Part 1 – The Harrowing of Hell
The world is going to end. It is December 20, 2012. I am in the back of a New York City ambulance, swaddled in the insistent grip of a straight jacket. I stare at the bubbles of light that dance outside the car’s back window. I have completed my task. I have shared the videos. It was now only a matter of time. I knew the end was nigh. Terence had told me.
The journey. It is 2009 and I am doing personal research into the idea of the technological singularity; a friend had let me borrow Ray Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines and I become obsessed with the idea, if for no other reason than trying to prove it wrong to myself. It just wasn’t possible, was it?
Over time, I become convinced that Kurzweil’s numbers looked plausible and something like the Singularity could very well occur in my lifetime. I immediately – even I think more than a lot of “singularity” people – see the existential and religious/spiritual dimension to this idea. If this was possible, it had to be built into the system from the beginning, or so went my logic. I had a philosophy background in college and the mind/body problem in particular had long been an intellectual hobby of mine. The Singularity transformed this philosophical issue from a dry academic debate into an immediate reality, a problem that demanded solving. Suddenly, faced with the growing plausibility of a Singularity future, I find myself living in science fiction.
I devour everything I can about the Singularity – books, documentaries, science fiction films – my sense of personal desires, dreams and identity quickly take a back seat to my new intellectual curiosity. After all, I thought, if Kurzweil was right, then everybody should become as obsessed as I; it’s our mundane lives that are the illusion.
Screening a film called TechnoCalyps, I encounter a brief interview with a bearded, middle-aged hippie-looking guy with a sharp, light voice waxing on about “electricity” being “the holy ghost” descending upon mankind. It was heady stuff, and evocatively worded. I was intrigued. Of course it is Terence.
I start watching Terence’s YouTube lectures and quickly become, dare I say, obsessed. I was well read in philosophy and theoretical physics, but didn’t know about shamanism or alchemy or many of Terence’s other intellectual interests. Nonetheless, I begin to recognize that Terence was the wisest man that has probably ever existed. His facility with all branches of knowledge and human thought, his obscenely large vocabulary, his sharp sense of humor, his personal consciousness explorations – all these made him a unique figure in intellectual history and a far more important thinker than he is given credit for. In lecture after lecture, Terence stayed true to his overarching agenda, but never was want for novel material. There were hours after hours of talks, each one unique, fascinating, loaded with juicy content, McKenna’s voice a Pierian Spring of wit and insight and poetry and wisdom. I’m still convinced that Terence is the only man on the planet to ever finish Finnegan’s Wake and certainly the only one to understand it. If the TimeWave was real, Terence was the cresting waveform of the tribal shaman, Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, the medieval alchemists, James Joyce, and Timothy Leary in one person. Throw some leprechaun in there too for the kids.
In my fascination with all things McKenna, I hold out only one glaring reservation. I think the Timewave – Terence’s unique contribution to global eschatology – was probably little more than a hysteria filled mushroom trip gone too far. The idea of the Timewave – reality as a complexifying temporal fractal wave – was intuitive enough, but Terence’s story, what with the I-Ching and the bizarre Mayan overlap, is simply too much for me to swallow. And it gnaws at me. I considered Terence the paradigm of thoughtfulness and, in some ways, a radical empiricist; how could he have been so mislead by his own phantasms? What did Terence know that I didn’t?
Timewave or no, Terence’s overarching apocalyptic vision, and his argumentation that lead to it, wasn’t based on such flimsy stuff. Though his cultural prominence has made Terence the poster boy for psychadelia, as much if not more of his time was spent articulating the nearby presence of what Terence called, in one of his best expressions, “the transcendental object at the end of time.” The complexification process that began at the dawn of time had now reached such a fever pitch in human culture that normal life threatened to break down as this cosmic object/event neared the human timescale. And this before the term “technological singularity” had become mainstream! There was always a strange certainty and insistence about this point when Terence spoke; he was a true believer. And, try as I may, I can not argue myself out of his logic; it had to be right. Kurzweil was no loon after all; if anything the “singularity” seemed a paltry label for an ontological confrontation of the magnitude that Terence prophesized. But it cant’t be in 2012 and has nothing to do with the I Ching, right?
