576 - Countdown Into Complexity

Program Notes

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

Timewave 1995 - 2012Source: Fractal-Timewave.com

Date this lecture was recorded: March 1996

This podcast features Terence McKenna in a March 1996 workshop where he goes into great detail about his Timewave idea. Although I haven’t been including his Timewave talks in recent podcasts, since this series hasn’t been posted elsewhere on the Net I’ve decided to keep the entire weekend’s workshop intact. Baring any unexpected new recordings to pop up, this will be the last time that I include a Timewave lecture in the salon. However, this is one of his more comprehensive explanations of what turned out to be a not-so-great idea and is worth listening to as a way to sharpen your own critical thinking skills.

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20 ►

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

00:00:23 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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And a happy July 4th goes out to Ryan M. and to our regular monthly donor, Samuel G.,

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both of whom made donations directly to the salon to help with our monthly expenses here.

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Also, I’d like to welcome Daisy D., Zanzibar D., Riley S., Robin S., and James J., all of whom are my newest supporters on Patreon,

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and I look forward to meeting them and my other Patreon supporters this coming Monday

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night for our weekly Zoom conversations.

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So thank you one and all for your support of these podcasts.

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Now today we’re going to pick up with the next-to-last Terrence McKenna talk from the

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March 1996 Esalen Workshop that we’ve been listening to for, well, for a few weeks now.

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And today I’m going to play what became a regular feature of these lectures,

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where Terence went into great detail about his time wave idea.

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And if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while,

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you know that I haven’t been playing his time wave lectures lately

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for reasons that I really don’t need to go into once again. But I’m including it

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today because as far as I know, there aren’t any other copies of this weekend workshop on the net,

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and I think it should be complete. Thanks to Ian Wynn, who was a participant in this workshop,

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I’ve been able to digitize a set of tapes the Esalen staff gave him as a remembrance

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of his time there that weekend. So thank you once again, Ian. Now, I suspect that maybe a few of our

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fellow salonners will consider leaving us after I say my piece about the I Ching right now. But let

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me ask you, do you really believe that it’s possible for a fortune-telling book that is thousands of

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years old to be able to provide personal advice about your life if you just toss a few coins so

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as to find the perfect paragraphs that fit your current situation? Think about that for a moment.

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Is tossing a few coins any better than shuffling a tarot deck? I simply don’t understand intelligent people

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like Terence McKenna, who put so much value into a fortune-telling book. The only reason

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I can figure that Terence was into it was that after rejecting his parents’ religion,

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the I Ching appealed to his mystical sense simply because it’s so old. In my opinion,

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you can get just as much good advice from the daily horoscope in your newspaper

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or from a Chinese fortune cookie

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as you can from tossing the I Ching coins.

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Yet, many people I know seem to revere it

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like a holy book of some kind.

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Sure, there’s some good advice in it,

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but tossing a few coins to find the part of the book

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that applies directly to your life

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at this exact moment in time,

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well, that seems kind of foolish to me.

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But Terrence took it seriously and wound up with his time wave idea.

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Of course, we know how that turned out.

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One other critique I have comes from the part of the talk we are about to listen to,

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where Terrence explains how he initially fixed the end point and starting

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points of his wave. If I understood him correctly, he began by fitting deep plunges in his graft

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to calendar dates where there was an event of great historical importance,

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and I’m not questioning that way of fitting it on a timeline. The thing that disturbs me, however,

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is that history is written by the winners,

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and it isn’t necessarily a true story of everything that has happened.

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In fact, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that there could have been even larger historical events that took place

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and, well, have essentially disappeared from written history.

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Also, there seems to be a lack of historical points on this graph from Chinese history,

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and that seems kind of strange to me since the time wave is built around an ancient Chinese

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book.

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And I probably don’t need to add this observation, but just because Terence calls his time wave

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idea a theory, in fact it isn’t.

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As you already know, a theory is a coherent group of tested general propositions that are commonly regarded as correct.

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And by definition, the time wave idea is a hypothesis at best, but it’s never been an actual theory.

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And one last comment before we listen to this recording.

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As you will hear, Terence was describing his TimeWave software graphs on a

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projection to a screen that everybody could see. Unfortunately, I don’t have the ability to add

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those images to this podcast, but what I have done is to add a screen capture of the graph from

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1995 through 2012, and I included it in today’s program notes, which you will find at psychedelicsalon.com.

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If you take a look at it, you can easily see why Terrence was so excited about its prediction for

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the period that they had just entered. In fact, it looks like an extremely deep plunge into novelty

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has just begun. However, as I mentioned in a previous podcast, that entire year seems to be devoid of almost any world-shaking events that I can find.

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You may want to take a quick look at the history of 1996 yourself, however, just to see what I may have missed.

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Well, that’s enough of my critique of the time wave for now.

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So let’s join Terence and learn what it is that made him believe in the power of that old book to tell the future of the entire human race via his interpretation of it into the time wave.

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And then I’ll be back after that to add a few more of my own thoughts about this talk.

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We’re going to take a sort of conceptual and subject categorical leap here.

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I assume you all have some familiarity with the I Ching. conceptual and subject categorical leap here.

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I assume you all have some familiarity with the I Ching.

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Is that a reasonable assumption?

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The I Ching is a Chinese divinatory system of great antiquity.

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It involves 64 ideograms called hexagrams that are composed of broken and unbroken lines.

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They are arranged in a

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traditional sequence called the King Wen sequence.

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The divination is carried out through a

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coin toss operation or a sortilage

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involving euro stocks.

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I assume I’m not making headlines with this news

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for anybody. Okay, good.

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So, Li Qing, usually translated as the book of changes,

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is in fact a scientific text, in my opinion,

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a study of great sophistication

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of the very subject we’re talking about this evening,

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the nature of time, the nature of time the nature of change

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and in the same way that western science

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by fixating through certain Greek

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predilections on matter

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was able to unravel nuclear chemistry

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and molecular biology

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and so forth, these ancient people

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in China,

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pre-Han, early Zhou,

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which we’re talking 1500 BC,

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they weren’t interested in matter.

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They were interested in time.

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And they brought to this interest in time

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at least as much energy and sophistication

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as the research teams at CERN in

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Switzerland bring to probing the heart of the nucleus of the atom. And they learned things,

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you know, you spend a millennium or two on a given problem, opposing that problem under all

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circumstances, and from many philosophical points of view

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and pharmacological platforms eventually

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you begin to get answers

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and I believe that the I Ching is a kind of

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smashed up piece of machinery

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that in its present form

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but a shadow

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of what it represented in the past

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in terms of sophistication and understanding.

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For several thousand years,

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it has been commented on and passed down

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and preserved by people who were not fully in touch

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with precisely what it was.

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Under the guidance of the Logos fully in touch with precisely what it was you know under the

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guidance of the Logos with the

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help of psilocybin

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and so forth and so on I think

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I’ve made some progress

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with reconstructing

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what this ancient piece of machinery

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might have looked like

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and what kind of information they might

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have been getting out of

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it. So now bear with me for a minute, if you haven’t been already. As I said, the I Ching is

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64 hexagrams, numbered 1 through 64, and usually presented in a traditional sequence called the

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King Wen sequence, which is old. Nobody knows where it came from.

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King Wen is a legendary figure.

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He supposedly got into some political trouble around 1350 BC,

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and they put him in the can for a while.

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And while he was there, he figured this out.

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He thought it up.

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He built this operating system.

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And the interesting thing about the King Wen sequence

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is that it is not a logical sequence on the face of it.

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When Leibniz, the European philosopher, got his hands on the I Ching,

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his Jesuit friends shipped him a copy in the 17th century,

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he immediately organized it as a binary number system

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and rearranged the hexagram and showed that it was a binary number system.

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And Leibniz’s sequence, any hacker knows instantly how to do it from the first

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hexagram on

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King Wen’s sequence

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not at all obviously

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under any set of rules

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and the logos

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and its promptings to me

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it was interesting, it was like a koan

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you know

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a problem which a master sets a student which

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must be solved before we can move on to deeper water. And the koan was, you know,

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what are the ordering principles of the king-win sequence? Can you prove, prove in fact that it is the product of uh intent or is it in fact

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simply a jumble that has become traditional over thousands of years and there is no set of rules

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for generating the king when sequence pretty close, you notice. We’re not talking here about planetary

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transformation or

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human fusion

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with the biosphere. It’s very

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academic, close focused,

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analytical stuff.

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So I looked at the

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King Wann sequence

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and I was

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intuitively led, is probably

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the way to put it, to look at what’s called the first order of difference.

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The first order of difference is a very simple concept.

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It simply means how many lines change as you go from one hexagram to the next.

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Simple, right?

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next. Simple, right?

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Okay, so as you go from hexagram 1 to 2,

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there’s a certain change value,

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6 or whatever it is, and then 3 to 4,

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4 to 5, so forth and so on. And so I found out what these data points were,

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and then I drew a graph of these values down to 64

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and it’s just a symbol of it obviously

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and so I looked at this thing for a long time

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and it didn’t seem to have any

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it looked stochastic, random

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it didn’t seem to have any particular order to it

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but then I noticed a very interesting thing

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which is that this section

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is a mirror image of this section

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such that

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imagine making a copy of this

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and putting it right here

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and then rotating it 180 degrees in the plane,

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meaning turn it upside down, to the non-technical

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folks. Turn it upside down,

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well, then it will slide

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into itself. A perfect fit

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here and here. So then you get something which looks like this.

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In other words, it has closure

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at the beginning and closure at the beginning

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and closure at the end,

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but no closure in between.

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Interesting thing about these data points

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is that if you think about the possible data points,

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they are obviously 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6,

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the number of lines that can change

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as you go from one hexagram to another.

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In fact, there are no fives. 3, 4, 5, or 6, the number of lines that can change as you go from one hexagram to another.

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In fact, there are no fives.

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If you look at the King-Wen sequence,

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one of the first things you notice is that it is not simply 64 hexagrams. It is really 32 pairs of hexagrams

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hexagrams because each pair

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the pairs are formed by turning the first

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term upside down

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now there are 8 cases where turning a hexagram

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upside down has no effect on it

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and in all 8 cases it is followed by a hexagram

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which is exactly its opposite

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and so the rule obviously is followed by a hexagram which is exactly its opposite.

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And so the rule obviously is,

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if turning a hexagram upside down causes no change,

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all lines change,

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then you can analyze these data points and you discover that there are 75% odd values,

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25% even values, exactly.

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So no fives,

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this three to one ratio of odd to even

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and this peculiar closure seem to me

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a sufficient argument that this is the

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product of human intent. This was

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supposed to be done this way.

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And in fact, in some of the older commentary on I Ching,

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there’s a passage in which it says

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the forward-running numbers refer to the past the backward-running numbers refer to the future well

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now in the I Ching there are no backward-running numbers but in this thing there are because when you make this, you have 1, 2, 3, to 64,

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but what you’ve got over here is 63, 62, 61, down to 1,

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and what you’ve got over here is equals 64, 64, 64.

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It always sums to 64

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so what this is is some kind of magical

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occult multi-leveled

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mana

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laden thing

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that these pre-jo

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diviners dreamed up

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essentially the entire I Ching

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has been turned into this monoglyph of itself

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well, so now

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let’s symbolize this thing

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by the letter S

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a hexagram, as you know

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is made of six lines.

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It’s also, if you know a little more about it,

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in the commentaries, it’s always thought of as being formed of two trigrams,

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two three-line structures.

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And then it has an essential and very powerful cohesive unity as a hexagram, as a unity, as a one.

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So every hexagram has six lines, two trigrams, and one wholeness to it.

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wholeness to it so the thought which occurred to me

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under the strong prompting of the logos

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was to take this thing which I just showed you

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which is at the top of a kind of hierarchy

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and move it to the bottom

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of the hierarchy

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and build a hexagram

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so remember how I said we’ll symbolize that thing

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by the letter S

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so I took six of those

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and I did this

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six

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I laid six in a row

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and that stood in my mind

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for the 6 lines of a hexagram

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but over this

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I lay then

00:17:57 ►

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like that

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those are the trigrams

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and then I’m sure you anticipate my thought

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over that I lay one

00:18:16 ►

that stands for the unity of the

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hexagram

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so now what I had was a lot of lines

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running everywhere

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and the absolute conviction that I now possessed

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an enormous secret

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of some sort

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the map of time, the picture of history

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the snapshot of the zeitgeist

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moving through a higher dimension

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something like that

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and I was a burden to my friends

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and a joy to my enemies

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for many many months

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as I attempted to corner people in all night conversations

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of great energy and perplexity

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that had my friends

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meeting to plan what is to be done.

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Hope this never happens to you.

00:19:10 ►

And finally, Ralph Abraham, God love him, said, it’s an occult thing.

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I mean, it’s this occult thing.

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Only you understand it.

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And it’s not even clear that your interpretation is always the same. He said

00:19:26 ►

what you have to do is you have to

00:19:28 ►

turn it into an ordinary mathematical object

00:19:32 ►

that is

00:19:34 ►

a known quantity. Well, essentially

00:19:38 ►

this was like telling your dog to

00:19:40 ►

split the atom. It was like, great, Ralph.

