| Mark Dery on 7 Apr 2001 02:10:14 -0000 |
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| [Nettime-bold] Struck By Noetic Lightning |
<Author's Note: Recently, Roy Christopher, editor of FrontWheelDrive
<http://frontwheeldrive.com>, an e-zine devoted to e-cultural crit and
fringe futurism, asked me for a contribution. Since it was the anniversary
of the cyberdelic philosopher Terence McKenna's death, the stars seemed to
be conjoining for a reprint of my interview with McKenna.
Terence McKenna died of brain cancer on April 3, 2000. He was 53. The
following article was originally published in the late, much-lamented
Australian cyberzine _21.C_ ("The Inner Elf: Terence McKenna's Trip,"
_21.C_, #3, 1996) and later reprinted in the _21.C_ anthology _Transit
Lounge_ (Craftsman House, 1997). The centerpiece of the article is a lengthy
interview with McKenna, conducted in two epic sessions in 1996.
As a rule, I maintain a zero-tolerance policy toward newage vacuity. Even
so, I was eager to interview McKenna, whose writings and interviews offered
irrefutable evidence of a prodigious intellect, nimble wit, and sweeping
erudition. I was not disappointed. A foeman worthy of anyone's steel, he
proved to be as generous of spirit as he was intellectually formidable. To
be sure, some of his ideas struck me-still strike me-as refried ectoplasm,
and I'll never understand his indulgence toward the evo-mystical flummery of
Teilhard de Chardin-unreconstructed Lamarckian and Up-With-Eugenics
cheerleader. Nonetheless, I thrilled to his intelligence and was enchanted
by his eloquence, equal parts Irish talespinning, scholarly discourse, and
Joycean riverrun. And that voice: drawling, nasal, sly with irony, suffering
fools graciously if not gladly. Like many, I'll think of Terence on December
12, 2012, the day his Transcendental Object at the End of Time is supposed
to arrive. True unbeliever that I am, I doubt it will. For the present,
however, he only knows.
- Mark Dery>
STRUCK BY NOETIC LIGHTNING: TERENCE MCKENNA MEETS THE MACHINE ELVES OF
HYPERSPACE
On a rainy February evening in 1967, fueled by the mind- morphing
hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine (DMT), Terence McKenna's ontological warp
drive engaged, leaving a contrail of frozen light where his ego used to be.
James Joyce would have dubbed the event an "epiphany." The psychologist
Abraham Maslow would have called it a "peak experience." The sci-fi writer
Philip K. Dick would have used the Platonic term anamnesis, the recollection
of the absolute truths hidden within us. And a theologian would refer to it
as a metanoia, or metamorphosis of consciousness.
In his lecture, "Psychedelics Before and After History," McKenna
describes it as "a revelation of an alien dimension---a brightly lit,
non-three-dimensional, self-contorting, linguistically intending modality
that couldn't be denied." Imagine the inside of your cranium, redecorated
with frescoes of the Marvel Comics cosmology by Jack Kirby, or a Disneyland
"dark ride" based on a near-death experience as envisioned by Benoit
Mandlebrot, or a virtual reality tour of God's cerebral cortex, hosted by
the Lucky Charms leprechaun.
"I sank to the floor," recalls McKenna, in a recording of the 1987
lecture. "I [experienced] this hallucination of tumbling forward into these
fractal geometric spaces made of light and then I found myself in the
equivalent of the Pope's private chapel and there were insect elf machines
proffering strange little tablets with strange writing on them, and I was
aghast, completely appalled, because [in] a matter of seconds...my entire
expectation of the nature of the world was just being shredded in front of
me. I've never actually gotten over it. These self-transforming machine elf
creatures were speaking in a colored language which condensed into rotating
machines that were like Faberge eggs but crafted out of luminescent
superconducting ceramics and liquid crystal gels. All this stuff was just so
weird and so alien and so un-English-able that it was a complete shock---I
mean, the literal turning inside out of [my] intellectual universe!
"This went on for two or three minutes, this situation of
[discontinuous] orthogonal dimensions to reality just engulfing me. As I
came out of it and the room reassembled itself, I said, 'I can't believe it,
it's impossible...' To call that a drug is ridiculous---that just means
that you just don't have a word for it and so you putter around and you come
upon this sloppy concept [that] something goes into your body and there's a
change. It's not like that; it's like being struck by noetic lightning."
[Author's Note: "Noetic" derives from the theologian Teilhard de Chardin's
"noosphere"---the collective consciousness of humankind conceived of as a
sort of philosophical virtuality.]
"[What] astonished me was [that]...in the carpets of Central Asia, in
the myths of the Maya, in the visions of an Arcimboldi or a Fra Angelico or
a Bosch, there is not a hint, not a clue, not an atom of the presence of
this thing," says McKenna. "This was more [multiplex] than the universe that
we share with each other. It was the victory of Neo-Platonic metaphysics;
everything [was] made out of a fourth-dimensional mosaic of energy. I was
knocked off my feet, and set myself the goal of understanding this. There
was really no choice, you see."
McKenna's quest led him to Nepal and Tibet, where his studies of
central Asian art and culture reaffirmed his belief that, contrary to
Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner's assertions in their switched-on version of
the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the psychedelic experience had no strict
corollaries in traditional systems of esoteric thought. Nonetheless, the
pre-Buddhist shamanism of Nepal and Tibet, which involved the use of hashish
and datura, had captured his imagination. Delving deeper into the subject,
he traveled to the outer islands of Indonesia, where he spent a year in
search of an indigenous tradition of magico-religious drug usage, supporting
himself through the suitably surreal "blood sport" of professional butterfly
collecting.
