Terence McKenna
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Terence McKenna | |
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Born | Paonia, Colorado, U.S. | November 16, 1946
Died | April 3, 2000 San Rafael, California, U.S. | (aged 53)
Occupation | Author, lecturer |
Education | BSc in ecology, resource conservation, and shamanism |
Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
Period | 20th |
Subject | Shamanism, ethnobotany, ethnomycology, metaphysics, psychedelic drugs, alchemy |
Notable works | The Archaic Revival, Food of the Gods, The Invisible Landscape, Psilocybin Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, True Hallucinations. |
Spouse | Kathleen Harrison (1975–1992; divorced) |
Children | 2 |
Relatives | Dennis McKenna (brother) |
Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was an American ethnobotanist and mystic who advocated the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, ethnomycology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. He was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s",[1][2] "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism",[3] and the "intellectual voice of rave culture".[4]
McKenna formulated a concept about the nature of time based on fractal patterns he claimed to have discovered in the I Ching, which he called Timewave Zero,[3][5] proposing that this predicted the end of time, and a transition of consciousness in the year 2012.[5][6][7][8] His promotion of Timewave Zero and its connection to the Maya calendar is credited as one of the factors leading to the widespread beliefs about the 2012 phenomenon.[9] Timewave Zero is considered pseudoscience.[10][11]
Biography
Early life
Terence McKenna was born and raised in Paonia, Colorado,[5][12][13] with Irish ancestry on his father's side of the family.[14]
McKenna developed a hobby of fossil-hunting in his youth and from this he acquired a deep scientific appreciation of nature.[15] He also became interested in psychology at a young age, reading Carl Jung's book Psychology and Alchemy at the age of 14.[6] This was the same age McKenna first became aware of magic mushrooms, when reading an essay titled "Seeking the Magic Mushroom" which appeared in the May 13, 1957 edition of LIFE magazine.[16]
At age 16 McKenna moved to Los Altos, California to live with family friends for a year. He finished high school in Lancaster, California.[13] In 1963, he was introduced to the literary world of psychedelics through The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley and certain issues of The Village Voice which published articles on psychedelics.[3][13]
McKenna said that one of his early psychedelic experiences with morning glory seeds showed him "that there was something there worth pursuing",[13] and in interviews he claimed to have smoked cannabis daily since his teens.[17]
Studying and traveling
In 1965, McKenna enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley and was accepted into the Tussman Experimental College.[17] While in college in 1967 he began studying shamanism through the study of Tibetan folk religion.[3][18] That same year, which he called his "opium and kabbala phase",[6][19] he traveled to Jerusalem where he met Kathleen Harrison, an ethnobotanist who later became his wife.[6][17][19]
In 1969, McKenna traveled to Nepal led by his interest in Tibetan painting and hallucinogenic shamanism.[20] He sought out shamans of the Tibetan Bon tradition, trying to learn more about the shamanic use of visionary plants.[12] During his time there, he also studied the Tibetan language[20] and worked as a hashish smuggler,[6] until "one of his Bombay-to-Aspen shipments fell into the hands of U. S. Customs."[21] He then wandered through southeast Asia viewing ruins,[21] and spent time as a professional butterfly collector in Indonesia.[6][22][23]
After his mother's death[24] from cancer in 1970,[25] McKenna, his brother Dennis, and three friends traveled to the Colombian Amazon in search of oo-koo-hé, a plant preparation containing dimethyltryptamine (DMT).[5][24][26] Instead of oo-koo-hé they found fields full of gigantic Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms, which became the new focus of the expedition.[5][6][12][24][27] In La Chorrera, at the urging of his brother, McKenna was the subject of a psychedelic experiment[5] in which the brothers attempted to "bond harmine DNA with their own neural DNA" (harmine is another psychedelic compound they used synergistically with the mushrooms), through the use of a set specific vocal techniques. They hypothesised this would give them access to the collective memory of the human species, and would manifest the alchemists' Philosopher's Stone which they viewed as a "hyperdimensional union of spirit and matter".[28] McKenna claimed the experiment put him in contact with "Logos": an informative, divine voice he believed was universal to visionary religious experience.[29] McKenna also often referred to the voice as "the mushroom", and "the teaching voice" amongst other names.[16] The voice's reputed revelations and his brother's simultaneous peculiar psychedelic experience prompted him to explore the structure of an early form of the I Ching, which led to his "Novelty Theory".[5][8] During their stay in the Amazon, McKenna also became romantically involved with his interpreter, Ev.[30]
In 1972, McKenna returned to U.C. Berkeley to finish his studies[17] and in 1975, he graduated with a degree in ecology, shamanism, and conservation of natural resources.[3][22][23] In the autumn of 1975, after parting with his girlfriend Ev earlier in the year,[31] McKenna began a relationship with his future wife and the mother of his two children, Kathleen Harrison.[8][17][19][26]
Soon after graduating, McKenna and Dennis published a book inspired by their Amazon experiences, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching.[5][17][32] The brothers' experiences in the Amazon were the main focus of McKenna's book True Hallucinations, published in 1993.[12] McKenna also began lecturing[17] locally around Berkeley and started appearing on some underground radio stations.[6]
Psilocybin mushroom cultivation
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/23/Psilocybin_Magic_Mushroom_Growers_Guide_book_cover.jpg/170px-Psilocybin_Magic_Mushroom_Growers_Guide_book_cover.jpg)
McKenna, along with his brother Dennis, developed a technique for cultivating psilocybin mushrooms using spores they brought to America from the Amazon.[16][26][27][31] In 1976, the brothers published what they had learned in the book Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, under the pseudonyms "O.T. Oss" and "O.N. Oeric".[12][33] McKenna and his brother were the first to come up with a reliable method for cultivating psilocybin mushrooms at home.[12][17][26][27] As ethnobiologist Jonathan Ott explains, "[the] authors adapted San Antonio's technique (for producing edible mushrooms by casing mycelial cultures on a rye grain substrate; San Antonio 1971) to the production of Psilocybe [Stropharia] cubensis. The new technique involved the use of ordinary kitchen implements, and for the first time the layperson was able to produce a potent entheogen in his [or her] own home, without access to sophisticated technology, equipment, or chemical supplies."[34] When the 1986 revised edition was published, the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide had sold over 100,000 copies.[12][33][35]
Mid- to later life
Public speaking
In the early 1980s, McKenna began to speak publicly on the topic of psychedelic drugs, becoming one of the pioneers of the psychedelic movement.[36] His main focus was on the plant-based psychedelics such as psilocybin mushrooms (which were the catalyst for his career),[12] ayahuasca, cannabis, and the plant derivative DMT.[6] He conducted lecture tours and workshops[6] promoting natural psychedelics as a way to explore universal mysteries, stimulate the imagination, and re-establish a harmonious relationship with nature.[37] Though associated with the New Age and Human Potential Movements, McKenna himself had little patience for New Age sensibilities.[3][7][8][38] He repeatedly stressed the importance and primacy of the "felt presence of direct experience", as opposed to dogma.[39]
In addition to psychedelic drugs, McKenna spoke on a wide array of subjects,[26] including shamanism; metaphysics; alchemy; language; culture; self-empowerment; environmentalism, techno-paganism; artificial intelligence; evolution; extraterrestrials; science and scientism; the Web; and virtual reality.
