He's been called a "psychedelic bard" by Wired Magazine, a "psychedelic explorer and back-to-the-past futurist" by The Prophets Conference, and "the Timothy Leary of the '90s" by none other than Dr. Timothy Leary himself. Terence McKenna, the "altered statesman" of the rave generation and technology revolution, evolved beyond his physical body on April 4th, 2000.

Author of numerous books, including the Archaic Revival, his series of trilogues with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abrams, and, co-authored with his brother Dennis, The Invisible Landscape and The Magic Mushroom Growers Guide, Terence McKenna's ideas have had a strong impact on global rave culture, as well as science and society in general. Advocate of a ritualistic return of shamanistic practices involving psylocibic mushrooms, DMT and other substances, he openly prompted individual seekers to ingest his legendary "heroic dose" in order to invoke a journey of mystical and mathematical proportions. Such activities might facilitate experiences which could help shift individual perception beyond commonplace bio-survival neurological awareness and unleash the visionary prospects of a personalized inter-dimensional odyssey straight into the heart of the universe and the nature of being.

While he did highly promote substance-induced introspective practices, McKenna, unlike Dr. Tim, did not encourage those who became turned on to drop out of society or profession. Instead, he encouraged individuals to viscerally experience the deepest levels of communicating with potent, genuine languages manifest in nature, embedded into the fabric of beingness as fractal patterns of information. And to become highly involved with computers and software, especially at the level of programmer and web designer. McKenna praised the evolution of technology as the greatest manifestation of a deeper psychedelic communication taking place externally, and supported the need for individuals to have psychedelic experiences in order to properly identify with the acceleration of human intelligence, and the greater "global mind" of the Internet.

He said, "without sounding too clichŽ, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind. That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you about whatever you're dealing with. . . . I don't think human beings can keep up with what they've set loose unless they augment themselves, chemically, mechanically or otherwise."

McKenna not only saw the acceleration of this knowledge, but he also mapped it with his Timewave Zero concept. Quoting Wired Magazine, "the Timewave is a strange fractal object McKenna pried out of the I Ching . . . He believes that it charts the degree of novelty active at any point in human history. The wave spikes in times of change, coinciding with the Black Death, the Enlightenment, and the birth of Mohammed. A computer program McKenna helped develop predicts the future . . . up until December 21, 2012, when novelty spikes to infinity and the Timewave stops cold." This date also coincides with the end of the Mayan Long-Count Calendar, one of the most accurate calendars ever created, tracking the "procession of the Equinoxes" across 26,000 year cycles.

However, McKenna's overall message regarding the so-called end-date in 2012 isn't an apocalyptic one. Instead, his theory reaches out as a prophetic gospel looking toward a time in our very near future where planetary knowledge and experience may have peaked to an extent so vital to the human notion of beingness, that time as we presently conceive of it may cease to be relevent. If this were so, it could be likened to the final gestation period of human consciousness before we, as planetary companions, are collectively born into a completely new and currently inconceivable state of awareness.

From his introduction to John Major Jenkins epic work, Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, Terence McKenna states: "We do not need the Maya and their prophetic calendar to know that we are living in times in which the ways of the world are being hammered and recast upon the anvil of fate. Our own calendar, rational in conception and intent--yet by its own millennial turning now upon us--inevitably directs our attention to larger scales of time and larger possibilities of being than those that claimed the attention of our recent ancestors. We know that we have come to a time of shift and renewal. We need, in this time more than any other, to understand and draw hope from the faith of the Maya that our time--this time now upon us--is the time of true creation."

Thanks for joining RadioValve for this special commemorative interview, originally produced by Jeff Levy and remastered by E23, saying farewell to the body of one of our generation's beloved philosophical bards, Terence McKenna, while still remaining turned on by his ideas and beingness forever woven within the Timewave...