Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic
 salon. So how are all of you today? Sorry it's been so long since I've been here in the salon
 to get another McKenna talk out, but I'll tell you about that story a little later. You know,
 it is good to have you back here again though for another installment of Terrence McKenna's walk in
 the valley of novelty. And I think you're really going to enjoy this one. Among other things Terrence
 does here on this clip I'm playing is part of his famous rap about the transcendental object at the
 end of time. I know most of you have heard that once or twice before and so this one I think you'll
 enjoy. It's always a little different each time. And as you know, this is from a workshop that
 Terrence held in the summer of 1998. At least you know that if you've heard the previous two podcasts
 where the first two parts of this workshop were podcasts. And this part by the way begins with his
 thoughts about the year 2012. So keep in mind that this was in 1998 he's saying this.
 And he called the year 2012 a year where there could be a possible cultural singularity.
 And I point this out because the word cultural attached to singularity because lately there's
 been some discussion on the net about Terrence's, they think Terrence's misunderstanding of what
 they see as a technological or scientific or mathematical singularity. You know the criticism
 I think is mainly coming from you know the PhD math and physics guys who are using the term much
 more precisely than I think Terrence intended when he spoke about cultural singularity. You know
 more as a poetic term I think than as a scientific one. So you scientific types out there hey
 loosen up a bit you know have a have a talk or two and listen to how a bard and not a scientist
 sees these interesting times that we now find ourselves in.
 Now enslave yourself to the machine.
 Can you expand on the 2012 date and this whole idea what's going to be happening in your
 idea? Well I talked this morning about how 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
 which informs the whole history of the universe on all scales chemical, biological, cultural, etc.
 is accelerating, speeding up. And it seems as if what wants to happen is the whole
 cosmos wants to change into information or put another way in a geometric model all points want
 to become connected. The thing is achieved through connectivity. The path of complexity to its goals
 is through connecting things together. Well if that's true then 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. And if that's what the universe is trying to do
 to overcome its dissipate state, its spread out state and somehow function as a unitary monad,
 then this point does not lie too far ahead of us in time given the acceleration rates of all these
 technical processes. So at least locally. So on one level I think there is a cultural singularity.
 A cultural singularity, what I mean by that is a place in our cultural development where we can't
 predict or understand what will happen to us. A kind of flip point if you want or doorway if you
 want or revelation if you want. And it's built in to the structure of space and time. It's that
 novelty and its emergence is now operating at such a fine scale that it's actually reflected in the
 lives of individual people. The human adventure has become the cutting edge of cosmic destiny.
 But it won't always be so. It will actually move through the human domain and into smaller and more
 rapid and compressed domains of concrescence and probably in our lifetimes. And what will this
 mean or what will it look like? It seems to me it's just not possible to say because we're too
 far away from it. Even though it's only 14 years in the future if it's in 2012. Those 14 years are
 going to be so mutational, so transformational that right now in time we can't see around the
 corner. We're summoning strange helpers to our aid. The machines that we had such confidence in
 controlling are actually a kind of intellect of some sort that is alive and with us in the
 historical continuum and evolving at a far faster rate than we are. And what all this leads to and
 how it works is very, very difficult to predict. And I'm not a paranoid. I don't see, I don't,
 I think it's very difficult to predict. I think we wished for transformation. Western civilization
 built it into its cultural agenda. Science delivered far more than we ever dreamed in
 terms of understanding of matter and energy and space and time. And now under the aegis of market
 capitalism where everything is in a state of furious competition, somebody is going to put
 something together that is just going to completely redefine and rewrite the nature of reality itself.
 And my bet is it will be some kind of a technology. It may, it could be a drug, it could be a machine.
 I would be nice to think that it might be a technique or a teaching, but just looking at
 the history of the human race, I'll bet you it's some kind of technology/drug type thing
 that is just going to be plugged in to us and our consciousness and our aspirations.
