Program Notes

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989.

Today we continue with the June 1989 Terence McKenna workshop session in which he sets out his ideas about history and time in his Timewave hypothesis. And while we now know that this idea of his will never actually become an actual theory, as it is sometimes said to be, nonetheless, he points out several instances in which history appears to be following a fractal pattern. As far as I know, this particular Timewave lecture hasn’t been released on the Net before.

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Transcript

00:00:00

This program was originally posted on the Psychedelic Salon’s first-run Patreon feed three months ago.

00:00:07

As you know, I’m publishing new Salon 1.0 programs first on Patreon as a way to thank my supporters there.

00:00:14

Additionally, for only $1 a month, they can also join me every Monday evening for a live edition of the Salon,

00:00:21

where we sometimes jointly interview featured speakers whose conversations I also

00:00:26

publish on the podcast from time to time.

00:00:28

Now, here is the program from which you heard a preview three months ago. Linguistic Archive. Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

00:00:52

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

00:00:56

And I want to begin by reporting that during the month of November,

00:01:00

122 fellow salonners have joined me on this Psychedelic Salon 3.0 podcast,

00:01:07

the one that I’ve made available through my Patreon site. As you all know, all of the Salon

00:01:12

3.0 podcasts will become available on the original Salon RSS feed just three months after they first

00:01:19

appear on this new 3.0 feed. And in addition to listening to these podcasts early, my supporters, for only

00:01:26

$1 a month, are also invited to the weekly live session that I host on Zoom. Every Monday around

00:01:34

noon, I send to each of my supporters on Patreon a personal email with the link for that evening’s

00:01:39

live salon, which takes place at 6.30 p.m. Pacific Time. Now, from time to time, in addition to myself

00:01:47

and a few salonners who are becoming regulars for the live salons, there will also be guests who

00:01:53

appear. In fact, last week, my friend Matt Palomary was with us to answer a lot of questions about

00:01:58

ayahuasca, and in a week or so, I’ll be hosting an expert on Ibogaine. In the event that you have some questions about

00:02:05

Ibogaine, well, you’ll be able to ask them directly from an expert yourself. So I hope to see you

00:02:11

there. And to find out more about the live swans, just click the Patreon link at the top of the

00:02:17

psychedelicsalon.com website. Now, before we begin listening to today’s Terrence McKenna Talk, I have two other announcements.

00:02:27

First, as I mentioned last week, tickets are now on sale for the Imagine Convergence, the conference that will take place next March.

00:02:36

As you know, some of the headliners that we’ve heard from here in the salon are going to be there, and they include Dr. Bruce Dahmer, Dr. Charlie Grobe, and Paul Stamets.

00:02:46

there, and they include Dr. Bruce Dahmer, Dr. Charlie Grobe, and Paul Stamets. This is really going to be an excellent chance to get to know these interesting people on a personal level,

00:02:51

because the conference is limited in size due to the nature of the location for this event,

00:02:56

and so it’s going to be a much more intimate gathering than is usually found at larger events.

00:03:01

And I’ll put a link to it in today’s program notes. If you’re planning to attend, please let me know.

00:03:07

Some of our other fellow salonners have already told me

00:03:09

that they’re going to be there, and I hope to meet you there

00:03:12

and connect you with a few of the others as well.

00:03:16

Now, one other announcement is about the recent psychedelic conference

00:03:20

that was held in Estonia on the 21st of September.

00:03:24

Happily, they had four cameras that recorded this entire event,

00:03:28

and you can watch it online if you want.

00:03:31

I’ll link to the free trailer that’s on YouTube,

00:03:33

and there you will hear from several speakers who have been featured here in the salon.

00:03:38

They are Dennis McKenna, Jeremy Narby, Susan Blackmore, and Luis Eduardo Luna.

00:03:45

Now, one of the more important results of this conference, in my opinion,

00:03:50

was that the mainstream media in Estonia gave it a great deal of coverage.

00:03:55

And this means that some lonely psychonauts in that land

00:03:59

now know that they are not alone after all.

00:04:01

And, well, I find that to be really important,

00:04:04

having been in that situation myself at one time.

00:04:08

By the way, one of the conference organizers for that event

00:04:12

is also one of our fellow salonners.

00:04:14

And hopefully this conference was successful enough to repeat next year.

00:04:19

Because, well, I think it’s really important for us all to see

00:04:22

how widespread the interest is in psychedelic medicines.

00:04:26

In fact, this is something that has become obvious from the live Monday night salons,

00:04:30

where we’ve had salonners join us from New Zealand, England, Russia, Slovenia, Australia, Uruguay, and the Netherlands, among other countries.

00:04:39

Like Anonymous, we are everywhere, so expect us.

00:04:44

So, now let’s get on with the program.

00:04:47

Today we rejoin Terrence McKenna and a few of his friends, one June evening in 1989, almost 30 years ago.

00:04:56

And back then, of course, there was a lot of hype surrounding the possible major event of some kind that was going to take place in 2012.

00:05:06

And, of course, before that was coming the dreaded Y2K calamity.

00:05:11

And at the same time that all of this hype was going on,

00:05:14

there were also these Terrence McKenna bootleg tapes that were floating around

00:05:18

in which he was talking about this idea of his that he called the time wave.

00:05:23

Now, if you’ve been here with me in the salon for a while,

00:05:26

you already know my thoughts about this offbeat idea,

00:05:29

but no matter what I may think about it,

00:05:32

at the time that Terrence was first presenting the time wave

00:05:35

to small audiences around the country,

00:05:38

well, there were parts of his stories that were extremely seductive.

00:05:42

However, since 2012 has come and gone,

00:05:45

and you and I at least think we are still here listening to this recording

00:05:49

of an old Terrence McKenna tape,

00:05:51

you remember that old Chris Christopherson line from A Star is Born?

00:05:55

Are you a figment of my imagination, or am I one of yours?

00:06:00

But before I sidetrack you to think about that,

00:06:04

we’d better get on with today’s talk,

00:06:06

which will most likely be the last time that I podcast one of his Time Wave presentations.

00:06:12

But since this set of talks hasn’t been seen on the net before, or I should say heard on the net before,

00:06:17

I feel that I should publish it here just to complete the online record of Terrence McKenna recordings.

00:06:24

And even though the Time Wave actually never made it to theory status,

00:06:29

nonetheless, there are some interesting historical commentaries

00:06:32

that Terence makes in this talk,

00:06:34

and which I found somewhat thought-provoking.

00:06:37

Hopefully you will too.

00:06:40

By the way, as you’ll hear in just a moment,

00:06:43

while Terence was giving this talk,

00:06:48

he was showing time wave graphs on a computer monitor.

00:06:54

But it isn’t actually necessary to see the graphics in order to understand what he’s pointing out.

00:07:04

And while that would not be the case if this was a talk about art, the graphics for this talk, however, are really their only lines that look like the outlines of mountain ranges.

00:07:11

And the point of Terence displaying those graphs is simply to show a peak or a valley taking place on the time wave that corresponds with the historical event that he’s talking about.

00:07:17

Well, now you’re probably more confused than you were when I started trying to explain that. So

00:07:22

all I’m saying is that you don’t need the video aids to understand this talk.

00:07:27

How’s that?

00:07:29

Now, at last you say.

00:07:31

Here is Terence McKenna who will proceed to give us an overview

00:07:35

of the past 50,000 years of human presence on this planet.

00:07:42

Many times today I’ve used this metaphor

00:07:45

about lower level languages

00:07:48

mapping higher dimensional spaces

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well one of the approaches

00:07:55

that has driven me in my involvement

00:07:58

with psychedelics is the belief

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that this is a domain of ideas.

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And so it’s very important to me

00:08:09

to try and bring something out of those spaces.

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And I think, you know, in the way that every Jungian patient

00:08:18

is supposed to be able to produce a mandala

00:08:22

accompanying the individuation process

00:08:25

in the same way

00:08:27

every psychedelic voyager

00:08:29

who keeps their wits about

00:08:31

them should be able to produce

00:08:34

a map or

00:08:35

a sketch or a diagram

00:08:37

of the territory

00:08:39

well this

00:08:41

which I’ve been working on

00:08:43

since 1971,

00:08:46

is the most original part of my thing,

00:08:52

and so I’m sort of shy about absolutely laying it on you

00:08:56

because it’s also, in some sense,

00:08:58

the most demanding part of my rap intellectually.

00:09:03

I mean, you just have to pay attention

00:09:06

and be smart to start with

00:09:08

for this to I think make

00:09:10

sense in the time we have

00:09:12

available

00:09:14

nevertheless I’ll give

00:09:16

it a whirl

00:09:18

the notion

00:09:21

is generally this

00:09:24

that there is a quality The notion is generally this,

00:09:30

that there is a quality in the world that has previously been left unnoticed and undescribed,

00:09:36

especially by science.

00:09:38

Science is interested in spin, velocity, momentum, charge, so forth,

00:09:46

but a fundamental aspect of reality has been ignored.

00:09:54

And I call this fundamental aspect novelty

00:09:57

after Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics

00:10:03

has set forth in process and

00:10:06

reality. Novelty

00:10:08

another way of thinking

00:10:10

of it is density of

00:10:12

connectedness

00:10:13

and what is being said

00:10:16

by this idea is that

00:10:17

density of connectedness or

00:10:19

novelty comes and

00:10:22

goes in all

00:10:23

situations.

