This website, including all text and images,
is copyright material
and may not be
reproduced,
in whole or in part,
by any means,
electronic or otherwise,
without the express written consent of
Leslie Fieger.
Approaching Timewave Zero
by Terence McKenna
Time, like light, may best be described as a
union of opposites. Time may be both wave and, ultimately, particle, each in
some sense a reflection of the other. The same holographic properties that
have long been an accepted part of the phenomenon of the perception of
three-dimensional space also suggest that interference patterns are
characteristic of process. Living beings especially illustrate this: They
are an instance of the superimposition of many different chemical waves,
waves of gene expression and of gene inhibition, waves of energy release and
energy consumption, forming the standing wave interference patterns
characteristic of life. We hypothesize that this wave description is the
simple form of a more complex wave that utilizes the simple wave as the
primary unit in a system of such units, combined in the same way as lines
are combined into trigrams and then hexagrams in the I Ching. We will argue
that this more complex wave is a kind of temporal map of the changing
boundary conditions that exist in space and time, including future time. We
have called the quantized wave-particle, whatever its level of occurrence
within the hierarchy or its duration, eschaton.
We don't think about time because we take it for granted like
breathing, but consider our hypothesis that the space-time continuum is a
modular wave-hierarchy. The Eschaton is a universal and fractal
morphogenetic field, hypothesized to model the unfolding predispositions of
space and time. This structure was decoded from the King Wen sequence of the
I Ching and was the central idea that evolved in the wake of the events of
La Chorrera as described in my book,
True
Hallucinations.
I've been talking about it since 1971, and
what's interesting to me is at the beginning, it was material for
hospitalization, now it is a minority viewpoint and everything is on
schedule. My career is on schedule, the evolution of cybernetic technology
is on schedule, the evolution of a global information network is on
schedule. Given this asymptotic curve, I think we'll arrive under budget, on
time, December 22, 2012.
The King Wen sequence of the sixty-four
hexagrams of the I Ching is among the oldest structured abstractions extant.
It has been found scratched on the shoulder bones of sheep that have been
dated to 4000 BC so we do know that this sequence existed very early in
ancient China, yet the nature of the ordering principles preserved in that
sequence remains unelucidated. The I Ching is a mathematical divinatory tool
whose probable origin is the mountainous heart of Asia-the home of classical
shamanism and Taoist magic. The I Ching is a centrally important part of
humanity's shamanic heritage that is rich in implications.
The I Ching is particularly concerned with
the dynamic relationships and transformations that archetypes undergo; it is
deeply involved with the nature of time as the necessary condition for the
manifestation of archetypes as categories of experience. The I Ching,
through its concern with detailing the dynamics of change and process, may
hold the key to modeling the temporal dimension that metabolism creates for
organisms, the temporal dimension without which mind as we know it, could
not manifest.
The intellectual problem that led me into
studying the I Ching so thoroughly was simply a wish to understand the
ordering principles that lay behind the King Wen sequence. I set myself to
examine it as an object mathematically definable, possessing certain kinds
of symmetry, to try to discover the ordering principles that lay behind it.
It is not simply 64 hexagrams in some random association but rather the
hexagrams occur in pairs, and the problem of determining the ordering
principles is thereby reduced to a more manageable set of 32 elements -- the
second term of each pair is the inversion of the previous hexagram and there
are eight cases when the natural structure of the hexagram makes its
inversion ineffective in changing any of the lines.
Explaining the order of the thirty-two pairs
is rather more tricky and involves a certain amount of intuitive insight.
The quality which I chose to examine in trying to reason what the ordering
principle among the thirty two pairs might be is called the first order of
difference. How to take this essentially mystical diagram and turn it into a
rationally apprehendible diagram that was described in the standard
terminology that has been evolved for the handling of graphically portrayed
information. I succeeded in doing this in 1975 and 76 by quantifying all the
qualities of the wave that I was interested in preserving. Qualities like
skew, overlap, degree of parallelism, and similar values, I figured out a
quantification scheme that preserved these qualities as numerical entities.
