[Music]
 So, this theory has probably not stormed the intellectual battlements of Western civilization,
 for one reason, because it poses so fundamental a challenge.
 Science cannot swallow the time wave.
 You have to choose one or the other.
 The time wave is not a cult. It is not a cult.
 But it is not science as we have done it for the past 500 years,
 because it assumes that one of our primary intuitions is actually true.
 The intuition that every moment is unique.
 It treats that as the central starting point for an entirely new metaphysic of being.
 And so, the smooth duration, the simple answer, the parsimonious good try, has to be put aside.
 Now, why the I Ching?
 Because, in the same way that Western culture evolved a maniacal obsession with matter
 that ends with atomic fusion, sequencing of the DNA, room temperature superconductors,
 Buckminster Fullerenes, and all that,
 in the same way that Western intellectual methods were relentlessly pushed toward an understanding of matter,
 in the East, a different obsession held sway.
 For cultural factors not needing to be discussed here, people were interested not in matter, but in time.
 The other great mystery given to us in this dimension. Time.
 And if you're interested in time, you don't conquer time by building vast instrumentalities
 and seeking a primary particle and all that.
 The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward, into metabolism.
 The human body is a knot in time.
 It is a non-thermodynamic state of equilibrium maintained by the miracle of metabolism.
 Metabolism is a slow, controlled chemical burning of organic material.
 So subtle a form of burning that the energy is trapped in various membranes and cytochrome cascades
 and put to the work of organism.
 And if you imagine then, at some time thousands of years in the past,
 people possessing techniques which today we would call yogic.
 But what they really are, are simply probably what are now called "stilling of the heart" techniques.
 Techniques for suppressing gross bodily function.
 In other words, noticeable breathing, noticeable heartbeat, noticeable pulse.
 Techniques for stilling all this.
 It turns out that as, if this can be done, and it is persistently claimed that it can be done,
 as noise leaves the physiological circuits, and circuits,
 the mind falls inward into a world of interiorized phenomena
 for which we have no language but the language of idiots.
 Because this is not our cultural obsession.
 So we say, "Well, it's a dream, it's a hallucination, it's who knows, let's see what's going on with the 11 o'clock news."
 But in other cultures, complex vocabularies were produced to study these states.
 Vocabularies as complex as our scientific vocabularies.
 And in the same way that in the 19th century, Mendeleev and those people came to discern that all matter
 is produced out of the combination of a limited number of elements,
 and there were arguments about how much, how many, but it's generally assumed under 110, and that's generous,
 out of 110 basic elements, the entire world of material phenomenon emerges.
 Similarly, in the inspection of time, it was realized that time too comes in flavors, if you will.
 Not 50,000, not 300 million, not 4, not 8, but 64.
 And this probably has to do something with the cube root of 4,
 and certain things having to do with the dimensionality in time and space.
 I mean, why this number is a reason for speculation.
 It's a number built into biology too.
 There are 64 codons coding for the 8 amino acids.
 This is no coincidence.
 It's something about the basic grammar of being itself arises around these numbers.
 Well, they not only saw that time is made of these elements,
 but they saw that they occurred in certain fixed patterns of recurrence,
 at different levels, at different speeds,
 and that from the point of view of this I Ching philosophy,
 a given moment in being at some locus of space and time is a kind of interference pattern
 created by moving levels of, let us call them, influences.
 And these influences interpenetrate each other on many levels.
 And all of this can in fact be quantified and mathematized
 and portrayed in the universal language of mathematics.
 And that's what I've tried to do.
 I'm sorry this answer ran so long, but I want to make it seem reasonable to you
 that there are categories in time as well as in matter,
 and that if you can discern these categories,
 you can gain as powerful an intellectual understanding of time as we have of matter.
 Now let me get back to how this thing is read, and then I want to move forward here.
 When the wave moves up, habit is increasing.
 When the wave moves dramatically down, novelty is increasing.
 And time on all scales is made out of a sense into habit,
 plunges into novelty, novelty troughs, and further ascends into habit.
 And you can feel these things in your own life.
 When the luck is running with you, nothing can stop you.
 When the wave is against you, God helps you.
 And this happens to empires. It happens to political careers.
 It happens to species. It happens to entire orders of biological life,
 100 million years of endless radiation into all kinds of niches across the planet.