00:10:32

It’s an ebb and a flow of probability, if you want to think of it that way.

00:10:46

In other words, the time is not simply a dimension of pure duration, as Newton thought, but the time is actually a topological manifold over which events meander

00:10:48

as they find their way

00:10:50

to lower

00:10:52

energy gradients or

00:10:53

more novel states of

00:10:55

organization and

00:10:57

this fairly abstract

00:10:59

idea

00:11:00

I have

00:11:03

been able to construe

00:11:05

into a formal

00:11:07

notion

00:11:08

formal notion means mathematically

00:11:11

formal

00:11:12

that if anything

00:11:15

what this idea suffers from

00:11:17

is being not too abstruse

00:11:19

but too concrete

00:11:21

and it is the notion

00:11:23

that density of connectedness,

00:11:26

novelty,

00:11:27

is something which the universe

00:11:29

over long periods of time

00:11:31

conserves,

00:11:33

but that over short periods of time

00:11:36

it appears to be in a state of flux

00:11:39

so that there is more and more of it

00:11:42

as you approach the present moment in time

00:11:46

in the life of the universe.

00:11:48

There wasn’t very much novelty

00:11:51

immediately after the Big Bang.

00:11:53

There was only cosmic,

00:11:56

the chemistry of pure plasmas.

00:11:59

Then with cooling, more organization,

00:12:02

further cooling, more organization.

00:12:04

I mentioned this the first night, cooling, more organization, further cooling, more organization.

00:12:07

I mentioned this the first night, but I didn’t explicitly connect it to this idea.

00:12:12

While this is a mathematical idea,

00:12:14

it emerges out of the I Ching,

00:12:17

which might seem an unlikely place

00:12:20

to seek for a data field

00:12:22

from which to launch an empirical

00:12:27

description of nature

00:12:29

but I submit that it

00:12:31

isn’t because

00:12:33

what the I Ching properly understood

00:12:36

represents is

00:12:37

a kind of

00:12:39

understanding

00:12:41

of time

00:12:43

based on the evolution of a cultural worldview

00:12:47

within a completely different linguistic then

00:12:50

than our own,

00:12:52

an understanding of time,

00:12:55

the subtleness and sophistication of which

00:12:58

exceeds our own,

00:13:02

exceeds our own.

00:13:03

And what the basic idea of the I Ching is

00:13:05

well first of all let me review for anybody

00:13:07

who isn’t in

00:13:09

doesn’t have in hand the fundamentals

00:13:12

the I Ching is a

00:13:13

Chinese system of divination

00:13:15

of great age

00:13:16

it uses 64

00:13:19

ideograms which are called

00:13:21

hexagrams and they are composed

00:13:24

of six levels

00:13:25

broken or unbroken lines

00:13:28

the sum total of this set of six levels broken unbroken

00:13:31

is 64

00:13:32

these 64 ideograms are felt to be

00:13:38

symbolic of states of change

00:13:41

and then there are various ways of consulting this

00:13:44

as an oracle

00:13:45

and a lot of Chinese philosophical

00:13:48

speculation has gone into

00:13:50

it and so forth and so on

00:13:51

my idea was

00:13:53

that the I Ching is a piece of broken

00:13:55

machinery that even as

00:13:58

we inherit it at the earliest

00:14:00

strata of commentary

00:14:01

which is the early Han dynasty

00:14:04

that it is

00:14:05

a broken piece of

00:14:07

machinery the simple

00:14:09

coin tossing oracle

00:14:11

or euro stock oracle

00:14:13

that has been used throughout the

00:14:15

historical life of China

00:14:17

is a late

00:14:19

and

00:14:20

syncretic

00:14:23

adaptation to the I Ching

00:14:26

what it was before the Han

00:14:27

dynasty I believe

00:14:29

was a kind of perfected

00:14:32

philosophical

00:14:34

mathematical system

00:14:36

for understanding

00:14:38

time

00:14:39

understanding the ebb and flow

00:14:42

of this quality which we’re

00:14:44

calling novelty.

00:14:45

Well, you may recall there is this notion in Eastern thought of Tao.

00:14:50

Tao is the ebb and flow of some kind of informing spirit

00:14:55

which makes things happen or holds them back

00:14:59

according to the mysterious inner workings of its laws.

00:15:02

to the mysterious inner workings of its laws

00:15:04

so in a way

00:15:06

what this is is this is an effort

00:15:08

to mathematically

00:15:09

model Tao

00:15:11

to take the statements about

00:15:14

Tao contained in

00:15:16

for example the Tao Te Ching

00:15:17

and to take them as mathematical

00:15:20

axioms and then see

00:15:22

what kind of a system

00:15:24

you get if you carry through with this

00:15:27

program of research for instance the Tao Te Ching opens with the words the way that can be told of

00:15:36

is not an unvarying way in the wayly translation okay if the way that can be told of

00:15:45

is not an

00:15:45

unvarying

00:15:46

way

00:15:46

then the

00:15:47

way that

00:15:48

can be

00:15:48

told of

00:15:49

is a

00:15:49

varying

00:15:50

way

00:15:51

means it’s

00:15:52

a wave

00:15:53

of some

00:15:53

sort

00:15:54

it’s

00:15:54

describing

00:15:55

a stream

00:15:56

of variables

00:15:57

so forth

00:15:58

and so on

00:15:58

well

00:15:58

by conserving

00:16:00

the intent

00:16:01

of these

00:16:03

statements

00:16:04

about

00:16:04

Tao and by studying the internal mathematics that operate the intent of these statements about Tao

00:16:05

and by studying the internal mathematics

00:16:08

that operate inside the King Wen sequence

00:16:11

and inside that sentence is an hour

00:16:14

of excruciating explanation

00:16:16

which you will be spared.

00:16:19

By doing this,

00:16:21

I was able to construe

00:16:24

what I at first took to be a calendar. I thought

00:16:28

that I was in the process of discovering some kind of Neolithic lunar calendar. But then

00:16:35

further reflection led me to realize that what was happening for me was the answer to my prayers and that an idea over months over years encountered in dreams

00:16:50

and vision and so forth was slowly surfacing like being born in my awareness and that it was well as a proud parent I almost

00:17:06

said perfect

00:17:07

no

00:17:09

it was elegant

00:17:12

elegant

00:17:13

it was this peculiar

00:17:16

elegant

00:17:17

idea

00:17:19

that though its outlines

00:17:22

were completely unexpected to me

00:17:24

it had the curious quality of answering a lot of my questions.

00:17:31

And so what it is, and I’ll show it to you in a minute, is it’s the idea that a way to model the flux of novelty in the world is to treat it

00:17:46

as a fractal wave

00:17:48

waveform

00:17:51

to write

00:17:52

an equation

00:17:53

for a recursive fractal

00:17:55

curve with certain qualities

00:17:57

which when placed against

00:17:59

the historical record

00:18:01

will confirm

00:18:04

its accuracy

00:18:05

by giving a map of the vicissitudes of historical development in time.

00:18:12

See what I mean?

00:18:13

And this wave will have the present positioned in it at some point.

00:18:21

And that means that at all points to the left

00:18:26

of that point

00:18:28

will be data points

00:18:30

in the future

00:18:31

so this is not only a theory of history

00:18:35

time which has

00:18:37

undergone what Whitehead

00:18:38

calls the formality of actually

00:18:41

occurring

00:18:41

but it is also a theory

00:18:44

of the future

00:18:46

time which has not

00:18:48

yet undergone

00:18:50

the formality of occurring

00:18:52

well there are different ways

00:18:54

to try and convince somebody that

00:18:56

this notion is true or has

00:18:58

a chance of a snowball in hell

00:18:59

of being true and

00:19:01

the I’m not going

00:19:04

to argue from the I Ching

00:19:05

or from the elegance of construction

00:19:08

this evening

00:19:09

instead I’m going to try and

00:19:11

demonstrate its application

00:19:14

to modeling

00:19:15

history

00:19:16

you see if we take seriously the notion

00:19:19

of mathematical modeling

00:19:21

of processes

00:19:22

and this is what chaos theory, dynamics, catastrophe theory,

00:19:28

all these things which I recognize as psychedelic domains,

00:19:34

this is what they’re interested in.

00:19:36

Well, if you really believe you have a model of process,

00:19:39

then you have to model human history.

00:19:42

Now, there’s a problem here

00:19:44

that we should deal with right off the bat

00:19:48

which is if you have a wave mechanical theory of time then a wave is a phenomenon in time of

00:20:00

ebb and flow of amplitude that comes to an end

00:20:05

in other words all waves have what is called

00:20:09

a wave length

00:20:10

and on the largest level this wave is what’s called

00:20:14

a soliton meaning it has only one

00:20:18

energy crest in it

00:20:19

so

00:20:21

you have to assign an end

00:20:26

to the wave

00:20:27

and the way in which you choose the end date for the wave

00:20:32

is by fitting historical data

00:20:35

against the wave

00:20:37

in an effort to see if the historical data

00:20:40

where the clots of novelty occur

00:20:43

occur in the low spots

00:20:46

of the wave if you get it

00:20:48

so it fits perfectly

00:20:49

then you just simply look at the end of the

00:20:52

wave and see what the end date

00:20:54

is and you know then what the end

00:20:56

date is

00:20:56

when we did that

00:20:59

the end date

00:21:01

emerges as startlingly

00:21:04

close and this is the part of the theory that defies the end date emerges as startlingly close.

