Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/Dr. Doyle/Spirit/Science & Technology/Timewave Zero

Text File | 1994-10-08 | 22KB | 375 lines

   Light-Technology: Timewave Zero

               THE APPROACHING TIMEWAVE ZERO BY TERRENCE MCKENNA

   Aspen BBS ([e-mail]) 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 [e-mail] or
     call 1-800-748-1240


     _________________________________________________________________

                                 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 timewace 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