 Then suddenly a planetary cooling and a mass extinction,
 and the novel forms disappear.
 But over long periods of time, as I said, habit is vanquished and novelty is concentrated.
 And that's part of the story, half of the story.
 The other half of the story is that this process of movement into deeper novelty is speeding up,
 always has been speeding up, goes faster and faster and faster.
 So if this is 7 billion years, you can see back here things were deadly slow.
 Here life appears. Once life appears, the pace quickens.
 Once life leaves the ocean, at this scale, the thing is practically a direct descent into novelty.
 Though when we blow this up, as we can do, we will see that what looks here,
 like a smooth straight shot into the lap of God,
 turns out to be the old rugged path that we followed for a long, long time.
 Every theory has a hard swallow. The hard swallow in ordinary science is the Big Bang.
 Notice that it's the limit test for credulity.
 If you can believe that the entire universe sprang from nothing in a single instant for no reason,
 what would you resist as a hypothesis?
 It's the limit case for improbability as far as I can tell.
 Nevertheless, science says, you know, give us one free miracle
 and we can then go from there and never ask the favor again.
 So apparently you get one free miracle in your system building.
 I prefer to locate my miracle at the end.
 And you may say, well, is that just arbitrary? Why December 21st, 2012?
 Well, obviously, if the theory has any utility,
 if this idea of habit and novelty has any instructive value at all,
 then we should find novel events clustered in these troughs
 and we should find periods of constipated recidivism on these upsweeps.
 So now we have two data fields with which to play.
 We have the formal and mathematically defined and utterly inflexible wave
 and we have the vicissitudes of natural and human history.
 On the natural history level, asteroid impacts, glaciations, extinctions,
 fluctuations in incidental incoming solar energy,
 cooling of the oceans, enormous volcanic eruptions, this sort of thing.
 In the human world, wars, revolutions, technological innovations,
 migrations of people, introductions of new technologies.
 And so the idea then is to take the mathematically defined wave
 and the admittedly messy data of natural and human history
 and seek a best fit between them.
 And when you impartially get them lined up so that it seems
 that most major episodes of novelty that historians or people who care about these things agree on
 and most low points in the wave line up with each other,
 then you simply go to the end of the wave and look at the end point and it kicks out a date.
 And I did this and I will show you my correlation.
 As a big picture, I think this is pretty accurate to how most educated historians
 would view what has gone on on this planet in the last 6,000 years.
 It's telling us that 4500 BC, a descent into novelty is underway
 and it didn't start very far back here.
 Quite a steep descent into novelty.
 And in fact, what we find here is Sumer, Ur, Chaldea, Babylon, Egypt.
 And so a series of civilizations, each leaping beyond the accomplishments of the other
 until we reach the pyramid building phase of Egypt, the old kingdom.
 And then right down here, there's a kind of novelty trough.
 Egyptian civilization rages across here.
 And in fact, it does fulfill the intuition of theosophists and other people
 that Egypt achieved something that was not surpassed in novelty until early Roman times.
 In other words, clear, all this happens, but you don't get this level of novelty
 until you get over here to about 220 BC.
 And I maintain, technologically and so forth and so on, that's probably just about right.
 This upswing back into habit, the historical record is characterized by brutal civilizations.
 The Hittites, the Metani, imperialist Syria, you know, motorcycle gangs with chariots
 is what we're talking about here.
 If we were to blow this up, we would see that there were some interesting plunges into novelty,
 phonetic alphabets, expansion of Phoenician trade routes and so forth and so on.
 But the turning point is up here.
 And as far as Western history is concerned, what happens up here is Homer sings his song.
 And I maintain, symbolically and literally, that's what started it all.
 That's what set the last phase in motion.
 I had a professor, maybe I'm echoing his prejudice, but a philosophy professor in college,
 he said, "You want to know where it all went wrong? I'll tell you where it all went wrong.
 When the Greeks stopped being fishermen and pulled their boats up on the shore
 and started to talk philosophy, it all went wrong."
 Well, I don't know if it went wrong. It certainly went in a different direction.
 Homer sings his song, and it begins an almost unbroken cascade into modernity.
 I want to talk about this one for a minute because there is an aspect of this theory
 that I find very appealing that I haven't touched on yet,
 which is if you've been paying attention, you've noticed that screens repeat themselves.