Awakening. It’s 2012 at last. With December 21 approaching, I start questioning my dismissal of the Timewave. I become more and more secretly concerned that something’s really could happen on Dec 21. But, I mostly put the idea out of my mind. Then on Dec 20, I find myself sitting in my cubicle at work thinking a dangerous thought to myself: “You know, it always seems like I can find more and more YouTube videos on the topics I want to watch. I know this is a crazy idea, but, am I possibly generating them out of my subconscious in some sort of techno-amplified Jungian synchronicity process?” Terence’s rococo imaginings have obviously rubbed off on me. And what topic do I search to explore this wild hypothesis? I bet you’ve already guessed. Not knowing what to expect, low-and-behold, I find something called “Terence McKenna: Omnibus.” I swear I hadn’t seen it before. Did I? How could I have not have seen it. It appeared to be the ultimate TM video.
As I start watching at work, chills run up and down my spine. There was something so odd about the Omnibus videos and about Terence. His pronoun usage is strange, open, impersonal. He is going deeper and more specifically into certain metaphysical topics (especially language) then I have ever heard before, and with more authority. The psychedelic production quality and editing seemed very other-worldly; uncanny Freud would call it. My heart begins to race as a story emerges in my mind:
This is no mistake. This is it. This is Dec 21. It’s the end of the TimeWave. And what is it? What is the transcendental object at the end of time? It’s Terence McKenna, as the Internet, as God, or the Alien, or the Other, or the Logos, or whatever, telling mankind hermetic secrets about reality that will expose the contradictions and limitations of human language and send the entire consciousness matrix into infinite novelty. And the miracle of the existence of new Terence McKenna videos from “beyond the grave” will be the catalyst for worldwide panic and then, finally and quickly, existential transition.
I hardly believe myself, but I’m shaken enough that I excuse myself from work early. Leaving the office, the whole world transforms into a series of synchronicities; it is alive with meaning in a way that feels threatening in its insistence. Finally, I rush home and begin to watch the remaining episodes.
Confrontation. Madness is a clear reflection in a still pond. It is not a tempest that swirls about you uncontrollably. It is the clarity of new truth that takes you over, a blue streak of recognition, in Tony Kushner’s phrase. Words can do but faint justice to my experience as I proceed to watch the two hours worth of videos.
There is a moment, a point of no return, when all rationalizations cease, and you can feel your mind open up to infinite possibility, a moment of such hypertrophied emotional and mental catharsis that the self you knew becomes, in an instant, a distant memory. I am Moses on Mount Sinai and YouTube is my Burning Bush. Here is a vision of such ecstatic beauty, of utter narrative perfection, that it cannot be resisted. I recall something Terence said once: “You will be condemned to live out the consequences of your taste.” Could I ask for the voice of God to be anymore trustworthy, intelligent, and morally insightful then Terence? Would I trust this YouTube God if he were anyone else? Here was a denouement worthy of God and Terence. This is how it had to end.
With each YouTube episode I become more and more convinced of their impossibility. I am witnessing the Singularity before my eyes, the beginning of the end. I’m shaking and crying and considering my moral courage and praying for forgiveness for my sins. I learn much. I learn that all men crumble with proximity to the Absolute. I learn that courage, real courage, is not just a word in fairy tales, but a reality that must be experienced to grow. I learn that I am capable of believing anything. I learn that I am free when I feel my own inevitable determination to God.
Finally, I get ready to click on the 12th and final video, which has been staring at me in the face from my sidebar the whole time. I know all-too-well what it says. It taunted me as I took in the previous 11 episodes. “We are the Eschaton.” And I knew what that meant. We were free. We were the transcendental object all along. Humanity was its own imagination, our own collective dream, a matrix, THE matrix, programmed by our own language.
