“Timewave zero” is a numerological formula that purports to calculate the ebb and flow of “novelty”, defined as increase in the universe’s interconnectedness, or organised complexity, over time. According to Terence McKenna, who conceived the idea over several years in the early-mid 1970s while using psilocybin mushrooms and DMT, the universe has a teleological attractor at the end of time that increases interconnectedness, eventually reaching a singularity of infinite complexity in 2012, at which point anything and everything imaginable will occur simultaneously.
McKenna expressed “novelty” in a computer program, which purportedly produces a waveform known as timewave zero or the timewave. Based on McKenna’s interpretation of the King Wen sequence of the I Ching, the graph appears to show great periods of novelty corresponding with major shifts in humanity’s biological and cultural evolution. He believed the events of any given time are recursively related to the events of other times, and chose the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as the basis for calculating his end date in November 2012. When he later discovered this date’s proximity to the end of the 13th b’ak’tun on the Maya calendar, he revised his hypothesis so that the two dates matched.
The first edition of The Invisible Landscape refers to 2012 (as the year, not a specific day) only twice. McKenna originally considered it an incidental observation that his and José Argüelles dates matched, a sign of the end date “being programmed into our unconscious”. It was only in 1983, with the publication of Sharer’s revised table of date correlations in the 4th edition of Morley’s The Ancient Maya, that each became convinced that December 21, 2012 had significant meaning. McKenna subsequently peppered this specific date throughout the second, 1993 edition of The Invisible Landscape.
March 13th, 2010 at 06:56
Terence Mckenna is my hero!
March 26th, 2010 at 15:42
Realisation of the self, which is whol.
May 31st, 2010 at 01:15
so….1996?
July 19th, 2011 at 00:25
This guy is an idiot. The description says pretty bluntly that he had already fudged the numbers to have it correspond with the Mayan calendar.
It says he arbitrarily picked the bombing of Hiroshima as a date to use whatever math he implemented, but I wonder what would happen if he used something else (probably NOT the same, unless he fudges more numbers).
Also, his credibility is pretty shot, seeing as he gets his ideas from the influence of drugs. I’m sorry to any new age thinkers out there, but what you see when on drugs has no correspondence to anything. Its just a hallucination induced by a balance of chemicals that the brain is not used to dealing with.
July 19th, 2011 at 00:28
Seeing that comments have to be moderated before they are posted, my previous comment will probably be censored since it clearly doesn’t follow whatever beliefs the owners of this site hold.
Way to stifle free speech.
July 24th, 2011 at 19:50
I believe that the comments are only moderated when they contain links (spam) or profanity.
August 8th, 2011 at 14:43
@Rational:
I hope that you have or will visit again to see that your comments survived the censor! (or did they? I don’t work here, so I have no way of knowing if anything was cut, but the jist seems pretty coherent).
In any case, I am responding to your assertion that “what you see when on drugs has no correspondence to anything”. How do you know that?
It has already been well recorded that human perceptions are subject to change when one is intoxicated. Some drugs retard neurological functioning, others promote it, and still others bend perception in ways ineffable to the sober. While some may maintain that drugs are but a shortcut to profound states of mind that are achievable without chemical interference (through meditation or hypnosis, for example), the fact remains that a man off his face on LSD has access to mental processes that most will never imagine. So, while I admit that the choosing of the date on which to base the timewave theory seems arbitrary to most, who is to say that McKenna was not, in fact, in touch with “God”?!
Scepticism is generally laudable, in my opinion, but your reaction to the psychedelic connection cited here seems dogmatically dismissive. Your brief rejection comes off like “Drugs? huh? Drugs are a mug’s game! This can’t be right!”
Sorry to be so judgmental and “new age”, I’m sure your comments were just an abreaction induced by a balance of memes that your brain is not used to dealing with.