 And it may already be here. It may be the internet. It may be nanotechnology. It may be
 biotechnology and cloning and quantum teleportation and virtual reality and all the rest of this. I
 mean, we are just at the brink of taking these various pieces of the god magician puzzle and
 putting them together and figuring out, well, what can you do? What do you do if you can do anything?
 I mean, that's really the question at the end of history. Once you have overcome all limitation,
 what is the human agenda? Yeah?
 Do you believe then that this is something that we're just,
 we're observing or we actually play a part in its development? So what is the purpose of these
 hallucinogenic experiences? Is it to get information so we can influence the outcome or are we just
 watching? No, I think we're more than watching. I think we spin it. We're the spin doctors of
 the thing. In other words, if there is a prophecy which must be fulfilled, it's a kind of general
 prophecy. Something like, "And man shall become dirigible in the last decades of the, or the first
 decade of the third millennium." It's general. In other words, what does that mean, "Man becomes
 dirigible." We turn into airships. We become oblate spheroids. We what, what, what, what does
 it mean? Well, that's open to human definition through specific acts of creation. The levels of
 novelty or habit in any given moment will be fulfilled, but how they're fulfilled is a matter
 of human decision. An example which maybe makes this clearer is from statistics. For example, we
 know that in the next 12 months, between eight and 11 people will jump off the Golden Gate Bridge,
 but who those people will be is surely not decided today. They have the right, through
 the experiences they meet along the way, to either include or disinclude themselves in that
 group of victims. So in that same way, I think the future, the details are ours to fabricate.
 The great landscape over which the city of time will be built is given by natural law.
 And where we are in time is very near this attractor. How, and then people sometimes object
 to this and say, "Well, don't you think it's weird, a weird coincidence that we happen to be so near
 the attractor when presumably it could have been throughout time?" Well, no, I don't think it's
 weird. I think the strangeness of our condition signifies the nearness of the attractor. That
 the reason our world is so accelerated, the reason all effects are being smeared toward Omega,
 is because of the nearby presence of this cultural black hole, this singularity of technology and
 biological intent that is feeding backwards into time these apocalyptic images. And I would predict
 that between now and 2012 there will be ever more hysteria, prophecy, prediction, revelation,
 squirrely teachings, people bawling out their strange despair on every street corner. Because
 in the collective unconscious of which each of us shares a part, the thing at the end of time
 is spinning like a club ornament, like a Christmas tree ball, like a bar ornament. And it's throwing
 off scintillations, which are distorted images of itself. The transcendental object at the end
 of time infects the history that precedes it with the images of its approaching unfoldment.
 This is what I mean when I say history is the shockwave of eschatology. The presence of history
 on this planet means that this thing is moving beneath the surface, this protean form that when
 it manifests it will shed the institutions of history the way a butterfly sheds a chrysalis
 when it breaks out of its metamorphosis. But the period of latency, the period inside the shell
 for this metamorphosing super-creature is the 25,000 year season that we call human history.
 The fact that it's the same period of time as the precession of the equinoxes,
 I don't know, don't ask me, fortune or coincidence. Yeah.
 Terence, I'm interested in your reaction to the recent announcement by astronomers
 that more than 90% of the universe is composed of something called dark matter.
 Well, this has been a problem in astrophysics for a while. What it is, is to state the problem
 differently, the universe seems to hold together far better than it should, given the amount of
 matter that we can observe. In other words, given the amount of matter we can observe, our physics
 of gravitation tells us that the galaxies should fling themselves to pieces and everything should
 assume a kind of uniformity. Why doesn't it do that? This is called the dark matter problem.
