519 - Our Cyberspiritual Future Part 5

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Today we get to hear Terence McKenna’s lecture about his TimeWave hypothesis (it never became a true theory). This 1997 talk was given less than three years before Terence’s death and thus represents some of his latest thinking about this topic. He defines the TimeWave as a mathematical model of how the world works, as based upon the I Ching. Also, he clearly states that where the end point is set determines all of the other data points fall. However, in true Terence McKenna fashion he points out that even if he was 0.001% off, that gave him a range of 60,000 years in which his prediction would still be valid. He then goes on to discuss his correction to the Watkins objection that was discussed in podcast 472.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“We are involved in the most accelerated, asymptotic ascent into change, so far as we can tell, that the cosmos has ever known.”

“In the one sample we know of, biology has proven itself to be four times as enduring as the stars themselves.”

“I won’t defend it [the TimeWave] though. I’ve decided to get a life after 2012 no matter what happens.”

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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And while I’m a bit tardy in getting out today’s podcast,

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several of our fellow salonners didn’t wait for me and instead sent in a donation

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to help with the expenses of producing these podcasts

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and to ensure that the plans for Psychedelic Salon 2.0 continue apace.

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And these great souls are John P., Daniel R., John W., and longtime salonner and donor Juan P.

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Now, normally right now I’d explain that the latest little heat wave in Southern California

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made it impossible for my old computer to chug along in the heat, thus making this podcast a few

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days late. But I’m not going to do that, even though I think I just did that.

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But I’m not going to do that because of a wonderful note that I received in the mail

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from longtime salonner and major contributor to the salon, Marjean M.

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And here’s how she began her letter.

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Dear Lorenzo, I’m happy for you making this decision to pass it on. For several years now

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I have rolled my eyes as you would begin another podcast making apologies for how tardy it was.

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I’d be thinking, come on Lorenzo, give yourself a break. And so Marjean, I’m giving myself a break

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and hopefully you won’t get too much eye-rolling exercise today.

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And by the way, thanks for reminding me to relax a bit.

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I’ve essentially fallen so far behind on my email lately that I’ve missed a chance to make another appearance on the Third Eyedrops podcast.

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And my promised breakfast with fellow salonner Darren B. has fallen through temporarily.

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with fellow salonner Darren B. has fallen through temporarily,

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not to mention a whole bunch of responses still due to donors and fellow salonners who have used our comments forum to send me a message.

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So I’ll eventually catch up, I’m sure.

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Okay, so I’m still beating myself up a bit, Marjean.

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I’ll try to relax even a bit more.

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At least for today, when my focus is to finally get this podcast out.

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And so speaking of today’s podcast, as you know, if you’ve been here in the salon for a while,

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I haven’t been playing the Saturday night sessions of Terrence McKenna’s workshops,

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where he explains his ideas about the time wave.

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Now, if you’ve let my grumpy thinking infect your mind as to the time wave being a dead end,

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here’s a suggestion.

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When you listen to Terence talk about the flow of earthly history in regards to the time wave,

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instead of thinking about time and all of human history,

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think instead only about the flow of time in your own life.

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think instead only about the flow of time in your own life?

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What if his ideas about a time wave actually do have some bearing on our own life trajectories?

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I’m not sure that this will be of much use here,

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but his ideas do seem to resonate better with me when I think on a smaller scale.

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And I’ll have more to say about that after we first listen to a complete explanation about his time wave hypothesis. Now, about an hour and 20 minutes from now, you’re going to hear Terence talk

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about a time over a year earlier when the so-called Watkins objection to his time wave

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hypothesis was first raised. And if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while, then

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you may remember back to my podcast number 472, where

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we heard Terrence talking about having just returned from meeting with Watkins in Palenque

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and that he would be returning to his home in Hawaii to think about it. Well, now we

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get to hear what his thinking about the Watkins objection led him to.

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him to. Okay, well, tonight has become sort of a set piece in these things, because we always to set aside Saturday night for a discussion of the time wave. Some of you have been to five,

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six, seven, and ten of these things can deliver this lecture verbatim. However,

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and deliver this lecture verbatim.

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However, even for you,

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there are tiny thrills this evening because there are some new things

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to say about the time wave, believe it or not,

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things never before said in public,

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if I get to them.

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But that all lies in the realm

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of the details

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so before the details comes

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the general introduction to the game

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and

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the idea here

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it’s an indulgence

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of me that you sit

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and listen to this

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all these other talks I give

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are essentially passing on information to you

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about drugs or technology or philosophy

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or something like that.

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This is my own thing,

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so entirely my own thing

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that no one has ever even tried to steal it from me.

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So if it’s right, it’s all my fault, and if it’s right, it’s all my fault,

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and if it’s wrong, it’s all my fault.

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Although that too may change,

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may be about to change.

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The notion, simply put,

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is what we have here

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is a mathematical model of an idea about how the world works.

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And you can accept the idea without accepting the mathematical model.

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What the mathematical model does is gives hellish precision

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to something which otherwise would be

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a kind of loose-headed after-dinner speculation,

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a kind of how-would-it-be-if thought.

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And this idea came to me

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as these overarching general metaphors seem to do

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if you study the history of ideas sort of all in a flash

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no no this is I go down to the peyote button okay so and I used the vocabulary

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of Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysic

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to surround these mathematical ideas

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so here is the basic notion

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the idea is that time

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which in western physics

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and philosophy

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is assumed to be flat,

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or what Newton called pure duration,

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and the only adjustment of that idea

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that’s ever taken place in the scientific canon

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is that Einstein added the very slight caveat

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that in the presence of massive magnetic fields,

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the space-time continuum became very, very gently curved.

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So throughout the evolution of the Western notion of time,

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two notions have been in play,

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that time was either perfectly flat

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or that it was damn near perfectly flat and that it had a

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very smooth distortion from perfect flatness the roots of this assumption which is all that it is

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lie in greek mathematics because in aristotelian physics it was thought that

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the orbits of the planet were

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perfect circles and that

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the perfect, that is

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bilaterally symmetric

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geometric shapes

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were somehow the key to

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understanding

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the physics of the cosmos

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as empirical

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investigation of the nature of the cosmos. As empirical investigation of the nature of nature

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proceeded,

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one by one,

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these perfect Greek models

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had to be tossed out

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simply because the evidence

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supported other conclusions.

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In other words,

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careful examination

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of the movement of the planets

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reveals that they do not move

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in perfect circles

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they move in ellipses

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the entire system

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of Ptolemaic astronomy

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was a system of nesting

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planetary orbits

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in perfect circles

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with smaller circles

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with smaller circles

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in order to avoid the

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great simplifying conclusion

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that it wasn’t circles at all, it was ellipses.

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And one by one, as I say, these ideas have had to be given way.

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The one that we’ve held on to the longest

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is this idea that time is a perfectly smooth

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surface and to

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illustrate

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what that means to science

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you have only to think of

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the first thing you’re told if you

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study statistics

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which is chance has

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no memory

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if you study statistics

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they will give you a problem like this. A man has flipped

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a coin 49 times. It has come up heads. Now he’s flipping the coin the 50th time. What

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are the odds it will come up heads? And the odds, according to the science of probability, are 50-50.

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Flying under the battle flag of chance has no memory.

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So, in other words, in statistics you’re taught

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that the fact that you’ve had heads 49 times

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doesn’t prejudice you toward heads the 50th time.

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No gambler would take this seriously for a moment. Gamblers

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aren’t statisticians. Gamblers believe in runs, and essentially they believe, as I believe,

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that some places in time favor heads and some places in time favor tails and if you can sense by any

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means where these times are you can probably make a fortune now the reason

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this idea of the flat duration of the temporal continuum has been so

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tenaciously hung on to in Western science is because if you carefully deconstruct Western

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science, it can’t do business without this notion. Because the central idea of the Western

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scientific method is something called the experiment. The experiment is a special situation that you set up

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that is somehow designed to reveal or trap or cast into high relief

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an aspect of nature normally occluded or buried in other processes. The experiment is a way of making naked the particular phenomenon that you’re trying to look at. But notice that the concept of experiment contains built into it the idea of replicability,

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meaning that the experiment is not something done once.

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The experiment is something which must be potentially doable

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an infinite number of times or tens of thousands of times.

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And experimentalists have the phrase

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and the notion,

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what they call the restoration of initial conditions.

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In order to repeat an experiment,

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you must be able to restore the initial conditions.

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Let’s say you want to know if the light bulb

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is working

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we will perform an experiment

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we will turn on the light

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we throw the switch

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the light comes on

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yes the light is working

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now we turn the light off

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we have just restored

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initial conditions

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to the pre-experimental situation.

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For the idea of experiment to mean anything,

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you must be able to restore the initial conditions.

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Well, now suppose that every moment in time

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has a unique character,

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that there is something special and unique

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about every moment in the serial time continuum.

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If that were found to be true,

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then initial conditions can never be restored.

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It’s a fiction

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it’s an illusion

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a hallucination

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of the empirical mind

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now science

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when it does its experiments

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it would never say

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this experiment will give

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the following data on the

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charge of the electron

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but it must be performed on Tuesdays before noon.

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That would seem to a scientist an absurd statement

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because scientific statements are what is called time invariant.

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They work on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, before noon, afternoon, any time

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because the assumption is made that they are time-invariant.

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The idea that I wanted to explore,

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because it seemed to me, based on my own personal experience as a living person,

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and also it seemed to me, based on my psychedelic experience,

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that in fact every moment is unique

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and that we can never go home again.

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And that where you are situated in the space-time continuum

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is absolutely an irreversible determinant of your destiny.

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So temporal invariance is a fiction.

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And you could almost redefine science

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from this point of view,

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science as we have known it up to this moment,

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as the following.

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Science is the study of those phenomena

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so coarse-grained that their situation in the space-time continuum

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does not affect their outcome.

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These are very coarse-grained phenomena indeed.

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Things like ball bearings rolling down inclined planes,

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electron charge transfers, very basic mechanical things seem to be time

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invariant. But now when you look at less coarse-grained things like the lives of animals, the destinies of nations, love affairs, corporate takeovers, wars, revolutions,

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art movements. These things are incredibly time dependent. They are in fact almost entirely

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creatures of time. An affair conducted in France in the 30s one way won’t fly in America in the 30s one way won’t fly in America

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in the 80s

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done the same way

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and it would be preposterous.

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We don’t expect our love affairs

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to be exact repeats

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of previous love affairs

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or our meetings with our attorneys

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to be exactly like

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previous meetings with our attorneys.

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These kinds of higher grade phenomena are distinguished by the fact that they’re unique.

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And they’re…

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Chaos during space.

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I don’t think so.

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I think that’s saying something else.

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So, my first concern

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was to point out the limitation

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of the scientific method because it’s based

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on probability theory

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and then to say

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we need a better theory

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if what I’m

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telling you is so

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then

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a science that bases

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itself on probability theory will never be able to bring nature into true focus.

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It will be able to get a picture of these coarse-grained phenomena,

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but it means there can be no science of society, no science of psychology,

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no science of the large-scale behavior

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of complex systems of any kind,

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because probability theory levels out the differences.

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So my notion was that

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rather than the flat surface of pure Newtonian duration,

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we should play with the idea that time has a local structure

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and a local fine structure.

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In other words, that far from moving over a perfectly smooth surface as we move through time we are experiencing

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an ebb and flow of probability if we could somehow dipstick this ebb and flow we would have a dial

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we would have a meter which which said heads here tails here, and as you watched it, you would see it go toward heads,

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then toward tails.

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This is what it’s favoring.

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Now it’s favoring heads.

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Now it’s favoring tails.

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Now heads.

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Now tails.

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In other words, probability is not a constant phenomenon.

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It’s a fluctuating phenomenon.

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Somewhat facetiously, I suggest to you that if time were truly invariant

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and if the odds of a coin flip are truly 50-50,

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then the coin should land on its edge every single time.

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That’s the rarest of all outcomes in a coin flip.

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You have to spend years in sleazy bars

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with sticky tabletops in order to see a quarter

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land on its edge and stand there.

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So when you put this to the statisticians,

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then they say, well, then there are minor factors impinging,

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and then with some kind of magic side of hand,

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they explain how the universe decided whether it would be heads or tails.

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Well, if in fact time is a fluctuating variable,

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it can be portrayed as any fluctuating variable is portrayed against some kind of a power axis

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against time on the horizontal axis.

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And if you knew then how to scale this fluctuating curve

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against the time you were living in

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you would begin to get a map

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of the ebb and flow

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of probability

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so that’s part of the idea

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I’m trying to put forth here

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now

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to bring this around, I’ve made, I’ve tried to talk about two phenomena that I as a simple ordinary person have observed about nature, that I suspect you too have observed about nature,

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but that science, for some reason,

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has chosen to completely ignore and, when pressed, deny

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that the phenomena I’m about to discuss exist,

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and yet, to me, they are self-evident.

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They have a relationship to each other.

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The first phenomenon I’ve noticed

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that science makes nothing of

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or denies

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is that the further back in time you go

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the simpler things become

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or to put

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to stand the statement on its head

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beginning at the earliest moments of the universe Or, to put, to stand the statement on its head,

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beginning at the earliest moments of the universe,

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the universe has grown ever more complex.