Finding none, he journeyed to the Amazon Basin in 1970, where the Waika
and Yanomamo indians inhale a powdered form of the visionary vine ayahuasca.
"The dominant motif is a flood of visual imagery that, try as one might, one
cannot recognize as the contents of either the personal or the collective
unconscious," he says, in "Sacred Plants and Mystic Realities," an interview
included in his book _The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic
Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the
Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History_. "This was truly fascinating
to me. I had made a thorough study of Jung and therefore had the expectation
that motifs and idea systems from the unconscious mind would prove to be
reasonably homogeneous worldwide. What I found, instead, with the peak
intoxication from these plants, was a world of ideas, visual images, and
noetic insight that really could not be co-mapped on any tradition---even
the esoteric tradition. This was so fascinating to me that I have made it
the compass of my life."
In the years since his fateful encounter with the self-transforming
machine elves of hyperspace, McKenna has elaborated a personal cosmology
which for funhouse logic and fever dream detail rivals the Palais Ideal of
the "outsider" artist Ferdinand Cheval---a sprawling delirium of temples,
towers, monuments, grottoes, spiral stairways, and statuary, fashioned from
cement studded with pebbles and encrusted with shells. A born raconteur, he
has fashioned his mental Merzbau on the New Age lecture circuit, where his
effortless eloquence, encyclopedic erudition, and inside-out wit have earned
him the benediction of the psychedelic High Priest himself, who dubbed
McKenna "the Timothy Leary of the '90s."
_Entertainment Weekly_, an unimpeachable source on spiritual matters, lumped
him together with Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins, and Marianne Williamson in a
round-up of "power gurus," and rave bands such as The Shamen have set his
ruminations to billowing techno-trance music. His theories are expounded in
his books (_The Archaic Revival_, _True Hallucinations_, _Food of the Gods:
The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge_, and _The Invisible
Landscape_, co-authored with his brother Dennis, a respected
ethnopharmacologist) but McKenna's metier is the spoken word---stand-up
philosophy that meme-splices Alfred North Whitehead and Alfred E. Neuman,
delivered in a reedy, insinuating voice that sounds like Paul Lynde doing an
impression of Don Juan (the Yaqui indian sorcerer, not the legendary Spanish
rake). Available on tapes with titles like "Having Archaic and Eating It
Too" and "Shedding the Monkey," his lectures are tours de force of verbal
virtuosity and pack-rat polymathy, leaping trippingly (in both senses of the
word) from quantum mechanics to medieval alchemy, from the chaos theory of
Ilya Prigogine to the neo-Platonism of Philo Judaeus. Elevating ontology
hacking to an art form, McKenna brings Carl Sagan's worst nightmare to life:
the reason, rhetoric, and technical vocabulary of science appropriated in
the service of a unified field theory concocted from psychedelic Darwinism,
fringe linguistics, and New Age eschatology.
Tens of millennia ago, he theorizes, climatic changes forced the
proto-human primates of the African savanna to abandon their exclusively
vegetarian diet for an omnivorous one. Following the vast herds of wild
cattle whose dung harbored the insects that were undoubtedly part of their
new diet, they cannot have missed the striking stropharia cubensis (magic
mushrooms) growing in the cow pies. "The mushroom is a totally anomalous
object in the grassland environment---it stands out like a sore thumb,"
asserts McKenna, in "Sacred Plants and Mystic Realities." According to
McKenna, natural selection would favor the mushroom-eating apes, since
psilocybin (the psychoactive ingredient in cubensis) has been proven to
enhance visual acuity and stimulate sexual desire. Citing Henry Munn's essay
"The Mushrooms of Language" and Julian Jaynes's _Origins of Consciousness in
the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_, he argues that psilocybin catalyzed
the emergence of language in early hominids by expanding "their arboreally
evolved repertoire of troop signals" into the hunting-pack signaling
necessary for survival in their new environment. "It is reasonable to
suggest that human language arose out of the synergy of primate
organizational potential by plant hallucinogens," he writes, in "Mushrooms
and Evolution" (_The Archaic Revival_).
From there, it's only a silly millimeter to the edge. "Hallucinogenic
plants may have been the catalysts for everything about us that
distinguishes us from other primates, except perhaps the loss of body hair,"
writes McKenna. "All of the mental functions that we associate with
humanness, including recall, projective imagination, language, naming,
magical speech, dance, and a sense of religio may have emerged out of
interaction with hallucinogenic plants." During one particularly memorable
trip, the mushroom told him (his words) that it is literally not of this
world; in fact, Stropharia cubensisis is an alien symbiote whose spores were
borne across the galaxy. If this scenario sounds strangely reminiscent of
_Invasion of the Body Snatchers_, with its extraterrestrial "pod" plants, it
's worth mentioning that as an "odd kid" growing up in a remote Colorado
town in the 1950s, McKenna was an avid fan of the seminal science fiction
magazine _Weird Tales_. In his defense, however, it should be noted that no
less reputable a scientist than Francis Crick has advanced the theory of
directed panspermia, which proposes that all life on this planet somehow
sprang from extraterrestrial spores, possibly engineered by a higher
intelligence. Alternately, suggests McKenna, the mushroom may be an
intergalactic communications device, "allowing me to hear the alien when the
alien is actually light-years away, using some kind of Bell nonlocality
principle to communicate."