Through a process of collapse of the wave I went further and actually
graphed the first order of difference of the hexagrams seeking again the
ordering principle, a figure of this work was displayed in the Invisible
Landscape (Figure 26).
The paradox of hypermodernity is that one can
only understand it if one goes back a 100,000 years in time. History is an
anomaly. History is a complete fluke. Its a brief episodic transitional
phenomenon. Its not going to leave more than a centimeter of deposition in
the strata of this planet. It is the platform from which we will launch the
collective soul of our species out into the higher life of the galaxy. We
use the metaphor "Mother Earth," but if the earth is our Mother then we must
be parted from her. The earth may be the credle of humankind but you don't
stay in the cradle forever unless there is something wrong with you. So
earth is the platform, and psychedelic substances, human machine
interphasing, nanotechnology, quantum distribution of information are the
means.
We are on the brink of possibilities that
will make us literally unrecognizable to ourselves and those possibilities
will be realized, not in the next thousand years but in the next 20 years
because the acceleration of invention and novelty and information transfer
is at this point so rapid.
Timewave Zero is an exploratory idea system
and a software package that runs on personal computers. It is the broadcast
output of the naturally superconducting experimental deoxyribonucleic matrix
transceiver operating in hyperspace. We believe that by using such ideas as
a compass for the collectivity, we may find our way back to a new model in
time to reverse the progressive worldwide alienation that is fast hurling us
into an ecocidal planetary crisis. A model of time must give hope and
overcome entropy in its formal composition. In other words, it must
mathematically secure the reasonableness of hope. This theory, and indeed
the mathematical theory of dynamic systems generally does this by securing
in a formal manner the process by which transformation can naturally arise
and persist out of a background of flux. It becomes increasingly clear that
we are now experiencing a period marked with extreme density of novel
ingressions, a time when the rational and acausal tendencies inherent in
time may again reverse their positions of dominance.
If the wave model is a valid general theory
of time, it should be possible to show why certain periods or places have
been particularly rich in events that accelerate the creative advance into
novelty, and also to show where and when in the future such events might be
expected to recur. To carry out this operation, a personal computer has
proven indispensable. A group of programs implementing these ideas has been
written by our colleague Peter Meyer. We call this program Timewave Zero.
The software takes these theories and discoveries concerning the I Ching and
creates time maps based upon them. The time maps or novelty maps show the
ebb and flow of connectedness or novelty in any span of time from a few days
to tens of millennia. The theory is not deterministic; it does not say what
will happen in the future, only the levels of novelty that whatever happens
will have to fulfill. As such it operates as a map, or simplified picture,
of the future (and past) behavior of whatever system is being studied. The
end date is the point of maximized novelty in the system and is the only
point in the entire wave that has a quantified value of zero.
December 21, 2012 AD. We arrived at this
particular end date without knowledge of the Mayan Calendar, and it was only
after we noticed that the historical data seemed to fit best with the wave
if this end date was chosen that we were informed that the end date that we
had deduced was in fact the end of the Mayan Calendar.
In all the novelty maps, when the graph line
moves downward, novelty is assumed to be increasing. When there is movement
away from the base line, novelty is assumed to be decreasing in favor of
habitual forms of activity. Time is seen as the ebb and flow of two opposed
qualities: novelty versus habit, or density of connectedness versus
disorder. In this we see clearly that one trend toward greater novelty
reached its culmination around 2700 B.C., precisely at the height of the Old
Kingdom pyramid-building phase; then a counter movement toward predictable
forms of behavior asserted itself and increased in importance until around
900 B.C. At that time, around the time of the consolidation of Mycenaean sea
power, the tendency toward habituation was overcome and replaced by a long
cascade into greater and greater novelty that reaches its culmination early
in the twenty-first century.
The career of novelty is revealed to be a
process that is punctuated by subprocesses. These mitigate, modify, and
influence an overall general tendency toward greater and greater novelty.
The theory shows the last fifteen hundred years to have been highly novel
times that have oscillated at levels of novelty very close to the horizontal
axis, the maximized "zero state."
Agreement between the historical record and
the ebb and flow of the wave argues strongly that the Timewave is in fact
able to accurately portray the evolution of historical patterns of change.
