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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