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Thanks. Do you think you’ll have any

00:19:46 ►

time in the next few months to

00:19:48 ►

put in on this

00:19:49 ►

and so I sat with it for

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a couple of years

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and then one afternoon I was

00:19:55 ►

getting loaded and watching

00:19:57 ►

dust motes in a

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sunbeam and not thinking about

00:20:02 ►

anything much at all and

00:20:04 ►

I had it I had it

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I had it whole and entire

00:20:08 ►

I saw how to take this occult thing

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how to take its multiple properties

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such as degree of parallelism

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skew, overlap

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the scales of the three levels

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and all of these variables,

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and I saw how to collapse it

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into an ordinary mathematical object.

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And it’s quite trivial.

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I won’t bore you with it.

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It’s so trivial.

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It basically has to do with deconstructing the wave,

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assigning numerical values to all of its parts

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rebuilding it and then adding them up

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and then lo and behold all these intuitions

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you had about how when it is parallel

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and close together values should drop

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and all that are conserved

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and we get the time wave

00:21:04 ►

and the time wave and the computer is simply doing a whole lot of

00:21:09 ►

housekeeping work with it and not

00:21:12 ►

making any arithmetical errors and scaling

00:21:15 ►

it to time

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now the

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objection that could be made to this

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easily could be made to it

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and that I at one time

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felt the force of this

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objection

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I’ve talked myself out of it now

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but it’s how I would have attacked

00:21:35 ►

it myself at a certain point

00:21:37 ►

and it went something like this

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now let’s

00:21:41 ►

see you are

00:21:43 ►

advocating a revision in physics

00:21:46 ►

based on a Chinese oracle that you have deciphered a secret message from, is that it?

00:21:57 ►

And how long have you had this particular delusion?

00:22:02 ►

a particular delusion.

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So I’ve built a metaphor,

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which I hope makes it a little clearer why I believe it is reasonable

00:22:13 ►

to use a Chinese oracle as a stepping stone

00:22:16 ►

to a revision of physics.

00:22:21 ►

And in order to explain this,

00:22:23 ►

I have to have resort to a fairly elaborate metaphor

00:22:26 ►

so here it is

00:22:27 ►

think of sand dunes

00:22:34 ►

just picture them in your mind

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for a moment

00:22:37 ►

now, notice that this picture in your mind

00:22:42 ►

of these dunes

00:22:44 ►

that the dunes look like wind.

00:22:48 ►

They look like wind.

00:22:50 ►

Now, sand dunes are made by wind.

00:22:55 ►

What’s going on here? a pressure, a variation in pressure gradients over time,

00:23:07 ►

which moves the sand around.

00:23:11 ►

And when the wind stops blowing,

00:23:13 ►

what is left is essentially a lower dimensional signature

00:23:17 ►

of this higher dimensional phenomenon.

00:23:22 ►

Comme ci, comme ça.

00:23:24 ►

Now, for grains of sand

00:23:28 ►

substitute genes

00:23:31 ►

for wind

00:23:34 ►

substitute millions of years of evolutionary

00:23:38 ►

time, time flows

00:23:41 ►

and the genes move around, and they assume certain configurations.

00:23:49 ►

I maintain that those configurations are lower dimensional slices of the higher dimensional architecture of time itself.

00:24:00 ►

In other words, we bear the thumbprint of the medium in which we arose.

00:24:05 ►

We bear it in every cell of our bodies.

00:24:08 ►

Every atom bears it.

00:24:09 ►

Every molecule bears it.

00:24:13 ►

And if this can be known,

00:24:17 ►

this pattern of time that is impressed in all organism and perhaps all matter,

00:24:24 ►

that is impressed in all organism and perhaps all matter,

00:24:30 ►

then an understanding of time unfolds as a fractal,

00:24:35 ►

an infinitely self-similar structure that is repeating different patterns on many, many scales

00:24:39 ►

in order to create the phenomenology of the universe as we experience it.

00:24:47 ►

So, that’s basically the theory.

00:24:53 ►

And then the theory, I don’t think,

00:24:56 ►

would amount to much

00:24:57 ►

if it weren’t for the fact

00:25:00 ►

that with the computer,

00:25:01 ►

we can now take the theory

00:25:03 ►

and ask the question, okay, given all this

00:25:06 ►

arm-waving and theorizing

00:25:08 ►

does the unfolding wave

00:25:12 ►

actually mirror

00:25:14 ►

and hence predict

00:25:16 ►

the unfolding of the historical continuum?

00:25:22 ►

I maintain that at this stage

00:25:25 ►

it’s arguable that it does.

00:25:30 ►

Now, there’s a

00:25:32 ►

but there’s a curious

00:25:33 ►

and unsettling aspect

00:25:36 ►

to all of this.

00:25:39 ►

If you have a theory of wave mechanics

00:25:42 ►

of any system

00:25:43 ►

waves have

00:25:46 ►

wavelength

00:25:46 ►

therefore the wave must be

00:25:49 ►

generated from some point

00:25:52 ►

and

00:25:53 ►

if what we’re talking

00:25:56 ►

about is a

00:25:57 ►

graphic congruence

00:26:00 ►

between

00:26:01 ►

theory and

00:26:03 ►

nature then theory must be fitted to nature

00:26:09 ►

in the search for a best fit

00:26:12 ►

between the curve, the describing curve

00:26:15 ►

and the phenomena it seeks to describe.

00:26:17 ►

You understand what I mean?

00:26:18 ►

Now, the problem is with this theory

00:26:21 ►

if it is a problem

00:26:22 ►

is that when we compute our best fit of the curve

00:26:27 ►

to the data, we reach a fairly unexpected conclusion, which is that novelty is going

00:26:35 ►

to reach infinity within our own lifetimes. That the universal process that has been going on for billions of years across

00:26:46 ►

this epigenetic landscape

00:26:48 ►

wandering deeper and deeper

00:26:50 ►

into realms of novelty

00:26:52 ►

faster and faster

00:26:54 ►

and deeper and deeper is

00:26:56 ►

actually going to

00:26:57 ►

reach

00:26:59 ►

become mathematically outside

00:27:02 ►

of our description within our

00:27:04 ►

own lifetime,

00:27:10 ►

specifically in 2012 AD.

00:27:21 ►

It’s not pleasing, this prophecy of the end of the world within one’s own lifetime.

00:27:25 ►

This is the typical pattern of delusional messianism that is so drearily familiar.

00:27:29 ►

Nevertheless, we have more than a Lullian decoding of scripture here.

00:27:35 ►

We have a formal and completely unambiguous algorithm,

00:27:40 ►

and we have a body of data.

00:27:42 ►

So I just will now demonstrate it to you

00:27:46 ►

and you can reach your own conclusions

00:27:49 ►

there are people who have

00:27:52 ►

who may not even be aware of this theory

00:27:55 ►

who have reached the same conclusion

00:27:58 ►

some by avenues I respect

00:28:01 ►

and some by avenues I don’t respect

00:28:05 ►

and without saying who’s who

00:28:07 ►

I’ll list some of these approaches

00:28:11 ►

there’s a group of people

00:28:13 ►

I believe they’re called

00:28:14 ►

extopians or singularists

00:28:18 ►

they’re engineers

00:28:19 ►

they’re total rationalists

00:28:21 ►

they’re tech heads

00:28:23 ►

and they say that the rate of energy release

00:28:26 ►

information storage and technological advance

00:28:30 ►

is proceeding so rapidly

00:28:32 ►

that sometime between 2010 and 2025

00:28:37 ►

the whole system becomes unrecognizable

00:28:41 ►

to itself

00:28:42 ►

congruence with this prediction.

00:28:46 ►

The Maya civilization,

00:28:49 ►

which perished a millennia ago,

00:28:51 ►

had a 5,600 plus year calendar

00:28:55 ►

that culminates on the exact same day

00:28:59 ►

that this theory computes to.

00:29:02 ►

A fact which I didn’t know

00:29:04 ►

when I made my choice for the end date.

00:29:08 ►

There are Hasidic Jews in Israel

00:29:11 ►

who believe that they have Kabbalistic logic

00:29:16 ►

to support the conclusion that the Messiah will appear in late July of 2012.

00:29:23 ►

And then someone mentioned last night

00:29:26 ►

this Vedic

00:29:27 ►

it’s called Jyotish

00:29:29 ►

spelled J-O-Y

00:29:30 ►

a form of astrology

00:29:32 ►

it’s Vedic astrology

00:29:34 ►

3,000 or 4,000 years old

00:29:36 ►

00:29:38 ►

whether you do it by

00:29:40 ►

whether you calculate toward it mathematically

00:29:42 ►

or intuitionally or

00:29:44 ►

whatever and whether you exist now or in

00:29:47 ►

the case of the Maya a millennia ago

00:29:50 ►

certain people by certain techniques

00:29:52 ►

seem to have located a peculiar moment

00:29:55 ►

in time and what exactly this means we

00:29:59 ►

don’t know but this wave scales to it as

00:30:03 ►

well now what I want to do here, this is this year,

00:30:09 ►

and pointing at today, and as you see, it will culminate here.

00:30:13 ►

But what I want to do now is put a lot of time on the screen

00:30:17 ►

and show you how this thing works.

00:30:20 ►

So let me specify time span, E, B. Okay, well, now here what we’re looking at here is a very large span of time, 6 billion years. And the entire career of life on earth is 600 million years which is this down sweep so you see at that scale

00:30:49 ►

it’s like a done deal it’s almost a smooth curve on a scale of 600 million years it’s just been an

00:30:56 ►

uninterrupted rush toward the omega point ever since we dropped gills and crawled out onto the land. As we magnify and zoom into this,

00:31:06 ►

it turns out there was a lot of drama along the way.

00:31:11 ►

Let me see if I can get my zoom going here.

00:31:14 ►

Now each time it makes a new graph,

00:31:17 ►

we’ll see twice as much detail and half as much time.

00:31:23 ►

There’s 1.5 billion years

00:31:26 ►

there’s the last 750 million years

00:31:30 ►

375 million years

00:31:34 ►

that’s all life

00:31:35 ►

getting hold of the planet

00:31:39 ►

there’s the last 100 million years

00:31:41 ►

here let me stop that one

00:31:43 ►

that’s the last 100 million years here let me stop that one okay

00:31:45 ►

that’s the last 93

00:31:47 ►

million years and

00:31:50 ►

there is

00:31:51 ►

00:31:52 ►

event

00:31:56 ►

that has to be

00:31:58 ►

predicted correctly

00:31:59 ►

for the theory to work

00:32:01 ►

at 65 million years there was an

00:32:03 ►

asteroid impact

00:32:05 ►

that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

00:32:10 ►

And there it is.

00:32:14 ►

It’s an exact science, folks, but I’m not.

00:32:19 ►

Okay, here is this extinction event.

00:32:24 ►

This is, you’ve got 113 million years on the screen,

00:32:28 ►

ending at the zero point in 2012,

00:32:31 ►

and this massive extinction event, 65 million years,

00:32:35 ►

clearly shows as the most dramatic event on the screen.

00:32:40 ►

Yeah.

00:32:41 ►

So what is the opposite of the descent into novelty

00:32:46 ►

as you see the increasing point of scale reaching maximum

00:32:50 ►

at a slightly earlier time period

00:32:52 ►

what’s the converse?

00:32:54 ►

equilibrium, yes, and then homeostasis

00:32:58 ►

homeostasis is the perfect example

00:33:00 ►

because homeostasis is repetition, closed energy cycle.

00:33:05 ►

Absence of chaos.

00:33:06 ►

Absence of chaos.

00:33:07 ►

Predictability, in other words.

00:33:09 ►

And then it inevitably reaches a place where there’s a symmetry break

00:33:14 ►

and then a cascade.

00:33:16 ►

And then disintegration.

00:33:17 ►

Okay, so now let’s start our zoom forward again.

00:33:24 ►

Well, what you do is there’s 46 million years.

00:33:29 ►

Let’s get down here to something palpable.

00:33:34 ►

11 million years.

00:33:36 ►

This is primate territory.

00:33:38 ►

What did you use to hit the asteroid date?

00:33:41 ►

Just published material in Nature.

00:33:43 ►

There’s the last two million years

00:33:45 ►

like that.

00:33:47 ►

The question was? How do you know

00:33:49 ►

when to start? You mean

00:33:51 ►

how did I choose the

00:33:54 ►

end date? Or the beginning date

00:33:56 ►

of the whole? Well, the beginning

00:33:58 ►

date, I’m a little fuzzy

00:33:59 ►

on. I simply propagated

00:34:02 ►

it back until I had more

00:34:04 ►

time than astrophysics requires for the life of

00:34:07 ►

the universe. And that was all I needed. I’m not entirely committed to the Big Bang. There’s

00:34:14 ►

plenty of odd assumptions in all of that stuff. What I did was I thought about, at first I tried to scale it to the stuff I knew.

00:34:29 ►

So I’ve been sort of interested in history.

00:34:32 ►

So I said, okay, if you have a theory of novelty of history,

00:34:37 ►

where are the novel points in history without getting too technical?

00:34:41 ►

Well, I think anybody who’s studied history. 25 minutes.