The theory of time that is implied by the Timewave is a theory of time as a
fractal, or self-similar, wave. A fractal wave comes quite naturally
equipped with an extensive set of internal resonances that show a formal,
but acausal, linkage between events and periods of time that may be widely
separated from each other in space and time.
So, for example, when we look at events of
the one hundred years leading up to the Mayan calendrical termination, we
see that the graph is topologically similar to the graph that we have said
applied to the past several thousand years. My interpretation of this is
that it means that shorter duration subsets of the fractal curve of time are
microversions of the larger pattern in which they are embedded. Such an idea
lays the basis for understanding such phenomena as fads, fashion, and the
occasional wave of historical obsession that characterize society.
Imagine zeroing in on the point in which the
wave passes out of the past and into the future. The stupendous idea of an
end of time is an attempt to negate the eternal stasis, to break the circle.
All peoples who have awakened to the suffering and hope of the condition
humaine have arrived at this idea, each in its own way. The other peoples
who have created a world for themselves have also appointed an end to it:
Indians, Persians, Greeks, Arabs, and Jews. This final time revolutionizes
the course of the world. We are familiar with the Gnostic intuitions of the
first and second century suggesting that energy is the "divine light" that
is trapped in matter and that energy, in order to free itself, must evolve
itself through progressively subtler stages until it generates
self-reflecting consciousness, which can then evolve techniques for freeing
all energy from matter.
Like this myth, all ideas of salvation,
enlightenment, or utopia may be taken to be expressions in consciousness of
the drive of energy to free itself from the limitations of three-dimensional
space and return to the uncontaminated essence of itself in an epoch of
realized concrescent satisfaction. Concrescent satisfaction includes the
notion of energy unbounded by space or time. This means for our theory that
at especially low-value regions of the modular wave-hierarchy a quantum jump
should occur in the concrescent process.
What this advance of novelty is, and what the
process of becoming may be seen to be in essence, is the revelation of the
interspecies' mind. In human beings, it is approached through the
non-metabolizing neural DNA scattered through the body, and for humans it
becomes apparent as a higher cortical phenomenon, as an experience, and as a
confrontation with the Jungian "collective unconscious." This revelation and
its integration into the field of shared experience is a process of
transformation of the previously limited ego. The many magnitudes of
duration in which the levels of the modular hierarchy of waves can be
supposed to be operable exceed, at both ends of the scale, any physical
processes known to occur.
Language and its appearance is a recent
instance of concrescence. It is a recent form of novelty, having been in
existence not more than a million years. As a concrescence occurring in our
species, it may provide a clue to the path that evolving human novelty will
take in the future. Following the acquisition of language, the advance into
novelty, now in part self-reflecting, continued on a higher level. The most
recent of these major new levels of coordinated organization may be embodied
in the epoch of electronic communications and the furiously evolving
post-relativistic consciousness of the twentieth century.
Language is the embodiment of meaning.
Meaning signifies organization, and there is no organization without
purpose. What is the purpose of organization? Is it perhaps to retard
entropy? In such a case, the meaning of meaning for that which apprehends
meaning is the necessity to purposefully create and maintain order. (cf.
Prigogine et al. 1972).
The great puzzle in the biological record is
the suddenness of human emergence out of the primate line. It happened with
enormous suddenness. Lumholtz calls it the most explosive reorganization of
a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record.
All of biology is, in a sense, a conquest of
dimensionality. That means that animals are a strategy for conquering
space/time. Complex animals do it better than simpler animals, and we do it
better than any complex animal, and we twentieth century people do it better
than any people in any previous century because we combine data in so many
ways that they couldn't-electronically, on film, on tape, and so forth. So,
the progress of organic life is deeper and deeper into dimensional conquest.
From that point of view, then the shaman begins to look like the advance
guard of a new kind of human being, a human being that is as advanced over
where we are as we are advanced over people a million years ago.
Biology constantly changes the context in
which evolution occurs. I have downloaded this into a phrase; "The
universe-the biological universe at least-is a novelty conserving engine."