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And this is a true statement,

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whether we’re talking about physical systems,

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because the universe begins as a physical system of pure electrons quickly

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simple atomic systems

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are formed

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hydrogen and helium

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they aggregate under the force of gravity

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notice how things are becoming more complicated

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at the center of these

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gravitational aggregates

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pressure and temperature rises

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suddenly a

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new phenomenon bursts

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into being fusion

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it cooks out heavier

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elements like sulfur iron

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and carbon

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and where a cosmic

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moment ago we had a very

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simple universe full of

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only unpaired electrons

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suddenly we have a universe full of all kinds of

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atomic species distributed at various volumetric densities and so forth and so on and then with

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the advent of carbon you get long chain polymers you get molecular chemistry before you only had

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atomic chemistry some of these long chain polymers

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begin to transcript themselves

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now you’ve got some kind of self replicating

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molecular system preserving information

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it quickly becomes

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non-nucleated life which quickly

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becomes nucleated life which then becomes

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multicellular life which then becomes nucleated life which then becomes multicellular life

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which then becomes complex life sex is invented the phyla form that you see

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what’s happening as we’re approaching the present in this description the

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universe is filling up with complex phenomena of many orders of magnitude, stars, galaxies, cells, organisms, ecosystems, yada, yada, yada, on and on.

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And then very recently in this picture of crystallizing or condensing complexification,

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you get higher animals using language, inventing culture, building tools,

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transmitting messages through wires,

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enclosing the entire planet in a communication system, on and on and on.

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So, point one about this that science has missed is the universe apparently,

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or it is a reasonable statement to say the universe has an appetite for complexity

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as the universe grows it grows ever more complex now if you set it back in some domain

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uh you here’s a planet covered with jungles and oceans its home star undergoes a hiccup

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jungles and oceans are reduced to vapor

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the atmosphere is blown off

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this is a great simplification

00:24:54 ►

what happens?

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the system immediately sets itself

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going toward restoring and surpassing

00:25:01 ►

the originally achieved complexity

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so it isn’t an inevitable and everywhere march toward complexity.

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It’s a march towards complexity that can be deflected

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by large-scale catastrophe or statistical fluctuations,

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but it always picks itself up out of the ditch

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and begins again the forward march toward greater complexity.

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And notice that this is occurring across domains.

00:25:31 ►

This is not a phenomenon of biology or sociology or physics.

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It’s a phenomenon of all three and more.

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It’s a phenomenon that seems to permeate

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all levels of organization.

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That’s point one.

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Point two is looking at the same data

00:25:54 ►

that I just laid out for you,

00:25:57 ►

notice that the closer we get to the present,

00:26:00 ►

the faster this complexification is occurring

00:26:05 ►

so that the cool down from the electron plasma

00:26:12 ►

into the aggregate of early stars

00:26:15 ►

this took a long, long time

00:26:18 ►

and then the cooking out of heavy elements

00:26:21 ►

took a long time

00:26:23 ►

not as long as the first step,

00:26:25 ►

but hundreds of millions,

00:26:27 ►

perhaps billions of years.

00:26:29 ►

When you enter the realm of planetary biology,

00:26:34 ►

suddenly change through the advent

00:26:38 ►

of genetic transfer and reshuffling of genes

00:26:41 ►

is vastly accelerated.

00:26:44 ►

And where before change took hundreds of millions of years,

00:26:48 ►

now it’s being accomplished in millions of years.

00:26:51 ►

Well then, when culture and language using creatures like ourselves

00:26:58 ►

come onto the scene,

00:26:59 ►

it’s like a hyper-acceleration of that already accelerated process.

00:27:06 ►

And now change is coming not in millions of years,

00:27:10 ►

but every few hundred years or every few decades.

00:27:15 ►

And the entire experience of human history has been one

00:27:19 ►

of ever-accelerating change and novelty

00:27:24 ►

to the point where now in a single lifetime

00:27:27 ►

we experience more change

00:27:29 ►

than people 50 years ago

00:27:33 ►

experienced in the previous thousand years.

00:27:37 ►

I mean, when you think about the fact,

00:27:39 ►

this is 1997.

00:27:41 ►

100 years ago,

00:27:43 ►

there were a few telephones. There were zero automobiles 100 years ago.

00:27:51 ►

There were zero aircraft 100 years ago. There were no computers of any sort. There were

00:27:59 ►

no antibiotics. TV was undreamed of. I mean, you know all of this,

00:28:08 ►

but we stand around saying things never change.

00:28:11 ►

When in fact, you know, we are involved in the most accelerated asymptotic ascent into change,

00:28:17 ►

so far as we can tell, the cosmos has ever known.

00:28:21 ►

Well, so these are the two phenomenon that I took note

00:28:25 ►

of and then

00:28:25 ►

I couldn’t

00:28:27 ►

being as I

00:28:28 ►

in Barry’s

00:28:29 ►

sense as we

00:28:30 ►

discussed it

00:28:31 ►

being a

00:28:31 ►

rationalist

00:28:33 ►

I saw no

00:28:34 ►

reason then

00:28:36 ►

looking at this

00:28:36 ►

process which

00:28:37 ►

has been running

00:28:38 ►

since the big

00:28:39 ►

bang till right

00:28:40 ►

now

00:28:41 ►

to see any

00:28:42 ►

possible

00:28:43 ►

argument

00:28:44 ►

force or situation that could cause the universe to

00:28:48 ►

suddenly change its mind about that being the direction it wants to go in no the universe wants

00:28:55 ►

to go toward greater novelty and it wants to go there faster and faster and And it’s possible,

00:29:07 ►

since this novelty acceleration is so asymptotic,

00:29:10 ►

that most of the creative unfolding

00:29:13 ►

of the universe

00:29:14 ►

will actually occur

00:29:16 ►

in the last few days, hours, or minutes

00:29:19 ►

of its existence.

00:29:21 ►

This is the basis of my

00:29:24 ►

much misrepresented and misunderstood enthusiasm for what some people dial in as the end of the world or the apocalypse or the eschaton because it seems to me if you try to clock these accelerating rates of change

00:29:47 ►

honest examination of the situation leads to the conclusion that it is now moving so fast

00:29:54 ►

that within our lifetimes it will approach speeds that from a human perspective appear infinite. In other words, more change is going to take place

00:30:07 ►

in the next ten years

00:30:09 ►

than has taken place in the previous five billion years.

00:30:13 ►

And, you know, we’re going to be present for this.

00:30:19 ►

This is an idea almost the exact opposite

00:30:24 ►

of ordinary causality. exact opposite of ordinary causality.

00:30:26 ►

The idea of ordinary causality is that there was an enormous cosmic explosion

00:30:31 ►

at the beginning of things,

00:30:33 ►

and that from that moment everything has been spreading out,

00:30:38 ►

cooling down, and organizing or disorganizing itself as it may,

00:30:46 ►

but that there is no goal, purpose, telos, vector, arrival point,

00:30:57 ►

or any other formulation you might make

00:31:00 ►

that indicates that the universe knows where it’s going.

00:31:04 ►

I simply don’t believe this.

00:31:07 ►

It appears to me that the universe does know where it’s going.

00:31:10 ►

It’s going into deeper novelty.

00:31:14 ►

I call the universe a novelty-conserving engine.

00:31:19 ►

What that means is when it produces novelty,

00:31:22 ►

it tenaciously hangs on to it. It does not lightly

00:31:26 ►

give up a species, a molecular arrangement, a star system. These things are held together.

00:31:36 ►

They have their what Eric Jansch called metastable, or what Rupert Sheldrake calls their morphogenetic field.

00:31:49 ►

Their appetite for coherency perpetuates them through time.

00:31:54 ►

Okay, well, so that’s the introduction to this idea.

00:31:57 ►

And I don’t think anything I’ve said to this point,

00:32:00 ►

though it is in fact scientifically radical,

00:32:02 ►

it’s not very arguable.

00:32:04 ►

I mean, the facts are on the table.

00:32:06 ►

You can like it or not like it it but this all seems to be the case

00:32:08 ►

the universe is under the

00:32:14 ►

is being shaped

00:32:18 ►

by an attractor

00:32:20 ►

of some sort

00:32:21 ►

that finds self-reflection

00:32:25 ►

in complexity.

00:32:27 ►

So you could almost say

00:32:28 ►

we are being pulled forward

00:32:30 ►

into the future

00:32:31 ►

by something that is shaping us

00:32:34 ►

in its own image

00:32:35 ►

as it draws us ever nearer

00:32:37 ►

to its aura,

00:32:39 ►

to the umbra of its presence.

00:32:44 ►

Okay.

00:32:43 ►

of its presence.

00:32:44 ►

Okay.

00:32:52 ►

Closed systems tend to run down into entropy.

00:32:55 ►

It is only a cheerful assumption that the universe is a closed system

00:32:57 ►

and it’s certainly not true

00:32:59 ►

that biology is a closed system.

00:33:05 ►

When an astrophysicist tells you

00:33:08 ►

that the universe is going to end in heat, death, and entropy,

00:33:13 ►

do you know what value he is giving biology and his model?

00:33:18 ►

Zero.

00:33:20 ►

Precisely dot.

00:33:22 ►

Is that reasonable?

00:33:24 ►

They say, well, biology, we only have located it on one planet. It’s so ephemeral. precisely dot is that reasonable? they say well biology

00:33:25 ►

we only have located it on one planet

00:33:27 ►

it’s so ephemeral

00:33:28 ►

it does seem to be a slight counter flow

00:33:31 ►

to the second law of thermodynamics

00:33:32 ►

but would be preposterous to suggest

00:33:35 ►

etc. etc. etc.

00:33:36 ►

not at all

00:33:37 ►

for the following reasons

00:33:39 ►

the average life of a star

00:33:44 ►

is 500 million years.

00:33:48 ►

Now, we happen to be in orbit around an extraordinary stable type of star.

00:33:54 ►

This star is older than that, perhaps 8, 9, 10, like that.

00:34:01 ►

But the average life of a star is 500 million years

00:34:05 ►

we know that life

00:34:08 ►

has existed on this

00:34:09 ►

planet for 1.83

00:34:14 ►

billion

00:34:15 ►

years

00:34:17 ►

so nearly

00:34:19 ►

nearly

00:34:20 ►

4 times longer

00:34:23 ►

than the life of the average star in this universe.

00:34:27 ►

So to suggest that biology is not tenacious,

00:34:33 ►

to suggest that it’s ephemeral and not in for the count,

00:34:37 ►

is just to simply ignore the data.

00:34:40 ►

In the one sample we know of,

00:34:50 ►

In the one sample we know of, biology has proven itself to be four times as enduring as the stars themselves.

00:35:06 ►

So I think it is unnecessary to worry about the second law of thermodynamics. reversed if life can break out to a sufficient level of, and may

00:35:08 ►

already have been reversed. After all,

00:35:10 ►

we don’t know what the distribution

00:35:12 ►

and extent of life is

00:35:14 ►

in the universe.

00:35:16 ►

Okay, so all of this is like

00:35:18 ►

it’s a nice idea.

00:35:19 ►

Yeah? I’m not very knowledgeable

00:35:21 ►

about this. It’s all new to me.

00:35:23 ►

At what point does, if novelty is happening faster, faster, faster,

00:35:27 ►

like the events of novelty are closer, closer, closer, closer together,

00:35:31 ►

well, at what point is it not novelty because it’s not new anymore?

00:35:36 ►

That’s the point where all novelty that is possible has become manifest.

00:35:42 ►

In other words, when the amount of novelty in the universe reaches infinity,

00:35:49 ►

the program of expressing novelty will be finished.

00:35:53 ►

All possibilities will have been realized.

00:35:55 ►

All possibilities will have been realized.

00:35:58 ►

Well, okay, so this is a wrap.

00:36:00 ►

It’s pretty good.

00:36:01 ►

It sounds okay.

00:36:03 ►

It deals with certain data.

00:36:04 ►

It opens certain vistas. But it’s just a wrap it’s pretty good it sounds okay it deals with certain data it opens certain vistas

00:36:06 ►

but it’s just a wrap to go to the next level in the game of theory making you have to bring in

00:36:15 ►

mathematics and you have to make precise predictions about the system you’re studying and then if these predictions

00:36:26 ►

are judged to be

00:36:28 ►

true

00:36:30 ►

and that’s a very tricky term

00:36:32 ►

and if you’re interested in it

00:36:34 ►

you should read somebody like

00:36:36 ►

Imre Lakatos who wrote

00:36:38 ►

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge

00:36:40 ►

the question

00:36:41 ►

what is true, what is proof

00:36:44 ►

what is falsified evidence, so forth.

00:36:47 ►

These are questions that the philosophy of science deals with in detail,

00:36:51 ►

and we can’t hear.

00:36:53 ►

But anyway, if your theory is judged to be true,

00:37:00 ►

that’s the level at which paradigm shifts occur

00:37:03 ►

ever since the Greeks at the mathematical level.

00:37:07 ►

So I, since 1971,

00:37:12 ►

under the inspiration of my trip to the Amazon

00:37:16 ►

and mushrooms and so forth,

00:37:18 ►

have been trying to develop a higher dimensional model

00:37:24 ►

of the space-time continuum that would allow the

00:37:29 ►

extension of the precision techniques of physics and to some degree biology into domains like

00:37:37 ►

art history, culture, and even our own lives. And so I’ve developed something which I call novelty theory.

00:37:51 ►

And I use the vocabulary of Alfred North Whitehead

00:37:55 ►

because it’s a pre-existing vocabulary

00:37:58 ►

created by a very, very, very reputable mathematician,

00:38:04 ►

which, as this story will make clear, I am not.

00:38:09 ►

And so novelty theory.

