McKenna, Terence. The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

The subtitle says it all, and Terence McKenna has figured it all out! Well, there's no end to what can be figured out; but McKenna is certainly engaged, more completely and effectively than anyone else I know, in the Great Work, the grand synthesis.

Twentieth-century history, with all its technological and material excesses and global warfare, is not, he has concluded, "simply a fluke or an anomaly — it is the culmination of a process that has been in motion for as long as the planet has been in existence." (p. 18) And far from being outside of or cut off from nature, we — and all our machines — are its finest, and perhaps its final, flowering, because, he boldly asserts, "History is going to end." The human beings alive today are, therefore, "the natural agents for a compression that is building up in the temporal world toward transition into some higher order of existence." (p. 18)

He finds the most convincing evidence for this unsettling conclusion to be available in the realms of psychedelic experience, particularly that aided and abetted by the psilocybin mushroom, which he strongly suspects of having an extraterrestrial provenance. In fact, the mushroom told him that it did! Previously, it revealed, it was a lifeform, a species, that gained complete knowledge of its own genetic information (as we are about to do) and then reengineered itself for optimal survival and dispersal through the galaxy, employing spore encapsulation for travel between host planets and a mycelial network strategy on planetary surfaces. Its sole purpose appears to be the enlightenment of other species, a subject it knows something about, since "The true history of the galaxy over the last four and a half billion years is trivial to it." (p. 39)

This will give you some sense of the reach and novelty of Terence McKenna's mind. But he's not just mouthing off (though he has clearly been making out with the Blarney Stone). He has gone to considerable personal risk — he has laid his soul as well as his worldly reputation on the line — to bring back and spread the good, if largely unexpected and incomprehensible, news of Rebirth. He was, in his own words, "appalled" to discover, 20 seconds after smoking DMT one day in 1966, that right next door, "one quanta away," there was raging "a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien," and that it fully intended to take humanity home with it. He came back and said, "I cannot believe this; this is completely impossible" (p. 38). And, he says, he continued to feel that way after quite a few repeat encounters.

When I first explored psychedelics and the greater world into which they lead, and in my early episodes of exposure to "alien" intelligence, I certainly didn't understand what it all meant. I still don't have the full picture — to see it all one must be it all — but it's slowly coming into focus. And the more clearly I see it, the more strongly I'm inclined to take up a station at the mid-point between the mundane and the cosmic, the present and the future, and help bridge the gap.

McKenna's vision (and those like it) is so vast and absolute, so alien to most people's present experience, that it seems cold and remote, impossible to attain (if we even wanted to). Yet the reality of our situation, I'm convinced, is that planetary Rebirth is embedded, that its seeds are germinating right now, in the warm human hearts, in the very normal homes and workplaces, of all of us. As we all tell our stories, they nurture the seedlings of change, which grow from within us to intertwine and transform our world.

Back to Apocalypse