<P> "What I think happened is that in the world of prehistory all religion was experiential, and it was based on the pursuit of ecstasy through plants . And at some time, very early, a group interposed itself between people and direct experience of the' Other .' This created hierarchies, priesthoods, theological systems, castes, ritual, taboos . Shamanism, on the other hand, is an experiential science that deals with an area where we know nothing . It is important to remember that our epistemological tools have developed very unevenly in the West . We know a tremendous amount about what is going on in the heart of the atom, but we know absolutely nothing about the nature of the mind ." </P> <P> Either philosophically or religiously, he expressed admiration for Marshall McLuhan, Alfred North Whitehead, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Carl Jung, Plato, Gnostic Christianity and Alchemy, while regarding the Greek philosopher Heraclitus as his favorite philosopher . </P> <P> McKenna also expressed admiration for the works of writers including Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, whose book Finnegans Wake he called "the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature of the 20th century," science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who he described as an "incredible genius," fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, with whom McKenna shared the belief that "scattered through the ordinary world there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth" and Vladimir Nabokov; McKenna once said that he would have become a Nabokov lecturer if he had never encountered psychedelics . </P> <P> During the final years of his life and career, McKenna became very engaged in the theoretical realm of technology . He was an early proponent of the technological singularity and in his last recorded public talk, Psychedelics in The Age of Intelligent Machines, he outlined ties between psychedelics, computation technology, and humans . He also became enamored with the Internet, calling it "the birth of (the) global mind", believing it to be a place where psychedelic culture could flourish . </P>

Transcendental object at the end of time wiki