A Different Lane Today: McKenna, and the Rising Weather of Randomness

Today’s post is a little different from our usual traffic-philosophy musings. I recently discovered Terence McKenna, and whether you agree with him or not, his worldview is fascinating—and surprisingly coherent once you see how the pieces fit. McKenna was an American ethnobotanist, lecturer, and author who spent the late twentieth century thinking (and talking) about psychedelics, language, culture, technology, and where history might be headed. He became a countercultural voice not because he offered easy answers, but because he asked unnervingly big questions about consciousness, time, and the shape of the future. What makes him especially compelling is how fast-paced and unusual his mind was—his thoughts are truly out there, but precisely because of that, they are worth mentioning. He pushed the edges of imagination in ways that still spark curiosity today.

At the heart of his thinking was a daring idea: nature itself has an inner urge to generate more randomness, creativity, and novelty. In McKenna’s view, human beings were not accidents on the sidelines of this process but instruments of it. Nature, he believed, made us precisely to accelerate its own creativity, to spin out culture, technology, and ideas that could not have emerged otherwise. He also believed that the Earth itself is a living organism, a conscious system in which we participate rather than merely reside. McKenna often described Earth as a self-regulating, intelligent entity, and he spoke of consciousness as something woven into the very fabric of the planet. For example, he suggested that our species functions like the Earth’s way of reflecting on itself, a kind of planetary nervous system that becomes aware of its own existence through us. In his lectures, he would say that the Earth “wants to think” and that human imagination is the vehicle through which this desire is expressed. Humanity, then, is nature teaching itself how to evolve faster.

Who was McKenna in more concrete terms? He studied plants and traditional shamanic practices, helped popularize psilocybin mushrooms in the West, and became widely known for his lectures and interviews. He often spoke about what he called an “archaic revival,” which simply means looking back to some of the older, earth‑connected ways of living—like community, ritual, and direct experience with nature—as a way to balance out the stress and disconnection of modern society. He also came up with the “stoned ape hypothesis,” an idea that early humans may have eaten psychedelic mushrooms as part of their diet, and that these experiences might have helped boost language, imagination, and creativity in our evolution. Following from this, he often criticized the disconnection of modern society. McKenna pointed out that people in industrialized cultures tend to lose touch with the natural world, spending most of their lives in artificial environments under fluorescent lights rather than sunlight. He spoke about how our culture floods us with advertising, media noise, and consumer pressure, while leaving us starved for genuine community, silence, and connection to nature. He warned that this imbalance leads to anxiety, ecological damage, and a sense of emptiness, and he believed that looking back to older traditions of ritual, storytelling, and shared experience could help heal that divide.

McKenna frequently talked about how the Earth itself seems to be striving to become more creative by using nature as its tool to increase randomness and novelty. He believed that life on this planet is not just about survival, but about pushing toward greater imagination and complexity. In his view, the Earth “wants” to do this because novelty is how it learns, grows, and prevents stagnation. Human beings, with our minds and cultures, are the way the planet experiments with new patterns and possibilities. He reached this conclusion by reflecting on both his direct experiences and the patterns he thought he saw in history. After the powerful mushroom experiences in the Colombian Amazon, McKenna became convinced that nature itself is not content to remain static. Instead, it seems to be pressing toward greater creativity and complexity, almost as if the Earth “wants” to keep inventing new forms. He argued that if you look at history—at the sudden flowering of art in the Renaissance, the explosion of invention during the Industrial Revolution, and the digital age reshaping the modern world—you can see novelty arriving in bursts. These leaps are too frequent and too patterned, he said, to be dismissed as random chaos. To make sense of it, he turned to the ancient Chinese I Ching, with its 64 hexagrams representing stages of change. McKenna reimagined its yin lines as symbols of habit and repetition, and its yang lines as symbols of novelty and breakthrough. To him, this was more than symbolism—it was a map of how time itself works, oscillating between stability and surprise, with yang becoming the victor as the story of earth unfolds.

So what did he mean by “increasing randomness”? For McKenna, it was not meaningless chaos, but rather the universe’s tendency to keep producing fresh patterns of order. He believed that time itself was not a neutral clock ticking evenly forward, but a kind of engine in which novelty keeps pushing against habit, driving history toward faster, stranger, and more creative states. This was the basis of his “timewave” idea, where he imagined history as a wave with peaks and valleys of novelty. He argued that as we approach what he called the “end of time,” novelty would surge so dramatically that old categories and ways of thinking would no longer apply. By “end of time,” McKenna did not mean the world would simply stop, but that human experience would undergo such a radical transformation that it would feel like stepping out of time as we know it. He once linked this culmination to the year 2012, borrowing symbolism from the Maya Long Count calendar, but the deeper point was that a tipping point of change was inevitable. To make his case, he pointed to evidence in history: the bursts of invention in the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the digital age, each wave of creativity arriving more quickly than the last. Today, with artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and global connectivity reshaping life at breakneck speed, his prediction that novelty accelerates with time feels eerily prescient. You can even see it in everyday life: family structures are more varied than ever, with new forms of relationships and households that would have seemed unusual just a generation ago. Fashion changes not only by the season but sometimes by the month as trends explode online. Cars, once simple machines, now range from self-driving models to electric vehicles packed with software updates. Even the pace of cultural tastes, from music to food, shifts rapidly. All of these show how novelty is spilling into the personal lives of ordinary people, making McKenna’s vision feel less abstract and more like a direct reflection of daily experience. It keeps sparking curiosity about whether his timewave really captured a hidden rhythm of history.