McKenna soon became a fixture of popular counterculture[5][6][37] with Timothy Leary once introducing him as "one of the five or six most important people on the planet"[40] and with comedian Bill Hicks' referencing him in his stand-up act[41] and building an entire routine around his ideas.[26] McKenna also became a popular personality in the psychedelic rave/dance scene of the early 1990s,[22][42] with frequent spoken word performances at raves and contributions to psychedelic and goa trance albums by The Shamen,[7][26][37] Spacetime Continuum, Alien Project, Capsula, Entheogenic, Zuvuya, Shpongle, and Shakti Twins. In 1994 he appeared as a speaker at the Starwood Festival, documented in the book Tripping by Charles Hayes.[43]
McKenna published several books in the early-to-mid-1990s including: The Archaic Revival; Food of the Gods; and True Hallucinations.[6][12][22] Hundreds of hours of McKenna's public lectures were recorded either professionally or bootlegged and have been produced on cassette tape, CD and MP3.[26] Segments of his talks have gone on to be sampled by many musicians and DJ's.[4][26]
McKenna was a colleague and close friend of chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham, and author and biologist Rupert Sheldrake. He conducted several public and many private debates with them from 1982 until his death.[44][45][46] These debates were known as trialogues and some of the discussions were later published in the books: Trialogues at the Edge of the West and The Evolutionary Mind.[3][44]
Botanical Dimensions
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/12/Botanical_Dimensions_ethnobotanical_preserve_in_Hawaii.jpg/220px-Botanical_Dimensions_ethnobotanical_preserve_in_Hawaii.jpg)
In 1985, McKenna founded Botanical Dimensions with his then-wife, Kathleen Harrison.[22][47] Botanical Dimensions is a nonprofit ethnobotanical preserve on the Big Island of Hawaii,[3] established to collect, protect, propagate, and understand plants of ethno-medical significance and their lore, and appreciate, study, and educate others about plants and mushrooms felt to be significant to cultural integrity and spiritual well-being.[48] The 19-acre (7.7 ha) botanical garden[3] is a repository containing thousands of plants that have been used by indigenous people of the tropical regions, and includes a database of information related to their purported healing properties.[49] McKenna was involved until 1992, when he retired from the project,[47] following his and Kathleen's divorce earlier in the year.[17] Kathleen still manages Botanical Dimensions as its president and projects director.[48]
After their divorce, McKenna moved to Hawaii permanently, where he built a modernist house[17] and created a gene bank of rare plants near his home.[22] Previously, he had split his time between Hawaii and Occidental, CA.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Hanna_jon_1999_mckenna_terence.jpg/220px-Hanna_jon_1999_mckenna_terence.jpg)
Death
McKenna was a longtime sufferer of migraines, but on 22 May 1999 he began to have unusually extreme and painful headaches. He then collapsed due to a seizure.[27] McKenna was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer.[7][12][27] For the next several months he underwent various treatments, including experimental gamma knife radiation treatment. According to Wired magazine, McKenna was worried that his tumor may have been caused by his psychedelic drug use, or his 35 years of daily cannabis smoking; however, his doctors assured him there was no causal relation.[27] McKenna died on April 3, 2000, at the age of 53.[7][8][17]
Library fire and insect collection
McKenna's library of over 3,000 rare books and personal notes was destroyed in a fire in Monterey, California on February 7, 2007. An index of McKenna's library was preserved by his brother Dennis.[50][51]
McKenna studied Lepidoptera and entomology in the 1960s, and his studies included hunting for butterflies, primarily in Colombia and Indonesia, creating a large collection of insect specimens.[52] After McKenna's death, his daughter, the artist and photographer Klea McKenna, preserved his insect collection, turning it into a gallery installation, then publishing The Butterfly Hunter, a book of 122 insect photos from a set of over 2,000 specimens McKenna collected between 1969 and 1972, alongside maps of his collecting routes through rainforests in Southeast Asia and South America.[52] McKenna's insect collection was consistent with his interest in Victorian-era explorers and naturalists, and his worldview based on close observation of nature. In the 1970s, when he was still collecting, he became quite squeamish and guilt-ridden about the necessity of killing butterflies in order to collect and classify them, according to McKenna's daughter, this led him to cease his entomological studies.[52]
Thought
Psychedelics
Terence McKenna advocated the exploration of altered states of mind via the ingestion of naturally occurring psychedelic substances;[5][32][42] for example, and in particular, as facilitated by the ingestion of high doses of psychedelic mushrooms,[26][53] ayahuasca, and DMT,[6] which he believed was the apotheosis of the psychedelic experience. He was less enthralled with synthetic drugs,[6] stating, "I think drugs should come from the natural world and be use-tested by shamanically orientated cultures ... one cannot predict the long-term effects of a drug produced in a laboratory."[3]
He recommended, and often spoke of taking, what he called "heroic doses",[32] which he defined as five grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms,[6][54] taken alone, on an empty stomach, in silent darkness, and with eyes closed.[26][27] He believed that when taken this way one could expect a profound visionary experience,[26] believing it is only when "slain" by the power of the mushroom that the message becomes clear.[53]
Although McKenna avoided giving his allegiance to any one interpretation (part of his rejection of monotheism), he was open to the idea of psychedelics as being "trans-dimensional travel". He proposed that DMT sent one to a "parallel dimension"[8] and that psychedelics literally enabled an individual to encounter "higher dimensional entities",[55] or what could be ancestors, or spirits of the Earth,[56] saying that if you can trust your own perceptions it appears that you are entering an "ecology of souls".[57] McKenna also put forward the idea that psychedelics were "doorways into the Gaian mind",[42][58] suggesting that "the planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being" and that the psychedelic plants were the facilitators of this communication.[59][60]
Machine elves
McKenna spoke of hallucinations while on DMT in which he claims to have met intelligent entities he described as "self-transforming machine elves".[3][8][61][62]
Psilocybin panspermia speculation
In a more radical version of biophysicist Francis Crick's hypothesis of directed panspermia, McKenna speculated on the idea that psilocybin mushrooms may be a species of high intelligence,[3] which may have arrived on this planet as spores migrating through space[8][63] and which are attempting to establish a symbiotic relationship with human beings. He postulated that "intelligence, not life, but intelligence may have come here [to Earth] in this spore-bearing life form". He said, "I think that theory will probably be vindicated. I think in a hundred years if people do biology they will think it quite silly that people once thought that spores could not be blown from one star system to another by cosmic radiation pressure," and also believed that "few people are in a position to judge its extraterrestrial potential, because few people in the orthodox sciences have ever experienced the full spectrum of psychedelic effects that are unleashed."[3][7][18]
Opposition to organized religion
McKenna was opposed to Christianity[64] and most forms of organized religion or guru-based forms of spiritual awakening, favouring shamanism, which he believed was the broadest spiritual paradigm available.[65]
Technological singularity
During the final years of his life and career, McKenna became very engaged in the theoretical realm of technology. He was an early proponent of the technological singularity[8] and in his last recorded public talk, Psychedelics in the age of intelligent machines, he outlined ties between psychedelics, computation technology, and humans.[66] He also became enamored with the Internet, calling it "the birth of [the] global mind",[17] believing it to be a place where psychedelic culture could flourish.[27]
Admired writers
Either philosophically or religiously, he expressed admiration for Marshall McLuhan, Alfred North Whitehead, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Carl Jung, Plato, Gnostic Christianity, and Alchemy, while regarding the Greek philosopher Heraclitus as his favorite philosopher.[67]
McKenna also expressed admiration for the works of writers Aldous Huxley,[3] James Joyce, whose book Finnegans Wake he called "the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature of the 20th century,"[68] science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who he described as an "incredible genius,"[69] fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, with whom McKenna shared the belief that "scattered through the ordinary world there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth"[8] and Vladimir Nabokov. McKenna once said that he would have become a Nabokov lecturer if he had never encountered psychedelics.
"Stoned ape" theory of human evolution
McKenna's hypothesis concerning the influence of psilocybin mushrooms on human evolution is known as "the 'stoned ape' theory."[16][42][70]
In his 1992 book Food of the Gods, McKenna proposed that the transformation from humans' early ancestors Homo erectus to the species Homo sapiens mainly involved the addition of the mushroom Psilocybe cubensis in the diet,[26][70][71] an event that according to his theory took place about 100,000 BCE (when he believed humans diverged from the genus Homo).[22][72] McKenna based his theory on the effects, or alleged effects, produced by the mushroom[3] while citing studies by Roland Fischer et al. from the late 1960s to early 1970s.[73][74]
McKenna stated that, due to the desertification of the African continent at that time, human forerunners were forced from the shrinking tropical canopy into search of new food sources.[6] He believed they would have been following large herds of wild cattle whose dung harbored the insects that, he proposed, were undoubtedly part of their new diet, and would have spotted and started eating Psilocybe cubensis, a dung-loving mushroom often found growing out of cowpats.[6][7][42][75]
McKenna's hypothesis was that low doses of psilocybin improve visual acuity, particularly edge detection, meaning that the presence of psilocybin in the diet of early pack hunting primates caused the individuals who were consuming psilocybin mushrooms to be better hunters than those who were not, resulting in an increased food supply and in turn a higher rate of reproductive success.[3][7][16][26][42] Then at slightly higher doses, he contended, the mushroom acts to sexually arouse, leading to a higher level of attention, more energy in the organism, and potential erection in the males,[3][7] rendering it even more evolutionarily beneficial, as it would result in more offspring.[26][42][71] At even higher doses, McKenna proposed that the mushroom would have acted to "dissolve boundaries," promoting community bonding and group sexual activities.[12][42] Consequently, there would be a mixing of genes, greater genetic diversity, and a communal sense of responsibility for the group offspring.[76] At these higher doses, McKenna also argued that psilocybin would be triggering activity in the "language-forming region of the brain", manifesting as music and visions,[3] thus catalyzing the emergence of language in early hominids by expanding "their arboreally evolved repertoire of troop signals."[7][26] He also pointed out that psilocybin would dissolve the ego and "religious concerns would be at the forefront of the tribe's consciousness, simply because of the power and strangeness of the experience itself."[42][76]
