define God, he would define it as this novelty-generating process. This definition could serve as the basis for a new moral order. What about Nazi Germany? I asked. Or the hydrogen bomb?

Or AIDS? McKenna acknowledged that novelty may be accompanied by increased suffering and death, but in general progress of some kind emerges out of these catastrophes. It couldn't close its eyes and waltz past that. And it did! So in that sense Nazi Germany, with its science-fiction production values and its silly rhetoric, served a useful purpose. As early as the 's, McKenna sought to make his drug-inspired insight precise and quantitative.

He discovered that fractals, mathematical objects whose patterns repeat themselves at different scales, provide an excellent model of the entropy-novelty dialectic.

So what did McKenna really think would happen on December 21, ? It's a prediction of an unpredictable event. Perhaps we will be visited by an alien spaceship, or an asteroid. But did he really think the apocalypse would arrive on December 21, ?

His model was "just a kind of fantasizing within a certain kind of vocabulary. His eyes glittering, he divulged a "huge--quote unquote—coincidence" involving his prophecy. After he made his prediction that the apocalypse would occur on December 21, , he learned that thousands of years ago Mayan astronomers had predicted the world would end on the very same day.

What does all this mean? Two weeks after I met him in New York, just after he returned to his home in Hawaii, McKenna collapsed in the throes of a seizure. Tests revealed an enormous, malignant tumor deep inside his brain. McKenna's choices were grim. The physician recommended gamma-ray surgery, in which converging beams of radiation bombard the tumor. This treatment might give McKenna another six months to a year, but it could also cause dementia and other side effects. Untreated, McKenna would probably die within a month.

McKenna chose the radiation surgery. He made it past the great millennial cusp, but he went downhill rapidly after that. He died on April 3, , less than eleven months after I met him.

He was During my lunch with McKenna at the Millennium Hotel, I had asked him if all his psychedelic excursions had mitigated his fear of death. His reply revealed how hard-headed he was, beneath all the phantasmagoric blarney. Ultimately, my assumption is that, if I have the opportunity, I would embrace it if I saw it coming.

But I'm scientific in my approach to my own knowledge of death. In other words, DMT may show you what the dying brain is like… But dying is not death. Near-death experiences are not death experiences. To McKenna wonder was the essence of gnosis. As he told me during our interview, all his confabulations were intended to make us see that the world is "a weird, weird place.

To shake us out of our perceptual torpor, McKenna played the holy fool, the crazy wisdom sage. He pushed our faces in the most exotic, lurid inventions of modern science and technology, including superstring theory, time travel, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. He even stooped to speculating about extraterrestrials and to forecasting the end of life as we know it. What elevated him above most other prophets was that he delivered his prophesies with a wink, an implicit acknowledgement that ultimately reality is stranger than we can say or even imagine.

Addendum : Fans of McKenna will want to check out this wonderful series of videos, the Terence McKenna Omnibus, including one in which McKenna says: "Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.

Robby Berman. Share The human brain doubled in power, very suddenly, , years ago. In this article. The Future. Surprising Science. Big Think. I am not saying that ayahuasca is better than peyote, San Pedro, psilocybin or all the rest: further, when you start out, it is valid to experiment with different ones and different healers.

But to really benefit from such entheogens, you have to settle on one and plumb its depths, which, in the case of ayahuasca, involves some turbulent moments, but dealing with them is how you learn. If the above sounds mean-spirited about a man who is widely recognized to have been a visionary, my point is that he had the defects of his virtues and the former may enable us to better assess the latter, which were considerable, stemming from the kind of restless spirit and wide-ranging curiosity which is characteristic of the true pioneers in any field of knowledge.

He was also an explorer of the Colombian Amazon, but so far as I know he and his brother, the ethnobotanist Dennis, missed the opportunity to take ayahuasca when they descended the Putumayo, where it is commonly used and it is not or only exceptionally , a custom of the indigenous inhabitants of the place where they wound up, the remote mission station of La Chorrera.

Scraped off at dawn, the bark exudes a red sap which is then dried and formed into pellets which are ingested. The purpose is a hair-raising voyage to the land of death, in order to spot those who have cast an evil spell on you and then take your revenge on them. Still, that they even knew of the thing was an accomplishment! But when there were so many plant medicines they could have learned about from the natives, why did they settle on a magic mushroom!

Westerners were very rare birds there, especially hippies, so much so that one legacy they did leave is a body of the jungle equivalent of urban legends. One story is that when the bush telegraph alerted the people in that hamlet to their approach, the missionaries rang the bells of the church to warn the locals that hostiles were arriving.

Another is that they did come across ayahuasca but were so clueless and desperate to get stoned that they powdered and smoked the roots of the vine, though, who knows, it may even work! Legends of one sort or another continued to trail Terence. Indeed, he vehemently asserted that the prohibitionists were the immoral ones, since they repressed the human right to a direct communion with the divine in order to uphold a rotten power structure based on money, weapons and brainwashing.

Other long-hair dissenters were saying the same thing at the same time, but few combined such militancy with the sharp reasoning, eloquence and the authority he had as a seasoned psychonaut. Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third-story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve culturally laid down models of behavior.

We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war.