He lives a mile or so up a rutted road that winds through a gorgeous subtropical rain forest an hour south of the Kona airport. His house - a modernist origami structure topped with a massive antenna dish and a small astronomy dome - rises from the green slopes of Mauna Loa like something out of Myst. There's a small garden and a lotus pond, and the structure is surrounded by a riot of vegetation, thick with purple flowers and mysterious vines.
McKenna has owned land on this mountainside since the s but didn't start building the house until Every morning, I ascend a spiral staircase decorated with blue LEDs to get to the study. It's here that McKenna spends the majority of his time during my visit, either staring into his Mac or sitting cross-legged on the floor before a small Oriental carpet, surrounded by books, smoking paraphernalia, and twigs of sage he occasionally lights up and wafts through the air.
With his widely set and heavy-lidded eyes, McKenna looks like a seasoned nomad merchant. Silness has shorn McKenna's usually full head of hair down to gray stubble, and the upper right side of his forehead is gently swollen and graced with a Frankensteinian scar.
Though he is desperately ill, his spirits are as alive as ever: gracious and funny, brilliant and biting. But he tires quickly, and seems intensely energized only when the prospect of chocolate cookies or ice cream arises.
He is also very skinny, having lost a lot of muscle in his thighs, and he moves painfully slowly when he moves at all. McKenna and Silness have hosted a regular stream of visitors and well-wishers over the last months, but the scene is definitely not Learyland.
They are living life as close to normal as possible - which is how McKenna prefers it. The other thing is to do what you always wanted to do.
I wasn't too keen on that, either. My tendency was just to twist another bomber and think about it all. An early popularizer of virtual reality and the Internet, he argued that VR would be a boon to psychedelicists and businesspeople alike.
There's a lot to think about in McKenna's lair. An altar lies on top of a cabinet over which hangs a frightening old Tibetan tangka. With McKenna at my side, the altar's objects are like icons in a computer game: Click and a story emerges. Click on the tangka and get a tale of art-dealing in Nepal. Click on the carved Mayan stones and hear about a smoking god who will arrive far in the future. Click on an earthen bowl and wind up in the stone age.
Gamers know that the most interesting objects usually lie near the obvious ones, and indeed, the real prizes here lurk inside the narrow cabinet drawers: butterflies. Click on these hummingbird-sized beauties and you'll be transported back 30 years to the remote islands of Indonesia, where McKenna dodged snakes and earthquakes in order to capture prize specimens for the butterfly otaku of Japan. The most prominent feature of the room are the 14 large bookcases that line the walls, stuffed with more than 3, volumes: alchemy, natural history, Beat poetry, science fiction, Mayan codexes, symbolist art, hashish memoirs, systems theory, Indian erotica, computer manuals.
Deeply attuned to the future of consciousness, McKenna remains a devoted Gutenberg man. McKenna derives great pleasure from pushing the envelope of the human mind, but he is equally turned on by technology.
On the one hand, the house, which was only finished last year, is completely off the grid, irrigated with rainwater collected in a large cistern up the hill, and powered by solar panels and a gas generator.
There are no phone lines. At the same time, Ethernet connections are built in everywhere, even out on the deck. His plan was to eventually stream lectures over the Net, thus eliminating the need to travel in order to "appear" at conferences and symposia. McKenna normally spends four or five hours a day online, devouring sites, weeding through lists, exploring virtual worlds, corresponding with strangers, tracking down stray facts. Sometimes he treats the Net like a crystal ball, entering strange phrases into Google's search field just to see what comes up.
Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with. As our society weaves itself ever more deeply into this colossal thinking machine, McKenna worries that we'll lose our grasp on the tiller. That's where psychedelics come in. Who would want to do machine architecture or write software without taking psychedelics at some point in the design process? It's a typical McKenna question: simultaneously outrageous and, in some twisty way, true.
For obvious reasons, hard statistics on the extent of psychedelic use in the high tech industry are tough to come by. Psychedelics have certainly left their mark on computer graphics, virtual reality, and animation. Well, why? C'mon - it's because it was created by tripsters. Together father and son would get high and go to museums to analyze the objects. How would you get this Minoan vase, this Etruscan statue, up on the screen in 3-D? If you look at a seashell or a glass vase as a modeling problem, then everything is an animation.
The Net, says McKenna, is "an oracle," fostering an unprecedented dialog between human beings and the sum total of human knowledge.
Ultimately, McKenna wants something more than trippy images. He hopes that computer graphics will blossom into a universal lingo, a language of constantly morphing hieroglyphic information that he claims to have glimpsed on high doses of mushrooms. Something about how we process language holds us back.