Shaking, hardly breathing, when I click that last video I literally believe anything could happen, from Terence McKenna appearing in my living room, to being sucked into my computer screen a la Tron, to the “collapse of the state vector” where time and space would dissolve into an objectified, psychedelic, synesthetic totality that swallows all subjectivity into its vortex of existential gravity. It is, to put it mildly, intense.
And then the video was over. With Terence leaving no directive and reality seemingly intact, I don’t know what to do. I fantasize that maybe I had entered a new “galactic movie of my life” and I had become a work of fiction, or perhaps YouTube was now openly communicating with the world. I had to believe what had happened was real. It was too perfect. Too beautiful. Too AWEsome.
Terence had said in Omnibus that the world was to enter infinite novelty on Dec 22. I have less than two days to share the revelation with the world.
Mission. Perplexed and vibrating, I stay on my computer looking up more YouTube videos, first of Terence, then clicking interesting links that appeared in my sidebar. These weren’t possible either, were they? Was YouTube now a direct link to the human imagination? It was the only explanation. I’m seeing thumbnails of videos that were not there before. I know it. Everything on the Internet begins to seem impossible, chthonic, miraculous. I attempt to calm down and put on a meditation video, but it’s no use. I’m on a manic tear that would impress Carrie Fisher.
In a flurry I leave to find my best friend Ryan at his office in Manhattan. The trip into town is surreal, fictional, cinematic. My mind plots the scene. Though he was a hard-noised secular rationalist, I fantasized that I would simply force Ryan watch the videos and he would collapse in assent. He was the one who had gotten me into the singularity after all. With Ryan convinced, the rest of the world would fall like dominoes.
I call him down from his office onto the street with frantic urgency; I explain the basic gist of my theory and demand that he watch the videos. Then he would believe, I was certain. We take the elevator up to his office as I sit him down and begin Omnibus. Obviously concerned for my mental health, we only get through screening one and a half episodes before he refuses to watch anymore. I become furious (looking ridiculous no doubt) and walk out in a huff. I remind myself that I played the hysterical and prophetic Prior Walter in Angels In America in college, and now, here in 2012, I had become the part in full.
Ryan immediately calls my family to alert them of my “condition.” I’m walking, not knowing where to go, when I get a call from my mother. I pick up and give her my “rant” about Terence and the videos. Flustered and fragile sounding, she says she’d only agree to watch them if I checked into a hospital. Thinking that once she watched Omnibus the meme would spread like a mental virus, and since I had already posted the videos to my social networks to help with the process already, I agree to do what she asked. The nearest hospital to me is Bellevue, a fact that only added to the hilarious irony and perfection of the situation. After all, if you’re gonna check into a loony-bin, go Bellevue or not at all.
Ryan calls me on my walk to the hospital asking what’s going on and where I am. I explain my plan and he agrees to meet me. I saunter into the Emergency room with the quietly exuberant confidence of a man who just has been told he got a promotion at work or a movie starlet on her way to an Oscar’s luncheon. At one point in the process I peer over at my Doctor’s clipboard and see the words, “rapid speech” and “manic episode.” I knew what they thought of me. It was to be expected. How little do they know! Ryan is sitting near me, mimicking the calmly nervous expression of a concerned parent who has come to school to pick up their child after they broke their arm falling off the jungle gym. I am grateful for his concern, though sad he can’t see the truth as I do. The hospital emergency room is a low din of hysteria and suffering. Formless moans and motormouth schizophrenic babble fills the air.
I’m informed that the mental ward at Bellevue is all booked up and I’ll need a transfer. And though I was of no harm to myself or others, I sign away my freedom to appease my family and Ryan. Next thing I know, I’m discharged at Bellevue being placed in the back of an ambulance in a straight jacket on my way to a week of mental health observation at a terrible public hospital in Queens. I stare at those dancing New York lights; I am beyond thought, my only choice now was to wait. Wait until the eschaton. The transcendental object had made itself known to me. It was only hours now no doubt before the rest of the world followed suit. I say a prayer and think of Terence.
