Revisiting McKenna’s Transcendental Object at the End of Time
The following is a transcript of a speech I made on May 1st, 2020 at Global UnConference 1. You can find the coinciding video for it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYk0apkh_p8
Hello everyone, thank you for joining me here today. I know we are living in some pretty interesting times right now. But for all the negatives, there is a silver lining. It has opened up opportunities that would not have been possible before, including this event happening today and I want to thank Michael and the Unit Global team for putting this together.
Ever since a friend of mine introduced me to Terence McKenna in college, I have been listening to his lectures and interviews on and off for the past 6+ years and even when I relisten, I still learn new things that I didn’t pick up previously. McKenna can be called a lot of things, a philosopher, a botanist, an explorer of consciousness, but above all, he was a messenger and a successful one I might add. Even as we passed the 20-year anniversary of his death last month, his ideas still reverberate as strong as ever today. People are spreading his philosophy now more than ever whether they may be through lectures on YouTube, memes on Instagram, or me giving you this speech through Zoom.
Terence shared a lot of theories during his lifetime, but one that he repeated multiple times and really caught my attention, even recently, was The Transcendental Object at the End of Time. To be honest, I feel a sense of duty to share with you my own thoughts on what the Transcendental Object at the End of Time is and what it means for us. By the end of this, I hope you view the Transcendental Object as ultimately a message of hope of a world that could be. A world that I believe is possible in the near future if we are able to learn how to be empathetic towards one another. I hope this speech will give you solace and acceptance in your own life and reignite the belief in yourself that was always there.
I think the Transcendental Object was a theme that was ever so present in his lecturers because it has to do with the fate of all of us, both individually and collectively. It sounds so grandiose when you repeat it, “The Transcendental Object at End of Time, The Transcendental Object at the End of Time.” So now, what is it even anyway?
The Transcendental Object at the End of Time is the consequential destination for humanity and life in this universe as a whole. It is our final destiny as a species, whether that may be reaching for the stars in hyperspace or building a new world for ourselves in cyberspace. Ever since the beginning of time, the Transcendental Object has been a force pulling us forward and guiding us through the unknown as the universe grows ever more in novelty and complexity. It is the same force that brought the first nascent creatures out of the depths of the ocean onto unexplored landscapes on the surface. It is the same force that drove our ape ancestors to leave the safe haven of the canopies to explore the uncharted grasslands of the African continent. The Transcendental Object was the spark of consciousness that lit in our human ancestors’ minds and helped us develop a propensity for language which in turn gave us the necessary tools for us to articulate and manipulate the world around us to our advantage.
Each of these events was a stepping stone toward the Transcendental Object, so in this spirit, I would like to call them Transcendental Checkpoints. They were fundamental and necessary changes that were dramatic and abrupt but still pale in comparison to the Transcendental Object at the End of Time. From the first Transcendental Checkpoints that preceded us to the final Transcendental Object at the End of Time that we are heading towards, what each stage represents are levels increasing in novelty and complexity until we get to the highest form of both.
Novelty was a concept near and dear to Terence’s heart because he viewed novelty as the unsung force behind all creation in the universe. In addition, the second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy in a system can never decrease over time and actually spontaneously evolves towards thermodynamic equilibrium, which is the state with maximum entropy. Aligning this concept of entropy with Terence’s notion of novelty suggests that we are moving in a direction towards more complexity through each Transcendental Checkpoint we pass through.
I actually think the classic Nintendo game Super Mario is a great metaphor when trying to conceptualize Transcendental Checkpoints and the journey towards the Transcendental Object at the End of Time. At each level Mario embarks on, he is going forward, overcoming numerous obstacles, and eating magical mushrooms that give him special abilities along the way. Once Mario completes a level, he starts all over again but at a new higher one.
But that is where the comparisons between Super Mario and life in the universe end. When Super Mario reaches the end of a level, he jumps to pull a flag down to the ground and some congratulatory music plays in the background. The universe that we are in acts a bit different when life reaches a Transcendental Checkpoint because life doesn’t just arrive at one, it blasts through it and it sure looks like that on a large enough time scale. For example, there wasn’t just a singular moment that the animals first appeared on land from the ocean depths. It took millions of years of evolution to get to that point.
If you are curious and want to see a snapshot of that transformation from water-based creature to land-dwelling animal taking place today, all you have to do is observe the lifespan of amphibians. They start their lives as tadpoles and undergo metamorphosis; They’re gills transmute into lungs and they become air-breathing adults such as frogs. I think when Terence said that nature is alive and talking to us, this one thing nature is showing us. Animals that experience metamorphosis such as frogs, butterflies, and others are prime examples of species undertaking an alchemical transformation through a Transcendental Checkpoint within their own lifetime.
