Timewave Zero: Did Terence Mckenna *really* believe in all that 2012 prophecy stuff?

Richard Metzger of Dangerous Minds explores Terence McKenna's prediction that December 21, 2012 will mark the occurrence of what McKenna called "an unpredictable event ... some enormously reality-rearranging thing … I don’t know if it’s built into the laws of spacetime, or it’s generated out of human inventiveness, or whether it’s a mile and a half wide and arrives unexpectedly in the center of North America.”

Renowned science writer John Horgan, author of The End of Science, Rational Mysticism, and several other books, pens a regular column at Scientific American where he takes a closer look at some of the quirkier topics that can still fall under the purview of “Science.” His current column pertains to Terence McKenna, the late psychedelic bard who spoke of the “self-transforming machine elves from hyperspace” he’d meet though psychedelic drug use.

What interests Horgan the most pertains to McKenna’s so-called Timewave Zero theory of history, which holds that something “novel” and mind-bending would happen on December 21, 2012. This notion was “revealed” to him by an “alien intelligence” during a psychedelic experiment conducted by McKenna and his younger brother Dennis, in the Amazon jungle in 1971 (Dennis McKenna, today a respected ethnopharmacologist, was the “channel” through which this entity supposedly spoke, has apparently never been much of a believer in his brother’s apocalyptic theories).

The Timewave Zero formula purports to mathematically “decode” the 64 hexagrams of the King Wen sequence of the I Ching into something that graphs fractal patterns of “novelty” and particularly active eras in history, culminating in a singularity point of infinite complexity that he predicted would happen at the end of the 13th b’ak’tun of the Maya calendar.

McKenna believed that all of human history and cultural and scientific evolution were moving inexorably towards a “strange attractor” at the end of time. Timewave Zero was later codified into a software program that seemingly mapped major moments in humanity’s evolution with the Timewave’s peaks and valleys.

Read the rest of "Timewave Zero: Did Terence Mckenna *really* believe in all that 2012 prophecy stuff?"

(Screenshot of Timewave Zero software from Rumor Mill News)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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http://www.facebook.com/people/Bruce-Wright/1451447525 Bruce Wright

This just in: drugs mess up your brain.
- coneyislandbaby
  
  Bruce. Obviously you’ve never heard McKenna speak, either in person or during one of his scores of recorded lectures from the 1980s and early 90s. For me, he was one of if not THE most interesting lecturers. He had an exquisite ability to use words and to form sentences in order to get his points across. If drugs are what made him who he was, then pass the drugs!
  
  McKenna was a great and humorous story-teller. One of my favorites is his recounting of a night in Hawaii where he felt the presence of a DMT-induced PTERODACTYL land on the roof of his hut – whether Terence McKenna “really believed” in what he said (in his lectures) is a moot question. You might as well ask Kobe Bryant whether he “really believes” in playing basketball. McKenna was the best at what he did, which was talk. Bring on the hyper-dimensional self-transforming machine creatures!
  - cpm5280
    
    > He had an exquisite ability to use words and to form sentences
    > in order to get his points across.
    
    Oddly, a talent many people have had. It has not, however, helped all of those same people have points worth getting across.
- miasm
  
  Perhaps.
  But they undeniably fuck up, with far greater intensity, those who do not take them.
- http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQVkEI2VrY
cpm5280

Cue the apologists for crazy in 3…2….1….
- http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
  
  McKenna’s brand of crazy requires no apology.
Peppermint

Dude that would make a great campaign for Mage: The Ascension.
http://twitter.com/JesseYules Jesse Yules

When in a mystical mood it’s fun to ask big “What if?” mind-fuck questions. I don’t think hypothesizing about a patterns observed in history is foolish. Maybe there will be some world changing event at the end of the year. The world economies are teetering on the brink of collapse, so it’s not impossible.
Ambiguity

Just a little clarification:

Dennis McKenna, today a respected ethnopharmacologist, was the “channel” through which this entity supposedly spoke, has apparently never been much of a believer in his brother’s apocalyptic theories.

Dennis didn’t channel the time-wave zero stuff. This is conflating some…experiences… the two had in Columbia, but the time-wave zero stuff came later, and didn’t involve Dennis at all.