00:38:13 ►

But novelty theory needs an equation

00:38:16 ►

to go up to the great simulacra of true science

00:38:21 ►

with Newton and Einstein and Huygens and Maxwell

00:38:26 ►

and those people

00:38:28 ►

and so over the past

00:38:32 ►

20 years

00:38:32 ►

I’ve tried

00:38:36 ►

to do this and I’ve produced

00:38:37 ►

a mathematical

00:38:40 ►

equation which is a fractal

00:38:42 ►

algorithm

00:38:43 ►

which is a self- algorithm which is a self similar

00:38:46 ►

recursive

00:38:47 ►

curve

00:38:49 ►

that I modestly propose

00:38:52 ►

we substitute

00:38:54 ►

for the zero

00:38:56 ►

in Newtonian

00:38:58 ►

physics that describes

00:39:00 ►

the curvature

00:39:01 ►

of space time

00:39:03 ►

and I won’t say too much about how I derived this,

00:39:09 ►

except to say that it was by a mathematical deconstruction of the I Ching.

00:39:16 ►

The I Ching is, as you probably know,

00:39:21 ►

a Chinese oracle of great antiquity

00:39:25 ►

and one of the things that has struck

00:39:28 ►

various people who’ve become involved

00:39:31 ►

with it Leibniz Benjamin Franklin Carl

00:39:35 ►

Jung that it seems to work like

00:39:40 ►

psychedelics it seems to be a general an

00:39:43 ►

exception to the general rule

00:39:45 ►

that this woo-woo stuff never works.

00:39:50 ►

The I Ching works.

00:39:53 ►

And why it works, a great deal of ink has been spilled upon this subject.

00:40:02 ►

Jung’s explanation of synchronicity, if you carefully deconstruct it, is no explanation

00:40:08 ►

at all. It basically says it works because it does work. I wanted to go a little deeper

00:40:15 ►

than that. I think that what I want to say about this evening is just to give you a metaphor.

00:40:22 ►

what I want to say about this evening is just to give you a metaphor

00:40:24 ►

because if someone were to attack me

00:40:28 ►

and I’ve been attacked on many levels

00:40:30 ►

the attack that I used to feel most stinging

00:40:35 ►

was one that sort of proceeded along these lines

00:40:39 ►

aha

00:40:40 ►

so you want to make a revolution in physics based on a Chinese oracle?

00:40:49 ►

Is that what you’re saying?

00:40:50 ►

You propose a redefinition of the Newtonian space-time continuum

00:40:56 ►

based on a 3,000-year-old occult fortune-telling method.

00:41:01 ►

Is that right?

00:41:02 ►

I understand that kind of attack. That’s how I attack.

00:41:09 ►

That’s a withering attack. And so then I had to think, you know, why do I want to do that?

00:41:17 ►

That sounds awfully squirrely when put that way. So here is my defense of it now the claim of the I Ching it is called the book of changes

00:41:29 ►

is that it describes change so now let’s let’s make a metaphor here which I think will help us

00:41:41 ►

understand what must be going on.

00:41:49 ►

This is the only point in any of my teaching where there is any chance for what is called a visualization

00:41:52 ►

or an experiential thing.

00:41:57 ►

So make the best of it.

00:41:59 ►

Close your eyes, damn it,

00:42:01 ►

and think of dunes, sand dunes. Get a good clear picture of some sand dunes

00:42:10 ►

in your head. Okay, now, the thing to notice about these dunes that you’re looking at is

00:42:17 ►

that they look like wind. Dunes look like wind. Now, what does this mean? Well, dunes look like wind now what does this mean

00:42:25 ►

well

00:42:26 ►

dunes are made by wind

00:42:31 ►

and somehow they

00:42:34 ►

reflect the thing which made them

00:42:38 ►

let’s think of

00:42:41 ►

each grain of sand

00:42:43 ►

as a bit in a computer.

00:42:48 ►

Let’s think of wind as a program which is being run on that computer.

00:42:54 ►

The program is run.

00:42:57 ►

The bits rearrange themselves furiously.

00:43:01 ►

And when the program stops running,

00:43:02 ►

furiously and when the program stops running what we have is

00:43:05 ►

a lower dimensional slice

00:43:08 ►

of this pressure gradient phenomenon

00:43:11 ►

in time, the wind

00:43:13 ►

the dune is in some sense

00:43:17 ►

the signature of the wind

00:43:19 ►

if you knew how to backward engineer from the dune

00:43:23 ►

you could create wind do you see what I’m

00:43:26 ►

getting at here? All right, now, forget sand dunes, forget bits in computers, think of

00:43:34 ►

genes. You are made of genes. All life on this planet has always been made of genes and think of time as wind

00:43:45 ►

this wind has blown for 1.84 billion years

00:43:52 ►

and the bits, the genes

00:43:56 ►

have been rearranged into what?

00:43:59 ►

a lower dimensional slice of the structure

00:44:03 ►

of the force that created them and what of the force that created them.

00:44:05 ►

And what was the force that created them?

00:44:08 ►

Time.

00:44:09 ►

Time created them.

00:44:11 ►

And so in their structure is the architecture of time itself.

00:44:18 ►

You can backward engineer out of the genetic material

00:44:22 ►

toward the architectonics of the physics of the temporal domain.

00:44:29 ►

Okay, now let’s go back to Zhou, China, 3,000 years ago,

00:44:34 ►

a culture as obsessed with time as we are with matter,

00:44:38 ►

a culture that didn’t build super colliding whatchamacallits,

00:44:43 ►

but instead perfected meditation techniques,

00:44:49 ►

stilling of the heart techniques,

00:44:51 ►

yogas that were designed to suppress physiological functioning

00:44:56 ►

until it fell very close to death itself.

00:45:00 ►

And then the inquiring minds of generation of sages observed within the core of organism flux of some sort, the coming and going of variables. That’s all we have to say, they created a special notation language.

00:45:27 ►

And out of this effort to note, catalog, and understand the temporal variables,

00:45:35 ►

soon realized to be not infinite, but in fact finite, quite finite,

00:45:42 ►

in the same way that all the physical universe

00:45:45 ►

can be built up out of 108 or 106 physical elements

00:45:50 ►

the entire temporal domain

00:45:52 ►

can be built up out of 64 elements

00:45:56 ►

and this 2 to the 6th number

00:46:00 ►

00:46:01 ►

it’s built into the I Ching

00:46:04 ►

it’s built into the structure of the DNA,

00:46:07 ►

it’s built into the algorithm that I’ve developed for tracking time. So my answer to the person who

00:46:16 ►

sneered at me using the I Ching as the basis for this is the I Ching is only an artifact that indicates

00:46:26 ►

a database

00:46:27 ►

of knowledge

00:46:29 ►

about temporal variables

00:46:31 ►

that has been coded into a very

00:46:33 ►

ethnocentric notation

00:46:36 ►

system, the 64

00:46:37 ►

hexagrams with their

00:46:40 ►

commentaries

00:46:42 ►

but

00:46:44 ►

by mathematically

00:46:45 ►

tearing that apart and treating it

00:46:47 ►

formally we can tease

00:46:49 ►

out of all that data

00:46:50 ►

this pattern

00:46:52 ►

this fractal

00:46:54 ►

and we can deal with it with our own

00:46:56 ►

technologies and our own epistemologies

00:46:59 ►

and we can

00:47:00 ►

replace the

00:47:03 ►

zero quality

00:47:04 ►

of space-time

00:47:06 ►

with a much richer description.

00:47:10 ►

Now what we have is a Cartesian line,

00:47:13 ►

a flowing graph that depicts

00:47:15 ►

the ebb and flow of novelty in time

00:47:18 ►

if we can correctly calibrate it

00:47:22 ►

to our own historical domain.

00:47:26 ►

So now I want to show you this wave and talk…

00:47:29 ►

So this guy asks this question.

00:47:30 ►

Did you sort of unleash this response right back to him at that moment?

00:47:33 ►

Did you spontaneously…

00:47:35 ►

Or did you later in your hotel room go,

00:47:37 ►

shit, I should have…

00:47:38 ►

No, I think I’m the guy,

00:47:40 ►

and then I thought up the question and I thought up the answer

00:47:45 ►

it was probably something like that

00:47:47 ►

so basically you’re saying that the

00:47:49 ►

I Ching, oh well one side

00:47:51 ►

of this is the I Ching is a

00:47:54 ►

artifact of a metaphor

00:47:55 ►

for evolution

00:47:56 ►

precisely, yes I think

00:48:00 ►

you see the I Ching

00:48:01 ►

it was old

00:48:04 ►

by the time the Han Dynasty got it.

00:48:07 ►

The earliest commentaries on the I Ching are early Han Dynasty, about 300 B.C.

00:48:14 ►

It was ancient by that time.

00:48:17 ►

No one knew what it was.

00:48:19 ►

What means was it constructed?

00:48:21 ►

No one knows.

00:48:22 ►

I mean, it was called the Book of the Zhou

00:48:25 ►

in the early period of Chinese history.

00:48:28 ►

It’s not even thought to be Chinese.

00:48:30 ►

They don’t claim it.

00:48:32 ►

They say it came from somewhere else.

00:48:34 ►

And the story of King Wen,

00:48:36 ►

this

00:48:37 ►

person who got put in jail

00:48:39 ►

for political rabble-rousing

00:48:42 ►

and then formulated it,

00:48:44 ►

there’s no historical basis for that.

00:48:47 ►

I mean, that’s a founding thing.

00:48:49 ►

It is interesting, though,

00:48:50 ►

that he was put in jail

00:48:52 ►

and then he discovered it.

00:48:53 ►

In other words,

00:48:54 ►

he had to keep still

00:48:55 ►

for a long time somewhere.

00:48:58 ►

And then he found it.

00:49:00 ►

I don’t think that the Confucians

00:49:04 ►

of the Han Dynasty

00:49:05 ►

had any better grip on the I Ching than we do.

00:49:10 ►

It was up for grabs.

00:49:12 ►

And then it became a simple country oracle for centuries.

00:49:17 ►

What I did with the I Ching is I dealt,

00:49:21 ►

I remember I confessed earlier,

00:49:23 ►

I’m no good at languages.

00:49:24 ►

So I just dumped the whole Chinese thing. I said, I don I confessed earlier I’m no good at languages so I just dumped the whole Chinese thing

00:49:27 ►

I said I don’t need to know Chinese, it’s pre-Chinese

00:49:30 ►

and I said it’s pre all these commentaries

00:49:35 ►

so the only thing you can deal with

00:49:37 ►

if you really want to deal with the I Ching itself

00:49:41 ►

is the 64 hexagrams

00:49:44 ►

in the King Wen sequence that’s the

00:49:46 ►

traditional sequence and that’s what I

00:49:49 ►

dealt with and studied it for

00:49:51 ►

mathematical order to try and figure out

00:49:54 ►

whether it it was simply 64 hexagrams in

00:50:00 ►

a in a traditional but jumbled order or

00:50:04 ►

what were the principles of order that underlie it?

00:50:08 ►

Well, I won’t go into that very much this evening,

00:50:11 ►

but for those of you who are keen for the I Ching

00:50:13 ►

and can take a look at it when you get home,

00:50:16 ►

if you look at the King Wen sequence,

00:50:18 ►

the very first thing you notice if you’re paying attention

00:50:21 ►

is it isn’t 64 hexagrams,

00:50:24 ►

it’s 32 pairs of hexagrams because

00:50:27 ►

the second the in each pair the first turned upside down gives the second so if you look at it

00:50:36 ►

number three is four turn three upside down you get four turn five upside down you get six and so on now there

00:50:50 ►

are eight cases where when you turn it upside down it doesn’t change you meet the first exception in

00:50:57 ►

the first two hexagrams the first hexagram is all solid lines turn that upside down and you’ve still got all solid lines.

00:51:05 ►

In these eight cases then,

00:51:08 ►

a second rule is obviously invoked.

00:51:12 ►

It’s that if turning a hexagram upside down

00:51:14 ►

causes no change,

00:51:16 ►

all lines change.

00:51:19 ►

And so as you go from hexagram one,

00:51:22 ►

all solid,

00:51:23 ►

turning it upside down,

00:51:24 ►

no change, therefore all solid, turning it upside down, no change,

00:51:25 ►

therefore all change,

00:51:27 ►

therefore number two,

00:51:29 ►

all broken,

00:51:30 ►

that’s the first pair.

00:51:32 ►

Second pair,

00:51:33 ►

number three,

00:51:34 ►

turned upside down,

00:51:36 ►

is four.

00:51:37 ►

Five upside down,

00:51:38 ►

six.

00:51:39 ►

Seven upside down,

00:51:41 ►

eight.

00:51:42 ►

Then I think nine to ten

00:51:43 ►

is another one of the ones

00:51:45 ►

with the exception

00:51:45 ►

and all lines change

00:51:47 ►

and so forth and so on.

00:51:48 ►

And there are many other properties

00:51:50 ►

and I worked on this

00:51:52 ►

in isolation for 20 years.

00:51:57 ►

Now I’ll show you the output

00:52:00 ►

and explain the nature of the game

00:52:02 ►

and I do want to leave time

00:52:04 ►

to go into the new stuff because the new stuff output and explain the nature of the game and I do want to leave time to

00:52:05 ►

go into the new stuff because the new stuff

00:52:08 ►

is the new stuff

00:52:11 ►

let me explain what’s going on here

00:52:18 ►

what you see on the screen

00:52:22 ►

this is time and this is a measurement of habit versus novelty.

00:52:32 ►

The higher the graph, the more habit in the system.

00:52:39 ►

The notion here is that this is a push-pull thing.

00:52:43 ►

The opposite of novelty is habit. In every

00:52:48 ►

moment, hour, day, year, millennium,

00:52:51 ►

kilocosm of time, habit and novelty are

00:52:55 ►

locked in some kind of dynamic struggle.

00:52:59 ►

You mentioned this is a Whitehead thing. I’ve never read a Whitehead book.