00:34:45 ►

Would nominate.

00:34:47 ►

The Greek golden age.

00:34:49 ►

The Italian renaissance.

00:34:51 ►

And the 20th century.

00:34:53 ►

Or at least they would tolerate.

00:34:55 ►

Those candidates.

00:34:58 ►

So I said.

00:35:00 ►

Well I then.

00:35:02 ►

Let’s see if we can find a place.

00:35:03 ►

Where three big troughs. Do that. And, let’s see if we can find a place where three big troughs do that,

00:35:08 ►

and then let’s look at the crucifixion,

00:35:10 ►

or something else, in other words,

00:35:12 ►

to see if it also appears to be correctly described.

00:35:16 ►

Well, eventually you get a fit

00:35:18 ►

where you can go from the Big Bang down to Nixon’s resignation

00:35:22 ►

and always have this very satisfying feeling

00:35:25 ►

that it’s giving at the correct scoring

00:35:28 ►

at the correct level of novelty

00:35:30 ►

and the correct ratio and proportion to the events

00:35:34 ►

in which it is embedded

00:35:36 ►

and when I got it right

00:35:38 ►

the last 67 year cycle

00:35:43 ►

begins the day the atom bomb was dropped

00:35:46 ►

on Hiroshima and

00:35:49 ►

it’s a resonance you see with the Big Bang

00:35:53 ►

and then

00:35:54 ►

everything else seemed to

00:35:58 ►

fall into place at that point

00:36:01 ►

now it’s tricky, it is tricky because

00:36:04 ►

it’s a fractal. And so there are

00:36:09 ►

possibilities of error. And that’s why periods of time like what we’re living through are so

00:36:17 ►

interesting. Because, you see, I’ve made the small-scale prediction that this period we’re living in will be novel

00:36:27 ►

based on large-scale correlations.

00:36:30 ►

Now if the prediction comes true,

00:36:34 ►

that, like, clinches it.

00:36:36 ►

It shows, then, that the choice was correct

00:36:40 ►

and we gain confidence.

00:36:42 ►

And I maintain there’s, in principle,

00:36:44 ►

no reason

00:36:45 ►

why this much information shouldn’t be known about the future.

00:36:49 ►

The future is not magically guarded from understanding

00:36:54 ►

any more than any other part of nature is.

00:36:57 ►

And in fact, statistics, probability theory,

00:37:01 ►

is a valiant effort to come to terms with the future.

00:37:07 ►

I maintain horribly and inevitably flawed by the assumption of linear time.

00:37:14 ►

What do I mean by that?

00:37:15 ►

Well, here’s how probability theory works.

00:37:18 ►

Say you want to know the charge on a certain

00:37:25 ►

well, no

00:37:28 ►

how much electricity is running through a wire

00:37:31 ►

you want to know this

00:37:32 ►

well, here’s how you do it in ordinary science these days

00:37:35 ►

you measure the electricity

00:37:39 ►

10,000 times

00:37:41 ►

you add it together

00:37:43 ►

and you divide by 10,000 now, it’s conce together, and you divide by 10,000.

00:37:46 ►

Now, it’s conceivable that the value you come up with

00:37:50 ►

will not match a single one of your measurements.

00:37:54 ►

Your measurements never agreed with this value.

00:37:57 ►

So what we’re doing, you see, is because we assume time is uniform,

00:38:03 ►

we don’t feel any intellectual sin

00:38:05 ►

in smearing those values that way.

00:38:09 ►

Filter the novelty.

00:38:10 ►

The law of averages damps the novelty in the system

00:38:15 ►

and you get a kind of averaging.

00:38:17 ►

Probability theory cannot be done anymore

00:38:20 ►

with impunity if this is true.

00:38:23 ►

Chucking the whole sort of fun of physics

00:38:26 ►

for the last 50 years.

00:38:27 ►

And I think you’re making a,

00:38:30 ►

you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

00:38:32 ►

You mean to attack probability theory?

00:38:34 ►

No, to ignore the excitement and the thrill

00:38:38 ►

of totally insanity that comes from

00:38:41 ►

quantum mechanics and relativity.

00:38:43 ►

Well, no, I’m not rejecting that.

00:38:46 ►

The quanta

00:38:47 ►

is far larger than probability

00:38:50 ►

theory.

00:38:52 ►

I think, you know, there’s an interesting

00:38:54 ►

revolution going on in quantum

00:38:55 ►

physics right now.

00:38:59 ►

It amuses me.

00:39:02 ►

Arguably, I mean,

00:39:03 ►

the one concept that seems secure in 20th century physics

00:39:09 ►

and about which there has been more ballyhoo and self-congratulations

00:39:13 ►

than about any other single concept

00:39:16 ►

is the much-vaunted uncertainty principle of Heisenberg,

00:39:21 ►

which is supposed to be a bridge to understanding consciousness

00:39:25 ►

uniting science and art

00:39:27 ►

letting us see the

00:39:29 ►

scintillating elusive

00:39:31 ►

mercurial beauty

00:39:32 ►

it turns out

00:39:35 ►

it’s

00:39:37 ►

BS to put it

00:39:39 ►

as kindly as possible

00:39:41 ►

when the

00:39:43 ►

Bohr-Heisenberg theory was formulated, there was another theory of the quanta on the table. But this theory had an assumption built into it, which was thought to be so fantastic that it was never seriously considered,

00:40:07 ►

and instead this uncertainty principle was taken on board.

00:40:12 ►

The notion which was built into the rejected version of the quanta

00:40:20 ►

was called non-locality.

00:40:23 ►

quanta was called non-locality and it held that somehow

00:40:26 ►

all particles that had ever been

00:40:29 ►

in interaction with each other in the past

00:40:32 ►

were somehow mysteriously and

00:40:35 ►

instantaneously linked to each other

00:40:37 ►

throughout all space and time instantaneously

00:40:41 ►

and since all particles were once

00:40:45 ►

confined in a space less than the diameter

00:40:48 ►

of the nucleus of a Joe atom

00:40:51 ►

then presumably all particles in the universe

00:40:55 ►

were connected together through this non-locality

00:40:58 ►

if you accepted this B theory

00:41:01 ►

of the quanta

00:41:02 ►

so it was rejected out of hand.

00:41:07 ►

This was a theory formulated by David Bohm.

00:41:10 ►

Well, now it comes back to haunt them

00:41:14 ►

because there is non-locality.

00:41:18 ►

It’s been confirmed.

00:41:20 ►

At first, it was only there were thought experiments with it.

00:41:27 ►

Yes, and the… at first it was only there were thought experiments with it yes but now experiments are being

00:41:30 ►

done where you actually bring

00:41:32 ►

two electrons together

00:41:33 ►

separate them in space

00:41:36 ►

flip the spin

00:41:38 ►

of one

00:41:39 ►

and see the other one flip its

00:41:41 ►

spin even though they’re now

00:41:43 ►

separated in time and space.

00:41:46 ►

So the physics community,

00:41:51 ►

and let me say about the Bohm theory

00:41:53 ►

and the Bohr-Heisenberg formulation,

00:41:56 ►

the mathematics is identical.

00:41:59 ►

The mathematics is identical.

00:42:01 ►

One does not give better results than the other.

00:42:04 ►

But they have

00:42:05 ►

these completely antithetical concepts built into

00:42:09 ►

them, and I doubt that the Heisenberg thing will

00:42:12 ►

survive. It was actually

00:42:14 ►

a mistake. Oh, and what I want to say then

00:42:18 ►

about the Bohm formulation is with Bohm’s

00:42:21 ►

mathematics, velocity and location

00:42:24 ►

can be known simultaneously

00:42:26 ►

to any limit of exactitude.

00:42:29 ►

There is no uncertainty in the Bohm formulation.

00:42:37 ►

I don’t know how I got off on this.

00:42:40 ►

My proposal to you is that those guys

00:42:43 ►

are having the same kind of problems

00:42:46 ►

and are not being able to intervene in events

00:42:50 ►

that I think you would feel very warm and close to them.

00:42:56 ►

Oh, I…

00:42:58 ►

That is analogous to the one you’re looking at.

00:43:02 ►

Yeah, I would assume that if I’m right and if they’re right,

00:43:06 ►

we’ll have to meet somewhere out there.

00:43:10 ►

There’s this guy Lentz at Stanford

00:43:12 ►

who has a very interesting cosmology

00:43:15 ►

which he calls a fractal foam cosmology.

00:43:20 ►

And I don’t understand his mathematics,

00:43:23 ►

but he talks about how in his cosmology

00:43:26 ►

in the first few moments of the universe

00:43:29 ►

these things were generated

00:43:31 ►

which he calls scalar waves

00:43:34 ►

and they’re waves but they don’t move

00:43:39 ►

they’re, as he puts it, frozen in space time

00:43:43 ►

but the reason you know they’re there

00:43:46 ►

is because they affect the clustering

00:43:49 ►

and the ebb and flow of probability.

00:43:54 ►

That’s it. That’s it.

00:43:56 ►

I mean, it’s absolutely it.

00:43:58 ►

So what Lenz’s scalar waves have to do with the time wave,

00:44:02 ►

I don’t know, but it’s very, very interesting

00:44:05 ►

that these kinds of theories

00:44:07 ►

now are coming forward.

00:44:10 ►

I think it’s because we are feeling an inadequacy

00:44:14 ►

in our science because

00:44:16 ►

the fine structure of complex systems

00:44:20 ►

won’t come into focus

00:44:24 ►

using statistical analysis. You get a blurred picture of what’s

00:44:30 ►

going on, and no matter how you deal with the data, it remains blurred because this

00:44:35 ►

temporal variable is in there that you’re not aware of, and it’s creating this inadequacy

00:44:42 ►

in your model.

00:44:46 ►

You wanted to say something?

00:44:48 ►

Well, two questions.

00:44:53 ►

First, how do you introduce data into the system?

00:44:56 ►

In other words, given the I Ching as the construct, right,

00:45:00 ►

and a formula derived from that,

00:45:02 ►

which is the assumption I’m making here,

00:45:05 ►

what do you enter to create the graph?

00:45:07 ►

Ah,

00:45:09 ►

you enter the valuations of

00:45:11 ►

the, there are

00:45:13 ►

384 points

00:45:15 ►

in this thing, because it’s

00:45:17 ►

6 times 64.

00:45:20 ►

So, and at each

00:45:21 ►

one of these positions,

00:45:24 ►

you generate a data, a number,

00:45:28 ►

and then that is fractalized and put through this.

00:45:35 ►

And this is all explained exhaustively in the Invisible Landscape

00:45:39 ►

and the manual for this thing is now 75 pages long. And the second question is, taking a 500-year model or a 250-year model or whatever we would

00:45:52 ►

choose in current time, is there a replication of the pattern currently shown with a decline

00:45:59 ►

of that order being demonstrated at any other point in history?

00:46:03 ►

Yes, the question you’re asking is,

00:46:05 ►

are there resonances inside the system?

00:46:08 ►

And of course there are, because it’s fractal.

00:46:12 ►

So self-similarity occurs at many scales.

00:46:15 ►

As you see with a normal fractal,

00:46:18 ►

self-similarity is hierarchical.

00:46:20 ►

This has hierarchical self-similarity,

00:46:23 ►

but it also has a degree of internal self-similarity

00:46:27 ►

on every level

00:46:30 ►

so this plunge that we’re going through right now

00:46:35 ►

its resonance, its direct historical resonance

00:46:39 ►

on the preceding larger scale

00:46:43 ►

is the period around the 10th century, 948 AD.

00:46:50 ►

Now, what happened in that period is

00:46:53 ►

there was an enormous cultural efflorescence in Islam.

00:46:59 ►

The Umayyad Caliphate at Cordoba

00:47:01 ►

and the other Umayyad Caliphate at Baghdad

00:47:04 ►

were producing, you know,

00:47:08 ►

and a lot of it was mathematical and technical. It’s arguable that that was the birth of modern

00:47:15 ►

science. Those kinds of resonances can be used as a basis for prediction is something I haven’t

00:47:22 ►

had time to look at. There are many resonances to each point. It’s

00:47:26 ►

not a simple system. Here we can only discuss it in simple terms, but in the MS-DOS version,

00:47:33 ►

it will print a page full of references, of resonances. And let me explain how I imagine

00:47:39 ►

time in this thing. Here’s, first of all all how the Newtonians imagine time

00:47:45 ►

if you ask a Newtonian

00:47:46 ►

what is the most important moment

00:47:49 ►

impinging on this one

00:47:52 ►

in other words

00:47:53 ►

what moment is

00:47:55 ►

most important in shaping

00:47:57 ►

this moment

00:47:58 ►

he will tell you or she will tell you

00:48:00 ►

it’s the moment immediately before

00:48:02 ►

this is this amazing faith in the momentum of cause and effect.

00:48:09 ►

This takes a completely different view

00:48:12 ►

and says any given moment in time

00:48:15 ►

is a kind of interference pattern

00:48:18 ►

caused by the existence of other moments in time.

00:48:23 ►

And that time is, in fact,

00:48:25 ►

an extremely complex, data-heavy,

00:48:29 ►

kind of holographic matrix.