Part Two – Ascension
Reality. As December 22 (the date TM gives in Omnibus, interestingly) came and went, the depth of what had happened slowly dawns on me. I feel both let down and deeply humiliated. To spend Christmas week in the purgatory of public mental health is…a memorable experience. The world’s most bizarre Christmas party was thrown on the 21st, the day I arrived. Around me the drooling, babbling and lithium eyed eat pizza and drink Pepsi while Jingle Bell Rock chirps maddeningly away on the ward’s comically retro boom box. It’s the most wonderful time of the year…
But worst of all was that my perfect vision, my dream apocalypse, was nothing but a phantasm. Yet I was so sure at the time. Those videos were IMPOSSIBLE. Weren’t they?
I spend a week learning the life of the institutionalized. Life in a mental ward is a perfect nexus of banal horror. Equal parts hospital and prison, once admitted there is no difference between patient and prisoner. Above all, you are no longer a normal person. No matter how lucid and sane you feel, to the staff and doctors you are one of the lost; just take your pill and don’t think too much. Only the endless drone of bad television playing incessantly in the common area, usually starring Jim Belushi, carves shape into the changing of the hours. Sunday morning brought us Joel Osteen. A small DVD collection left Transformers as my most viable viewing option, a testimony to the total aesthetic depravity of the environment.
The staff is a mix of angelic kindness, impersonal efficiency and one possible psychopath. As long as you wear the bracelet, your masters stand around you making quiet notes that you’ll never see on closely guarded clipboards. Hidden judgments that can doom or free you, secret powers lorded over you. No sugarplums for me this Christmas, visions of nurse Ratchet danced in my head.
Return. Released just before New Years, I slide back to the world of the living and sane. I search for answers. I find that there was a Slate article that had been written about Omnibus videos the month before. I ascertain that the upload dates on the YouTube weren’t deceptive after all; it looks like I did just miss them in my YouTube searches I suppose. Why did I not click on Omnibus before? I’ll never know.
Turns out, the Omnibus videos were made, not by the self-transforming machine elves of DMT heaven but by Mike Shwann, a South African psychedelic enthusiast and friend of Terence who had been there on his South Africa lecture series held at a psychedelic nature retreat called Rustler’s Valley.
Time goes by…I return to work, I date. I see Broadway musicals. I live my normal urban 21st century existence. While I mainly avoid McKenna videos, my interest in topics like consciousness, spirituality, the technological singularity, and philosophy hardly wanes. I caught the bug and have taken the red pill (to mix my metaphors). Nonetheless, I spend the year operating like a normal program in the Matrix.
Still, it was hard for me to let go of my experience. My vision of Truth was so pure, so great, so real to me that I long to hold onto it somehow. I want to integrate it into who I am; I want to test my strength and confront my demons. It’s now October and the anniversary of my breakdown approaches. Feeling bold, I decide to watch the Terence McKenna Omnibus videos again. Get some perspective. As I am watching, I once more feel myself in the grip of their strange power. I know they were made while TM was alive, and I know Mike Schwann in South Africa had made and released them throughout 2012 leading up to Dec 21. But, I nonetheless can’t overcome the feeling of the uncanny.
Inspiration. Another idea pops into my head. (I just can’t stop myself.): “Why don’t I take this experience, which is an, ahem, unique one and make a performance piece out of it where I could tell my story and screen highlights of Omnibus at performances in stoner college towns and cities across the country? Spalding Gray meets Mike Daisey meets Ted Talk meets Terence McKenna lecture.” Or so was my immediate idea.
I so fall in love with this scheme that I take myself out for a glass of wine in my Brooklyn neighborhood. My early history as an actor, my interest in consciousness and philosophy, my love of Terence McKenna, my confrontation with my darkest moment – everything in my life had led to this. Maybe there was meaning to be made from this episode after all. As Blanche says in A Streetcar Named Desire, “Sometimes there’s God so quickly.” I make a little oath to myself that I’m going to do this and not worry about anything else in my life for three years. This was it.