00:53:03 ►

Did he use it in a

00:53:05 ►

similar kind of a

00:53:07 ►

context that you were using it

00:53:09 ►

he didn’t have this

00:53:12 ►

wave he invented

00:53:14 ►

oh yeah habit and novelty

00:53:16 ►

yeah this is all

00:53:18 ►

whiteheadian metaphysic

00:53:20 ►

and the book to read if you’re

00:53:22 ►

interested the essays are

00:53:24 ►

wonderful but that’s not where the meat is

00:53:26 ►

the meat is in process and reality

00:53:29 ►

I mean the great unread philosophical

00:53:33 ►

tome of the 20th century

00:53:35 ►

process and reality by Alfred North Whitehead

00:53:38 ►

tell your friends

00:53:40 ►

anyway so this is time

00:53:44 ►

and this is habit going up

00:53:47 ►

so for instance

00:53:48 ►

when the wave moves sharply downward

00:53:52 ►

like this

00:53:53 ►

we call that a plunge into novelty

00:53:56 ►

when the wave moves upward

00:53:59 ►

like this

00:54:00 ►

we call that an ascent into habit

00:54:03 ►

and the idea is that if we get it properly scaled against

00:54:07 ►

historical time or the evolutionary record or the astrophysical record, whatever kind of phenomena

00:54:16 ►

we’re looking at, if we get this thing properly scaled against it, it will give us a description that will match our intuition or our databases about these particular phenomena. And here’s a payoff. It’ll give you a map into the future. In other words, to it, future history is no different from past history

00:54:45 ►

so it can

00:54:47 ►

if I’m right

00:54:50 ►

can give us a picture

00:54:52 ►

of future time that we

00:54:54 ►

haven’t yet lived through

00:54:55 ►

now I want to

00:54:56 ►

what we’ve got on the screen time wise

00:55:00 ►

here is 6 billion

00:55:02 ►

years

00:55:03 ►

the entire history of the earth the entire life of the planet this is

00:55:10 ►

this huge plunge into novelty here is in good accordance given the scales of how much we know

00:55:17 ►

about these events with the impact the earth collided with a Mars-sized object

00:55:25 ►

and the moon was created out of the detritus of this catastrophe.

00:55:31 ►

I know this sounds like it comes straight from Velikovsky and Sedona,

00:55:37 ►

but it’s actually, this is what planetologists believe.

00:55:42 ►

It was on the cover of Scientific American

00:55:45 ►

October 1994 with the words

00:55:48 ►

a Mars sized object collided

00:55:52 ►

with the earth to create the primitive moon

00:55:55 ►

so this happened right here

00:55:57 ►

as part really of the condensation of the planet

00:56:00 ►

the stabilization of its surface

00:56:02 ►

the infall of planetesimal stuff

00:56:06 ►

was ending and life appears

00:56:09 ►

and then there’s the crisis

00:56:12 ►

of the naked

00:56:15 ►

prokaryotes being oxidized

00:56:18 ►

by oxygen which is then a poisonous gas

00:56:21 ►

and then once that was overcome

00:56:24 ►

the rest pretty much proceeded.

00:56:27 ►

To give you an idea of how much time is on the screen,

00:56:31 ►

from the top of that little pimple there

00:56:33 ►

over to where we’re sitting tonight

00:56:36 ►

is about 650 million years.

00:56:41 ►

In other words,

00:56:42 ►

virtually the entire career of organic life

00:56:46 ►

out of the sea, on land

00:56:48 ►

is in this part of this thing

00:56:52 ►

now what I’ve done is I’ve configured it for a zoom mode

00:56:56 ►

and I want to do a zoom movie

00:56:59 ►

in on the present

00:57:01 ►

and I will narrate what’s going on.

00:57:06 ►

Seek minimum.

00:57:08 ►

No.

00:57:10 ►

Just a moment.

00:57:12 ►

No.

00:57:15 ►

What happened here?

00:57:18 ►

Zoom.

00:57:19 ►

Yes.

00:57:21 ►

Seek minimum.

00:57:25 ►

No. Approach minimum? No.

00:57:26 ►

Approach factor?

00:57:28 ►

Two.

00:57:29 ►

I’m going to enter a value of two as an approach factor.

00:57:33 ►

What this will do is slice the screen in half,

00:57:38 ►

and each screen we see will be twice as much detail

00:57:42 ►

and half as much time.

00:57:48 ►

So it will be more clear as we actually do it

00:57:49 ►

so there’s 6 billion years

00:57:55 ►

on the screen

00:57:56 ►

now 3 billion years on the screen

00:57:59 ►

now a billion and a half

00:58:03 ►

that’s the career of life

00:58:04 ►

out of the sea

00:58:06 ►

750 million years

00:58:11 ►

375 million years

00:58:16 ►

those are cometary impacts

00:58:18 ►

glaciations

00:58:20 ►

there’s 187 million years

00:58:23 ►

93 million years

00:58:28 ►

see the catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs

00:58:31 ►

46 million years

00:58:35 ►

23 million years

00:58:40 ►

the fractal has recurred

00:58:41 ►

you saw that pattern before

00:58:43 ►

11 million years

00:58:46 ►

5 million years

00:58:52 ►

again now those are ice ages

00:58:55 ►

2.9 million years

00:59:00 ►

the domain in which we arose

00:59:02 ►

1.4 million years

00:59:05 ►

732,000 years

00:59:12 ►

yes it’s a fractal

00:59:15 ►

certain patterns will recur

00:59:17 ►

366,000 years

00:59:20 ►

183,000 years

00:59:24 ►

91,000 years? 91,000 years? The last 100,000 years? And C, 45,000 years? 22,000

00:59:41 ►

years? I want to stop it now for a minute.

00:59:48 ►

Sometimes, depending on who’s in the audience and how much time we have,

00:59:50 ►

we linger as we go through those things

00:59:52 ►

to discuss sunspot cycles,

00:59:56 ►

planetesimal impacts,

00:59:58 ►

the bust-up of Gondwana land,

01:00:00 ►

whatever your thrill is.

01:00:07 ►

But, of course course people can argue that the dating

01:00:09 ►

of these kinds of things like the Permian explosion

01:00:12 ►

the breakup of Pangea

01:00:15 ►

are themselves subject

01:00:19 ►

to dispute on scales of tens of millions

01:00:22 ►

of years and so you say well

01:00:24 ►

maybe it’s working maybe maybe it’s not.

01:00:26 ►

Who can say?

01:00:28 ►

I should tell you at this point that where the end point is

01:00:33 ►

determines where all the other data points fall.

01:00:37 ►

This should be self-evident.

01:00:39 ►

And so you have to choose an end point.

01:00:42 ►

The end point that I’ve chosen that’s generating all this data

01:00:47 ►

is December 21st, 2012 A.D.

01:00:52 ►

In other words, a date less than 20 years in our own future.

01:00:57 ►

This has gotten me a lot of flack.

01:01:01 ►

There’s something about it.

01:01:03 ►

People find a prediction

01:01:05 ►

of great change more

01:01:07 ►

palatable the further off in time

01:01:10 ►

you place it

01:01:11 ►

but on a

01:01:14 ►

scale of 6 billion

01:01:15 ►

years I could

01:01:17 ►

be off

01:01:18 ►

60,000 years

01:01:21 ►

and have made an error

01:01:24 ►

of.001 percent so people who sneer and say well it

01:01:31 ►

didn’t happen like you said it happened well you know maybe i was 0.001 percent off and that

01:01:39 ►

yes okay this is the last

01:01:45 ►

22,000 years and I’ll just briefly

01:01:48 ►

interpret it for you so that

01:01:50 ►

you can

01:01:50 ►

didn’t I tell you this afternoon

01:01:57 ►

that the most uncool thing you can do

01:02:00 ►

is ask someone what did you

01:02:01 ►

just say

01:02:03 ►

and I’m a worse case than most

01:02:07 ►

because the truth is I haven’t the faintest idea

01:02:10 ►

of what I just said.

01:02:11 ►

Would you care to refresh me?

01:02:15 ►

I mean, it’s a flaw in me.

01:02:17 ►

It’s not a problem with you.

01:02:19 ►

I just can’t remember.

01:02:20 ►

It was about being off a little bit.

01:02:25 ►

Oh.

01:02:25 ►

People judge you.

01:02:26 ►

Well, see, I’m saying, okay,

01:02:29 ►

the end of the world

01:02:30 ►

or the condensation of the eschaton

01:02:34 ►

or whatever it is

01:02:34 ►

will occur at 11.18 a.m.,

01:02:40 ►

December 21st,

01:02:42 ►

11.18 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time, December 21st 1118 AM Greenwich Mean Time

01:02:45 ►

December 21st 2012

01:02:49 ►

but if I were off 60,000 years

01:02:53 ►

on a scale of

01:02:55 ►

6 billion years

01:02:58 ►

I’d have made an error of.001%

01:03:01 ►

that’s all

01:03:03 ►

I’m just pointing out that where time scales are so big 0.001%. That’s all.

01:03:06 ►

I’m just pointing out that where time scales are so big,

01:03:09 ►

precision begins to

01:03:10 ►

take on a different meaning.

01:03:12 ►

So if it doesn’t happen at 11.18,

01:03:14 ►

don’t blame you.

01:03:15 ►

You might be really close.

01:03:19 ►

I won’t

01:03:20 ►

defend it, though.

01:03:21 ►

I’ve decided to get a life

01:03:24 ►

after 2012,

01:03:26 ►

no matter what happens.

01:03:31 ►

I got the curve.

01:03:35 ►

I had the curve.

01:03:37 ►

And I knew I had to fit it to time.

01:03:40 ►

And so I did what good statisticians do.

01:03:43 ►

I sought what’s called a best-fit curve of data to algorithm.

01:03:49 ►

In other words, I…

01:03:51 ►

And people say, well, but history is not a quantifiable phenomenon.

01:03:56 ►

How can you draw a curve of the novelty of history

01:03:59 ►

to fit to your novelty way?

01:04:01 ►

Well, true, it isn’t a quantified phenomenon,

01:04:06 ►

but you can make certain broad statements about history

01:04:09 ►

that if you don’t agree with them, you’re going to have a real

01:04:12 ►

uphill battle ahead of you. Here’s

01:04:15 ►

such a statement.

01:04:17 ►

The Greek golden age of Pericles was

01:04:20 ►

truly novel. Here’s

01:04:24 ►

another one.

01:04:22 ►

was truly novel.

01:04:24 ►

Here’s another one.

01:04:31 ►

The Italian Renaissance was truly novel.

01:04:33 ►

Here’s another one.

01:04:37 ►

The 20th century was truly novel.

01:04:41 ►

Okay, so now we have three data points right there.

01:05:06 ►

So we know that if our curve has to have troughs at those three points anyway, or it will be wrong, and then we can begin to talk about more arguable points, the birth of Islam, or the fall of Rome, or the dynastic Egypt.

01:05:08 ►

These things are more arguable.

01:05:10 ►

So you start with the easy cases.

01:05:12 ►

You try and get a good fit,

01:05:15 ►

and then you look at the harder cases and see if your wave is still fitting,

01:05:18 ►

and then you proceed to still finer detail.

01:05:21 ►

And I did this for months.

01:05:24 ►

At first I thought

01:05:25 ►

that well I

01:05:28 ►

had many ideas but I finally

01:05:30 ►

decided that 2012

01:05:32 ►

was the date

01:05:34 ►

and then

01:05:35 ►

I don’t know whether this complicates

01:05:37 ►

things or helps

01:05:39 ►

depends on your mentality

01:05:41 ►

but then I discovered that

01:05:44 ►

the Mayan calendar ends on the same day

01:05:48 ►

to my mind

01:05:52 ►

this was a complication I didn’t need

01:05:55 ►

other people said well it proves you’re right

01:05:58 ►

I said no it muddies the water

01:06:00 ►

it brings in a bunch of squirrels from LA

01:06:04 ►

and it brings in a bunch of squirrels from LA and it brings

01:06:05 ►

in the

01:06:06 ►

this

01:06:07 ►

and the that

01:06:08 ►

and I would

01:06:09 ►

have just

01:06:10 ►

preferred to

01:06:10 ►

stand alone

01:06:11 ►

but for

01:06:13 ►

better or ill

01:06:14 ►

the Maya

01:06:15 ►

and I

01:06:15 ►

using different

01:06:17 ►

mathematics

01:06:17 ►

and different

01:06:18 ►

assumptions

01:06:19 ►

calculated

01:06:20 ►

our way

01:06:21 ►

out of all

01:06:22 ►

eternity

01:06:23 ►

to the same day now the only thing i have in common with

01:06:29 ►

those people is we both take mushrooms they did i do they also what revered elves it also laid you

01:06:41 ►

open for a lot of trashing a lot lot of comparisons to you and Jose Arguelles

01:06:47 ►

and stuff like that.

01:06:48 ►

Right. It was not helpful in my estimation.

01:06:53 ►

Why they calculated the end of their world

01:06:58 ►

to occur centuries after the actual collapse of their world

01:07:02 ►

is lost in time.

01:07:04 ►

We don’t know.

01:07:05 ►

I mean, because I was so dependent on the mushroom

01:07:08 ►

for the production of this theory,

01:07:10 ►

it’s almost as though there’s a barcode in there

01:07:13 ►

and says wherever in space and time you are,

01:07:17 ►

know that,

01:07:19 ►

and then it gives it in your own notational system.

01:07:21 ►

The following date is important.

