Updated 2 years ago
AB: You have a theory about time. Time is one of my favorite all-time topics, so before we launch into what you think about time, tell me what you think time is. In other words, is time our invention, or is time a real thing … I realize we’re measuring it, but in the cosmic scheme of things, is there really time?
TM: Yeah, you give me a perfect entree to launch into this thing. See, in the west we have inherited from Newton what is called the idea of pure duration, which is simply that time is sort of a place where things are placed so that they don’t all happen at once; in other words, it’s used as quality-less, it’s an abstraction. In fact, I think when we carry out a complete analysis of time, I think what we’re going to discover is that like matter, time is composed of elemental, discrete types. All matter, organic and inorganic matter, is composed of 104, 108 elements … there’s some argument. Time, on the other hand, is thought to be this featureless, qualityless medium, but as we experience it, as living feeling creatures, time has qualities. There are times when everything seems to go right, and times when everything seems to go wrong …
AB: That’s absolutely true. I’ve wondered about that all my life. There are time when, in effect, you can do no wrong, and there are other periods of time when you can do no right, no matter what you do.
TM: Well, so in looking at this, I created a vocabulary … actually I borrowed it from Alfred North Whitehead … but I think I’m on to something which science has missed, and it’s this; it’s that the universe, or human life or an empire or an ecosystem, any large scale or small scale process, can be looked at as a dynamic struggle between two qualities which I call habit and novelty. And I think they’re pretty self explanatory. Habit is simply repetition of established patterns, conservation, holding back what has already been achieved into a system, and novelty is the chance-taking, the exploratory, the new, the never-before-seen.
And these two qualities–habit and novelty–are locked in all situations in a kind of struggle. But the good news is that if you look at large scales of time, novelty is winning, and this is the point that I have been so concerned to make that I think science has overlooked. If you look back through the history of the human race, or life on this planet, or of the solar system and the galaxy, as you go backward in time, things become more simple, more basic. So turning that on its head, we can say that as you come towards the present things become more novel, more complex.
So I’ve taken this as a universal law, affecting historical processes, biological processes and astrophysical processes. Nature produces and conserves novelty, and what I mean by that, as the universe cools the original cloud of electron plasma, eventually atomic systems form, as it further cools molecular systems, then long-chain polymers, then non-nucleated primitive DNAcontaining life, later complex life, multi-cellular life, and this is a principle that reaches right up to our dear selves. And notice, Art, it’s working across all scales of being. This is something that is as true of human societies as it is of termite populations or populations of atoms in a chemical system. Nature conserves, prefers novelty. And the interesting thing about an idea like this is that it stands the existentialism of modern philosophy on its head … you know, what modern, atheistic existentialism says is that we’re a cosmic accident and damn lucky to be here, and any meaning you get out of the situation, you’re simply confering. I say, no … by looking deeply into the structure of nature, we can discover that novelty is what nature produces and conserves, and if that represents a universal value system, then the human world that we find today with our technologies and our complex societies represents the greatest novelty so far achieved, and suddenly you have a basis for an ethic–that which advances novelty is good, that which retards it is to be looked at very carefully.
Terence McKenna with Art Bell, March 19th 1998
AB: Now comes Terrence McKenna from the Hawaiian Islands, and he comes in a very interesting way. Uh, Terrence, welcome to the program.
TM; it’s a pleasure to talk to you again Art. .. how are you?
AB: Uh, I am fine. Um, now Terrence, let us begin … uh, where are you in the islands? I mean not exactly, but sort of roughly?
TM: I’m on the Big island of Hawaii on the Kona side. I’m in south Kona on the Big Island.
AB: Um you are coming to us actually from your home. Last time we did an interview you had to, like, go to somebody’s house or something to do the interview … leave your own home, because you’re so remote that all you’ve got is a cell phone … and that’s how you did the show last time, right?
TM: That’s right.
AB: Alright. This time, we’re using a different setup. It has a tiny little glitch in it every now and again, and so tell people how it is that you’re reaching us .. I mean
that’s an interesting story all by itself.