According to McKenna, access to and ingestion of mushrooms was an evolutionary advantage to humans' omnivorous hunter-gatherer ancestors,[26][75] also providing humanity's first religious impulse.[75][77] He believed that psilocybin mushrooms were the "evolutionary catalyst"[3] from which language, projective imagination, the arts, religion, philosophy, science, and all of human culture sprang.[7][8][27][75]
Criticism
McKenna's "stoned ape" theory has not received attention from the scientific community and has been criticized for a relative lack of citation to any of the paleoanthropological evidence informing our understanding of human origins. His ideas regarding psilocybin and visual acuity have been criticized as misrepresentations of Fischer et al.'s findings, who published studies of visual perception parameters other than acuity. Criticism has also noted a separate study on psilocybin-induced transformation of visual space, wherein Fischer et al. stated that psilocybin "may not be conducive to the survival of the organism". There is a lack of scientific evidence that psilocybin increases sexual arousal, and even if it does, it would not necessarily entail an evolutionary advantage.[78] Others have pointed to civilizations such as the Aztecs, who used psychedelic mushrooms (at least among the Priestly class), that did not reflect McKenna's model of how psychedelic-using cultures would behave, for example, by carrying out human sacrifice.[12] There are also examples of Amazonian tribes such as the Jivaro and the Yanomami who use ayahuasca ceremoniously and who are known to engage in violent behaviour. This, it has been argued, indicates the use of psychedelic plants does not necessarily suppress the ego and create harmonious societies.[42]
Archaic revival
One of the main themes running through McKenna's work, and the title of his second book, was the idea that Western civilization was undergoing what he called an "archaic revival".[3][26][79]
His hypothesis was that Western society has become "sick" and is undergoing a "healing process": In the same way that the human body begins to produce antibodies when it feels itself to be sick, humanity as a collective whole (in the Jungian sense) was creating "strategies for overcoming the condition of disease" and trying to cure itself, by what he termed as "a reversion to archaic values." McKenna pointed to phenomena including surrealism, abstract expressionism, body piercing and tattooing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, rock and roll and catastrophe theory, amongst others, as his evidence that this process was underway.[80][81][82] This idea is linked to McKenna's "stoned ape" theory of human evolution, with him viewing the "archaic revival" as an impulse to return to the symbiotic and blissful relationship he believed humanity once had with the psilocybin mushroom.[26]
In differentiating his idea from the "New Age", a term that he felt trivialized the significance of the next phase in human evolution, McKenna stated that: "The New Age is essentially humanistic psychology '80s-style, with the addition of neo-shamanism, channeling, crystal and herbal healing. The archaic revival is a much larger, more global phenomenon that assumes that we are recovering the social forms of the late neolithic, and reaches far back in the 20th century to Freud, to surrealism, to abstract expressionism, even to a phenomenon like National Socialism which is a negative force. But the stress on ritual, on organized activity, on race/ancestor-consciousness – these are themes that have been worked out throughout the entire 20th century, and the archaic revival is an expression of that."[3][18]
Novelty theory
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/db/Messier51_sRGB.jpg/220px-Messier51_sRGB.jpg)
—McKenna, Terence. In the Valley of Novelty 1998 07 31
The central role in Terence McKenna's thought is played by the notion of synergy,[83] which is the spontaneous emergence of a logically nondeducible from its constituent parts and because of that novel[84] quality (configuration,[85] gestalt), whose negative potential energy[86] (love,[87] spirit,[88][89] intuition,[90][91] information[92]), binding its parts into a whole,[93] is inexplicably more negative than a simple sum of the negative potential energies of those parts when they are not bound into a whole.[94][95]
Information or novelty[96] is negative potential energy.[92]
- 200 letters synergized into 30 words are more informative—have a more negative potential energy and a deeper potential well—than 200 separate letters.
- 30 words synergized into a single sentence are more informative—have a more negative potential energy and a deeper potential well—than 30 separate words.
Like marbles rolling towards the narrow bottom of a funnel-shaped potential well, 200 letters spontaneously synergize themselves first into 30 words (so that the potential well becomes deeper), then into a single sentence (so that the potential well becomes still more deep):
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Mass_potential_well_increasing_mass.gif)
The sentence acts as the attractor of the entire process, which is why the letters become bound not into random words but into the words specifically suited for the resultant sentence.[84]
Thus, the universe is a funnel that deepens as its atoms synergize themselves first into molecules, then into people.[97] The most intuitive man, eventually appearing at the narrow bottom of the funnel-shaped potential well, is the attractor, puppeteer of the entire 13.8‑billion‑year‑long process of his self-creation.[98]
Negative potential energy is inherently hierarchic because in the case of an infinite space homogeneously filled with massive particles, the individual negative potential energies of the particles cancel each other, so that the resultant potential energy is zero. Conversely, in the case of an infinite space hierarchically filled with massive particles, the individual negative potential energies of the particles amplify each other, so that the resultant potential energy is infinitely negative. That is why the universe spontaneously progresses from its initial homogeneous state (a black hole[99][100]) towards its final hierarchic state (a dendritically fractal wormhole).[101]
As the universe spontaneously hierarchizes, its gravitational potential field becomes ever more negative-energied,[102] i.e. consisting of an ever more negative number of parts called "quanta" and because of that ever more anti-local, holistically integrative.[103][104] It is the ever stronger telepathic and telekinetic intuition[105][91] of the universe, striving to negate (i.e., decrease) the number of the universe's parts by hierarchically interconnecting them into an ever smaller number of wholes, until eventually all masses of the universe become interconnected by a single dendritically fractal wormhole.[96]
The universe's gravitational potential field is time[106]—a potential flow of the vacuum,[107][108] converging to the field's centre.
The centre of the universe's gravitational potential field is positioned in the future[109] and sucks[110] the universe's vacuum with the matter entrained thereby into the future[111] via a dendritic network of virtual Planck-scale wormholes, of which the field consists.[112][113]
The network of Planck-scale wormholes is most densely ramified and complexified in the most intuitive man's brain,[114][115] making it the absolute centre of the universe's gravitational potential field. The most intuitive man is the all-unifying god of gravitation/love or Eros[116] incarnate, positioned at the end of time (Terence McKenna initially slated time to end on 16 November 2012, which is his 66th birthday), whose love, spirit, intuition or information is the negative energy[92] that is sucking[110] the universe's matter towards its final state called eternity or the eschaton, which is the universe whose matter has become gravitationally accelerated to the speed of light[117][110] and thus transited into the eternal mode of existence.[118][119][120]
Terence McKenna envisioned that the universe's matter would be gravitationally accelerated to the speed of light and thus ephemeralized to the point of being amenable to psychokinesis by the end of the year 2012. The graph of matter's acceleration to the speed of light and the graph of matter's ephemeralization are essentially the same graph:
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/Journey_times.gif/400px-Journey_times.gif)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/17/PPTCountdowntoSingularityLinear.jpg/400px-PPTCountdowntoSingularityLinear.jpg)
The universe's matter is falling into the universe's gravitational field.[121]
While falling into the universe's gravitational field, every atom of the universe expels its gravitational potential energy (rest mass) in the form of radiation and thus shrinks in size, becoming increasingly massless, ephemeral.[122][123][124]
By losing their rest mass, the universe's atoms lose their resistance to the gravitational pull exerted by the universe's gravitational puppeteer—the most intuitive man—and thus become his ever more obedient puppets, which eventually endows him with the ability of psychokinesis.
Any self-gravitating system, converting its rest mass into energy, radiates away only a half of that energy but retains the other half.[125][126]
Therefore, upon converting all of its rest mass into radiant energy, an atom will retain a half of that radiant energy circulating within itself and serving as a quasi rest mass. Those end-time atoms will formally have rest masses but essentially will be massless "radiant spirits".
During the last era of its existence called the eschaton, which McKenna slated to begin in the end of the year 2012, the universe will consist of such ephemeralized to the point of being amenable to psychokinesis, ghostlike atoms, frantically performing their danse macabre on the verge of instantaneous disappearance:
All change is relative. The universe is expanding relatively to our common material standards; our material standards are shrinking relatively to the size of the universe. The theory of the "expanding universe" might also be called the theory of the "shrinking atom". <...>
Let us then take the whole universe as our standard of constancy, and adopt the view of a cosmic being whose body is composed of intergalactic spaces and swells as they swell. Or rather we must now say it keeps the same size, for he will not admit that it is he who has changed. Watching us for a few thousand million years, he sees us shrinking; atoms, animals, planets, even the galaxies, all shrink alike; only the intergalactic spaces remain the same. The earth spirals round the sun in an ever‑decreasing orbit. It would be absurd to treat its changing revolution as a constant unit of time. The cosmic being will naturally relate his units of length and time so that the velocity of light remains constant. Our years will then decrease in geometrical progression in the cosmic scale of time. On that scale man's life is becoming briefer; his threescore years and ten are an ever‑decreasing allowance. Owing to the property of geometrical progressions an infinite number of our years will add up to a finite cosmic time; so that what we should call the end of eternity is an ordinary finite date in the cosmic calendar. But on that date the universe has expanded to infinity in our reckoning, and we have shrunk to nothing in the reckoning of the cosmic being.
We walk the stage of life, performers of a drama for the benefit of the cosmic spectator. As the scenes proceed he notices that the actors are growing smaller and the action quicker. When the last act opens the curtain rises on midget actors rushing through their parts at frantic speed. Smaller and smaller. Faster and faster. One last microscopic blurr of intense agitation. And then nothing.