00:21:05

And this is the part of the theory that defies the momentum of reason.

00:21:13

It’s that for it to work,

00:21:17

it seems to imply that the emergence of the transcendental object

00:21:22

out of hyperspace and into three-dimensional history

00:21:26

has to happen somewhere around 2012,

00:21:30

specifically December 22, 2012.

00:21:35

So having told you, you know,

00:21:37

the hardest thing you have to swallow about this,

00:21:41

let’s now take a look at it.

00:21:44

Now, the way the game is played

00:21:45

this is software called Time Wave Zero

00:21:48

and it’s like a

00:21:50

microscope or a telescope

00:21:52

it allows us to look at the wave

00:21:54

against any

00:21:58

time scale

00:21:59

so if for instance we find that we have

00:22:02

among ourselves a prominent

00:22:04

historian of the late Roman period,

00:22:06

we can throw the late Roman period up on the screen

00:22:10

with the waveform equation for novelty solved

00:22:15

and then interview our expert about whether it fits his intuition

00:22:20

of when the important turning points, high points, and low points of the late Roman

00:22:28

period were. Now, we have to specify certain parameters. One is how much time are we going

00:22:36

to see on the screen? We can see as much as 135,000 years on one screen, or we can see as little as three days. I’ve chosen 50,000 years,

00:22:52

and I’ve chosen a zero date, as I told you, of December 22, 2012, and there’s a little pointer

00:23:00

that points at what is called the date of interest and just for whimsy’s sake

00:23:07

I have chosen as the date of interest today

00:23:11

so then when the program is activated

00:23:15

an excruciating set of arithmetical computations

00:23:21

swings into action

00:23:23

and it used to take me a day to make one of these screens,

00:23:30

and it involves thousands of calculations,

00:23:33

any one of which, if you botch, then you skew the whole thing.

00:23:39

So in spite of the fact that this takes quite a while,

00:23:43

it ain’t nothing like the old days

00:23:45

let me tell you

00:23:46

what it’s telling us up in the upper corner there

00:23:51

is that 51.67 millennia

00:23:54

are on the screen

00:23:55

the zero date is 12-22-2012

00:23:59

and this is the wave

00:24:02

ignore the bicoloration

00:24:04

that’s something having to do with the transfer to the monitor

00:24:07

okay now

00:24:09

how do we interpret this wave

00:24:12

what are we looking at here

00:24:14

okay what we’re looking at is

00:24:17

a picture of the ebb and flow of novelty over time

00:24:22

when the wave moves downwards,

00:24:26

novelty is increasing.

00:24:29

When the wave moves upward

00:24:32

toward the top of the screen,

00:24:35

the counterflow to novelty,

00:24:38

which Rupert Sheldrake suggested to me,

00:24:40

I call habit.

00:24:42

Habit is increasing.

00:24:45

Or entropy. Or disconnectedness. suggested to me I call habit. Habit is increasing,

00:24:46

or entropy,

00:24:48

or disconnectedness,

00:24:50

or recidivist,

00:24:52

or conservative tendencies. So this is a push-pull theory

00:24:55

of an underlying wave of Tao

00:24:59

that distorts ordinary probabilities

00:25:03

either toward the novel

00:25:06

or away from the novel

00:25:08

depending on temporal variables.

00:25:12

See, temporal variables,

00:25:14

something which was always excluded from science.

00:25:18

Okay, so how do I interpret this thing

00:25:22

in terms of depicting the career of novelty. The purple

00:25:25

line points at

00:25:27

today.

00:25:31

And

00:25:31

clear over here, it’s

00:25:33

45,000,

00:25:36

nearly 50,000 years

00:25:37

ago. Now, this

00:25:39

first steep

00:25:41

decline into novelty

00:25:43

has

00:25:44

first of all these dates are very

00:25:50

broadly

00:25:52

determined for things so

00:25:54

far back but this is thought

00:25:56

to be the height of the Neanderthal

00:25:58

radiation

00:25:59

the fire using

00:26:02

tool using species that

00:26:03

preceded us.

00:26:05

Then this second, deeper stab into novelty

00:26:11

that’s quite extreme here

00:26:13

occurred about 35,000 years ago.

00:26:17

This accords very well with the earliest,

00:26:23

with the current estimates

00:26:25

of where language emergence

00:26:27

seems to have taken place.

00:26:30

And as you see,

00:26:32

a very deep level of novelty

00:26:34

was probed in the aftermath

00:26:37

of whatever this breakthrough was.

00:26:41

Then there was again

00:26:44

a recidivist

00:26:45

conservative movement

00:26:48

and then up here at about 18,000

00:26:51

and what this is friends

00:26:53

and what this is too are glaciations

00:26:57

highly punctuated movement of ice

00:27:00

southward from the poles of the planet

00:27:02

freezing out the migratory access

00:27:06

of Africa to the ancient

00:27:08

Middle East because these glaciers came

00:27:10

as far south as Sidon

00:27:12

in Lebanon

00:27:13

so these glaciations show

00:27:16

as highly punctuated

00:27:18

negative or anti

00:27:20

novel episodes in

00:27:22

the situation

00:27:23

what happens here at 18,000 BP

00:27:26

is what’s called the Magdalenian Revolution.

00:27:31

It is the invention of bone antler technology,

00:27:36

the cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira,

00:27:40

the sudden proliferation of religion,

00:27:46

artistic forms, painting,

00:27:48

so forth and so on.

00:27:50

Well now with the command,

00:27:52

with one command, we can

00:27:54

slash the screen in half

00:27:56

and explode the data

00:27:57

and it won’t be dramatic

00:28:00

at this point but notice

00:28:02

that the

00:28:03

end point is retreating

00:28:06

slightly from the other side

00:28:08

so what we’re going to be seeing now is

00:28:10

more data about less

00:28:12

time as we

00:28:14

zero in on

00:28:16

the present

00:28:17

in a sense we’re looking at frames

00:28:20

of a movie as we

00:28:22

fly closer and closer

00:28:24

toward the present symbolized as a kind of fractally

00:28:29

expanding landscape beneath us okay 25,000 years ago there’s the Magdalenian revolution

00:28:37

that’s Chattal Hyuk the pyramids are there this okay here’s what we’ve got

00:28:45

this is this Magdalenian thing

00:28:48

where art, religion

00:28:49

so forth and so on

00:28:51

then there’s a carrying capacity problem

00:28:53

this is this

00:28:55

desertification thing that I’m talking about

00:28:58

the partnership paradise

00:29:00

is down in here

00:29:02

on that saw-toothed

00:29:04

edge that’s

00:29:06

where the

00:29:08

symbiotic relationship with

00:29:10

the mushrooms first comes into

00:29:12

being, this is where

00:29:14

all these forms related

00:29:18

to partnership society

00:29:20

that have been accumulating

00:29:22

in the primate adaptation

00:29:23

to the mushrooms and so forth and so on are all brought together.

00:29:28

This is where hunting and gathering turns into pastoralism, so forth and so on.

00:29:34

Then dryness in the Sahara, cultural disruption, migration.

00:29:40

Then the Chattal Hyayuk episode. I talked about Chattal earlier today,

00:29:48

this premature burst of complexity and brilliance.

00:29:52

Now with 12,000, 13,000 years on the scale,

00:29:56

you can see how sharply the theory picks it up.

00:30:02

Now, do you understand that what’s happening

00:30:04

is that this wave is, in my opinion,

00:30:09

and you are to judge each yourself,

00:30:12

this wave appears to be giving an accurate description

00:30:16

of the ebb and flow of novelty

00:30:19

into the human world on a scale of millennia.

00:30:23

But yet this wave is a mathematical object

00:30:28

elaborated by myself out of the I Ching.

00:30:33

In other words, there is no logical reason

00:30:36

why there should be this correspondence,

00:30:40

and yet there is.

00:30:41

I am suggesting that it’s because this is a,

00:30:47

that there is a correspondence

00:30:50

between our intellectual organization

00:30:53

and the organization of the syntax of our languages,

00:30:57

a correspondence with what we call

00:30:59

the outer world of space and time,

00:31:02

and that this is scripted in at a fairly profound level

00:31:07

here is the breakup of Eden

00:31:12

the dryness

00:31:15

then the Chatal Hiyuk

00:31:18

deep penetration here

00:31:20

its destruction by the dominator culture

00:31:24

that came south

00:31:25

is indicated by this upward

00:31:27

swing of this thing

00:31:29

and then on this descending slope

00:31:31

here you get

00:31:33

the great civilizations

00:31:36

of early

00:31:38

human history

00:31:39

in descending order from the top

00:31:41

of that little spike down to the bottom

00:31:44

you get sumer er chaldea

00:31:50

babylon and egypt egypt is right in the bottom of this trough okay so what this screen is showing

00:32:01

is that all time since the pyramids were built

00:32:05

and I by the way don’t use

00:32:07

diddled dating

00:32:08

I use real dates

00:32:11

the pyramids were built in 2790

00:32:14

BC

00:32:14

sorry Atlantis fans

00:32:17

so you see that all time

00:32:23

since the building of the Great Pyramid

00:32:26

is represented by this little sweep up and this little sweep down

00:32:31

and then a little choppiness at the end.

