McKenna first suggested that something dramatic might happen in 2012 in his 1975 book The Invisible Landscape, co-written with Dennis, and he elaborated on his prediction-and the timewave theory-in True Hallucinations. When McKenna extrapolated the model into the future, it predicted a huge spike in novelty in December 2012. McKenna devised a mathematical model that charted the ebbs and surges of creative, "novel" events-including wars, revolutions, famines, plagues and scientific and technological advances-throughout human history. McKenna's trips also inspired his "timewave" theory, which holds that existence and even time itself emerge from the interaction between two opposing forces, one conservative and the other creative. McKenna's visions persuaded him that tryptamines-a class of chemicals that includes DMT and psilocybin-were messages from an alien civilization, or "overmind." In the early 1970s, McKenna and his younger brother Dennis (who became a slightly more sober authority on psychedelics) trekked into the jungles of Colombia, where they ingested enormous quantities of ayahuasca, marijuana and mushrooms. He became an itinerant scholar-adventurer, traveling to the Far East and South America in search of exotic mind-altering philosophies and substances, including two of his favorites, magic mushrooms and ayahuasca, a DMT-laced tea brewed from plants native to Amazonia. Raised in a Colorado ranching town, Terence McKenna discovered psychedelics in 1965 when he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied ecology and shamanism (ah, the Sixties). What follows is an edited excerpt from Rational Mysticism (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), which describes my 1999 meeting with McKenna and my attempt to find out what he really thought would happen in December 2012. McKenna was less a scientist or even philosopher than a performance artist or jester, and I mean that as a compliment. But he was truer to himself in True Hallucinations (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), a memoir packed with psychedelic tall tales and wild riffs on the nature of reality. By outlawing psychedelics, he said, we have cut ourselves off from the wellspring of our humanity.įood of the Gods showed that McKenna could play the serious scholar when he chose. The visions inspired in our ancestors by these substances-and particularly by plants containing psilocybin, dimethytryptamine (DMT) and other psychedelics-were the seeds from which language sprung, followed by the arts, religion, philosophy, science and all of human culture, McKenna asserted.
His book The Food of the Gods (Bantam 1992) was a rigorous argument-complete with footnotes and bibliography-that mind-expanding plants and fungi catalyzed the transformation of our brutish ancestors into cultured modern humans. In his books and lectures, McKenna extolled psychedelic drugs as a spiritual path superior to that of any mainstream religion. Perhaps I can allay their anxieties by relating my encounter with a prominent popularizer of the 2012-doomsday meme, psychedelic guru Terence McKenna.
But many folks out there are reportedly worried.
Rational Scientific American readers surely scoff at claims-based on ancient Mayan calendars and other esoterica-that life as we know it will end this December, especially now that NASA experts have "crushed" the prophecy.
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