01:07:26 ►

Don’t you think it would be possible

01:07:28 ►

if these elves in the other dimensions

01:07:31 ►

were able to impart some knowledge

01:07:33 ►

to those that crossed the barrier

01:07:35 ►

and entered into their domain,

01:07:38 ►

that they could come back with it

01:07:39 ►

and they could also find out this time sequence?

01:07:44 ►

Well, what’s interesting is that the numbers

01:07:46 ►

that go into the formulation of the Mayan calendar

01:07:50 ►

aren’t very similar to Mayan numbers.

01:07:53 ►

So it’s like we’re triangulating here.

01:07:57 ►

It is interesting that Mayan numbers

01:08:00 ►

look somewhat like hexagrams.

01:08:04 ►

It’s possible that ancient knowledge systems

01:08:07 ►

are all about…

01:08:09 ►

I think what it is is there’s a message

01:08:11 ►

that wants to be told.

01:08:14 ►

I don’t know who’s telling it.

01:08:16 ►

Is it the planet?

01:08:17 ►

Is it the extraterrestrials?

01:08:19 ►

Is it the DNA?

01:08:21 ►

But there’s a message that wants to be told.

01:08:23 ►

And it’s not some fuzzy you know, fuzzy thing like love

01:08:28 ►

one another. It’s more in the nature of a mathematical revelation of some sort. You’re

01:08:36 ►

supposed to be able to figure out love one another without a galactic commission having to send an expedition to inform you of that

01:08:45 ►

that’s lifting you can do

01:08:47 ►

on your own

01:08:48 ►

but what I want to point out here

01:08:53 ►

this is the last 22,000 years

01:08:55 ►

and see how from

01:08:57 ►

basically up here at the top of this

01:09:00 ►

little hill

01:09:01 ►

that’s where Homer sang his song

01:09:04 ►

and from there on, at this scale,

01:09:08 ►

it looks just like a completely uninterrupted,

01:09:10 ►

perfectly smooth descent into hyper-novelty.

01:09:14 ►

Now when we get in there and see the details,

01:09:18 ►

you will see that curve is not smooth at all.

01:09:20 ►

It’s tremendously interrupted and punctuated.

01:09:23 ►

Yeah.

01:09:23 ►

Where would the King Wen thing be on its wave?

01:09:29 ►

No, well, the entire

01:09:31 ►

we’re in the wave. The wave is being

01:09:34 ►

formed by

01:09:35 ►

it’s an imprecise term, but interference

01:09:40 ►

between King Wen’s

01:09:43 ►

sequences.

01:09:44 ►

But what time was the King Wen’s sequence formed?

01:09:49 ►

You see what I’m saying?

01:09:49 ►

1185 BC.

01:09:52 ►

Yes, we’re on the way to that.

01:09:54 ►

That’s roughly right up here

01:09:57 ►

where Homer sang his song.

01:09:59 ►

Same, you know, close enough.

01:10:02 ►

Huh?

01:10:03 ►

The Helico?

01:10:04 ►

Yeah, yeah. close enough yeah ok now

01:10:07 ►

it’s all very well when you’re talking about

01:10:11 ►

glaciations, extinctions, continental drift

01:10:14 ►

things where you have not great precision

01:10:17 ►

but if you’re of the kind of rationalist

01:10:21 ►

I am, you should be able to

01:10:24 ►

anticipate that this is going to be a tougher row to hoe

01:10:29 ►

as we get closer to the present

01:10:31 ►

for the obvious reason that we know more about the present

01:10:36 ►

and we know it with great precision.

01:10:39 ►

You know, October the 12th, 1492,

01:10:43 ►

July 4th, 1776, August the 8th, 1492. July 4th, 1776.

01:10:47 ►

August the 8th, 1914.

01:10:50 ►

It begins to get constrained.

01:10:54 ►

And so if your theory is right,

01:10:57 ►

the stakes rise.

01:10:58 ►

So having paused here 22,000 years out from today,

01:11:04 ►

let me resume the Zoom.

01:11:14 ►

And I guess we’ll still do an approach factor of two.

01:11:23 ►

Eric, how did you establish

01:11:26 ►

zero

01:11:27 ►

imagine the way

01:11:29 ►

you mean

01:11:30 ►

well I wanted

01:11:35 ►

you see I wanted

01:11:37 ►

infinite

01:11:39 ►

novelty

01:11:41 ►

to have a special value

01:11:43 ►

so zero is the only special value

01:11:47 ►

there is in the integers

01:11:49 ►

and also people sometimes say

01:11:52 ►

it’s counterintuitive

01:11:54 ►

shouldn’t it be that novelty increases

01:11:57 ►

when it goes up

01:11:58 ►

and habit increases when it goes down

01:12:01 ►

and the answer is no

01:12:04 ►

because first of all,

01:12:06 ►

that would mean that high novelty

01:12:08 ►

would just be some arbitrarily high number,

01:12:11 ►

where if you can watch it slowly

01:12:14 ►

over centuries and millennia

01:12:16 ►

make its way towards zero,

01:12:18 ►

there’s a certain drama in that that I like.

01:12:21 ►

And also, because this was coming to me

01:12:25 ►

out of the psychedelic place

01:12:27 ►

wherever that is

01:12:28 ►

I had the image of time

01:12:31 ►

like a river

01:12:32 ►

and I wanted infinite novelty

01:12:36 ►

to be the ocean

01:12:37 ►

so time had to

01:12:39 ►

flow downhill

01:12:41 ►

to get to the ocean

01:12:43 ►

so I think of it it begins in the arid highlands of habit

01:12:48 ►

and then flows thousands of years across ever-descending terrain

01:12:57 ►

until it finally is merged with the infinite ocean of novelty at altitude zero.

01:13:07 ►

I have a related question.

01:13:09 ►

How did you know to put it to a calendar, to a date, to time?

01:13:15 ►

Again, it was largely intuitional.

01:13:17 ►

I saw that there are…

01:13:22 ►

The I Ching is composed, as you know, of 64 hexagrams.

01:13:26 ►

Each hexagram is composed of six lines.

01:13:29 ►

Six times 64 is 384.

01:13:34 ►

Now, 384, as a calendar number,

01:13:38 ►

at first doesn’t look too inviting.

01:13:41 ►

It’s 19 days longer than the solar year. So if you actually had a calendar

01:13:48 ►

of 384 days, it would precess 19 days against the solar year. Nevertheless, it turns out

01:13:57 ►

in ancient Israel, there was a 384-day calendar, and parts of Islam still use a 384-day calendar.

01:14:07 ►

How much is the calendar?

01:14:09 ►

I’m not sure.

01:14:10 ►

I think it’s a calendar pre-Deuteronomy.

01:14:15 ►

But the number 384 begins to become more interesting

01:14:21 ►

when you realize that a lunation is 29 and change days

01:14:28 ►

13 lunations is

01:14:31 ►

383.89 days

01:14:35 ►

you know it’s within a

01:14:38 ►

rat’s eyebrow of 384

01:14:43 ►

so then I thought aha well this is a lunar calendar yeah a 384 day lunar

01:14:53 ►

calendar and I conferred with Wolfram Eberhardt who was my teacher in all things Chinese, and he had studied the Chinese calendar.

01:15:06 ►

He had no idea what my insane agenda was.

01:15:09 ►

He just thought I was a really motivated undergraduate.

01:15:14 ►

But he blessed all these conclusions and said,

01:15:18 ►

you know, this is all within the van of ancient Chinese thought.

01:15:23 ►

It’s all creditable.

01:15:26 ►

Yeah.

01:15:27 ►

It also seems, I may say so,

01:15:30 ►

that your counterintuitive notion

01:15:33 ►

of the direction of novelty

01:15:36 ►

as opposed to habit

01:15:37 ►

is partaking of some sort of,

01:15:39 ►

there’s something else going on.

01:15:41 ►

Some sort of muse was working with you

01:15:44 ►

because not only did it sort of resonate

01:15:47 ►

with your own journey, you went to India and the kind of journey there was always up to

01:15:54 ►

the peaks. And then you went down, descended to the Amazon. And just in a sort of symbolic

01:16:02 ►

universe, there seems to be a revolution going on in a spiritual paradigm

01:16:06 ►

where people are saying enough with this transcendent stuff.

01:16:11 ►

It’s in the human lowlands.

01:16:13 ►

Is that what you’re saying?

01:16:14 ►

Yeah.

01:16:15 ►

I can appreciate that.

01:16:18 ►

You know, the Renaissance wasn’t…

01:16:19 ►

You mentioned the Renaissance.

01:16:21 ►

There’s another resonance.

01:16:23 ►

The Renaissance didn’t start by getting real spiritual.

01:16:27 ►

It was when, what’s his name?

01:16:33 ►

Was it Petrarcho?

01:16:36 ►

Petrarcho.

01:16:37 ►

He started the Renaissance by coming down.

01:16:42 ►

He took Augustine with him

01:16:44 ►

and was thinking of having this vision.

01:16:49 ►

And instead, he left his transcendence

01:16:53 ►

and said his soul was too attached to literature and poetry and love

01:16:58 ►

for his Laura and went down into the Renaissance.

01:17:05 ►

Yes, I’m familiar with this incident.

01:17:07 ►

Yeah, so there’s something else going on

01:17:10 ►

that you were kind of plugging into

01:17:13 ►

that’s part of a whole symbolic revolution,

01:17:16 ►

I think, that’s going on now.

01:17:17 ►

Well, it couldn’t have been otherwise, I think.

01:17:21 ►

Let me run this thing forward now.

01:17:24 ►

let me run this thing forward now and

01:17:26 ►

okay

01:17:29 ►

an approach factor of two

01:17:31 ►

so it’s 22,000 years

01:17:35 ►

there’s the last 715 years

01:17:40 ►

see the Italian Renaissance

01:17:41 ►

that long low period

01:17:42 ►

that’s the year of exploration

01:17:44 ►

there we are from the European Enlightenment to the present see the Italian Renaissance, that long, low period, that’s the year of exploration.

01:17:48 ►

There we are from the European Enlightenment to the present.

01:17:54 ►

There we are from the early 18th century to the present.

01:17:59 ►

That’s the 20th century, most of it.

01:18:06 ►

That’s from roughly 1948 to the present.

01:18:12 ►

That’s roughly from sometime into the 70s.

01:18:17 ►

This is the last 11 years.

01:18:24 ►

The last five years. The pointer is pointing at today, by the way.

01:18:28 ►

The last two years, and that’s enough of that.

01:18:32 ►

And as you can see, if we were to reconfigure the thing,

01:18:35 ►

we could see into the future.

01:18:40 ►

What’s the drop there?

01:18:41 ►

The one that we just came through

01:18:45 ►

01:18:46 ►

well let’s see

01:18:48 ►

the Martian

01:18:54 ►

meteorite, the cloning of

01:18:56 ►

Dali, all those

01:18:58 ►

things that happened last year

01:19:01 ►

in 1996

01:19:02 ►

1996 was a test case

01:19:04 ►

for the theory because

01:19:06 ►

I’ve been saying since

01:19:07 ►

1975

01:19:09 ►

or something that

01:19:11 ►

1996 would produce a

01:19:13 ►

definitive novel

01:19:15 ►

event somewhere within

01:19:18 ►

two weeks of the first of August

01:19:20 ►

of that year.

01:19:22 ►

The Martian meteorite

01:19:24 ►

is good enough for me.

01:19:26 ►

That’s the confirmation

01:19:28 ►

of extraterrestrial life.

01:19:32 ►

And some people say,

01:19:32 ►

well, that’s nonsense.

01:19:34 ►

And it was bogus.

01:19:36 ►

But nothing that enormous

01:19:39 ►

arrives uncontested

01:19:41 ►

on the human plate.

01:19:44 ►

So I think I’m

01:19:45 ►

still in the

01:19:46 ►

running

01:19:47 ►

there’s a

01:19:51 ►

short

01:19:52 ►

developing

01:19:53 ►

okay

01:19:55 ►

okay

01:19:57 ►

now

01:19:58 ►

normally

01:19:59 ►

how these

01:20:00 ►

lectures

01:20:00 ►

proceed

01:20:01 ►

is we go

01:20:02 ►

slightly more

01:20:02 ►

slowly through

01:20:03 ►

this and so

01:20:04 ►

then we’ve

01:20:04 ►

arrived at the end

01:20:06 ►

of the lecture

01:20:06 ►

however

01:20:09 ►

the point on there

01:20:11 ►

from here it looks like it’s reached

01:20:14 ►

oh it looks like it’s touching zero

01:20:18 ►

no it isn’t touching zero

01:20:20 ►

the nature of the software is to always

01:20:22 ►

allow one point to touch

01:20:24 ►

the horizontal axis but there’s allow one point to touch the horizontal axis

01:20:25 ►

but there’s only one point in the entire system

01:20:29 ►

that has a valuation of zero

01:20:32 ►

so now the new part of the thing

01:20:36 ►

or what I want to talk about coming out here

01:20:39 ►

is two years ago

01:20:42 ►

there is a curious property to this thing,

01:20:47 ►

which I don’t yet understand, and I’ll briefly sketch it out.

01:20:52 ►

It’s that when you look at billions of years,

01:20:56 ►

the computer has something going on in the software

01:20:59 ►

where it keeps track of days to end.

01:21:06 ►

It’s not a piece of data which is ever displayed on the screen,

01:21:10 ►

but it’s a piece of data which the program needs to know.

01:21:13 ►

It needs to know the days to end.

