[54] McKenna had intensively studied lepidoptera and entomology in the 1960s, and as part of his studies hunted for butterflies primarily in Colombia and Indonesia. According to her, it is an attempt to present a pseudoscientific claim in a seemingly scientific style. "[16][43][73], In 2019 McKenna's theory was supported by the mycologist Paul Stamets. Take a look, and click on some links to uncover some of his theories, Including the "Stoned Ape Theory". "[17], For the Canadian documentary filmmaker, see, "Timewave Zero" redirects here. [62][63], McKenna spoke of hallucinations while on DMT in which he claims to have met intelligent entities he described as, "self-transforming machine elves". In the video below, renowned mycologist Paul Stamets explains the “stoned ape hypothesis” to Joe Rogan.The hypothesis was developed by Terence McKenna and documented in his 1993 book Food of the Gods.McKenna’s “Stoned Ape Hypothesis” offers one explanation for how humans doubled … Concluding that "It is, without question, destined to play a major role in our future considerations of the role of the ancient use of psychoactive drugs, the historical shaping of our modern concerns about drugs and perhaps about man's desire for escape from reality with drugs. ", "Was psychedelic guru Terence McKenna goofing about 2012 prophecy? [6][7][43][78], McKenna's hypothesis was that low doses of psilocybin improve visual acuity, particularly edge detection, meaning that the presence of psilocybin in the diet of early pack hunting primates caused the individuals who were consuming psilocybin mushrooms to be better hunters than those who were not, resulting in an increased food supply and in turn a higher rate of reproductive success. from the late 1960s to early 1970s. [43] There are also examples of Amazonian tribes such as the Jivaro and the Yanomami who use ayahuasca ceremoniously and who are known to engage in violent behaviour. His ideas regarding psilocybin and visual acuity have been criticized as misrepresentations of Fischer et al. "[91] Therefore, according to McKenna's final interpretation of the data and positioning of the graph, on December 21, 2012 we would have been in the unique position in time where maximum novelty would be experienced. Some projected dates have been criticised for having seemingly arbitrary labels, such as the "height of the age of mammals"[10] and McKenna's analysis of historical events has been criticised for having a eurocentric and cultural bias. While interesting, it does have several holes on several fronts. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you're going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights. They hypothesised this would give them access to the collective memory of the human species, and would manifest the alchemists' Philosopher's Stone which they viewed as a "hyperdimensional union of spirit and matter". [12] McKenna also began lecturing[17] locally around Berkeley and started appearing on some underground radio stations. It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. He postulated that "intelligence, not life, but intelligence may have come here [to Earth] in this spore-bearing life form". TIL about the ‘Stoned Ape’ theory the idea that ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms was the "evolutionary catalyst" from which language, projective imagination, the arts, religion, philosophy, science, and all of human culture sprang. Fungi: Death Becomes Them - CrashCourse Biology #39. "[5][7] When describing this model of the universe he stated that: "The universe is not being pushed from behind. [20] He sought out shamans of the Tibetan Bon tradition, trying to learn more about the shamanic use of visionary plants. The theory certainly captures the imagination and its proponents believe staunchly in the Stoned Ape hypothesis, but the data and further research in this case points to the theory being invalid. In a nutshell, the Stoned Ape Theory says that magic mushrooms sped up the evolutionary process and that, ultimately, the psychedelic experience … [3][45], In 1985, McKenna founded Botanical Dimensions with his then-wife, Kathleen Harrison. As Manly P. Hall explains: "Most of the ancient philosophies teach that life descended onto the physical planet from some sphere of superphysical energy which encloses the physical planet. [44], McKenna published several books in the early-to-mid-1990s including: The Archaic Revival; Food of the Gods; and True Hallucinations. [6] He believed they would have been following large herds of wild cattle whose dung harbored the insects that, he proposed, were undoubtedly part of their new diet, and would have spotted and started eating Psilocybe cubensis, a dung-loving mushroom often found growing out of cowpats. The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal that is as inevitable as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release it up near the rim. [37] Though associated with the New Age and Human Potential Movements, McKenna himself had little