Terence McKenna: The Omega Point 5b

We conclude the last segment of McKenna's last interview before his untimely death.


(The Omega Point is the eschaton to McKenna.  It is the singularity in some ways, although the two are not totally identical.)

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Question: We have fourteen years until this event.  And a way in which we can describe our times is in terms of very chaotic events, acts of unspeakable evil, and at the same time, there is this sort of buzz and thrust of optimism.  Everything from a guy like Peter Schwartz talking about The Long Wave, the big booming economy, educational levels and qualities of life, but it's definitely a dynamic where you have extremes of good and evil.  Would you talk a little bit about the relationship between that dynamic as we go forward, and the novelty continues to climax?

Well, novelty is not necessarily good, or nice.  Novelty is complex.  That's what it is.  So, I see really a concatenation of tendencies and forces here at the end.  It's only going to weirder.  The level of contradiction is going to rise excruciatingly, even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction.  I think it's going to get weirder and weirder and weirder and finally it's going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is.  And, at that point novelty theory can come out of the woods.  Eventually people are going to say, what the hell is going on?  It's just too nuts!  It's nut enough to say it's nuts! You have to explain why it's so nuts.

Our own decision to view the universe as dead, as inanimate, as unintelligent allowed us, permitted us, to dissect it, to use it and to deny it's validity outside of human purpose.


So between now and 2012, the next fourteen years, I look for the invention of artificial life, the cloning of human beings, a possible contact with extraterrestrials, possible human immortality, and, at the same time, appalling acts of brutality, genocide, race-baiting, homophobia, famine and starvation.  Because, systems which are in place to keep the world sane are utterly inadequate to the forces that have been unleashed.  The collapse of the socialist world, the rise of the Internet, these are changes so immense, that nobody could imagine them ever happening.  And now that they have happened, nobody even bothers to mention what a big deal it is.

The fact that there is no such thing as the Soviet Union, people never talk about it anymore.  But when I was a kid, the notion that, that would ever change was beyond conceiving.  So the good news is that as primates, we're incredibly adaptable to change.  Put in a desert, we survive.  Put us in the jungle, we survive.  Under Hitler, we survived.  Under Nixon, we survived.  We can put with about anything and it's a good thing, because we're going to be tested to the limits.

And this is why the right wing is so alarmed, because what they see going on is the breakdown of all tradition, all order, all sanctioned norms of behavior.  They're quite right that it's happening, but, they're quite wrong to conclude that it should be resisted, or is somehow evil.

The mushroom said to me once, this is what's like when a species prepares to depart for the stars.  You don't depart for the stars under calm and orderly conditions.  It's a fire in a madhouse.  And that's what we have, the fire in the madhouse at the end of time.  This is what it's like when a species prepares to move on to the next dimension.

We happen to be the point species on a transformation that will affect every living organism on this planet at it's conclusion.

Question:  I see that with Jenkins calling it Galactic Cosmology, it's like our home continues to expand.  We've gone from the village to the neighborhood, to the nation-state, to the planet.  So let's just talk about the conclusion of the archaic mind when it reaches.

Well the great watershed difference between archaic understanding and what is called scientific materialism is the archaic mind understood, in fact, perceived, that nature is conscious.  Nature is alive.  Nature is an organism, full of intent.  The goal of the archaic mind is to connect with, to communicate with, align itself to this greater Gaian holism, which is sometimes called nature, the great spirit, and the realm of the ancestors.  This is what the archaic mind understood and was comfortable with and in fact it is true.  Our own decision to view the universe as dead, as inanimate, as unintelligent allowed us, permitted us to dissect it, to use it and to deny it's validity outside of human purpose.


(We include a presentation by McKenna on the Archaic Mind.  If you cannot see the embedded video, here is the link: http://bit.ly/lLQu26)


Now the consequences of living like that is coming back to haunt us.  We have almost destroyed our home.  We have almost cut the earth from beneath our own feet.  So this impulse towards the Gaialanic and the archaic is a survival instinct.  At this point, we must give reverence and credence to nature and nature's methods because no other methods will allow us to work our way out of the present mess we're in.  High temperature, high energy resource extraction, commodification, mega-agriculture, we're at the end of the rope for these things.

So the archaic holds answers, but it only holds answers if we are willing to think of the universe as a living intelligent entity, with which we are in partnership, not set against.  but, that we are in fact, a part of a morphogenetic intent and an unfolding reality that is larger than human understanding.  Imagine, larger than human understanding!

Question:  So the whole entire Milky Way Galaxy is a being?

Well, it's an organism.  Yes, the galaxy is a kind of an organism.  You can think of it as a fractal resonance with a cell.  The galaxy has a nucleus of very dense material where very mysterious processes are going on.  It has a cytoplasmic envelope of stars and gas clouds that surround that core.  And then it is an individual, very distinctly defined by the vast emptiness that lies between it and the next galaxy.

Yes I think that nature builds by fractal intent.  All organisms have a core and then a deployed surround, whether we're talking about the cell, the solar system, the Earth, and the galaxy.  In the process of the conservation of novelty, structures are created with cores that are more complex than their outlying neighborhoods.  To my mind, a galaxy, hanging in Space, is a picture of the time wave, every star is a data point in the an enormous computer simulation of the novelty wave, that's what it has that spiral structure.  You know, scientists are very puzzled that the galaxies don't fly apart.  They don't seem to have enough mass that their gravitation should hold them together.  There's been a lot of talk about "dark matter," some missing factor.  Well the missing factor is novelty.  The galaxy stays together because the galaxy want to be a galaxy.  In other words, it wants to hold on to the level of novel morphology that it has achieved.  It has an actual appetite for pressing itself in that form.  That's why those galaxies are spiral, and in a very real sense, those spirals are pictures of the time wave, where we can at last see it not confuse it with its background or foreground.  So, everything organizes itself, fractally, spirally, with a dense center in its spatial domain and a dense center in its temporal domain.  We are like this.  Galaxies are like this, planets, stars, bird flocks, corals reefs, etc.  But, in the case of the galaxies, it is particularly easy to observe the structure, because the thing is so huge that its forces dominate and stamp out other forces that might distort it.
(We finally include the video of this entire talk for your perusal.  If you cannot see the embedded video, here is the link: http://www.realitysandwich.com/node/93685)