- —Eddington, Arthur. The Expanding Universe CUP, 1933, pp. 90–92
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Mycelium_growth_simulation.gif)
For more information, watch The River Model of General Relativity.
Well, then, if you picture what I'm describing, it's a funnel of some sort, which begins with an extremely wide mouth, but which has now narrowed to an extremely small and fast-moving kind of situation. And this is why history is a self-limiting process. It isn't that we have broken away from the slow-moving processes of ordinary nature. It's that we represent nature at a different time frame. And I think this is why history is ending. Because it's going so much faster than it used to go that it's going to finish very soon. There may be as much experience ahead of us as there is behind us, but we're moving through it so much faster than we used to that we're literally approaching the end of time at a faster and faster speed.
- —McKenna, Terence. The Birth of a New Humanity 1992
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/09/Funnel_to_Singularity.gif/1000px-Funnel_to_Singularity.gif)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Cerebrum_animation_small.gif/120px-Cerebrum_animation_small.gif)
—Terence McKenna
An external observer would see our black-hole universe as a sphere of space that is being sucked into its central wormhole:
The drain hole sucking water toward it is equivalent to the singularity at the center of a black hole sucking space toward it.
- —Sen, Paul. Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe Simon and Schuster, 2022, p. 228
Consequently, our black-hole universe shrinks ever faster, spins ever faster, and has an ever deeper funnel-shaped vortex, through which the black-hole universe's space swirls into the black-hole universe's central wormhole.[97]
To us, falling towards the central singularity, our shrinking black-hole universe seems to be expanding:
Now let us consider an astronaut explorer who goes to visit a black hole and falls in. According to her own proper time, the explorer can soon arrive in the vicinity of the horizon. Any light emitted at rs in the outward radial direction as she falls in stays at the horizon, according to outer observers, but travels at c relative to the astronaut. Therefore, in the astronaut's rest frame the horizon moves outwards at c.
- —Steane, Andrew M. Relativity Made Relatively Easy OUP, 2012, p. 368
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Black-hole_universe_and_its_gravity_well.gif/900px-Black-hole_universe_and_its_gravity_well.gif)
—Battersby, Stephen. Big Bang glow hints at funnel-shaped Universe New Scientist, 2004 04 15
"This can be illustrated by an analogy with flowing water. If there is laminar flow through a large pipe of decreasing diameter, then the flow velocity increases as a function of distance along the pipe <...> The conclusion is that motion forward in time is motion towards smaller r. An object entering the horizon is carried down to r = 0 just as surely as you and I are carried into next week."
—Steane, Andrew M. Relativity Made Relatively Easy OUP, 2012, pp. 367–68
"Strange Attractor. The term means ‘an irreducible invariant set that attracts the trajectories of all nearby points.’ This term was used by Terence McKenna to describe the ‘Omega Point’, which sucks our evolutionary trajectory towards it, like the plughole at the end of time."
—Strange Attractor fUSION Anomaly
"In this article by Frank Tipler called ‘The Omega Point as Eschaton’, ... Tipler reaches the conclusion that there is an omega point and it does represent the funneling together of all world lines. He, for purposes of mental comfort, sets it far in the future, but in principle, there is no reason to do that."
—McKenna, Terence. Time Travel, Psychedelics, and Physics August 1991
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/20/Mass_potential_well_increasing_mass.gif/220px-Mass_potential_well_increasing_mass.gif)
"Yet the more persistently we try to avoid man in our theories, the more tightly drawn become the circles we describe around him, as though we were caught up in his vortex. <...> We are not dealing with an immutably fixed focus but with a vortex which grows deeper as it sucks up the fluid at the heart of which it was born. The ego only persists by becoming ever more itself, in the measure in which it makes everything else itself."
—Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de. The Phenomenon of Man Harper Perennial, 1955, pp. 281, 172
"The latest theory on how the universe will end involves everything being swallowed by a giant wormhole—a scenario dubbed the ‘Big Trip’."
—Swarup, Amarendra. Phantom energy may fuel universe-eating wormhole New Scientist, 2005 11 11
Timewave Zero
Timewave Zero—a mathematical technique aimed at predicting and plotting the ebb and flow of novelty—is Terence McKenna's illegitimate and stillborn brainchild, for novelty is called so because its properties and behaviours, including the pattern of its ebb and flow, are emergent and cannot be mechanically (by means of formal logical manipulations) derived from any known relational abstractions, such as the King Wen sequence of 64 hexagrams.[84]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/44/King_Wen_%28I_Ching%29.png/220px-King_Wen_%28I_Ching%29.png)
The basis of the technique was conceived in the mid-1970s after McKenna's experiences with psilocybin mushrooms at La Chorrera in the Amazon led him to closely study the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.[5][6][27]
In Asian Taoist philosophy, opposing phenomena are represented by the yin and yang. Both are always present in everything, yet the amount of influence of each varies over time. The individual lines of the I Ching are made up of both Yin (broken lines) and Yang (solid lines).
When examining the King Wen sequence of 64 hexagrams, McKenna noticed a pattern. He analysed the "degree of difference" between the hexagrams in each successive pair and claimed he found a statistical anomaly, which he believed suggested that the King Wen sequence was intentionally constructed,[5] with the sequence of hexagrams ordered in a highly structured and artificial way, and that this pattern codified the nature of time's flow in the world.[28] With the degrees of difference as numerical values, McKenna worked out a mathematical wave form based on the 384 lines of change that make up the 64 hexagrams. He was able to graph the data and this became the Novelty Time Wave.[5]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9d/Screenshot_of_Timewave_Zero_software.png/220px-Screenshot_of_Timewave_Zero_software.png)
Peter J. Meyer (Peter Johann Gustav Meyer), in collaboration with McKenna, studied and developed novelty theory, working out a mathematical formula and developing the Timewave Zero software (the original version of which was completed by July 1987),[128] enabling them to graph and explore its dynamics on a computer.[5][7] The graph was fractal: It exhibited a pattern in which a given small section of the wave was found to be identical in form to a larger section of the wave.[3][5] McKenna called this fractal modeling of time "temporal resonance", proposing it implied that larger intervals, occurring long ago, contained the same amount of information as shorter, more recent, intervals.[5][129] He suggested the up-and-down oscillation of the wave shows an ongoing wavering between habit and novelty respectively. With each successive iteration trending, at an increasing level, towards infinite novelty. So according to novelty theory, the pattern of time itself is speeding up, with a requirement of the theory being that infinite novelty will be reached on a specific date.[3][5]
McKenna believed that events in history could be identified that would help him locate the time wave end date[5] and attempted to find the best-fit of the graph to the data field of human history.[7] The last harmonic of the wave has a duration of 67.29 years.[130] Population growth, peak oil, and pollution statistics were some of the factors that pointed him to an early twenty-first century end date and when looking for a particularly novel event in human history as a signal that the final phase had begun McKenna picked the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.[5][130] This adjusted his graph to reach zero in mid-November 2012. When he later discovered that the end of the 13th baktun in the Maya calendar had been correlated by Western Maya scholars as December 21, 2012,[a] he adopted their end date instead.[5][136][b]
Timewave Zero is considered to be pseudoscience.[10][11] Among the criticisms are the use of numerology to derive dates of important events in world history,[11] the arbitrary rather than calculated end date of the time wave[26] and the apparent adjustment of the eschaton from November 2012 to December 2012 in order to coincide with the Maya calendar. Other purported dates do not fit the actual time frames: the date claimed for the emergence of Homo sapiens is inaccurate by 70,000 years, and the existence of the ancient Sumer and Egyptian civilisations contradict the date he gave for the beginning of "historical time". Some projected dates have been criticized for having seemingly arbitrary labels, such as the "height of the age of mammals"[11] and McKenna's analysis of historical events has been criticised for having a eurocentric and cultural bias.[6][26]
The Watkins Objection
The British mathematician Matthew Watkins of Exeter University conducted a mathematical analysis of the Time Wave, and claimed there were mathematical flaws in its construction.[26]
Critical reception
This section needs additional citations for verification. (October 2022) |
Judy Corman, vice president of the Phoenix House of New York, attacked McKenna for popularizing "dangerous substances". In a 1993 letter to The New York Times, he wrote that: "surely the fact that Terence McKenna says that the psilocybin mushroom 'is the megaphone used by an alien, intergalactic Other to communicate with mankind' is enough for us to wonder if taking LSD has done something to his mental faculties."[17] The same year, in his True Hallucinations review for The New York Times, Peter Conrad wrote: "I suffered hallucinatory agonies of my own while reading his shrilly ecstatic prose".[17]
Reviewing Food of the Gods, Richard Evans Schultes wrote in American Scientist that the book was "a masterpiece of research and writing" and that it "should be read by every specialist working in the multifarious fields involved with the use of psychoactive drugs." Concluding that, "[i]t is, without question, destined to play a major role in our future considerations of the role of the ancient use of psychoactive drugs, the historical shaping of our modern concerns about drugs and perhaps about man's desire for escape from reality with drugs."[137]
In 1994, Tom Hodgkinson wrote for The New Statesman and Society, that "to write him off as a crazy hippie is a rather lazy approach to a man not only full of fascinating ideas but also blessed with a sense of humor and self-parody".[17]
In a 1992 issue of Esquire magazine, Mark Jacobson wrote of True Hallucinations that, "it would be hard to find a drug narrative more compellingly perched on a baroquely romantic limb than this passionate Tom-and-Huck-ride-great-mother-river-saga of brotherly bonding," adding "put simply, Terence is a hoot!"[6]
Wired called him a "charismatic talking head" who was "brainy, eloquent, and hilarious",[27] and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead also said that he was "the only person who has made a serious effort to objectify the psychedelic experience."[17]
Publications
Books
- McKenna, Terence; McKenna, Dennis (1975). The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching. New York: Seabury. ISBN 978-0-8164-9249-7.