00:32:34

And remember, the purple line is pointing at today.

00:32:39

This is 13,000 years.

00:32:42

Here’s half that.

00:32:44

Now, see, we’re getting closer and closer

00:32:46

to epochs of historical time

00:32:49

about which we have considerable amounts of data.

00:32:53

I mean, you know, it’s one thing

00:32:55

to talk about when language appeared,

00:32:57

but we’re pulling even here

00:32:59

with periods of time

00:33:01

where we have dense amounts of historical data,

00:33:04

and we’re going to go right up into the 20th century with periods of time where we have dense amounts of historical data.

00:33:09

And we’re going to go right up into the 20th century with this process.

00:33:14

To my mind, this is what an extraterrestrial or hyperdimensional being would communicate.

00:33:18

This is a hyperdimensional map of the world.

00:33:22

It’s somebody’s way of saying hi

00:33:25

you know I mean a very complex

00:33:28

somebody

00:33:29

but nevertheless it’s somebody’s way

00:33:32

of saying hi

00:33:33

okay I love this screen

00:33:36

I call this

00:33:38

particular place in the wave

00:33:40

history’s fractal

00:33:42

mountain and I may call

00:33:44

this book I want to write about this history’s fractal mountain. And I may call this book

00:33:45

I want to write about this,

00:33:46

history’s fractal mountain.

00:33:48

You’re looking at it.

00:33:50

Beyond Mount Analog,

00:33:52

this is a mountain

00:33:54

to set your sights on climbing.

00:33:57

The Great Pyramid

00:33:59

is right down here.

00:34:02

We are here.

00:34:04

Okay, what’s here?

00:34:06

Homer.

00:34:07

Homer is at the top

00:34:09

of history’s fractal mountain.

00:34:11

In other words,

00:34:12

1100 B.C.

00:34:15

Okay, what was the primary

00:34:17

turning point there?

00:34:19

What happened there

00:34:20

that changed this upswing

00:34:22

that is characterized

00:34:24

by Assyria

00:34:25

the Hittites

00:34:27

the Metani

00:34:28

all these wheeled chariot

00:34:31

more and more warlike more and more

00:34:34

kingship even

00:34:35

and even at that looking back

00:34:37

enviously at the grandeur

00:34:39

that had been Egypt

00:34:41

what changed up here

00:34:43

well it was the Mycenaean pirates

00:34:48

laying siege to an opium-addicted

00:34:53

late Minoan civilization

00:34:56

and conquering it

00:34:58

and beginning to import into Greek religion

00:35:01

the ecstatic mysterious

00:35:05

mother based mysteries

00:35:08

that become the mysteries

00:35:09

of Demeter and Persephone

00:35:11

and Eleusis and the other Greek

00:35:13

mysteries in other words

00:35:15

as we’ve always been taught

00:35:17

the Greeks were the key

00:35:19

and this certainly

00:35:21

confirms 19th century

00:35:24

thinking on that,

00:35:25

that the Greeks broke through to something.

00:35:30

I mean, we might speculate what it was.

00:35:32

I think it was realism.

00:35:35

That, you know, if you’ve ever seen the marbles

00:35:38

that are displayed in the museum at the Parthenon,

00:35:43

you realize this is different than masks

00:35:45

and this is different than,

00:35:48

I mean, these people wanted to make

00:35:51

marble into flesh.

00:35:54

They had an aesthetic that is exactly,

00:35:57

so far as we can tell,

00:35:59

like the highest expression of our own.

00:36:03

Okay, so then there’s this

00:36:06

turning point then there’s a

00:36:08

steep episode steep descend

00:36:10

into novelty on the slope of this

00:36:12

thing at the Greek

00:36:14

Renaissance the Renaissance

00:36:16

that included Plato

00:36:18

and this is not let me say

00:36:20

Indo-European

00:36:23

specific

00:36:24

at the very same moment

00:36:26

that Plato was teaching in Athens

00:36:30

Ezekiel was active in Israel

00:36:34

Mencius and Lao Tzu

00:36:36

were active in China

00:36:38

this was a moment of tremendous creativity

00:36:41

well then notice that down here

00:36:44

from about 500 AD

00:36:46

there’s been a different kind of time.

00:36:50

Oscillation around a mean

00:36:52

very close to,

00:36:54

recall that when the line moves down

00:36:57

novelty is increasing.

00:36:59

So since 500 AD

00:37:01

there has been oscillation

00:37:04

around a mean

00:37:05

very close to the maxima of novelty.

00:37:09

And I maintain that this explains to some degree

00:37:14

the obsessive, haunted, neurotic character of civilization since that time.

00:37:21

It’s because the transcendental object is so eminent

00:37:26

that we sense it.

00:37:28

Our artists, our prophets,

00:37:30

our seers sense this thing.

00:37:34

Now there is an aspect of this

00:37:36

that I haven’t mentioned

00:37:38

which is because it’s fractal,

00:37:41

certain parts of the wave

00:37:43

are like certain other parts on

00:37:46

higher and lower levels

00:37:48

so that for instance

00:37:50

the wave reveals

00:37:52

that Nazi Germany

00:37:54

a racial cult

00:37:56

a leader cult

00:37:58

a bunch of order

00:38:00

freaks has a

00:38:02

in this theory a geometrical

00:38:04

relationship to pharaonic

00:38:07

Egypt leader cult order freaks so forth and so on that the ebb and flow of what

00:38:15

we call fashion and fad is under the control of a wave like this now here you

00:38:22

see from the top of the hill to the bottom of the hill

00:38:26

and one reason I mention

00:38:28

the resonance thing at this point

00:38:30

is because

00:38:31

you will see this screen again

00:38:34

in the future

00:38:36

this screen is describing

00:38:38

3200

00:38:40

and roughly

00:38:42

30 years

00:38:43

but there is a place in the 20th century where this screen will repeat

00:38:50

itself the turning point in the you see there are these nested cycles of time of various durations

00:38:59

and one of these cycles begins in 1945 it’s the terminal short cycle

00:39:07

it runs from 1945 to 2012

00:39:11

and when you look at that cycle

00:39:13

the topology of it

00:39:15

you see that the change

00:39:18

in that 1945 to 2012 cycle

00:39:22

came in 67

00:39:24

so it perfectly confirms the nuttiest political

00:39:30

dreams of those of us who went through that period. Looking at this screen as though it

00:39:36

were not 3,230 years, but a period from 1967 to 2012, I could tell you that we are then right here, roughly.

00:39:48

We have come through a period of steep descent into novelty

00:39:53

since 67,

00:39:55

punctuated by various recidivist and neo-fascist counterflows.

00:40:02

Nevertheless, we’re down here

00:40:03

where we are beginning to experience

00:40:06

this oscillation around

00:40:08

the mean very close

00:40:10

to the ingression of the transcendental

00:40:12

object and this will go on

00:40:14

until 2012

00:40:16

ok now we’re only

00:40:18

seeing 1614

00:40:20

years

00:40:21

from 509 Julian

00:40:24

that’s 509 AD to

00:40:28

2124 AD it’s interesting this is

00:40:32

basically also the period of time from

00:40:36

today roughly to 2012 so when you look

00:40:42

at this know that the scaling

00:40:45

and the valuations could be different

00:40:48

but the topological manifold would stay the same

00:40:52

if you were looking at from today

00:40:54

to the end of the cycle

00:40:56

now this is interesting

00:40:59

it’s not shy about prediction

00:41:02

as we approach the chaotic,

00:41:06

what I call the chaos at the end of history.

00:41:08

This is what I said we should have called the weekend.

00:41:11

You’re looking at it, folks.

00:41:13

There’s the chaos at the end of history.

00:41:15

It’s a series of wildly punctuated gyrations

00:41:20

as we come down through the last 1,500 years

00:41:24

preceding the emergence of the transcendental object.

00:41:29

Now I have to crib slightly.

00:41:32

At a certain point it becomes impossible

00:41:36

and if you’re interested in accuracy you have to…

00:41:39

Okay, down in the bottom of this thing,

00:41:43

this thing,

00:41:44

what we have over here is the fall of the Roman Empire.

00:41:49

It’s just on the screen. In terms of the resonances with the cycle, we’re living through the fall of the Roman Empire occurred early last November.

