Tony Smith's Home Page

2012

- Year of Water Dragon

Terence McKenna's Timewave not only describes past history -

Timewave makes future Predictions

from his death (3 April 2000) to Mayan 13.0.0.0.0 (21 December 2012):

 

The peak around 11 September 2001 saw the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers.

 

The peak around Spring 2003 saw Comet C/2002 V1 and Iraq, not to mention SARS

 

Will something happen in 2007 ??? Credit Crisis Comets

 

What about 21 December 2012 ??? Jobs Crisis Comets

 

To see whether we should worry about 2007 and 2012, look at how Timewave was developed, and at some Timewave charts:

 

John Major Jenkins, in his 1994 article THE HOW AND WHY OF THE MAYAN END DATE IN 2012 A.D., said

"... Terence McKenna ... suggests that the position of winter solstice sun within 3 degrees of the Galactic Center in the year 2012 A.D. (a "once-in-a-precessional- cycle" event) may provide the eschatological end point for his theory of time known as Timewave Zero. His end date was chosen for historical reasons and was, apparently, only later discovered to correspond with the Mayan end date. ... on winter solstice of 2012, Galactic Center will be rising heliacally just before dawn, in a way reminiscent of how the Maya observed Venus's last morningstar appearance. ...

... The Maya ... Classic Period is thought to have lasted from 200 A.D. to 900 A.D ... The early Maya adopted two different time keeping systems, the "Short Count" and the Long Count ...

... The Short Count derives from combining the tzolkin cycle with the solar year and the Venus cycle of 584 days. In this way, "short" periods of 13, 52 and 104 years are generated. ...

... The Long Count system ... is based upon nested cycles of days ...

... For example: 6.19.19.0.0 equals 6 baktuns, 19 katuns, 19 tuns, 0 uinals and 0 days. If we add up all the values we find that 6.19.19.0.0 indicates a total of 1007640 days have elapsed since the Zero Date of 0.0.0.0.0.

The much discussed 13-baktun cycle is completed 1872000 days (13 baktuns) after 0.0.0.0.0. This period of time is the so called Mayan "Great Cycle" of the Long Count and equals 5125.36 years.

... The point of interest for these early astronomers seems to have been the projected end date in 2012 A.D., rather than the beginning date in 3114 B.C. Having determined the end date in 2012 (for reasons we will come to shortly), and calling it 13.0.0.0.0, they thus proclaimed themselves to be living in the 6th baktun of the Great Cycle. The later Maya certainly attributed much mythological significance to the beginning date, relating it to the birth of their deities, but it now seems certain that the placement of the Long Count hinges upon its calculated end point. ...".

 

Terence McKenna, on the Art Bell radio show of 5/22/97, said

"... it seems to me ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved ... the human nervous system is globalizing itself, building a model of conscious thought on a planetary scale. ...

... I've got a formal mathematical theory that ... produce[s] ... a time-scale wave ... by fitting known historical and paleontological and geological data into these waves at different scales, I was finally able to discern a best fit. ... It never says what will happen, it says when interesting things are highly likely ... with a wave like that, you can do ... retrodicting. In other words, if you have a wave of novelty that describes the past, you have to correctly predict the Italian renaissance, the Greek enlightenment, the modernity of the 20th century, so by predicting the past, we've gained confidence that this wave predicts the future. ...

... There is only one point in the entire cycle where ... the universe is actually evolving some kind of process of self-metamorphosis, and human beings indicate that we have crossed some boundary into some new era, a new epoch of ever greater acceleration into this process of self-revelation. ... that point occurs on this solstice date in 2012. ...".

 

Terence McKenna said, in his article

Derivation of the Timewave from the King Wen Sequence of I Ching Hexagrams
"... For the Taoist sages of pre-Han China time was composed of sixty-four irreducible elements ... The I Ching ...

... It is well known that hexagrams in the King Wen sequence occur in pairs. The second member of each pair is obtained by inverting the first. In any sequence of the sixty-four hexagrams there are eight hexagrams which remain unchanged when inverted. In the King Wen Sequence these eight hexagrams are paired with hexagrams in which each line of the first hexagram has become its opposite, (yang changed to yin and vice -versa). ...

... My intuition was to look at the first order of difference ... of the thirty-two pairs of hexagrams comprising the King Wen Sequence ... that is, how many lines change as one moves through the King Wen Sequence from one hexagram to the next.

The first order of difference will always be an integer between one and six.

When the first order of difference within pairs is examined it is always found to be an even number. Thus all instances of first order of difference that are odd occur at transitions from one pair of hexagrams to the next pair.

When the complete set of first order of difference integers generated by the King Wen Sequence is examined they are found to fall into a perfect ratio of 3 to 1, three even integers to each odd integer.