01:21:16 ►

And we discovered about four years ago

01:21:19 ►

that if you put 6 billion or 20 billion years on the screen

01:21:24 ►

and then you go up to one of those peaks

01:21:27 ►

and to the exact day of the peak

01:21:33 ►

of the shift

01:21:34 ►

where it goes over the point

01:21:37 ►

and if you then look into the guts of the program

01:21:40 ►

at the days to end number

01:21:43 ►

it is in an extraordinary number of cases

01:21:47 ►

either a prime or the product of two primes

01:21:50 ►

this either astonishes you

01:21:54 ►

or means absolutely nothing

01:21:56 ►

but it’s quite peculiar

01:22:00 ►

well and quite unexpected

01:22:04 ►

and so then there was some hope

01:22:07 ►

that the thing there was a way to reconfigure

01:22:10 ►

the thing to actually search

01:22:12 ►

for large primes

01:22:13 ►

and that there was a way to

01:22:15 ►

sort of reconfigure it

01:22:18 ►

and search for large primes

01:22:19 ►

this was about three years ago

01:22:21 ►

so I got into

01:22:24 ►

email correspondence

01:22:25 ►

with a mathematician in England

01:22:27 ►

about these primes.

01:22:30 ►

And then we decided,

01:22:31 ►

we agreed that we would meet in Palenque

01:22:34 ►

two years ago.

01:22:37 ►

And he came to see me.

01:22:42 ►

And it was a…

01:22:44 ►

Well, his name is Matthew Watkins

01:22:48 ►

and if you go to my website

01:22:50 ►

you will see that there is a button there

01:22:53 ►

called the Watkins objection

01:22:55 ►

we met to discuss

01:22:59 ►

this search for primes

01:23:02 ►

but as our mathematical discussions unfolded

01:23:06 ►

it began to become clear that we had a problem

01:23:10 ►

and the problem was

01:23:12 ►

that Watkins felt

01:23:15 ►

that he had discovered an error

01:23:18 ►

in the mathematical formulation of the wave

01:23:22 ►

and it centered around a very arcane detail

01:23:29 ►

in the construction of the wave,

01:23:31 ►

which I won’t even begin to make clear to you what it was.

01:23:36 ►

But he and I understood each other,

01:23:39 ►

and I understood that if he was right,

01:23:43 ►

as he thought he was,

01:23:44 ►

that I was in deep shit indeed

01:23:47 ►

because if he was right

01:23:50 ►

I had made a mistake

01:23:51 ►

and the thing that the Logos

01:23:55 ►

had wanted me to do

01:23:57 ►

with the King Wen sequence

01:24:00 ►

I had made a blunder

01:24:03 ►

I knew what the Logos wanted but I had made a blunder. I knew what the logos wanted,

01:24:06 ►

but I had made a very,

01:24:10 ►

an error was Watkins’ position.

01:24:13 ►

And it was a difficult experience for me,

01:24:17 ►

not only because I didn’t know

01:24:19 ►

how I was going to feed myself

01:24:21 ►

if this thing went up in smoke,

01:24:24 ►

but I also

01:24:26 ►

it was very hard for me

01:24:29 ►

to understand Watkins

01:24:30 ►

and any of you

01:24:32 ►

who are professional mathematicians

01:24:34 ►

who try to talk to me about this

01:24:36 ►

will discover that

01:24:37 ►

I’m an idiot savant

01:24:39 ►

you know, it’s mine

01:24:41 ►

I invented it

01:24:43 ►

but I can’t defend it in

01:24:45 ►

academic mathematical terms

01:24:48 ►

I don’t think of myself as

01:24:52 ►

Einstein, certainly, but there is a story

01:24:55 ►

about Einstein that after he published the general

01:24:58 ►

theory of relativity, a physicist named

01:25:01 ►

Herman Bondi launched a furious

01:25:04 ►

attack on it.

01:25:06 ►

And Niels Bohr went to Einstein

01:25:08 ►

and he said,

01:25:09 ►

Bondé is saying all these things.

01:25:12 ►

He’s publishing all these papers.

01:25:14 ►

What are you going to do about it?

01:25:15 ►

And Einstein said,

01:25:17 ►

I can’t do anything about it.

01:25:19 ►

I cannot understand the man’s objection.

01:25:23 ►

So this was the position

01:25:26 ►

I found myself in.

01:25:29 ►

Watkins was terrifying.

01:25:31 ►

He was,

01:25:31 ►

I never had the guts

01:25:33 ►

to ask him how old he was.

01:25:35 ►

My guess would be

01:25:36 ►

19,

01:25:38 ►

something like that.

01:25:41 ►

I mean,

01:25:42 ►

just one of these

01:25:43 ►

flaming geniuses, just one of these people for whom quadratic equations came like walking, you know.

01:25:54 ►

And so we had this series of, I thought of it as the meetings by the pool. We had three long meetings by the pool where my world wilted, curled, melted,

01:26:10 ►

retracted and finally it was just, it was very sort of sad actually. And, but it wasn’t

01:26:19 ►

all, it was also, it wasn’t definitive because I could not understand him and he was also I think even he would agree

01:26:25 ►

arrogant in that

01:26:28 ►

way that you’re trained to be

01:26:30 ►

in the British university system

01:26:32 ►

I mean you are to be

01:26:34 ►

scathing you are to take no

01:26:36 ►

prisoners and he said

01:26:38 ►

I want to write a paper about

01:26:40 ►

your wave

01:26:42 ►

and I said fine

01:26:44 ►

and we’ll put it on the website

01:26:46 ►

and he said

01:26:47 ►

I’m going to put forward my objection

01:26:53 ►

he said what shall I call the paper

01:26:56 ►

and I said well how about

01:26:58 ►

autopsy for a mathematical hallucination

01:27:01 ►

when you really get into the spirit of this thing,

01:27:07 ►

you say, you know, let me guide the knife.

01:27:09 ►

Let me turn on the saw.

01:27:12 ►

Don’t trouble yourself.

01:27:17 ►

So how about autopsy for a mathematical hallucination?

01:27:22 ►

He said, fine.

01:27:23 ►

And then he did it.

01:27:25 ►

And it was, you know,

01:27:28 ►

several pages of mathematical notation

01:27:33 ►

and several nasty paragraphs.

01:27:36 ►

And I sat with it for months.

01:27:38 ►

And then I said,

01:27:38 ►

I can’t really understand Watkins,

01:27:42 ►

but I do understand what I intended.

01:27:46 ►

And so what I’m going to do is I’m just going to answer his objection by once again as clearly as

01:27:54 ►

possible defining my methods and putting that on the internet and then let the

01:28:01 ►

chips fall where they may and some third party will have to resolve all this

01:28:06 ►

so I did that

01:28:08 ►

and Watkins took a leave of absence

01:28:11 ►

and I understand he was last seen

01:28:14 ►

somewhere in the west of Ireland

01:28:16 ►

with a donkey and a harp

01:28:19 ►

truly

01:28:20 ►

and he basically then just dismissed the whole thing

01:28:29 ►

and said well you’re a cult

01:28:30 ►

your people are morons

01:28:33 ►

you can’t even understand this objection

01:28:36 ►

and this whole thing is really boring to me

01:28:39 ►

and so then it was sort of left like that

01:28:44 ►

but I got good support

01:28:47 ►

from my mathematical friends

01:28:49 ►

and Ralph Abraham was wonderful

01:28:51 ►

and he said

01:28:52 ►

he told all kinds of stories

01:28:55 ►

from the history of mathematics

01:28:57 ►

about people who had made

01:28:59 ►

enormous blunders

01:29:00 ►

whose names are still enshrined

01:29:03 ►

in the stars

01:29:04 ►

and on and on

01:29:06 ►

but I really felt

01:29:08 ►

shaky about the whole thing

01:29:10 ►

and I talked

01:29:12 ►

about it at Esalen

01:29:13 ►

but Watkins

01:29:16 ►

never dealt

01:29:17 ►

with the fact that the wave did

01:29:20 ►

describe time

01:29:21 ►

he wasn’t interested in that

01:29:23 ►

he just said you made a mistake,

01:29:26 ►

and so why should we talk any further?

01:29:29 ►

You made a mistake.

01:29:31 ►

And so trying to say, you know,

01:29:33 ►

that it adds up or it looks good or so far,

01:29:35 ►

you made a mistake.

01:29:39 ►

Well, in the past seven, eight months,

01:29:43 ►

I’ve been working very quietly

01:29:46 ►

with a person

01:29:48 ►

who came out of the woodwork

01:29:49 ►

and I don’t think

01:29:52 ►

he wants his name yet spoken

01:29:54 ►

in public so all I

01:29:56 ►

can tell you is he is a

01:29:58 ►

professional mathematician

01:29:59 ►

his ordinary

01:30:01 ►

job is modeling

01:30:03 ►

thermonuclear fusion processes

01:30:06 ►

for the United States government at a desert installation

01:30:10 ►

somewhere in the American Southwest.

01:30:14 ►

His mathematical credentials are impeccable.

01:30:18 ►

And he said, I want to go to bedrock with this Watkins thing.

01:30:24 ►

And I’m going to do a complete vector

01:30:27 ►

analysis of the wave

01:30:29 ►

and break it down at every level

01:30:31 ►

formalize every step

01:30:33 ►

and try to understand

01:30:35 ►

what has happened here

01:30:37 ►

because he like me was liked

01:30:39 ►

the theory

01:30:40 ►

so we’ve been working very

01:30:43 ►

quietly or rather I’ve been reading his email and he has

01:30:47 ►

been working. And here’s what we come up with. I made a mistake. I did make a mistake.

01:31:01 ►

I made a mistake.

01:31:04 ►

I did make a mistake.

01:31:10 ►

That’s, for me, the bad news.

01:31:17 ►

But it turns out that the mistake I made was tiny.

01:31:22 ►

The wave that you saw tonight, the wave that I’ve shown you over and over again, year after

01:31:29 ►

year, is, and this is not a fuzzy figure or a guess or anything like that, it’s wrong by 3%. There’s a 3% difference

01:31:46 ►

between this wave

01:31:48 ►

and the wave that all parties

01:31:51 ►

have now converged upon

01:31:53 ►

as in fact the true wave.

01:31:57 ►

We call this the time wave, TW.

01:32:01 ►

We’re calling the new one the CTW,

01:32:04 ►

the corrected time wave.

01:32:10 ►

My mistake was, as Watkins defined it, but he never carried through.

01:32:20 ►

Something about his way of thinking was, once he discovered I’d made a mistake,

01:32:26 ►

for him he felt that if we think of it as a game,

01:32:30 ►

that he had won the game.

01:32:32 ►

He never went on to see what the consequences of the mistake were.

01:32:38 ►

And the consequences of the mistake were to distort the values

01:32:42 ►

by overall 3%.

01:32:45 ►

Hundreds of screens are within less than 1% difference of each other.

01:32:57 ►

The overall conclusions that come out of these two years of mathematical hell

01:33:03 ►

that we’ve embroiled in

01:33:05 ►

is actually we’re now in more robust shape than ever

01:33:09 ►

because thanks to this gentleman’s work

01:33:12 ►

which will be posted on the internet shortly

01:33:15 ►

and all of you who have TimeWave Zero software

01:33:19 ►

we’re going to put a file up

01:33:22 ►

which you will be able to download

01:33:24 ►

and pull out the bad values, plug in the good values,

01:33:30 ►

and then the interface will run the new wave for you.

01:33:35 ►

And good news from my point of view is that in the process of this going on,

01:33:42 ►

the time wave has gone from being the mathematical hallucination

01:33:46 ►

of Terence McKenna

01:33:47 ►

to a vetted

01:33:49 ►

formalism having been

01:33:51 ►

hammered on and had its tires

01:33:53 ►

kicked by some of the best

01:33:55 ►

mathematicians in the business

01:33:57 ►

all stages in the construction

01:33:59 ►

of the wave are now

01:34:01 ►

formally defined

01:34:03 ►

the overall effect of adopting

01:34:06 ►

the corrected time wave is truly good news

01:34:10 ►

and it should be surprised to no one

01:34:12 ►

it turns out the universe is even more novel

01:34:15 ►

than I thought it was

01:34:17 ►

because the new time wave tends to start

01:34:22 ►

closer to zero

01:34:23 ►

and hue closer to it as it moves along.

01:34:28 ►

So the overall picture that emerges

01:34:30 ►

is of a more novel universe

01:34:33 ►

than we thought we had before.

01:34:36 ►

And then, and this is, to my mind,

01:34:40 ►

the ultimate payback,

01:34:42 ►

though I have always argued publicly

01:34:45 ►

feeling it was the

01:34:47 ►

obligation of the public

01:34:49 ►

to be my opposition

01:34:51 ►

though I have always argued publicly

01:34:54 ►

for the congruency

01:34:56 ►

of these screens

01:34:58 ►

to historical data

01:34:59 ►

I’ve always been aware

01:35:02 ►

of a couple of things

01:35:04 ►

that were puzzling to me.

01:35:06 ►

One of them was, why is it that that plunge into novelty in the 10th century for the Umayyad caliphates

01:35:16 ►

reaches a greater depth of novelty than the founding moment of Islam 200 years before,

01:35:24 ►

when it seems derivative of Islam.

01:35:28 ►

And I just held this in my mind.

01:35:30 ►

I felt, you know,

01:35:32 ►

I need to study the Umayyad caliphates.

01:35:34 ►

I need to study the foundation of Islam.

01:35:36 ►

I need to figure out why this is.

01:35:38 ►

But it always irked me.

01:35:41 ►

Nobody ever mentioned it to me

01:35:45 ►

or pointed it out

01:35:46 ►

I discovered this slight discrepancy

01:35:50 ►

in my own intuition about how the wave should work

01:35:53 ►

I also discovered another slight discrepancy

01:35:57 ►

about my intuition how the wave should work

01:36:00 ►

which is I always felt

01:36:02 ►

that the novelty graph for World War II

01:36:07 ►

should reach the greatest descent into novelty

01:36:11 ►

at the use of the atomic bombs over Japan.

