Terence McKenna’s Time Wave Zero diagram might be a picture of the Earth’s fate.
Rising and falling fluctuations appear to chart not only the past and present of our world’s life, but a future final dip into maximum novelty at the Time Wave’s climax, signaling either the planet’s total transformation or death .
In his book Food of the Gods, ethnobotanist Terence McKenna suggests that the origin of the Biblical Tree of Knowledge myth may have derived from our ape ancestors’ earliest encounters with hallucinogenic mushrooms. This novel historical event may have been the humanizing catalyst which brought us language and culture, and human history. More recently, in Trialogues at the Edge of the West, co-authored with British biologist Rupert Sheldrake and chaos theorist Ralph Abraham, McKenna has put forth a theory that suggests that mankind may well be on the brink of as great an explosion of novel events as that earliest proto-cultural one. On his own website at http://www.levity.com/eschaton/, McKenna elucidates his “Novelty Theory” and “Time Wave Zero”.
The Time Wave is an algorithm derived from certain mathematical relationships inherent in the King Wen sequence of sixty-four hexagrams of the I-Ching. This algorithm, when displayed as a wave and overlaid onto a given notion of historical time, appears to chart what McKenna calls history’s “the ebb and flow”. That is, where the Time Wave predicts a period of great novelty (as understood to be a period of innovation, transformation, or planetary crisis), a look at that moment in recorded history should show a corresponding event, recognizable as being of great significance. His Time Wave appears to correspond with surprising accuracy with such events as planet-wide mass-extinctions of species, cometary impacts, mankind’s development and implementation of certain technologies, great social upheavals, and times of aesthetic renaissance.
The frightening thing about the Time Wave, or the exciting thing, depending on your point of view, is that, if it is correct in predicting past historical periods of novelty, then it follows that it applies to the near future. And according to the Wave, on December 21, 2012, a period of maximum tolerable novelty will be reached, or surpassed, and mankind can expect an exponential increase on par with our original apprehension of language and proto-civilization. Imagine events on the scale of cometary impact, the extinction of the dinosaurs, the Italian renaissance, the implementation of time travel technology, a cure for AIDS, the bankruptcy of Microsoft, the American, French and Russian revolutions happening all in one night.
On the evening of April 25, 1996, McKenna spoke about these ideas and their implications at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine’s Synod Hall in Manhattan. As we waited for his appearance, the crowded hall had a distinct aesthetic ambiance. There was a subtle but effective light show, consisting of swirling, psychedelic, ever-changing patterns above the podium and in the air overhead. McKenna was humble, funny, and fluent. The talk focused on novelty as manifested by technology, and in particular computers and new information technologies. Much to our disappointment, there was relatively little direct acknowledgment of the mushroom entities, the UFO beings, or the hyper-dimensional self-transforming mechanical elves sometimes described in his books. Their presence could be sensed, however, and they weren’t far away. They were probably in the green room net-surfing on their laptops.
The following afternoon, we met with Terence at the Paramount Hotel on Times Square, and followed up the evening’s talk with questions of our own.
Ken: In the last issue we talked to Rupert Sheldrake and one of the things that comes up with him, and that he talked about a lot has to do with habits of nature and repetitions in nature. During that interview I began to wonder about the other side of that equation–novelty as opposed to habits–and so I think it’s interesting and appropriate that we talk to you now.
Terence: Well, he and I have had this very conversation because you see his theory, in a sense, is the most conservative theory you could possibly imagine because what it says is nothing happens but for how things happened before. So the trick then, in that kind of a model, is how do you ever get anything to advance? How do you ever get novelty out of that situation? Well, my mathematics sort of show a way out of that trap. And you can have a formative causation-type cosmology and still get novelty out of the system.
K: So your novelty theory is compatible with Sheldrake’s hypothesis of formative causation?
TM: They’re more than compatible. I would say complementary, even somewhat immodestly. The good thing about my rap is that it boils down to mathematics. What Rupert’s thing is, without a mathematical formulation, is a speculation, you know. If you’re talking about a morphogenetic field, sooner or later you have to come up with field equations of the field. And at that point, things become very real or vaporize pretty quickly. And my field equations for the time wave, this thing I call the time wave, could have been called the morphogenetic field. These are just nomenclatural differences. It does what the morphogenetic field is supposed to do.
David: I was looking at your web site, at the time wave and some of the time wave charts and graphs and I noticed that you represent novelty on that graph as being the low end of the wave and its opposite, habit, as being the high end, and therefore the novelty is a descent. I was just wondering why you represent it as a descent rather than an increase, since it’s an increase in diversity, it seems.
