He applies such rigorous logic to the Timewave theory itself. "It may sound like a prophecy, but it wasn't really achieved that way," McKenna reveals. "I had an algorithm that produced a saw-toothed wave, somewhat like a stock market fluctuation, and then I had the historical record of humanity's accomplishments over several millennium. I felt that there were discernible eras in the historical record, where there were sudden forward surges of what I called 'novelty' - technical and cultural innovation. By fitting the wave against the historical record, with an eye towards ever more precise alignment, I eventually came to an alignment that seemed to be mutually congruent. At that point I simply looked at the endpoint of the wave, and discovered that it was within a couple of weeks of this Mayan calendrical date.

"I'm not myself claiming that the Maya and I were looking at the same thing. If history and the unfolding of events follow a mathematical pattern, then following the thought of Carl Jung that all human consciousness has a common understructure in the unconsciousness, its not that unreasonable that their calendrical end date and the end of this wave would agree. The Western calendar reaches a thousand year turning within twelve years of the end of the Mayan date. A twelve year difference on a scale of a thousand years is only a 1.2% difference. I'm in agreement with the Mayans, who are in agreement with the Western calendar, within very small increments. I don't think they have an exact date, but a window of between 2010 and 2025.

"You don't have to believe in Mayan prophecies or the Timewave to sign on to the idea that if you accelerate current cultural trends such as energy relief, the Internet fuelled information explosion, and rising populations, it is impossible to concede that history goes on centuries and centuries into the future.

"Clearly within the next thirty years, we are going to pass into a zone that will be difficult to recognize with our current cultural equipment. This cultural acceleration has been the result of population growth, communications media, and science that has occurred for centuries. The Timewave pictures an accelerated inter-connectivity that keeps asymptotically increasing day by day, hour by hour. You don't need the Timewave to feel this happening, but its interesting that out of the unconsciousness comes a mathematical form like the Timewave that confirms that in fact the process that is already underway."

"As history accelerates, consensus about what reality is completely breaks down. This is why you have the growth and strengthening of religious fundamentalism at the same time that you have an incredible flowering of social experimentalism and techno-worship. People are having to work very hard to stay up to date with what is going on. As they age or move from the cultural centers where these memes are being generated, they simply grow exhausted; everybody finds a certain level of failure and calls it 'success'."

Virtual Unrealities

Many cultural critics have commented on the development of Virtual Reality technology (VR) and the Internet, notably Mario Perniola, Jean Baudrillard, Douglas Rushkoff and Mark Dery. Comparisons to quantum mechanics of this technological impact have become common in the Consciousness Wars that have divided the physics community (particularly the recent writings of Douglas Hofstadter, David Chalmers, Roger Penrose and Daniel C. Dennett) between hardcore 'reductionists' and Platonic 'mysterions'. In such an environment McKenna's views are not always cutting edge, but he can debate such issues with the very best. "The mind is found to be the force that makes the world out of some Superspace of possibilities. Of 'all and everything', the mind collapses the state vector into the formality of something actually occurring," he told me.

"When you look at quantum physics for example, you realize that this Aristotelian 'true-or-not' notion breaks down. In some sense expectation feeds reality, the electron is nowhere at all until we look at it, and then we find it. Perhaps the end of history and the transformation of the world is nowhere at all in time until we form a very concrete expectation of it. Then, lo and behold, its waiting for us when we get there."

And his explanation of the link between psychedelics and VR technology is clearer than most, with the notable exception of Kathryn Bigelow's stark film Strange Days (1995). "The technology that fascinates me and holds great promise is some form of 'immersive technology'. VR is trivialised as online pornography, or three dimensional architectural plans, but in fact what VR could be if all technical problems could be overcome is an incredible tool for communication, because it will allow us for the first time in human history to step into the confines of another mind.

"We attempt to do that now with spoken and written language, but the bandwidth is so limited, the cultural assumptions that have to be made are so powerlessly confining, that its an illusion of communication. But if in fact I could build a simulacrum of my hallucinations, and then you could put on the helmet and see that simulation, without a word being spoken, you would have a more profound sense of what I had experienced that couldn't be conveyed in any other way.

"There is tremendous corporate pressure to develop these immersive technologies for the entertainment domain. We spend more money on developing entertainment technology than on military or medical research in America. In order to serve the needs of the market place, there may turn out to be a hidden benefit, because the immersive technology of VR can dissolve very profoundly the boundaries, and assumptions of boundaries, between human beings."

Digital Shamanism

Sounding like Brian Eno or a ZooTV-era U2, he describes the sociopolitical problems that VR and the Internet raises. "The technology is very complicated in itself. At the same time that it alienates, it unifies people on a different level. We are witnessing the exacerbation of economic class structures and the north/south-first/second/third world becoming more intense, there is also the world of cyberspace and Internet culture that is extremely international, anti-corporate, technically reliant, and by my readings, optimistic. Your interpretation depends on where you decide to stand - you may throw up your hands in frustration that the human race is down for the count, where as the person standing next to you may feel that this is the time of greatest opportunity and freedom that ever existed. How these paradoxes can exist side by side is a measure of how psychedelic and complex global society has become. We need to inform people of the options, and this is why psychedelics are so important. They tend to dissolve categorical and cultural boundaries, and culture is no longer a friend - we cannot identify ourselves in these old ways any longer to certain land masses or racial groups. This thinking is extremely 'retro', what psychedelics do is expose the underlying unifying strata that unites everything. This is why youth culture can accept psychedelics, having little to lose, whilst those who have built up fortunes, political power, and wealth on the basis of perception of difference feel very threatened by psychedelics.