The ratio of 3/1 ... was a carefully constructed artifact achieved by arranging hexagram transitions between pairs to generate fourteen instances of three and two instances of one. Fives were deliberately excluded. The fourteen threes and two ones constitute sixteen instances of an odd integer occurring out of a possible sixty-four. This is a 3/1 ratio exactly.

... Look carefully at ...[the figure immediately below]...

... Notice that it is a complete set of the sixty-four possible hexagrams, running both sequentially forward and backward. Since it is composed of sixty-four hexagrams of six lines each it is composed of 6 x 64 or 384 lines or yao. ... The closure at the beginning and end of this figure suggested that it might be useful to model process.

Its 384 subunits imply a calendar. Can it be coincidence that the length of a lunar month, 29.53 days, times 13 is 383.89? I believe that what we have here is a 384 day lunar calendar ...".

 

What did King Wen have in mind when he constructed his 64-hexagram sequence?

King Wen created his I Ching hexagram arrangement while imprisoned by the Shang emperor. It was not an arrangement to describe abstract principles, but was designed for life in our physical world, beginning with pure Yang, forward moving Heaven, and ending with a hexagram described by two characters that mean "not yet across (a river)", so that its ending is really also a beginning, just as in real life.

When King Wen wrote about the 64 hexagrams, he wrote for each entire hexagram a Judgment. The Duke of Zhou (a son of King Wen) wrote a poetic text, the Line Text, for each hexagram Judgment. Each poem line corresponds to a hexagram line, and each whole poem goes with the Chinese characters for each hexagram Judgment.

The 64 King Wen hexagrams are arranged in 32 dual pairs. For 28 of the pairs, one is the other turned upside down. 8 hexagrams are the same turned upside down, so they make up 4 pairs of opposites.

It seems likely to me that Terence McKenna was on the right track in seeing the King Wen sequence as carrying within it a description of our past and future history.

 

Does Terence McKenna's Timewave accurately reveal the King Wen History of our Past and Future?

Matthew Watkins, in his paper Autopsy for a Mathematical Hallucination?, said

"... Terence McKenna ... had developed ... the Timewave theory ... which involved mathematically modelling the historical ingression of "novelty" using a fractal generated from the King Wen sequence of I Ching hexagrams. The idea had been revealed to him whilst in an altered state of consciousness brought about by psilocybin mushrooms. ... a description had originally been published in [the book] The Invisible Landscape (Terence and Dennis McKenna) in the early seventies ...

... The timewave is a mathematical function defined by applying a "fractal transform" to a piecewise linear function. The latter function is an expression of 384 "data points" (positive integer values) derived from the King Wen sequence. ... my main concern was with the powers of -1. These constitute the "missing step" which isn't mentioned in The Invisible Landscape, but which turns up as a footnote of the TimeExplorer software manual [for Timewave software]. On p.79 we find

Now we must change the sign of half of the 64 numbers ... as follows ...

... I immediately thought "WHY?" ... The footnote associated with this step reads:

22. This is the mysterious "half twist". The reason for this is not well understood at present and is a question which awaits further research

This struck me as absurd. ... McKenna ... immediately grasped the significance of my challenge. He would have to either (1) justify this mysterious "half twist" or (2) abandon the timewave theory altogether. He [Terence McKenna] claimed not to remember the exact details for its inclusion, as it had been decided upon over 20 years ago. ...

... without ...[the "half twist"]... the collapse of the "multi-levelled complex bi-directional wave" into the 384 values "fails to preserve" some geometric property. The "collapse" is pictured in the figure below:

... The ...[upper]... form is not fractal, as one might think, but is a simple "piecewise linear" function, essentially expressing the 384 values. The ..[lower]... form is the "multi-levelled complex wave", which is in fact just the superimposition of six piecewise linear functions ... over the interval [0,384] ... These functions are built from the two halves of ...[this figure shown above in McKenna's article]... McKenna refers to these as ... the forward flowing wave and ... the backward flowing wave. Our six functions are:

... The "collapse" of the latter into the former is built into my formula, and is essentially a sum of "angular" and "linear" divergences between the three pairs of functions. The "half twist" has the effect of complicating the angular terms, essentially scrambling the +/- information relating to the relative slopes of the various line segments. ... I must conclude that the "timewave" cannot be taken to be what McKenna claims it is. ...

... I don't find McKenna's timewave exploit to be completely without value. Certain observations (such as the absence of 5's in the set {h(1),...,h(64)} and the correspondence of the Chinese 13-lunation ritual calendar with six 64-day cycles) are certainly worthy of further consideration.