01:36:15 ►

After all, a new physical principle is involved.

01:36:20 ►

But I always knew that by the old time wave,

01:36:47 ►

But I always knew that with the corrections in place,

01:36:51 ►

both of these problems have been rectified. And now the founding moment of Islam is more novel, slightly,

01:36:57 ►

than the Umayyad caliphates.

01:36:59 ►

And the use of atomic weapons over Japan is more novel, slightly,

01:37:04 ►

than the battle of

01:37:05 ►

Stalingrad and there are

01:37:07 ►

a couple of other areas

01:37:09 ►

too technical or too

01:37:11 ►

obscurantist to go into

01:37:13 ►

at the moment but

01:37:15 ►

to me it was

01:37:18 ►

a win-win situation

01:37:19 ►

the only slightly galling thing

01:37:21 ►

about the whole thing was I

01:37:23 ►

personally have to

01:37:25 ►

admit that

01:37:26 ►

I made

01:37:27 ►

and defended

01:37:28 ►

for 22

01:37:29 ►

years or

01:37:30 ►

however long

01:37:31 ►

it was

01:37:31 ►

a 3%

01:37:35 ►

skew

01:37:36 ►

of the

01:37:37 ►

values

01:37:38 ►

because I

01:37:39 ►

made a

01:37:40 ►

methodological

01:37:41 ►

error in

01:37:42 ►

the scoring

01:37:42 ►

of the

01:37:44 ►

time wave

01:37:45 ►

now that that’s corrected

01:37:47 ►

and that we have a complete vector analysis

01:37:51 ►

of the entire wave

01:37:53 ►

and it is now a completely explicit mathematical object

01:37:57 ►

that any trained mathematician in the world

01:38:00 ►

can now answer any conceivable question

01:38:04 ►

that might be put

01:38:05 ►

about its formalism

01:38:07 ►

we’re ready for prime time I think

01:38:12 ►

yeah

01:38:13 ►

yes 3%

01:38:18 ►

no no

01:38:21 ►

that’s all, it has nothing to do with that

01:38:24 ►

all that stuff about 2012

01:38:27 ►

and all that you get to keep

01:38:29 ►

that was never even up for grabs

01:38:32 ►

but I’m sorry I don’t have

01:38:34 ►

an overhead projector

01:38:37 ►

maybe we could bring actually the lights up a little for this

01:38:40 ►

gently please

01:38:42 ►

for the cannabinated among us.

01:38:49 ►

Yeah, I want to go back to that. To

01:38:53 ►

explain to you what I mean, I have a

01:38:58 ►

couple of illustrations here. Yeah, I

01:39:01 ►

think so. Remember, I’ve talked for years about history’s fractal mountain.

01:39:09 ►

Okay, here is what I defended for 22 years, this wave.

01:39:18 ►

Here’s the truth of the matter.

01:39:20 ►

That’s the CTW.

01:39:22 ►

Yeah, that’s the CTW over here.

01:39:24 ►

When’s the next mountain? When’s the CTW over here

01:39:25 ►

when’s the next mountain

01:39:26 ►

when’s the next mountain

01:39:27 ►

September 7th

01:39:33 ►

we have been

01:39:35 ►

moving upward into habit

01:39:37 ►

and on September 7th

01:39:39 ►

it will turn down

01:39:41 ►

we are now

01:39:44 ►

undergoing a series of

01:39:45 ►

oscillations before 2012

01:39:48 ►

I’ll leave this up

01:39:50 ►

after this evening

01:39:51 ►

or for the rest of this evening

01:39:53 ►

and if you care to stay after the lecture

01:39:55 ►

you can play with it

01:39:56 ►

there’s always people in the room

01:39:58 ►

who know how to rescale it

01:40:00 ►

and run it for you

01:40:01 ►

I don’t know how well you can see these

01:40:03 ►

but do you see that it’s

01:40:05 ►

damn near at this scale the same way? But in fact, it is not the same way. Okay, so

01:40:12 ►

that’s history’s fractal mountain. This is what I thought it was. This is what the new

01:40:17 ►

vetted, corrected, and cleaned up version turns it out to be. Here are some more examples.

01:40:26 ►

This is from,

01:40:27 ►

now this one is more dramatically different.

01:40:30 ►

This is from 213 B.C.

01:40:38 ►

to 6, I don’t know what’s going on,

01:40:42 ►

oh, to 2012.

01:40:45 ►

Now wait a minute here.

01:40:47 ►

I’m not sure enough of what this one is to show you.

01:40:59 ►

Here’s two versions of 1905.

01:41:04 ►

Old Wave. New Wave. Yeah. two versions of 1905. Old wave,

01:41:05 ►

new wave.

01:41:07 ►

Yeah.

01:41:09 ►

In certain situations it is different.

01:41:11 ►

So the dates actually must change?

01:41:13 ►

No. Well, not the end date.

01:41:16 ►

Not the end date, but like for example

01:41:17 ►

when you just said September 7th?

01:41:20 ►

Oh, things like that

01:41:21 ►

change very, very slightly.

01:41:24 ►

Actually, sometimes what happens is that

01:41:27 ►

the actual transition date doesn’t change,

01:41:31 ►

but the path of the graph to it and from it

01:41:34 ►

has a different topology.

01:41:37 ►

I think you see that here.

01:41:38 ►

See how these both reach their novelty maxima

01:41:42 ►

at the same point,

01:41:44 ►

but the path to it is different

01:41:46 ►

so did this

01:41:47 ►

the corruption that was made

01:41:49 ►

did it address all that

01:41:51 ►

that should be counted as a crime?

01:41:53 ►

no, that was completely left in the dust

01:41:56 ►

while all this other fighting

01:41:58 ►

went on

01:41:59 ►

here’s the one that

01:42:00 ►

here’s the one

01:42:04 ►

that shows one of the places where I myself had doubts.

01:42:09 ►

This is the period from 1935 to 1955.

01:42:15 ►

In other words, including all of World War II.

01:42:19 ►

Here’s the old version, new version.

01:42:23 ►

Here’s the old version, new version.

01:42:26 ►

And as you… 45.

01:42:27 ►

Yeah, the 45 is weighted heavier here

01:42:31 ►

and 43 is weighted heavier here.

01:42:35 ►

So it’s amazing to me

01:42:39 ►

that I could have claimed for 22 years

01:42:42 ►

that it described time,

01:42:44 ►

argued all these cases,

01:42:46 ►

finally gotten it straightened out

01:42:48 ►

and discovered that it describes time even better than it did before.

01:42:53 ►

Have you found any new discrepancies or anything?

01:42:56 ►

Have you had a chance to really go through the whole thing

01:42:58 ►

and really find some?

01:43:00 ►

No. See, I haven’t yet actually had a chance

01:43:04 ►

to load the new data into my own version of Time Wave Zero.

01:43:09 ►

When I do, I’ll go through really with a fine-tooth comb, as you say,

01:43:15 ►

because there are about 50 or 60 historical incidents that are indices for this.

01:43:21 ►

They all have to be looked at.

01:43:23 ►

Now, here are two that are quite different.

01:43:27 ►

This is 1915.

01:43:31 ►

Old version.

01:43:34 ►

New version.

01:43:37 ►

Now, the World War II began in 1914.

01:43:43 ►

One.

01:43:44 ►

World War I. Sorry. World War I. I said it began in 1914. One. World War I.

01:43:45 ►

Sorry.

01:43:46 ►

World War I.

01:43:47 ►

I said it began in one?

01:43:49 ►

Couldn’t be.

01:43:50 ►

No.

01:43:51 ►

Yes, World War I began in 1914.

01:43:53 ►

So again you see that the new data is much more congruent with the facts of the matter.

01:44:02 ►

And so forth.

01:44:04 ►

Let’s see if I have any others

01:44:05 ►

that might be

01:44:06 ►

at a glance useful

01:44:09 ►

well here’s one

01:44:14 ►

this is the one we’ve always argued over

01:44:17 ►

all these many years

01:44:19 ►

and it’s interesting

01:44:21 ►

this is the one basically from the fall of Rome

01:44:26 ►

to the present

01:44:27 ►

old version

01:44:29 ►

remember and here’s foundation of Islam

01:44:32 ►

Umayyad Caliphate

01:44:34 ►

you’ve practically memorized this stuff

01:44:37 ►

black death

01:44:38 ►

I know there’s the black death

01:44:41 ►

and there’s the renaissance

01:44:43 ►

and there’s the enlightenment

01:44:44 ►

here’s the Black Death, and there’s the Renaissance, and there’s the Enlightenment. Here’s the new version.

01:44:47 ►

Quite interestingly different.

01:44:51 ►

Much food for thought.

01:44:55 ►

So bottom line is, as I said,

01:45:00 ►

all I had to do to make this a field

01:45:03 ►

of genuine human study and endeavor

01:45:06 ►

instead of my own little bailiwick

01:45:08 ►

is admit that I made a mistake

01:45:11 ►

which I freely do

01:45:13 ►

I did make a mistake

01:45:15 ►

and I should say I’m grateful to all of the people

01:45:18 ►

who participated in this

01:45:20 ►

I’ve never feared the knife

01:45:23 ►

including the young mathematicians this I don’t mind I’ve never feared the knife and you know

01:45:25 ►

including the young mathematician

01:45:27 ►

yes Watkins

01:45:28 ►

first and foremost

01:45:31 ►

because he

01:45:33 ►

he put his finger

01:45:35 ►

on the error and then it all

01:45:37 ►

proceeded from there

01:45:39 ►

and the whole thing has

01:45:41 ►

been since its conception

01:45:43 ►

in 1971,

01:45:50 ►

moving slowly toward a process of being an ever more robust object in the theater of intellectual discourse.

01:45:53 ►

And I didn’t bother to bring my colleague’s notes over tonight

01:45:58 ►

because it would be like exhibiting hieroglyphs to colleagues,

01:46:04 ►

at least it is to me,

01:46:06 ►

but he has produced, you know,

01:46:09 ►

eight pages of vector analysis

01:46:12 ►

that just lays the whole thing out from A to dot.

01:46:16 ►

Yes.

01:46:17 ►

Can you explain briefly again

01:46:20 ►

what you mean by the end of time?

01:46:25 ►

Well, simply this asymptotic explosion of novelty. In other words, what is it like when

01:46:35 ►

you have more change in a single day than you used to have in a thousand years? What

01:46:41 ►

is it like when you have more change in a second than you’ve had in the previous hundred thousand years

01:46:48 ►

I’ll lay out for you the mathematics of the time wave

01:46:52 ►

in terms of its closure

01:46:54 ►

and then we can probably call it quits

01:46:56 ►

but here’s how this theory works

01:47:00 ►

here’s the kind of universe this theory says we’re living in. It says that the universe is approximately 72 billion years old.

01:47:11 ►

That’s a lot older than orthodox astrophysics says.

01:47:16 ►

They’re fighting over whether it’s 9 to 14.

01:47:20 ►

This theory says it’s 72 billion years old.

01:47:25 ►

That’s the first cycle of its unfolding.

01:47:31 ►

164th of the way from the end of that cycle,

01:47:36 ►

it enters another cycle.

01:47:38 ►

That cycle is 1.3 billion years long.

01:47:50 ►

It’s another level of concrescence, and I take it to be the domain of life. That’s about the amount of time life has been around. Well, the next

01:47:56 ►

level is 275 million years long. What we’re doing each time is we’re dividing by 64.

01:48:07 ►

Nothing complicated.

01:48:10 ►

So 72 billion divided by 64

01:48:13 ►

equals 1.3 billion.

01:48:16 ►

Divided by 64 equals, I’m guessing,

01:48:19 ►

but roughly 275 million

01:48:22 ►

divided by 64 is, I don’t know,

01:48:26 ►

3 or 4 million,

01:48:28 ►

divided by 64 is 175,000

01:48:32 ►

or something like that,

01:48:34 ►

divided by 64 is 4,306,

01:48:38 ►

the domain of history as we know it.

01:48:42 ►

The next division is 67 years

01:48:46 ►

the period from the moment

01:48:48 ►

of the dropping of the atom bomb

01:48:50 ►

on Hiroshima until

01:48:52 ►

the solstice of 2012

01:48:54 ►

67 years

01:48:56 ►

the next cycle

01:48:58 ►

is 384

01:49:00 ►

days it will begin

01:49:02 ►

late in

01:49:04 ►

2011

01:49:04 ►

the next cycle is 6 days

01:49:08 ►

long now understand that in each

01:49:10 ►

one of these cycles

01:49:12 ►

as much novelty happens

01:49:14 ►

as happened in

01:49:16 ►

all the previous

01:49:18 ►

cycles so from

01:49:20 ►

384 days you go to

01:49:22 ►

a cycle 6 days

01:49:24 ►

from that you go to a cycle 6 days from that you go

01:49:26 ►

to a cycle an hour and 35 minutes

01:49:29 ►

long then you go to a cycle

01:49:32 ►

a minute and a half long then a cycle

01:49:35 ►

1.3 seconds long

01:49:38 ►

and you just keep doing this

01:49:41 ►

dividing by 64 until you

01:49:44 ►

reach the domain of Planck’s

01:49:46 ►

constant 6.55

01:49:48 ►

times 10 to the minus

01:49:50 ►

25 erg seconds

01:49:52 ►

technically known

01:49:54 ►

as a jiffy

01:49:55 ►

among

01:49:58 ►

us professionals

01:49:59 ►

and beyond

01:50:01 ►

the realm of the

01:50:04 ►

jiffy,

01:50:08 ►

there is no need to carry out these divisions because it means nothing.

