Art Bell: You have a theory about time. Time is one of my favorite all-time topics, so before we launch into what you think about time, tell me what you think time is. In other words, is time our invention, or is time a real thing ... I realize we're measuring it, but in the cosmic scheme of things, is there really time?

Terence McKenna: Yeah, you give me a perfect entree to launch into this thing. See, in the west we have inherited from Newton what is called the idea of pure duration, which is simply that time is sort of a place where things are placed so that they don't all happen at once; in other words, it's used as quality-less, it's an abstraction. In fact, I think when we carry out a complete analysis of time, I think what we're going to discover is that like matter, time is composed of elemental, discrete types. All matter, organic and inorganic matter, is composed of 104, 108 elements ... there's some argument. Time, on the other hand, is thought to be this featureless, qualityless medium, but as we experience it, as living feeling creatures, time has qualities. There are times when everything seems to go right, and times when everything seems to go wrong ...

AB: That's absolutely true. I've wondered about that all my life. There are times when, in effect, you can do no wrong, and there are other periods of time when you can do no right, no matter what you do.

TM: Well, so in looking at this, I created a vocabulary ... actually I borrowed it from Alfred North Whitehead ... but I think I'm on to something which science has missed, and it's this; it's that the universe, or human life or an empire or an ecosystem, any large scale or small scale process, can be looked at as a dynamic struggle between two qualities which I call habit and novelty. And I think they're pretty self-explanatory. Habit is simply repetition of established patterns, conservation, holding back what has already been achieved into a system, and novelty is the chance-taking, the exploratory, the new, the never-before-seen. And these two qualities — habit and novelty — are locked in all situations in a kind of struggle. But the good news is that if you look at large scales of time, novelty is winning, and this is the point that I have been so concerned to make that I think science has overlooked. If you look back through the history of the human race, or life on this planet, or of the solar system and the galaxy, as you go backward in time, things become more simple, more basic. So turning that on its head, we can say that as you come towards the present things become more novel, more complex. So I've taken this as a universal law, affecting historical processes, biological processes and astrophysical processes.

Nature produces and conserves novelty, and what I mean by that, as the universe cools the original cloud of electron plasma, eventually atomic systems form, as it further cools molecular systems, then long-chain polymers, then non-nucleated primitive DNA-containing life, later complex life, multi-cellular life, and this is a principle that reaches right up to our dear selves. And notice, Art, it's working across all scales of being. This is something that is as true of human societies as it is of termite populations or populations of atoms in a chemical system. Nature conserves, prefers novelty. And the interesting thing about an idea like this is that it stands the existentialism of modern philosophy on its head ... you know, what modern, atheistic existentialism says is that we're a cosmic accident and damn lucky to be here, and any meaning you get out of the situation, you're simply conferring. I say, no ... by looking deeply into the structure of nature, we can discover that novelty is what nature produces and conserves, and if that represents a universal value system, then the human world that we find today with our technologies and our complex societies represents the greatest novelty so far achieved, and suddenly you have a basis for an ethic — that which advances novelty is good, that which retards it is to be looked at very carefully.

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TM: Well this is the thing about technology ... it tends to polarize people. Let me make one point here before we leave this time thing ... I said I'd identified a tendency in the universe which science had missed, which was to conserve novelty. And then you asked about the internet, which sort of led me to the second half of the observation. Not only does the universe have this preference for novelty, but each acceleration into novelty has preceded more quickly than the one which preceded it. So for instance the slow cooling out of the universe lead to the slightly more rapid appearance of organic chemistry which led to the quite rapid evolution of higher plants and animals which led to the hysterical pace of human history, and I see no reason to suppose that that process of acceleration will ever slow down.

AB: Is it a linear process or is it an exponentially acceleration process?

TM: It's an exponentially accelerating process which leads to a kind of end-of-the-world scenario which has led a lot of people to place me out with the squirrels because I'm saying that this process of novelty is now moving so quickly that within our own lifetimes it is going to accelerate essentially to such an intensity that we will be experiencing more novelty in a few weeks or days than we've previously experienced in the whole life of the cosmos.

AB: You have described precisely what I have just written about ... I wrote a book called the quickening ...