By the way, Dennis — whom I’ve met a few times and is a great guy — is currently putting a book together (after a successful Kickstarter campaign) on his perspective of what happened in Columbia, and his take on his brother. It should be really good reading, and will hopefully put to rest some of the more “literal” interpreters of TM. TM’s work is much more enjoyable (and meaningful, insofar as is possible) when you view him as a story-teller, and not as some kind of scientist or prophet.
- coneyislandbaby
  
  Dennis McKenna is generally thought to be the “brains” behind the operation, doing much of the basic research regarding all the SPACE/TIME theories. He’s as interesting as Terence, but much quieter and more tempered
PaulDavisTheFirst

why do people listen to people like mckenna who within a couple of minutes of an hour long interview has already demonstrated the ability to simultaneously reference and completely misrepresent the 2nd law of thermodynamics? i mean, sure, i know what the dude is getting at, but he’s simply wrong that our observations/experience of increase complexity are in any way in conflict with the 2nd law of thermodynamics, or more generally (and in his terms) “the universe’s preference for disorder”.
- babyfeet
  
  I think I get your point, and it’s a fair one.
  But please, please let me know of these ‘people like mckenna’.
  Because I’ve never heard anyone like him. I’d love to find more, but no one has shown up.
  I think ‘fauning’ is what I am doing. Terence was something very special.
ChurchoftheBlackPanda

I am of the opinion that “Food of the Gods” was a masterpiece and should be compulsory reading for everyone, but that much of the rest of his writing, entertaining though it is, is on the far side of batty. And I’ve been down some of the same roads as he has.
- Ambiguity
  
  I loved True Hallucinations, because it was a story, and he was a great story teller. It still stands today as a great piece of travel writing.
  
  Food of the Gods seemed like batty-ness to me!
Rich Keller

I read this yesterday and I found the bit about the meaning of existence being the creation of novelty to be inspiring.
http://jimbeach.net mindfu

He also retroactively inserted the date of 12/21/2012 into his work; it doesn’t appear anywhere in the first edition of “The Invisible Landscape” (the book that had most of his pharma-pocalyptic prophecies).

That and other works of McKenna’s provide fun and fascinating writing, that is unfortunately taken as proven fact by too many wanna-believe new agers.
http://jimbeach.net mindfu

In any case, we’ll certainly find out in about 6 months. I’m wondering if the miraculous event will be for Facebook and Twitter to suddenly start making profits.
- edgore
  
  Now *that’s* crazy, drug induced madness!
ian_b

The 12/21/12 date always seems a little too convenient to me. If I recall, he pegged it to the first atomic bomb, which seems totally subjective. Maybe I’m cynical, but it seemed like he was just mashing new age theories together and trying to extrapolate some greater meaning.

Also, he pulls out different simulation data from his software and pegs certain historical events to peaks/valleys on the curve, but the relationship of those events have little meaning, and I never saw him use it as a predictor for anything beyond his “timewave zero” date.

That said, ideas in “Food of the Gods” and “Archaic Revival” were ahead of their time, and I think will gain relevance as we approach the singularity–even if we never reach it.
http://twitter.com/duanesbrain duaneromanell

“an unpredictable event … some enormously reality-rearranging thing.” You mean, like 9/11, which is mentioned nowhere on this chart. So much for the wisdom of machine elves.
- coneyislandbaby
  
  “So much for the wisdom of machine elves.”
  
  It’s sounds like you’re a little disappointed that McKenna wasn’t able to predict the future specifically. You must know that no one can predict the future. McKenna’s Timewave Zero software and theories only provide a loose outline of “novelty” and “habit” – the Timewave is only a template, not a crystal ball
  
  From what I understand, the self-transforming machine elves weren’t that intelligent. They mostly acted as cosmic cheerleaders during McKenna’s mushroom or quick DMT trips. The elves enjoy asking questions and performing what McKenna called “three-dimensional puns” – But McKenna did receive a lot of his material from what he called “The Mushroom” which is/was more of a grandfatherly entity
  
  It’s all good science fiction if you ask me. Not something to get all worked up about and to take too seriously. Fun stuff!
- edgore
  
  If you think that 9/11 was some kind of anomaly in human history you haven’t read much history. People frequently kill other, and just as frequently people go kinda nuts in reaction to these killings. Not to diminish the tragedy of 9/11, but it’s not really an outlier in human behavior.
  - http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
    
    You’d have to agree it set a new benchmark in terms of the effectiveness of terrorism…
    - edgore
      
      Maybe a new benchmark for poor responses to terrorism.
      