01:50:11 ►

You’ve reached the grain upon which reality is being printed.

01:50:18 ►

There is nothing.

01:50:19 ►

Well, so if we have a universe

01:50:21 ►

that is undergoing this collapse into hyper-novelty

01:50:26 ►

and it has to start at age 72 billion years

01:50:32 ►

and collapse down to 6.55 times 10 to the minus 23rd erg seconds,

01:50:38 ►

how much time do you think it has left in its existence

01:50:44 ►

when it’s halfway through the process? And the answer is an hour and 35 minutes.

01:51:02 ►

go half of its evolutionary unfolding in the

01:51:04 ►

last hour and 35

01:51:05 ►

minutes of its existence

01:51:07 ►

and that’s what I mean

01:51:10 ►

by the end of the world

01:51:11 ►

I mean that you know there will be

01:51:14 ►

more novelty

01:51:15 ►

jammed into every

01:51:18 ►

nanosecond

01:51:19 ►

of those last 35 minutes

01:51:22 ►

than there previously

01:51:23 ►

were in millions of years of cosmic time.

01:51:28 ►

It’s as though we’re falling into a black hole,

01:51:32 ►

not of gravitational compression,

01:51:35 ►

but of novelty.

01:51:38 ►

And it’s what has called us forth

01:51:40 ►

out of animal organization.

01:51:43 ►

It’s what has given,

01:51:45 ►

put these enormous technical tools in

01:51:47 ►

our hands. It’s what shapes

01:51:49 ►

our dreams. It’s what’s calling

01:51:52 ►

us home.

01:51:53 ►

It’s why I believe

01:51:55 ►

that in less than a hundred

01:51:57 ►

years this planet will

01:51:59 ►

be, from the human point of view,

01:52:02 ►

empty.

01:52:03 ►

The thing, whatever it is

01:52:05 ►

will have come and gone

01:52:07 ►

the novelty

01:52:08 ►

and I suspect what it is

01:52:09 ►

is it’s actually some kind of

01:52:12 ►

other dimension

01:52:13 ►

the way I think of it is

01:52:16 ►

novelty is crowding in

01:52:19 ►

to three dimensional space time

01:52:21 ►

and crowding in

01:52:23 ►

and crowding in

01:52:24 ►

what happens in 2012, December 2012,

01:52:29 ►

is the three-dimensional space-time continuum

01:52:33 ►

will be unable to contain any more novelty.

01:52:37 ►

And like water flowing out of an overfilled bucket,

01:52:41 ►

the novelty will actually begin to push into another dimension.

01:52:47 ►

It will actually force

01:52:49 ►

into existence

01:52:52 ►

another ontological dimension

01:52:56 ►

to reality that will contain it.

01:52:59 ►

And we call this

01:53:01 ►

true pure spirit

01:53:02 ►

or the coming of Maitreya

01:53:04 ►

or the end of the world.

01:53:07 ►

I mean, human languages are utterly inadequate to this.

01:53:11 ►

We’re not causing it. We can’t understand it.

01:53:14 ►

We are like corks on the cosmic ocean being carried toward what is essentially the climax of physics in three-dimensional space-time.

01:53:25 ►

And people who say, well, don’t you find it rather odd that we’re here to witness it,

01:53:33 ►

means you didn’t understand theory.

01:53:36 ►

We’re here to witness it because we were called into existence as part of the process.

01:53:43 ►

into existence as part of the process we’re here to witness it

01:53:46 ►

because if it’s happening

01:53:49 ►

we’re happening

01:53:50 ►

because we’re part of this expression

01:53:54 ►

of novelty

01:53:56 ►

we’re part of this alien thing

01:54:01 ►

I mean it’s always been

01:54:05 ►

revealing itself,

01:54:08 ►

but at ever greater speeds.

01:54:11 ►

And, you know, somewhere around 50,000 years ago,

01:54:14 ►

if you were paying attention,

01:54:15 ►

you would have smelled it in the air.

01:54:18 ►

And if you weren’t paying attention then,

01:54:20 ►

check back at dynastic Egypt.

01:54:23 ►

And if you’re still too dull to pick it up

01:54:25 ►

check in on the 20th century

01:54:28 ►

and I don’t think anybody can miss it

01:54:30 ►

now you know the air is

01:54:32 ►

filled with

01:54:33 ►

the eminence of the

01:54:36 ►

eschaton I mean we are

01:54:38 ►

now so dynamically locked

01:54:40 ►

with this field of attraction

01:54:42 ►

that all you have to do is

01:54:44 ►

take a cat nap,

01:54:46 ►

smoke a J, lie in a hot tub,

01:54:50 ►

and it’s waiting just behind your eyelids,

01:54:53 ►

just under the surface of ordinary reality.

01:54:56 ►

You don’t have to look far or move fast

01:54:59 ►

to find it waiting.

01:55:02 ►

The sense of the eminence of the eschaton

01:55:04 ►

is the pervading essence of life in the 20th century.

01:55:12 ►

Or I’m a monkey’s uncle.

01:55:15 ►

Thank you very much.

01:55:22 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:55:25 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:55:30 ►

And that was how Terrence expected the world would come to an end on December 21, 2012.

01:55:36 ►

Or, he would be a monkey’s uncle, so he said.

01:55:41 ►

But let’s see if there may still be some redeeming value from Terrence’s big ideas about time. So he said. Saturday Night Sessions, where he gave his standard time wave talk. And if you’d like to listen to the first part of the next time that he gave this talk,

01:56:08 ►

late in the same year of 1997, well, you can listen to that in my podcast number 204,

01:56:15 ►

which I posted on November 18th, 2009.

01:56:19 ►

I think that I maybe only played the first 20 minutes or so of that Saturday Night Talk

01:56:24 ►

in the podcast,

01:56:31 ►

but you may find it interesting anyway. Now, when Terrence said that the universe has an appetite for complexity, as the universe grows, it grows ever more complex. Well, that does seem obviously

01:56:37 ►

true. But we don’t have to actually look at the entire universe to come to that conclusion.

01:56:43 ►

Just look at your own life. From the time you were an infant until now, well, it seems to me a safe bet that your own life

01:56:50 ►

has grown more complex as time has progressed. Now, I don’t have any suggestions as to what that

01:56:57 ►

may mean, but it is something that I’m going to give a little more thought to. Most people that

01:57:03 ►

I know from time to time say that they would like their lives to become simpler, less complex.

01:57:09 ►

So is that actually possible without reversing time?

01:57:14 ►

Another thing that Terrence said in this talk was that there would be more change in the next 10 years than in the previous 5 million years.

01:57:22 ►

Well, it seems to me that while inventions like the airplane,

01:57:26 ►

the automobile, and the telephone,

01:57:28 ►

not to mention computers and the Internet,

01:57:31 ►

certainly seem to support his hypothesis,

01:57:34 ►

what is left unmentioned is how we define change.

01:57:38 ►

Are we talking only about technology?

01:57:40 ►

Or should we also be looking at things like human behavior?

01:57:44 ►

When you consider the barbaric ways in which we humans seem to be treating one another,

01:57:49 ►

well, I’m not so sure that much change has taken place at all since 1997.

01:57:55 ►

And then there’s this point where Terence said that he believes that the universe does know where it’s going,

01:58:01 ►

because it’s going even deeper into novelty.

01:58:04 ►

Well, I can buy the even deeper into novelty idea,

01:58:08 ►

but I’ve got a real problem with thinking that the universe itself knows where it’s going.

01:58:13 ►

Doesn’t that give some kind of essential life awareness to the universe itself?

01:58:18 ►

Is he saying that the universe is some kind of a being that can actually know something?

01:58:23 ►

I don’t think that Terrence actually meant that,

01:58:26 ►

but his language there is a little bit loose for me.

01:58:30 ►

So those are a few of the ideas that this talk of Terrence’s sparked in my mind

01:58:35 ►

as I was listening to him just now,

01:58:37 ►

but there is something else that came into focus for me as well.

01:58:41 ►

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to throw the baby out with the

01:58:45 ►

bathwater, so to speak. The overall majority of Terrence’s ideas I have always found quite

01:58:50 ►

scintillating. And even though I disagreed with him about the time wave, well, that doesn’t mean

01:58:55 ►

that I haven’t been thinking about some of the implications of that idea. But I think we have

01:59:01 ►

to face up to what I consider to be a few serious flaws in his time wave hypothesis.

01:59:07 ►

Besides the fact that there was no great shift that we know of that took place in 2012,

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as he said in this talk, and I quote,

01:59:15 ►

where the endpoint is determines where all the other data points fall,

01:59:20 ►

and this should be self-evident, end quote.

01:59:22 ►

Of course, this then opens up the possibility of moving the end point and having at it once again.

01:59:30 ►

But are you sure that this would really be a good use of our time?

01:59:34 ►

As Terence has made very clear, the graphical chart of the time wave is, at its most basic level,

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a graphical representation of the I Ching.

01:59:44 ►

at its most basic level, a graphical representation of the I Ching.

01:59:50 ►

It is a graph created by manipulating the multiple ways the I Ching may be interpreted.

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I could go on, but you’re every bit as smart as I am, so just think about that for a while.

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As he said, that’s where I got the curve.

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And it doesn’t even purport to be a representation of the meaning of the I Ching,

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but only of the differences in the symbols.

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And that is the basis of his wave, which as it turns out is also a fractal wave.

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So besides accepting the I Ching as the ultimate divination tool,

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the time wave also requires that we reject the possibility that human history is cyclic and instead accept it as a fact

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that history is fractal.

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And, of course, there is also the fact that to support this hypothesis, Terence very blandly

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ignores the entire field of astrophysics and declares that, contrary to virtually every

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scientific opinion, that his opinion is that the universe is actually 72 billion years old.

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And that’s just one stretch too many for me.

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But then again, it’s something you’re going to have to decide on your own,

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because I’m certainly no expert on these things.

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Now, those are a few of my major complaints about Terence’s time-wave hypothesis.

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And let’s be honest here and not call it a theory,

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unless, of course, you can say it actually has been tested and it failed.

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However, maybe we should hold on for a moment here

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and take a little closer to listen to some of the things

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that Terence had to say about time itself

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and see if there still isn’t some of his work here

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that is worth looking into a little more closely.

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What I’m thinking about is the nature of time itself.

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Just two days ago, my 11-year-old granddaughter asked me why sometimes time is fast and sometimes time is slow.

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And since I was just previewing today’s talk at the time, well, the way she phrased it struck me.

02:01:43 ►

She didn’t say why did time seem to

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go fast. She said why is time sometimes fast and why is time sometimes slow? Is it? Is time fast

02:01:55 ►

and slow? We’ve all had experiences of time seeming to move at different speeds, so what’s that all

02:02:01 ►

about? Well, if you are a physicist, you can now breathe a sigh of relief here.

02:02:07 ►

Because I’m not going to suggest that we screw with the way that we measure time in the physical world.

02:02:13 ►

For one thing, if time wasn’t linear, our computers wouldn’t be working right now.

02:02:18 ►

But emotionally, time does seem to have different properties under varying conditions.

02:02:23 ►

So what I’ve been playing with these

02:02:25 ►

past few days, when it was too hot in this little room to turn on my computer, is that I’ve been

02:02:30 ►

experimenting with ways that an emotional time wave could be created for our own lives. And one

02:02:37 ►

of the things that always bothered me about Terence’s wave is that his proposal that novelty

02:02:41 ►

never goes away, never goes below the horizontal axis.

02:02:47 ►

And, I don’t know, that just didn’t feel right to me.

02:02:52 ►

So, in my little experiments, all of which pretty much suck, by the way,

02:02:56 ►

but anyway, I used a plus and minus scale,

02:03:00 ►

indicating whether I was feeling good or feeling neutral or bad at the time.

02:03:03 ►

And I’ve experimented with several ways to set plot points, like the day I began a new job,

02:03:06 ►

personal anniversaries, age, health, things like that. But to tell the truth, with all those various

02:03:12 ►

graphs, I still haven’t come up with anything very revealing. Maybe if there was a standard way to do

02:03:17 ►

this, and we all overlaid thousands of charts, then maybe something could be understood about

02:03:23 ►

public moods or how movements begin.

02:03:25 ►

What I’m really trying to say here in this long-winded rap is that even though Terrence’s

02:03:31 ►

time wave hypothesis has been shown to be wrong, maybe you or one of your friends will find a

02:03:37 ►

little meme in there that will eventually grow into a better idea of how best to think about time.

02:03:47 ►

better idea of how best to think about time. But you know, we still have to give the devil his due,

02:03:53 ►

so to speak. Near the end of his talk that we just listened to, Terrence, speaking in early August 1997, stated that the next big descent into novelty would take place on September 7th of that year.

02:04:01 ►

Do you remember what he said?

02:04:03 ►

When’s the next mountain? When’s the next mountain?

02:04:10 ►

September 7th

02:04:12 ►

we have been moving upward into habit

02:04:16 ►

and on September 7th it will turn down.

02:04:21 ►

And while the 7th turned out to be a relatively quiet day

02:04:24 ►

the day before certainly wasn’t,

02:04:27 ►

because it was on September 6th, 1997, that two and a half billion people all around the world

02:04:34 ►

watched the televised funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. you’re traveling through another dimension a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind

02:04:57 ►

a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination

02:05:01 ►

your next stop the twilight zone And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

02:05:14 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

519 - Our Cyberspiritual Future Part 5 – TimeWave

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Program Notes

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