- McKenna, Terence; McKenna, Dennis (1976). Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide. Under the pseudonyms OT Oss and ON Oeric. Berkeley, CA: And/Or Press. ISBN 978-0-915904-13-6.
- McKenna, Terence (1991). The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco. ISBN 978-0-06-250613-9.
- McKenna, Terence (1992a). Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge – A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution. New York: Bantam. ISBN 978-0-553-07868-8.
- McKenna, Terence (1992b). Synesthesia. Illustrated by Ely, Timothy C. New York: Granary Books. OCLC 30473682.
- Sheldrake, Rupert; McKenna, Terence; Abraham, Ralph H. (1992). Trialogues at the Edge of the West: Chaos, Creativity, and the Resacralization of the World. Forward by Houston, Jean. Bear & Company. ISBN 978-0-939680-97-9.
- McKenna, Terence (1993). True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco. ISBN 978-0-06-250545-3.
- Sheldrake, Rupert; McKenna, Terence; Abraham, Ralph H. (1998). The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination & Spirit. Monkfish Book Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9749359-7-3.
Spoken word
- History Ends in Green: Gaia, Psychedelics and the Archaic Revival, 6 audiocassette set, Mystic Fire audio, 1993, ISBN 978-1-56176-907-0 (recorded at the Esalen Institute, 1989)
- TechnoPagans at the End of History (transcription of rap with Mark Pesce from 1998)
- Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1999) (DVD) HPX/SurrealStudio
- Conversations on the Edge of Magic (1994) (CD & Cassette) ACE
- Rap-Dancing into the Third Millennium (1994) (Cassette) (Re-issued on CD as The Quintessential Hallucinogen) ACE
- Packing For the Long Strange Trip (1994) (Audio Cassette) ACE
- Global Perspectives and Psychedelic Poetics (1994) (Cassette) Sound Horizons Audio-Video, Inc.
- The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (1992) (Cassette) Sounds True
- The Psychedelic Society (DVD & Video Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- True Hallucinations Workshop (Audio/Video Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- The Vertigo at History's Edge: Who Are We? Where Have We Come From? Where Are We Going? (DVD & Video/Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Ethnobotany and Shamanism (DVD & Video/Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Shamanism, Symbiosis and Psychedelics Workshop (Audio/Video Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Shamanology (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Shamanology of the Amazon (w/ Nicole Maxwell) (Audio/Video Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Beyond Psychology (1983) (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Understanding & the Imagination in the Light of Nature Parts 1 & 2 (DVD & Video/Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Ethnobotany (a complete course given at The California Institute of Integral Studies) (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Non-ordinary States of Reality Through Vision Plants (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Mind & Time, Spirit & Matter: The Complete Weekend in Santa Fe (Audio/Video Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Forms and Mysteries: Morphogenetic Fields and Psychedelic Experiences (w/ Rupert Sheldrake) (DVD & Video/Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- UFO: The Inside Outsider (DVD & Video/Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- A Calendar for The Goddess (DVD & Video/Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- A Magical Journey: Including Hallucinogens and Culture, Time and The I Ching, and The Human Future (Video Cassette) TAP/Sound Photosynthesis
- Aliens and Archetypes (Video Cassette) TAP/Sound Photosynthesis
- Angels, Aliens and Archetypes 1987 Symposium: Shamanic Approaches to the UFO, and Fairmont Banquet Talk (DVD & Video/Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Botanical Dimensions (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Conference on Botanical Intelligence (w/ Joan Halifax, Andy Weil, & Dennis McKenna) (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Coping With Gaia's Midwife Crisis (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Dreaming Awake at the End of Time (DVD & Video/Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Evolving Times (DVD, CD & Video/Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Food of the Gods (Audio/Video Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Food of the Gods 2: Drugs, Plants and Destiny (Video Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Hallucinogens in Shamanism & Anthropology at Bridge Psychedelic Conf.1991 (w/ Ralph Metzner, Marlene Dobkin De Rios, Allison Kennedy & Thomas Pinkson) (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Finale – Bridge Psychedelic Conf.1991 (Audio/Video Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Man and Woman at the End of History (w/ Riane Eisler) (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Plants, Consciousness, and Transformation (1995) (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Metamorphosis (w/ Rupert Sheldrake & Ralph Abraham) (1995) (Video Cassette) Mystic Fire/Sound Photosynthesis
- Nature is the Center of the Mandala (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Opening the Doors of Creativity (1990) (DVD & Video/Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Places I Have Been (CD & Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Plants, Visions and History Lecture (Audio/Video Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Psychedelics Before and After History (DVD & Video/Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Sacred Plants As Guides: New Dimensions of the Soul (at the Jung Society Clairemont, California) (DVD & Video/Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Seeking the Stone (Video Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Shamanism: Before and Beyond History – A Weekend at Ojai (w/ Ralph Metzner) (Audio/Video Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Shedding the Monkey (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- State of the Stone '95 (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- The Ethnobotany of Shamanism Introductory Lecture: The Philosophical Implications of Psychobotony: Past, Present and Future (at CIIS) (Audio/Video Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- The Ethnobotany of Shamanism Workshop: Psychedelics Before and After History (at CIIS) (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- The Grammar of Ecstasy – the World Within the Word (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- The Light at the End of History (Audio/Video Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- The State of the Stone Address: Having Archaic and Eating it Too (Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- The Taxonomy of Illusion (at UC Santa Cruz) (DVD & Video/Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- This World ...and Its Double (DVD & Video/Audio Cassette) Sound Photosynthesis
- Trialogues at the Edge of the Millennium (w/ Rupert Sheldrake & Ralph Abraham) (at UC Santa Cruz) (1998) (Video Cassette) Trialogue Press
Discography
- Re : Evolution with The Shamen (1992)
- Dream Matrix Telemetry with Zuvuya (1993)
- Alien Dreamtime with Spacetime Continuum & Stephen Kent (2003)
- "Reclaim Your Mind" with Mark Pontius (2020)[138]
Filmography
- Experiment at Petaluma (1990)
- Prague Gnosis: Terence McKenna Dialogues (1992)
- The Hemp Revolution (1995)
- Terence McKenna: The Last Word (1999)
- Shamans of the Amazon (2001)
- Alien Dreamtime (2003)
- 2012: The Odyssey (2007)
- The Alchemical Dream: Rebirth of the Great Work (2008)
- Manifesting the Mind (2009)
- Cognition Factor (2009)
- DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2010)
- 2012: Time for Change (2010)
- The Terence McKenna OmniBus (2012)
- The Transcendental Object at the End of Time (2014)
- Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations (2016)
See also
Notes
- ^ Most Mayanist scholars, such as Mark Van Stone and Anthony Aveni, adhere to the "GMT (Goodman-Martinez-Thompson) correlation" with the Long Count, which places the start date at 11 August 3114 BC and the end date of b'ak'tun 13 at December 21, 2012.[131] This date was also the overwhelming preference of those who believed in 2012 eschatology, arguably, Van Stone suggests, because it was a solstice, and was thus astrologically significant. Some Mayanist scholars, such as Michael D. Coe, Linda Schele and Marc Zender, adhere to the "Lounsbury/GMT+2" correlation, which sets the start date at August 13 and the end date at December 23. Which of these is a better correlation remained unsettled.[132] Coe's initial date was "24 December 2011." He revised it to "11 January AD 2013" in the 1980 2nd edition of his book,[133] not settling on December 23, 2012 until the 1984 3rd edition.[134] The correlation of b'ak'tun 13 as December 21, 2012 first appeared in Table B.2 of Robert J. Sharer's 1983 revision of the 4th edition of Sylvanus Morley's book The Ancient Maya.[135]
- ^ The 1975 first edition of McKenna's The Invisible Landscape refers to 2012 (but no specific day during the year) only twice. In the 1993 second edition, McKenna employed December 21, 2012 throughout, the date arrived at by the Mayanist researcher Robert J. Sharer.[136]
References
- ^ Znamenski, Andrei A. (2007). The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and Western Imagination. Oxford University Press. p. 138. ISBN 978-0-19-803849-8.
