Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/feel the pain of everyone/Timewave-Surfer-Dudes,-bOING-b

Text File | 1994-02-27 | 10KB | 181 lines

Timewave Surfer Dudes
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Software launching on my DOS system emits its bold meme - "Timewave
Zero version 4.07.  Copyright 1989, 1991 Lux Natura.  A precision
instrument for exploring the theory of time as a fractal wave derived
from the King Wen Sequence of I Ching Hexagrams.  Based on
extraterrestrial communications to Terence McKenna.  Software
developed by Peter Meyer.  Published by Dolphin Software.  Please
press a key to begin..."

As a kid I attempted to escape from a devout religious upbringing by
listening to the radio.  I'd listen to just about anything for
shelter, especially the weird or progressive.  Regardless of how faded
or what level of static, I'd stretch the tendrils of my auditory
cortex across Etheric Maze to any haven, elsewhere or elsewhen, that
allowed people to think for themselves.  So much for xtian mind
control tech.  These days I still tolerate immense radio static,
straining to catch that ephemeral whiff of, say, an ionized King
Missile track...  No bother, tis a creative pursuit to fill in the
riffs.

Lately I've noticed how this annoys my friends.  Given the tiniest
crackle, some will scramble impulsively, twisting the dial to find
comfort in gigawatt playlist sleaze, anything to avoid the fear of
Noise.  A parallel, predicted by the Eight Circuit model, can be found
in common reactions to a really nice, witty guy named Terence McKenna.
Try it: goto a local New Age bookstore, rent McKenna tapes, pop 'em in
the deck.  Most likely a couple of your friends will bend over
backwards to kill your stereo, invent new forms of logic to reason you
out of listening, thus confirming Leary's prediction that Circuit N
types will instinctively fear Circuit N+1 parlance.  "Go listen to
something proven and safe for us couch potatoes; this dangerous stuff
might prompt you to think creatively."

Because it does, throughout hours of apparently boundless rap, rant
and rhyme presented in the brilliant shrill cackle of a modern Celtic
bard/visionary.  And, to me, McKenna makes his most incisive cultural
point in the middle of one rant with the crying of I Ching Hexagram
#49: "The magician is the one who makes the calendar."

To dominate, a new religion always appropriates calendrical events:
Yule becomes Xmas, etc.  Think about it, who determined the time scale
of your life: some pontiff, Ike Newton, Julius Caesar, or you?  Who
decided that you'd celebrate each of your birthdays during the same
season?  Who fixed legal systems onto the varying cycles of sun or
moon?  Anybody who's ever tripped can vouch that Time isn't much of a
scalar, bound by precise tickings within Swiss factory spawn.  Time
spirals, wrinkles, bends, or to paraphrase Edgar Cayce "flows like a
river... with eddies and backcurrents."  Cut to the chase, this is the
room with the Wolfmother Wallpaper.  Welcome to Time Hacking.

As Terence sez: "Newton's conception of time is that of pure duration,
a measure without structure; Timewave Zero presents time as a
fractal."  The skinny is that TMcK had been diving into calendrics,
researching across Time and Gaia, pondering alternative theories.
Then he went South to nibble on his own preferred version of
Rainforest Crunch with some Amazon yage heads.  Bingo.  Cut deep
enough into your psyche with indole alkaloids and you'll end up
meeting some Other Dudes.  Okay, okay, you don't even need drugs, just
try systematic lucid dreaming or meditation: we're not alone.
Anywhere or anywhen else you go, if it's deep enough, therein lies an
Experience that our evolutionary level of consciousness just can't
quite grok.  Symbolize 'em as aliens, pixies, gopod or Elvis, the
point is we all have a lot to learn that cannot be put into words.

So Terence learned a bit about a certain mathematical function, later
found to be a fractal, but hey this was back in 1971 before fractals
had even become trendy.  He started playing with numerical sequences
in the oldest section of I Ching, a numerical system of 64 hexagrams
which encompasses most of the astronomical cycles observable to the
naked eye, i.e. state-of-the-art Chinese tech 3000 years ago for those
bicameral enthusiasts in the audience.  From this he arranged a table
to generate a function, which math buddies at Berkeley ID'ed as a
really trippy fractal...  Timewave Zero.

