Terence McKenna grew up in Paonia, Colorado.[1] He was introduced to geology through his uncle and developed a hobby of solitary fossil hunting in the arroyos near his home.[specify] From this he developed a deep artistic and scientific appreciation of nature.
At age 16, McKenna moved to, and attended high school in, Los Altos, California.[1] He was introduced to psychedelics through The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley[1] and Village Voice.[2] One of his early experiences with them came through morning glory seeds (containing LSA), which he claimed showed him “that there was something there worth pursuing.”[1]
After graduating from high school, McKenna enrolled in U.C. Berkeley. He moved to San Francisco during the Summer Of Love before his classes began, and was introduced to cannabis by Barry Melton in 1965 [3] and tried LSD soon later.
As a freshman at UC Berkeley McKenna participated in the Tussman Experimental College, a short-lived two-year program on the Berkeley campus. He graduated in 1969 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Ecology and Conservation.
One of McKenna’s most widely-promulgated ideas is known as Novelty theory. It predicts the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe as an inherent quality of time. McKenna developed the theory in the mid-1970s after his experiences in the Amazon at La Chorrera led him to closely study the King Wen sequence of the I-Ching. Novelty theory involves ontology, extropy, and eschatology.
The theory proposes that the universe is an engine designed for the production and conservation of novelty. Novelty, in this context, can be thought of as newness, or extropy (a term coined by Max More meaning the opposite of entropy). According to McKenna, when novelty is graphed over time, a fractal waveform known as “timewave zero” or simply the “timewave” results. The graph shows at what time periods, but never at what locations, novelty increases or decreases.
Considered by some to represent a model of history’s most important events, the universal algorithm has also been extrapolated to be a model for future events. McKenna admitted to the expectation of a “singularity of novelty”, and that he and his colleagues projected many hundreds of years into the future to find when this singularity (runaway “newness” or extropy) could occur. The graph of extropy had many enormous fluctuations over the last 25,000 years, but amazingly, it hit an asymptote at exactly December 22, 2012.[16] In other words, entropy (or habituation) no longer exists after that date. It is impossible to define that state. The technological singularity concept parallels this, only at a date roughly three decades later. According to leading expert Ray Kurzweil), another concept called cultural singularity (essentially cultural dissolution, or language dissolution), parallels this as well. Terrence claimed to have no knowledge of the Mayan calendar, which ends one day before the Timewave graph does: December 21, 2012, this is likely to be true as Mckennas timewave theory was published in The Invisible Landscape 12 years before the book which brought the Mayan calendar into public consciousness; José Argüelles’s The Mayan Factor