Upon simple molecules are built complex molecules. Upon complex molecules
are built complex polymers. Upon complex polymers comes DNA. Out of DNA
comes the whole machinery of the cell. Out of cells comes simple aggregate
colony animals like hydra and that sort of thing. Out of that, true animals.
Out of that, ever more complex animals with organs of locomotion, organs of
sight, organs of smell, complex mental machinery for the coordinating of
data in time and space. This is the whole story of the advancement of life.
In our species, it reaches its culmination
and it crosses over into a new domain where change no longer occurs in the
atomic and biological machinery of existence; it begins to take place in the
world that we call mental. It's called epigenetic change;change that cannot
be traced back to mutation of the arrangement of molecules inside long chain
polymers, but change taking place in syntactical structures that are
linguistically based.
This idea requires a fairly radical
reorganization of consciousness, because what I'm saying is the universe was
not born in a fiery explosion from which it has been blasted outward ever
since. The universe is not being pushed from behind. The universe is being
pulled from the future toward a goal that is as inevitable as a marble
reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release it up near the rim. If you do
that, you know the marble will role down the side of the bowl;down, down,
down;until eventually it comes to rest at the lowest energy state, which is
the bottom of the bowl. That's precisely my model of human history. I'm
suggesting that the universe is pulled toward a complex attractor that
exists ahead of us in time, and that our ever-accelerating speed through the
phenomenal world of connectivity and novelty is based on the fact that we
are now very, very close to the attractor.
The First Three Minutes is a book in which
author Stephen Weinberg leads the reader through all the complex physics as
matter is crystallizing out of hyperspace, and the universe is undergoing
its initial expansion in the first three minutes of creation. When you
consider this model of exploding galaxies, colliding quasars, and mega this
and mega that, it's worth noting that these distant parts of the universe
register only as faint tracings on our instruments, until they are
interpreted through the fishy fiat of a bunch of stacked up theories and
formulas. And where is our data sample coming from? Radio telescopes, which
are responsible for building our current picture of the universe, were only
invented around 1950. All the energy that has fallen on all the radio
telescopes on this planet since the invention of radio telescopy is less
energy than would be generated by a cigarette ash falling a distance of two
feet. It's pretty flimsy stuff folks, compared to the meat of the moment in
which we find ourselves.
It seems more likely to me that all this
complexity is better directed toward the end of the cycle when, after
billions of years of evolution, everything finally comes together. Alfred
North Whitehead proposed this same idea. He said that history grows toward
what he called a "nexus of completion." And these nexuses of completion
themselves grow together into what he called the "concrescence." A
concrescence exerts a kind of attraction, which can be thought of as the
temporal equivalent of gravity, except all objects in the universe are drawn
toward it through time, not space.
As we approach the lip of this cascade into
concrescence, novelty, and completion, time seems to speed up and boundaries
begin to dissolve. The more boundaries that dissolve, the closer to the
concrescence we are. When we finally reach it, there will be no boundaries,
only eternity as we become all space and time, alive and dead, here and
there, before and after. Because this singularity can simultaneously
co-exist in states that are contradictory, it is something which transcends
rational apprehension. But it gives the universe meaning, because all
processes can be seen to be seeking and moving in an effort to approximate,
connect with, and append to this transcendental object at the end of time.
One way of thinking about it is to compare it
to one of those mirrored disco balls, which sends out thousands of
reflections off of everybody and everything in the room. The mirrored disco
ball is the transcendental object at the end of time, and those reflected
twinkling, refractive lights are religions, scientific theories, gurus,
works of art, poetry, great orgasms, great souffles, great paintings, etc.
Anything that has, in Nietszche's phrase, the "spark of divinity within it,"
is in fact, referent to the original force of the spark of all divinity
unfolding itself within the confines of three-dimensional space.