00:48:32 ►

And if you can decondition yourself

00:48:35 ►

from your large-scale position in things,

00:48:39 ►

you can actually feel or sense the continuum.

00:49:05 ►

I mean, I got it down to an aphorism. Rome falls nine times an hour. And if you’re paying think things that there is no rationale for and in as hemlines rise and fall on a slightly

00:49:12 ►

different scale and as art movements come and go on a slightly different

00:49:16 ►

scale what is all this well it’s other times other resonances it was very interesting at the website a couple of months ago

00:49:28 ►

I looked at the wave

00:49:31 ►

and I said the end of the year would have a medieval flavor

00:49:35 ►

because we were crossing through

00:49:38 ►

the late 8th century

00:49:41 ►

and then I noticed

00:49:43 ►

the liberals have this thing

00:49:46 ►

every Christmas time,

00:49:48 ►

this in Hilton Head, North Carolina,

00:49:51 ►

called the Renaissance Gathering,

00:49:54 ►

and Clinton always goes.

00:49:55 ►

So all the right-wingers got together

00:49:58 ►

at this thing called the Dark Ages

00:50:00 ►

as a satire on the Renaissance.

00:50:04 ►

And their Dark Age Gathering Dark Ages as a satire on the Renaissance.

00:50:12 ►

And their Dark Age gathering occurred right in the darkest of the Dark Ages in the Resonance.

00:50:17 ►

A lot of this is for the production of humor, I hope you realize.

00:50:31 ►

If you’re fans of James Joyce and understand how Ulysses is constructed. You know, what’s going on in Ulysses is a man is trying to buy some kidneys to take back to his apartment to fry for breakfast.

00:50:35 ►

But somehow in visiting the butcher and the local bar and running into an old friend,

00:50:41 ►

the entire Homeric war is fought out

00:50:45 ►

in these few blocks of Dublin

00:50:47 ►

and also the entire

00:50:49 ►

fall and redemption of mankind

00:50:51 ►

and this is called allegory

00:50:54 ►

and it’s nested

00:50:55 ►

reference

00:50:56 ►

and fractal association

00:50:59 ►

and it’s a very powerful way

00:51:01 ►

to make art

00:51:02 ►

and I think it’s a very powerful way to make art and I think it’s a very powerful way to make art

00:51:05 ►

because it’s how nature made the world

00:51:08 ►

the world is an allegory

00:51:12 ►

and it’s based on analogies

00:51:15 ►

I mean I look sometimes at people

00:51:19 ►

and I see other people

00:51:21 ►

I see faces from the past, sometimes my past, sometimes

00:51:27 ►

a further back. Time is an interference pattern. Yeah.

00:51:34 ►

The one thing I’m a little confused about is how you draw the pattern to a given scale.

00:51:42 ►

Like, does it make sense to say you could put in Charles McKenna’s birthday

00:51:46 ►

and see his family

00:51:47 ►

people always ask this question

00:51:50 ►

yeah although I’m

00:51:52 ►

not entirely comfortable with it

00:51:54 ►

let me trace the history of this kind of

00:51:56 ►

thinking for you

00:51:57 ►

astrology has

00:52:00 ►

obviously has certain

00:52:02 ►

analogues to this

00:52:04 ►

because it’s about predicting

00:52:07 ►

the fates of dynasties and so forth

00:52:10 ►

from the movement of the stars

00:52:11 ►

and it’s a peculiar combination

00:52:14 ►

of mathematical exactitude and occult fancy

00:52:18 ►

oh god, I’ve lost the thread

00:52:24 ►

ask again the birthday thing Oh God, I’ve lost the thread. Ask again.

00:52:27 ►

The birthday thing, yes.

00:52:29 ►

So originally, astrology was a tool for statecraft.

00:52:35 ►

Royal houses and wars and stuff were fought,

00:52:39 ►

and that kind of thing.

00:52:40 ►

Well, the first, I don’t know if they were the first,

00:52:43 ►

but the first large crop of yuppies

00:52:46 ►

was late Roman. And these people had vast wealth and they dabbled in the occult and they were

00:52:54 ►

interested in these mystery religions and they were aware of astrology as a tool of statecraft.

00:53:00 ►

And people asked the very same question, said, you know, I’m an important person, can you do a horoscope for me?

00:53:09 ►

and so then the natal horoscope was invented

00:53:12 ►

around that time, first century AD

00:53:15 ►

the natal horoscope

00:53:17 ►

I can imagine that we each have our own time wave

00:53:23 ►

in a sense and that it begins at your birth

00:53:28 ►

and it ends at your death

00:53:30 ►

or your death is a very novel point in the wave.

00:53:35 ►

The wave has different cycles in it.

00:53:39 ►

This has 384 data points.

00:53:43 ►

I mentioned that.

00:53:44 ►

Notice that 384 is exactly 13 lunations.

00:53:49 ►

At first, I thought I was discovering

00:53:51 ►

a Neolithic Chinese calendar,

00:53:54 ►

that it’s an extraordinarily accurate lunar count.

00:53:59 ►

It precesses 19 days per year against the sun,

00:54:04 ►

but that might be a price people would be willing to pay,

00:54:07 ►

especially if it had been developed in a tropical climate.

00:54:11 ►

But each larger cycle is made

00:54:15 ►

by multiplying that number, 384, by 64.

00:54:20 ►

And each smaller cycle is made

00:54:23 ►

by taking that number and dividing it by 64

00:54:26 ►

and what you get then over about 20 levels

00:54:31 ►

stretching from 72 billion years at the top

00:54:35 ►

down to 6.55 times 10 to the minus 23rd at the bottom

00:54:41 ►

in other words the domain of Planck’s constant

00:54:44 ►

the realm of the jiffy

00:54:46 ►

you get

00:54:48 ►

this set of nested

00:54:50 ►

cycles, well the next cycle

00:54:52 ►

up from this

00:54:53 ►

from the 384 day cycle

00:54:56 ►

is 67 years

00:54:58 ►

104.25

00:55:00 ►

days, it’s 6

00:55:02 ►

sunspot cycles of the minor type

00:55:04 ►

2 of the major type

00:55:06 ►

but interestingly close to the average human lifespan

00:55:10 ►

67 years

00:55:12 ►

almost as though it’s a kind of a tone

00:55:14 ►

an octave of existence

00:55:17 ►

I’m very interested in people’s 68th year of life

00:55:23 ►

what that feels like.

00:55:25 ►

Because in a sense, if you live to be 68 in this theory,

00:55:30 ►

you get to start over.

00:55:32 ►

You know, you were sort of your slate is cleaned

00:55:36 ►

and you get to go forward.

00:55:38 ►

But this kind of thing, I find, you know,

00:55:42 ►

I’m not that attracted to it.

00:55:45 ►

I’m more interested in the idea

00:55:47 ►

that this is some kind of a message from somewhere

00:55:51 ►

and that the message is in two parts.

00:55:56 ►

The first part is something extraordinary

00:55:58 ►

is going to happen to you and your world in 2012.

00:56:03 ►

And the second part is,

00:56:08 ►

and the reason you should believe the first part is because this wave which predicts that

00:56:12 ►

predicts all things which preceded it

00:56:15 ►

predicted the Italian Renaissance

00:56:17 ►

so forth and so on

00:56:19 ►

let me start this puppy going again

00:56:21 ►

and I’ll show you what I mean

00:56:22 ►

what have we got?

00:56:24 ►

a million point

00:56:25 ►

four on the screen. What’s the locality of it? Does this apply to our galaxy, the whole

00:56:32 ►

universe, or this planet? Well, that’s another good question. I’ve thought about it in all

00:56:38 ►

different ways, and I think it’s local.

00:56:46 ►

I’m not sure how local.

00:56:48 ►

It seems to be akin to a planet to come up with a pattern that you use.

00:56:53 ►

Well, if it’s a universal fractal pattern,

00:56:57 ►

then it must be available in many places.

00:57:01 ►

A thing that would be very satisfying to me

00:57:04 ►

would be if

00:57:05 ►

somebody could find this same set of

00:57:07 ►

numbers somewhere else

00:57:09 ►

in nature.

00:57:12 ►

Anywhere.

00:57:13 ►

Yeah, I can’t.

00:57:16 ►

The Fibonacci series.

00:57:18 ►

Yeah.

00:57:19 ►

The Fibonacci

00:57:20 ►

complex set of data.

00:57:24 ►

It sounds like that any moment in time can be decomposed into a number of hexagrams,

00:57:27 ►

and that the hexagrams have dignitary components to them.

00:57:30 ►

I know the hexagram has a meaning of course that you can draw from it.

00:57:40 ►

Is there a sense in which you can figure out what hexagrams correspond with what moment and figure out the characteristics of that moment?

00:57:47 ►

Yes, you can, and you could build a vast interpretive industry on that.

00:57:53 ►

In other words, there would be a way to extract meaning rather than mathematics from this.

00:57:59 ►

What you would do is you would look at a given point in the wave

00:58:02 ►

and not only look at its wave structure,

00:58:07 ►

but say what hexagrams are building this and what are the ratios of the influences

00:58:11 ►

that they’re contributing

00:58:12 ►

and basically that’s another lifetime

00:58:16 ►

of work for me

00:58:18 ►

but that would be very rich stuff

00:58:22 ►

let’s go

00:58:24 ►

let it run for a minute.

00:58:26 ►

That’s 1.4 billion years,

00:58:29 ►

730,000 years,

00:58:32 ►

366,000 years,

00:58:35 ►

183,000 years.

00:58:36 ►

Now, those are glaciations in there.

00:58:39 ►

That’s the last 100,000,

00:58:42 ►

45,000.

00:58:47 ►

Now, let’s look at this this is the last

00:58:49 ►

this is basically 5,000 BC

00:58:53 ►

now the game, the stakes rise

00:58:57 ►

because we know with fairly high detail

00:59:01 ►

what has gone on in the last 5,000 years

00:59:04 ►

in terms of inventions, cultural migrations dynasties, so forth and so on.

00:59:09 ►

So this is from 5,000 BC to the present.

00:59:16 ►

Well, along this descent into novelty here are the great ancient civilizations.

00:59:24 ►

are the great ancient civilizations.

00:59:29 ►

Ur, Chaldea, Babylon,

00:59:33 ►

and down here in the bottom of the novelty trough,

00:59:37 ►

pre-dynastic Egypt, Old Kingdom Egypt.

00:59:39 ►

In other words, the great pyramids are built precisely at the most novel point of that trough,

00:59:44 ►

which sort of supports the theosophical faith

00:59:47 ►

that Egypt did learn something,

00:59:51 ►

that it took a long time to go past them,

00:59:54 ►

not necessarily 1950.

00:59:57 ►

According to the time wave,

00:59:59 ►

they were the most novel thing that had ever come down the pike until roughly the foundation of the Roman Republic.

01:00:12 ►

And that’s about right.

01:00:13 ►

That feels about right.

01:00:16 ►

On this upslope, this is all pretty ugly stuff here.

01:00:21 ►

The Hittites, the the Mitanni Assyria

01:00:27 ►

we’re really getting into male dominance

01:00:30 ►

warfare as a way

01:00:31 ►

of life, empire building

01:00:33 ►

slavery

01:00:34 ►

huge building projects

01:00:38 ►

based on human agony

01:00:40 ►

ugly business

01:00:42 ►

but it’s punctuated

01:00:44 ►

by some real moments of

01:00:46 ►

progress like

01:00:47 ►

the Phoenician alphabet

01:00:50 ►

and so forth and so on

01:00:51 ►

and up here at the top of this thing

01:00:54 ►

Homer sings his

01:00:56 ►

song

01:00:56 ►

the Trojan Wars occur

01:01:00 ►

actually just slightly before that

01:01:02 ►

what’s happening there is that

01:01:04 ►

Mycenaean piracy is

01:01:06 ►

overwhelming the old Minoan

01:01:08 ►

empire this is just in a small part of the world

01:01:10 ►

but it happens to have a lot of

01:01:12 ►

consequences let me say about

01:01:14 ►

that some people say your

01:01:16 ►

theory is so Eurocentric

01:01:18 ►

have you noticed what kind of

01:01:20 ►

world you’re living in

01:01:21 ►

that’s right that’s

01:01:24 ►

why the theory is Eurocentric.

01:01:27 ►

In other words, the Maya may have been wonderful,

01:01:31 ►

but what counts in the historical game

01:01:34 ►

is how much influence you have on the present.

01:01:37 ►

And the Maya have no influence on the present.

01:01:40 ►

I mean, other than some interesting shards in the museums

01:01:43 ►

and respect for their architecture, they didn’t pass it on so you know there

01:01:50 ►

isn’t a man woman and child on this earth who wasn’t deeply affected by what

01:01:55 ►

went on in Greece in the 5th century BC not a man woman or child on this planet. Now, what was going on in 5th century B.C.

01:02:07 ►

somewhere else,

01:02:09 ►

that river of influence

01:02:12 ►

may not have reached the present.

01:02:14 ►

Some did, some didn’t.