It wouldn't surprise me if a fractal map of temporal resonance was encoded into the King Wen sequence, just as it wouldn't surprise me if something quite remarkable does occur on December 21, 2012. ...".

Can Terence McKenna's Timewave construction be corrected?

John Sheliak, in his papers A Mathematical and Philosophical Re-Examination of the Foundations of TimeWave Zero and Novelty Theory and Specification, Delineation, and Formalization of the TimeWave Zero Data Set Generation Process - Philosophical, Procedural, and Mathematical, said

"... Watkins ... uncovered an operational flaw in the process used to generate the 384 number data set from the basic FOD ... First Order of Difference ... number set, ... Watkins' most important conclusion appeared to be speculative - that the unexplained "half twist" spelled doom for the TimeWave ...

... I decided to delineate and mathematically formalize each of the steps in the process that takes one from the King Wen hexagram sequence, to the final 384 number data set that is used to generate the TimeWave. ... The results show that the mathematical errors, described by Watkins, do produce a distortion in the standard TimeWave, but that this distortion does not destroy the information content of the data set, and it is correctable.

In addition, the standard and revised data sets exhibit a significant degree of correlation, showing that TimeWaves generated by the standard data set retain a significant portion of the information content that is contained within the revised waves.

The standard TimeWave is corrected using the mathematical formalization process, which produces a TimeWave free of distortion and one that appears to be a more accurate reflection of known historical process than the standard wave. ... This development begins with the King Wen hexagram sequence and proceeds to the final 384 number data set, using standard mathematical procedures and operations. The process is clarified and streamlined by the introduction of vector notation and operations, which also preserves the notion of wave "directed" flow, described by McKenna. ...

... Once this revised 384 number data set has been calculated, it is used as input to the TWZ software in order to generate revised TimeWaves that may be compared with the original standard TimeWaves. ... The results of the mathematical formalization and subsequent comparison analysis show that the revised data set produces a TimeWave that appears to reflect historical process with greater accuracy than the standard TimeWave. This difference is likely due to the fact that the standard data set produces a distorted TimeWave, as the result of imbedded mathematical errors that increase the noise level in the wave.

Comparisons of the standard and revised data sets and TimeWaves, show a generally high degree of correlation, inferring that the standard wave retains much of the information content of the revised wave, despite its distortion. ...

... One interesting feature ... is the nature of each wave at its respective endpoints. Recall that the value of the wave at x = 0 will be discarded because it is a duplicate or "wrap" of the value at x = 384. This will not effect the relative values of the two waves at x = 384, because they are both zero-valued at this endpoint. However, the value of each wave at  x = 1 is not the same, with the standard wave having a value of 10 while the revised wave value is zero. ...

... For the standard wave, it has been argued that the zero value at the end of the waveform implies some kind of singularity at the end of the process - or at the end of time.

... This revised wave is implying, that there may be singularities at both ends of the continuum.

This is also an argument for a closed system that may be undergoing some kind of cyclic renewal process ... universes [might] emerge from the zero-point, or vacuum field, go through an evolutionary process, then perhaps return to the zero-point field at the end of the cycle. This cycle may then repeat itself ... Could this be similar to the process that the TimeWave and Novelty Theory attempt to revel? ...".

 

Most of the Timewave charts that I have put on this page (the black-and-white ones, from a levity eschaton web page) are Unrevised Standard Timewave Charts. The only Revised Timewave Charts that I have put on this page (the ones with magenta Timewave Lines, from a levity eschaton web page or John Sheliak's paper Specification, Delineation, and Formalization of the TimeWave Zero Data Set Generation Process - Philosophical, Procedural, and Mathematical) involve only the time period 1942 to 2012.

 

25 bybp to 2012

This Timewave from 25 billion years ago to 2012

is an Unrevised Standard Timewave Chart. For the time prior to about 4 billion years ago, the TWZ seems to degenerate into a series of peaks with no clear correlation with events such as Inflation or the Big Bang.

Since the Unrevised Standard Timewave has no early-time singularity, but the Revised Timewave does have an early-time singularity, perhaps a Revised Timewave Chart might show Inflation and/or the Big Bang.  

 

7.0 bybp to 2012

The Timewave from 7.0 billion years ago to 2012

is an Unrevised Standard Timewave Chart, but it seems to retain structure that corresponds to Historical Events.

 

 

700 mybp to 2012

The Timewave from 700 million years ago to 2012

is an Unrevised Standard Timewave Chart. For the time from the Cambrian to 65 million years ago, the TWZ looks to me like a steady decline with no clear identification of Historical Events, although the 65 mybp Dinosaur-killer Chicxulub event and the 35-30 mybp Antarctic Glaciation event show up clearly. Perhaps a Revised Timewave Chart might show more structural details for the time from the Cambrian to 65 million years ago.