A quick look at Western civilization over the
past several hundred years suggests we are indeed moving toward the
concrescence. The twentieth century has only accelerated the process of
increasing novelty and the dissolving of old boundaries. In our own time, we
have created ever more elaborate languages and ever more elaborate
technologies for transforming, storing, and retrieving language, so that we
are now on the brink of being able to give every single person the complete
cultural inventory, the complete data base of human beings' experience on
this planet. It's as if the collectivity of our humanness has finally become
an intellectual legacy for all of us. That's what these data highways and
networks are all about. The nervous system is being hardwired. This is not
only an advance deeper and deeper into novelty, but it is an advance in
which each successive stage occurs more quickly than the stage which
preceded it.
Following the breakdown of the Soviet Union,
there was much talk about "lifting of the Iron Curtain." I find this phrase
interesting because it conjures up images of a membrane suddenly
disappearing, as indeed it has. As more and more of these membranes
disappear, what is emerging is a sense of acceleration of information flow
and a sense of rising ambiguity and apprehension. That's why it's important
to realize what the process is. As human beings, we are unique for our
ability to feel, to download experience, to connect disparate data fields,
and then to project a goal, a hope--a distant coordination of concern that
leads toward an appetite for completion. That's what the concrescence is.
It's not some alien thing injected into our forward moving timestream like a
boulder on the floor of a river. The concrescence is the lost path of our
collective soul. The metaphor that makes sense for what we're going
through--because it gets the biology of it; it gets the drama of it; it gets
the risk of it; it gets the the fun and joy of it--is the metaphor of birth.
To see the picture clearly, you must break
out of the flat cultural illusion and rise up to look at the situation.
That's why psychedelics are so important. They raise you out of the
historical maxtrix, giving you a sense of participation in a transcendental
reality. Psychedelics catalyze imagination. They drive you to think what you
did not think otherwise. There is a good argument that the critical catalyst
that propelled us out of the slowly evolving hominid line--causing us to
take a right-hand turn into culture, language, art, and learning--was
probably the inclusion of psychedelic plants in our diet during that
episodic moment when we went from fruitarian, canopy dwellers to omnivorous
pack hunting creatures of the grasslands.
It's interesting that DMT and psilocybin, so
closely related to each other, both have something to say about language,
and that they say it in precisely opposite ways. Psilocybin is a teaching
voice that speaks to you in your language. LSD doesn't do that; ayahuasca
doesn't do that. Psilocybin does, for some reason. This is not my illusion.
It's a commonly noted effect, but if you don't speak to it, it won't be
there. DMT doesn't speak to you in English; it speaks to you in Elfish. What
happens on high dose DMT is that you see the speaker. With mushrooms, you
almost never encounter a being you can see. You see hallucinations, but you
do not see the author of the data stream. On DMT, the entities come bounding
out of the woodwork. DMT is not like a psychedelic drug, in the sense that
you're getting into the contents of your hopes, memories, fears and dreams.
It's much more like a parallel continuum. It's much more as though you've
broken through to some alien data space. You find yourself in an
inconceivable world where everything has been replaced by elf machinery.
There are these self-dribbling, jeweled basketball-looking entities that use
this musical sing-song language to condense visible objects out of the air.
Why are they doing that? I assume that on one level they are trying to
teach, but it's more than that. On another level, they seem to be giving a
demonstration of the fact that reality is made of language. They're saying,
"If you don't believe reality is made of language, here I'll make you one."
So these opalescent beings make all these
things and set them loose in this strange environment, and these things,
themselves, are emitting language and making other things. Everybody's
chattering, screeching, crawling over each other, clamoring for your
attention, and under sufficiently hyped-up conditions, you are able to reply
in a kind of spontaneous glossolalia. There's a bit of art in making this
peculiar pseudo- linguistic stream of syllables, and when you're stoned,
it's an incredibly pleasurable experience.
I think that this glossolalia is probably
mixed up with the generation of language itself. In other words, we probably
invented language long before meaning, and it was some very practical person
who got the idea that the words could have meaning. Before that, language
was primarily verbal amusement. After all, the most readily at hand musical
instrument is the human voice. Sound is an incredibly powerful transducer of
energy that we haven't really come to terms with. When we put a test tube in
which a chemical reaction is going on, into a square wave generator and
bombard it with very high amplitude sounds, we find that these sounds drive
the chemical reaction faster, as if sound were an enzyme. When people are
loaded to the gills on ayahuasca, they do the same thing. They sing for
hours and sonically drive these states, navigating through a world of vocal
landscapes that come forth from sound.