 My thinking on this is this is a good problem for novelty theory to cut its teeth on,
 because I don't believe that 90% of the matter in the universe goes unobserved. I think the neutrino
 has a slight mass and that that accounts for a significant portion of the unobserved mass
 in the universe, and the rest of it, it's not that there's mass missing, it's that there's a law
 missing. And behold, what law is it? It's the law of novelty on one level, because if you believe
 there is something called novelty working at extragalactic and galactic scales, then that
 answers your question, why does the Milky Way tend to stay the Milky Way? The answer is because
 as a spiral galaxy, it's a more complex organism, a more complex structure, than it is as a dissipated
 homogeneous mass. So it's that, and if this were proven, you would actually have, begin to work
 toward a quantified measurement of the strength of the novelty field, because you would just,
 you would take the known mass of the universe, you would subtract the newly discovered mass of
 the neutrino, and the amount that was left, you would proclaim as the novelty constant,
 which is the constant which then causes large-scale structures to persist through time
 for no other reason than that they represent higher orders of organization. Recently, the most
 recent ultra-revolution in astrophysics, which means in the last six weeks these days, is the
 discovery that there seems to be some kind of repulsive force, a kind of anti-gravity, if you
 will, that the universe seems to be expanding slightly faster than the laws of physics say it
 should, and they've gone back to some work Einstein did and rejected in the 20s, where he actually
 hypothesized this anti-gravitational factor. This, if proven, would be a tremendous, could be
 arguably a tremendous piece of evidence in favor of novelty theory, because one of the things novelty
 theory says is the universe never goes back to its initial conditions. Well, in astrophysics,
 there's been this debate, does it or doesn't it? If gravity, if the force of gravity is at a certain
 level, then eventually the outward expansion of matter in the universe would be halted,
 and the whole thing would implode upon itself. The latest findings indicate that will not happen,
 that the universe grows outward into infinity forever, never retracing its steps and always
 elaborating new forms and new emergent properties. Let's see, I've had an experience on drugs,
 and I've read about it, other people have had a similar experience, which is that
 what's presented to you as perception takes the form of a series of stills.
 So this resonates for me with some teachings in Buddhism and in Sufism, that basically what
 appears to us as manifestation is actually coming through as a series of stills, and we kind of
 glue it together with our mentation of it. And I wondered if you had come across this,
 or you have any comments on this, or you think of it as just a straight phenomenon,
 or is it of some cosmological import? Well, it's certainly interesting that film
 and talkies and all that really got rolling in the '20s, which is when quantum theory really
 got rolling. And quantum theory is on one level a theory that reality is delivered as a series of
 stills, you know, this mysterious quantum between which then there is some great incomprehensible
 gulf, and these things arrive this way. I know what you mean. I have seen the slideshow,
 the series of hallucinations where it's click, and this thing hangs in space, no movement whatsoever,
 click, weird and interesting. But on the other hand, I've seen all kinds of weird
 themes and variations on simply a visionary movie. That's one kind of hallucination.
 For instance, I sometimes see text, and then as I watch the text, the level of sense and nonsense
 drifts. Words flip over, letters turn themselves upside down, words that made sense are replaced
 by gibberish. Well, now what kind of a hallucination is that? You have to be a printhead.
 I mean, could a Wittoto have a hallucination like that, where text was going through these
 variations? Ralph has described to me mathematical hallucinations, you know, drifting parentheses
 and factorial signatures and all this stuff moving around, and you're watching it and you
 understand it somehow, you know. I've had those things like when you're a little kid and you
 get it in a cereal box and you pull it one way and the lion is in the cage, you push it one way
 and the bars become what the foreground reverses and becomes the background, and now there's a
 tiger in the cage, and I describe the hallucinations with the sliders on them. And so, I don't know,
 I think it's all in everything. You cannot conceive of information in a way that the hallucinogens
 then can't see your bid and raise the ante. What is it about the I Ching that qualified you
 in the eyes of the entity that it revealed the time wave? I have a sense of an attractor.
 I see what the I Ching is, but I don't see the relationship.
 Well, here it is in a nutshell, or a not-shell, as James Joyce said. I was not a sinologist,
 I was not a scholar of Confucian or Han Dynasty occultism. The good news is,
 the part of the I Ching that I looked at is older than all of that. What my attention was drawn to,
 is the only way I can put it, by this teaching entity was the sequence of the King Wen sequence.
