Terence McKenna

Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.

Summary

Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000) was a writer, philosopher, and Ethnobotanist. He is noted for his many speculations on the use of psychedelic, plant-based hallucinogens, and subjects ranging from Hypnosis, Shamanism, the development of human consciousness, and novelty theory.

He made essential contributions to the concept of a Biocentric Culture (see Vital Unconscious and Biocentric Principle).

Ideas

• Stoned Ape Theory - McKenna theorizes that as the North African jungles receded toward the end of the most recent ice age, giving way to grasslands, a branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the branches and took up a life out in the open -- following around herds of ungulates, nibbling what they could along the way. Among the new items in their diet were psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing in the dung of these ungulate herds. The changes caused by the introduction of this drug to the primate diet were many -- McKenna theorizes, for instance, that synesthesia (the blurring of boundaries between the senses) caused by psilocybin led to the development of spoken language: the ability to form pictures in another person's mind through the use of vocal sounds.
• Timewave Zero - transformations of numbers, derived from the King Wen Sequence of I Ching hexagrams, relating to the occurrence of temporal phenomena. This led eventually to a mathematical description of "the timewave", which allegedly correlates time and history with the ebb and flow of something called Novelty, claimed to be a quality intrinsic to the temporal structure of the universe.
• Novelty Theory - Attempts to calculate the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe as an inherent quality of time.
• Machine Elf - a term coined by McKenna to describe the entities that he claims one becomes aware of after having taken tryptamine based psychedelic drugs, especially DMT.
• Dominator Culture - McKenna used the term dominator culture in part to illuminate what happened to cultures native to the Americas, and in part to describe the contrasting, antithetical character of what he sees as Western patriarchal culture - indicating, for example, his claims that it perennially lacks of social conscience and lacks of concern for the environment.