patience for New Age sensibilities. The Stone Tape theory is the speculation that ghosts and hauntings are analogous to tape recordings, and that mental impressions during emotional or traumatic events can be projected in the form of energy, "recorded" onto rocks and other items and "replayed" under certain conditions.The idea draws inspiration and shares similarities with views of 19th-century … But the stress on ritual, on organized activity, on race/ancestor-consciousness – these are themes that have been worked out throughout the entire 20th century, and the archaic revival is an expression of that. [68], During the final years of his life and career, McKenna became very engaged in the theoretical realm of technology. [3][5] McKenna called this fractal modeling of time "temporal resonance", proposing it implied that larger intervals, occurring long ago, contained the same amount of information as shorter, more recent, intervals. He also frequently referred to this as "the transcendental object at the end of time. When examining the King Wen sequence of the 64 hexagrams, McKenna noticed a pattern. [28] With the degrees of difference as numerical values, McKenna worked out a mathematical wave form based on the 384 lines of change that make up the 64 hexagrams. This created hierarchies, priesthoods, theological systems, castes, ritual, taboos. [5][6][12][24][27] In La Chorrera, at the urging of his brother, McKenna was the subject of a psychedelic experiment[5] in which the brothers attempted to bond harmine (harmine is another psychedelic compound they used synergistically with the mushrooms) with their own neural DNA, through the use of a set specific vocal techniques. He had a hobby of fossil hunting in his youth, which helped him gain a scientific appreciation of nature. "[7][26] He also pointed out that psilocybin would dissolve the ego and "religious concerns would be at the forefront of the tribe's consciousness, simply because of the power and strangeness of the experience itself. [6] He conducted lecture tours and workshops[6] promoting natural psychedelics as a way to explore universal mysteries, stimulate the imagination, and re-establish a harmonious relationship with nature. "[3][18], Novelty theory is a pseudoscientific idea[9][10] that purports to predict the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe as an inherent quality of time, proposing that time is not a constant but has various qualities tending toward either "habit" or "novelty". This controversial theory asserts that this mutualistic symbiosis between humans … [5][7] The graph was fractal, it exhibited a pattern in which a given small section of the wave was found to be identical in form to a larger section of the wave. So according to novelty theory, the pattern of time itself is speeding up, with a requirement of the theory being that infinite novelty will be reached on a specific date. He finished high school in Lancaster, California. [16][26][27][31] In 1976, the brothers published what they had learned in the book Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, under the pseudonyms "O.T. [11], Terence McKenna was born and raised in Paonia, Colorado,[5][12][13] Joe Rogan Reacts to Michael Pollan's DMT Story . And, it's not easy. All the compounds are potentially dangerous, and all compounds, at sufficient doses or repeated over time, involve risks. [5][24][26] Instead of oo-koo-hé they found fields full of gigantic Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms, which became the new focus of the expedition. See more ideas about apes, theory of evolution, stone. What McKenna called his "theory of evolution" is what came to be known as the Stoned Ape Theory: the idea that consumption of wild mushrooms by early hominids had a drastic impact on the evolutionary development of … "[6], Wired called him a "charismatic talking head" who was "brainy, eloquent, and hilarious"[27] and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead also said that he was "the only person who has made a serious effort to objectify the psychedelic experience. The idea draws inspiration and shares similarities with views of 19th-century intellectualists and psychic researchers, such as Charles Babbage, Eleonor Sidgwick and Edmund Gurney. In the 1970s, when he was still collecting, he became quite squeamish and guilt-ridden about the necessity of killing butterflies in order to collect and classify them, and that's what led him to stop his entomological studies, according to his daughter. He was less enthralled with synthetic drugs,[6] stating, "I think drugs should come from the natural world and be use-tested by shamanically orientated cultures ... one cannot predict the long-term effects of a drug produced in a laboratory."