- ^ Horgan, John (2004). Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 177. ISBN 978-0-547-34780-6.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w Brown, David Jay; Novick, Rebecca McClen, eds. (1993). "Mushrooms, Elves And Magic". Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations for the New Millennium. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press. pp. 9–24. ISBN 978-0-89594-601-0.
- ^ a b Partridge, Christopher (2006). "Ch. 3: Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Contemporary Sacralization of Psychedelics". Reenchantment of West. Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture. Vol. 2. Continuum. p. 113. ISBN 978-0-567-55271-6.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Jenkins, John Major (2009). "Early 2012 Books McKenna and Waters". The 2012 Story: The Myths, Fallacies, and Truth Behind the Most Intriguing Date in History. Penguin. ISBN 978-1-101-14882-2.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Jacobson, Mark (June 1992). "Terence McKenna the brave prophet of The next psychedelic revolution, or is his cosmic egg just a little bit cracked?". Esquire. pp. 107–138. ESQ 1992 06.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Dery, Mark (2001) [1996]. "Terence McKenna: The inner elf". 21•C Magazine. Archived from the original on July 24, 2014. Retrieved February 7, 2014.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Horgan, John. "Was psychedelic guru Terence McKenna goofing about 2012 prophecy?" (blog). Scientific American. Retrieved February 5, 2014.
- ^ Krupp, E.C. (November 2009). "The great 2012 scare" (PDF). Sky & Telescope. pp. 22–26 [25]. Archived from the original (PDF) on April 18, 2016.
- ^ a b Bruce, Alexandra (2009). 2012: Science Or Superstition (The Definitive Guide to the Doomsday Phenomenon). Disinformation Movie & Book Guides. Red Wheel Weiser. p. 261. ISBN 978-1-934708-51-4.
- ^ a b c d Normark, Johan (June 16, 2009). "2012: Prophet of nonsense #8: Terence McKenna – Novelty theory and timewave zero". Archaeological Haecceities (blog).
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Pinchbeck, Daniel (2003). Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism. Broadway Books. pp. 231–38. ISBN 978-0-7679-0743-9.
- ^ a b c d Kent, James (December 2, 2003). "Terence McKenna Interview, Part 1". Tripzine.com. Retrieved June 29, 2011.
- ^ Dennis McKenna (2012). The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna (ebook) (1st ed.). Polaris Publications. p. 71. ISBN 978-0-87839-637-5.
- ^ McKenna, Dennis 2012, p. 115.
- ^ a b c d e Lin, Tao (August 13, 2014). "Psilocybin, the Mushroom, and Terence McKenna". Vice. Retrieved July 12, 2018.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Martin, Douglas (April 9, 2000). "Terence McKenna, 53, dies; Patron of psychedelic drugs". The New York Times. Archived from the original on June 16, 2009. Retrieved September 12, 2012.
- ^ a b c McKenna 1992a, pp. 204–17.
- ^ a b c McKenna 1993, p. 215.
- ^ a b McKenna 1993, pp. 55–58.
- ^ a b McKenna 1993, pp. 22–23.
- ^ a b c d e f g "Terence McKenna; Promoter of psychedelic drug use". Los Angeles Times. April 7, 2000. p. B6.
- ^ a b "Terence McKenna". Omni. Vol. 15, no. 7. 1993. pp. 69–70.
- ^ a b c McKenna 1993, pp. 1–13.
- ^ McKenna 1993, p. 23.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v Letcher, Andy (2007). "14.The Elf-Clowns of Hyperspace". Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom. Harper Perennial. pp. 253–74. ISBN 978-0-06-082829-5.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Davis, Erik (May 2000). "Terence McKenna's last trip". Wired. Vol. 8, no. 5. Retrieved September 10, 2013.
- ^ a b Gyus. "The End of the River: A critical view of Linear Apocalyptic Thought, and how Linearity makes a sneak appearance in Timewave Theory's fractal view of Time…". dreamflesh. The Unlimited Dream Company. Retrieved July 19, 2015.
- ^ McKenna 1993, p. 194.
- ^ McKenna 1993, p. 3.
- ^ a b McKenna 1993, pp. 205–07.
- ^ a b c Hancock, Graham (2006) [2005 Hancock]. Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind. London: Arrow. pp. 556–57. ISBN 978-0-09-947415-9.
- ^ a b Letcher 2007, p. 278.
- ^ Ott J. (1993). Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, their Plant Sources and History. Kennewick, Washington: Natural Products Company. p. 290. ISBN 978-0-9614234-3-8.; see San Antonio JP. (1971). "A laboratory method to obtain fruit from cased grain spawn of the cultivated mushroom, Agaricus bisporus". Mycologia. 63 (1): 16–21. doi:10.2307/3757680. JSTOR 3757680. PMID 5102274.
- ^ McKenna & McKenna 1976, Preface (revised ed.).
- ^ Wojtowicz, Slawek (2008). "Ch. 6: Magic Mushrooms". In Strassman, Rick; Wojtowicz, Slawek; Luna, Luis Eduardo; et al. (eds.). Inner Paths To Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds Through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. p. 149. ISBN 978-1-59477-224-5.
- ^ a b c Toop, David (February 18, 1993). "Sounds like a radical vision; The Shamen and Terence McKenna". Rock Music. The Times.
- ^ Sharkey, Alix (April 15, 2000). "Terence McKenna". The Independent (Obituary). p. 7.
- ^ McKenna, Terence (1994). "181-McKennaErosEschatonQA". In Hagerty, Lorenzo (ed.). Psychedelia: Psychedelic Salon ALL Episodes (MP3) (lecture). Event occurs at 32:00. Retrieved April 11, 2014.
- ^ Leary, Timothy (1992). "Unfolding the Stone 1". In Damer, Bruce (ed.). Psychedelia: Raw Archives of Terence McKenna Talks (MP3) (Introduction to lecture by Terence McKenna). Event occurs at 2:08.
- ^ Hicks, Bill (1997) [November 1992 – December 1993]. "Pt. 1: Ch. 2: Gifts of Forgiveness". Rant in E-Minor (CD and MP3). Rykodisc. Event occurs at 0:58. OCLC 38306915.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Gyrus (2009). "Appendix II: The Stoned Ape Hypothesis". War and the Noble Savage: A Critical Inquiry Into Recent Accounts of Violence Amongst Uncivilized Peoples. London: Dreamflesh. pp. 63–66. ISBN 978-0-9554196-1-4.
- ^ Hayes, Charles (2000). Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures. Penguin. p. 1201. ISBN 978-1-101-15719-0.
- ^ a b Sheldrake, McKenna & Abraham 1998, Preface.
- ^ Sheldrake, McKenna & Abraham 1992, p. 11.
- ^ Rice, Paddy Rose (ed.). "The Sheldrake – McKenna – Abraham Trialogues". sheldrake.org. Archived from the original on November 28, 2013.
- ^ a b "Who We Are & Library Hours/Contact Info". Botanical Dimensions.
- ^ a b "Plants and People: Our Ethnobotany Offerings". Botanical Dimensions.
- ^ Nollman, Jim (1994). Why We Garden: Cultivating a sense of place. Henry Holt and Company. p. 181. ISBN 978-0-8050-2719-8.
- ^ Frauenfelder, Mark (February 22, 2007). "Terence McKenna's library destroyed in fire". Boing Boing (group blog). Retrieved September 12, 2012.
- ^ Davis, Erik. "Terence McKenna's Ex-Library". Internet Archive. Archived from the original on October 4, 2012. Retrieved February 19, 2018.
- ^ a b c 'The Butterfly Hunter' by Klea McKenna By Tao Lin, Sep 9 2014, 7:36pm, Vice
- ^ a b Stamets, Paul (1996). "5. Good tips for great trips". Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World: An identification guide. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press. p. 36. ISBN 978-0-89815-839-7.
- ^ Wadsworth, Jennifer (May 11, 2016). "Federal approval brings MDMA from club to clinic". Metro Active. Metro Silicon Valley. Retrieved May 17, 2016.
- ^ Pinchbeck 2003, p. 193.
- ^ McKenna, Terence. "The Invisible Landscape". futurehi.net (lecture). Future Hi. Archived from the original on October 16, 2005.[verification needed][infringing link?]
- ^ Pinchbeck 2003, p. 247.
- ^ Trip, Gabriel (May 2, 1993). "Tripping, but not falling". New York Times. p. A6.
- ^ Shamen (1992). "Re: Evolution". Boss Drum (CD, MP3). Epic. Event occurs at 4:50. OCLC 27056837. Track 10.
- ^ McKenna, Terence. "The Gaian mind". deoxy.org. Archived from the original on February 3, 1999. – Cut-up from the works of Terence McKenna.
- ^ Rick Strassman, M.D. (2001). DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A doctor's revolutionary research into the biology of near-death and mystical experiences (Later printing ed.). Inner Traditions Bear and Company. p. 187. ISBN 978-0-89281-927-0.
- ^ Pinchbeck 2003, p. 213.