      Terrorism was already pretty successful before 9/11. The PLO and IRA used it to become legitimate, recognized political entities (though they quickly also demonstrated that being good at terrorism doesn’t make you good at politics), and dropping atomic bombs on Japan resulted in the immediate capitulation of an entire nation-state.
      
      9/11 is only remarkable because it happened recently, and here in the US – where things like that don’t usually happen, and when they do, they are generally performed by far right extremist members of our citizenry.
      
      Again, I am not saying that 9/11 was not a terrible thing, or that the lives lost on that day were not tragic losses.
      
      Just that in the sweep of human history (which is what the original article is about, even if the original article is about a hokum theory about the sweep of human history), it’s not really an outlier in any way. Some religious fanatics killed people. They killed an unusually large number of them at one time, in a country that did not expect that to happen right then, but not very many when you consider the number of people that get killed in wars, some of them run by religious fanatics.
      
      The only remarkable thing about it is that some people have seized on this event and the people that did it as somehow being an existential threat to western civilization, which is, of course, stupid, and probably a result of millennial “end of days” thinking, which is also common throughout history. Lots of people have always thought they lived at the end of the world, though none of them have been right yet.
      - http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
        
        Who’s to say none of them have been right yet? There’s no shortage these days of well-founded contenders…
        
        Anyone who imagines there isn’t currently an arseload of novelty multiplying at an exponential rate needs to take a look out the window.
        
        We’re sitting on the end of a whole mess of hockey sticks.
http://profiles.google.com/bigfatpugsley Αντώνης Παππάς

Well Greece is currently imploding. From 6AM to 2PM the news here were.
-21,5 official unemployment, >53% for people under 30
-Vigilante kills 2 with an AK-47 after a break-in Athens. (Guns are forbidden here, and as far as I know there is no castle law.)
-Nazi MP, already charged with battery,assault and larceny, attacked 1 female communist and 1 female eurocommunist MP on TV while screeching about communist ruffians
-Aide of former majority party PASOK leader blames the Nazi MPs behavior on eurocommunists.
- Greek Medicare has totally collapsed, its endowment largely being now haircut Greek bonds, with pharmacists refusing to provide medication until part of the debt owed to them is paid. Virtually none is privately insured.
-For the last week there is NO CHEMO in the whole country
-250 people suffering mental disorders haven’t had a full meal or medication for 3 days in a mental asylum in Athens, due to lack of funds.

Perhaps we’ll take you with us!

ΕΔΙΤ: I forgot that a 15-year old was abducted.
- tubacat
  
  I feel so much sorrow for Greece right now. I hope that people pull together to help each other through these times, and that things get better as soon as possible. It’s a beautiful country with wonderful people…
miasm

True Hallucinations might be the best attempt at encapsulating the ‘is it, isn’t it” experience I’ve ever encountered.
Whether Terrence actually believed that Electron Spin Resonance-induced cold fusion really was binding information from an extra-galactic source of intelligence into his neural DNA, seems almost beside the point.
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

If you can read these words, know this. You are living in a multi-verse. T. McKenna was/is one of the best guides to this reality. It’s all happening right now and then and here and there.
niktemadur

McKenna the psychonaut explored virtually uncharted territory, his empirical cataloging of this is truly fascinating and important stuff. For the record, I prefer his stories of consuming truly frightening quantities of psilocybin over the DMT ones.

Often, McKenna displayed an impressive ability for truly inspired insights of interpretation on past events and history. Again, fascinating stuff.

McKenna the prophet/futurist, not so much, latching on to artifices like the I-Ching, the Mayan calendar and the like. Modern alchemy, Chinese alchemy, it’s still alchemy, and Homie don’t play that.

But overall, McKenna had a true joyful blast with his time on this Earth, and for that, I profoundly admire the man.
- niktemadur
  
  Just a personal thought that doesn’t belong on my comment above, if I had to start over with a clean slate and could choose where to live, one of those “fantasy choices”, one of my top three candidates would be Big Sur, a stone’s throw from the Esalen Institute, one of McKenna’s old haunts.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Doug-Lucchetti/1132787135 Doug Lucchetti

I like McKenna’s books in a way I don’t like much new agey lit, and I liked McKenna whom I’d met a couple of times and whom I’d seen perform a couple of times in the early 90s. I always interpreted his perspective in a way similar to the way I interpret Francis Fukuyama’s concept of “the end of History”. It’s not literal, it’s literature, and seeing another’s perspective through it is a way to expand our understanding. I’m looking forward to Dennis’s book.