Ironically, in enabling our quantum leap out of nature and into culture
via the abstraction of embodied experience through language, the mushroom
set in motion an evolutionary telos that McKenna believes will culminate in
a union of signifier and signified. In a cyberdelic variation on Marshall
McLuhan's vision of Homo Cyber "retribalized" by electronic
interconnectedness, McKenna envisions the magical reassembly of the
primordial world-view shattered by language, like the shards of a broken
vase flying together in a film run backwards. "[W]e will recover what we
knew in the beginning: the archaic union with nature that was seamless,
unmediated by language, unmediated by notions of self and other, of life and
death, of civilization and nature," says McKenna, in a 1988 interview ("In
Praise of Psychedelics,"_The Archaic Revival_).
Humanity's post-Logos apotheosis will be precipitated, says McKenna, by
the arrival of "the transcendental object at the end of time." A cross
between the enigmatic monolith from _2001: A Space Odyssey_ and de Chardin's
Omega Point (an evolutionary epiphany that marks the arrival of an
"Ultra-Humanity"), McKenna's transcendental object is, in his words, a
"cosmic singularity"---a term from chaos theory which refers to the
transition point, in a dynamical system, between one state and another.
Evolution, he asserts, in Douglas Rushkoff's _Cyberia_, is poised to break
free of "the chrysalis of matter...and then look back on a cast-off mode of
being as it rises into a higher dimension."
The question of the literal truth or falsity of McKenna's theories is
largely irrelevant, since they so obviously function as bedtime stories for
cyborgs, spun from Arthur C. Clarke-ian sci-fi mysticism, New Age
millenarianism, and the Dionysian "expressive politics" of the '60s
(specifically, of Norman O. Brown in _Love's Body_). Understood as theology,
they take on almost conventional shapes, with the fateful fungus and the
tumble into language as the Story of the Fall, McKenna's visionary
experience in "fractal geometric spaces made of light" as Saul's conversion
on the road to Damascus ("suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him,"
Acts 9:3), and the transcendental object at the end of time as the Eschaton
foretold in the Revelation.
Intriguingly, McKenna was raised in the Catholic tradition, a
background he shares with one of his acknowledged influences, the devout
Roman Catholic Marshall McLuhan. In _Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the
End of the Century_, I note that for McLuhan as for McKenna, the invention
of the written word was the "separating membrane," dividing the "I" from the
"all-that-is-not-I" and casting Western civilization into the postlapsarian
world of isolation, objectivity, and rationality. His limning of this event
in a 1969 _Playboy_ interview sounds unmistakably like the Biblical allegory
of the fall:
The whole man became fragmented man; the
alphabet shattered the charmed circle and
resonating magic of the tribal world,
exploding man into an agglomeration of
specialized and psychically impoverished
individuals, or units, functioning in a world
of linear time and Euclidean space.
Elsewhere in the same interview, McLuhan holds forth the McKenna-esque
hope that the psychic convergence facilitated by electronic media
could create the universality of consciousness
foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men
would continue as no more than broken
fragments until they were unified into an
inclusive consciousness. In a Christian
sense, this is merely a new interpretation of
the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after
all, is the ultimate extension of man...I
expect to see the coming decades transform the
planet into an art form; the new man, linked
in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and
space, will...himself...become an organic art
form. There is a long road ahead, and the
stars are only way stations, but we have begun
the journey.
Likewise, for McKenna, a self-styled "mouthpiece for the incarnate
Logos," history will only achieve closure when the disembodying technology
of language is at last re-embodied---when the Word is made flesh, in other
words.
* * *
Mark Dery: The ability to hold apparently contradictory ideas in one's mind
is "the test of a first-rate intelligence," to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Even so, your attitude toward technology seems somewhat inconsistent. In
your recorded lecture, "Shamanic Approaches to the UFO: Angels, Aliens, and
Archetypes Symposium," you inveigh against it, maintaining that technology
is a "demonic pact" that has led "to the present cultural and political
impasse, [which] involves massive stockpiles of atomic weapons,
propagandized populations cut off from any knowledge of their real
histories, [and] male-dominated organizations plying their message of lethal
destruction and inevitable historical advance." At the same time, in your
lecture "Psychedelics Before and After History," you conjure a cybernetic
Arcadia made possible by nanotechnology, where "the technological
appurtenances of the present world have been shrunk to the point where they
have disappeared into [nature] and...we all live naked in paradise but only
a thought away is all the cybernetic connectedness and ability to deliver
manufactured goods and data that this world possesses."
Terence McKenna: I'm mistrustful of the dynamic at work in high technology,
but you've probably heard me quote the French sociologist Jacques Ellul, who
said, "There are no political solutions, only technological ones; the rest
is propaganda." I believe that. I feel a commitment to democratic pluralism,
but other than that political solutions seem fraught with difficulties. I
believe in what I call a forward escape, meaning that you can't go back and
you can't stand still, so you've got to go forward and technology is the way
to do this. Technology is an extension of the human mental world, and it's
certainly where our salvation is going to come from; we cannot return to the
hunter-gatherer pastoralism of 15,000 years ago. As far as the antithetical
positions that you hung on me, I would just say, along with Oscar Wilde, "I
contradict myself? I contradict myself!"
