Terence McKenna – Culture is your operating system

Terence McKenna was more than a little wacky, but within his psychedelics infused philosophizing, there is some wisdom. This brief clip of audio (with added images) is a fine example of the ways in which he gets it right from a far different angle than most of us can comprehend.

He is essentially talking about worldviews - what he call cultural operating systems - and there is much of what he says here that is similar to what we talk about in Integral Studies. While integral theory advocates non-pharmaceutical methods of transformation, McKenna advocates psilocybin and DMT, among other entheogens to clear out no longer useful operating systems and make room for new perspectives.

Terence Mckenna – Culture is your operating system

Terence McKenna and his idea of extropy is explained through the window of opportunity we can call novelty. One of Terence 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 25000 years, but amazingly, it hit an asymptote at exactly December 22, 2012.

Tags: psychedelics, entheogens, worldviews, personal growth, transformation, Terence McKenna, Culture is your operating system, shamanism, integral theory, extropy, Novelty theory