 

 

37.0 kybp to 2010

The Timewave from 37,000 years ago to 2012

is an Unrevised Standard Timewave Chart, but it seems to retain structure that corresponds to Historical Events.

 

 

3 kybp to 1094

The Timewave from about 3000 years ago to 1094

is an Unrevised Standard Timewave Chart. For the time from Qin China to Tang China, the TWZ looks to me like a steady decline with no clear identification of Historical Events, except for a peak near the Comet of 540 AD. Perhaps a Revised Timewave Chart might show more structural details for the time from Qin China to Tang China.

 

 

400 to 2012

The Timewave from 400 to 2012

is an Unrevised Standard Timewave Chart, but it seems to retain structure that corresponds to Historical Events.

 

 

1942 to 2012

The Timewave from 1942 to 2012

is a Revised Timewave Chart with structure that corresponds to Historical Events.

 

  

1981 to 2012: From Berlin to ?The End?

The Timewave from 1981 to 2012

is a Revised Timewave Chart with structure that corresponds to Historical Events, including 911 and Comet C/2002 V1 and the Iraq crisis.

 

2012

 

What might 2012 - ?The End? - be like ?  

 

I don't know, but maybe one possibility might be that suggested by Teilhard de Chardin: that humanity will turn, by planetary arrangement and convergence of all elementary terrestrial reflections,towards a critical pole of reflections of a collective and higher order. He concludes that:

if we could see the specific radiation of Noospheres scattered throughout space, it would be practically certain that we would see a cloud of thinking stars.

 What about 2007 ?

 

I can't see future history that clearly, but there are many possibilities, including but not limited to natural disasters, killer flu epidemic, stock market crash, oil and/or currency crisis, conflict with anti-USA factions of Islam, and/or conflict with China. ( update - Now in March 2008, I see not only continued oil/war problems, but also a Credit Crisis as well as two Comets. )

 

 


Events shown on Timewave Charts:

 


Timewave was only one of Terence McKenna's interests. He discussed another in a May 1993 OMNI magazine interview:

"... In his 1992 book Food of the Gods, McKenna delineates a radical history of drugs and human evolution, chronicling our descent from "stoned apes" and extolling the virtues of psilocybin mushrooms and DMT (dimethyltryptamine), a potent psychedelic compound. ... What Is DMT? Dimethyltryptamine is chemically related to the LSD, psilocybin class of hallucinogenic drugs. It is a serotonin agonist; that is, it mimics the neurotransmitter serotonin, but interferes with its normal action. This class of drugs enhances the brain's sensitivity to many kinds of incoming information. As an agonist, DMT locks into receptors of neurons usually available to serotonin and competes with -- often "winning out" over -- serotonin at the receptor site. To find out more about DMT's mechanism of action, we [OMNI] consulted leading neurobiologist and serotonin investigator, Dr. George Aghajanian of the Yale University School of Medicine.

AGHAJANIAN: I'm finding that except for the fact that is has a very short duration of action -- 30 to 45 minutes -- DMT has the same effects on various receptors, particularly the serotonin-2 (5-HT2) receptor, as the other hallucinogens -- LSD or mescaline -- that can have effects for up to eight hours. ... I think the other hallucinogens are taken up in lipid [fat] compartments of the brain, cell membranes, and elsewhere and that the drug is released slowly from these compartments. The persistence of effects depends on the continued presence of the drug. DMT is not very lipid soluble, so it's not stored in the lipid compartments and thus washes out rapidly. ...

MCKENNA: ... My book is about the history of drugs ... the key unlocking ...[the]... great mystery ... of how our minds and consciousness evolved from the ape ... is the presence of psychoactive plants in the diet of early man. ...

MCKENNA: From 75,000 to about 15,000 years ago, there was a kind of human paradise on Earth. People ... Nobody went more than three or four weeks before they were redissolved into pure feeling and boundary dissolution. Community, loyalty, altruism, self-sacrifice -- all these values that we take to be the basis of humanness -- arose at the time in a situation in which the ego was absent.

OMNI: If this was all so wonderful, why did it end?

MCKENNA: The most elegant explanation is that the very force that created the original breakthrough swept away its conditions. The climatological drying of Africa forced us out of the forest canopy, onto the grasslands, and into bipedalism and omnivorous diets. We lived in that paradisiacal grasslands situation, but the climate was slowly getting drier. Mushrooms began to be less available. ...