MD: I'm not sure that there's a contradiction, since you seem to fall neatly
on one side of the fence, for the most part---that of New Age
techno-eschatology. Then again, there's an obvious contradiction in the fact
that you vilify language and yet you're a virtuoso raconteur with a gift for
wordplay.
TM: Well, when I talk about the Logos I always invoke Philo Judaeus, who
introduced the concept of the Logos into the Hellenistic world but who was
unsatisfied with it and spent a great deal of time talking about the more
perfect Logos, the Logos that goes from being heard to being seen without
ever crossing over a definable moment of transition. In a sense, my position
is that all of history is a making of the Logos more and more concrete. In
the same way that McLuhan saw print culture as replacing an earlier,
eye-oriented manuscript culture, my hope is that cyberdelic culture is going
to overcome the linear, uniform bias of print and carry us into a realm of
the visible Logos. I really believe that not only human society is involved
in what could be looked at as a conquest of dimensions but that biology
itself is, as well. This is the great overarching theme of evolution---this
is why we go from being slime mold to having binocular vision and bipedalism
and then adding memory and language at the top end of animal organization.
It's because the thing that we are, whether you call it bios or logos
incarnate or whatever, is striving to ascend to higher and higher
dimensions.
MD: And if I understand you, that ascension leads inevitably to a state
where the name for the thing and the thing itself are reunited in a sort of
epistemological epiphany?
TM: Exactly.
MD: But aren't you chasing the same mirage intellectuals have pursued down
the centuries, from Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" to Baudrillard's
"Precession of the Simulacrum?" Isn't it in the nature of human perception
that we see things darkly, rather than as they "really" are? And doesn't
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle suggest that reality itself is a slippery
concept? The notion of an ultimate reality seems to be an ontological
illusion; the closer we get, the further it recedes.
TM: Well, this may be true, but on the other hand, it's not that it's not
real, it's that it's never realized; it serves as an arrow for the process.
I mean, these problems were completely solved within the context of the 16th
century, but that didn't end history, and now we're trying to solve the
problems of the 18th and 19th century. When we do, I don't think it will
usher in the absolute stasis of the _eschaton_; it will simply define a new
cultural playing ground for us. But there's no question that as a result of
the phonetic alphabet and Western religion and the growth of the ego and
industrial power we are facing a narrow neck. The world didn't end when Rome
fell, but the _Roman_ world ended when Rome fell, and what I'm trying to do
is put a little spin control on the electronic world that is going to emerge
out of the ashes of the assumptions of capitalism, communism, linear print
culture, heavy industrial culture, and so forth.
MD: Are you suggesting that even though we've passed into post-industrial
culture, our world-view is still shaped by the mechanical paradigms of the
industrial age?
TM: Yes. Spenserian social theory and the economics of Smith and Keynes:
these are the thoughts that rule our society, and they're all 19th century.
Ever since the birth of the atomic bomb and the electronic and psychedelic
technologies that were emerging at the same time, we have essentially lived
on the capital built up by these 19th century ideologies. One of the
problems with cyberculture is that these ideologies don't match our
technologies.
MD: What would an ideology better suited to our technological landscape look
like?
TM: Well, what these new technologies are doing is dissolving boundaries.
The nation state, the monolithic party, and the nuclear family---all
boundary-defined institutions of one sort or another---are legacies of the
past; what we need is an ideology that is mercurial, shifting, non-static.
And as long as we're talking about mercury and mercurial things, there is in
alchemy (a pre-modern form of thinking) the idea of the Coincidencia
Oppositorum, which means that you have to have ideologies which are able to
accommodate positions which within the context of the previous ideology
would've appeared contradictory. The very notion of non-contradiction is a
notion that emerges out of the linear, print-created mindset; the whole
sterility of that world-view is its inability to live with the presence of
contradiction. And so it denies it, which creates the unconscious of a
society where we've got serial killers running around. The world is not as
simple as we desperately wish to make it within the context of the linear
world-view.
MD: The notion that we've said good-bye to the Gutenberg Galaxy is a
McLuhanesque perception. You often invoke McLuhan, who built his
historiography on a bedrock of technodeterminism. But is the presumption
that our world-view is shaped by the technologies of our age the best way to
analyze culture and history?
TM: I think it's a good method, although I would hate to be caught saying it
's always the way to go. I suppose the reason I'm so enthusiastic about
psychedelics, at this point, is not because I think they're a sure fix, but
because I really register the urgency of the situation. If this boat could
have been turned around by mere hortatory rhetoric, it would have been
turned around by the Sermon on the Mount. We don't have a lot of time, and
the only thing that I have ever seen change a lot of peoples' minds in a
hurry is psychedelics. So I advocate them not as the best solution but as a
wild long shot that's the only game in town at this point.
MD: Help me keep all the spaghetti on my fork, here; I'm having difficulty
with the loose ends. You're saying on the one hand that what cyberculture
needs is a brave new ideology consonant with its technologies, and on the
other hand that you believe in technological solutions, which would seem to
render ideology irrelevant. Doesn't this return us to the Carousel of
Progress in Disneyland? Wasn't looking for technological solutions to what
are essentially social or political problems the keystone of technocratic
thinking in the '50s and '60s?
TM: I think we've always had these two factions, one thinking that utopia
was just around the corner with the next invention, and the other claiming
things always stay the same. Again, it's a Coincidencia Oppositorum that
things do stay the same but on the other hand they're changing at a faster
and faster rate. So it isn't a matter of making a choice between these
things; it's a matter of substituting a kind of Boolean logic where you can
simultaneously hold both possibilities as potentially realizable even though
in a different kind of logic they may appear incommensurate. This is the
kind of world we're living in.