00:42:01

last November living through the fall

00:42:04

of the Roman Empire

00:42:05

we are down in here

00:42:07

we are at the beginning

00:42:10

of the dark ages

00:42:11

this is the beginning of the

00:42:13

this is the beginning of the dark ages

00:42:16

this is patristic Christianity

00:42:18

is creating a new religion

00:42:20

here, then you get the dark

00:42:22

ages, then you get this extremely steep descent one of the

00:42:28

steepest on the graph it falls coincident to the life of muhammad which is interesting to me

00:42:37

because i was surprised that muhammad got such a such a steep fall the steep you know one of the

00:42:46

great events of human history

00:42:48

Christ is nothing like this

00:42:50

well then my

00:42:52

New York editor for Lyle Stewart

00:42:54

sent me a book that his

00:42:56

company publishes called

00:42:58

The 100

00:42:59

and it’s somebody’s

00:43:02

opinion about who the

00:43:04

100 most important people

00:43:06

in human history were

00:43:07

he said you’ll love this

00:43:09

look at number one

00:43:11

I turned it Mohammed

00:43:12

number one

00:43:14

in the opinion of not myself

00:43:16

but someone who made a very careful study

00:43:19

of this matter

00:43:20

and published a book

00:43:21

that you can barely lift

00:43:23

so okay this is the triumph of Islam a

00:43:29

tremendous surge into novelty why because mathematics philosophy science the preservation

00:43:39

of the literature the lost literature of Greece all of this was in the hands of Islam

00:43:46

at a period of time when Europe was a rat-infested hole.

00:43:52

I mean, Toledo in Spain had street lighting

00:43:56

and modern-style sewers

00:44:00

at a time when Paris was a muddy village

00:44:04

where people dumped their

00:44:05

waste in the streets. Okay, going forward, this stab here around 1182, let me see if

00:44:15

I can pick it up exactly, 1135, okay, this is Bernard of Clairvaux, Adrian IV, Peter

00:44:23

Lombard, Thomas a Beckett,

00:44:25

Eleanor of Aquitaine.

00:44:27

That’s the clue for me.

00:44:29

All that other stuff is fine.

00:44:31

Crusades, yes, all for that.

00:44:33

But Eleanor of Aquitaine

00:44:35

participated in a very interesting episode

00:44:38

in the history of Western consciousness

00:44:41

because, as I’m sure you all know,

00:44:43

she was the queen who was the

00:44:47

great patron of the troubadours and who encouraged the importation of the ideal of romantic love

00:44:57

into the angivine courts she in other words gay it was an outburst of goddess consciousness

00:45:05

that laid the basis for the later Mariological outbreak that built Chartres

00:45:12

so Eleanor of Aquitaine is a very important figure in the evolution of human consciousness

00:45:22

and the troubadours

00:45:24

I don’t have time to go into this

00:45:26

in a general lecture like this

00:45:28

but this is a very rich subject

00:45:30

the relationship of the Sufis

00:45:32

to the troubadours

00:45:33

the way in which at this time

00:45:35

Sufi ideas

00:45:37

the legacy of the earlier Islamic breakthrough

00:45:41

are penetrating both

00:45:42

southern Bengal

00:45:44

and southern France at the

00:45:46

same time creating

00:45:48

both the heresy of Chaitanya

00:45:50

in Bengal and

00:45:52

the whole phenomenon of

00:45:54

courtly love at the Angervine Court

00:45:56

of Eleanor of Aquitaine

00:45:57

so that’s there

00:45:59

this next and then

00:46:02

you know gothic

00:46:03

Christianity and all that is represented in a fashion pleasing to me, which is as a consolidating recidivist and conservative movement. 1355. Let me see how close exactly it is. 1359, 1357. Okay, here’s what’s going on. First of all, it’s a direct hit on one of the most appalling incidents in Western history, which is in 1355, one-third of the population of Europe died,

00:46:47

consumed by the Black Death.

00:46:51

Truly, you know,

00:46:52

a civilization-shattering blow.

00:46:56

And aside from that,

00:46:58

what was going on,

00:47:00

1355,

00:47:01

the actual bottom of the trough

00:47:04

occurred in 1359.

00:47:06

What has happened is besides the Black Death,

00:47:09

the first phase of the Hundred Year War ended then.

00:47:13

Giotto is painting.

00:47:15

Meister Eckhart is writing.

00:47:17

William of Ockham is formulating his philosophy.

00:47:20

Tamerlane, Chaucer, Wycliffe, so forth and so on,

00:47:24

right there

00:47:25

so this is the full flowering

00:47:28

of the Middle Ages

00:47:31

what’s happening here

00:47:33

in this steeper descent into novelty

00:47:37

that begins around 1445

00:47:41

up at the top of this thing is 1445.

00:47:45

The printing press is invented.

00:47:49

Only 40 years later, we’re down at the bottom of this trough, 1492.

00:47:56

What has happened? The Italian Renaissance has occurred.

00:48:00

Printing has begun to work its tremendous impact on the Western mind

00:48:06

new techniques of navigation have

00:48:09

created the possibility of Columbus

00:48:12

discovering America and this has

00:48:14

happened in perfect concert consort

00:48:18

with the fall of this line I mean to me

00:48:22

this is eerie there comes a

00:48:25

I know the argument about how you see

00:48:27

pattern everywhere

00:48:28

and you know I know all this

00:48:31

but

00:48:32

it doesn’t

00:48:34

it only works

00:48:36

if the thing is keyed to 1222

00:48:39

2012

00:48:40

if you move the wave

00:48:43

not a single one of these correlations that I’ve pointed out to you works. It just becomes a mishmash. It only works in this alignment.

00:49:02

the consolidation in the new world and then

00:49:03

the negative consequences

00:49:06

of that colonial thing

00:49:08

the detriment to consciousness

00:49:11

the rise of slavery

00:49:12

so forth and so on

00:49:14

what’s happening at the top of this pinnacle

00:49:16

right here

00:49:18

is

00:49:19

let’s slice it

00:49:23

and I’ll look at it

00:49:24

1740

00:49:28

so the next change that it picks up

00:49:32

is what is called the European Enlightenment

00:49:35

the next great wave of novelty

00:49:39

after the Renaissance

00:49:41

the great period of change was

00:49:44

1445 to 1500 then let’s call

00:49:52

it 1740 to 1800 and it picks these up perfectly here now you’ll see okay

00:50:03

that’s the top that’s 1741 up here now what you get down here on this sawtoothed thing

00:50:10

is the American Revolution the French Revolution and the Napoleonic restoration all right here as

00:50:22

a consequence of this outbreak of ideas,

00:50:25

scientific techniques, philosophical breakthroughs,

00:50:28

and so forth and so on that happened as a consequence of the European Enlightenment.

00:50:36

Then there is the 19th century, I mean, I’m sorry, the 19th century here with the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War

00:50:50

both appearing as portions of this period of recidivism.

00:50:55

Wars are not, in this theory, progressive or novelty-creating.

00:51:02

They break apart structure.

00:51:02

progressive or novelty creating.

00:51:04

They break apart structure.

00:51:10

And we’re beginning to see the little fractal mountain of history appear again at the end of the wave

00:51:13

because we’re closing in on the next level of the fractal.

00:51:18

Now we’re just going to see from 1804 to 2006

00:51:22

with the purple line

00:51:25

pointing at today

00:51:26

you see the notion is

00:51:28

that somehow

00:51:29

psychedelics allow us

00:51:33

to either see

00:51:35

and record these

00:51:36

higher dimensional mappings

00:51:38

in ways that we can convey

00:51:40

or else this is

00:51:43

a message, this is the

00:51:44

characteristic of the message that for me it

00:51:48

is this series of condensing metaphors some many of which i’ve shared with you today but at the

00:51:56

core of it it becomes formal and mathematical it is trying to make a statement about the organization of reality that we have

00:52:05

completely missed and it’s willing to do it in this extremely rigorous and formal way i mean

00:52:13

whatever you may say about this theory it isn’t fuzzy wuzzy i mean we’re going to tell you to the

00:52:20

day where to look for the change these predictions are to the day

00:52:25

I haven’t demonstrated

00:52:27

this part of the program to you but you do

00:52:29

understand do you not that we could

00:52:31

pick any point in the wave

00:52:33

and blow it up and just see

00:52:35

detail detail detail

00:52:37

okay

00:52:39

here’s the

00:52:41

American Civil War

00:52:43

the Franco-Prussian War

00:52:45

then a steep descent here in 1888

00:52:49

then

00:52:51

and what that is I’m not sure

00:52:53

I’m not really a historian of the late 19th century

00:52:56

then a rise and this pinnacle here

00:53:00

this little pinnacle is almost exactly

00:53:03

1900 so that from the top of that pinnacle, is almost exactly 1900. So that

00:53:05

from the top of that pinnacle down,

00:53:08

this is the career of novelty

00:53:09

since

00:53:12
00:53:14

1933 is at

00:53:16

the bottom of the trough.

00:53:18

1967 is at

00:53:19

the top of the wave.

00:53:21

We are the purple line.

00:53:24

Well, it’s interesting. I think the wave we are the purple line well it’s interesting i think the wave does give remarkable

00:53:28

fit to technological innovation uh but wars uh i’m not sure whether it feeds into the culture

00:53:39

of the rest of us or whether uh military technological breakthroughs simply feed into further military technological breakthroughs. I would almost argue that more accurately than anything else what this thing portrays is the history of technology and that this may argue that this thing which happens in 2012 is a technological breakthrough.

00:54:07

It’s like the ultimate artifact

00:54:10

is what we’re trying to build,

00:54:13

and the ultimate artifact is the human soul.