TM: There’s a unique place in the mathematics–the place where novelty is at its maximum. It seemed to me more elegant to give that a value of zero than to give it simply an arbitrarily high positive value. So really what we should say is that the graph is a graph of habit. And that when it descends, habit is slackening, or losing its hold. But I just think the human organism’s drive to be optimistic makes it preferable to speak of it as a novelty wave rather than a habit wave. The other thing, as I said last night, I thought of time as water. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Amazon basin and among people for whom rivers end at springs, and begin where they join other rivers. In the Witoto language this is their assumption. The fact that the river is moving, they don’t account for that. They say, well of course the river begins where it’s biggest and then you go upstream and finally you reach its ending. It peters out, it becomes nothing. That’s the end of the river. So these are just culturally contrived notions.
D: Ken and I also found it interesting how you explained the mathematics–basically throwing the I Ching for the world. Using the I Ching as the basis upon which to generate the wave, and then the comparison with history which yielded such interesting results on that chart. On the chart a dip in the wave corresponds to a particular historical event which is, say, the Big Bang, or something else which we can call a moment of incredible novelty. How is it possible to look at history and say, “Here’s a period where there’s an increase in novelty. Here’s a period where there’s less novelty.”?
TM: You mean, how do you score history? Well, it seems to me that where the argument comes is in the tough cases. In other words, if somebody said, “I have a theory that predicts where novelty will fall–” you don’t have to know very much about history to ask the question, “Well, what does your theory say about Periclean Athens? What does it say about the Italian renaissance? What does it say about the 20th century?” Now, if it fails to pick up those points and to predict them as novel, I think the person would immediately begin to have an uphill battle on their hands. If you got those three right, then you say, well, then, how does it do with the European Enlightenment, how does it do with the fall of Rome, how does it do with Ancient Egypt? So what you do is begin with the easy cases and then you keep fitting the wave, seeking what they call “best-fit” configuration of the wave to the data. And then eventually when you think it’s right, it should work for the most trivial things and you should have satisfaction.
So, it’s true that history is not a quantified body of study, but it’s also true that we make quantified and qualitative judgments about it. You could appoint a hundred historians to decide what were the thousand most novel six-month periods in the last 10,000 years and then see how we did. And I’m confident that we would do extraordinarily well. Of course with history, you know, there is revisionism. I mean, a regime may value some trivial event greatly for its propaganda value to serve their agenda. Then that regime is overthrown, then that past historical event is seen more nearly in the proper perspective, or at least in a new and different perspective. And so forth and so on. But you know, what is taught in the universities, if there is a course called theory of history, the academic position is that history is trendlessly fluctuating. Well now this is an interesting concept. If it’s trendlessly fluctuating, it is the only phenomenon, in or out of nature, known to exhibit this particular kind of behavior. There are no trendless fluctuations. Watch any process, at any level long enough, and you will be able to iterate its basin of attraction.
I think we like our successes. We have been great at understanding the nucleus of the atom and so we talk about that a lot. But history is a complete black box to us. So we don’t talk about our utter ignorance of history, even though understanding and trying to control history is probably the single most important issue for our society. So I think that the explosion of the application of fractal descriptions to nature suggests that all processes will yield to certain kinds of fractal descriptions. And history is obviously a process embedded in nature. A product of the decisions of animal minds and bodies. My numbers may turn out to be wrong, but I feel very strongly that my methods will be vindicated some day by somebody. This is how you would do it, if you granted that time was not a smooth surface and that probability theory will have to be traded in for a more sophisticated model of the ebb and flow of contingency.
K: To what extent is the novelty that’s being charted in the time wave specific to the Earth? Is it just about the Earth, or something broader?
TM: No, I think it’s about the Earth. I think the Earth represents what Whitehead would call a nexus of actual occasions sufficient to call it an organism, and that it has this archetypal structure, if you will, the time wave. And that it unfolds its archetypal structure through time. And we are the witnesses, victims and actors in this peculiar drama.
D: So the descent into the eschaton, the final zero-state, you’re saying that that applies to this planetary history and not necessarily to the universal cosmic history?
TM: I find it hard to believe that it makes much sense outside of the context of the Earth because obviously the Earth itself is a concrescence of immense novelty. A very special kind of planet with a very special kind of biology, with a very special kind of primate and so forth.
K: But the time wave diagram, looking back goes beyond the formation of the Earth, the prehistory of the Earth, before the big bang, what about that?