As an example of that, think about quantum physics, which is the basic
metaphor of the new civilization: in quantum physics, you have ordinary
logic, the either/or kind of logic we're all familiar with, and then
embedded like raisins in bread dough in that logic you have what are called
Isles of Boole---Boolean logic, incommensurate with the logic that surrounds
it. That quantum mechanical image can be raised right up to the level of the
macrophysical realm we're living in. Contradiction is not a problem;
contradiction is the proof that you're actually dealing with the Real.
Science is in real crisis because the guy who works for some company
developing products in an R&D environment and thinks of himself as a
scientist has probably never read a work on the philosophy of science, and
the philosophy of science is in deep, deep trouble. The Isles of Boole
embedded in ordinary logic or the implications of Godel's Incompleteness
Theorem are the death knell for what most people think of as scientific
thinking because they've allowed us to scratch down into the levels of
reality where we confront not truth as it was assumed to exist in the 19th
century but rather this magical Coincidencia Oppositorum. The world really
is based on contradictions; nowhere is it writ large that the primate mind
should be able to hold within its confines a correct model of being, and yet
this is what science assumes.
MD: The New Age has used the new physics to contest the traditional
scientific notion of an objective, absolute truth and thereby legitimate its
own world-view ever since Fritjof Capra's _The Tao of Physics_.
It's my understanding that you make your living on the New Age circuit,
lecturing at places like the Esalen Institute or the Omega Institute for
Holistic Studies in upstate New York. Nonetheless, in an earlier
conversation, you told me, "I am _not_ New Age; I loathe all this
Fall-of-Atlantis, color-therapy stuff---it's just bunk." Even so, in the Q&A
sessions on your lecture tapes, you're very indulgent toward channeling,
UFOs, and other notions dear to the New Age. In fact, in your taped lecture
"Shamanic Approaches to the UFO," you say, "I have had contact experiences,
I have seen a UFO very close, I have met with entities from other
dimensions." In such moments, you adequately earn the label "New Age";
either that, or you're using terms like "UFO" and "entities" metaphorically,
which makes me wonder if this is just a tactful way of not alienating paying
customers.
TM: Well, I do feel a distance between myself and the New Age, most of which
is just menopausal mysticism. But let me break your question into two parts:
First of all, whenever I mention channeling, I say that if you can do this
without drugs, you're probably mentally ill. Now, the experiences of
spinning disks in the sky that fill the supermarket tabloids are a whole
other can of worms. Have you read Jung's book, _Flying Saucers: A Modern
Myth of Things Seen in the Sky_? It's the best book ever written on UFOs; it
appeared within two years of the first flying saucer sighting in 1948, and
it essentially solves the mystery.
MD: If I recall, your reading of Jung led you to conclude that flying
saucers in the sense of extraterrestrial machines do not exist, but that
they are a sort of phantasmagoric manifestation of the collective Id
erupting into the mass imagination.
TM: Well, there's more to it than that: this acceleration of history and
technology that we are so intensely experiencing---and which we can look
back into history and see has been going on for a long time---is in fact
real, and we are being pushed toward what I call the Transcendental Object
at the End of Time, which can be thought of as the ultimate tool in
three-dimensional space. It's a higher dimensional object of some sort and
either this thing is coming to meet us (which raises questions I can't
answer) or we are summoning it out of ourselves. By virtue of its
hyperdimensionality, the Transcendental Object is acting as an attractor in
the historical continuum. It sets off sparks or resonances that go back
through time so that when the farmer in Iowa sees the spinning disk in the
sky, he overlays it with his Fundamentalist religious upbringing, his
reading of supermarket tabloids, and so forth; he dresses it in these
culturally-conventionalized ideas. But what it is is a true (again, this
phrase) Coincidencia Oppositorum, the epistemic umbilical mark of reality;
it is proof that there is a telos to the historical process. This planet is
haunted at the higher levels by archetypes of various sorts and the entire
historical thrust is toward confrontation with the Other. If you're living
in the 16th century, it's conceived of as a visitation by the Virgin Mary;
in the 20th century, it's interpreted as friendly extraterrestrials from
Zeta Reticuli. But in fact what it is is none of these things; in truth, it
is the Other---that which cannot be reduced to anything familiar in our
world---and the process of history is the shock wave which announces the
eminence of this rupture of reality by this Transcendental Object.
MD: You'll forgive me for being so mulish, but I've found a drill-bit
insistence on hard facts to be a rather effective way of boring through
opaque rhetoric. What, exactly, _is_ the Transcendental Object at the End of
Time? How did you arrive at this concept?
TM: Basically, from reading Jung on alchemy. Do you know anything about
alchemy?
MD: A little; is your Object a cross between the Philosopher's Stone and the
monolith in _2001: A Space Odyssey_?
TM: That's exactly it; Jung liked to talk about how, in the pre-scientific
age, when people were naive about the categorical separation between mind
and matter, they were able to imagine a migration of terms so that what was
matter and what was mind would come together in something which was of the
nature of both and neither. I would say that we are still epistemologically
naive about the nature of mind and matter and that history is the effort to
build a tool, and that tool is the self, and the self is this
transdimensional vehicle: it transcends life and death, it transcends space
and time, it is both here and there, it is both real and unreal, and so
forth and so on.
