- A short excerpt from a lecture by Terence Mckenna
"Time has accelerated, Time has left the gentle ebb and flow of gene transfer and adaptation that characterizes biological evolution and instead historical time is generated. No one of us I think can imagine that history could go on for another thousand years. What would it look like? At the current rate of population growth, spread of epidemic diseases, rate of invention, connectivity, depletion of resources. It is impossible to conceive another thousand years of human history. We have burned our bridges. We are preparing for a kind of cultural forward escape.
The simple example of metamorphosis, is that of a caterpillar to a butterfly. We all know that there is this intermediate resting stage where the caterpillar (for all practical purposes) is enzymatically dissolved and then reconstituted as an entirely different organism, with different physical structures, different eyes, different legs, a different way of breathing, with wings, where no wings were before, with a different kind of feeding apparatus; this is what is happening to us. History is a process of metamorphosis. It’s like what a butterfly is doing in a cocoon or what is happening to a child in the womb, it’s a gestation process where one form of life is being changed into another. It begins with monkeys and ends with a human machine planet girdling interface, capable of releasing the energies that light the stars; and it last about 15 or 20 thousand years and during that period the entire process hangs in the balance. This would all happen naturally and with a great deal of anxiety I imagine, as history builds to its ever more climactic and horrifying crescendo and we would all be ignorant or very baffled about what’s going on were it not for the institution of Shamanism.
The Shaman actually rises into a domain where past and future are different areas on the same topological manifold. It’s what’s really going on. If you think about Shamanism, it’s about predicting weather, predicting game movement and curing diseases. It’s as though, the members of culture are imprisoned in linear time and the Shaman is not. Culture is simply closing upon the human experience, but the human organism outside the confines of culture in a direct relation to nature transcends time and space. This was a fact I believe that was known in prehistory and in fact was the source of Paleolithic values, which were not material, not linear, not surplus oriented, not class oriented, not power oriented, but rather oriented towards an egalitarian partnership, in an environment of great material simplicity. Human beings lived like that probably for half a million years; with poetry, with dance, with mathematics, with magic, with story, with humor. But not with, the paralyzing and toxic artifacts of the late evolving, machine worshiping, linear phonetic alphabet using, tight arsed straight culture that we are a part of.”
