“May you be alive at the end of the world.” - Irish Blessing
The word eschatology derives from two Greek roots meaning "last" (ἔσχατος) and "study" (-λογία) – involves the study of "end things", whether of the end of an individual life, of the end of the age, of the end of the world, or of the nature of the Kingdom of God.
death and the afterlife, Heaven and Hell, the Second Coming of Jesus, the resurrection of the dead, the rapture, the tribulation, millennialism, the end of the world, the Last Judgment, and the New Heaven and New Earth in the world to come.
time is not linear but rather follows a cyclical, spiral and fractal pattern
"novelty theory." - the rate of change in human history accelerates over time, leading to a point of maximum novelty, which McKenna associated with the year 2012
The Mayan calendar - marked the end of a significant cycle and the beginning of a new era of consciousness. the transition around 2012 would bring about a profound transformation in human consciousness, akin to a "shock wave of the eschaton". He described this period as one where the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical would blur, leading to a new understanding of reality.
He suggested that the 20th century was a "shudder" that announced the approaching cataracts of time, over which our species and the destiny of the planet would be swept.
Apocalypse - the great revealing at the end of Time
The End of Time The End of the World The end of a world vs. the end of your world
the eschaton
The Eschaton
McKenna described the Eschaton as the ultimate endpoint or purpose of human history—a transformative moment where time, consciousness, and reality converge. He didn’t see it as a physical apocalypse but as a spiritual and intellectual awakening. For McKenna, the Eschaton marked the culmination of human evolution, leading to hyper-awareness or a new dimension of existence where humanity transcends its current limitations.
History is the shock wave of the eschaton
“I think it’s fairly profound, it’s fairly apocalyptic. History is ending. I mean, we are to be the generation that witnesses the revelation of the purpose of the cosmos. History is the shock wave of the eschaton. History is the shock wave of eschatology, and what this means for those of us who will live through this transition into hyperspace, is that we will be privileged to see the greatest release of compressed change probably since the birth of the universe. The twentieth century is the shudder that announces the approaching cataracts of time over which our species and the destiny of this planet is about to be swept.” - TM
The Transcendental Object At The End of Time
“Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of biological organization that preceded it, that it must be the response to a kind of attractor, or dwell point that lies ahead in the temporal dimension. Persistently, western religions have integrated into their theologies the notion of a kind of end of the world, and I think that a lot of psychedelic experimentation sort of confirms this intuition, I mean, it isn’t going to happen according to any of the scenarios of orthodox religion, but the basic intuition, that the universe seeks closure in a kind of omega point of transcendence, is confirmed, it’s almost as though this object glittering in hyperspace throws off reflections of itself, which actually ricochet into the past — illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary. And that out of these fragmentary glimpses of eternity we can build a kind of map, of not only the past of the universe, and the evolutionary progression into novelty, but a kind of map of the future, this is what shamanism is always been about, a shaman is someone who has been to the end, it’s someone who knows how the world really works, and knowing how the world really works means to have risen outside, above, beyond the dimensions of ordinary space, time, and causality, and actually seen the wiring under the board, stepped outside the confines of learned culture and learned and embedded language, into the domain of what Wittgenstein called “the unspeakable”. - TM
The Transcendental Object at the End of Time
McKenna described a “transcendental object” as the ultimate goal of existence—a mysterious, ineffable entity or state that humanity is drawn toward. It’s both a destination and a revelation of ultimate truth.
This concept frames history as a quest for transcendence, where the end of time reveals a unified, divine reality beyond human comprehension.
“The great secret known to Apollonius of Tyana, Paul of Tarsus, Simon Magus, Asklepios, Paracelsus, Boehme, and Bruno is that: we are moving backward in time. The universe in fact is contracting into a unitary entity which is completing itself. Decay and disorder are seen by us in reverse, as increasing. These healers learned to move forward in time, which is retrograde to us.” - PHILIP K. DICK, VALIS
Library of Light Edition 1.0 — Last revised: May 2026