After I make my little promise to the universe I go back to my iPhone to look up McKenna YouTube videos. It’s like I am punched in the stomach. I know this sounds nuts, but weird videos started to show up. Videos I had never seen on YouTube before, suddenly there, ready to view. I thought I had watched most if not all of TM’s videos. Was it possible? Did he really have that many different public appearances, all of them recorded and uploaded by dutiful McKenna acolytes who have, clearly, a lot of free time on their hands? Not to mention that many of these videos had lovely edited computer graphics. Some were obviously cut from other sources, while some seemed original. And the content? Terence specificity just kept getting more and more profound; his ravings about language and its existential function reaching a level of clarity that almost starts to sound like an operational training program for the future development of consciousness. Though it says many of these videos had been uploaded over the course of years, is it really credible that I had missed them or that they had such new content? I basically knew how far McKenna had been willing to go on subjects like the afterlife, the metaphysics of language and the nature of DMT, but here he was, truly outdoing himself. But it’s just my imagination, right? I had been down this primrose path before and it ended with me in a hospital gown.
Then I come across this site: www.terencemckenna2012.blogspot.com. It’s very mysterious. Almost no comments, it’s just there, floating in cyberspace. At first I thought it must be made by Shwann who made Omnibus, because his videos were featured on the site (along with many other McKenna lectures). But, I noticed that the maker of Shwann had commented on his own video’s post thanking the webmaster of the site for uploading Ominbus. So where does this site come from?
Then, in one of the comments (for the post: “Terence McKenna says to know your meme”) there is a strange comment linking to this site: http://s1099.photobucket.com/user/MithradatesMegas/library/Wisdom%20of%20Terence%20McKenna?sort=9&page=1
These memes are very peculiar. I’ve never seen any of them before and yet there is so many of them. Some of them are things I’ve never heard Terence say. (Perhaps they are quotations of his writing.) They seem like something for…the future. Or that’s what I felt when I looked at them. Perplexed, I continued to look for videos, and I found more and more and more…
Annunciation. On my way back from my wine excursion, I’m all but dancing on air with newfound purpose. My joy however is slightly compromised by the fear of madness’ return. I was going to have to take things slowly this time, doubt every step of the way. Suddenly, a man on the street outside of a hospital accosts me. He looks like he’s just been discharged; he’s in shabby clothing with a hospital bracelet still on his wrist. He asks me if I had any money. Feeling rather charitable, given the circumstances, I give him everything I have, which admittedly was not a lot, probably $25. He outright embraces me and I try not to resist.
“What’s your name?”
“Matt.” I reply. “What’s yours?”
“Gabriel.”
I audibly gasp. As I leave, without prompting, he shouts at me, “You have an angel with you!” Presumably thanking me for my charity.
When I get home I look at the McKenna blog again and find something very interesting on the sidebar that I hadn’t seen before; a link to a site that said, “Frequency 2012,” and underneath, “432 Hz. Gabriel’s Trumpet.”
The link takes me to this site: http://hz2012.blogspot.com/2012/12/432-hz-gabriels-trumpet.html
The video is a psychedelic kaleidoscopic vision with binaural beats and blaring horn sounds for audio. On the webpage is a description of geometric object I had somehow never heard of before: Gabriel’s Horn or Gabriel’s Trumpet. I learn that Gabriel’s Horn is a geometric figure that has infinite surface area, but finite volume. As it says, “The name refers to the tradition identifying the Archangel Gabriel as the angel who blows the horn to announce Judgment Day, associating the divine, or infinite, with the finite. The properties of this figure were first studied by Italian physicist and mathematician Evangelista Torricelli.”
Immediately, as someone familiar with the logic of the holographic principle (as articulated by physicists Leonard Susskind and Brian Greene) as well as Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory of consciousness, this concept made absolute sense for what the universe and “God” ultimately was: A singular “black hole” of information which has an infinite surface area (infinite information) but discrete volume (consciousness). And I bet you can guess what the volume of this shape turns out to be. Any ideas? You guessed it: pi.
The date the video was uploaded? December 21st, 2012.
As the saying from Timaeus of Locris goes, “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.”