Magical philosophy, which has about fifty, to
a hundred thousand years under its belt--as opposed to science which only
goes back to the Renaissance--has always claimed that the world is made of
language. The world is a thing of words, and if you know these words, you
can take it apart and put it together any old way you wish. Sanskrit, for
example, has the reputation for being a magical language. There are
supposedly certain ragas--arrangements on sounds with particular
rhythms--that can cause a haystack to burst into flame. The nub of what I'm
trying to get at here is that the world is made of language. Our entire
Western religious tradition begins with the incredibly cryptic statement,
"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was made flesh." What is this
making the word into flesh? And does it not imply that eventually the flesh
will become word?
As we now know, since the discovery of DNA,
we arise out of sequences of what are called codons, which are the
nucleotide units in the DNA which code for protein. The messenger RNA takes
the template of the DNA and runs itself through a ribosome, and the ribosome
gathers amino acids out of the ambient environment, connecting them up to
create a protein. What this means is that we are, in fact, textural. Each
one of us is a word of approximately 700,000,000 characters, and this word
is made flesh when the sperm and the egg form a zygote and the DNA textural
message is downloaded into matter. Now we are on the brink of decoding the
human genome, and the end result of this is that the flesh will be made
word.
It's interesting that many of the psychedelic
compounds involved in the language phenomena, like DMT and harmine and
harmaline, occur as part of human metabolism, ordinarily. And harmaline,
specifically 5-methoxy tetrahydroharmalan, occurs in the pineal gland. The
pineal gland has always been thought of as somehow connected to the soul.
Descartes called it the seat of the soul. What I'm trying to get at here, is
the the world is mental in some way that we do not yet understand, but which
we're edging toward understanding. I think of history as a kind of mass
psychedelic experience. The drug is technology, and as technology gets more
and more perfected as a mirror of the human mind, the cultural experiences
becomes more and more hallucinatory.
Our planet is on a collision course with
something that we, at our present state of knowledge, don't have a word for.
A black hole is simply a gravitationally massive object, so massive that no
light can leave it. What I'm talking about is something like that, except
that it isn't so much gravitationally massive as temporally massive. We are
soon to be sucked into the body of eternity. My model points to 11:18 am,
Greenwich Mean Time, December 21, 2012 AD.
My notion is fairly simple. History is a set
of nested resonances with each epoch being shorter than the one that
preceded it. This event horizon is like a series of ghost horizons, and once
you enter into history, you enter into the outer shell of the temporal field
of the attractor or the concrescence. In other words, history is the
disturbance in nature which precedes the concrescence. It precedes it by
only 50 thousand years--a geological microsecond--before all life is melted
down in the presence of the singularity. History is a curious interzone that
is not the singularity and not the absence of the singularity; it's the
singularity in the act of becoming. It only lasts a geological microsecond,
but if you happen to be born as we are, inside that microsecond, then you
have a very curious perspective on the phenomenon because you observe it
from inside.
Within history's series of nested cycles,
each cycle is only human/machine interfacing, pharmacological redesigning of
the human brain/mind system, possibly digitalizing and downloading into the
microphysical realm.
All these disparate physical elements come to
nothing if they don't add up to more than the sum of their parts. And the
more than the sum of their parts is the transcendental element we call love.
That is part of the eschaton that has never left us, but accompanied us
across the African grassland and into history. Love has been bloodied and
battered by the experiences of sexism and racism and so forth. But never
lost as an ideal, never lost as a guiding light and an experience, and when
we dissolve all the boundaries, this is what we will discover; an
unconditional caring, an unconditional affection that goes through all life
and all matter and gives it meaning. You don't have to wait for the end of
the world to get this news. You can just short circuit the collective march
toward that realization by accelerating your own microcosm of spirituality
through the use of the hallucinogens. They are the doorways that the Gaian
mind has installed in the historical process to let anybody out any time
they want out, provided they have the courage to turn the knob and walk
through the door.