TM: Someone showed me your book and I said yes, this guy is onto this.

AB: I'm on to it I guess in a more pedestrian perspective than yourself after listening to your first half hour, but we're talking about exactly, precisely the same thing. I've been this talk radio thing for about 13 years, you know, that all-night show, and I am a trained observer of events and people, and every night I've had to watch the news and dissect what's going on in our world to prepare for this program. And in that 13 years, unmistakably socially, politically, environmentally, you name it, in every one of those areas of human endeavor, things are beginning to accelerate. There is simply no question about it, and that sounds exactly to be the same thing you're proposing here.

TM: Yes, where I've gone further than most people is, a lot of people have noticed the "time is speeding up" phenomena, but they tend to give credit to science or media or something like that. What' I'm saying is that this is built into the laws of physics.

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AB: I sat here as I listened to the first half hour, in shock, because I realized you were describing exactly what I wrote about, and what I did, Terence, I realize that a lot of people will say that this quickening, or whatever you want to call it, is a by-product of mass communication. And I began to realize, uh-uh, it is not a product of mass communication. Yes we're hearing about it more, and more volumes about it, but in fact, what you are describing is really going on, and I documented that much in my book in each one of these areas and many more ... I documented the fact that it is not mass communication which is beginning to quicken things, but there is another process at work. Now, I don't know what that is, and I don't know where it is leading. People will say, well, when we finally get to this crunch point, whatever that is, what will happen? And I don't have that answer ... I'm just a talk show host, and observer, but maybe you do. When we finally reach what you call Timewave zero, um, what is going to happen?

TM: Well, the only way to predict what will happen is to look at the quality of what has happened as the quickening, as you call it, has begun to accelerate. What it's been characterized by is the dissolution of boundaries between classes of people, bodies of knowledge, pools of capital, language groups, and so forth and so on, and so it seems to me ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved. And of course, what that looks like, I don't know. I don't know if it's a virtual reality where you become god through the public utilities or exactly what it is, but it's clear to me that the human nervous system is globalizing itself, building a model of conscious thought on a planetary scale. Tens of thousands of people are participating in this, none of them has a real notion of what it's all about, but everyone is observing this sort of unfolding grand design and I think the emergence of alphabets is part of the quickening, I think the emergence of hominids out of more primitive primates is part of this quickening, I think this is the business that this planet has been about for a very long time.

AB: Uh ... Are you able to discern any time-lines to timewave zero?

TM: Yes, we've been talking about this as a metaphor ... what makes me, I hope, a little different from some of the other prophets in the marketplace is, I've got a formal mathematical theory that ... you know, I mentioned habit and novelty, this dualistic flow ... well, because it is a dualistic flow, it can be portrayed like the ebb and flow of the price of a stock, or something like that, in other words, it can be portrayed as a line graph. So I've written computer programs which produce what I call novelty waves ... in other words, a time-scale wave that pictures the ebb and flow of novelty. And by fitting known historical and paleontological and geological data into these waves at different scales, I was finally able to discern a best fit. But the conclusion that it led to was very startling to me, which is: this ultimate novelty, this transcendental object at the end of time, isn't millennia in the future, it is in fact slated to collide with historical necessity some time in late 2012.

Now, I know you have some interest in the Mayan calendar ... I didn't know when I calculated this date that it was the same end date as the Mayan calendar ... to the day ...

AB: Let me ask you this... what did you, uh, input to your data base for this computer program? In other words, what did you start with?

TM: Well I had a very academic interest in the I Ching, which is the Chinese method of divination, and everyone who's looked at this thing has been struck by the fact that it seems to work ... and so I carried out a mathematical analysis...

AB: I don't know what Ching (sic) is, and I know a lot of other people don't either. What is it?

TM: Well, it's existed for thousands of years in China ... it's sometimes done by throwing fifty stalks, or sometimes done with coins, but it's a method of producing a thing called a hexagram which made up of either broken or unbroken lines — six on top of each other — so if you're a mathematician you can figure, if it's made up of broken and unbroken lines and there are six of them on top of each other there must be a possibility of 64 of these things ... And thousands of years ago in China there was a vast body of literary commentary built up around these hexagrams, and they have always been presented in a traditional order, a certain way that they are always presented. And I was studying a very academic question, which was, is this order of these hexagrams a true order, in other words, governed by rules, or is it simply a random jumble sanctioned by tradition?