Humanity has been on a long and strenuous journey towards the Transcendental Object since the dawn of mankind. For most of humanity’s existence, we were hunter-gatherers which was the de facto way to organize society for hundreds of thousands of years. These groups were inherently egalitarian cultures that lived off a certain square-mileage of land, took only what they needed, and conceptualized time in long periods. The passing of time was observed through noticing weather patterns that appeared at certain times of the year aka keeping track of the seasons. Keeping record of this was vital to their survival and told our hunter-gatherer ancestors many things such as when the rivers would flood, when a specific animal was migrating somewhere, or when certain wild vegetation blossomed.
Then at some point give or take around 12 thousand years ago, certain wild plants took hold of humanity and for the first time, people left their nomadic ways to settle in one place in order to harvest a specific crop. This happened with wheat in the fertile crescent of the middle east, rice in the Yangtze River basin of China, and maize in the Tehuacán Valley of Mexico. It is often stated that we domesticated these plants but in reality, they also domesticated us. The agricultural revolution was upon us and human society was about to embark on a 12 thousand year expedition of progress and advancement that has led to the complex global civilization that we live in today.
It is often viewed that the start of the agricultural revolution was the beginning of history as we know it. Egalitarianism gave way to hierarchies and these hierarchies would be the basis of all great empires that would be built in the future. In every civilization in which an empire arose, what they had in common is that they claimed a divine right to rule whether it be the Mandate of Heaven in China or the Pharaoh being the chosen intermediary between this earthly realm and higher realm of the gods. As humanity became aware of its power to create and bend reality to its will, for the first time in history, groups of people were now authoring their own path towards the Transcendental Object at the End of Time for others to follow which would end up causing all sorts of problems.
Analyzing it further, when leaders espouse doctrine claiming divine right and profess a path on how people ought to live, what is actually happening is that by pushing people towards said doctrine, they are hijacking the Transcendental Object for their own purposes. This is the opposite from the pulling effect that the Transcendental Object naturally has on life in the universe. This shift from letting our intuition capture the frequency of the Transcendental Object that naturally pulls us toward it in favor of letting inherently flawed man-made ideologies push us toward something else has resulted in much of humanity being misguided for thousands of years.
We must exercise extreme caution and recognize the innate dangers that come with ideologies such as organized religion. What may start out as a corrective effort eventually devolves into corruption and self-dealing. For example, early Christianity was a rectification of the Roman Empire and its polytheistic doctrine. Yet, when it became the dominant force in Europe and the Mediterranean hundreds of years after its birth, it ushered in a period known to history as the dark ages. The Catholic Church’s word was supreme and any challenge to it was bound to be crushed. Over time, the Catholic Church became corrupted itself and near the middle of the second millennium engaged in the widespread selling of indulgences or what I like to call “tickets to heaven” in order to fund its activities. In effect, the Catholic Church was not only asserting their version of the Transcendental Object at the End of Time through doctrine and scripture, but literally selling it for money. These indulgences were one of Martin Luther’s main motivations for coming out against Catholic Church and igniting the Protestant Reformation.
Terence once referenced that history is a shockwave of eschatology which is the part of theology that is concerned with death, judgement, and the final destiny of humankind. He continued by saying we should live as if the apocalypse has already occurred and will happen again. And since the dawn of the agricultural revolution twelve thousand years ago, history has been filled with such events that could objectively be considered apocalyptic. The Bronze Age Collapse, the fall of Rome, the rapid demise of the Aztec and Incan empires at the helm of a few hundred Spanish conquistadors. To the people living in these societies during these times, it sure as hell would seem that the world was ending.
Over the past 100 years, humanity has grown at a rate never before witnessed in recorded history. This has been met with profound advancements in technology and led to striking changes in lifestyle. We assume that the progress we made should have led to a better life for all, but the truth is that people are more anxious, depressed, and confused than what our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors could ever conceive to be. Even in the face of space travel and quantum computers, our human brains are still looking for some ideology to latch onto in order to make sense of the world. Yet, the problem with all of these ideologies, both religious and secular, is that they presume what the Transcendental Object at the End of Time is and how to get there.
Today, the current cultural zeitgeist that has emerged has us feeling powerless over our lives and ultimately trapped by our singular individual timelines, which is a self-limiting process. We are told to get a degree, get a job, do this, do that and you’ll be happy. Just as the religious creeds of old, modern culture is constantly talking down to us on how we should live and what we need to do to achieve a sort of “secular salvation.” The problem is just like the past doctrines, it’s a lie filled with contradictions and right now we are seeing those contradictions face tremendous pressure in real-time. Many of the institutions that we thought were stable are actually incredibly fragile
One clear example of this is modern-day higher education in America. Since World War II, college has been seen as the cornerstone for individuals seeking a prosperous life and a step towards making meaningful contributions to society. Yet today as the world evolves from an industrial society that was the norm 80 years ago into the information age, college has become stagnant and complacent in an ever-changing world. Many people rack up tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt with the belief that college will lead to a better life but end are saddled with that debt and are working jobs they don’t like for years if not decades to pay off that debt. As remote learning is taking hold in the United States because of Corona and things do not look like they are going to return back to normal anytime soon, how can colleges justify its bloated administrative salaries and exorbitant expenses towards students?
