Terence McKenna - History Quotes

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First of all, why a descent into novelty rather than an ascent? It was my thing to do as I wanted to do it, and it seemed to me—the way I thought of time was I thought of it like a river. And so I thought of it as flowing toward its lowest level. And I thought of history as a river and Eternity as the ocean. So naturally history flows downhill to reach Eternity. I also like the fact that when the descent in elevation is rapid, the river runs faster, and when the landscape is almost flat, the river broadens out and meanders. So it was to preserve this idea of time as a fluid. The other reason is a mathematical reason. It has to do with the fact that if we have novelty moving downward, then the maximum of novelty is zero.

Terence McKenna
History is the shockwave of eschatology. In other words, we are living in a very unique moment, ten or twenty thousand years long, where an immense transition is happening. The object at the end of and beyond history is the human species fused into eternal tantric union with the superconducting Overmind/UFO. It is that mystery that casts its shadow back through time. All religion, all philosophy, all wars, pogroms, and persecutions happen because people do not get the message right. There is both the forward-flowing casuistry of being, casual determinism, and the interference pattern that is formed against that by the backward-flowing fact of this eschatological hyperobject throwing its shadow across the temporal landscape.

Terence McKenna
My interpretation of the (end date) is that it is the point at which the ingression into novelty and the degree of interconnectedness of the separate elements that comprise the concrescence will be such that the ontological nature of time itself will be transformed. History will end, and the transcendental object that has been drawing being into ever deeper reflections of itself since the first moments of the existence of the universe will finally be completely concrescent in the three-dimensional space-time continuum. Then the moving image of time will have discovered itself to be eternity.

Terence McKenna
History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.

Terence McKenna
Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors.

Terence McKenna
The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.

Terence McKenna
My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past.

Terence McKenna