[3]. So it's safe to say they don't think highly at all of the theory. The Stoned Ape Theory was founded by none other than the American author, lecturer, ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence Kemp McKenna. Who was Terence McKenna? Ancient Origins articles related to stoned ape theory in the sections of history, archaeology, human origins, unexplained, artifacts, ancient places and myths and legends. I, for one, do not find that … [3][7][8][38] He repeatedly stressed the importance and primacy of the "felt presence of direct experience", as opposed to dogma.[39]. [5][6], For the 1972 British television play, see, "The "Stone Tape Theory" of hauntings: A geological perspective", https://archive.org/details/soulthingsorpsy00dentgoog, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stone_Tape&oldid=1000223316, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, William Denton, Elizabeth M. Foote Denton. He was able to graph the data and this became the Novelty Time Wave. "the theory" - 'that might be possible' Some pretty fancy 'logic' there, a marvel of precision reasoning - total clueless incoherence. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it's a kind of blessing. [84][85][86] This idea is linked to McKenna's "stoned ape" theory of human evolution, with him viewing the "archaic revival" as an impulse to return to the symbiotic and blissful relationship he believed humanity once had with the psilocybin mushroom. with Irish ancestry on his father's side of the family. With each successive iteration trending, at an increasing level, towards infinite novelty. Oeric". We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. In his book Food of the Gods, McKenna proposed that the transformation from humans' early ancestors Homo erectus to the species Homo sapiens mainly had to do with the addition of the mushroom Psilocybe cubensis in the diet,[26][73][74] an event that according to his theory took place in about 100,000 BCE (which is when he believed that the species diverged from the genus Homo). He was less enthralled with synthetic drugs, stating, "I think drugs should come from the natural world and be use-tested by shamanically orientated … Price speculated about "psychic ether" as an intermediate medium between spiritual and physical reality, which can enable objects to carry memory traces of emotions or experiences from the past. stoned ape theory Mckenna spent the last twenty-five years of his life studying the ontological foundations of shamanism, in digesting mushrooms, yopo snuff, and ayahuasca. [5][88] He suggested the up-and-down pattern of the wave shows an ongoing wavering between habit and novelty respectively. [26], One expert on drug treatment attacked McKenna for popularizing "dangerous substances". "[93], John Horgan in a 2012 blog post for Scientific American also commented that, Food of the Gods was "a rigorous argument...that mind-expanding plants and fungi catalyzed the transformation of our brutish ancestors into cultured modern humans. [5][90][Note b], McKenna saw the universe, in relation to novelty theory, as having a teleological attractor at the end of time,[5] which increases interconnectedness and would eventually reach a singularity of infinite complexity. The individual lines of the I Ching are made up of both Yin (broken lines) and Yang (solid lines). McKenna soon became a fixture of popular counterculture[5][6][37] with Timothy Leary once introducing him as "one of the five or six most important people on the planet"[41] and with comedian Bill Hicks' referencing him in his stand-up act[42] and building an entire routine around his ideas. [76][77], McKenna stated that, due to the desertification of the African continent at that time, human forerunners were forced from the increasingly shrinking tropical canopy into search of new food sources. [6][12][22] Hundreds of hours of McKenna's public lectures were recorded either professionally or bootlegged and have been produced on cassette tape, CD and MP3. [52][53] His daughter, the artist and photographer Klea McKenna, subsequently preserved his insect collection, turning it into a gallery installation, and then publishing it in book form as The Butterfly Hunter, featuring her selected photos of 122 insects – 119 butterflies/moths and three beetles or beetle-like insects – from a set of over 2000 he collected between 1969 and 1972, as well as maps showing his collecting routes through the rainforests of Southeast Asia and South America. The library is the first place to go when looking into taking a new compound. [43], One of the main themes running through McKenna's work, and the title of his second book, was the idea that Western civilization was undergoing what he called an "archaic revival". [3], In their book How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age, authors Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn dismissed the idea as an irrational claim, stating, "The problem is that we know of no mechanism that could record such information in a stone or play it back. For the album by the Dutch, sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFMcKenna1993 (, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine § Reported_encounters_with_external_entities, "Terence McKenna the brave prophet of The next