[ Although I agree with Terence McKenna that climate change could have caused a "paradisiacal" culture to end, my opinion is that the most likely such climate change was the end of the Ice Age around 11,600 years ago in which the sea level rose, forcing people to crowd into higher ground, increasing competition for more limited resources, and rewarding predatory competitive behavior and rigid military social/economic structures. ]
MCKENNA: ... My scenario, if true, has enormous implications. For 10,000 years, with the language and social skills of angels, we've pursued an agenda of beasts and demons. Human beings created an altruistic communal society; then, by withdrawing the psilocybin or having it become unavailable, we've had nothing to fall back upon except old primate behaviors, all tooth-and-claw dominance.

OMNI: You're giving an enormous amount of power to a drug. What can you tell me about psilocybin?

MCKENNA: ... For the last 500 years, Western culture has suppressed the idea of disembodied intelligences -- of the presence and reality of spirit. Thirty seconds into the DMT flash, and that's a dead issue. The drug shows us that culture is an artifact. You can be a New York psychotherapist or a Yoruba shaman, but these are just provisional realities you're committed to out of conventional or local customs. ... Psilocybin shows you everything you know is wrong. The world is not a single, one-dimensional, forward-moving, causal, connected thing, but some kind of interdimensional nexus.

OMNI: If everything I know is wrong, then what?

MCKENNA: You have to reconstruct. It's immediately a tremendous permission for the imagination. I don't have to follow Sartre, Jesus, or anybody else. Everything melts away, and you say, "It's just me, my mind, and Mother Nature." this drug shows us that what's waiting on the other side is a terrifyingly real self-consistent modality, a world that stays constant every time you visit it.

OMNI: What is waiting? Who?

MCKENNA: You burst into a space. Somehow, you can tell it's underground or an immense weight is above it. There's a feeling of enclosure, yet the space itself is open, warm, comfortable, upholstered in some very sensual material. Entities there are completely formed. There's no ambiguity about the fact that these entities are there.

OMNI: What are they like, Terence?

MCKENNA: Trying to describe them isn't easy. On one level I call them self-transforming machine elves; half machine, half elf. They are also like self-dribbling jeweled basketballs, about half that volume, and they move very quickly and change. And they are, somehow, awaiting. When you burst into this space, there's a cheer! Pink Floyd has a song, "The Gnomes Have Learned a New Way to Say Hooray." Then they come forward and tell you, "Do not give way to amazement. Do not abandon yourself." ...

OMNI: What are these elves, these creatures about?

MCKENNA: They are teaching something. Theirs is a higher dimensional language that condenses as a visible syntax. For us, syntax is the structure of meaning; meaning is something heard or felt. In this world, syntax is something you see. There, the boundless meanings of language cause it to overflow the normal audio channels and enter the visual channels. They come bouncing, hopping toward you, and then it's like -- all this is metaphor; they don't have arms -- it's as though they reach into their intestines and offer you something. They offer you an object so beautiful, so intricately wrought, so something else that cannot be said in English, that just gazing on this thing, you realize such an object is impossible. ... The object generates other objects, and it's all happening in a scene of wild merriment and confusion.

Ordinarily language creates a system of conventional meanings based on pathways determinate by experience. DMT drops you into a place where the stress is on a transcending language.

Language is a tool for communication, but it fails at its own game because it's context-dependent. Everything is a system of referential metaphors. We say, "The skyline of New York is like the Himalayas, the Himalayas are like the stock market's recent performance, and that's like my moods" -- a set of interlocking metaphors. We have either foreground or background, either object or being. If something doesn't fall into these categories, we go into a kind of loop of cognitive dissonance. If you get something from outside the metaphorical system, it doesn't compute. That's why we need astonishment. Astonishment is the reaction of the body to the ineffectiveness of its descriptive machinery. You project your description, and it keeps coming back. Rejected. Astonishment breaks the loop. ...

... Something in an unseen dimension is acting as an attractor for our forward movement in understanding.

OMNI: Attractor?

MCKENNA: It's a point in the future that affects us in the present. ... Our model that everything is pushed by the past into the future, by the necessity of causality, is wrong. There are actual attractors ahead of us in time -- like the gravitational field of a planet. Once you fall under an attractor's influence, your trajectory is diverted.

OMNI: Does the attractor have a kind of intelligence?

MCKENNA: I think so. It's what we have naively built our religion around: God, totem. It's an extradimensional source of immense caring and reflection for the human enterprise. ...

OMNI: ... How does it end?

MCKENNA: This crazy stuff goes on for 90 seconds; then you fall away from it. They bid you farewell. In one case, they said to me: "Deja vu, deja vu!" ...

OMNI: Terence, my friend, does anything scare you?

MCKENNA: Madness. People always ask, "Will I die on drug A, B, or C?" That's the wrong question. Of course you can die, but what is at risk is your sanity, because it seems as though the deconstruction of reality has no bottom, and you can just move out into these places. I worry about not being able to contextualize these things, losing the thread allowing me to return to the human community. We're trying to build bridges here, not just sail off. ...

