Approaching Timewave Zero
by Terence McKenna

From Magical Blend Magazine Issue 44 November 1994

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 hyper modernity 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. The Birth metaphor;if the earth is our Mother then we must be parted from her, the earth is the cradle of humankind but you don't stay in the cradle forever or there is something wrong with you ...so this is the platform and psychedelic substances, human machine interphasing, nanotechnology, quantum distribution of information...

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.

In part I of "Timewave Zero" Terence McKenna initiated the reader into his theory of nature's upcoming quantum jump out of history. Looking at the I Ching from a quantum physic's perspective, Terence and his brother Dennis discovered a wave pattern in the ordering of the Tarot's trigrams and hexagrams that suggested time could be mapped. One of the oldest "structured abstractions" known, the I Ching has been found scratched on the 6,000 year-old shoulder bone of a sheep. Since the I Ching is particularly concerned with the dynamic relationships and transformations that archetypes undergo, McKenna intuited that the I Ching must also be deeply involved with the nature of time as the necessary condition for the manifestation of archetypes as categories of experience.

Centering his attention on examining the King Wen sequence of sixty four hexagrams, McKenna's search for the ordering principles that lay behind it managed to translate what was essentially a mystical diagram into a rationally apprehensible, mathematical model. Working with Peter Meyer, McKenna developed a personal computer software package that takes his discoveries concerning the I Ching and creates time maps based upon them. These time maps, or novelty maps, show the ebb an flow of connectedness, or novelty, in any span of time from a few days to tens of millennia.

In McKenna's novelty map, 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. According to this graph, one trend toward greater novelty reached its culmination around 2700 B.C., precisely at the height of the Old Kingdom pyramid-building phase. Perhaps most remarkable of all McKenna's discoveries was the fact that the only point in the entire wave that has a quantified value of zero is December 21, 2012 A.D.--the same date that has been interpreted as the Mayan Calendar's end of time.

The Timewave zero model shows the past 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." When the zero point is reached, the wave passes out of the past and into the future. We are approaching a point, says McKenna, "when the rational and acausal tendencies inherent in time may again reverse their positions of dominance."

McKenna views history, with it's hunger for completion, as "an anomaly... a complete fluke," in which "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." As history races toward it's denouement, evolution is carried out of strictly biological confines and into the mental realm where language and other abstractions begin to pull us together toward "a complex attractor that exists ahead of us in time." This "concrescence," says McKenna is now so close that it can be felt in the sense of accelerating time and complexity.

In the second part of this article, McKenna discusses the repercussions of our collective approach to Timewave Zero and how psychedelics can be used to condition ourselves for our upcoming move into of the body of eternity and out of three- dimensional time and space.

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.

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