So history does have a purpose and the revelation of this purpose is not
that far in the future. In fact, the chaos of the 20th century signifies
that the historical process is coming to an end. We are now in a position to
actually understand and confront this Transcendental Object at the End of
Time and we are drilling toward it with psychedelic drugs and cybernetic
machinery and so forth, and it is drilling toward us in its fashion (which
is incomprehensible to us at this point).
At the same time, we're caught up in the 19th century desire to eliminate
teleology from thinking about the world in order to keep Darwinism
uncontaminated by deism. That has to be put aside because there is in fact a
teleological attractor and fields like chaos and catastrophe theory
completely legitimate this kind of thinking in a scientific context which
was not possible in the 19th century because they couldn't conceive of that.
MD: With the aid of a programmer, you've produced a software package called
_Timewave Zero_ that illustrates your vision of the end of history---on
December 12, 2012, to be exact, with the arrival of the ineffable _mysterium
tremendum_ that you call the Transcendental Object at the End of Time. Is
your zero hour a poetic metaphor or an actual calendar date?
TM: You mean how seriously do I take it? Well, as a rationalist I don't take
it seriously at all. I mean, these things are models. On the other hand, I'm
puzzled, because I have a whole theory about time that is a true
theory---not a conversational theory, but a mathematical formalism, a
fractal that describes the topology of temporality, which in Newtonian
physics is assumed to be a smooth surface. I substitute for the traditional
zero curvature a complex fractal dimension and then I can see that all time
that we have any data about, meaning historical or paleontological or
whatever, can be mapped onto this fractal. But with a peculiar caveat: for
the wave to fit the data, it must be generated from 2012 A.D.
MD: But millenarians throughout history have fixed on arbitrary endpoints
and adduced an abundance of evidence to support their prophecies.
Inevitably, the great day comes and goes and history grinds on.
TM: I'm well aware of the slippery nature of prophecy, and how once a
prophecy is made, there is ample evidence at hand to support it. However, I
think the evidence is that we are pointed toward a very tight choke point of
some sort, and people who blithely assume that history will be a going
concern in 500 or 1,000 years don't seem to have grokked the transformative
power of technology.
My _Timewave Zero_ software places tools in your hands for you to decide
whether this theory is just the product of too much psilocybin; it's a
laboratory for moving this wave around and looking at it against historical
data. This complex mathematical object is a touchstone for connecting a
bunch of different data points that otherwise would appear completely
unrelated to each other. I'm very aware of the selectivity of perception and
the slippery nature of historical data, but if I could corner you with this
software for a couple of hours, I could at least shake your faith that 2012
is going to be a year like any other.
MD: Are there any parallels between your Transcendental Object and Tipler's
Omega Point? [Author's Note: In the weeks that elapsed between the two epic
sessions in which this interview was recorded, I sent McKenna some articles
by the physicist Frank J. Tipler which I thought might interest him. The
essays in question set forth themes elaborated in Tipler's _Physics of
Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead_, where
he offers nothing less than a "testable physical theory for an omnipresent,
omniscient, omnipotent God who will one day in the far future resurrect
every single one of us to live forever in an abode which is in all
essentials the Judeo-Christian heaven." Tipler posits an Omega Point (a term
borrowed from the French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) of infinite
density and temperature toward which the universe will collapse in a
backward Big Bang called the Big Crunch. The energy generated by this
implosion could be used, he theorizes, to drive a cosmic computer simulator
(think of _Star Trek: The Next Generation's Holodeck_) with infinite
processing power---enough, certainly, to bring back to (virtual) life every
creature that ever lived.]
TM: I'm in complete agreement with Tipler and Teilhard de Chardin except
that I'm willing to actually talk about the endpoint as imminent. I thought
that Tipler's response to the German theologian ("The Omega Point as
_Eschaton_: Answers to Pannenberg's Questions for Scientists," _Zygon_, vol.
24, no. 2, June 1989), was an incredibly creative piece of dreaming---all
these ideas about computers of such size that the entire universe can be
modeled raise the possibility of fairly apocalyptic scenarios. And the speed
at which microminiaturization and computing power are going forward makes it
not unreasonable that some of the scenarios that Tipler is talking about
could probably be realized pretty much by 2012. The rate of technological
acceleration in many fields is such that when you propagate all these curves
forward into the future, you see that sometime after the turn of the century
they seem to go asymptotic or become infinite. I would like to hear more
from Tipler about his _eschaton_ theory and know a bit about the background
of this kind of thinking. The notion of an attractor seems to have
re-legitimized teleology in science.
MD: Yours seems to be a teleology of strange attractors.
TM: You could call it that. Have you read _Process and Reality_ by Alfred
North Whitehead? That's where my whole metaphysic is drawn from; Whitehead
has a concept that he calls "concrescence" and by that he means the
_eschaton_, the Omega Point, the Transcendental Object at the End of Time.
What I've done is simply take the Whiteheadian metaphysic and create a
mathematical model that is consistent with his concept and then shown how it
would work as a heuristic machine.
MD: Don't you draw on Bateson as well?
TM: I hardly know anything about Bateson, although I do occasionally use his
phrase "the pattern which connects," but my intellectual roots are Jung,
McLuhan, and Whitehead and perhaps a little Thomas Aquinas, imbibed without
realizing it as a result of being raised Catholic.
