History Ends in Green: Terence McKenna on Evolution, Emergence and Complexity

by Alex Vikoulov

"Human history is a 25,000-year transition zone. Before you enter the zone, you're an animal. After you leave the zone, you're a 'god'." -Terence McKenna

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​Terence Kemp McKenna (1946–2000) was an American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for 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, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness.

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​Terence McKenna spoke of the Omega Point, the concept of "divine" evolutionary unification introduced by the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, as the "Transcendental Object at the end of time," universal teleological attractor. Evolution, according to McKenna, is not being pushed from behind by the force of causal necessity, we humans, like the rest of Nature, are being pulled towards this universal attractor, this temporal vortex, reacting to the siren song of the Transcendental Object.
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 It beckons across the dimensions, it throws an enormous shadow over the enterprise of human history... The presence of creatures such as ourselves on this planet is an indication of the nearness of the Transcendental Object at the end of time; it is an attractor, an energy sink in the epigenetic landscape... 

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​The Universe you and I live in is by far more complicated place than the early universe was. As Terence McKenna once said: "I see the cosmos as a kind of novelty-producing engine, a kind of machine that produces complexity in all realms – physical, chemical, social – and then uses that achieved level of complexity as a platform for further complexity." The amount of complexity at any given moment is in direct correlation to the temporal distance from that event to the Omega Point. Say, primordial mitochondria are much farther from the Omega Point than the humans of the early 21st century.

​Think of the Omega Point as a star radiating energy, universal attractor — things are not being pushed from behind on the evolutionary timeline but being pulled toward the Omega Point, a point of maximum complexity and connectivity. As McKenna eloquently puts it: “With the emergence of the global Internet, a human population of several billion, and an electronic Noosphere, we are now within the shadow of this Transcendental Object at the end of time."

Video: The Omega Point Cosmology (ebook trailer for The Origins of Us)

In his book Food of the Gods: the Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, Terence McKenna crafts his carefully thought-out theory proposing that our pre-human primate ancestors consumed psilocybin mushrooms for thousands of years, and this is the primary reason humanity’s evolution rapidly accelerated — launching us forward in the animal kingdom. Terence McKenna’s Stoned Ape Theory is more plausible than it sounds — especially in context of the emergence of human mind and language development.

​The "Linguistic Singularity" made us human. McKenna wrote that, with the invention of language, human biological evolution basically seized and cultural evolution, an epigenetic phenomenon, has taken over, ever since. McKenna's theory remains one of the most controversial, but fascinating and what it actually boils down to is that a new psychoactive chemical was introduced to a species, and over millennia, this chemical, that functions as a neurotransmitter, had a drastic effect on the evolutionary trajectory of that species.

​One thing is for sure, we would not be who we are today if Earth had not prepared us for the next evolutionary leap and given us a chance to eat our way to higher consciousness, according to McKenna.

Video: From Monkeydom to Starshiphood w/Terence McKenna
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The second big singularity should be identified as the "Cyberdelic Singularity," started in the 1960s, coinciding with the dawn of Space Age, intersection of cybernetic and psychedelic cultures, aimed at augmentation of human mind, confluence of nascent information technology and personal liberation through boundary-dissolving, mind-expanding psychedelic exploration.

​The Cyberdelic Singularity opened up the whole new realms of possibilities for our species: Outer Space, Inner Space, and Cyberspace. Psychedelics were later suppressed by social institutions because of their imminent threat to status quo capitalism and political order, but recently, we start to witness some sort of psychedelic renaissance.
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 We are going to shed the monkey. The linguistic being that is symbiotic with these monkeys is about to disentangle itself from matter and realize some kind of angelic transformation very difficult for us to anticipate or understand.

We are now accelerating towards probably the most important moment in the entire history of Earth, comparable in significance only to the emergence of life itself on this planet — the Technological Singularity, Intelligence Supernova, the Omega Point of Homo sapiens -- progressively morphing into one Global Mind. This "cosmic event" would mark the end of human era, as we are to inexorably transcend our animal biology, and even more importantly, we are to transcend our limited dimensionality. History is, after all, "a shockwave of eschatology" in the words of McKenna.*​

In the following series of lectures (duration about 7 hours) McKenna discusses eschatology and our "psychedelic trip" through epochs. Highly recommended if you can set aside some time to listen to this extraordinarily brilliant thinker well ahead of his time. If you can relate to what McKenna says in his lectures, then you'll love my new book The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution:

Video: History Ends in Green w/Terence McKenna

​​​*Abridged excerpt from the book 
"The Syntellect Hypothesis: 
Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" 
by Alex M. Vikoulov,
available now on amazon.com, bn.com,
​and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore.

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​Tags: Syntellect Hypothesis, Five Paradigms, minds evolution, psychedelic drugs, entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, Terence McKenna, transcendence, conscious experience, psychedelic experience, noosphere, superintelligence, singularity, human evolution, transcendental object, Omega Point, linguistic singularity, cyberdelic singularity, technological singularity, teleological attractor, philosophy of mind, science of mind, evolution of consciousness, transcendentalism, neo-transcendentalism, history ends in green, dimensionality, eschatology

*Image Credit: Ecstadelic Media

About the Author:
Alex Vikoulov is a futurist, digital philosopher, neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter and media artist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution."  Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area).  More Bio...