00:54:18

We’re trying to condense the soul.

00:54:22

We have not given up on the alchemical dreams

00:54:27

of the 16th century, essentially.

00:54:30

Okay, so here you see this.

00:54:32

1900, the end of the Edwardian thing,

00:54:36

descent into novelty,

00:54:37

World War I, the 20s,

00:54:40

further descent into novelty,

00:54:41

1933, Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany

00:54:45

World War II is fought

00:54:48

down in this trough

00:54:49

now the tendency coming out

00:54:52

of the post-war period

00:54:53

was for

00:54:55

everybody to go conservative

00:54:57

and hang on to whatever they could

00:55:00

and stasis

00:55:02

the Cold War

00:55:03

a great standoff

00:55:05

a great freezing of the evolution

00:55:07

of cultures in a

00:55:09

state of

00:55:10

mental state of military

00:55:13

siege

00:55:14

you see what the idea here is

00:55:18

is that we are

00:55:20

lower dimensional creatures

00:55:21

with a great deal

00:55:23

of anxiety about the value dark domain

00:55:27

that we call the future.

00:55:31

This thing, whatever it is,

00:55:33

is offering like a map

00:55:35

of the future

00:55:37

that you don’t take on faith.

00:55:40

You confirm that it works

00:55:42

by seeing that it mapped

00:55:44

all previous time

00:55:46

with perfect accuracy

00:55:48

and so it is somehow then

00:55:50

reasonable to conclude

00:55:52

that it can be extrapolated

00:55:54

forward. Now here’s a beautiful

00:55:56

shot of history’s fractal

00:55:58

mountain. Remember I

00:55:59

and now you see it not as

00:56:02

Minoan Crete

00:56:04

falling to Mycenaean piracy

00:56:06

with Plato here

00:56:09

and Jesus here

00:56:10

and the fall of Rome here

00:56:12

but you see it as 1967

00:56:15

up here

00:56:18

and the present down here

00:56:21

this is the period

00:56:22

that we have traversed

00:56:23

since 1967

00:56:24

that’s where the switch

00:56:27

was thrown

00:56:29

that set us into

00:56:30

this last cascade

00:56:32

and in a way

00:56:34

a fairly profound way

00:56:36

since 1967

00:56:37

we have been reliving

00:56:40

in a rapid

00:56:42

and condensed form

00:56:44

the themes

00:56:45

and concerns that have

00:56:48

proceeded from since

00:56:49

1000 BC

00:56:51

in other words we are acting out

00:56:54

in speeded up and

00:56:55

condensed forms

00:56:57

previous historical epochs

00:57:00

that’s why you know

00:57:01

we’re on the brink of a dark age

00:57:04

but the dark age will be over

00:57:07

by

00:57:08

1993

00:57:09

then there is this Mohammed

00:57:12

analog

00:57:13

and then in 1996

00:57:16

the analogous

00:57:19

event related

00:57:20

to the discovery of the new

00:57:22

world the Columbus

00:57:24

moment comes and then sometime after the discovery of the new world. The Columbus moment comes.

00:57:26

And then sometime after the turn of the century,

00:57:29

we hit the Italian Renaissance.

00:57:31

Sometime after that, around 2009 or so,

00:57:37

we hit the European Enlightenment.

00:57:42

And then very quickly, after 2009,

00:57:45

we lived through the entire flowering

00:57:47

of industrialism,

00:57:49

modern science,

00:57:50

the 19th century,

00:57:51

the 20th century,

00:57:52

and we are sucked into

00:57:55

the transdimensional object.

00:57:58

This is it.

00:57:59

It’s like an onion

00:58:01

of ever more condensing levels.

00:58:04

We are inside

00:58:05

the transcendental

00:58:07

object at this

00:58:08

moment

00:58:08

we call it

00:58:10

the 20th century

00:58:11

and we’re inside

00:58:13

a larger shell

00:58:14

of it

00:58:14

which we call

00:58:15

human history

00:58:16

but we are going

00:58:17

to migrate

00:58:18

into

00:58:18

more and more

00:58:20

realized

00:58:22

densified

00:58:23

compacted

00:58:24

connected expressions of this fractal pattern more and more realized, densified, compacted, connected

00:58:25

expressions of this fractal pattern

00:58:30

which just seems to be

00:58:31

the signature of creation

00:58:34

in this space-time matrix.

00:58:38

As Sogyal Rinpoche says,

00:58:40

you understand what I mean?

00:58:44

You understand what I mean? You understand what I mean?

00:58:47

Well, maybe. I don’t know if I understand

00:58:50

what I mean. This does

00:58:52

explain why we have such a

00:58:54

hard time cognizing

00:58:55

what’s going on.

00:58:57

We’re in 500 A.D.

00:59:00

for God’s sake.

00:59:01

How much can we be expected to understand?

00:59:04

They haven’t invented the calculus yet

00:59:07

they haven’t invented computers yet

00:59:10

they haven’t invented navigation yet

00:59:12

there are no telescopes

00:59:13

we don’t know from radio

00:59:15

we’re just rummaging around

00:59:18

we’re like Macrobius

00:59:20

he lived in 500 AD

00:59:22

he believed that the circumference of a circle

00:59:26

was twice its diameter

00:59:27

that’s the quality of thought that’s going on in our world

00:59:31

he really did

00:59:33

he really did, he wrote it

00:59:36

well, let’s do something slightly different

00:59:41

and then I’ll take questions

00:59:43

I’m going to change some of the parameters

00:59:45

and let’s look at the present

00:59:49

in a little more detail

00:59:51

hopefully this will show us the future

00:59:54

it will show us the present

00:59:58

and a little bit of the past and then everything up

01:00:01

to the emergence of the transcendental object

01:00:04

at that point the graph doesn’t work anymore

01:00:07

because novelty becomes so dense

01:00:11

that it can no longer be portrayed

01:00:13

in the Cartesian coordinates

01:00:15

it begins to move orthogonal

01:00:18

into the dimension that I’ve been calling hyperspace

01:00:22

or the divine imagination.

01:00:31

Is that your definition?

01:00:34

Of hyperspace?

01:00:35

The divine imagination?

01:00:36

Yeah, from William Blake.

01:00:39

Okie dokie.

01:00:40

Okay, let’s see what’s happening.

01:00:43

Yes, all right.

01:00:46

So you see what lies ahead we

01:00:48

are deeper into

01:00:49

novelty than we

01:00:50

have ever been

01:00:51

before ahead of

01:00:53

us lies a little

01:00:54

bump that will be

01:00:57

less novel than

01:00:58

what we’ve

01:00:59

experienced but

01:01:00

when you think

01:01:01

that the

01:01:01

Tiananmen

01:01:02

square freak

01:01:03

out occurs right

01:01:04

in the bottom of this little trough,

01:01:07

why enough is enough,

01:01:08

then in 92 you see we probe deeper levels of novelty.

01:01:17

Then there’s a recidivist movement.

01:01:19

There’s the Mohammed thing in late 95.

01:01:24

These are the real dates.

01:01:27

There’s the New World thing in 2005.

01:01:34

And then in 2009, the European Enlightenment.

01:01:38

And everything since the European Enlightenment

01:01:41

has to be crammed in between 2009 and late 2012

01:01:46

we’re back here

01:01:48

I’ll have it

01:01:49

so you can, we’ll get more

01:01:52

we’ll lose the end of the graph

01:01:54

here, but see how the graph

01:01:56

runs down to zero

01:01:57

where the graph touches zero

01:02:00

that’s where novelty

01:02:01

soars to infinity

01:02:03

that’s where the novelty is maximized

01:02:06

that’s the point where the bit

01:02:09

goes hyperspatial

01:02:12

and the Cartesian coordinates become

01:02:15

inadequate to the task

01:02:18

of portraying the phase space

01:02:21

that’s what we’re trying to do, transcend the phase space here. So now we’re

01:02:27

going to see 15 years from 1985 to 2001, very conveniently. Is this all in your book, too?

01:02:38

No, Bantam won’t pay big money for this. I have to sell a hundred thousand books for them before they’ll let me

01:02:46

do a book on this subject

01:02:48

no but this

01:02:50

is very dear to my heart

01:02:52

I love this I just think it’s so

01:02:53

kinky it’s like

01:02:55

it’s like a

01:02:57

it’s like a psychedelic thing

01:03:00

it’s like a toy

01:03:02

it’s as though those

01:03:04

jeweled metallic twisting turning things that they were

01:03:09

offering to me this is one of them except it’s made out of ideas they did understand that the

01:03:17

only thing i could take back that it had to be an idea that I couldn’t bring back a thing, so they gave me an idea.

01:03:27

And one of the things I think about these little tykes,

01:03:31

these self-transforming elf machines,

01:03:35

is, you know, I talked today about how it had the aura of a playpen

01:03:42

or some kind of reception area for human beings well it has a slightly different

01:03:47

it has another aura and i talked about how it was like the circus well you know when you were a kid

01:03:53

and you went to the circus one of the things your parents said to you if they were like my parents

01:03:59

was be careful you don’t meet a pickpocket so I’ve noticed that in the DMT flash

01:04:07

there is this slight concern

01:04:09

it isn’t a fear that they will be violent with you

01:04:13

or a fear that something truly bad would happen to you

01:04:19

but there is this slight suspicion

01:04:21

that these guys are not entirely your friend

01:04:24

that they’re too tricky, too zany,

01:04:28

their sense of humor too out in front of your own

01:04:31

for you to be able to fully trust these guys.

