Novelty Theory and the Strange Attractor at the End of Time
Novelty Theory, one of McKenna’s signature ideas, suggests that time is cyclical, marked by increasing complexity and novelty. Borrowing from chaos theory, he described a “strange attractor”—a point of infinite novelty pulling history toward a transformative end, the Omega Point. He believed this convergence would radically reshape reality.
I really believe that we are being asked to participate in the birthing of a new order of being. And that there is reason for great optimism and hope, because it looks like we're just boring into solid rock. But in fact, there's somebody else boring through that solid rock, and they have triangulated our approach, and they are hurrying to meet us. I don't think we fell into this situation because of bad fate or bad destiny. This is part of the process. History is what happens when an animal species, an advanced animal, falls under the influence of a transformative attractor of some sort. History is only about 25, 000 years in duration.
The interesting part in the last 5, 000 years, what has happened is that something confounding has entered the local situation, or was always dormant there but has stirred to wakefulness. And it is not God, not the God that in Milton's wonderful phrase, hung the lamps like stars in heaven. It isn't that God. Maybe it's the God of biology. But whatever it is, it is to us as we are to the termite. And what it is doing is it is casting an enormous transcendental shadow back through time over the epigenetic landscape of biological becoming. And in a course orthogonal to biology, a course set on the transcendental, and it is pulling us toward it through the medium of transforming our languages, through the medium of the imagination, which is, after all, this mysterious mental domain in which we are whispered to by angels, demons, gods, ancestors, aliens.
And out of that intercourse, culture, self-transforming, shedding its face every hundred years, building on novelty, is ascending toward a reaching out toward the unspeakable. This has been going on, I think, for billions of years. It has obviously and incontrovertibly been going on since the advent of consciousness in the human species. And now we're there. We're in the final domain of the confrontation with the secret. It is impossible to conceive of history going on for hundreds of years. The planet cannot sustain it. All of these social structures and institutions that we have surrounded ourselves with are obviously lifeboats. They are not made to last. They are made to carry us to a certain point in the life of the earth. And we are now there, or we are within 20, 30, 40, 50 years of confronting the transcendental object at the end of time that drew us out of the animal body. History is the proof and the shockwave of the eschaton.
- Taxonomy of Illusion