TM: Well the timing of the big bang is now really hotly under discussion. I have a feeling the big bang may, in spite of its apparent present security in theory, be not entirely the correct story. You know recently that cosmology was revised to add this inflationary bubble in the first milliseconds, in order to account for mass distributions and certain other things. I think there may be local big bangs, but I suspect that the universe is an eternal, self-creating thing and that to ask its dimensions is to misunderstand what it is.
Nothing really makes sense about the time wave except the last eight billion years. And there you see the very dramatic, catastrophic events that created the Earth are very well depicted by the wave. And the ebb and flow of cometary impact and species extinctions. I think it’s a remarkable thing. I wish someone would study the time wave with an open mind from a statistical point of view. I mean, that’s the way, in fact to defeat it. If someone thought “These are the ravings of a drug-twisted…this is nonsense!” Well the way to attack it then is to show that it does not predict novel events. Get your own list of 100 novel events and show that the correlation of the wave is no better than chance. This would be a nice thesis for somebody and a bit of a reputation. There is a guy trying to topple me, but he doesn’t use that approach. He is a very abstract mathematician in England. There’s this thing on my web site called “The Watkins Objection.” He attacks the method of constructing the algorithm and, well, it’s probably too technical for your readers to be interested in, but naturally it’s of vital interest to me.
D: It’s interesting, perhaps romantic to think of the precision of the date that you’ve predicted for the zero-state (12:00 A.M. December 21, 2012). In what ways do you see that as an end of history and in what ways do you see it as a beginning? Or is it more of one than the other?
TM: Well I vacillate on this, because I’ve lived with this idea since 1971. I know how it feels to take a hard position and how it feels to take a soft position. I’m kind of inclined to the hard positions, I mean, why not, you know? And what a hard position is is not that this is a social transformation, not that this is a political dispensation, but that in fact it’s a crisis in physics itself. And that we didn’t cause it and we’re not responsible for it. We’re just being pulled along by something on the scale of an earthquake. And that it affects physical law. So that’s a hard position. A modified hard position would be that it’s something in the human collective personality that is seeking to express itself through fusion of all the individuals into some kind of cyber-organic matrix whose intent lies in the collective unconscious of the species, and we don’t know what that is. We are all just tits on that boar. And then the soft position…There’s a group of people on the Internet called “singularists”. And they are complete tech heads, engineers, not an iota of psychedelic or spiritual manna in them. But they take all these engineering curves–curves of energy release, curves of speed, curves of population, curves of information densification–and reach exactly the same conclusion, that some time between 2010 and 2020, life becomes unrecognizable. We apparently possess starships, can build nano sites, can download ourselves into circuitry, can completely control our genetic expression, remain immortal, transform into other species, on and on and on, just based on the programs in place in R&D at the corporate-state level. Well, so, clearly, what we’ve done is we’ve found the change button and just like a mad ape we’re just pounding the change button.
And the trick, I mean, the motivation for my career, why I do this rather than stay home in Hawaii where it’s very pleasant, is I think a lot of people are anxious. This causes anxiety, all this. It needn’t. It isn’t a bad thing. It’s scary because the future was postponed for so long that now the breaking of the logjam is going to look like Armageddon. But it isn’t Armageddon. What lies beyond all this I think, is the first authentic human civilization. These are the pre-pre- times. You know Gandhi was once asked what he thought of Western Civilization and he said “It sounds like a veddy good idea.” So, that’s my idea of how the future will look back at this scene.
K: So that explosion of novelty is like your idea of the technology of time travel. It’s the sort of event that once it occurs, changes everything.
TM: Yeah, because, interestingly, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the time wave and asking questions like how does it relate to the dynastic fortunes of the great families of Europe, how does it relate to the rise and spread of capital, how does it relate to earthquakes, how’s it relate to religions. What it really relates to well, where it just snaps into focus, is technology. Apparently McLuhan was right. It’s technology that shapes culture more than anything else. The politics, the art, all this is derivative of what technologies are in place. And you know when you go from the unstirrupped horse to the stirrupped horse, when you go from the front-loading muzzle to the, whatever, these things are what make the difference. Technological innovation is just reaching an excruciating level of intensity in this society. And the interesting thing is that, unless you’re somebody like me who can surf the net all day from a Hawaiian mountain, you don’t know what’s going on. The people working in these laboratories, the people bringing high bandwidth, they don’t know what’s going on in nanotechnology, neither of them know what’s going on in AI or complexity theory, and none of them know what’s going on in education theory and social programming. In each one of these fields, the top people feel like the Holy Grail of their whole enterprise is five to six years away. Well, it’s going to start arriving, all this stuff. You know, like what I talked about last night, this discovery of these planets outside the solar system is entirely the fact that a certain technology was pushed beyond a certain level of resolution and then–bingo!–these things snap into focus. They knew that if they were there, they would see them, when that technology reached that level of noiseless operation. So, biological evolution has stopped. In a sense cultural evolution has stopped.
