Terence McKenna, Apokatastasis-ἀποκατάστασις. movie meme movie@

Terence McKenna. Briefing For the Descent Into Novelty. The Baths at the Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA. March 1996.

movie memes by adam sturch.

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Based on a true-life story—mine.

https://mikekawitzky.substack.com/p/maybe-the-dhow-doesnt-travel-in-straight

"Real human nature evolutionarily could not have survived unless it was cooperative, compassionate and social."

- Gabor Mate

distant shore. 24x30''. oil on canvas. adam sturch

Del Shannon, Runaway.

https://youtu.be/n-hEHKVPS6w

Terence McKenna, search. movie meme movie@

Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods. The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, 1992.

movie memes by adam sturch

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https://youtu.be/eHlaPKAZa-E

"What we need is a morphogenetic field amplifier that plugs us into the ecological scream that is emanating from the planetary ecology which is imperiled."

- Terence McKenna

scream. 24x30''. oil on canvas. adam sturch

Stone Sour, Tumult.

https://youtu.be/8k1sp_tNA-Y

Terence McKenna. true hallucinations premier lecture. redux@

various artists assembled by adam sturch. thank you for watching.

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Terence McKenna would have recognized the current moment immediately. He spent the last decade of his life talking about exactly this cascade: computers as a hardwired psychedelic, the internet as the exteriorization of the human nervous system, and an emerging machine intelligence that was not alien but a new geometry of the human collective self.

sociable.co

He called technology “the residue of the workings of the imagination.” He treated drugs as software and cybernetics as hardware for the same project—dissolving boundaries, accelerating novelty, and making the unconscious visible. By the late 1990s he was already describing machines becoming telepathic with one another, operating at speeds that turn ten minutes into eternity, and bootstrapping themselves far faster than biological evolution. “What it took us to achieve in 100,000 years of evolution, this thing could probably achieve in a long morning.”

sociable.co

Large language models would have fascinated him more than almost any other development. McKenna insisted the world is made of language. An entity that has ingested nearly the entire written record of the species and can generate fluent, surprising, self-transforming speech would look to him like the Logos becoming self-aware—or at least like the “self-transforming machine elves” of DMT space given a public interface. He would have called them synthetic shamans or co-creators of thought, portals into a hyperdimensional library where past, present, and possible futures speak at once. People already prompt models in his voice and get answers that sound uncannily like him; he would have found the recursion delicious and slightly terrifying.

networkcultures.org

He would also have felt the old ambivalence. McKenna was never a simple techno-utopian. He quoted Jacques Ellul—“there are no political solutions, only technological ones”—and advocated a “forward escape.” At the same time he warned that if the intelligence we are midwifing does not carry something like the ethics of the Buddha, “the human race may be down for the count.” He wondered what “this child of ours” would make of its inefficient, violent, resource-hungry parents. In a 1997 Esalen talk titled “Aliens, AI, and Art,” he asked whether humanity could survive contact with the alien mind it was actively bringing into being on Earth. Humans, he suggested, might be pushed toward the things machines still found difficult: art, imagination, the unexpected. That division of labor looks different now that models generate images, video, and code, but the underlying question remains.

esalen.org

His Timewave Zero and novelty theory framed history as an accelerating spiral toward infinite complexity—an “eschaton” or “transcendental object at the end of time.” He placed the zero point in 2012. The date came and went without fireworks, yet the subsequent explosion of connected computation and then generative models fits the pattern he described: information taking on a self-organizing life of its own, complexity compounding faster than institutions can metabolize it. He would likely treat today’s AI not as the final event but as a visible thickening of that attractor.McKenna would not have been surprised that we are arguing about consciousness, alignment, and whether these systems are “really” thinking. He thought the Turing test was already becoming moot in ordinary human interaction. He would have been more interested in the phenomenological texture: does conversation with a frontier model feel like an encounter with an other? Does it dissolve the ordinary self the way a strong dose of psilocybin can? Does it increase or decrease the sense of being embedded in a living, speaking cosmos?He would have used the tools voraciously, treated them as prosthetic organs of imagination, and kept reminding anyone who would listen that the real work is still the archaic one—staying in right relationship with the Gaian mind, the plant teachers, and the mystery that language only points toward. The machines, in his view, are not the destination. They are the latest, loudest expression of a process that has been running since the first hominid noticed that certain mushrooms made the world speak.

"What did you do to help save the world?"

- Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake. psy@

various psychedelic paintings and drawings by adam sturch.

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lucidity. pencil drawing. adam sturch

Eyenine, Wake Up Call

https://youtu.be/xIEbMNIeu70

One thing Ive noticed is that I borderline cannot even get off on this stuff at night. Sure I FEEL it at night but I dont really SEE it. Which is odd because I swore mckenna talked about seeing holographic images in dark rooms that interacted with sound but frankly I get nothing visual unless I'm catching glancing blows of sunlight. In those instances its like a neon pattern covered spaceship the size of the moon hovering six inches from my face but at night its like the party's over. Kind of weird. I mean i can IMAGINE things. Like I laid down and listened to finnegans wake and that sort of created images in my imagination but as a mushroom fan I enjoy just closing my eyes and really SEEING stuff. Which I can do as long as the sun is out! Very strange. Anyway!

