Timewave Zero
Terence McKenna is a professional mushroom researcher, among
other things, and in the course of his long first-hand study he
experienced a visionary inspiration for a fascinating piece of
software called Timewave Zero. I first read of it in his
book The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms,
the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFO's, Evolution, Shamanism, the
Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. Quite a mouthful,
that: but when you've done as many mushrooms as Terence…Anyway,
the official introduction to the original program from Dolphin
Software describes it best:
This software illustrates Terence McKenna's theory of time, history
and the end of history as first described in the book The Invisible
Landscape by him and his brother Dennis, and more recently
in his The Archaic Revival (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).
The theory of Timewave Zero was revealed to Terence by an alien
intelligence following a bizarre, quasi-psychedelic experiment
conducted in the Amazon jungle in Colombia in 1971. Inspired by
this influence Terence was instructed in certain transformation
of numbers derived from the King Wen sequence of I Ching hexagrams.
This led eventually to a rigorous mathematical description of
what Terence calls the timewave, which correlates time and history
with the ebb and flow of novelty, which is intrinsic to
the structure of time and hence of the temporal universe. A peculiarity
of this correlation is that at a certain point a singularity is
reached which is the end of history-or at least is a transition
to a suprahistorical order in which our ordinary conceptions of
our world will be radically transformed. The best current estimate
for the date of this point is December 21, 2012 CE [current era],
the winter solstice of that year and also the end of the current
era in the Mayan calendar.
The primary function of the software is to display any portion
of the timewave (up to seven billion years) as a graph of the
timewave related to the Western calendar (either Gregorian or
Julian). You can display the wave for the entire 4.5-billion-year
history of the Earth, note the peculiarities of the wave at such
points as the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs (65 million
years ago) and inspect parts of the wave as small as 92 minutes.
The software provides several ways of manipulating the wave display,
including the ability to zoom in on a target date or to step back
to get the larger picture.
A remarkable quality of the timewave is that it is a fractal.
Once a part of the wave is displayed the software allows you to
expand any smaller part (down to 92 minutes). This usually reveals
a complexity of structure which persists however much the wave
is magnified, a property typical of fractals. The idea that time
has a fractal structure (in contrast to the Newtonian conception
of time as pure, unstructured duration) is a major departure from
the common view of the nature of time and physical reality. That
time is a fractal may be the reason why fractals occur in Nature.
It's illuminating to experiment with this program, finding correlations
of the novelty points (sudden, steep descents of the timewave)
with critical eras of transformation: the atomic bomb, the Neanderthals,
the rise of homo sapiens, the birth of language, the Black Death,
the Enlightenment, the agricultural revolution, 1967…. And so
for the past few years since first using it I've been intrigued
to see what was going to happen in the spring of 1996. Because
following a long, boring plateau of some three years' duration,
there is a nosedive to novelty right now: from late February until
May of this year. Are you noticing anything different? Where will
this period take us? (Though we've still got a ways to go yet,
in this ordinary consciousness ….)
--Nowick Gray
cougar@alternativeculture.com
Terrance
McKenna Land
The "Timewave Zero" software has
been revised and re-issued under a new name: "Fractal Time."
The "Fractal Time" web site is at http://www.magnet.ch/serendipity/twz/
Full-featured DOS/Windows timewave software may be downloaded
from
http://www.magnet.ch/serendipity/twz/sw_resp.htm
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