01:04:35

Well, I thought, I went into my mind and I meditated,

01:04:38

where have I had this feeling before of you can’t trust them,

01:04:43

they’re probably alright and then I realized

01:04:46

it was in my

01:04:47

my itinerant

01:04:50

smuggling

01:04:52

days in India

01:04:53

and the vibe

01:04:56

is that of traders

01:04:57

these guys

01:04:59

are sharp

01:05:01

they’re there to make a deal

01:05:03

and all the stuff that they pull out and show you, look

01:05:07

at this, look at this. These are trade items. These are goods. That’s the problem. Too often we go into

01:05:16

the psychedelic state and people say you should think of a question. These guys say say i’ve got questions of my own you bring me questions you know why don’t

01:05:28

you bring me an idea why don’t you bring me something i might want to have i sort of believe

01:05:36

that the reason i was given this is because they took something from me what they took from me was everything I knew about the I Ching

01:05:46

I mean I can just imagine them turning it over in their hyper dimensional hands

01:05:51

and saying crude but the workmanship shows a certain sensitivity you know put

01:06:00

that up on the shelf and why don’t you give this poor fellow something in return

01:06:06

and they said well how about a hyperdimensional map of space time

01:06:10

I said good give him that

01:06:12

so you know here it is

01:06:15

fair trade

01:06:17

okay here we are

01:06:21

so close to it that it’s hard probably for you to see,

01:06:25

but remember the purple line points at today.

01:06:29

Can you see that the bottom of the trough has already happened?

01:06:33

That’s the day that they put a million people in Tiananmen Square.

01:06:38

It’s just 25 days in the past now, but we’re already on the recidivist upswing

01:06:46

you can see this

01:06:48

period that lies ahead

01:06:50

until early 91

01:06:52

is going to be of a different

01:06:54

character than the time

01:06:56

that we’ve come through

01:06:58

well we can focus in

01:07:00

we could go down to

01:07:02

three days we could get it

01:07:04

so you could see hourly fluctuations yeah

01:07:07

I should make it clear I don’t think I said this in the theory the idea is that this stacked

01:07:13

hierarchy of vibrations passes through these cycles that are shorter and shorter we’ve been looking at the 4306 year cycle

01:07:25

with a little bit

01:07:26

about the 67

01:07:27

year cycle

01:07:28

but there’s also

01:07:30

a 384 day cycle

01:07:32

a 6 day cycle

01:07:33

a 135 minute cycle

01:07:35

and so on

01:07:37

down to the range

01:07:38

of Planck’s constant

01:07:39

this thing is

01:07:40

imagine

01:07:41

we’re imagining

01:07:42

the universe

01:07:43

as a temporal hologram

01:07:46

whose fractal dimensionality matches the contours of this wave.

01:07:52

So we’re suggesting that time is a kind of very complex interference pattern,

01:08:00

standing wave, or resonance pattern,

01:08:23

standing wave or resonance pattern where certain times reinforce trends in other times on different levels across a schema of relatedness that is not linear but related through the topology of this particular manifold okay so here is Tiananmen Square

01:08:26

filled with a million people

01:08:27

here we are

01:08:28

I can tell you that this upward swing

01:08:32

becomes flat on the 30th of June

01:08:37

then it sort of runs along flat

01:08:40

for a couple of weeks or so

01:08:42

then there’s a little descent

01:08:44

and then an upward fluctuation

01:08:46

and then this.

01:08:48

And this all goes on through 1989

01:08:51

and most of 1990.

01:08:53

And then in early 91,

01:08:57

a new level of novelty

01:08:59

is not only tested

01:09:01

but explored for a long, long time.

01:09:05

I mean, this looks like wild stuff down in here.

01:09:10

And then so on, and it proceeds into the future

01:09:13

and runs to ground in 2012.

01:09:16

Well, this is just a demonstration of a mathematical effort

01:09:25

to take a snapshot of the hyperspatial mind

01:09:29

from a different angle than we’d looked at it before.

01:09:34

So that’s it.

01:09:43

Are there questions?

01:09:47

Question.

01:09:48

When you came up with the end date,

01:09:49

did you just do that by trial and error,

01:09:51

or did you have some…

01:09:54

Yes, actually I did just,

01:09:56

well, not exactly trial and error,

01:09:58

but by intuition.

01:10:00

And the funny thing about the end date

01:10:02

that I haven’t mentioned tonight yet, I think,

01:10:05

is this end date is the same end date as the end date of the Mayan calendar.

01:10:11

The Mayan calendar is composed of 13 cycles called baktuns.

01:10:18

And they’re about 500 and some odd years long.

01:10:22

And the 13th baktun ends on December 22nd

01:10:26

2012

01:10:27

now I didn’t know that

01:10:29

when I fit this

01:10:32

wave to this

01:10:33

the only thing that I

01:10:36

have in common with the

01:10:38

ancient Mayans is

01:10:40

that we both use psilocybin

01:10:42

mushrooms for vision

01:10:44

well is this then an objective map of a higher dimensional space

01:10:51

that they somehow, with their linguistic and intellectual equipment,

01:10:57

were able to find their way to the same conclusion by different means?

01:11:02

It seems to me a bizarre coincidence. Nevertheless,

01:11:08

I can’t account for it. I achieved this alignment of the wave without knowledge that that was

01:11:16

also the end date of the Mayan calendar.

01:11:18

Do you reduce this to a daily situation and you watch it to see? Oh, yes. I can show you just, you know, 30 days

01:11:29

or I can print out a month time map for someone

01:11:33

or a weekly time map for someone.

01:11:36

And have you looked back at, say, the last month

01:11:38

when all was going on in China and so on and seen each?

01:11:42

Oh, yes. to my jaded view

01:11:45

it’s always right.

01:11:47

I need help, you know,

01:11:49

of one sort or another for sure

01:11:53

because to me it appears to work

01:11:55

and, you know, I use objective

01:11:59

chronological databases,

01:12:02

these reference books that you can buy

01:12:04

like a chronologue of history and technology or a file system of some sort

01:12:28

well this is a wonderful filing system

01:12:31

once you get to know this wave

01:12:34

you know that you know the same distance

01:12:37

from Charlemagne to Henry Ford

01:12:39

as from Amenhotep to Hannibal

01:12:42

and you’re able to see these

01:12:45

distance time relationships

01:12:47

you understand history

01:12:49

it wants us to understand our own history

01:12:53

we are partially amnesic

01:12:55

because we don’t understand our history

01:12:58

it’s a weird kind of ignorance

01:13:00

it’s sort of intolerable from the point of view

01:13:04

of whatever is looking at us it

01:13:06

thinks we should know our history because our history is somehow our present that’s the message

01:13:14

here the past is making the present not in the good old way that everybody always says that. But in an entirely different way, the past is actually making the present.

01:13:27

Yes?

01:13:28

So, with this, you can actually foretell the future

01:13:31

and that you can say,

01:13:33

you don’t know what’s going to happen,

01:13:34

but tomorrow at noon,

01:13:36

something is going to happen that’s going to be interesting.

01:13:38

That’s right.

01:13:40

That’s right.

01:13:41

Does that indicate to you,

01:13:44

you get insight into

01:13:45

a certain preparedness

01:13:46

well a certain

01:13:49

preparedness

01:13:49

which I call

01:13:50

I read it negatively

01:13:52

I say it’s the end

01:13:53

of anxiety

01:13:54

yes because you

01:13:56

look ahead

01:13:57

and you say

01:13:58

aha

01:13:58

the big changes

01:14:00

this year

01:14:00

will come

01:14:01

in August

01:14:02

the tough time

01:14:04

will come in April between there tough time will come in April.

01:14:05

Between there and then,

01:14:06

it’s like this.

01:14:08

And then you live through it

01:14:09

and it’s confirmed for you.

01:14:12

So then the next time

01:14:14

you make a similar projection,

01:14:16

you have greater faith in it.

01:14:19

And it’s important to notice

01:14:21

this is not a determinism.

01:14:26

This does not interfere with free will

01:14:28

this isn’t some kind

01:14:30

of mathematical

01:14:32

predestination trip

01:14:34

it’s not saying

01:14:35

what will happen

01:14:37

it’s only saying

01:14:39

what the level of novelty

01:14:42

will be

01:14:43

that whatever happens fulfills.

01:14:47

So it’s not predicting events,

01:14:50

it’s predicting levels of novelty

01:14:52

in whatever events come to be at that point

01:14:56

on a global level.

