Terence Mckenna had a great gift for sharing new and interesting ways of looking at the world.
I love his intuitive notion of the transcendental object, Which turns the current scientific norm on its head.
Instead of a singularity at the start of time, Mckenna envisioned a singularity at the end of time.
He felt that science’s singularity (The big bang) was the limit test of credulity; That the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant!
‘Whether you believe this or not, notice that it is not possible to conceive of something more unlikely or less likely to be believed!’
‘what these philosophers of science are saying is, give us one free miracle, and we will roll from that point forward — from the birth of time to the crack of doom! — just one free miracle, and then it will all unravel according to natural law.’
Mckenna felt that the singularity was more likely to appear at the end of time.
He envisioned a transcendental multi-dimensional object, a strange attractor, drawing us towards it through what we think of as time.
It has always been there, exerting it’s timeless and indefatigable influence like a huge gravity sink, but from our ‘lower’ dimensional viewpoint its appearance is something that will happen in the future.
Mckenna, interestingly, saw history as an unnatural state for man (ie the last 25000 years)
He saw history, culture and civilization as merely the ripples of the transcendental object as we are drawn ever faster towards it. Like some protean form stirring beneath a strange sea, about to make its presence known.
As the object breaks the surface and comes into sight, time appears to speed up. Increasing novelty enters the system as we hurtle towards the singularity. The resonances of history fold in upon one another and overlap.
It may be imagined that feelings of deja-vu will accelerate as the fractal nature of time becomes apparent. Echoes, resonances and patterns are repeated at an ever increasing rate. The patterns recur on every level. A love affair, the fall of an empire, the death agony of a protozoan, all occur within the context of this, always the same, yet ever different pattern. All events are resonances of other events, in other parts, and at other scales of time.