01:02:16 ►

But something got loose

01:02:19 ►

at the eastern end of the Mediterranean

01:02:23 ►

right in this time span

01:02:27 ►

I think it’s the phonetic alphabet

01:02:29 ►

I think the phonetic alphabet empowers

01:02:32 ►

a distancing from the object of your

01:02:35 ►

concern that allows this eerie

01:02:38 ►

Faustian thing that is so

01:02:41 ►

typical of the western mind and I’m not

01:02:46 ►

I didn’t originate that idea

01:02:47 ►

many people have commented that

01:02:50 ►

the Greek alphabet

01:02:51 ►

it just carries you so far

01:02:54 ►

into abstraction

01:02:55 ►

that then that

01:02:57 ►

thought style becomes inevitable

01:03:00 ►

obviously you’ve been describing

01:03:02 ►

events in western culture

01:03:04 ►

what are the correlatives to Indo-Asian? great advances seem to occur simultaneously in different places,

01:03:28 ►

in and of itself an argument for something like the time wave.

01:03:33 ►

So, you know, while the Roman Empire is rising and establishing law and order and so forth and so on,

01:03:40 ►

the Han Dynasty is doing the same thing in China.

01:03:44 ►

The Han Dynasty is doing the same thing in China.

01:03:51 ►

As the Maya are reaching their cultural apex with their astronomy and their mathematics and city building and so forth and so on,

01:03:55 ►

the Cordovan caliphates are doing the same thing.

01:04:00 ►

There’s quite a bit of that sort of thing.

01:04:02 ►

Is there any hypothesis here at all measurable?

01:04:06 ►

I mean, a contradiction?

01:04:08 ►

I don’t understand.

01:04:10 ►

Well, in other words, where one series of events

01:04:13 ►

would describe homostasis,

01:04:17 ►

another series of events would describe a descent into novelty.

01:04:21 ►

In other words, have you located any contradiction

01:04:23 ►

within the prescribed system? No, because a descent into novelty, In other words, have you located any contradiction within the prescribed system?

01:04:26 ►

No, because a descent into novelty

01:04:28 ►

as it were, takes

01:04:30 ►

precedence. Equilibrium

01:04:32 ►

only counts

01:04:34 ►

if it completely pervades the system.

01:04:36 ►

You see what I mean?

01:04:38 ►

Alright, let’s go

01:04:39 ►

forward into this because I want you to

01:04:41 ►

see these later epochs.

01:04:44 ►

Oh, I guess I didn’t enter the thing. I want you to see these later epochs oh I guess I didn’t enter the thing

01:04:46 ►

I want you to see these later epochs because this is where we can really judge it more

01:04:52 ►

accurately, this is basically from

01:04:56 ►

300 AD, I’m sorry

01:04:59 ►

AD, yes, this is from the fall of Rome

01:05:04 ►

to the present, not is from the fall of Rome to the present.

01:05:05 ►

Not precisely.

01:05:08 ►

The fall of Rome, it took a long time and there were humiliation after humiliation.

01:05:11 ►

But generally, the kidnapping of Augustus Romulus in 375

01:05:17 ►

is considered to be the final straw.

01:05:21 ►

So notice that what this says is that

01:05:24 ►

after the fall of Rome here, history had a different

01:05:29 ►

character. It was not a steep and fairly uninterrupted descent into novelty, but it began

01:05:36 ►

to oscillate between periods of novelty and periods of intense recidivism. And notice also that this theory is not shy about making predictions.

01:05:49 ►

Now we’re down on it.

01:05:51 ►

And this extraordinarily steep descent into novelty right here,

01:05:58 ►

that’s the resonance to what’s happening right now.

01:06:02 ►

That’s 10th century Islam.

01:06:05 ►

This one which precedes it over here

01:06:08 ►

is the foundation moment of Islam.

01:06:14 ►

Muhammad is born in 570 and died in 630.

01:06:18 ►

That whole thing occurs along this descent.

01:06:23 ►

Islam is very important. I have to stress this because

01:06:27 ►

we all live in a culture that is totally anti-Islamic. And, you know, it’s perfectly

01:06:33 ►

legitimate to talk about ragheads and this and that, but I’ve got news for you. You know,

01:06:40 ►

the science, the mathematics, the architecture, the poetry, the administrative skills, the knowledge of hydrology, so forth and so on.

01:06:48 ►

And for any people or person who is truly alarmed by modernity, we were talking about this this evening, Islam is an answer.

01:07:02 ►

And I imagine it’s going to experience great growth

01:07:05 ►

over the next few years.

01:07:07 ►

These portions of Central Asia

01:07:10 ►

that were held by the old Soviet Union,

01:07:13 ►

Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan,

01:07:17 ►

Nagorno-Badzkaia,

01:07:20 ►

and all of these places,

01:07:22 ►

if they were ruled by the people who live there

01:07:26 ►

they would be radical Islamic republics

01:07:29 ►

it’s conceivable that in this period

01:07:31 ►

over the next few months

01:07:33 ►

there could be a worldwide uprising of Islam

01:07:37 ►

that would end with it making the greatest

01:07:40 ►

territorial gains since it’s made in the 10th century

01:07:44 ►

if all Muslims were ruled by Muslim governments making the greatest territorial gain since it’s made in the 10th century.

01:07:49 ►

If all Muslims were ruled by Muslim governments,

01:07:54 ►

an enormous reconstruction of the boundaries of the world would take place.

01:07:59 ►

So these two dissents both seem related to Islam.

01:08:02 ►

I mean, Europe is just a mess at this time. I mean, Macrobius, writing in the 5th century,

01:08:06 ►

thought that the circumference of a circle

01:08:09 ►

was twice its diameter.

01:08:12 ►

You know, what?

01:08:13 ►

They didn’t have string?

01:08:15 ►

I don’t know.

01:08:18 ►

Imagine that.

01:08:20 ►

That’s how low things sunk in Europe

01:08:22 ►

while these people were gazing at the stars

01:08:25 ►

and inventing the quadratic equation and so forth and so on.

01:08:30 ►

Okay, this one, hard for you to see,

01:08:37 ►

occurs in 1122.

01:08:40 ►

That’s the crusade which breaks apart

01:08:44 ►

the stasis of medieval Europe and lets in all kinds of novelty, right?

01:08:51 ►

Now, the next one is this one, and this is an interesting one and illustrates how the character of dissents,

01:09:02 ►

well, the different characters of kinds of dissent into novelty.

01:09:06 ►

Let me get it on the screen a little bigger here.

01:09:10 ►

Here it is, this one.

01:09:14 ►

Now, it’s a dramatic dissent into novelty,

01:09:18 ►

but unlike most dissents into novelty,

01:09:21 ►

it’s also a dramatic return to normalcy.

01:09:24 ►

Now, what kind of event would give a signature like that? descents into novelty, it’s also a dramatic return to normalcy.

01:09:29 ►

Now, what kind of event would give a signature like that?

01:09:35 ►

A dramatic descent into novelty, a dramatic ascent back to the previous circle. The fall of an empire and the growth of another empire includes time.

01:09:37 ►

Well, how about this? An epidemic disease.

01:09:41 ►

Yes, 1356.

01:09:47 ►

One third of the population of Europe dies in 18 months.

01:09:49 ►

But now think about that.

01:09:51 ►

It’s catastrophic.

01:09:53 ►

It’s traumatic.

01:09:54 ►

But no new technology is introduced.

01:09:58 ►

No boundaries are shifted.

01:09:59 ►

No new religion enters the area.

01:10:02 ►

And no genes cross frontiers

01:10:05 ►

there is simply a demographic collapse

01:10:08 ►

everything comes to a halt

01:10:10 ►

and then everybody who was in number 2, 3 and 4 position

01:10:15 ►

moves up

01:10:16 ►

the wheels start turning again

01:10:18 ►

and there’s no thirst for innovation

01:10:21 ►

the entire effort is just to get back where you were

01:10:24 ►

before the bad news hit.

01:10:27 ►

And so, within a generation or two,

01:10:29 ►

you’re back where you were.

01:10:32 ►

Very interesting that the correlation

01:10:35 ►

between what actually happened

01:10:36 ►

and the shape of the graph

01:10:37 ►

seems to support that conclusion.

01:10:40 ►

In contrast to that signature,

01:10:44 ►

notice what came next, an entirely different kind

01:10:49 ►

of descent into novelty. First of all, starting from greater recidivism and ending in greater

01:10:57 ►

novelty, such novelty that there is no recovery. There’s a slight recovery, but this entire trough

01:11:06 ►

represents a lower level of novelty

01:11:09 ►

than had really ever been probed before.

01:11:12 ►

So what is this?

01:11:14 ►

Well, right up here at the top,

01:11:16 ►

it’s 1440.

01:11:19 ►

No, that’s in 1455, 15 years later,

01:11:22 ►

but that plays a role in it.

01:11:24 ►

No, 1440 in Mainz near Frankfurt,

01:11:28 ►

Johannes Gutenberg prints the first book.

01:11:31 ►

And if you think the internet was something,

01:11:35 ►

this was a biggie for information technology for sure.

01:11:42 ►

And as you mentioned mentioned very shortly thereafter

01:11:47 ►

the Ottoman Turks seize Constantinople

01:11:50 ►

and Europe’s access to the east

01:11:53 ►

is strangled

01:11:55 ►

and it’s a total crisis for European civilization

01:11:59 ►

so what is done is these

01:12:03 ►

incipient capitalists pool their money and they finance new techniques in ship building and navigation.

01:12:16 ►

So this is all technical innovation and novelty.

01:12:20 ►

And they build ships and they sail around Africa.

01:12:27 ►

And they reconnect to the east meanwhile what’s going on

01:12:30 ►

and they get rich

01:12:33 ►

that’s what I meant to say

01:12:34 ►

they get rich beyond their wildest dreams

01:12:37 ►

these agricultural hill towns in northern Italy

01:12:42 ►

that had been dealing each other wine for centuries

01:12:45 ►

suddenly find themselves the center of the largest aggregation of capital ever gathered on the planet to that point.

01:12:54 ►

And they just pour money back toward their benefactors,

01:12:58 ►

not only the scientists that had created the technological revolution that allowed this,

01:13:04 ►

but into the arts and into their palaces

01:13:06 ►

and into the planning of their cities.

01:13:09 ►

And they create the Italian Renaissance.

01:13:11 ►

And everybody, who is anybody, is positioned along this descent,

01:13:17 ►

beginning with the Proto-Renaissance, the Fra Angelico and all of that,

01:13:22 ►

and then coming down through Donatello,

01:13:24 ►

not Duccio, Donatello

01:13:25 ►

Michelangelo, Leonardo

01:13:28 ►

da Vinci, Titian, Raphael

01:13:30 ►

the whole bit and the whole

01:13:31 ►

thing reaches culmination

01:13:33 ►

right down here at the bottom

01:13:35 ►

of the trough they actually

01:13:37 ►

experience a

01:13:39 ►

kind of eschatonic event

01:13:42 ►

at the bottom

01:13:43 ►

of this novelty trough, which is

01:13:46 ►

they discovered

01:13:47 ►

the other half of the

01:13:49 ►

planet.

01:13:51 ►

That’s what they do. 500

01:13:53 ►

years ago. 1492.

01:13:56 ►

Right down here.

01:13:57 ►

Well, that blew the door

01:13:59 ►

off its hinges.

01:14:01 ►

There has never been

01:14:03 ►

return to normality

01:14:05 ►

in a certain sense

01:14:07 ►

that did it

01:14:08 ►

this trough

01:14:10 ►

what this trough pictures

01:14:12 ►

is a period that ends

01:14:15 ►

in 1619

01:14:16 ►

1619 is the beginning

01:14:19 ►

of the 30 years war

01:14:21 ►

this period across

01:14:23 ►

the bottom of this trough has been called by art historians

01:14:26 ►

who have no knowledge of this theory, the age of the marvelous. This is the age of the great

01:14:33 ►

hermetic flowering. This is the age of Shakespeare and the court, the Rudolfine Court in Prague. This is the age of Arkham Boldo and John Dee

01:14:46 ►

and Robert Flood

01:14:47 ►

and, you know,

01:14:50 ►

that incredibly

01:14:51 ►

complex, psychedelic,

01:14:54 ►

manneristic mishmash

01:14:56 ►

that those late Renaissance

01:14:57 ►

people put together.

01:15:00 ►

But there’s a certain

01:15:01 ►

ugliness in it.

01:15:03 ►

It’s not an entirely flat trough of novelty

01:15:06 ►

there is a recursion to old patterns

01:15:10 ►

and I maintain what that is

01:15:11 ►

is the beginning of the rape subjugation

01:15:16 ►

of the new world

01:15:17 ►

and then the rise of gangster capitalism

01:15:21 ►

in that environment

01:15:22 ►

because interestingly Europe was somewhat strangled

01:15:27 ►

before the discovery of the New World.

01:15:29 ►

I mean, it required resource management and all that.

01:15:32 ►

I mean, if you’ve been to places like Portugal

01:15:35 ►

and you say, you know, these people ruled half the planet,

01:15:40 ►

this rocky, scrubby, storm-battered little country?

01:15:45 ►

How did they do it?

01:15:47 ►

Well, obviously by expropriating other people’s resources.

01:15:51 ►

That’s how they did it.