MD: I'd like to re-attack the question of the New Age's relationship to
science and technology. In _Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and
Technology in the Age of Limits_, Andrew Ross writes, "If metaphysicians no
longer habitually find themselves placed in the anti-science corner, it is
because theoretical science in the wake of quantum physics has shattered the
intellectual security of the mechanical picture of discontinuous time,
space, matter and objectivity." He goes on to note that some in the New Age
community "have made common cause with quantum physics, finding among the
more speculative adherents of that discipline a tolerance for mysticism that
complements their own holistic metaphysics and a new raison d'être for
closing the gap between the two cultures." What do you make of such
developments?
TM: Before, science was based on calculability and sober reflection, whereas
now it's based on premises which most people would find highly irrational
and counterintuitive. I feel pretty comfortable being on the side of the
philosophy of science but it's post-Newtonian, post-quantum physics science.
I'm a little suspicious of the New Age's appropriation of the language of
quantum physics, because I think most of these people couldn't solve a
partial differential equation if their lives depended on it; they're just
surfing on the obfuscation of quantum physics that its mathematical basis
provides.
MD: With all due respect, could you solve a partial differential equation?
TM: No, but I don't call on quantum physics to support my point of view.
MD: But you often wrap your ideas in the mantle of science by using
scientific terminology.
TM: There's science and then there's reason and science has at times used
reason although at times its conclusions have been fairly unreasonable.
Reason is a universal method for dealing with information, whereas science
is an extremely culturally conventionalized method. I think there's a role
for reason and the razors of logic but this is a branch of formal
philosophy, not a branch of science; science appropriates everything to
itself and then we tend to genuflect before it but what we really need is a
relativistic approach to the true scope of science which is considerably
less than it has claimed for itself. In the 20th century, it's claimed to be
the arbiter of truth in all domains when in fact it's simply the study of
those phenomena so crude that the restoration of their initial condition
causes the same thing to repeat itself, and that's a very small part of the
sum total of the phenomenal universe.
The question of whether or not what's ultimately important about a
scientific theory is its mathematical foundation or its popular
misconception is an interesting one. You should take a look at Misia Landau'
s book _Narratives of Evolution_, in which she argues from a lit crit point
of view that the theory of evolution is nothing more than a campfire story,
with all the elements of good theater. It has someone of poor and humble and
origins who goes a great distance in search of a great gift, forming
alliances along the way and finally attaining this gift, but it brings him
self-doubt rather than happiness, and so on. I view everything as narrative
and science is simply a part of that; its reliance on mathematics is much
less impressive to its high priests than it is to the rest of us.
MD: So you make common cause with the post-structuralists to the degree that
you view science as a text to be read closely for traces of culturally
constructed, rather than empirically verifiable, meaning.
TM: I'm a little uncomfortable being connected with deconstructionism,
having just read Camille Paglia (anybody who read _Sexual Personae_ would be
uncomfortable being connected with those people!) But I think these
critiques need to be done. Imre Lakatos, a Greek philosopher of science who
wrote a very influential book called _Criticism and the Growth of
Knowledge_, talks about how certain theories which we accept as scientific
have in fact been very reluctant to state the circumstances under which they
would be proven false, which is what characterizes real science.
Freudianism, for instance, is in this position: no Freudian has ever said
what piece of evidence would be necessary in order to abandon Freud.
MD: But isn't the question of falsification a moot point for someone
interested in "reading" a discourse as reflective of cultural biases? The
empirical grounding---or lack thereof---of Freudianism seems irrelevant, in
such a context.
TM: Well, I think you do have to ask this question of falsification,
ultimately. For instance, in my own theory of time I've been very concerned
to make it clear that if the historical continuum does not exhibit certain
properties then the theory should be dumped.
What is interesting about the Timewave is that it seems to supply a map of
historical vicissitude, a map that you can confirm for yourself by looking
at how it maps the past, which then gives you a certain measure of
confidence as you notice that it seems to map the immediate future
astonishingly well. Where the cognitive dissonance enters into it is that
all of these mappings only work if you assume a major singularity emergent
on the 22nd of December, 2012 A.D. That's such a screwy position that most
people grow fairly uncomfortable with it. I mean, here is a formal
mathematical theory that nevertheless has built into it a bearded character
carrying a sign that says, "Repent, for the end is near!"
MD: How comfortable are you with the stickiness of that position?
TM: Well, I'm not entirely comfortable. On the other hand, if you look at
the orthodox position on the universe, it's that it sprang from nothing in a
single moment. You would be hard pressed to construct a tighter limit test
for creditability than that! All I'm saying is that the singularity is more
likely to spring from a very complex situation than to spring from what is a
completely featureless situation, which is what the Big Bang says.
MD: But you're turning a semantic somersault, there: Science's position is
not that everything sprang from nothing, but rather that we do not know what
the state of the universe was one picosecond before what we now theorize
happened.
TM: You're right; they don't say the universe sprang from nothing, they say
we can calculate back to a moment when it was smaller than the diameter of
the electron and then we can't calculate any further, and they call that
last picosecond the pre-physical era, indicating that it's somehow bad taste
to attempt to push the laws of physics into that realm. But it seems to me
that this is not a wit different from saying, "Let there be light," and
resting with that. It's much more likely that the universe is driven by a
singularity, but the singularity is of the nature of an attractor rather
than an impelling force. Thus, it isn't a coincidence that at a high point
of human history the singularity occurs; what I'm suggesting is that history
is a phenomenon which announces the imminence of the concrescence: you only
get language-using, technology-elaborating animals a geological nanosecond
before the singularity occurs.