 Remember I showed you a screen where I said at the top of a certain mountain, Homer sang his song?
 This is that same shape.
 But we're now not looking at thousands of years. We're only looking at 52 years.
 Well, what's the deal?
 Well, because this thing is a fractal, it has built into it automatic resonances.
 So it gives you a very rich data field to work with.
 If this is a span of time from 1944 to 1996, it on another level is a span of time
 from roughly late Egyptian time to the Umayyad Caliphate, with Homer singing his song up here.
 On the short scale, the 52-year scale, this is 1967.
 Now, these two things are, according to this theory, in a situation of resonance
 or geometrical relationship to each other.
 Is there anything about the world of Homer that is like the world of 1967?
 And I maintain, yes, a tendency to easy lifestyles, loose shoes, and sophomoric philosophy,
 characterized both theories.
 And you see, it's a way of explaining such transient phenomena as fads and fashion.
 Why are we suddenly putting lion claws on the legs of our bathtubs?
 Well, because we're passing through a period of resonance when that was done in the past.
 In other words, the orthodox theories of history and time would tell you
 that the most important moment shaping this moment is the moment which just preceded this moment.
 It was, as it were, the conduit for the wave of causal necessity to arrive at this moment.
 But I'm saying something different.
 I'm saying that every moment in time is an interference pattern made by other moments in time
 that are related to each other not through linear seriality,
 but through this much more complex scheme of relations.
 So, you know, if you suddenly walk into a room and there's a heavy hit of black granite,
 inverted corners, and silver shadowing, it's a Jugendstil resonance.
 And I live in a kind of waking hallucination.
 I have a little aphorism which covers this.
 It's "Rome falls nine times an hour."
 It falls more than that and less than that, but let's say it falls nine times an hour.
 Well, then your job is to notice every time it falls.
 In other words, what we think of as our random musings and our personal mental furniture
 is in fact our subconscious awareness of these systems of temporal resonance operating around us.
 So, you know, as I look out at a crowd like this, if I let myself go, you know,
 I notice that Kant is sleeping in the corner
 and that Madame Lafarge seems to have just come in from the baths and taken her seat
 and Cleopatra is headed for the john and so forth and so on.
 How real is this?
 Who knows?
 You know, I mean, it's a matter of discernment.
 Well, what I would say, I mean, first of all, let's get a little more honest here.
 There's a lot of argument about where Homer actually sang his song.
 We can only really pinpoint it to within about 150 years.
 It's up here somewhere.
 Now, if I could zero in on this, but 1967 is here.
 1968 is just over the top.
 The first moon flight is there.
 Now, suddenly we have the Homeric resonance.
 What is Homer but a story of noble men on a long and far voyage and eventually the homeward return
 and then the heroics of that echoes over the centuries
 and probably the only heroic episode of the 20th century that's unsullied by hypo and manipulation and so forth
 is the flight to the moon.
 I mean, that was pretty amazing.
 You know, I don't care about the politics or any of the rest of it.
 I mean, what it took to do that, you notice we're not doing it.
 We don't have the gumption, the technology or the national focus to do that.
 And in a sense, so I take the moon flight to be in a sense the capstone of modernism.
 I don't consider postmodern time to begin after that.
 I mean, what was the 70s but a whining reprise of the 60s.
 And then everything else has followed from that.
 Shouldn't it then be in an opposite shot?
 I myself am more provisional.
 I will advocate this.
 I'm aware more, I think, than many in my audience how unlikely this is.
 I'm basically a devil's advocate because I'm fascinated with the fact that I thought this up.
 And this is not my style.
 It's hard for you to believe that because I've been now talking about it since 1971.
 So it has become me in a sense, but it isn't me.
 This is not how I think.
 This is not how I ever thought.
 I had to be led by the hand.
 I'm sloppier than this.
 I'm not precise.
 This was told to me.
 And it's eerie.
 It's turned my life to science fiction because I don't know what this is all about.
 I don't know why I'm here talking about this.
 I don't know why you're here listening to it.
 And I'm puzzled that outside this room the world is moving towards not this theory, but these kinds of conclusions.
 Is it the millennium?
 Well, this isn't about the millennium.
 This says forget the millennium.
 It's a complete waste of time, a speed bump on the way to the real event.