It’s ironic to think what America ended up being compared to what experts imagined 50/60 years ago. They believed that due to future advances in technology and productivity, people would be working less, have more free time, and live in abundance. Not only was that a lie but the opposite has happened. Today, people as a whole are working longer hours and are more unhappy, unsatisfied, and stressed than before. Millennials and Gen Z are faced with less opportunities than previous generations and for the first time in history are expected to be worse off than their parents. With all of these things to consider, something is bound to break.
Terence famously said in his talks that culture is not your friend. We must only look at the world around us to see that. The culture that has emerged in our time and place is one that fears death and ignores our own mortality instead of embracing our finite time on this earth. It is one that strongly encourages rampant consumption without regard over sustainability and the awareness of the fragile world around us. With all this being said, we are still writing our collective story as a species and have a chance to change. Today like our ancestors before us, humanity is at a crossroads and we have the unique opportunity to reset our destiny and begin heading towards the Transcendental Object at the End of Time once again.
Today we are fortunate enough to live in an age where individuals can have a rippling impact on the wider world via the technological tools at our disposal. The internet has proven to be one of the most disruptive and psychedelic creations of the modern age. It is no surprise that the adherents of the hippie movement and the original players in what would become Silicon Valley emerged in the same place at the same time, the bay area in the 1960s. I call the internet psychedelic because it has dissolved boundaries that were never thought possible. Ideas could be shared at the speed of light and people are connected with each other like never before. The ramifications of this are staggering because it shows us a glimpse of a world that could be. A world instead of being divided by nationality, religion, or race is united in the ideals of empathy, common purpose, and the collective betterment of humanity. This is essentially what the journey towards the Transcendental Object at the End of Time telling us.
The Transcendental Object at the End of Time is the ultimate form of novelty and complexity that we are all being pulled towards. A Terence puts it, the Transcendental Object is an attractor that has penetrated our collective minds and individual minds. The process of reaching the Transcendental Object is an alchemical transformation by the other that is actively metamorphosing us from our earthly vessels to what could be considered Godhood. Terence said history is finite and the dream that awaits us at the end of history is a place where laws are set by the imagination.
We are all in a continuous process towards transcending and this is shown by the arrow of entropy which is pulling us towards a hyper-complex state- one of ceaseless information sharing, dissolved boundaries and expanded levels of awareness allowing us to feel one another and to feel the consequences of our actions. Terence stated that the ultimate goal at the end of history and the End of Time is to create a way to share that dream and openly collaborate like Gods with open office doorways candidly sharing ideas that help everyone transcend. The Transcendental Object at the End of Time is not a divine birthright only reserved for kings but a destiny that is open for us all to achieve together.
On our way to divinity, we must recognize that nothing lasts. All of your relationships will end and the people around us will be no more. Time is ever moving forward, there is no going back to the canopies that populated the African plains or the hunter-gatherer lifestyles of the past. The Transcendental Object is an unstoppable force leading us from our primate physical bodies to angelhood. Like a fetus leaving the womb and into the world, the only way out is forward.
Because of these facts that surround our fate, it gives us the utmost obligation to live in the immediate moment and the responsibility to help others transcend around us. Living in the present moment is something that we all have complete control over. To me, that means meditating and appreciating the little things and simple pleasures in life. This could be anything from spending time with loved ones, learning a new skill, or noticing something new in your daily routines that you may have never noticed if you didn’t take a step back to do so. Helping others transcend means using the technological and pharmacological tools at our disposal to help them realize both their own limited morality and expansive power as human beings. It seems like every other week there is a new study confirming the benefits of the safe use of psychedelic substances. Even old institutions cannot ignore it and in September of 2019, Johns Hopkins opened a research center that strictly focuses on psychedelics. Furthermore, emerging technology like virtual reality may give us the opportunity to reach the world where we are only limited by our imagination sooner than we think.
In closing, I would look to end this talk with a quote from one of my favorite comedians Bill Hicks. Bill Hicks is someone I discovered in high school before I knew who Terence even was and frequently shared Terence’s philosophies in his stand-up acts. Anyways his most well-known monologue came at the end of one of his biggest performances, aptly titled Revelations that took place in London on May 27th, 1993, and it goes like this.
The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are.
And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly colored and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question: “Is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say: “Hey, don’t worry, don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.” … and we kill those people.
Ha ha, “Shut him up. We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real.” It’s just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as ONE.
Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defense each year, and instead spend it feeding, clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.
Thank you everyone for listening, I hope you enjoyed what I had to say. Rest in Peace Bill Hicks and Rest in Peace Terence McKenna.