OMNI: Do you think there is such a thing as a bad trip?

MCKENNA: A trip that causes you to learn faster than you want is what most people call a bad trip. Most people try to hold back on the learning inherent in drugs. But sometimes the drug releases the information and says, "Here's what you need to know."

The information may be, "You treat people wrong!" and nobody wants to hear that or, "You have some habits you need to think seriously about," and who wants to do that? ...

OMNI: What people specifically should not take them?

MCKENNA: People who are mentally unstable, under enormous pressure, or operating equipment that the lives of hundreds of people [or one] depend on. Or the fragile ones among us -- those to whom you wouldn't give a weekend airline ticket to Paris, those you wouldn't expect to guide you out of the Yukon.

Some people have been so damaged by life that boundary dissolution is not helpful to them. These people are trying to maintain boundaries, their functionality. They should be honored and supported and not encouraged to take drugs. ...

OMNI: How will science explore the after-death state?

MCKENNA: By sending enough people into this other dimension to satisfy themselves that this is eternity. Here the analogy of the New World holds: A few lost sailors and shipwreck victims like myself are coming back, saying, "There was no edge of the world. There was this other thing. Not death and dissolution, not sea monsters and catastrophe, but valleys, rivers, cities of gold, highways." It will be a hard thing to swallow, but then the scientists can go back to doing science on after-death states. They don't have to throw out their method. ...

OMNI: How do you see the future?

MCKENNA: If history goes off endlessly into the future, it will be about scarcity, preservation of privilege, forced control of populations, the ever-more-sophisticated use of ideology to enchain and delude people.

We are at the breakpoint.

It's like when a woman comes to term. At a certain point, if the child is not severed from the mother and launched into its own separate existence, toxemia will set in and create a huge medical crisis.

The mushrooms said clearly, "When a species prepares to depart for the stars, the planet will be shaken to its core."

All evolution has pushed for this moment, and there is no going back. What lies ahead is a dimension of such freedom and transcendence, that once in place, the idea of returning to the womb will be preposterous.

We will live in the imagination.

We will quickly become unrecognizable to our former selves because we're now defined by our limitations: the laws of gravity; the need to eat, excrete, and make money. We have the will to expand infinitely into pleasure, caring, attention, and connectedness. If nothing more -- and it's a lot more -- it's permission to hope. ...".

 

My opinion is that a lot of what Terence McKenna says about the past and future of humanity is true, except that brain-altering drugs are not a necessary part of our history, either past or future.

Personally, I try to avoid such brain-altering drugs because I see things described by Terence McKenna without them, and I think that chemically altering my brain would interfere with and distort my seeing such things. (Perhaps Terence McKenna would regard me as "unstable" or "fragile".)

 


 

According to a May 2000 Wired article by Erik Davis:

"... Terence McKenna's Last Trip ...

... Timothy Leary, the self-appointed guru of LSD who died in 1996 amid a flurry of digital hype about online euthanasia and his plans - which he scrapped - to undergo cryonic preservation ... spent the late '60s attempting to gather a hippie army under the notorious battle cry of "turn on, tune in, drop out."

Taking his advice, McKenna headed east to India ... until a stateside bust forced him into hiding in the wilds of Indonesia. In 1971, he and his brother went to the Amazon to hunt for ayahuasca, a legendary shamanic brew. But when they arrived at the Colombian village of La Chorera that spring, what they found were fields blanketed with Stropharia cubensis, aka magic mushrooms. ...

... After returning from South America ... McKenna farmed 'shrooms into the 1980s. He could turn out 70 pounds of them every six weeks, like clockwork. The trade financed the middle-class existence of a relatively settled man.

Then a good friend of his, an acid chemist, got busted. ... I had to work something else out." What McKenna worked out was "Terence McKenna," a charismatic talking head he marketed, slowly but successfully, to the cultural early adopters. ...

... the time was right for McKenna's visions. He was tempted with movie deals, got featured in magazines, and toured like a madman. ... Timothy Leary called him "the Timothy Leary of the 1990s." ... McKenna also was a popularizer of virtual reality and the Internet, arguing as early as 1990 that VR would be a boon to psychedelicists and businesspeople alike. ... McKenna realized that the Internet would be the place where psychedelic culture could flourish on its own. "Psychedelics were always about information," McKenna observes. "Their very existence was forbidden knowledge at one point. You had to be Aldous Huxley to even know about them." ...

... McKenna ... is convinced that an unprecedented dialog is going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge. ...

... "... the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind," says McKenna ...