- ^ Pinchbeck 2003, p. 234.
- ^ Rabey, Steve (August 13, 1994). "Instant karma: Psychedelic drug use on the rise as a quick route to spirituality". Colorado Springs Gazette – Telegraph. p. E1.
- ^ McKenna 1992a, p. 242.
- ^ McKenna, Terence (1999). Psychedelics in the age of intelligent machines (lecture) (video).
- ^ McKenna, Terence (1992). "Unfolding the Stone 1". In Damer, Bruce (ed.). Psychedelia: Raw Archives of Terence McKenna Talks (lecture) (MP3). Event occurs at 17:30.
- ^ McKenna, Terence (1990–1999). "Surfing Finnegans Wake". In Damer, Bruce (ed.). Psychedelia: Raw archives of Terence McKenna talks (lecture) (MP3). Event occurs at 0:45.
- ^ McKenna, Terence (1991). "Afterword: I understand Philip K. Dick". In Sutin, Lawrence (ed.). In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the exegesis. Underwood-Miller. ISBN 978-0-88733-091-9. "Convenience copy". sirbacon.org.[verification needed][infringing link?]
- ^ a b Mulvihill, Tom. "Eight things you didn't know about magic mushrooms". The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group Limited. Archived from the original on January 12, 2022. Retrieved June 14, 2015.
- ^ a b McKenna 1992b, pp. 56–60.
- ^ McKenna 1992b, p. 54.
- ^ Fischer, Roland; Hill, Richard; Thatcher, Karen; Scheib, James (1970). "Psilocybin-Induced contraction of nearby visual space". Agents and Actions. 1 (4): 190–97. doi:10.1007/BF01965761. PMID 5520365. S2CID 8321037.
- ^ McKenna 1992b, p. 57.
- ^ a b c d Znamenski 2007, pp. 138–39.
- ^ a b McKenna 1992b, p. 59.
- ^ Pinchbeck 2003, p. 194.
- ^ Akers, Brian P. (March 28, 2011). "Concerning Terence McKenna's 'Stoned Apes'". Reality Sandwich. Retrieved August 12, 2015.
- ^ Hayes, Charles (2000). "Introduction: The Psychedelic [in] Society: A Brief Cultural History of Tripping". Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures. Penguin. p. 14. ISBN 978-1-101-15719-0.
- ^ McKenna, Terence (1994). "181-McKennaErosEschatonQA". In Hagerty, Lorenzo (ed.). Psychedelia: Psychedelic Salon ALL Episodes (MP3) (lecture). Event occurs at 49:10. Retrieved April 11, 2014.
- ^ McKenna, Terence. "The Importance of Human Beings (a.k.a Eros and the Eschaton)". matrixmasters.net. Archived from the original on August 6, 2013. Retrieved November 29, 2013.
- ^ Spacetime Continuum; McKenna, Terence; Kent, Stephen (2003) [1993]. "Archaic Revival". Alien Dreamtime. Visuals by Rose-X Media House. Magic Carpet Media: Astralwerks. Event occurs at 3:08. OCLC 80061092. Archived from the original (DVD, CD and MP3) on July 6, 1997. Retrieved February 1, 2014.
- ^ McKenna, Terence. Understanding and Imagination in the Light of Nature 1987 10 17. "... synergizing progress is the notion to be maximized ..."
- ^ a b c Kagan, Sacha. Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity transcript Verlag, 2014, p. 168.
"Emergence allows to see ‘the new’. It is discontinuous i.e. does not follow from the logic of the elements when just lined up or lumped together, hence Bateson’s insistance on a jump in logical typing, and Morin’s point that emergence is ‘logically nondeductible [and] opens in our understanding the breach through which enters the irreducibility of reality’ (ibid., p. 109). Emergence is the outcome of synthesis, but also can retroactively contribute to producing that which produces it. It is both a superstructure (i.e. depending on an infrastructure) and an organizational potential.
The concept of emergence helps to understand ‘nature’ as an archipelago of systems, because ‘systems of systems of systems are emergences from emergences from emergences’ (ibid., p. 111). Emergence is not only implying logical jumps, but also physical jumps, and thus can help explain why a complex universe can be self-selecting and evolving."
- ^ Hoebel, Edward Adamson. Man in the Primitive World: An Introduction to Anthropology McGraw-Hill, 1958, p. 173. "The differing ways in which variant culture traits are related to each other lend to each culture its unique over-all quality, or configuration."
- ^ TeGrotenhuis, Ward Evan. Brownian Dynamics of Colloidal Suspensions Vol. 1, University of California, Berkeley, 1990, p. 80. "The potential energy is the sum of direct interactions between the particles; this depends on the instantaneous configuration."
- ^ McKenna, Terence. The World and Its Double 1993 09 11. "That’s what it’s really about. All these disparate physical elements come to nothing if they don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts. And the more than the sum of their parts is this transcendental element which we call love."
- ^ Grey, Mary C. Introducing Feminist Images of God Sheffield Academic Press, 2001, p. 84. "The Spirit is the binding energy expressed by the word re-ligio/religion—a word that itself reflects the brokenness and fragmentation of the universe, that God is trying to heal."
- ^ McKenna, Terence. Interview with Erik Davis for Wired magazine November 1999. "And in terms of what is it all leading toward, or what it’s about, it must be something about like the spiritualization of matter; that matter is evolving toward quintessence, or essence, or something like that, and we’re the startled witnesses to this thing, because we’re part of this stuff that I called emergent properties (or the side-effects, you could almost say) of the universal emergence of matter into spirit."
- ^ Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality The Free Press, 1978, pp. 21–22. "Thus the ‘production of novel togetherness’ is the ultimate notion embodied in the term ‘concrescence’. These ultimate notions of ‘production of novelty’ and of ‘concrete togetherness’ are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition."
- ^ a b Reichling, Mary Josephine. Images of Imagination: A Philosophical Study of Imagination in Music with Application to Music Education Indiana University, 1991, p. 133. "Intuition integrates the several parts to form a whole and does so spontaneously."
- ^ a b c Aspray, William. The Origins of John von Neumann's Theory of Automata In "Proceedings of the Summer Research Institute on the legacy of John von Neumann held at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, May 29–June 4, 1988". American Mathematical Society, 1990, p. 291.
"Szilard's explanation was accepted by the physics community, and information was accepted as a scientific concept, defined by its statistical‑mechanical properties as a kind of negative energy that introduced order into a system."
- ^ Swartz, Clifford E. Phenomenal Physics Wiley, 1981, p. 306. "In the solid phase, atoms are bound with a negative total energy. Their positive kinetic energy of oscillation is smaller than their negative potential energy of binding. The situation is analogous to that of our planet moving around the sun with positive kinetic energy, but bound in a negative gravitational potential energy well."
- ^ Dillon, John Andrew (Society for General Systems Research). Proceedings of the International Conference on Mental Images, Values, & Reality Vol. 1, Intersystems Publications, 1986, p. D-7.
"... binding energy or ‘synergy’ permitting the coherence of the system."
- ^ Chouhan, Neelu; Liu, Ru-Shi; Zhang, Jiujun. Photochemical Water Splitting: Materials and Applications CRC Press, 2017, p. 70.
"... binding energy is the system's synergy."
- ^ a b McKenna, Terence. In the Valley of Novelty 1998 07 31. "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, et cetera—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—at least locally."
- ^ a b Battersby, Stephen. Big Bang glow hints at funnel-shaped Universe New Scientist, 2004 04 15
- ^ McKenna, Terence. Approaching Timewave Zero Magical Blend, no. 44, 1994. "The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal that is as inevitable as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release it up near the rim. If you do that, you know the marble will roll down the side of the bowl down, down, down—until eventually it comes to rest at the lowest energy state, which is the bottom of the bowl. That's precisely my model of human history. I'm suggesting that the universe is pulled toward a complex attractor that exists ahead of us in time, and that our ever-accelerating speed through the phenomenal world of connectivity and novelty is based on the fact that we are now very, very close to the attractor."
- ^ Bulletin of the Astronomical Society of India Vols. 1–4, 1973, p. 9. "In fact, the black hole state represents the maximum entropy state of a certain amount of matter."
- ^ Peacock, Kent A. The Quantum Revolution: A Historical Perspective Greenwood Press, 2008, p. 168. "A black hole of a given mass is the highest possible entropy state for that mass."
- ^ Thinking Inside the Box The University of Chicago Magazine, 2002.
"For the vast majority of the simulation, from z = 30 to z = 10, the matter seems to be distributed uniformly. But at the tiniest level there are irregularities, ‘primordial quantum perturbations’ left over from the Big Bang that cause some particles to be ever so slightly closer to each other. These perturbations, says Kravtsov, are the ‘seeds of the structures’ we see today. ‘Gravity,’ he explains, ‘tends to make perturbations grow. As the density of matter in a perturbation increases, so does gravitational pull.’ <...> The evolution of the cosmic structure is hierarchical: gravitational collapse first builds small objects—galaxies—and then larger structures—clusters of galaxies. Clusters tend to move toward each other and form filamentary structures, flat and elongated. <...> The box rotates as the particles float toward one another, revealing from all angles the delicate beauty of the universe's filamentary structure. It looks exactly like the pulsating and branching blood vessels of the human body. ‘They actually have a lot in common,’ he agrees, ‘because they're both approximately fractal structures.’"