TM: Um, I’m reaching you on a spread spectrum radio circuit that’s a I megabyte wireless connection 30 miles to the town of Kailua Kona, and my telephone circuit is simply piggy-backing on this one megabyte internet connection. There’s a company out here called Computer Time, this character john Breeden has an amazing technology. I think I talked to you last year about my struggles for connectivity when I was piddling around trying to get 128 … now I have eight times faster than that, and it’s … he’s building a backbone for these islands, and anyone with line of sight to the server can have up to 6 megabytes if they can afford it.
AB: Well, uh, at your location, at your very remote location, what’s it like? Do you have power there, do you have … well, you obviously have to have power, I guess …
TM: Well, I’m running on solar power with a generator augment. There’s no phone lines or power lines up here, uh, we catch our own rainwater and pump it uphill for gravity flow … I didn’t start out to be a survivalist, but somehow in the course of building this Hawaiian place I managed to get all my systems off-grid and redundant, and this wonderful internet connection is what makes my life possible because otherwise I would be locked out of the cultural adventure … as it is, I feel like I am right in the middle of things.
AB: Boy, I’ll tell ya, you’re ahead of most of us on the mainland who suffer with horrendously slow 28.8 connections in many areas including mine at best, and here you are … it’s so neat that you’re able to do that these days, really excellent, so you’re um … describe your surroundings … I mean, do you have neighbors?
Uh …
TM: Um, I live up on the slopes of the world’s largest volcano, which is Mauna Loa … I live up at about the 2000 feet level on a five acre piece of forest that I built a small house on. My neighbors are scattered over this mountainside … days go by and I don’t see anybody, but if the pump breaks down or we need to get together there’s a kind of community, but it’s pretty spread thin, and it’s a day … a trip into town is once or twice a week event.
AB: Do you find yourself fighting madness, Terence?
TM: Well, that was always a problem, in my case.
AB: But don’t uh, you don’t have to resort uh either to uh chemicals or into uh … I remember reading, uh, you know, prisoners who’d be by themselves for years at a time, uh, in North Viet Nam or during the second world war, and they would devise methods of going into their own mind and uh fantasizing and doing all kinds of things that kept them sane.
TM: Well, I’ve got 3000 books here with me, and this internet connection, and I get about a hundred email messages a day, so … and then every once in a while I pack up and go off and give lectures and travel in airliners and go to parties, and about fourteen weeks out of the year that’s what I’m doing. But my natural inclination is to be a hermit, and I don’t think I mentioned it but this forest that surrounds me is a climax subtropical Polynesian rain forest that’s just radiant and beautiful, so uh, it’s wonderful. I don’t think I could live out here without the connection, that’s why I spent so much effort to put it together. With the connection I think this is a model for the future, I think as people in management positions–not that I am–but people in management positions will realize that they can live anywhere in the world with these high-speed connections, and they don’t have to drive to the office in a skyscraper downtown … that’s very retro I think.
AB: Um, listen, um, we’re supposed to do this at the beginning of the interview, and it might be that there’s a person or two out there that doesn’t know who Terence McKenna is, so if you would give me a short version of your own bio, your life, what you’ve done, who you are, what would you say?
TM: I’m a child of the 60’s, born in 1946, went to Berkeley as a freshman in 1965, uh, did the India circuit, did the LSD circuit, went to South America … I’ve written a number of books about shamanism and hallucinogens and uh psychoactive plants, and I’ve sort of evolved a unique career as a cultural commentator and I guess some kind of gadfly philosopher, and I’ve done a lot of stuff with young people … rave recordings and CD’s and appearances and that sort of thing, and I comment on the culture … I’m studying the culture, and as you know Art, when I share an idea which we both perceive as inevitable truth, but not everybody does, and not everybody does, which is that the world is moving at an ever-greater acceleration toward some kind of compete redefining of all aspects reality, and I’ve written a lot about that, and I have a mathematical model of it, and basically I get to be in a very enviable position, which is here at the end of a millennium I get to be a cultural commentator and gadfly.