 

... On May 22 [1999] ... McKenna's mind exploded. Hallucinations cut in like shards of glass; taste and smell were bent out of shape; and he was swallowed up by a labyrinth that, as he later put it, "somehow partook of last week's dreams, next week's fears, and a small restaurant in Dublin." Then his blood pressure dropped and he collapsed, the victim of a brain seizure ... a CAT scan in Kona revealed the presence of a walnut-sized tumor buried deep in McKenna's right frontal cortex. The growth was diagnosed as a glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most malignant of brain tumors. ...

 

[ In the 1996 movie Phenomenon, John Travolta played an ordinary small-town gas station mechanic who suddenly acquired greatly increased brain powers (intelligence, sensing wide ranges of electromagnetic signals, psychokinesis, etc.), which brain scans showed to be associated with "astrocytoma" which grew to be fatal in a short time. According to a 2003 emedicine Astrocytoma web page: "... Astrocytomas are CNS neoplasms in which the predominant cell type is derived from an immortalized astrocyte. ... WHO grade IV corresponds to glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). ... those with diffuse zones of infiltration ...[including]... glioblastoma ..[have]... the ability to arise at any site in the CNS, with a preference for the cerebral hemispheres; clinical presentation usually in adults; heterogeneous histopathological properties and biological behavior; diffuse infiltration of contiguous and distant CNS structures, regardless of histological stage; and an intrinsic tendency to progress to more advanced grades. .... Typical ranges of survival are ... less than 1 year for patients with glioblastoma (WHO grade IV). ...".

Could Terence McKenna's GBM have contributed to his insights during his life?

According to a 2003 emedicine GBM web page: "... Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is by far the most common and most malignant of the glial tumors. Composed of poorly differentiated neoplastic astrocytes, glioblastomas primarily affect adults, and they are located preferentially in the cerebral hemispheres. ... These tumors may develop from lower-grade astrocytomas (World Health Organization [WHO] grade II) or anaplastic astrocytomas (WHO grade III) ... Secondary GBMs (40%) typically develop in younger patients (<45 y) through malignant progression from a low-grade astrocytoma (WHO grade II) or anaplastic astrocytoma (WHO grade III). The time required for this progression varies considerably, ranging from less than 1 year to more than 10 years, the mean interval being 4-5 years. ...".

According to a 2003 emedicine Astrocytoma web page: "... low-grade astrocytomas [WHO grade II] may be radiographically stable and clinically quiescent for long periods after the initial presentation. ...".

Therefore, if Terence McKenna had a Secondary GBM, maybe it is possible that he may have had a low-grade astrocytoma for a long time, possibly even contributing to his psiolocybin-induced Timewave insight of the early 1970s.

On the other hand, if Terence McKenna had a Primary GBM (with no precursor), it is unlikely that his GBM contributed to such insights.

Whether Terence McKenna's GBM was Secondary or Primary should be determinable, because, according to a 2003 emedicine GBM web page: "... Genetically, primary and secondary glioblastomas show little overlap and constitute different disease entities. ...". However, I don't know which he had. ]

 

... To McKenna's amazement, his doctor described the thing as

a "fruiting body" that sent "mycelia" throughout the surrounding tissue -

mycological lingo straight out of the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide that McKenna had published in 1975 with his brother, Dennis, an ethnobotanist. The rest was less amusing: Without treatment, McKenna would die within a month. With treatment, the prognosis was six months. ... McKenna ... had to choose from among chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and the gamma knife - a machine that could blast the tumor with 201 converging beams of cobalt radiation.

At the same time, friends and comrades were stalking more ethereal treatments. On the Big Island, Hali Makua, a Grand Kahuna of Polynesia, hiked up the side of the Mauna Loa volcano. He meditated about McKenna and was illuminated with a handful of Hawaiian power words, words that he later phoned in to his ailing friend.

From the wilds of Nevada, paranormal radio jock Art Bell was planning a different kind of intervention. Bell went on the air and asked his 13 million listeners to participate in "great experiment no. 8." At 2 pm Pacific time on Sunday, May 30, Bell's listeners sent McKenna a mass blast of good vibrations. "

[ I was one of 13 million who tried to help. ]

It's not something I really believe in," says McKenna. "But I am much more sympathetic to the idea of a huge morphogenetic field affecting your health than the idea that one inspired healer could do it."

Even after he went under the gamma knife, McKenna couldn't quite believe what was happening to him. "There are only about 1,000 of these GBMs a year, so it's a rare disease. I never won anything before - why now?"