 I've tried to think of rational explanations for why this theory.
 And I've had to go pretty far afield.
 Here's a rational explanation.
 Suppose the millennium is so psychically charged that there's a danger of mass hysteria of some sort, mass suicides or something like that.
 Perhaps the collective unconscious senses this and my mission is to smear the expectation.
 In other words, what this does is it says don't get excited about the millennium.
 And then once the millennium is past, people will say, well, and don't worry about McKenna either.
 In other words, it's a way of cheating you past the millennium.
 If there weren't people running around saying 2012, 2010, 28, 26, 2004, there would be so much energy concentrated on the millennium that there might be various forms of mass hysteria.
 I mean, I don't know, but it's a more reasonable explanation than that. The secret of universal temporal architectonics has been handed over to an Irishman by a mushroom for the edification of mankind.
 I mean, that is too much.
 I'm amazed that because you see, it's so precise.
 And I don't know if you can tell from what I've said this evening, but it's very clear to me that it's not about being right some of the time.
 If it fails once, it fails completely.
 There's no wiggle room. That's why it's so interesting to try to trap it.
 This is not something where if we get seven out of ten, we're going to keep preaching.
 This thing must be right 10,000 times out of 10,000 tries.
 And as I offer it to you and to other people, because I think smarter people than me ought to be able to destroy it.
 Remember when I talked about how science gets points for proving you're wrong?
 If I could prove this was bunk, I would get a lot of points.
 If anybody could prove it was wrong, absolutely wrong, but it's amazingly slippery.
 So slippery, in fact, that it's almost like a living thing.
 Just when you think you've pushed it into a corner that it can't escape from, you get a Martian meteorite full of fossils right in your lap.
 We're struggling to say, is this a message? Is this meaning? Or is this self-generated hallucination?
 I don't know. I offer it as part of this weekend on imagination because this is my best trick in the imagination.
 My little theory of evolution is no more than a conversational rap.
 How would it be if? This is considerably different because it rests on a mathematical foundation.
 And don't forget, it does come genuinely from the I Ching.
 So we have this peculiar three-pronged situation.
 We have a pattern in the King Wen sequence taken by an Irishman and contorted into a mathematical wave,
 which gives a prediction for the apotheosis of the world, which matches the assumptions of a vanished Mesoamerican civilization.
 Huh? Why?
 Where does it end?
 Well, this question, when I calculate my own personal wave, first of all, I do entertain the idea that we may each have our own time wave,
 sort of following the model of astrology.
 But I'm aware, and I'm sure those of you who are professional astrologers are also aware, that the natal horoscope is essentially a commercial con.
 In other words, astrology, the royal art of astrology, was invented to guide the destiny of peoples and kings, pharaohs and courts.
 But in the late Roman period, the world's first yuppies came into being, or one of the world's first instances of yuppies.
 And they thought, well, the emperor has his horoscope cast. Am I less than the emperor?
 I too should have my horoscope cast.
 And enterprising Hellenistic astronomers were only too pleased to oblige.
 Otto Neugebauer published a wonderful book of the natal horoscopes of rich Athenian and Roman citizens.
 And to some degree, I think it is a slight distortion of astrology for astrological purposes.
 Nevertheless, in terms of the time wave, a reasonable question would be,
 well, how, if this is true, then how come I can have a bad day while you're having a good day?
 In other words, if novelty ebbs and flows according to this schedule, shouldn't we all be having good days and bad days together?
 And obviously we don't.
 So what then must be happening is that we are on different places in the wave system.
 And then if that's true, then in a sense, this huge wave could be thought of as the summation of all the little waves which comprise it.
 It's perfectly obvious. Let's say this were a huge scale of time, several thousand years.
 Well, then this might be a period of time as long as an entire lifetime.
 But not everybody alive in the world at that time would experience their life as an uninterrupted plunge into novelty.
 No. So a large percentage of people might. There is this phenomenon of the zeitgeist.
 And to the degree that we participate in our time, our life is in concert with the larger wave.
 This wave has durations of cycles in it. And one of the cycles, the cycle we're living through now, stretches from 1945 to 2012.
 It actually stretches from the Hiroshima bomb blast to the winter solstice of 2012.
 Well, I was born 18 months after that event. So if I have a personal time wave, it will end 18 months after the end of this wave.