It’s funny, I was in a gallery yesterday to see the new James Rosenquist show at the Castelli. So we go in and there’s this construction. I’m familiar with his work, and it’s like a complete departure from everything he’s ever done. I say to the gallery guy, “This is like a complete departure,” and he said, “No, no. This is a reconstruction of a piece he did in 1974 that we showed right in this gallery”. So you realize that the complete departure was the later work and you’re caught in a time loop. All of the art world is like this. Culture has looked like this, felt like this for 25 years. It’s technology that is changing and the first one to surface really is the net. The net is huge, I mean nobody understands the implications of it, not the people building it, not the people using it, not the people fighting it, none of them realize that this protean form…There’s this wonderful line of Stephen Vincent Benet’s, in one of his poems, “John Brown’s Body”, speaking of electricity. He says, “our willing serf already half a god” and this is what the Internet is like. It is really the nervous system of the planet forming embryonically in the Gaian womb and you can just feel it minute by minute knitting and connecting.
D: You said last night that culture isn’t your friend and ideology isn’t your friend and I think a lot of people are wondering whether the Internet is your friend, or nanotechnology is your friend. You seem friendly to these technologies, what about the kind of fear and paranoia I think a lot of people feel about them?
TM: I think that that is really induced by participating in the spasm of anxiety that the nation-state style of thinking feels when confronted by these things. This is a gun pointed at the head of the old way of doing business and to the degree that one is consciously or unconsciously invested in all that, it produces anxiety.
I meet a lot of people who experience the computer stuff as a speed-bump in their artistic life, you know. People bump up against it. They don’t want to do it. They don’t want to learn. You say, well, for Christ’s sake! You’re an artist in Manhattan! You wear black! You call yourself avant-garde, and you’re gonna dig in your heels and say no? No, you can’t. I mean, when oil paints were introduced, these guys had to learn the chemistry of grinding white lead and working with all these materials, egg tempera, that’s finished. That went a certain distance, and it’s good. Everybody better get used to the idea of learning, a lot, of being as a little child. I mean, I spend as much time as I can assimilating software, graphics software, three-dimensional software, software to implement HTML, software to make the sites more sexy, and once you unstiffen, and get into the feeling of it, it’s extremely satisfying. But if you freeze up in the presence of it, then you just think, “Oh, dear…”
K: So you feel like the most vital arena for aesthetic, artistic issues is definitely in the world of what’s happening on the Internet, is that right?
TM: Well, yes, I mean, simply for its speed, its convenience, the fact that there are no middlemen, no censors, no market forces, you can edit yourself after you publish yourself, nothing is ever finished, nothing is ever settled–I could just go on and on, it’s just, it’s so freeing. In any other art mode, you have to submit yourself to an enormous system of peer review, financial evaluation, waiting in line, on and on and on. With this, you just put it out there. If it’s garbage, it will be dismissed. But if it isn’t, you will not be held down by all these other factors. So, yeah, I think it’s going to bring great increase in the quality of the aesthetic values being expressed.
The other thing I’m interested in about the net, is how to handle erotic imagery and what the net says about Eros. And, this is a total frontier. Nobody has a clue. It’s been so long since anybody’s ever seen an erotic image that wasn’t trying to sell them something that nobody can even remember what it was like. But this needs to be worked out. On one end of the spectrum you have people yelling and screaming that the net dehumanizes, and on the other end of the spectrum apparently it’s just the steamiest, most Eros-laden thing on the landscape, and sometimes it’s the same people making both charges at once, so, clearly, it churns people at the deep level of how they define their self image and that naturally addresses the sexual dimension. So I haven’t exactly decided where to go with this. There’s a little experiment on my web site, we call it the response to the Telecommunications Decency Act. My response was not to black out my web page. I said, everybody should put up something sexually explicit. Take it from the Song of Songs, take it from D.H. Lawrence, but, if everybody would put up one sexually explicit piece of text or image, this entire stupid issue would just dissolve like the morning dew and we could get on with our lives. But, you know, when regular mail was first introduced, it was a huge issue about whether a solicitation of adultery could be–what the implications of the government participating and conveying this opportunity for sin, what the social response of the community should be to this and yadda yadda ya. And now people just say, “You can’t be serious”.