[ According to a 2003 GBM emedicine web page: "... GBM is the most frequent primary brain tumor, accounting for approximately 12-15% of all intracranial neoplasms and 50-60% of all astrocytic tumors. In most European and North American countries, incidence is approximately 2-3 new cases per 100,000 people per year. ...". For the USA 1999 population of about 273,000,000, that would be an annual incidence rate of about 5,400 to 8,100. ]

Like everybody else, he suspected a lifetime of exotic drug use may have been to blame. ... his doctors ... assured him there was no causal link.

[ According to a 2003 GBM emedicine web page: "... The only consistently identified risk factor is chronic exposure to petrochemicals. ...". Therefore, I am skeptical of the accuracy of Terence McKenna's doctors assurance to him that "there was no causal link" to "a lifetime of exotic drug use". It is possible that his doctors told him that so that he would not have any (in their view unhelpful) guilt feelings. ]

... Unfortunately, by last October [1999], five months after the initial diagnosis and treatment, ... Despite the radiation therapy, the tumor was still spreading.

McKenna traveled to the medical center at UC San Francisco, where a team of specialists surgically removed the bulk of the tumor. They then soaked the cavity with p53, a genetically altered adenovirus meant to scramble the hyperactive self-replication subroutines of the remaining tissue's DNA. Gene therapy is highly experimental; as Silness put it, McKenna became "a full-on guinea pig."

[ In the 1996 movie Phenomenon, John Travolta's character declined surgery and died shortly thereafter. ]

At first, the doctors at UCSF were extremely pleased with the results, and for four months the tumor cooled its heels.

But in February [2000], an MRI revealed that it had returned with a vengeance, spreading so thoroughly throughout McKenna's brain that it was deemed inoperable. He retreated to a friend's house in Marin County, and his family began to gather. ...".

Terence McKenna, born in 1946, died on 3 April 2000.

 

 


2012

The Chinese Stem-and-Branch Cycle for the years 2000 to 2012 is:

4697 (2000) year of Metal and Dragon 
4698 (2001) year of Metal and Snake
4699 (2002) year of Water and Horse
4700 (2003) year of Water and Sheep
4701 (2004) year of Wood and Monkey (Wood grows from Water)
4702 (2005) year of Wood and Chicken
4703 (2006) year of Fire and Dog (Wood burns to make Fire)
4704 (2007) year of Fire and Pig
4705 (2008) year of Earth and Rat (Fire's Ashes make Earth)
4706 (2009) year of Earth and Ox
4707 (2010) year of Metal and Tiger (Metal comes from Earth)
4708 (2011) year of Metal and Rabbit
4709 (2012) year of Water and Dragon (Water tempers Metal -
- Melted Metal runs like Water)

If you add to the 60-year Chinese Stem-and Branch cycle from

4637 (1940) year of Metal and Dragon 
4638 (1941) year of Metal and Snake
to
4697 (2000) year of Metal and Dragon

the 12 years ending with

4709 (2012) year of Water and Dragon 

then you get, according to a diagnosis2012 web page,

"... 72 years - precession of the equinox through one degree .... 360 x 72 = 25,920 ...

... 25,920 years (12 x 2,160) - 1 complete precession of the equinoxes (or solstices) ...

... In the Hindu system of time cycles, the longest cycles last trillions of years, but at the shorter end of the cycle spectrum, we have the four Yugas, which are:

[ Since 2,160 years = 72 x 30 = precession of the equinox through 30 degrees, or 1/12 of a full precession, there may be some connection between the Hindu system of time cycles and precession, but it is not completely clear to me because 200, 400, 600, and 800 are not multiples of 12. I would be happier with the precession idea if, instead of multiples of 100, multiples of 9 x 12 = 108 had been used to get:

However, it may be an acceptable practice in Hindu/Vedic cosmology to approximate 108 by 100. ]

... John Major Jenkins' recent book, Galactic Alignment goes into the Vedic Yuga system in some detail, and he studies the work of Hindu saint, Sri Swami Yukteswar, (born 1855) ... In one of the oldest Vedic writings, attributed to the god-man Manu, the 4 Yugas are said to add up to 24,000 years, but when they are enumerated, they only come to 12,000 years.

Yuketswar ... equates the 12,000 years to a descending half of the 24,000-year cycle, and another 12,000 years to an ascending half. Jenkins' Study of the Yukteswar analysis shows that Yukteswar was talking about the precession cycle, but basing it on a 24,000-year cycle, rather than the (approx) 25,700-year cycle recognised by astronomy.

[ The approximation by 25,700 by 24,000 = 25,920 / 1.08 is within the range mentioned above of approximating 108 by 100. ]

The descent into darkness started when the Summer (June) solstice sun was aligned with Galactic Centre, around 10,800 BC, and

the ascent back to light starts when the Winter (December) solstice sun aligns with Galactic Centre ...[ which is in the year 2012 ]".

 

 

 


 

 

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