psychedelic revolution, or is his cosmic egg just a little bit cracked? For some reason I know not what, an old tv commercial comes to mind, Playtex 'wonder bra' - "No Visible Mean Of Support!" I see this theory to make some sense but not to be taken too seriously as McKenna is not an actual evolutionary scientist. [12][33][35], In the early 1980s, McKenna began to speak publicly on the topic of psychedelic drugs, becoming one of the pioneers of the psychedelic movement. [26][27] He believed that when taken this way one could expect a profound visionary experience,[26] believing it is only when "slain" by the power of the mushroom that the message becomes clear. [45][46][47] These debates were known as trialogues and some of the discussions were later published in the books: Trialogues at the Edge of the West and The Evolutionary Mind. [16] The voice's reputed revelations and his brother's simultaneous peculiar psychedelic experience prompted him to explore the structure of an early form of the I Ching, which led to his "Novelty Theory". [5][17][32] The brothers' experiences in the Amazon would later be the main focus of McKenna's book True Hallucinations, published in 1993. I'm suggesting that the universe is pulled toward a complex attractor that exists ahead of us in time, and that our ever-accelerating speed through the phenomenal world of connectivity and novelty is based on the fact that we are now very, very close to the attractor. In late 1999, McKenna described his thoughts concerning his impending death to interviewer Erik Davis: I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd have no time to sort it out. In the early days of the Society for Psychical Research place memory was considered an explanation for ghostly apparitions, seemingly connected with certain places. [3], In the 20th century, the idea that objects are able to store and play back past events was re-introduced in 1939 and 1940 by then-SPR president H. H. Price. McKenna was opposed to Christianity[67] and most forms of organized religion or guru-based forms of spiritual awakening, favouring shamanism, which he believed was the broadest spiritual paradigm available, stating that: What I think happened is that in the world of prehistory all religion was experiential, and it was based on the pursuit of ecstasy through plants. [82] Others have pointed to civilisations such as the Aztecs, who used psychedelic mushrooms (at least among the Priestly class), that didn't reflect McKenna's model of how psychedelic-using cultures would behave, for example, by carrying out human sacrifice. In his book Food of the Gods (1992), Terence McKenna describes one of his many controversial ideas.This idea, known as the ‘Stoned Ape Theory’, relates to how our ancestors evolved to produce language and create art. [3][22][23] In the autumn of 1975, after parting with his girlfriend Ev earlier in the year,[31] McKenna began a relationship with his future wife and the mother of his two children, Kathleen Harrison. [22][75] McKenna based his theory on the main effects, or alleged effects, produced by the mushroom[3] while citing studies by Roland Fischer et al. Oss" and "O.N. [7][8][17], On February 7, 2007, McKenna's library of over 3000 rare books and personal notes was destroyed in a fire at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Babbage speculated that spoken words leave permanent impressions in the air, even though they become inaudible after time. [8][17][19][26], Soon after graduating, McKenna and Dennis published a book inspired by their Amazon experiences, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching. TIL of The Stoned Ape Theory, which is a controversial theory from Terence McKenna which states that a lot of our advanced human evolution came as a result of the ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms, also known as magic mushrooms by our primate ancestors. [3], Following Price's ideas, an archeologist turned paranormal researcher, T. C. Lethbridge, claimed that past events can be stored in objects thanks to fields of energy, that he believed to surround streams, forests or mountains. [22] Previously, he had split his time between Hawaii and Occidental, CA. For those not familiar with (or now hoping to become MORE familiar with) Terence McKenna, he presented the Stoned Ape Theory in his 1992 book, Food of the Gods, proposing that eating magic mushrooms pushed Homo erectus to Homo sapien by expanding his brain as well as his mind.His examples included psilocybin mushrooms improving visual acuity so hunters could … The new technique involved the use of ordinary kitchen implements, and for the first time the layperson was able to produce a potent entheogen in his [or her] own home, without access to sophisticated technology, equipment, or chemical supplies. (This is an issue throughout the article, but let's look at Stoned Ape for now.) [12][43] Consequently, there would be a mixing of genes, greater genetic diversity, and a communal sense of responsibility for the group offspring.