The Approaching TimeWave Zero By Terrence McKenna

Aspen BBS (aspen@cscns.com) 6 Oct 1994 posted:

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. My brother Dennis and I hypothesize
that this wave description is the simple form of a more conmplex 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. I 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 futnre 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 nniversal and
fractal morplnogenetic field, hypothesized to model the unfolding
predispositions of space and time This structure was decoded from the
King Wen sequence of the 1 Ching, and was the central idea that evolved
in a the wake of the events of La Chorrera as described in "True
Hallucinations."

I've been taking 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 and on time,
December 21, 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,
in order 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 that 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,
taking this essentially mystical diagram and turning it into a
rationally apprehensible diagram, as described in the standard
terminology that has been evolved for the handling of graphically
portrayed information. I succeeded in doing this in 1975 and 1976 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 time ordering principle. A
figure of this work is displayed in "The Invisible Landscape."

The paradox of hypermodernity is that one can only understand it if one
goes back 100,000 years in time. History is an anomaly. History is a
complete fluke. It' s 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 cradle of humankind but you don't
stay in the cradle forever unless there is something wrong with you. So
earth is the platform, and psyclnedelic 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 time 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 in general, 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 ten- dencies 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. It
should also 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 Peter Meyer. The program is called 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, it only predicts the level
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 A.D. 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 tine 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 countermovement 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, which 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
1,500 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, which may be widely
sepa- rated from each other in space and time.

So, for example, when we look at events of the 100 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 them- selves 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 intunitions 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
satisfactions. 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 nonmetabolizing 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 postrelativistic 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. (Prigogine, Ilya, Gregoire
Nicclis, and Agnes Bablyoyantz "Thermodynamics of Evolution." Physics
Today November-December 1972).

The great puzzle in the biological record is the suddenness of human
emergence out of the primate line. It happened with enormous suddenness.
Lumlholtz 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, 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 , 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 polynoers comes DNA. Out of DNA comes the whole machinery
of the cell. Out of cells come 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, and complex mental machinery for time coordinating of
data in time and space. This is the whole story of the advancement of
life.

In our species it reaches its culminations and crosses over into a new
domain where change no longer occurs in time 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.

     Terence McKenna and Sound Photosynthesis are celebrating the debut
     of the Timewave Zero video, the new versions of the TimeWave
     Software in both Mac and MS/DOS versions and the Concresence of
     McKenna Material Catalog.

     Magical Blend Magazine (C)1994

     This article is reproduced by LIGHTNET "The Aquarian Connection on
     the Internet" with premission of "Magical Blend Magazine." More
     articles and artwork are available at gopher aspen.com then choose
     Aspen Link-Up. To join Lightnet send e-mail to aspen@aspen.com or
     call 1-800-748-1240

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Timewave Zero

This software illustrates Terence McKenna's Theory of time, history and
the end of history as told in the book The Invisible Landscape by him
and his brother Dennis, and in his The Archiac Revival. The theory of
Timewave Zero was revealed to Terence by an extraterrestial intelligence
following an unsual psychedelic experiment conducted in the Columbian
Amazon jungle in 1971. He was instructed in certain transformations of
numbers derived from the King Wen Sequence of I Ching Hexagrams, leading
eventually to a rigorous mathematical description of the timewave. This
correlates time and history with the ebb and flow of novelty, which is
intrinsic to the structure of time and hence of the temporal universe.
At a certain point a singularily is reached which is the end of history
- or at least is a transition to a supra-historical order. This point is
usually taken to be December 21, 2012. the winter solstice of 2012 and
the end of the current era in the Maya calendar.

The primary function of the software is to display any portion or the
timewave (up to seven billion years) as a graph of tihe timewave related
to the Western calendar (either Gregorian or Julian). You can display
the wave for the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth, note the
peculiarities of the wave at such points as the time of the extinction
of the dinosaurs (65 million years ago) and inspect parts of the wave as
small as 92 minutes. A remarkable quality of the timewave is that it is
a fractal. Once a part of the wave is displayed the the software allows
you to expand any smaller part (down to 92 minutes). This usually
reveals a complexity of structure which persists however much the wave
is magnified, a property typical of fractals.

The documentation describes the origin, construction and philosophical
significance of the timewave, the use of the software, the mathematical
dcfinition or the timewave (with proofs of some related mathematical
theorems) and certain curious numerical properties. An interesting part
of the theory is that historical periods exist "in resonance" with each
other. Resonantly we are (in 1994) at the end of the period known
historically as the Dark Ages and will soon be reliving the Middle Ages.
The software permits graphical display of different regions of the
timewave that are in resonance with each other. This allows the period
1945 - 2012 to be interpreted as a resonance of the period 2293 BC -
2021 CE.

     [Image]

     Fractal Timewave Sequence of 1993-1997

There is also another advanced version of the program available with
additional features (ie. personal timewave derived from one's birth date,
documentation how Timewave was derived from the King Wend sequence, etc.)

Timewave Zero Program (MSDOS): $49 ($89 advanced Version) (+$14 overseas)

   Dolphin Software
   4815 West Braker Lane #502
   Austin, Texas 78759