Like the ultimate scout leader, the message McKenna delivered to thousands of
young people in his capacity as guest speaker at psychedelic trance events across the
globe—from Megatripolis in London, to San Francisco’s Toon Town and
Australia’s Transelements—was ‘be prepared’:
This is not a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse.... This is the last chance
before things become so dissipated that there is no chance for cohesiveness. We
can use the calendar as a club. We can make the millennium an occasion for
establishing an authentic human civilization, overcoming the dominator
paradigm, dissolving boundaries through psychedelics, recreating a sexuality
not based on monotheism, monogamy and monotony.... We are the
inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable. And now with the
engines of technology in our hands we ought to be able to reach out and
actually exteriorize the human soul at the end of time, invoke it into existence
like a UFO and open the violet doorway into hyperspace and walk through it,
out of profane history and into the world beyond the grave, beyond
shamanism, beyond the end of history, into the galactic millennium that has
beckoned to us for millions of years across space and time. THIS IS THE
MOMENT. A planet brings forth an opportunity like this only once in its
lifetime, and we are ready, and we are poised. And as a community we are
ready to move into it, to claim it, to make it our own.^9While it was criticized for propagating a not unfamiliar ‘linear masculine
eschatology’ featuring a ‘breakneck rush towards a crescendo of connectedness and
barrier dissolution—a Cosmic Climax’ (Gyrus 1999)—the predicted encounter with
the ‘transdimensional object at the end of time’ gathered conceptual momentum.
And the process enhanced McKenna’s status as a heroic folk-theorist at the same time
as it lent legitimacy to the preoccupations of the global underground dance
community
Post-rave psychedelic dance culture has embraced variations of Timewave Zero
and the Mayan Tzolkin, granting 21 December 2012 varied significance. Indeed,
what the date actually implies is open to vast interpretation, as it is taken to occasion
hyperspatial breakthrough, alien contact, planetismal impact, historical explosion,
quaser ignition at the Galactic Centre,^10 the ‘dawning of the techno New Jerusalem
or Cyber-Zion’ (McDaniel and Bethel 2002), or the birth of the ‘World of the Fifth
Sun, the cleansing of the earth and the raising of a higher level of vibration’,^11 etc.
The Melbourne-based Barrelful of Monkeys (BoM) elicit a principle message.
Post-2012 is regarded as a ‘Dreaming Universe’ and ‘our very momentum of
describing this event continues to concrese it into the act of becoming’. Whether
the coming event is held to be ‘the Eschaton, the Dreamtime, the Logos, the
Imagination, the Omega Point, an AI [artificial intelligence] Virtuality or simply the
momentum of history and culture reaching it’s [sic.] zenith...we get to choose how
we intepret it’. Catching glimpses of eternity, they’re following McKenna’s advice
and preparing ‘to be born into the next world’. Grafting the Hundredth Monkey
214 GRAHAM ST JOHN