 Little detail, King Wen is a person who may or may not have been a real person who supposedly
 lived around 1150 BC, and he got into some political trouble and he was put into prison,
 and while he was in prison he arranged the sequences of the hexagrams of the I Ching
 into a sequence, which is called the King Wen sequence, and which is the sequence traditionally
 used in China ever since. So the teaching voice said, "Look at the sequence."
 And the first question, it was posed as a series of questions, a dialogue between a teacher and
 a student. The question it posed for me is, "Is the sequence a sequence, or is it simply a
 traditional jumble?" Now what would be the difference? Well, if it's a sequence, then
 there's a rule that makes it, that orders it. If it's just a jumble, then there is no rule
 that orders it, it's just like a randomly shuffled pack of cards. So I was like, this is in over my
 head kind of stuff. I was basically just an Asian traveling freak. But I looked at what's called
 the first order of difference. The first order of difference is how many lines change as you
 go from one hexagram to the next. Not a very deep concept. I mean, the first hexagram is all
 solid lines. The second hexagram is all broken lines. Hexagrams have six lines. Therefore,
 what is the first order of difference as you go from hexagram one to two?
 Six. Six. All lines change. So I graphed this, and to make a long story short, I discovered
 artificial arrangements. I discovered that these hexagrams had been arranged to cause certain
 results to occur. That somebody had gone in there with an intent to achieve certain mathematical
 conservation effects. And I worked on it and worked on it, and eventually what came out of it
 was a fractal algorithm, a wave for you and I. And this wave is like a stock market graph,
 except that it's not showing the price of something. It's showing the ebb and flow
 of habit and novelty. And when the wave moves upward, habit, entropy, conservation, recidivism
 is increasing. And when the wave moves down, novelty, innovation, information, connectivity,
 anti-entropic process is increasing. And the idea was that this would allow an understanding of
 history, that you would be able to lay the wave over the past. And when you've got a perfect
 matchup with past revolutions, breakthroughs, atrocities, migrations, language changes,
 and so forth, you would just propagate the wave forward into the future, and you would have not
 only a theory of history, you would have a theory of future time. And so all this was done,
 to make a long story short, and the nature of the mathematical object being used was that it was a
 damped oscillation, or it was a self-limiting cycle. So it didn't just go on and on to infinity,
 it actually had a finite end. Well, the big surprise was when we got it matched up to history
 in the way that we felt was the best way, the way that most true to the most events in the intuition
 of the largest number of people kind of argument, then we went to see where is the end point? Where
 is the singularity? Thinking that it could be hundreds of years in the future, thousands of
 years in the future, millions of years in the future. This was in 1975. Discovered, no, it's
 38 years in the future. So that was the first surprise, that the wave, which seemed to work so
 well on the past, burdened itself with a near-term prediction that seemed highly unlikely.
 The second surprise came some six weeks later when somebody pointed out that to the day,
 to the day, we had calculated our way to the end of the Mayan calendar. Now that is weird, folks.
