Terence McKenna would have loved it. Scientific American, my
former employer, has just published “How Hallucinogens Play Their Mind-bending
Games.”
Illustrated with a trippy Lucy-in-the-Sky photo, the piece reports on investigations
into how exactly LSD affects the brain, providing yet another example of what I
have called The Psychedelic Revival.
Researching Rational Mysticism in 1999, I interviewed McKenna,
the crazy-like-a-fox psychedelic riffer-provocateur-performance-artist, just before
he was diagnosed with the brain tumor that killed him less than a year later. We met in New York City in the Millennium Hotel, right next to the World Trade Center, which was still standing. At
one point I warned McKenna that I had worked for 10 years at Scientific American,
and it had left me with a rather conservative, skeptical outlook.
Scientific American, McKenna assured me, is one of his favorite
magazines. It is “incredibly psychedelic,” and a major source of his
inspiration. He had just read an article in Scientific American about a
hypothetical cosmic force with “surreal,” “woo-woo” implications. “Essentially
what it says is that Newtonian spacetime is in the act of boiling away, and
what will be left in only a couple or three billion years--if you calculate
these processes fully--is a universe entirely defined by nonlocal quantum
activity.”
Anyone who reads Scientific American, McKenna continued, can
see that science is in the throes of “an enormous crisis, or maybe not crisis
but turmoil, based on the breakdown of paradigms.” Just look at superstrings,
parallel universes, hyperdimensions, time travel, and other bizarre notions
emerging from physics. Then there are technological advances such as artificial
intelligence, which is on the verge of creating machines with superhuman
intelligence. “Nobody knows what mind is,” McKenna said, “operating at
multigigahertz speeds in virtual realities unconstrained by gravity and economy
of any sort.”
Maybe in the future Scientific American can explore
McKenna’s time-wave theory, which tracks the ebbs and flows of “novelty” in terrestrial
history and predicts that humanity is hurtling toward an “enormously-reality
rearranging” event that will take place on December 22, 2012.
Heavens. What was the article/theory that had excited McKenna in 99? Has it proved robust? Has it turned to dust? It sounds intriguing.
As does he.
Posted by: Tom F | February 11, 2007 at 08:18 PM