TWZ, as the docs state, "correlates history with the ebb and flow of
novelty, which is intrinsic to the structure of the universe."  The
fractal zig-zags through advances and declines, extropy and
habituation, leading to a zero point at 21 Dec 2012.  This is a
singularity, which corresponds with the end-of-the-line for the Mayan
calendar as well.  Hmmm...  McKenna's work charts Time as the ebb and
flow of Novelty and Habit.  His friend Rupert Sheldrake cites periods
of habituation as morphogenic, i.e. developing form.  Their friend
Ralph Abraham describes the zero date as a chaotic strange attractor
leading to some event or non-event.  Maybe 2012 isn't Armageddon, but
rather a launching point for an ultra-chaotic suprahistory.  Okay, so
just how many shrooms did Arthur Clarke ingest while writing
"Childhood's End" and Whom did he meet?

Programmer-au-poil Peter Meyer has done an exquisite job of presenting
TWZ on a common denominator PC platform - DOS 2.10 or later w/o even
any graphics adaptor card required.  Peter's implementation of TWZ
provides a solid, intuitive framework for exploring the fractal, from
any target date or timespan.  We sat around an open fire in my
backyard one moonful night, sipping a nice Cabernet and time
traveling...

 "Look at this huge drop into novelty," Peter noted, "in February  to
April 1996 - this is the steepest drop in the wave in the 1990s.  It's
the fourteenth lower trigrammatic resonance in the 67-year cycle of a
another steep drop occurring in early 1525.  That was when the German
Peasants Rebellion was occurring, an event which touched off 150 years
of religious wars.

"In the second half of the 20th Century the wave peaks on February 12,
1968, then begins a long descent into novelty which bottoms out on
February 14, 1992.  From then to the zero date of December 21, 2012,
there are many ups and downs, indicating an exciting run up to the end
of history and a leap into a mode of being whose nature we can only
now just begin to glimpse."

Happy landings to you!  Zooming in, the fractal looks markedly similar
- the late 60's launched our most recent extropy fest; the early
1900's led a rough ride into post-WWII "bliss".  Zooming out, we catch
a massive slide around 14,000 BCE at the time of the agricultural
revolution and another back around 32,000 BCE near the beginning of
Homo sapiens' thriving and language.

Peter Meyer has several other related titles available through Dolphin
Software: C function libraries, encryption software, as well as Mayan
Calendrics, which is related to Timewave Zero.  "The Maya calendar
system is well-understood," sez Peter... "The problem is that there is
no conclusive evidence as to which dates in the Western calendar
correspond to dates in the Maya calendar that are found on the stelae
and in the codices."  The number system for the Maya calendar is base
20, and some dedicated scholars have suggested viable correspondences.

Peter's software provides a wonderful framework for exploring various
hypotheses of the Maya calendar, for converting between Western and
Mayan dates.  By the way, if someone had a sequence of numbers they
really wanted to protect, like say a private key for encryption, these
kinds of tools could let hir bury a secret in Time.

I sit here typing on 12.18.19.9.6 in the Tikal system using
correlation number 584,283, also called 1 Cimi 9 Yax, which PC
anthropologists would call 13 Oct 92 CE, also known as 18th day of the
Gort lunation by Celtic standards, and agreed by most modern
astronomers to be Julian day number 2,448,909.  Samhain time.  In a
couple weeks, by the first week of November 1992, our latest round of
descent into Novelty will have subsided, just around the time of the
US presidential election

In conjunction with Time Hacking, think of Terence viz other modern
shamans of the West.  Aldous Huxley knew psychedelics, but exhorted us
to keep the treasures indoled, hidden among elite intelligentsia - the
first step in building a Hermetic "egregor", aka meme factory.  His
friend Leri took the party out to the masses, thankfully - the second
Hermetic step into proselytizing Egregorville, which led to revolution
and backlash.  Now McKenna leaps to the fore, urging people to work
for their treasured trip experiences - a chaotic jumble to complete
the occultish Yod-He-Vow-He sequence...

In a time when the Just Say No crowd has monopolised the airwaves,
TMcK presents a very complex story, admonishing hardcore heads to
chase after botanical arcana instead of better living through
chemistry.  So authorities dismiss him as New Age nonsense (grin).
It's a shame that good hallucinogens are so tough to find in these
drug war days (wink).  Why, you almost have to crawl through jungles
just to get high anymore (snicker).  In fact, soon the authorities
will have wiped out rainforests and with them any hope of a
psychedelic revolution (open belly laugh).

Static rumbles the Etherwaves, but a message xmits clear enough for
those not afraid to stretch their heads.  To quote the closing of Tom
Robbins' time hacking treatise: "The temple door is open, the room
waits for you to enter."


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Copyright (c)1992, Paco Xander Nathan.  All rights reserved.
First appeared in _bOING-bOING_ magazine, issue #10:

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