Yes, I agree. What seems like a line (with a beginning and an end) from one vantage point, turns out to be circular; part of a cycle from a more comprehensive viewpoint. And then we see the cycle does not begin again from the same point; something is added (or taken away) and the circle shows itself to ‘really’ be a spiral.

I like Mckenna’s intuition that this acceleration to the singularity is somewhat akin to a birth process. It is a period of high risk. If one had no knowledge of what a ‘birth’ consisted of, it would seem a chaotic, dangerous, bloody business, fraught with danger. Luckily we are aware that this process is time limited and ends with a new beginning. (The beginning of a new cycle)

History then is ending. History is a kind of gestation process. It’s a kind of metamorphosis. It’s an episode in the life of a species. If you think of the simple example of metamorphosis, that of caterpillar to butterfly, we all know that there is this intermediate resting stage where the caterpillar is for all practical purposes enzymatically dissolved and then reconstituted and an entirely different kind of organism with different physical structures, different eyes, different legs, a different way of breathing, with wings where no wings were before, with a different kind of feeding apparatus. This is what’s happening to us. History is a process of metamorphosis. It’s a pubescent stage. It begins with naked monkeys and it ends with a human/machine planet-girdling interface capable of releasing the energies that light the stars and it lasts about 15,000 or 20,000 years and during that period, the entire process hangs in the balance.

It’s a period of high risk. It’s like what a butterfly is doing in the cocoon or what is happening to a child in the womb. It’s a gestation process where one form of life is being changed into another. Well, this would all happen naturally and with a great deal of anxiety I imagine as history builds to it’s ever more climatic and horrifying crescendo and we would all be ignorant or very baffled about what’s going on were it not for the institution of psychedelic shamanism. Remember I said that what is dissolved are the crystalline structures of cultural assumption. Well one of the strongest symmetries in our cultural crystal is the symmetry that gathers around the concept of past and future.

Terence McKenna ~ Eros and the Eschaton