 How can that be when this wave seems to dictate the end of all lesser waves?
 Another mystery to be unraveled by traversing the territory.
 Well, I don't know what the time wave is portraying. In other words, novelty, how is it transmitted?
 How is it detectable? Can we build a meter other than this time wave?
 Could we build a parallel technology which would confirm the existence of this thing?
 What can you do with novelty? The electromagnetic field, it turned out, you can transmit information.
 Light cities smelt metal, if you know how to do the trick.
 What you could do with this, I'm not sure.
 You see, if the last cycle from 1945 to 2012 is real, then in a sense, all larger cycles are compacted into it.
 In a sense, from 1945 to 2012, we're reliving the entire history of the world.
 If that's true, then we have reached roughly 1000 AD.
 That means that between now and 2012, we must traverse a, I don't even have the words for it, a domain of cultural change equivalent to the domain we traversed between 1000 AD and the present.
 In other words, slightly more than 1000 years of resonances have to be compacted into the next 16 years.
 Consequently, there's this feeling of things moving faster and faster.
 In a universe which was actually built on this kind of architecture, imagine this.
 A universe that actually had this kind of closure, where it was a series of, where each time cycle was 1/64th the size of the one that preceded it.
 Before a universe of that structure reached the domain of Planck's constant, 6.55 x 10^-25 ergseconds, it would undergo half of its unfolding into existence in the last hour and 35 minutes before the crunch.
 In other words, if this is the kind of universe that we're living in, half of the unfoldment into novelty will occur in the last day of the existence.
 That's how huge these rates of acceleration are.
 So when people ask the question, "What will happen in 2012?"
 They're asking you to see around the corner 9 times.
 It can't be done.
 Language fails.
 Apparently, as far as I can tell, what novelty, what will happen as novelty asymptotically increases in the final months, hours, minutes, milliseconds, is boundaries will dissolve.
 All boundaries. They're already dissolving.
 We see the nation-state dissolving, but wait till the atomic field dissolves.
 Everything is apparently crunching together in some kind of meltdown.
 It's the equivalent of a black hole, but it's not a gravitational collapse.
 It's a novelty collapse.
 We are collapsing into a black hole of novelty.
 I've tried to imagine how could this happen?
 What could happen without God's direct intervention?
 A) And B) Fleets of extraterrestrial starships appearing over every city on the planet.
 In other words, is there anything that we could self-generate that would fulfill this kind of scenario?
 And it turns out I found at least one answer, which is time travel.
 If, in fact, what happens in 2012 is that we begin the conquest of this previously unscratched dimension called time, then it is perfectly reasonable that a linear depiction of the ebb and flow of novelty would stop at a certain point,
 because once time becomes non-linear, you can't portray it on a Cartesian graph anymore.
 You need a higher dimensional matrix.
 It starts coming at you out of the screen.
 The novelty overflows the dimensional container you've built for it.
 Interestingly, when I had this idea 15 years ago, there was no idea in greater contempt in the scientific journals.
 I mean, time travel, ha, ha, ha, the grandfather paradox, this and that and the other thing.
 Now it's a perfectly respectable thing to discuss.
 There are schemes for time travel on the books that would work.
 It would require some godlike technology.
 I mean, in other words, you have to be able to spin a cylinder that is the size of Jupiter, nine-tenths the speed of light.
 But if you can spin such a cylinder at such a speed and travel along its horizontal axis, you will, in fact, be moved backward through time.
 Everybody agrees on this.
 They just say you can't do it.
 Whoa, hell, where have we heard that before?
 We can't do it.
 But yes, if you can think of it, you can do it.
 And if there's a crude, brute force way to do it, then there's a subtle, tricky, easy way to do it that comes along a little bit later.
 I mean, the vacuum tube was not the end of that line of development.
 And what we're talking about here is a vacuum tube version of a time machine.
 And a time machine may not be what we think it is.
 You know, the future is not like the past, except that it hasn't happened.
 If you were to suddenly find yourself in the future, it's a vector storm of unrealized possibilities.
 You've never seen an unrealized possibility.
 All you've ever seen are realized possibilities.
 And you don't know what an unrealized possibility would look like.
 There are a lot more of them than there are realized possibilities.
 And they fill the space called the future.
 If you suddenly found yourself in the future, you wouldn't even recognize it as that.