That's why I encourage everybody to think about computer animation, and think about it in practical terms. Because out of that will come a visual language rich enough to support a new form of human communication. In McKenna's mind we are not just conjuring a new virtual language. We are also, in good old shamanic style, conjuring the ineffable Other. McKenna argues that the imagery of aliens and flying saucers - which spring up in numerous tripping reports as well as in pop technoculture - are symbols of the transcendental technologies we are on the verge of creating.
In other words, we are producing the alien ourselves, from the virtual world of networked information. Well, I can imagine a landing site that's a Web site. If you build a Web site and then say to the world, 'Put your strangest stuff here, your best animation, your craziest graphics, your most impressive AI software,' very quickly something would arise that would be autonomous enough to probably stand your hair on end.
You won't be able to tell whether you've got code, machine intelligence, or the real thing. McKenna ties all this into the Timewave, his kookiest notion. He believes that it charts the degree of novelty active at any point in human history. The wave spikes in times of change, coinciding with the Black Death, the Enlightenment, and the birth of Mohammed.
A computer program McKenna helped develop predicts the future as well, at least up until December 21, , when novelty spikes to infinity and the Timewave stops cold. For McKenna, all of human history, with its flotsam of books and temples and mechanized battlefields, is actually a backward ripple in time caused by this approaching apocalypse.
What about Nazi Germany? I asked. Or the hydrogen bomb? Or AIDS? McKenna acknowledged that novelty may be accompanied by increased suffering and death, but in general progress of some kind emerges out of these catastrophes. It couldn't close its eyes and waltz past that.
And it did! So in that sense Nazi Germany, with its science-fiction production values and its silly rhetoric, served a useful purpose. As early as the 's, McKenna sought to make his drug-inspired insight precise and quantitative.
He discovered that fractals, mathematical objects whose patterns repeat themselves at different scales, provide an excellent model of the entropy-novelty dialectic. So what did McKenna really think would happen on December 21, ? It's a prediction of an unpredictable event. Perhaps we will be visited by an alien spaceship, or an asteroid. But did he really think the apocalypse would arrive on December 21, ?
His model was "just a kind of fantasizing within a certain kind of vocabulary. His eyes glittering, he divulged a "huge--quote unquote—coincidence" involving his prophecy. After he made his prediction that the apocalypse would occur on December 21, , he learned that thousands of years ago Mayan astronomers had predicted the world would end on the very same day.
What does all this mean? Two weeks after I met him in New York, just after he returned to his home in Hawaii, McKenna collapsed in the throes of a seizure. Tests revealed an enormous, malignant tumor deep inside his brain. McKenna's choices were grim. The physician recommended gamma-ray surgery, in which converging beams of radiation bombard the tumor. This treatment might give McKenna another six months to a year, but it could also cause dementia and other side effects.
Untreated, McKenna would probably die within a month. McKenna chose the radiation surgery. He made it past the great millennial cusp, but he went downhill rapidly after that.
He died on April 3, , less than eleven months after I met him. He was During my lunch with McKenna at the Millennium Hotel, I had asked him if all his psychedelic excursions had mitigated his fear of death. His reply revealed how hard-headed he was, beneath all the phantasmagoric blarney.
Ultimately, my assumption is that, if I have the opportunity, I would embrace it if I saw it coming. But I'm scientific in my approach to my own knowledge of death.
In other words, DMT may show you what the dying brain is like… But dying is not death. Near-death experiences are not death experiences. To McKenna wonder was the essence of gnosis. As he told me during our interview, all his confabulations were intended to make us see that the world is "a weird, weird place. To shake us out of our perceptual torpor, McKenna played the holy fool, the crazy wisdom sage.
He pushed our faces in the most exotic, lurid inventions of modern science and technology, including superstring theory, time travel, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. He even stooped to speculating about extraterrestrials and to forecasting the end of life as we know it.
What elevated him above most other prophets was that he delivered his prophesies with a wink, an implicit acknowledgement that ultimately reality is stranger than we can say or even imagine. Addendum : Fans of McKenna will want to check out this wonderful series of videos, the Terence McKenna Omnibus, including one in which McKenna says: "Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.
The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. For many years, he wrote the immensely popular blog Cross Check for Scientific American. Follow John Horgan on Twitter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital.
Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Load comments. During his time there he studied the Tibetan language and also became a hashish smuggler until one of his shipments was seized by US Customs. Needing to move on, he went to southeast Asia where he toured old ruins and became a professional butterfly collector. During their search, they came across openings in the forest with fields of huge Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms. This discovery changed the focus of the expedition.
Terence and Dennis learned the cultivation techniques used by the farmers and brought P. Using the knowledge they gained, the spores, and ordinary kitchen implements, they developed a cultivation technique that anyone could follow to grow the mushrooms. Up until that point, no one had figured out how to do it.
This marked the first time laypeople could produce entheogens in their own home. Oss and O.
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