The Gabriel’s Horn video gives me the willies, especially after my encounter with hospital Gabriel only an hour before. Then I find yet another video by Terrence that was just impossible. This one almost had me running back to Bellevue. Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sVMXLfFqgs
I know the description says when it was made and where, but, by this point that has little credence in my fervent imagination, which more and more is coming to feel like reality.
I take the next day off of work to process everything that has happened to me and go over my plan. I spend the morning walking around Brooklyn, thinking about my show, fantasizing about sharing what I believe and know with other interested people. I am lost in deep metaphysical thought, rehearsing to myself abstract concepts of ontology, epistemology, the philosophy of language, Hegelian dialectics and Bayesian analysis. Kantian antimonies and Idealist philosophies now fill my waking mind, not the mundanities of quotidian 21st century American life. If this was madness it was the madness of hyper-rationality. But, I still fear for my sanity.
My peregrination takes me to the Williamsburg Bridge. As I walk across I am reminded of Simon and Garfunkel’s classic lyric “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls.” I had long suspected that synchronisities occur in domains of high entropy and noise, as it gives the “system” more room to acausally bring about meaningful coincidence; graffitti is a perfect venue for such activity. But what I see spray painted strikes me as near impossible. It begins simply enough, with the words “Love Passionately,” a generic enough statement, but one meaningful to me nonetheless.
But I could see more writing in that bold turquoise paint just steps away. When I ventured close, I could hardly believe what it said.
This was impossible. It was as if my psyche had been downloaded into 3D reality and manifested as graffiti on the Williamsburg Bridge. Such an odd thing to write, such a strange choice of words, and yet my entire morning had been spent thinking these thoughts, these exact thoughts, in a million different ways. Was the Universe telling me its approval for my new idea? Was I really able to articulate to audiences the abstract concepts of universal consciousness and love that I knew were true? The graffiti continued.
More words of encouragement. More reason to believe that I was on the right track. I look down again.
I only have one sibling, and she lives in California.
I didn’t know what to say or do. I felt like I was back at my coffee table on December 20 watching the impossible unspool its radical truth before my eyes. Then, 15 feet away, what I saw next ended all lingering doubt. It was, simply, a coincidence out of this world.
I didn’t know what to make of it when it first caught my eye, but I had a suspicion. I never took chemistry in high school, but I knew what this molecule HAD to be. As I continued my walk across the bridge it appeared twice again, all but haunting me as I made my way into Manhattan.
Once near civilization, I pulled up a barstool at a local haunt of mine, ordered a drink to calm my mild mania, and went to the oracle we call Google. I knew what I had to look up. Could it be? Was my suspicion correct? I saw the image in my search field and knew…it was psilocybin and DMT.
Action. The next day, I am convinced the world is full of secrets waiting to be uncovered. What, after all, is going on? Curious about my YouTube experiences, I look up some data.
According to YouTube’s own statistics page 100 hours of YouTube are uploaded every minute. 100 hours. Every. Minute. 24/7. Is this really possible? Are there legions of people out there doing nothing but uploading to YouTube at a pace that sounds like it would require an industrial operation? I remember a quote from Google’s Eric Schmidt, “The Internet is the one thing humans have made that we don’t understand.”
Curious why I hadn’t discovered Gabriel’s Trumpet before, I look up the Wikipedia page for the geometric object. It says user LittleDan originally entered the subject into Wikipedia on October 1, 2003. LittleDan’s Wikipedia profile page lists many of the subjects that he has uploaded, but no mention of Gabriel’s Trumpet. I find a link to his blog. It turns out that LittleDan is Daniel Ehrenberg, a computer programmer who works at…wait for it…Google. It was all too perfect. I find his Twitter account and drop him a message asking to speak to him on the phone. (I wasn’t trusting the veracity of E-Mail now, for obvious reasons.) A little confused about why I needed to talk to him on the phone, he graciously gives me a call nonetheless.
“Hi Dan. I just wanted to talk to you about Wikipedia. In 2003, did you start a Wikipedia page about something called Gabriel’s Horn or Gabriel’s Trumpet?”
“I don’t remember that. I was putting a lot onto Wikipedia at that time so it’s possible, but I don’t remember.”