And this very obscure academic question led ultimately to the discovery that the I Ching was a 384-day, thirteen lunar cycle calendar. And then from there I realized that this 384-day calendar was actually a (something) subset in a fractal time-keeping scheme that is really more accurate and more sophisticated than anything in the west. So what I'm really suggesting here is that in the same way that the west conquered the nature of matter through the elaboration of modern science, about 4000 years ago in China a deeper analysis of time was carried out than has ever been undertaken in the west, and that the mathematics of this thing became buried then in this fortune-telling system. And I basically teased it out, and in my book The Invisible Landscape, and at my web site, all this stuff is explained.

AB: Terence, what is your web site?

TM: It's at levity, it's http://www.levity.com and then just click on Terence McKenna.

The interesting thing, Art, is that with a wave like that, you can do what's called 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.

AB: That sounds quite scientific, in other words, science is repeatability, and if your can repeatedly demonstrate that you can mathematically show the events of the past, then yes I would imagine that you can project.

TM: Well, so I've been active since 1975, but the theory is in a sense very conservative. It never says what will happen, it says when interesting things are highly likely, and when you're just wasting your time.

AB: Um, when you project toward 2012, um, what is the magnitude of the spike or the difference there? Uh, if you can give us an idea of the magnitudes along the way ...

TM: There is only one point in the entire cycle where the level of habit drops to zero; effectively then novelty becomes infinite. And at that point occurs on this solstice date in 2012. Now it's very interesting ... there are some people on the net called singularists, and they're hard-headed engineering types, and they take rates of energy release and rates of data storage, this sort of thing, and draw all their curves out, and they can see that some time between 2008 and 2020 everything will produce infinite amounts of energy ... we pack infinite amounts of data into infinitely small spaces, in other words, the same sort of things where, because of the acceleration built into the unfolding of this novelty process, we're gonna cross more territory between here and 2012 than we have crossed between the Big Bang and getting to here.

It kind of explains what is happening, that it isn't the old-style religion, that it isn't the sterile steady-state of science, it's that 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. This is what religions are raving about, this is what every prophet on the street corner is trying to articulate, and I think it's real. I think we're getting a lot of static because people can only deal with it through images that they know ... you know, Marshall McLuhan said we drive into the future using only our rear view mirror, and that's sort of what it is. But I call this thing the transcendental object at the end of time, and I think in a sense, religion, Christian revelation, it will all be fulfilled in a way none of us ever suspected, because nature has this appetite for novelty and acceleration into novelty.

AB: So then again I ask, uh, at this moment that we speak of, uh, 2012, what do you actually think will occur?

TM: Well, I've thought about this a good deal, and there are hard and soft scenarios, but I've noticed that what the Timewave seems most coherently able to track is technology. Somehow technology is very important, it's the transformation of the human relationship to the world through tools. And so what I'm thinking would fulfill this entire scenario without requiring God Almighty to put in an appearance is time travel. I think that we are moving toward ... you know if you look at biology over huge scales of time ... hundreds of millions of years ... it is a kind of conquest of dimensionality...

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AB: Here's what was written to me about Terence McKenna before we invited him on the program: "Art, have you heard about Terence McKenna's theory called Timewave Zero? He suggests that as we get closer to Timewave Zero, we are experiencing tachyon radiation from it. Evidently, the impending event is so colossal that it will emit such intense radiation that some of it will take the form of faster-than-light-speed tachyon particles, or waves, that, uh, can travel faster than light, and that they're actually being hurled backward in time. The closer we get to the event, the greater the radiation density, and somewhat more frequently and intensely we experience paranormal phenomena associated with it. This could be the mechanism behind what you call the quickening. The event we are approaching will probably be something tantamount to a white hole or a mini-big bang. It will, for all intents and purposes, be the end of time for us. Terence believes it will occur consistent with the Mayan calendar in the year 2012. By the way, he has derived this, uh, independently from the Mayan calendar ... he simply has discovered that it coincides with it.