- ^ a b Gribbin, John. In Search of the Multiverse Penguin, 2009, p. 131. "Any concentration of matter more compact than an infinitely dispersed cloud (even a cloud of gas containing one hydrogen molecule in every litre of space) must have less gravitational energy than an infinitely dispersed cloud, because, when material falls together energy is removed from the field. We start with zero energy and take some away, so we are left with negative energy. The negative energy of the gravitational field is what allows negative entropy, equivalent to information, to grow, making the Universe a more complicated and interesting place."
- ^ The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science Vol. XXXVI, Taylor & Francis, 1893, p. 24. "It is thus obvious that according to the ordinary conception we can assert no more than that the potential energy belongs to the system, that this conception therefore involves no localization of the energy in the system, and consequently no erroneous localization."
- ^ Cassidy, David C.; Holton, Gerald; Rutherford, F. James. Understanding Physics Springer, 2002, p. 239. "We must conclude that the potential energy belongs not to one body, but to the whole system of interacting bodies involved! This is evident in the fact that the potential energy gained is available to any one or to all of these interacting bodies."
- ^ Fuller, Buckminster. Synergetics Macmillan, 1975, §000.113. "Gravity is the inwardly cohering force acting integratively on all systems."
- ^ a b Firsoff, Valdemar Axel. Facing the Universe Sidgwick & Jackson, 1966, p. 179. "Time resembles a field of negative energy and so a negative inertia."
- ^ a b Ziegler, Franz. Mechanics of Solids and Fluids Springer, 1995, p. 167. "Force in such a potential field is a flux in the sense of a mechanical driving agent."
- ^ a b Volovik, G. E. The Universe in a Helium Droplet OUP, 2003, p. 60. "The non-viscous flow of the vacuum should be potential (irrotational)."
- ^ Tyndall on Heat Blackwood's Magazine, vol. 94, July–December 1863, p. 691. "The future energy contemplated by us as probable, is, in fact, our potential energy."
- ^ a b c Sachs, Paul D. Dynamics of a Natural Soil System Edaphic Press, 1999, p. 56. "The negative energy force that moves water is called suction."
- ^ a b Steane, Andrew M. Relativity Made Relatively Easy OUP, 2012, pp. 367–68. "The conclusion is that motion forward in time is motion towards smaller r. An object entering the horizon is carried down to r = 0 just as surely as you and I are carried into next week."
- ^ a b Getchell, Adam. Traversable Lorentzian Wormholes 2003. "Wheeler subsequently coined the term ‘wormhole’, although his wormholes were at the quantum scale. <...> Wheeler wormholes are Planck‑scale sized [Visser, p. 100]."
- ^ a b You can't get entangled without a wormhole: Physicist finds entanglement instantly gives rise to a wormhole ScienceDaily, 2013 12 05. "More fundamentally, the results suggest that gravity may, in fact, emerge from entanglement. What's more, the geometry, or bending, of the universe as described by classical gravity, may be a consequence of entanglement, such as that between pairs of particles strung together by tunneling wormholes."
- ^ McKenna, Terence. Spacetime Continuum / Alien Dreamtime An album recorded live on 26–27 February 1993 at the Transmission Theater, San Francisco, Ca.
"The human neocortex is the most densely ramified and complexified structure in the known universe. We are the cutting edge of organismic transformation of matter in this cosmos."
- ^ Mind/Brain Institute > Research The Johns Hopkins University. "The human brain is a network of 1011 neurons with 1015 connections, making it the most complex system in the universe."
- ^ McKenna, Terence. Eros and the Eschaton 1994 03 25. "But really, what Eros means in the Greek sense is a kind of unity of nature, a kind of all-pervasive order that bridges one ontological level to another."
- ^ Skinner, Ray. Relativity for Scientists and Engineers Courier Corporation, 2014, p. 189. "A beam of negative energy that travels into the past can be generated by the acceleration of the source to high speeds."
- ^ McKenna, Terence. The World and Its Double 1993 09 11. "We are being sucked into the body of eternity. And I think it’s going to happen very soon."
- ^ McKenna, Terence. New Maps of Hyperspace 1984. "... if one tries to imagine the point of view of a thing made of light, one must realize that what is never mentioned is that if one moves at the speed of light there is no time whatsoever. There is an experience of time zero. So if one imagines for a moment oneself to be made of light, or in possession of a vehicle that can move at the speed of light, one can traverse from any point in the universe to any other with a subjective experience of time zero. <…> One exists in eternity, one has become eternal. <…> One has transited into the eternal mode. One is then apart from the moving image; one exists in the completion of eternity."
- ^ Brooks, Michael. Roger Penrose: Non-stop cosmos, non-stop career New Scientist, 2010 03 10. "Then he found something interesting within it: at the very end of the universe, the only remaining particles will be massless. That means everything that exists will travel at the speed of light, making the flow of time meaningless."
- ^ Seeds, Michael A.; Backman, Dana. Foundations of Astronomy Cengage Learning, 2012, p. 77. "Gravity rules. The moon orbiting Earth, matter falling into black holes, and the overall structure of the universe are dominated by gravity."
- ^ Mathews, Albert P. The Nature of Matter, Gravitation, and Light W. Wood and Company, 1927, p. 106. "The quantity factor of potential energy is space or volume which however is equivalent to mass."
- ^ Heighway, Jack. Einstein, the Aether and Variable Rest Mass HeighwayPubs, 2011, p. 36. "Understanding why rest masses are reduced in a gravitational field only requires a simple insight: when an object is raised in a gravitational field, the gravitational potential energy increase is real, and exists as an increase, usually tiny, in the rest mass of the object."
- ^ Jeans, James Hopwood. The Universe Around Us CUP, 1930, p. 332. "As we go forwards in time, material weight continually changes into radiation. Conversely, as we go backwards in time, the total material weight of the universe must continually increase."
- ^ Böhm-Vitense, Erika. Introduction to Stellar Astrophysics CUP, 1992, p. 29. "After each infinitesimal step of collapse the star has to wait until it has radiated away half of the released gravitational energy before it can continue to contract."
- ^ Cameron, A. G. W. Technical Note D-1682: The Collapse Phase of Early Solar Evolution NASA, January 1963, p. 5. "As the protostar contracts, half of the gravitational potential energy released will be stored as internal heat, and the remaining half will be radiated away from the surface."
- ^ Swarup, Amarendra. Phantom energy may fuel universe-eating wormhole New Scientist, 2005 11 11. "The latest theory on how the universe will end involves everything being swallowed by a giant wormhole—a scenario dubbed the ‘Big Trip’."
- ^ United States Copyright Office Title=Timewave zero. Copyright Number: TXu000288739 Date: 1987
- ^ McKenna 1992a, pp. 104–13.
- ^ a b Abraham, Ralph; McKenna, Terence (June 1983). "Dynamics of Hyperspace". ralph-abraham.org. Santa Cruz, CA. Retrieved October 14, 2009.
- ^ Matthews, Peter (2005). "Who's Who in the Classic Maya World". Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies. Retrieved April 13, 2011.
- ^ Van Stone, Mark. "Questions and comments". famsi.org. Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies. Retrieved September 6, 2010.
- ^ Coe, Michael D. (1980). The Maya. Ancient Peoples and Places. Vol. 10 (2nd ed.). London: Thames and Hudson. p. 151.
- ^ Coe, Michael D. (1984). The Maya. Ancient Peoples and Places (3rd ed.). London: Thames and Hudson.
- ^ Morley, Sylvanus (1983). The Ancient Maya (4th ed.). Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. p. 603, Table B2. ISBN 9780804711371.
- ^ a b Defesche, Sacha (June 17, 2008) [January–August 2007]. "'The 2012 Phenomenon': A historical and typological approach to a modern apocalyptic mythology" (MA Thesis, Mysticism and Western Esotericism, University of Amsterdam). Skepsis. Retrieved April 29, 2011.
- ^ Schultes, Richard Evans (1993). "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge by Terence McKenna". Life Sciences. American Scientist (Book review). Vol. 81, no. 5. pp. 489–90. JSTOR 29775027.
- ^ "Literally What do You Want?".
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- Terence McKenna at IMDb
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- Dunning, Brian (June 30, 2020). "Skeptoid #734: The Stoned Ape Theory". Skeptoid.
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- Tao of Terence Archived August 11, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, a 12-part series of essays on McKenna by Tao Lin at Vice
- Terence McKenna Bibliography Archived July 7, 2015, at the Wayback Machine, list of references to books, articles, audio, video, interviews and translations by and about Terence McKenna
- Terrence McKenna's True Hallucinations Documentary by Peter Bergmann
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