 The only thing I have in common with the Mayan calendar is that we both, I and the Maya,
 took psychedelic mushrooms. Well, is it so woo-woo that it's actually as though there's a barcode
 in there, and if you get deep enough in and pass all the gates and pass all the passwords and get
 to the sanctum sanctorum, that then is revealed this axis point of time, whether you are doing
 it a thousand years ago or two thousand years ago, even as the Maya did it, or whether you're doing
 it 38 years in advance of the moment. This is the message, the mathematical, astronomical,
 Pythagorean download that the mushroom seems to give a lot of people. I mean, I don't say if you
 take mushrooms you will find yourself caught up in the dynamics of the Mayan calendar, but you might,
 many have. I certainly, you know, I'm more rational than I may sound here. I'm a good person to be the
 message for such a squirrely idea, because I doubt, I know absolutely how flaky this sounds,
 how unlikely, how lightly anchored. So I'm not here to found a cult, I just had a very wiggy
 experience that unlike, you know, the problem with most people's really wiggy experiences
 is that it never gets down to the nitty-gritty. And by the nitty-gritty I basically mean a
 mathematical formula that you can then throw up on a blackboard and say to the experts,
 "This is what God said to me, is it horseshit or what is it?" Usually what happens in these
 self-risen kundalini or psychotic break or shamanic whatever, or psychedelic runaway states,
 is that there is a revelation and it's quirky and it's personalistic and it's usually
 messianic and it's unanchored. So people put you away because they just say, "Well, you have no
 proof that you're the Kvitz Haiderach sent from Arcturus to lead mankind to milk and honey. You
 just say this and you say it too much and too loudly and inappropriately and so now we're
 going to drop a net over you." The good thing in my view of what happened to me is it actually
 got down to a mathematical proposition, a law, a hypothesized law, which may turn out to be false,
 but it was a contender. You understand what I mean? It played in the highest class of competition
 of all, which is in the realm of formal mathematical theory, as did Pythagoras, as did some
 of Plato's work. If you're interested in this kind of thing, read the 10th book of the Republic,
 The Myth of Ur. Do any of you recall what's going on there? This is Plato, he's at this banquet and
 then the conversation takes this sudden left turn and he tells this story about this guy, Ur,
 who was a soldier and died and was dead eight days and then came back and then he lays out this
 rap, one of the most puzzling passages in the entire Platonic corpus, The Myth of Ur, and it's
 this mathematical treatise about this thing called the spindle of necessity, which is the ratios are
 given and how it's something inside something else and something turns one way and something
 turns another way and the ratios are like this and like this. This is one of the most argued about
 passages in the ancient literature. What is being described? What does it mean? Well, it's another
 one of these mathematical downloads. I am still willing to argue that what I put down about the
 I Ching is true or that a truth is very close to the surface in all of that. Think about the I Ching
 for a moment. This is one of the world's oldest intellectual artifacts. This is a mathematical
 notation system of some sort for the purpose of creating a physics of time, a phenomenological
 description of the order of time based on human observation. And it arises in a completely non-Western
 context. It arises in a context we presume of shamanism and proto-Taoist values. And I think
 that what happened was that people with a very different set of agendas than those of Western
 civilization chased after an understanding of time in the same way that we chased after an
 understanding of matter. And the way you understand time is not by building enormous instruments or
 clashing elements together. No. Time, the essence of understanding time, lies in understanding
 organism. And so it yields to a very low-tech observational style of natural science, which we
 call yoga, by looking inside the body and the mind as you still gross physiological functions,
 subtler and subtler shells of vibration and emanation and physiological activity come into
 view. And eventually, if you, my hypothesis is that eventually if you do this with sufficient
 care and attention, you get down to some kind of level where you're actually at the level of the
 primal quantum mechanical vibrations that lie behind everything. In other words, you are in the
 realm of the primal patterns, the primal patterns whose activity downloads and eventuates as the
 macro-physical world. In other words, you're in the realm of the butterfly's wing and the chaos
 theory that says the butterfly's wing can start the cascade that leads to the hurricane. Well,
 these people who penetrated to this realm mapped it phenomenologically. They said time is a thing
 of elements in the same way that Western science discovered matter is a thing of elements.
 Said time is made of elements. Well, then the question immediately becomes for the rational
 mind, how many elements? A million? Ten thousand? One hundred? The answer is observe, make notes,
 observe similarities, observe differences, mathematically analyze your data. The answer is
 64. Time comes in 64 irreducible species and the hexagrams of the yi qing are simply a way of
 noting and assigning each one a distinct gestaltung for purposes of manipulation. And in the same way
 that plutonium is not sulfur and tin is not oxygen, these species of time display properties.