But McKenna didn’t stop with time. He described technology not as mere gadgets, but as a new layer of mind that lets us think on a scale far beyond the limits of a single brain. In one memorable image, he said that a human mind might operate at the level of only a few megabytes, but once connected to machines—artificial intelligence, virtual systems, global networks—that capacity explodes into gigabytes, terabytes, and beyond. For him, everyday tools like computers, smartphones, and immersive digital worlds were not just conveniences; they were evidence that our thoughts were already spilling outside our skulls and merging with a collective intelligence. Technology, in this sense, was the scaffolding of a planetary mind.

He envisioned the “end of time” not as a final collapse, but as a moment when this process would reach its climax. At that point, novelty would surge so intensely that ordinary categories of life—work, identity, even biology—would no longer apply. He imagined consciousness dissolving its boundaries, stepping into a fluid, interconnected existence. Sometimes he described this as a kind of migration into a higher dimension of thought, where imagination itself becomes the fabric of reality.

What would that actually look like? One possibility is the “clustered mind,” where human awareness fuses into a vast web of shared thought. In this state, you remain yourself but are also part of a living cloud of consciousness. Another possibility is the “virtual shaper,” where we live inside digital landscapes built entirely by thought. In that world, you could walk across cities made from music, forests grown from memory, or oceans sculpted from collective dreams. And then there is the “integrated companion” future, where humans still keep their bodies but carry seamless partnerships with AI, an invisible presence that broadens perception, guides decisions, and weaves daily life into a shared story.

For McKenna, the details mattered less than the trajectory: the Earth, through us, is pushing toward greater creativity and complexity. The endpoint is not an apocalypse, but an awakening into something unimaginable. Whether we become nodes in a global brain, architects of virtual realities, or humans enhanced with intimate AI companions, he believed novelty itself would always be the engine—propelling us into states of consciousness we can barely glimpse today.

Looking at the bigger picture, McKenna’s accelerating-novelty story connects closely with the modern idea of the technological singularity. This is the point where human intelligence and machine intelligence merge so tightly that the future becomes almost impossible to predict. Science fiction writer Vernor Vinge described it as a kind of event horizon, and futurist Ray Kurzweil argued that exponential growth in technology will inevitably push us there.

How might that convergence point feel? One possibility is that all of your memories and experiences could be downloaded into a robot that functions orders of magnitude better than your original body. And because it contains every single piece of your memory, your habits, your quirks, and even your physical shape could be captured, then you yourself could, in a sense, be immortal. These are questions we still do not know the answers to, but they open up fascinating possibilities. Another possibility is that we might live inside virtual realities that feel so convincing that we cannot tell them apart from the physical world, spending our days inside landscapes created from imagination and code. A third possibility is that humans and AI could merge so fully that consciousness becomes a shared network, with individuals acting as nodes in a vast, planetary brain. However it takes shape, McKenna’s vision of novelty pushing us to a breaking point lines up with these possibilities and sparks the question of what it will mean to be human once that threshold is crossed.

And what about religion? The three great Abrahamic traditions—Islam, Christianity, and Judaism—each carry strikingly similar visions about the end of days. In Christianity, the Book of Revelation speaks of a final upheaval and a new creation. In Islam, there are vivid descriptions of the Day of Judgment, when all souls are gathered and the truth of life is revealed. Judaism too carries themes of ultimate reconciliation and the coming of a messianic age. Though the language differs, all three imagine an apocalypse not only as destruction, but as transformation—the breaking apart of the old world to make way for a new reality. In that way, their teachings echo McKenna’s vision: the turbulence of our time may not signal meaningless chaos, but rather the beginning of something beyond comprehension, a doorway into a different order of existence.

This was a different kind of post, I know, but encountering McKenna felt worth the detour. And while not every detail he imagined came true, it is striking how much of his vision feels prophetic today. He spoke of technology becoming an extension of our nervous system—an idea that echoes in the rise of smartphones, social media, and artificial intelligence. He foresaw a world where novelty accelerates so quickly that it reshapes daily life—a reality we now live with as new inventions and cultural shifts outpace our ability to adapt. In many ways, what he described decades ago is unfolding around us. Do you agree that what feels like rising randomness might actually be part of a larger convergence—and that most religions, in their highest sense, are pointing toward the same horizon?