01:15:53 ►

There was a period of normalcy where they were shipping.

01:15:56 ►

It didn’t change that much.

01:15:58 ►

There were just years of ship, go out, empty Quebec, full of empty Quebec.

01:16:01 ►

Well, except that all this information was pouring into Europe. It was like as though they had landed on alien planets.

01:16:10 ►

You know, Albrecht Durer went to an exhibition of Toltec carving in Leiden,

01:16:17 ►

and his diary entries on this.

01:16:19 ►

I mean, for those people to gaze upon these artifacts,

01:16:23 ►

it was literally like science fiction to

01:16:26 ►

them and plants and animals and they were the center of the world all they knew was that

01:16:31 ►

it’s like adding another earth to the equation for them exactly an incredibly

01:16:35 ►

exotic earth I mean animals plants human beings the largest river in the world

01:16:43 ►

the highest waterfall in the world

01:16:46 ►

and on and on and on

01:16:48 ►

it just swam into their kin

01:16:50 ►

literally like an alien planet

01:16:52 ►

1619 the party’s over

01:16:56 ►

in America this is called the Protestant Reformation

01:16:59 ►

out of some delicacy

01:17:00 ►

it’s not the Protestant Reformation for God’s sake

01:17:03 ►

it’s the 30 years war it’s when everybody

01:17:06 ►

in Europe just went nuts and

01:17:08 ►

slaughtered each other

01:17:09 ►

for 30 years until

01:17:12 ►

1648 and

01:17:13 ►

you know the whole the Cromwellian

01:17:16 ►

thing happened in England and

01:17:18 ►

it was

01:17:20 ►

a drag it was wars of religion

01:17:22 ►

that little

01:17:24 ►

clip that indicates a descent into novelty a drag, it was wars of religion that little clip

01:17:25 ►

that indicates a descent into novelty

01:17:28 ►

I call Newton’s Notch

01:17:30 ►

Newton was important enough that the entire

01:17:34 ►

I’m teasing a little bit, there was other stuff going on

01:17:37 ►

the foundation of the Royal Society

01:17:40 ►

and so forth and so on, but generally this was

01:17:43 ►

a period of recovery

01:17:45 ►

from the age of the marvelous

01:17:50 ►

and it’s an era of powdered wigs

01:17:53 ►

and social mores

01:17:56 ►

increasing class stratification

01:17:58 ►

increasing assertion of the power

01:18:02 ►

of the protestant churches in northern Europe

01:18:04 ►

and so forth and so on.

01:18:05 ►

And then up here, 1740,

01:18:10 ►

this is what’s called the European Enlightenment.

01:18:13 ►

And a bunch of French people, Voltaire, Rousseau, philosophers,

01:18:18 ►

theoreticians of how human society should be run,

01:18:21 ►

produce these screeds, these theoretical texts. But wild men in the

01:18:29 ►

Americas take this up, and the conclusion of all the philosophizing that goes on up here

01:18:35 ►

is the American Revolution, which occurs on a downsweep into novelty, and I would argue was reasonably successful followed by

01:18:46 ►

the French Revolution

01:18:47 ►

precisely on an upswing

01:18:50 ►

in other words

01:18:51 ►

a movement back into habit

01:18:53 ►

and for my money the French Revolution

01:18:56 ►

ended catastrophically

01:18:58 ►

I mean it’s every liberal’s

01:19:00 ►

nightmare

01:19:00 ►

I mean it was horrible

01:19:03 ►

the good people turned to monsters

01:19:05 ►

and then they couldn’t keep hold of it

01:19:07 ►

in spite of that

01:19:09 ►

so the French Revolution

01:19:11 ►

ends with the enthronement of

01:19:13 ►

the Emperor Louis Napoleon

01:19:15 ►

go figure

01:19:16 ►

and then so forth

01:19:21 ►

and as you see the 20th century

01:19:24 ►

is down here at a much higher level of novelty, lower toward the zero point.

01:19:30 ►

And the entirety of the, since the middle 19th century, which is just about right, I maintain, since the middle 19th century, we’ve just been exploring totally new territory. You know, once you get

01:19:46 ►

Michael Faraday and Conrad Lorenz and Baron Lobachevsky and Fitzhugh Ludlow and all this,

01:19:57 ►

you know, in other words, non-Euclidean geometry, electromagnetic field theory, psychedelic drug use

01:20:05 ►

it all begins to come together

01:20:08 ►

and of course then the most important

01:20:10 ►

arguably the most important moment in the 19th century

01:20:14 ►

completely unrecognized at the time

01:20:16 ►

now predicted by the wave

01:20:19 ►

was 1837 when Charles Babbage

01:20:23 ►

assembled the Difference Engine

01:20:26 ►

and laid the basis for the cybernetic revolution.

01:20:32 ►

Let’s look at modern times in a little more.

01:20:35 ►

He built this thing called the Difference Engine, the Babbage Machine.

01:20:41 ►

It was a computer.

01:20:43 ►

And he knew what it was.

01:20:44 ►

He understood what was possible with it. machine. It was a computer. And he knew what it was. He

01:20:45 ►

understood what was possible

01:20:47 ►

with it. He went to the British government.

01:20:50 ►

He offered it to them.

01:20:51 ►

He begged them to develop

01:20:53 ►

this. And it was just so beyond

01:20:55 ►

their imagining.

01:20:58 ►

But it had all the

01:20:59 ►

elements of a modern computer.

01:21:02 ►

It was not electric, of course.

01:21:04 ►

It was a mechanical computer. It was not electric, of course. It was a mechanical computer.

01:21:06 ►

But all the principles

01:21:08 ►

were there, and in Babbage’s

01:21:10 ►

writing, it’s very clear he

01:21:11 ►

understood exactly what he had on his

01:21:14 ►

hands. Incredible.

01:21:16 ►

If you ever see a picture of Babbage,

01:21:18 ►

I mean, think about this. This guy

01:21:20 ►

lived in 1837. He looks

01:21:22 ►

like Flash Gordon.

01:21:24 ►

I mean, he has a haircut

01:21:25 ►

so in advance

01:21:27 ►

of his time.

01:21:29 ►

It’s incredible.

01:21:34 ►

Now let’s look at this.

01:21:35 ►

This is from 1888

01:21:38 ►

over here.

01:21:40 ►

And what’s interesting is

01:21:41 ►

we talked, we mentioned

01:21:44 ►

or came up this afternoon

01:21:45 ►

how you can use the calendar as a political

01:21:47 ►

flog when you have nothing else going

01:21:50 ►

well that not only happened

01:21:53 ►

or that not only will for sure happen in 2000

01:21:57 ►

but it very definitely happened in 1900

01:22:00 ►

there’s something about it

01:22:03 ►

everybody, they had the same feeling, actually,

01:22:06 ►

that we do now. The telephone had been

01:22:08 ►

invented in 1895, or, you know, popularized.

01:22:12 ►

They began installing them.

01:22:15 ►

That was the internet of that time.

01:22:18 ►

It’s still pretty amazing stuff. I mean,

01:22:20 ►

how you deliver sex over copper wire, I don’t

01:22:24 ►

know, but they managed to do that.

01:22:27 ►

And powered flight was happening all over the world.

01:22:32 ►

People were working on it.

01:22:33 ►

And so this point up here is, I believe, January 3rd, 1900 or something like that.

01:22:41 ►

It’s so on the money.

01:22:43 ►

And then this cascade into novelty.

01:22:46 ►

They were full of hope.

01:22:48 ►

They felt it within their grasp.

01:22:50 ►

The old world, the Edwardian world

01:22:53 ►

was falling away.

01:22:54 ►

It’s 1900.

01:22:56 ►

Radio is ahead.

01:22:59 ►

Relativity is five years in the future.

01:23:02 ►

Planck’s constant is filling the physics journals

01:23:06 ►

and

01:23:07 ►

you know

01:23:09 ►

in art

01:23:11 ►

the

01:23:12 ►

paraphysics is happening

01:23:15 ►

and there’s this

01:23:17 ►

in Italy

01:23:19 ►

futurism is beginning

01:23:21 ►

the first futurist

01:23:23 ►

tracts are being published.

01:23:25 ►

Well, then the First World War,

01:23:30 ►

quantum physics,

01:23:32 ►

all of these things,

01:23:33 ►

it gets weirder.

01:23:35 ►

It begins to get weirder.

01:23:37 ►

It becomes more than simply an object of optimism.

01:23:40 ►

It becomes hideously complex and novel

01:23:43 ►

and strange and bizarre

01:23:45 ►

and it reaches an apex in 1933

01:23:48 ►

and I don’t have to tell you

01:23:51 ►

so then across the bottom of this thing

01:23:56 ►

World War II is fought

01:23:59 ►

and World War II was like a rehearse

01:24:03 ►

for the apocalypse

01:24:04 ►

I mean wars now are not particularly about anything And World War II was like a rehearse for the apocalypse.

01:24:09 ►

I mean, wars now are not particularly about anything.

01:24:13 ►

That was a war which was about something.

01:24:18 ►

And it was utterly surreal for the people who experienced it to live through.

01:24:20 ►

I mean, it was about eugenics.

01:24:23 ►

It was about rocket bombs.

01:24:26 ►

It was about the power of radio to move millions of people

01:24:28 ►

it was about propaganda

01:24:29 ►

it was all kinds of things

01:24:32 ►

and of course it ended

01:24:33 ►

with kicking open the nuclear doorway

01:24:38 ►

anybody who doesn’t think

01:24:40 ►

World War II was a surreal extravaganza

01:24:44 ►

I recommend Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow,

01:24:50 ►

which is an incredible thing to read,

01:24:52 ►

an incredible work of literature,

01:24:56 ►

and you’ll never see life again the same way.

01:25:01 ►

Okay, so then once that’s all over

01:25:04 ►

and it reaches its apex in the destruction

01:25:08 ►

of the axis powers and the use of the atom bomb

01:25:12 ►

on Japan and so forth

01:25:13 ►

everybody has but one thought

01:25:16 ►

let’s knock this off

01:25:19 ►

let’s have some kids, crack a beer

01:25:23 ►

have a barbecue, they even called it the return to normalcy.

01:25:27 ►

And there was all this uniform conformity culture,

01:25:34 ►

Norman Rockwell, American white culture,

01:25:38 ►

all racial, sexual, intellectual, and social aberrant phenomena

01:25:45 ►

was incredibly repressed.

01:25:48 ►

And there were some spills along the way,

01:25:51 ►

the JFK assassination,

01:25:53 ►

so forth and so on.

01:25:56 ►

And then it approaches the cusp,

01:26:00 ►

the cemetery break.

01:26:02 ►

And if you have an incredible memory,

01:26:04 ►

you may remember that a few minutes ago

01:26:06 ►

I said Homer sang his song here

01:26:09 ►

one cycle back

01:26:11 ►

one fractal scale up

01:26:14 ►

so the analogy is

01:26:17 ►

or the analogy to Homer singing his song

01:26:21 ►

and to the fall of Mycenaean and all of that

01:26:24 ►

or I’m sorry the fall of Minoan fall of Mycenae and all of that or I’m sorry

01:26:25 ►

the fall of Minoan culture

01:26:28 ►

to Mycenae

01:26:29 ►

is the 1960s

01:26:32 ►

the freak revolution

01:26:35 ►

the Vietnam War

01:26:37 ►

the age of LSD

01:26:38 ►

the landing on the moon

01:26:40 ►

at this scale

01:26:42 ►

cannot be discerned

01:26:43 ►

from the top of that thing

01:26:44 ►

that all comes together right there 1968-69 moon at this scale cannot be discerned from the top of that thing. That all

01:26:45 ►

comes together right there.

01:26:48 ►

1968-69

01:26:49 ►

that’s where the cultural

01:26:51 ►

symmetry break occurs

01:26:53 ►

and then

01:26:55 ►

the final descent into

01:26:57 ►

novelty at that scale begins

01:26:59 ►

and I submit to you that’s a pretty good

01:27:02 ►

rendition of

01:27:03 ►

the myth of the culture that the media reinforces and that many of us carry.

01:27:08 ►

I mean, we do believe that was the turning point, that once rock and roll, LSD, sexual permissiveness and all this stuff was unleashed,

01:27:20 ►

we’ve then just been refining and experimenting with those themes ever since.

01:27:28 ►

The 70s were a descent into novelty.

01:27:34 ►

The 80s, these were fairly steady descents into novelty,

01:27:39 ►

but they didn’t surpass the madness of the middle 40s until

01:27:45 ►

well the early 80s I guess

01:27:49 ►

it’s not at scale here

01:27:51 ►

but

01:27:52 ►

and then you know

01:27:55 ►

with the Reagan era

01:27:57 ►

we enter into a kind of different

01:27:59 ►

kind of time

01:28:00 ►

this bizarre

01:28:02 ►

oscillation business where there are surges of

01:28:08 ►

habit and then collapses into novelty and then reassertions of orthodoxy and

01:28:14 ►

then collapses into novelty and this is what we’re experiencing now here I’ll go

01:28:20 ►

in on this

01:28:21 ►

now. Here, I’ll go in on this.