 Time is not as Newton thought pure duration, some kind of intellectual abstraction necessary
 for a serial universe. Time is a real thing. It's as palpable as electricity. It's as real as
 radiation. It's a thing. And so then what's going on is that objects which arise in time
 carry the impress in their structure of the medium in which they arose.
 And so organism becomes a microcosmic downloading, a mapping of the architectonics of being.
 I don't find this a cult at all. This seems to me quite reasonable. Let me give you an analogy
 to help you understand what I'm saying here. Think of a sand dune. Notice that when you
 envision a sand dune that it looks like wind. The thing in your mind looks like wind. Well,
 now let's analyze what's going on here. The sand dune looks like wind because sand dunes are made
 by wind. Okay, what is wind? Wind is a pressure gradient phenomenon that is variable in time.
 What is a sand dune? It's a download, a flattening. It's a one-dimensional picture of the wind.
 If you had a good computer and you had a sand dune, you could compute
 backward from the sand dune to the speed of the wind. Well, now taking that image,
 think of it this way. Think of the grains of sand as genes. Think of the wind
 as 500 or 700 million years of time moving those genes around, blowing them around,
 recombining them, breaking them apart, pushing them together. At the end of that time,
 life would bear the imprint of the medium in which it came to be. So it is in fact not a
 leap of occult faith that the human organism would have impressed upon it the categories
 that shape time because we arose in time. And you keep talking about biology and you talk about
 the leap from biology and the culture and you talk about the medium. What do you think of the
 internet as the wind or the medium and that the mnemonic qualities that are occurring in culture,
 tying into the genetic codes like biology does, is the real medium for unfolding what I mentioned
 to you earlier, the global intuition. It seems like all of this stuff is fitting together these days.
 Well, there's this thing called the two to the sixth n rule. I'm not sure that I can quote it
 directly, but Benjamin Worf figured this out. And it's that in any lexical tree, no category on any
 level can contain more than two to the sixth n members, in other words, 64. So in a way, we're
 dimensionally imprisoned inside this because our minds work this way and so do our bodies. DNA,
 like the I Ching, runs on a code based on 64. There are 64 codons coding for the various amino acids
 that make up all the proteins that organize organic nature. Well, so you have the I Ching,
 which categorizes time as having 64 categories. You have the DNA, which arose as the most elegant
 expression of complexity in time, running on 64 categories. Then you have the human brain running
 on the platform of animal organization run by DNA. And we discover through Worf's law, the two to
 the sixth n rule, that our lexical categories are ruled by these same limitations. So it appears,
 you know, what I said earlier this morning, that life is undergoing some kind of conquest of
 geometry. And I almost picture it like protoplasm flowing into a crystal landscape. We conquer this
 geometry by assuming its shape in some sense. So it transforms us even as we overrun it.
 What a thought. What a thought. It transforms us even as we overrun it. You know, I guess the
 question is, are we becoming our machines or are machines becoming us? That's the real question
 today. And did you catch the part about 2012 where he said, we spin it, we're the spin doctors of this
 thing. The details are ours to fabricate. So if that's the case, then hey, let's start fabricating
 this thing in a more sustainable and less fearful way. Actually, I guess I know I can tell you what
 to do to help our species prepare for some difficult times that I think are just ahead.
 But I can tell you to follow your heart. You know, I'm sure that deep inside, you know,
 what's the best road for you to take. And it may not be the easiest road, but you know,
 it's the one with heart. Well, I hope you enjoyed hearing more of Terrence McKenna today. I got a
 couple more of these to go and I'll try to get them out as soon as I can. I guess I'll tell you
 that I'm in the process right now of moving to a new place. And so I won't be able to get a new
 podcast out every week, just like I'd like to, but I hope you'll bear with me until I can get
 resettled again. Anyway, thanks for being with us here today in the psychedelic salon. And
 thanks again to Chateau Hayouk for the use of their fine music. And for now, this is Lorenzo
 signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.
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