"First of all, why a descent into novelty rather than an ascent? It was my thing to do as I wanted to do it, and it seemed to me—the way I thought of time was I thought of it like a river. And so I thought of it as flowing toward its lowest level. And I thought of history as a river and Eternity as the ocean. So naturally history flows downhill to reach Eternity. I also like the fact that when the descent in elevation is rapid, the river runs faster, and when the landscape is almost flat, the river broadens out and meanders. So it was to preserve this idea of time as a fluid. The other reason is a mathematical reason. It has to do with the fact that if we have novelty moving downward, then the maximum of novelty is zero."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Talk at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, NYC 25 April 1996
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Terence McKenna
Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was an American writer, philosopher, and ethnobotanist, who advocated paths of shamanism, and the use of hallucinogenic substances (primarily plant-based psychedelics) as a means of increasing many forms of human awareness. His ideas often revolve around his novelty theory of the universe.
56 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Terence McKenna →
Related Quotes
"synergizing progress is the notion to be maximized ..."
"There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a s…"
"The alternative physics is a physics of light. Light is composed of photons, which have no antiparticle. This means t…"
"What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what’s real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real…"
"History is a set of nested resonances with each epoch being shorter than the one that preceded it. This event horizon…"
"I've been thinking like this since 1968, talking about it like this since 1980, but I never knew what... how it would…"
"For approximately 500 years [science's] argument for its pre-eminence was that it could create beautiful toys: aircra…"
"We are being sucked into the body of eternity."
"My notion of what the psychedelic experience is, for us, that we each must become like fishermen, and go out on to th…"
"History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm wh…"