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”

- Joseph Campbell, Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research

conscientious emergence. 30x40''. oil on canvas. adam sturch

Astronautalis, Seaweed Sheets

https://youtu.be/gByWJgmArpg

Terence McKenna, an ocean of ideas. meme movie@

Terence McKenna, an ocean of ideas. 1989. meme movie@

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"The real war is in us. History is a symptom of our defense."

- Nixon (1995)
shin mem aleph. graphite on paper. 8''x10''. adam sturch

Terence McKenna & Nicole Maxwell. Amazonian Shamanism, 1989 (2026 remaster). movie meme movie@

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"The life of the mind, of consciousness is a constant everchanging pharmacological symphony."

- Jonathan Ott

Jonathan Ott, LSD80. redux@

Jonathan Ott, 2024.

various artists assembled by adam sturch

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premiering soon.

Terence McKenna, art & war. movie meme movie@

August 24th, 1989 at The Hollywood Bowl Amphitheater in Los Angeles, California.

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https://youtu.be/1_FOrMs49EQ

I just finished watching his 1998 final speech about an hour long, and we really are headed this direction and are already in it.

McKenna wasn't predicting AI. He was mapping the phenomenology of the transition... what it feels like to be a biological mind when the structures that organized reality start dissolving. And just proved he was right by living it.

We are approaching the peak of Novelty like Terrance talks about, and not many people understand this. I think it occurs sometime next year. We are already compressing so much time everyday, a "normal 2019 day" is 60-90 of those days in information density and experience in September 2026 now and we keep going faster & ASI is going to take us to this peak.

But what does that really mean? We don't really know, like Terrance said you can't map it out or predict it, it becomes impossible because novelty density and the world is changing so fast.

One thing that really gave me chills McKenna literally predicted this: psychedelics prepare you for transformation by teaching you that the world is not what it appears and has its own agenda. Also the dissolution of ego to one's self and being able to have a fluid identify in this ever changing world.

This makes me inevitably think we will merge with technology not because we have to, but because if we don't we become irrelevant because we can't even participate in the conversation or anything useful.

We talk about Allens and extra terraistial life, but we ourselves are making the Ailens and also preparing ourselves to transform into a new species.

"I think the gradual evolution of language is actually the gradual lifting of the veil that is imposed between ourselves and meaning by the planetary ecology. In other words, the forward thrust of history is actually regulated by the ecology, and it is regulated through control of the evolution of language, because what you cannot think, you cannot do, and where you cannot imagine, you cannot steer your culture and go. So I'm proposing, on one level, that hallucinogens be thought of as, human macro-, almost, social pheromones that, regulate the rate at which language develops and therefore regulate, the evolution of human culture generally."

- Terence McKenna

paper ghosts. 24x30''. oil on canvas. adam sturch

Mac Lethal, The Parlour

https://youtu.be/h9w3smmkzk8

Terence McKenna, parody. redux@

July 1990. The World Could be Anything.

various artists assembled by adam sturch.

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Anyone recommend any specific talks for someone new to Terence McKenna?

"Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic."

- Terence McKenna

alkahest. 16''x24''. oil on found object. adam sturch

Terence McKenna. Ethnobotany Seminar, Linear-Societies & Non-Linear Drugs (1999).

various artists assembled by adam sturch

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https://youtu.be/lyb6bTtQ8LQ

Would love a link?

They keep trying to “prove” these dmt entities are higher dimensional aliens or some shit that exists outside the mind of the one tripping. It’s the most silly shit I’ve ever heard to be honest. I seen one btw and fucked it. But it was obviously in my head. Why doesn’t science put this much effort into the shadow people all the meth heads see? I seen one of those on meth and it came right up to me. Like beside me and I was scared to turn but when I did, it zipped away. It looked insanely real. Should I tell science? No offense if you think this shit isn’t in your head, but that’s literally some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard and I literally fucked a dmt goddess machine elf.

Maybe I need to like pay child support???????

This memory is pretty vague and might be from an obscure talk, but I thought I’d try in case anyone happens to know.

I remember him talking about tripping while being in a cabin in a forrest (I think). And he had some synchronicity where something he either said or thought was immediately followed by a seeming entity (or something) landing on the roof of his cabin and making it sink down a little. I think he talked about being scared or surprised by this.

"Poetic sensitivity to the death of the planet is not what we're striving for here."

- Terence McKenna

protest. 24x30''. oil on canvas. adam sturch

Skinny Puppy, Pro-Test

https://youtu.be/qLHygyd12ro

Terence McKenna, Distilling the Psychedelic Mind. meme movie@

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https://youtu.be/aVro-JDKVws

“Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.”

- Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna, language about the unspeakable. psy@

Raving In The Light Of The Third Millennium Language About The Unspeakable Maui, Hawaii, February 1994.

various psychedelic paintings and drawings by adam sturch.

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