He goes on ... "It is not unreasonable to assume that ET's possessing UFO's, if they exist, will be flocking here to research, or rather, to presearch, the phenomenon. It is also believed that tachyon bombardment would have bizarre effects on the human nervous system — visions, that sort of thing — as well as physical manifestations in the environment, like the Clearwater virgin, bizarre mutations like the Chupacabra, and heaven knows what else ... all the stuff you attribute to the quickening might be explained by this." And after listening to the first hour, I might agree.

Terence, I'm stealing one more bit of time to read you a fax that I think relates and challenges you a bit. It is from Steven in Wichita, and it's well thought out. Um, here it is: "Art, I'm not sure that you can equate novelty with either acceleration or complexity. Nature has always been novel, and surprisingly so considering earlier periods in earth's history. Given that over 90% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct, and the exotic body designs, it would seem that novelty is a given. But in order to be effective it must have a survival advantage and be passed on. Once the novelty becomes a hindrance, it disappears. Acceleration may be more a factor of population density. Virtually all of the social problems we face today have been duplicated years ago in rat population density studies. Our novel inventions of this century have simply artificially allowed us to compress distance and time by modes of travel and communication. Profit motives have directed and limited the novelty of our civilization in this century as never before, and we are becoming a hindrance. The higher the population density, the more the acceleration seems to be, anecdotal but relative, compare the case of a small country town to a large city with its population density and resulting problems accelerated by stress and profit motives." That's from Steve in Wichita. What do you think, Terence?

TM:: Well, I don't disagree with all of that ... I think there's certainly been ebb and flow of novelty within the 20th century, parts of it more novel than others. But I think to argue that it isn't among the most novel periods of time is a pretty uphill battle. The question is whether novelty is something that simply adheres to statistical dynamics, or whether it's a real direction, a real arrow that's directing process, and that's what I maintain. I think it's not true to say that the biota of the earth today is not more novel than it was in the past. Certainly there are novel forms of life that have undergone extinction, but the proliferation of human life, which is an advanced animal plus a culture-creating creature, indicates to me that we are at a level of novelty that this planet has never before experienced. Of course, it's an arguable opinion, because history, which is what we're always comparing these waves to, is not yet a quantified thing ... I mean, how do you compare the War of the Roses over Queen Anne's War or something like that. But nevertheless, though we don't have an absolute quantification of history, there is general agreement among historians that events like the renaissance, the Greek Golden Age, the 20th Century, are periods where a great deal of novelty in social forms and technology was concentrated.

AB: Alright, you, uh, put together a computer program which was able to trace the ebb and the flow of this novelty and in effect chart major events in history. Uh, how many, if I might ask, hits and misses ... were there any misses in the model, or did you hit each, uh, major moment on history on the nose?

TM:: Well, by my understanding of this theory, there can be no misses. In other words, it's not a statistical theory, we're not okay if we're right two-thirds of the time, so we have to be right all of the time.

AB: So you're telling me you are.

TM:: I submit to you and to the world for your examination and critiquing the fact that yes, the Timewave with it's end point December 21, 2012, describes with as great an accuracy as I am able to discern the actual vicissitudes of novelty and habit in history and natural history ... that's the claim.

AB: Uh, Terence, have you submitted this ... I mean, this is serious science that you're discussing. Have you submitted this to peer review?

TM:: Well, among mathematicians, yes. And there's a lively debate raging on the internet about that.

Let me say something here though about science and why exceptions to the Timewave can't really occur under the tent of ordinary science. You have mentioned repeatability ... repeatability is the idea at the very basis of the scientific method, at the very basis of experiment. It's what's called restoration of initial condition. But now notice that what the Timewave theory is saying is that every moment in time is a unique moment.

AB: Is unique and will not specifically repeat. But what you are suggesting is that you can plot the highs of novelty throughout history.