MD: But what is the engine that drives that teleology?
TM: Well, now we go on to Tipler's paper: It's this Omega Point that he's
raving about. What's fascinating about Tipler's paper is that he's saying
that physics supports the de Chardinian point of view, which is a
theological point of view, but he, like de Chardin, makes the unnecessary
assumption that the Omega Point is far away in time, when actually there's
no way of making a judgement as to our distance from it based on what is
present in Tipler or de Chardin. What I've come up with is a map of the
temporal continuum which, when you have fitted its saw-toothed edges into
the ebb and flow of historical vicissitude, enables you to look at the end
of the wave and discover that far from meandering millennia or
mega-millennia into the future, it actually comes to ground 21 years into
the future.
MD: What exactly will happen in 2012 A.D.?
TM: I've given a lot of thought to this and the answers range over a
spectrum, from soft to hard. The softest version is: nothing at all. The
Seventh Day Adventists believe the end of the world occurred in 1830, which
is a _very_ soft version: it can happen and you don't even notice! In the
extreme, hard version, which maps Whiteheadian metaphysics onto Christian
eschatology, the stars fall from heaven, the oceans boil, the dead rise, and
so forth---in other words, a complete breakdown of ordinary physics.
MD: But aren't you fudging the disprovability of your theory, given that the
spectrum of possible proofs includes an event, on the extreme "soft" end,
whose cultural reverberations are below the threshold of detectability? If
nothing perceptible happened on December 22, 2012 A.D., how would an outside
observer discern whether you simply got the date wrong or the predicted
event transpired but was simply beneath the threshold of registration?
TM: Well, you need to move into the domain of what's called best-fit
theories of curve matching. In other words, we have a curve---the
Timewave---and we have a data field---human history---and what's needed is
an impartial method of matching the curve to history. This is a difficult
problem but not in principle an insoluble one; what makes it difficult on
the face of it is that history is not a quantified data field---you don't
get good agreement about what the vicissitudes of history really mean.
However, there is a kind of vague consensus that you could use to guide you.
If you had a thousand tenured professors of history and you asked them to
name the 10 most important turning points of the last 5,000 years, there
would be a fairly high percentage of agreement on the Golden Age of Greece,
the Italian Renaissance, the fall of the Roman Empire, and so forth as
having global consequence upon all peoples that followed upon them.
Eventually, what you would try to do is get a consensus by experts in the
field of history and then get them to propose a set of variables onto which
the original set of variables could be mapped and then the best fit
configuration of these two data streams should either indicate that 2012 is
the end of the Timewave or indicate some other date as the end of the
Timewave. So the answer to your question is that the comparison of these two
theories lies in the realm of the quantification of historical data.
I don't incline toward the softer end of the scale, but I find the hard end
of the scale, where you have the stars falling from heaven, equally hard to
believe. I see the _eschaton_ as a planetary phenomenon: I think the
Timewave is a topological manifold of the unconscious of biology or
something like that; I think the fate of this planet is entirely caught up
in this 2012 end date. I'm willing to be the devil's advocate for that, to
try to make it seem creditable, because the orthodox theory of history
taught in the universities is one of what's called trendless fluctuation,
meaning that history isn't under the governance of any set of laws. Well, if
that's true, then history is unique in this universe---the _only_ phenomenon
not under the governance of a set of rules.
MD: The notion of an "unconscious of biology," by which I assume you mean
some sort of planetary sentience, sounds like a New Age gloss on the Gaia
hypothesis.
TM: I've held different points of view about this. Sometimes I incline more
to this theory that you're asking about, that the Gaian mind has somehow
deputized a subset of higher animals called the primates to be the
energy-garnering units in the global ecosystem, and then the question would
be why? I'm interested in the phenomenon of these earth-crossing asteroids.
Every solid body in the solar system clear out to the moon of Pluto is
heavily cratered by cometary material and it may be that life actually has a
kind of hyperdimensional proprioception, that there is an anticipation of
danger on the planetary scale and so human beings have been called forth as
a kind enzymatic response to this sense of danger and the goal of human
history is to use thermonuclear weapons to blow apart some very large object
that would otherwise make a real mess out of things.
MD: I'd like to end with a suitably facetious question: What do you consider
yourself? Are you a psychotropic philosopher, a cartographer of altered
states, a stand-up comedian for those whose neurons have been permanently
rewired by psychoactive alkaloids, or---?
TM: I'm a cunning linguist (laughs).
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_Points of Reference_
_Psychedelics Before and After History_, a 90-minute tape available from
Sound Photosynthesis, (415) 383-6712, POB 2111, Mill Valley, CA 94942-2111.
_The Archaic Revival_ (HarperCollins, 1992).
_Timewave Zero_ software, available from 48 Shattuck Square #147, Berekely,
CA 94704.
_Metamorphosis_, an 88-minute video of a "trialogue" between McKenna, the
chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham, and the biologist Rupert Sheldrake on
chaos theory, Gaian consciousness, "morphogenetic fields," and New Age
eschatology, accompanied by fractal graphics and ambient techno, is
available from Mystic Fire Video, 524 Broadway, Suite 604, New York, NY
10012, 1-800-292-9001, $29.95.
McKenna's website is at http://www.levity.com/eschaton/.
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