01:14:59

And then there is a way to adapt it to individual lives,

01:15:03

to treat individuals,

01:15:06

to treat this as an equation for a global environment

01:15:09

and to treat each of us as particles

01:15:13

within the global environment with our

01:15:15

own end dates and beginning dates the

01:15:22

sum total of which average out into this contour see pardon me

01:15:30

on an individual level I’m not in I’m not welded to this part of the theory I’m experimenting with with it because it has slightly to my mind the aura of hokum about it but there is a 67 year

01:15:49

104.25 day cycle well if you take a person’s birth date and add 67 years 104.25 days and enter that as the end date

01:16:05

and then look at their lives

01:16:07

they achieve remarkable satisfaction

01:16:11

with this, including myself

01:16:14

although I don’t

01:16:15

it’s not in the canon

01:16:18

I don’t claim that it does that

01:16:24

but it’s fascinating to watch.

01:16:26

I mean, sometimes it’s very amazing.

01:16:28

I mean, somebody will tell you their birth date,

01:16:31

and you make the calculation and run the graph,

01:16:34

and you say, my God, what happened to you in 1972?

01:16:39

And they say, well, I attempted suicide and nearly succeeded,

01:16:43

and this and this and you know

01:16:45

it’s often very right

01:16:48

on this is eerie

01:16:49

stuff don’t think that

01:16:52

I am not Dane

01:16:54

Rudyard or anybody else

01:16:56

coming from those places

01:16:58

I respect astrology

01:16:59

because I know nothing about it

01:17:02

but

01:17:02

this seems quite strange to me

01:17:07

that this works.

01:17:09

Whitehead said a wonderful thing.

01:17:11

He said,

01:17:12

understanding is the apperception of pattern as such.

01:17:20

And I think this illuminates a lot of what is going on

01:17:24

in the psychedelic experience.

01:17:26

You look at a situation, you see a pattern, that aids you in understanding the situation.

01:17:36

But now if you shift your view and look at the same situation again and see a different pattern your understanding further deepens if you

01:17:46

shift your viewpoint again and achieve a third pattern you’re so understanding is

01:17:52

the apperception of pattern as such what we feel comfortable with as

01:17:58

understanding what we call understanding is nothing more than the apperception of pattern as such

01:18:06

this is why these hallucinations

01:18:09

are so absolutely

01:18:10

beguiling

01:18:12

because we cannot help but

01:18:15

perceive them as

01:18:17

understanding

01:18:18

in gazing upon such

01:18:21

complex and self

01:18:23

transforming beauty we perceive pattern and the feedback of that upon such complex and self-transforming beauty,

01:18:25

we perceive pattern.

01:18:27

And the feedback of that into our psychology

01:18:30

is a sense of meaning, a sense of meaning.

01:18:36

So it isn’t mysterious,

01:18:40

the way in which psychedelic plants

01:18:42

may have synergized consciousness.

01:18:45

They simply allowed patterns present to be perceived.

01:18:51

And this is what we’re constantly in the process of discovering,

01:18:55

the patterns already in place that we had overlooked.

01:18:59

Yeah?

01:18:59

You mentioned earlier that you were talking a little more about addictive patterns and compulsive patterns. Addictive and compulsive patterns

01:19:08

yes well extrapolating out of what I said today

01:19:11

you know

01:19:16

who was it

01:19:17

Ludwig von Bertalanthe

01:19:20

the guy who invented general systems theory

01:19:23

said human beings are not machines,

01:19:28

but in every situation in which they are given the opportunity

01:19:31

to behave like machines,

01:19:33

they will so behave.

01:19:36

So what I think is going on

01:19:40

is this has to do with this broken up symbiosis in prehistory

01:19:45

in the same way

01:19:48

that the children of

01:19:50

dysfunctional families

01:19:51

are set up to be

01:19:54

are highly

01:19:56

high probability

01:19:57

candidates for addiction

01:19:59

so are all

01:20:02

of us because we

01:20:04

are all inheritors of this original dysfunctional relationship to the family, the symbiotic family, the interspecies family that we come out of, which is the human we achieve peace of mind and the

01:20:28

disequilibrium of psyche that we feel

01:20:32

having been expelled from that cultural

01:20:34

context leads us to try every single

01:20:38

thing we can to assuage our

01:20:42

disequilibrium and And so opiates, cocaine, alcohol,

01:20:48

all of these things are a frantic effort

01:20:52

to restore a feeling that we feel capable of,

01:20:59

but that we just can’t quite reach it.

01:21:03

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:21:06

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

01:21:11

Now, if you’re new to the salon and haven’t heard Terence’s time wave rap before,

01:21:16

well, my guess is that based on what he just said about using this formula to predict future events,

01:21:22

well, that like me, you wonder how this is much different from

01:21:26

using astrology to predict the future. Well, I’m wondering the same thing, because as we know,

01:21:32

well, the time wave wasn’t any more able to predict the future than is any other such device.

01:21:37

And as evidence, I submit that 20 years ago, the most destructive personality in U.S. history

01:21:44

that 20 years ago, the most destructive personality in U.S. history wasn’t predicted by any oracle that I know of to become president.

01:21:49

And if they were any good, it seems to me that President Bonespurs

01:21:53

couldn’t be missed as a harbinger of a very destructive period in history.

01:21:57

The one that we are, in fact, now living through.

01:22:01

However, it is novel. I’ll give you that.

01:22:04

Okay, so now you’ve heard Terence’s live

01:22:07

time wave rap, and to be honest, all of the historical points on the graph do in fact

01:22:13

sound significant. But here’s the problem that I see with his analysis, and that’s the fact that

01:22:18

almost every major point in history that he mentions comes from Western civilization.

01:22:25

point in history that he mentions comes from western civilization. For example, during the time that he selects Eleanor of Aquitaine’s reign as a significant point, well, there were also very

01:22:32

significant events taking place in Japan and China at the same time, which I think led to even greater

01:22:38

historical events than did the troubadours, but hey, that’s just my opinion. Now what may be an interesting way to plot history, however,

01:22:47

using his time wave idea, would be to do versions of the time wave for different cultures, different

01:22:53

periods of their history, like the Japanese, Indian, Persian, Chinese, and so on. Then once

01:22:59

these time waves are lined up with the most significant events of those cultures, we could superimpose them and maybe get a better picture

01:23:07

of the overall wave of human thought and activities

01:23:10

that have taken place on a global scale.

01:23:13

Of course, I suspect that there are already much better ways of doing this.

01:23:19

You know, I have to admit that even though I’ve discounted Terence’s time wave ideas,

01:23:24

it still is fun to listen to him talk about it.

01:23:27

You know, I’ve sometimes wondered what his career would have been like

01:23:30

if he had never proposed this hypothesis, the one that he called a theory.

01:23:36

Now, one of the results, I think, might be that his 2012 approach of the Eschaton rap,

01:23:42

well, maybe never would have taken place.

01:23:44

And let’s be honest here,

01:23:46

even those of us who took the time wave and his 2012 ideas with a grain of salt,

01:23:51

well, we still enjoyed his lectures and having conversations with him. He had such a wonderful

01:23:57

mind that, well, at times he could be completely captivating, even while at the same time in the

01:24:03

back of our minds, we knew that it

01:24:05

was only a new myth that he was creating. Interestingly, many of the other myths that

01:24:11

he created are still alive today. But here’s another thought. If you are, like me, old enough

01:24:18

to be able to think back to the time when you were a child, and there was no such thing as the

01:24:22

internet, with its unlimited amount of news, information, and entertainment and there was no such thing as the internet, with its unlimited amount of news,

01:24:25

information, and entertainment. There was no such thing as a web-enabled phone, or jet airplanes,

01:24:31

or self-driving cars, or a space program. If you took one of us from back in the 1940s,

01:24:38

and instantly time-warped us to where we are today, well, my guess is that we time travelers

01:24:43

could easily buy into Terrence’s idea

01:24:46

that something significant had taken place in 2012 because the world was completely changed.

01:24:52

Humans seem much the same, but the physical world has been transformed from the slow-paced

01:24:58

farm culture-oriented place that we first knew what it is today. Maybe there really was an important

01:25:06

threshold that we crossed six or seven years ago and didn’t even notice, because like fish who

01:25:12

aren’t aware of the water, we are immersed in a period of history that is immensely significant.

01:25:18

But it’s like water around us, and well, we should maybe pay better attention to the fact that the times they are

01:25:25

changing. And for anyone who is still working on Terrence’s time wave idea and the hopes that he

01:25:32

can be proven correct about his hunch, I just want to remind you that the time wave is simply a plot

01:25:38

of the 64 possible line combinations that result from tossing a coin in an Iron Age Chinese fortune-telling game.

01:25:48

And now I’ve probably pissed off a few more friends,

01:25:51

but once you skin the tales of ancient mysteries from the idea of the I Ching,

01:25:56

what you have is a very old game of prophecy.

01:26:00

Now I do think that the messages given by the hexagrams in the I Ching

01:26:03

have significantly more value than the daily newspaper horoscope,

01:26:08

but hey, let’s call it what it is.

01:26:10

It seems to me that there’s more than enough mystery and psychedelic experiences

01:26:15

without the I Ching and Ouija boards coming into play.

01:26:19

But hey, that’s just my opinion, and not all of my friends agree with me,

01:26:24

so you’ll have to figure this one out on your own,

01:26:27

as you also have to do with everything else, I should add.

01:26:30

As the good Dr. Timothy Leary often said,

01:26:33

think for yourself and question authority.

01:26:37

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

01:26:42

Be well, my friends. Thank you.