TM: Yes, you can, but you cannot assume that you're doing it probabilistically. In other words, essentially when you really understand philosophically what the Timewave is saying, it's an enormous attack on probability theory. You know, the way science works now, if you want to know how much energy is flowing through a wire, you take a thousand measurements, you add them together and you divide by a thousand. And then you have the current flowing through the wire. But notice that that assumes that it doesn't matter what time you make the measurement. And so much of science is like this, to the point where I'm redefining science by saying that science is the study of those phenomena so coarse-grained that the time in which they occur does not affect them. And that leaves out then history, love affairs, corporate takeovers, empire building, everything interesting in the human world is too fragile, to finely embedded in the context of its time to be open to that kind of scientific modeling.

AB: So, they're really small, insignificant events that don't enter into the larger measurements that you're making of this ebb and flow?

TM:: Well, for instance, on a given day when the chart says novelty will be high, certainly somewhere in the world someone is having a very unnovel day ... it's a statistical thing, a Bell curve, no reference to you, Art ... but a bell curve where when the wave is predicting high novelty most people, most systems will experience that novelty, but of course some will not. It's the idea that probability is ebbing and flowing ... you know, when you study statistics the first thing they teach you is when you flip a coin the odds are 50:50 heads or tails. If that were true, the coin would land on its edge every single time. That's the rarest of all results in a coin toss. So what's really happening is that what are called secondary or tertiary factors are causing the coin to be heads or tails. I say, no, there are zones in time where heads are favored and zones in time where tails are favored. The idea that time can be described as a perfectly smooth surface which can be dealt with statistically is just a first pass with Greek idealism, and careful examination of nature shows that it could be inadequate, in the same way that perfect circles were inadequate for describing planetary motion.

AB: You are therefore saying that conventional science does not have and cannot have with its present course of investigation, a proper understanding of time?

TM: That's right ... beceause it assumes that it can be analyzed with statistics, and that flattens out and denies the difference between various times and types of times.

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AB: You made a fascinating statement ... I said if there's time travel where are all the time travelers ... your answer was, they will not be here until the first time machine was invented because you could not go back to a time prior to the invention of a machine that would enable travel. Your parallel was that you cannot travel where there are not roads, and there are not roads back that far in time. If time is to virtually end by 2012, Terence, where would you see the invention of a time machine between now and then.

TM: Well, I don't think it's between now and then ... I think it's then. In other words, if what the timewave zero thing is showing is that events can be portrayed in this linear way as a line on a graph, that suddenly in 2012 for some mysterious reason this can no longer be done, it must be because in 2012 time ceases to be linear. And that must mean that because a technology is created which causes time to lose its linear and serial quality, and that could only be time travel.

AB: And you believe that at that moment, tens of thousands, or even millions, who knows, of time travelers will suddenly show up.

TM: Well, actually that's my conservative model of what would happen. What's against that ... I'm sure you've heard this ... is the well-known grandfather paradox, which is ... time travel is always said to be impossible because you travel back in time and you could kill your own grandfather. How do we avoid this? I think we avoid this by actually ... what happens when the first time machine is invented is the rest of universal history happens instantly. This is the only way paradox can be kept out of the picture. So I call it the God whistle scenario.

AB: So in other words, linearity ends at that instant ...

TM: And the rest of the history of the universe occurs in a few milliseconds. It's sort of the reverse of the Big Bang where you get a lot of action in the first few nanoseconds of the universe's life. In this model the universe undergoes half of its morphogenetic unfolding in the last few milliseconds of its existence.

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AB: Let me ask you in your own little way as a historian, as you have looked back to develop your model, when you get to the time of Christ, what kind of a peak do you see?

TM: Fascinating question ... At that point in the wave there is a unique signature that doesn't occur anywhere else in the wave. So in a sense it does indicate the life of Christ as being incredibly unique. But recall I said it never says what will happen, it just says where to look. And what makes the call on Christ a little difficult is that Christ shared the earth with Augustus Caesar; in fact, the story of Christ's birth mentions that Joseph and Mary were going because of the census of the world that Caesar has called. Well, Caesar Augustus is one of the greatest military and political geniuses of all time, so he's in the same part of the wave as Christ. I don't know how to tease them apart, but I can certainly tell you that the time wave tells us that the period from 15 BC to 40 AD was extremely novel.

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