K: When I was talking to Rupert, one of the things that came up was the idea of ritual and deliberately repeating traditional kinds of tasks or crafts, or actions, in order to connect to the ancestors, in a positive way evoke resonance, and preserve certain kinds of habits or traditions. Maybe part of the resistance to moving into an electronic world of communication is that when those traditions are seen as positive then something valuable could be lost.
TM: Well I think the way to keep one foot in the archaic is through psychedelics. I think psychedelics are essentially, for me and for my position a kind of religion, in the sense that all problems can be solved that way, all imbalances can be redressed that way. That is the audience with the Queen. That is the place where all the stuff has to be looked at from, when it appears to come into contradiction.
K: And that circumvents the need for ritual.
TM: Well, no. I’m thinking of it as ritual–as probably one of the oldest rituals around. What it circumvents is the need for ideology. You know if you’re a Marxist and you get into a tight place you say, “Well, what does theory teach us?” Well if you’re a psychedelic person and you get into a tight place, you say, “Well, we just have to get loaded”.
D: You’ve said that the use of psychedelics can be seen as a way of preparing ourselves for the for the next thing. How can the psychedelic experience prepare humanity for the next big, evolutionary leap?
TM: Well, the essence of the psychedelic experience I think I mentioned last night is boundary dissolution and the essence of the meltdown of history is the same thing. I mean, history is essentially all these colored squares on the board. It’s BC 10,000, and then they begin to move and mix and rise and fall. Well 12,000 years later everything has become homogeneous, and history has ended, in a sense. It was that process and now, now we’re there. The psychedelic is a way of triggering off in the microcosm of your own experience, as it were, this same process. Many people, when they take psychedelics, they actually have visions of history, of historical stuff going on. I’ve had really weird hallucinations. I remember a set of hallucinations I had on ayahausca where I saw the Atlantic Ocean, Europe here, America here, and a little boat, a boat leaves France and a voice says, “Each boat represents 10,000 settlers”…and the little boat leaves Plymouth, England and little villages are springing up like Monopoly houses in Massachusetts and Good Lord! You know, the stain of Puritanism is spreading across the land, I’m just looking at this…Imagine the history of the world as an hour long thing like that, where things are moving…Did you ever see the Times Atlas of World History, the London Times Atlas, it was just a book, but it was drawn with arrows and frames and it was like that. It clearly saw that history was a moving dynamic of genes, technologies, languages, who’s up, who’s down and that this is all in play simultaneously…sort of like the functioning of a cell, it’s the history of the human race. Apparently these processes iterate on different levels, that’s what the fractal architecture of things actually means.
K: When you talk about language,one thing that’s come up is how psychedelics might promote linguistic facility. Or even produce translinguistic matter. I was interested in the question of the word being the center of meaning, or of meaning being elsewhere and the word versus three-dimensional form or two-dimensional form or color, being a vehicle for that meaning. Is there something primary about the word?
TM: I think the world is made of language. And in some extremely profound way that is very hard for us to get at. What this encounter with translinguistic matter is, is this place on the psychedelic spectrum where you actually catch the unconscious in the process of using words to make reality. It’s sort of like, you look behind where the stuff is coming in, you say, “Oh my God, so that’s how they do it.” You know, syntax. You know the chief difference between science and magic is that science takes the universe as a given. It’s an objective phenomenon to be analyzed, dissected, modeled and understood. The magical point of view says that the world is made of language, and therefore can be controlled by utterance. And this is a very deep idea in human beings. Well, it’s interesting, then, that computer languages are in fact languages that when uttered, cause things to happen.
That’s what a poetic language is supposed to do. It makes things happen. And, so, people who learn to hack these computer languages are essentially in a position to hack reality itself if they’re subtle enough. It was a great moment for me when I realized that the keyboard as interface was an illusion, and that it was actually me and it, we were one thing. And as more and more people become conversant with virtual realities, and how to create them, this hacking of reality through the control of special languages–you could almost call them magical languages– it’s going to make for extremely effective art. The myth of Western history is the Word become Flesh, In principio erat Verbum et Verbum caro factum est. Well, what does this mean? To me it means the downloading of the word into flesh is the rise of fully conscious and articulate human beings. Well then the giveback is the Flesh using the power of the Word to return the Word to its source. And that’s sort of this eschatonic, salvational, satiriological distillation idea that is so strong in alchemy, and in other forms of Western religion. Just the idea of salvation as a possibility…
D: Hm.
K: The idea of return, completion…
TM: Yeah, that something has fallen, it must be redeemed.
