The Transcendental Object at the End of Time
Gonzo ethnobotanist and mushroom-fairy evangelist Terence McKenna could see the end of time. Using a rather arcane combination of fractal maths, the I Ching and a lot of marijuana, Mckenna had deduced that the world was going to end, and soon. But this was no apocalypse of the Christian variety with falling brimstone, dragons, mass death and so on, rather the universe was being pulled into the future by an “iridescent strange attractor,” or what McKenna would refer to in his zonked style, as the “transcendental object at the end of time.” History, in Mckenna’s view, is driven by the forces of novelty and habit (much like Freud’s life and death drives). Biology is a “novelty conserving engine;” species complexify as they evolve; the biosphere is a living record of these spiraling complexities. With the introduction of human language this complexity is compounded and novelty goes parabolic: while human biology does not evolve, culture does and often radically so. The tryptamines found in psilocybin and DMT are the gravitational forces of this novelty explosion while also being the means of communication by an alien intelligence: mycelium, plants, machine elves, Gaia; in short, the planet itself. McKenna saw the accelerating global culture in the 90s (he died in the year 2000) rapidly dissolving into the advancing shadow of this immanent and unspeakable object. The magical end point where “nature would reward the dreamer,” was in sight and McKenna called it with his I Ching math—in turn confirmed by the Mayan calendar: the world would end in 2012.
see also:
The Epiphanies of Mycelium Teleology
Earthrise (1968) William Anders