01:28:23 ►

Faster than we’ve seen previously. Like oscillations

01:28:25 ►

happen over five or ten years.

01:28:28 ►

Or oscillations over

01:28:30 ►

months. Yeah.

01:28:32 ►

There’s now 89

01:28:33 ►

years on the screen. Here are the

01:28:35 ►

1960s.

01:28:37 ►

And now we’re back to today.

01:28:40 ►

We’re descending this thing.

01:28:42 ►

So basically what you’re looking at

01:28:44 ►

is the 90s

01:28:45 ►

with the present year in the middle.

01:28:48 ►

And it shows that this is, by the way,

01:28:51 ►

predicted to be the most dramatic year in the decade.

01:28:56 ►

And that that dramatic, whatever that drama is,

01:29:00 ►

it’ll be in full play by June.

01:29:04 ►

Why is Grab Taiwan by the Chinese?

01:29:08 ►

Or it could be an AIDS cure.

01:29:11 ►

Or it could be an Ebola outbreak.

01:29:15 ►

I wouldn’t look to the American presidential election

01:29:18 ►

for much excitement unless there’s gunplay,

01:29:23 ►

which never rule it out in this country.

01:29:27 ►

We play rough.

01:29:30 ►

There could be a scientific breakthrough

01:29:32 ►

of some sort.

01:29:34 ►

This planet detection thing

01:29:37 ►

is obviously edging toward explosion

01:29:40 ►

because there is a water-heavy,

01:29:43 ►

oxygen-rich world out there within 50 light years

01:29:47 ►

and the technology to detect it is now 99 percent in place and it’s just a matter of you know

01:29:56 ►

teasing it out of this hellaciously difficult data but we’re going to know recently the Hubble Space Telescope

01:30:05 ►

discovered the other 80%

01:30:08 ►

of the galaxies in the universe

01:30:11 ►

so we now have instead of 10 billion galaxies

01:30:15 ►

in one press release

01:30:18 ►

we go to 50 billion galaxies

01:30:21 ►

that means 5 times as much intelligence, five times as many civilizations, and that’s

01:30:29 ►

page 42 news in the New York Times.

01:30:35 ►

No, it’s funny. People say, well, what will happen after 2012? You haven’t been listening.

01:30:42 ►

This theory doesn’t say anything about what happens after 2012

01:30:46 ►

this is a theory about what happens before 2012

01:30:49 ►

that’s why waiting until 2012

01:30:52 ►

to use it will be rather

01:30:55 ►

self-defeating because it won’t work

01:30:59 ►

after 2012

01:31:00 ►

of course if there isn’t after 2012

01:31:03 ►

it will be wrong, in which case we will have the curious task on our hands, some of us, of figuring out why it seemed right for so long.

01:31:15 ►

Yes. I’ve never heard of anybody

01:31:28 ►

having an experience quite like this

01:31:30 ►

I mean it’s hard for you

01:31:33 ►

probably to appreciate who I am

01:31:35 ►

because I appear fully in command of this

01:31:39 ►

but I am not interested particularly in the I Ching

01:31:42 ►

I’m not a mathematician

01:31:44 ►

don’t like predestiny I’m not interested particularly in the I Ching. I’m not a mathematician.

01:31:48 ►

Don’t like predestiny.

01:31:52 ►

It’s just not my style, this whole thing.

01:31:57 ►

I’m a rationalist and somewhat cynical,

01:32:01 ►

left to my own devices, perhaps a little dark.

01:32:07 ►

This is an incredible argument for some kind of hope. It says there is an architecture to time. It says the wars, the rapes, the horrible revisions that go on are part of the

01:32:18 ►

pattern and all will eventually find resolution in the final culmination.

01:32:26 ►

And then, you know, the question which I would put to the mushroom

01:32:31 ►

or the logos or whoever it is, is if this is not true,

01:32:37 ►

then what possible purpose could all this have served?

01:32:44 ►

I mean, what’s it it for I don’t mind

01:32:46 ►

the public disgrace of being

01:32:48 ►

wrong but it’ll

01:32:50 ►

humble me but we didn’t probably

01:32:52 ►

need to mobilize a

01:32:54 ►

mass movement to humble

01:32:56 ►

me so

01:32:57 ►

what was it all for

01:33:00 ►

and I confess I really

01:33:02 ►

I don’t know

01:33:03 ►

I have ideas

01:33:05 ►

I mean any question like that

01:33:08 ►

as long as I’ve been thinking on it

01:33:10 ►

there will be answers

01:33:11 ►

I mean how about this

01:33:14 ►

suppose

01:33:15 ►

the unconscious

01:33:17 ►

is a kind of regulatory

01:33:20 ►

has a kind of

01:33:22 ►

regulatory function

01:33:24 ►

and of hysteria and of hysteria

01:33:27 ►

of mass hysteria

01:33:29 ►

and that what this prophecy

01:33:31 ►

made by me, made by the Maya

01:33:33 ►

made by these Vedic people

01:33:36 ►

what it’s for

01:33:37 ►

is to smear expectations

01:33:41 ►

about the millennium

01:33:42 ►

so that instead of having it all focus

01:33:46 ►

on January 1, 2000

01:33:49 ►

there’ll be dissenters

01:33:51 ►

there’ll be people who say

01:33:53 ►

well it isn’t January 1, 2000

01:33:55 ►

haven’t you heard?

01:33:56 ►

it’s 2012

01:33:57 ►

and so then a huge number of people

01:34:00 ►

will put their faith on 2000

01:34:03 ►

they’ll be disappointed and they’ll go away

01:34:06 ►

and get lives and then the people who didn’t contribute to that hysteria will delay their

01:34:12 ►

hysteria until 2012 and then it will fail and then they’ll get lives and then by this ruse

01:34:20 ►

the unconscious mind will have helped the species cross over this calendrical speed bump

01:34:27 ►

without mass hysteria, nuclear war

01:34:31 ►

or religious pogrom

01:34:32 ►

which might otherwise be a factor

01:34:35 ►

I don’t feel the power particularly of this idea

01:34:39 ►

but it’s the only one I’ve come up

01:34:41 ►

which answers the question

01:34:42 ►

if this isn’t true, what the hell is the point?

01:34:46 ►

In Young’s

01:34:48 ►

work on I Ching, does he

01:34:50 ►

touch on any cyclical

01:34:51 ►

historical reference?

01:34:54 ►

No, this is surprisingly

01:34:56 ►

absent, although

01:34:58 ►

in the Wilhelm

01:35:00 ►

Bain’s translation, there

01:35:02 ►

is something called the sequence.

01:35:05 ►

And it’s old, it’s Zhou, and it’s a kind of a poem

01:35:11 ►

which attempts to make a logical transition from each hexagram to the next

01:35:18 ►

in the Qing-Wen sequence.

01:35:22 ►

There are curious statements in the I Ching

01:35:25 ►

which definitely support the idea

01:35:28 ►

that there must be big chunks

01:35:30 ►

missing. For example,

01:35:33 ►

hexagram

01:35:34 ►

49 in the

01:35:36 ►

Wilhelm Bain’s translation is called

01:35:37 ►

revolution. So you turn

01:35:40 ►

to this expecting a

01:35:42 ►

dissertation on

01:35:43 ►

political reform of society.

01:35:47 ►

And what it says is the shaman is a calendar maker.

01:35:53 ►

He orders the seasons and he sets things right.

01:35:59 ►

And it’s a whole discussion about calendar making

01:36:03 ►

and as a way of creating political reform.

01:36:08 ►

Well, that’s bizarre. Another

01:36:11 ►

interesting thing is hexagram 63

01:36:14 ►

is after completion. Hexagram

01:36:19 ►

64 is before completion.

01:36:24 ►

The logic of their order is reversed.

01:36:28 ►

Again, suggesting that reversing the order of things

01:36:32 ►

is somehow allowed.

01:36:35 ►

The middle hexagram,

01:36:37 ►

meaning the hexagram at the halfway point,

01:36:39 ►

if you believe that the sequence was designed as a structure,

01:36:45 ►

is number 32, is called duration.

01:36:50 ►

And the image is of a ridge pole.

01:36:54 ►

Well, obviously the ridge pole is at the center

01:36:57 ►

and the rafters move off of it.

01:37:08 ►

I can’t remember which hexagram it is that says he who correctly understands

01:37:11 ►

the import of this sacrifice can hold

01:37:14 ►

the universe in the palm of his hand like a spinning

01:37:17 ►

marble that’s a very alchemical

01:37:21 ►

redaction

01:37:22 ►

and so forth and so on.

01:37:25 ►

I mean, just there are all kinds of textual clues to the fact,

01:37:30 ►

and of course this is coming through translation.

01:37:33 ►

It’s very important to read many translations of the I Ching.

01:37:37 ►

The Wilhelm Baines is incredibly deep and poetic and wonderful

01:37:43 ►

and preferred by me because I grew up with it.

01:37:47 ►

But did you ever notice?

01:37:49 ►

It’s not a translation of a Chinese book.

01:37:53 ►

It’s a translation of a German book.

01:37:56 ►

It’s the Carrie F. Baines translation

01:37:58 ►

of the German edition of the I Ching

01:38:01 ►

by Richard Wilhelm.

01:38:04 ►

There has recently been other translations of the I Ching by Richard Wilhelm. There has recently been other translations of the I Ching,

01:38:08 ►

and they are, you know, some bring one thing to it and some another.

01:38:14 ►

But I think we have been, for culturally biased reasons, as I said,

01:38:19 ►

incredibly naive about time.

01:38:22 ►

One, and this is the final thought that I’ll leave you with this evening,

01:38:28 ►

say this is true.

01:38:31 ►

How can it be true

01:38:33 ►

and not involve God’s entry into history

01:38:37 ►

or the explosion of the sun

01:38:40 ►

or the coming of the space brothers

01:38:42 ►

or some other highly improbable and somewhat cheesy event?

01:38:47 ►

How can it fulfill itself

01:38:51 ►

and yet not require willful suspension of disbelief?

01:38:57 ►

Well, one thought that’s occurred to me,

01:39:00 ►

you touched on it,

01:39:02 ►

the wave doesn’t seem to work after 2012, but I’ve noticed in analyzing

01:39:08 ►

all this history and stuff, that what the wave

01:39:11 ►

like people will always ask me, does it do the stock market?

01:39:16 ►

Only if the stock market moves hundreds of points, otherwise

01:39:19 ►

it’s lost in the noise of everything else going on

01:39:23 ►

in the world.

01:39:30 ►

When I ask myself, what does this wave predict best?

01:39:32 ►

In other words, is it politics?

01:39:35 ►

Is it biological evolution?

01:39:39 ►

What is it that it really predicts well?

01:39:41 ►

The answer is technology it seems to argue that technology

01:39:46 ►

and novelty are almost

01:39:49 ►

the same thing

01:39:50 ►

and interesting that the DMT creatures are builders

01:39:54 ►

in light and now we’re on the verge

01:39:57 ►

through VRML of becoming

01:40:00 ►

builders in light

01:40:02 ►

well if the wave describes

01:40:05 ►

technologies unfolding through time

01:40:09 ►

and if the wave can’t be propagated

01:40:12 ►

past 2012

01:40:13 ►

then it must be because in 2012

01:40:17 ►

a technology is invented which makes

01:40:21 ►

linear time and ends it

01:40:23 ►

in other words, time travel. Time travel.

01:40:28 ►

Now, 10 years ago, only mad people talked about time travel. It was not a respectable subject.

01:40:36 ►

Recently, there have been articles in physical review letters, in Scientific American in Nature it’s a very hot topic

01:40:45 ►

there are many schemes

01:40:47 ►

for time travel

01:40:49 ►

there are many notions about how time travel

01:40:51 ►

could be done

01:40:53 ►

and actually we should have been

01:40:55 ►

paying attention because Kurt Gödel

01:40:57 ►

in 1948 wrote a paper

01:41:00 ►

that advanced a scheme

01:41:01 ►

for time travel that was within

01:41:03 ►

the realm of possibility.

01:41:06 ►

Possibility.

01:41:07 ►

I’m not saying we’re going to cobble one together tomorrow.

01:41:11 ►

I mean, in some of these schemes,

01:41:12 ►

you have to spin cylinders the size of the solar system

01:41:16 ►

and stuff like that.

01:41:18 ►

But any technology that can be imagined

01:41:21 ►

can be realized by somebody.

01:41:24 ►

Well, if time travel were invented in 2012,

01:41:28 ►

that would explain why there was no longer possible

01:41:31 ►

a Cartesian graphical linear description of time’s unfolding,

01:41:36 ►

because at that point, time becomes multivectored

01:41:40 ►

and can no longer be portrayed in this kind of a matrix.

01:41:46 ►

Now, and this is the last on this,

01:41:49 ►

but an objection to time travel is always the grandfather paradox,

01:41:56 ►

which seems to imply that if time travel is possible,

01:42:00 ►

it’s only possible forward in time,

01:42:02 ►

because if it were possible backward in time

01:42:05 ►

you could come back and kill your own grandfather

01:42:08 ►

and then you wouldn’t exist

01:42:10 ►

and so therefore nobody could kill him

01:42:13 ►

and you get a logical paradox that is always trotted out

01:42:17 ►

to defeat time travel schemes

01:42:20 ►

I have a different notion of how this works

01:42:24 ►

time travel is not what we think it is schemes. I have a different notion of how this works.

