December 21, 2006

• Will history end in half a dozen years?

  When I had reposted my solstice entry for the countdown to Christmas I looked at the date, thinking, “twelve, twenty-one, twenty-… TWELVE!  TIMEWAVE ZERO is only six years away!”  I hadn’t thought about that for a while.  I have mentioned it here in passing several times, have been asked questions about it, and had said that I would write more about it.  Why not do that now, while I have free access to the computer, the weather is warm enough that there’s not a frigid draft freezing my feet, and I am relatively compos mentis?

  TWZ’s origin is absurd, its premise is implausibly unscientific by current standards, and yet any user of the software who is conversant with this planet’s paleontology and our species’ history, can find resonances, correspondences, between the fractal wave and identifiable events of the past.  The software has been in existence long enough now for some people to recognize correspondences with current events.  Many people believe that it also predicts a major event when the wave line crosses the zero axis on (at the best available approximation) December 21, 2012, which is coincidentally (or synchronistically) the end date of the Mayan Calendar.

  Terence McKenna was tripping on psilocybe mushrooms when the ‘shroom’s Deva clued him to the fractal resonance between the King Wen Sequence of  I Ching and the flow of history viewed as a contrast between novelty and “same old same old,” for want of a better term.  For many people, the foregoing sentence would be enough to discredit the whole idea.  For me, it was enough to intrigue me, since I had first been introduced to oracles through the I Ching, and had my own culturally programmed skepticism destroyed by their demonstrated ability not only to predict events but to guide me in responding to those events in ways that would benefit me.

  I had also gained a higher perspective on reality and learned how to transcend much of my own psychopathology through psychedelic neurochemistry.  I knew it would be foolish to dismiss McKenna’s theories without investigation.  I played with the software, read what McKenna had to say about it, listened to several taped talks he had given in workshops at Esalen and various universities, and came away more intrigued and interested than ever.

  I tend to gag reflexively when I encounter anyone trying to debunk or dismiss anything on the basis of its being inconsistent with “modern science.”  The cutting edge of science at this time:  quantum physics, string theory, and the like, is inconsistent with the Newtonian physics most people believe in.  Most people now alive on this planet, if they learned anything at all about the causes of earthquakes and volcanoes, got an entirely fallacious bunch of theories fed to them at church, on the “street”, or in school.  Not long ago, the ideas of plate tectonics and continental drift were dismissed by reputable geologists as “twaddle”, and I suppose there are still some die-hard reactionaries alive who consider plate tectonics an unproven theory.  That’s just how it is.  Some people must work so hard at wrapping their minds around a logically shaky idea that if they manage to do so, forever afterward they will not allow anyone to confuse them with facts.

  “Twaddle” is one of the words someone has used in reference to the Wikipedia article on Novelty Theory and Timewave Zero.  That article is under review for deletion, and I was pleased to see that the votes against deletion outnumbered the votes for it.  In the discussion of deletion, those in favor of it wrote terse unreasoned condemnations, while several of the votes against deletion included authoritative and reasoned statements.  I think the article could be improved, but deleting it would be tantamount to censorship in my opinion.  I think we should at least keep it around for another six years to see what develops.

  Some of the factual correspondences that have convinced me that the
  Timewave might be an accurate map of novel occurences in history,
  include the huge dip toward zero at the time of the K-T extinction event
  sixty-five million years ago when an asteroid impact off Bimini killed
  off the dinosaurs, and another dip corresponding to socio-cultural
  changes in the late 1960s.  McKenna and other researchers also
  discovered a series of  little double peaks following the big dips toward zero which
  signify novelty, corresponding to historically known periods of war. 
  In terms of TWZ, warfare is just a return to the same old same old.  Perhaps peace might mark the time when the wave crosses the zero axis.

  During Terence McKenna’s lifetime, he was asked many times what he thought would happen at Timewave Zero and beyond.  In his earliest talks and writings on the subject, he tended to refer to TWZ as the “end of history.”  When people would infer from that the end of the world, he was quick to correct them.  He emphasized that he thought it would be the “end of time as we know it.”  In some of his later talks, he said that after much thought he had concluded that it could mean the development of time travel.   Even before we had heard McKenna speak of time travel, Doug and I had, in our own discussions of it, concluded that the initiation of time travel would fit, would be consistent with a time when everything changes, when novelty reaches its apex and history as we have always known it changes forever.

  What do you think?

  More TWZ links:
  http://fusionanomaly.net/timewavezero.html
  software author Peter Meyer’s explanation of the zero date
  McKenna on the derivation from King Wen sequence
  TWZ and Language by Terence McKenna
  Why the Mayan Calendar?
  On Novelty by Nowick Gray

  • 7:28 pm
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