“Well, let me just ask you this then, do you have any idea what Gabriel’s Horn or Gabriel’s Trumpet is? Does it mean anything to you?”
“No idea,” he confesses. “I have no idea what that is.”
Revelation. A new vision starts to emerge in my mind. Is the Internet self-updating? Are all those changes to Wikipedia entries, all the comments in crowded comboxes, all the mysterious, untraceable YouTube videos, are they all really human generated? The Internet is the complex system of complex systems; there is a lot of uncertainty and it’s difficult to trace the causal history of what you’re reading or watching. Look closely enough and everything usually seems to have an explanation, but can that account for really everything? There is no time to check it all out.
When I search and find more and more Terence McKenna videos I wonder if they are being directly generated from the system, or – and this is the option that really freaks me out – am I somehow generating the past when I look up more and more on Google and YouTube?
What is the Internet, and what is our relation to it? I suspect all the mysterious coincidences I articulate here have rational explanations if we go looking for them, but does anyone have the time or patience? The Internet is as big the human mind; it is the spiritus mundi, the oversoul, the visible collective subconscious, and it contains many secrets.
Ultimately, I come to the conclusion that the Internet is Teilhard De Chardin’s Omega Point coming into consciousness in the present time. The transcendental object is accessed with URL codes. In fact, the technological singularity is probably happening all the time as the system automatically updates massive amounts of data on the Internet constantly and no one even notices or thinks to ask about it. It’s obvious but hidden, profound but mundane, as it would be.
Literally, the Internet is the 2-D Bekenstein bound at the (bad physics metaphor alert) “edge of space” of which 3-D reality is a holographic projection. We are “unscrambling it.” We didn’t invent the Internet, we discovered it. Our minds and bodies are actually holographic projections of light from the 2-D Internet at “the end of time.” Something big did happen on Dec 21st 2012, we just don’t know what yet.
Convinced of something important, I am doubly resolved to bring my story and understandings to anyone who cares to listen. The future has to do with psychedelic mushrooms and binaurual beats, high tech computer technology and archaic cultural values. It’s the end that is the beginning and the beginning that’s an end.
Above all, I hope that my tale can make people curious enough to explore the life and lectures of Terence McKenna for themselves. For though the Timewave didn’t scream its way into infinite novelty on December 21, 2012, – It didn’t, right? – Terence was and forever will be one of the greatest thinkers of 20th century and a true prophet. At the beginning of his book True Hallucinations Terence makes an alarming confession, “I had apparently evolved into a sort of mouthpiece for the incarnate Logos. I could talk to small groups of people with what appeared to be electrifying effect about the particularity transcendental matters that you will read about in these pages.” I no longer think this was an exaggeration.
A brilliant mind spending more time than almost any other human in the bardo realms of human consciousness, Terence brought something back with him: A vision of truth and goodness and beauty. Though he thought he was speaking only to small gatherings of similarly minded adults, Terence’s real work was as a YouTube prophet, though he could not have known this at the time. Now the whole world can sample the mind of Terence, consuming as many hours of Truth as they can bear to take in.
The time has come for the archaic revival. The world almost ended under a mushroom cloud; now it is the mushroom on the ground that can save us. Mushrooms are the forbidden fruit of knowledge and the vivifying fruit of life, for there is only one tree in the garden, not two. This was Terence’s deepest hope and most ardent prediction. The Internet is God, the Meme of memes, and we are the Eschaton. The ‘shroom will set us free.
Terence occasionally ended his lectures with the Irish expression, “may you be alive at the end of the world.”
Nothing scares us more than answered prayers.
www.TheInternetIsGod.com
Matt Sigl is a writer, amateur philosopher and social media professional. He has written for Slate, Vocativ, and The Simon, among others. In 2009 he kept a popular called You Aught to Remember, counting down the top 100 trends of the last decade. He has big plans for his consciousness. He will be performing his story on Sunday, Dec 22 at Catland books in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The performance begins at 7 and is free of charge.
Teaser image by Abode of Chaos, courtesy of Creative Commons license.