01:42:26 ►

Time travel is not what we think it is.

01:42:28 ►

If what

01:42:30 ►

we call time travel

01:42:31 ►

is an invention,

01:42:33 ►

which if ever invented,

01:42:36 ►

the moment the time

01:42:37 ►

machine was turned on,

01:42:40 ►

the rest of the history

01:42:42 ►

of the universe will happen

01:42:43 ►

instantly.

01:42:53 ►

Because the rest of the history of the universe will happen instantly because in order to avoid these temporal paradoxes, the entire system would have to undergo a kind of collapse.

01:43:00 ►

Here’s an analogy which might make this clearer.

01:43:03 ►

here’s an analogy which might make this clearer if you release gas into a cylinder

01:43:11 ►

the pressure equalizes on the walls of the cylinder

01:43:17 ►

this is called Bernoulli’s law

01:43:19 ►

well, so imagine that we suddenly become able to travel into the future.

01:43:27 ►

At first I imagined that what would happen is

01:43:30 ►

thousands and thousands of time machines would appear instantly,

01:43:36 ►

having traveled backward in time to witness the first flight forward into time.

01:43:41 ►

It would be as though you could fly your Piper Cub to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina,

01:43:47 ►

to that windy morning in 1905 when the Brothers W pushed out the flyer and took off. But then I

01:43:55 ►

realized, you know, this bears with it the implication of the grandfather paradox. So

01:44:01 ►

instead, I think what happens is the moment the first time machine is turned on, the most advanced state of evolution arrives instantly at the other side of the boundary.

01:44:18 ►

I call it the god whistle.

01:44:21 ►

A time machine is not really a time machine.

01:44:24 ►

It’s a way of destroying the rest

01:44:27 ►

of the history of the universe. And so, in a sense, we’re back to the big picture again.

01:44:35 ►

The invention of the time machine is a self-initiated annihilation of space and time.

01:44:42 ►

It’s a technological device. It’s by technology is critical in the history of the way.

01:44:47 ►

Yes, absolutely.

01:44:48 ►

And interestingly enough,

01:44:49 ►

if you think they wouldn’t risk this,

01:44:52 ►

there’s, I told you yesterday,

01:44:54 ►

nothing comes unannounced.

01:44:56 ►

There’s a very interesting story

01:44:58 ►

about the first datum test

01:45:00 ►

at Trinity in 1945.

01:45:04 ►

Yes, they had equations

01:45:05 ►

in front of them which

01:45:08 ►

led some people on

01:45:10 ►

the advanced team to

01:45:12 ►

believe that when the device was

01:45:14 ►

detonated the nitrogen

01:45:16 ►

in the atmosphere would

01:45:18 ►

ignite and that the entire

01:45:20 ►

atmosphere of the

01:45:22 ►

planet would burn

01:45:23 ►

and they figured it was a one in ten.

01:45:29 ►

And so they said, yeah, reasonable odds.

01:45:34 ►

Hitler’s out there.

01:45:35 ►

I guess Hitler wasn’t out there at that point,

01:45:37 ►

but those wily Japs were out there.

01:45:40 ►

So they said a one in ten chance, and they threw the switch,

01:45:43 ►

and it turned out the chamber was empty

01:45:46 ►

so we’re here to tell the tale

01:45:48 ►

it’s much closer to where you want to be

01:45:53 ►

well this reminds me of a wrinkle

01:45:57 ►

here’s a possible scenario

01:45:59 ►

which makes use of this concept

01:46:02 ►

there is a cosmological

01:46:05 ►

theory out there

01:46:09 ►

it’s not the top contender

01:46:11 ►

it’s mostly been developed by this guy Hans Ulf

01:46:14 ►

and it’s called a vacuum fluctuation cosmology

01:46:18 ►

quantum physics allows these things

01:46:20 ►

called vacuum fluctuations

01:46:22 ►

and what they are is particles literally appear out of nowhere.

01:46:29 ►

And this is allowed by quantum physics

01:46:33 ►

as long as parity is conserved.

01:46:37 ►

And what that means is

01:46:39 ►

that these particles must contact their antiparticle

01:46:43 ►

and annihilate themselves

01:46:45 ►

and restore the system to a net energy of zero.

01:46:50 ►

But there is this, yes,

01:46:52 ►

but there is this brief moment

01:46:54 ►

during the vacuum fluctuation

01:46:56 ►

when matter comes into being ex nihilo.

01:47:00 ►

Now, the interesting thing

01:47:01 ►

about the quantum description

01:47:04 ►

of the vacuum fluctuation

01:47:06 ►

is that the mathematics set no theoretical upper limit

01:47:10 ►

for the size of the fluctuation.

01:47:12 ►

It simply says the larger the fluctuation,

01:47:17 ►

the rarer it is.

01:47:21 ►

So Hans Olven suggests

01:47:23 ►

we are in a vacuum fluctuation

01:47:26 ►

of 10 high 22 particles

01:47:29 ►

and what that means is

01:47:32 ►

that somewhere in the larger metaverse

01:47:36 ►

our anti-matter twin exists

01:47:40 ►

and for the laws of physics

01:47:42 ►

to keep the accounts balanced

01:47:45 ►

parity will have to be conserved

01:47:48 ►

and what that might mean

01:47:50 ►

is a higher dimensional collision

01:47:53 ►

with our lost twin

01:47:55 ►

and this would not be a collision in three dimensional space

01:48:00 ►

you wouldn’t see it coming

01:48:02 ►

it would occur instantaneously throughout the entire space-time

01:48:08 ►

continuum. All particles would annihilate their antiparticles, and there is only one particle

01:48:18 ►

that has no antiparticle. The photon has no, there is no anti photon

01:48:25 ►

so if the universe were a vacuum fluctuation of this type at the moment of the

01:48:33 ►

Reconservation of parity all matter in this universe would disappear

01:48:39 ►

100% it would disappear and what would be left is all the light in the universe

01:48:46 ►

and a universe filled entirely with photons

01:48:52 ►

we have no idea

01:48:54 ►

what that is

01:48:56 ►

that might be the mind of God

01:49:00 ►

that might be the omega

01:49:03 ►

of the eschaton

01:49:04 ►

consciousness, there was an article in Scientific American

01:49:09 ►

of all places, three issues ago

01:49:11 ►

suggesting that consciousness is a general

01:49:14 ►

quality of the universe like gravity

01:49:17 ►

and light is implicated

01:49:19 ►

so it’s possible that

01:49:21 ►

now that’s a large scale

01:49:25 ►

you talk about abandoning the body

01:49:27 ►

this is a cosmology where at a certain point

01:49:31 ►

in the life of the universe all matter disappears

01:49:34 ►

and that would certainly

01:49:38 ►

for my money

01:49:40 ►

fulfill the novelty theory

01:49:44 ►

in a way all the fiber optic being laid leaves

01:49:47 ►

for a lot more light being pushed around then previously in a way or at least

01:49:52 ►

light in a much more complex pattern than just the sunshine well and the fact

01:49:57 ►

that we’re beginning to build with light the virtual realities are made of light

01:50:02 ►

people don’t understand you know know, in virtual reality,

01:50:05 ►

the difference between a 10-story building

01:50:08 ►

and a 100-story building,

01:50:11 ►

one zero.

01:50:14 ►

You enter the code where it says make it 10 stories high,

01:50:17 ►

you add one zero, it now makes it 100 stories high.

01:50:21 ►

Cost.

01:50:23 ►

It’s free.

01:50:24 ►

Light is free. I mean, virtually free. The technologies it moves

01:50:28 ►

through aren’t free. But, you know, we have hidden helpers in the quantum realm. Those little

01:50:35 ►

electrons, they are numerous. They want to help. You know, Horton hears a who, that sort of thing.

01:50:43 ►

Horton hears a who that sort of thing

01:50:44 ►

well that’s the basic lay of the land on this

01:50:49 ►

oh one last thing I should say

01:50:53 ►

in the interest of intellectual honesty

01:50:55 ►

is not everybody loves the time wave

01:50:58 ►

and some of the people who hate it are very bright

01:51:01 ►

and if you’re interested in

01:51:04 ►

you know

01:51:05 ►

Bear Duke’s

01:51:07 ►

discussions about

01:51:09 ►

this check my

01:51:11 ►

website

01:51:13 ►

there’s a young

01:51:15 ►

British mathematician who thinks

01:51:17 ►

he can take it apart

01:51:19 ►

and we’ve been going at it hammer and

01:51:21 ►

tongs and we’re going to lift the curtain

01:51:24 ►

on our discussion pretty soon.

01:51:26 ►

I would like inspection.

01:51:29 ►

I mean, I invite, and those of you who are professional or amateur mathematicians,

01:51:34 ►

I’d like to, people should check my work.

01:51:39 ►

I told you the first night, my method is shamanic,

01:51:43 ►

or my techniques are shamanic, or my techniques are shamanic,

01:51:46 ►

but my method is scientific and rational.

01:51:49 ►

The truth can defend itself.

01:51:52 ►

If this can be broken on the wheel of logical analysis,

01:51:59 ►

then so be it.

01:52:01 ►

It does empower hope, but there’s no percentage in false hope. I mean, the only

01:52:08 ►

true hope is in the maintenance of an open mind. So thank you very much.

01:52:18 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one

01:52:23 ►

thought at a time.

01:52:24 ►

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

01:52:31 ►

So now do you understand why I’ve not been playing these time wave lectures lately?

01:52:37 ►

But if for some reason you would like to hear more of these excursions into time and I Ching,

01:52:43 ►

well there are more than a dozen others that I’ve already podcast, including his discussion on two subsequent occasions to the

01:52:45 ►

lecture that we just listened to, where he talked about the challenges to his idea that he just

01:52:50 ►

mentioned. And you can go back and listen to them again if you want, but for me, the time wave

01:52:55 ►

excitement is over. By the way, did you notice that Terence just began with the assumption that

01:53:02 ►

the I Ching is to be taken in and believed without question?

01:53:06 ►

If this session had begun with an introduction similar to the one I gave earlier,

01:53:11 ►

I doubt if so many people would have bought into his time wave idea so easily.

01:53:16 ►

In fact, I can’t remember a single instance where the I Ching itself was challenged,

01:53:21 ►

at least when Terence was presenting his new idea.

01:53:24 ►

And since it is the

01:53:25 ►

basis of his entire system, it seems to me that the starting point for this talk should have been

01:53:31 ►

to bring into question the reliability and accuracy of the I Ching’s ability to predict the future.

01:53:38 ►

My guess is that the evening’s discussion would have taken an entirely different direction had

01:53:43 ►

that been the case. So here’s a question you may want to think about. Now that we know the time wave hypothesis was a

01:53:50 ►

bust, does that also mean that the I Ching, while it does contain some good ideas, it nonetheless

01:53:56 ►

isn’t something that one should build their lives around. To give Terence’s due, however,

01:54:02 ►

he does clearly point out that he is using an ancient Chinese oracle to make a major revision to the science of physics.

01:54:10 ►

Now, taken at face value, this seems preposterous, and as it turned out, it actually was preposterous.

01:54:17 ►

So why, then, with this major blunder in Terence’s thinking, at least from my perspective,

01:54:25 ►

blunder in Terence’s thinking, at least from my perspective. Why did we still go to his workshops,

01:54:30 ►

pass around his tapes, and stay up late at night talking about some of his other ideas?

01:54:36 ►

Well, that question answers itself, I think, because if you haven’t already figured it out,

01:54:42 ►

the genius of Terence McKenna was in his ability to provoke unique thoughts in our own minds as we contemplate what he was saying. Even when we

01:54:46 ►

disagreed with him, we were still able to mine a great deal of new ideas that his lectures sparked

01:54:51 ►

in us. My guess is that this has already happened to you and your friends, at least if you’ve

01:54:57 ►

listened to enough of his talks. Terence McKenna, in my opinion, was primarily a catalyst whose mission it was to spark new ideas in his listeners’

01:55:07 ►

mind. In closing, I’d like to say that while I do count myself as a diehard Terence McKenna fan,

01:55:15 ►

well, if the time wave was his only message, and if he never talked about psychedelics as well,

01:55:20 ►

well, he most likely wouldn’t have captured my attention as he did.

01:55:24 ►

And while some people may

01:55:26 ►

say that the time wave was his Achilles heel and that it should bring down his reputation,

01:55:31 ►

well, I prefer to see it as evidence that, like all of us, Terence could be wrong about some

01:55:37 ►

things. He too had feet of clay, and in my book that makes some of his other ideas even more

01:55:43 ►

appealing to me, since they aren’t coming from someone who sees himself as an infallible guru

01:55:49 ►

which is a stigma that he tried to avoid as best he could.

01:55:53 ►

So the bottom line for me is that while I’m not a fan of the time wave

01:55:58 ►

I nonetheless remain a big fan of Terence McKenna.

01:56:03 ►

And for now this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:56:07 ►

Be well, my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

576 - Countdown Into Complexity – Part 4

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Program Notes

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