 You'd just think you've gone mad, I think.
 So, I don't know if I should wrap this up.
 The basic notion is this is what I learned from psychedelics.
 This is my show and tell.
 It's an indulgence of my ego to do this, because most of what I tell you, you could learn somewhere else.
 I just have read the books and can regurgitate this stuff.
 Point you toward the plants, lead you through the philosophical issues, talk about the medical stuff.
 It's not particularly flashy. It's just a mental shortcut for you.
 This is original.
 And nobody has ever tried to wrest it from my grasp.
 That's how original it is.
 Nobody else wants the hideous responsibility of defending this particular piece of intellectual baggage.
 Why I like it is I believe that the idea which is the most fun is probably closest to the truth.
 And I find this idea to be absolutely delightful.
 It also has a kind of weird completedness about it.
 Even though nobody has made any contribution to this theory but me.
 In other words, I thought it up, top to bottom, start to finish.
 It doesn't feel to me like a human being could do that.
 It feels to me like it would take, that this is the product of an entire civilization.
 It must have taken hundreds of years.
 Many workers spread out in space and time.
 I can tell it.
 And I was told it. That's how I know it.
 But no single individual, and certainly not myself, could have dreamed this up from scratch.
 Yeah.
 [Audience member asks question]
 You mean before I had the whole thing?
 From 1971 to '75.
 And it was interesting, and this I cannot ever share with anybody else.
 You'll just have to believe me.
 But the way it was revealed was very odd.
 Because it never let me see where I was going.
 I couldn't figure out what I was doing.
 I mean, it said, "Go buy graph paper."
 "Go get your I Ching."
 "Look at the King Wen sequence."
 "Graph the first order of difference."
 And I would try and guess, "What are we doing?"
 "Are we discovering an ancient Chinese calendar?"
 "Why are we doing this?"
 It said, "No, no, don't worry about that. Just keep next step."
 And it always hid from me where I was headed.
 It still hides from me where I'm headed.
 You know, and the software has been written.
 The controversy rages on the internet.
 I even now have critics. That's good.
 That shows that it is moving out of the realm of private Idaho
 into the realm of debatable cultural artifact.
 And I think that if it's true, or if it has a part of the truth,
 we will know before 2012.
 In other words, a lot of people observed, not a lot, but a few hundred maniacs
 observed this prediction about 1996, and then watched the ensuing debate.
 My critics, my defense, their response, so forth and so on.
 So it's being watched, and the meme spreads,
 and apparently will be helped by things like simply where we are in relationship to the calendar.
 Simply because we're approaching a millennial turn.
 The producers of nitwit TV shows want to talk to me.
 They say, "I understand you have a way of predicting the future, given to you by UFOs, I heard.
 We want to put you on the air."
 Well, you know, I'm not sure about the wisdom of all of this.
 I figure, you know, let the meme fight for its life in the jungle of competing models of reality.
 When I pull back from the specificity and the fact that I invented it, that's my biggest problem.
 If I hadn't invented this, if I just heard that somebody invented it, and this is what it was,
 I think I would find it very interesting.
 But since I know the inventor very well, I'm very prone to doubt the thing.
 I mean, this is not a guy you would want to put a lot of pressure on.
 So, I don't know.
 I'm puzzled, and I offer it as an unsolved puzzle.
 I preached here earlier that you mustn't seek closure, and so I don't with this.
 If it's a communication, it's a very curious communication.
 If it is non-communication, it's even more curious.
 If it's a delusion, why is it so mathematically formal?
 If I'm pathological, why aren't there attendant sequela?
 Why just this very defined thing?
 The whole thing smacks of the impossible.
 It's even pushed me toward the idea that maybe this is not actually a reality.
 We're trapped, or I'm trapped.
 I don't know if you're trapped, but we're in some kind of piece of fiction.
 It's like a Philip K. Dick deal, you know?
 We're in some kind of simulacrum, and the clue to the fact that it's a simulacrum is this impossible idea.
 And so the point of the idea is not to believe it, but to use it as a wedge to fight our way out of this labyrinth
 and back to whatever reality we were in before we fell into this situation.
 Something like that.
 Anyway, I have the feeling that I'm blathering and spinning my wheels.
 Is there some final question that brings this all to a...
 Yeah.
 [unclear]
 Oh, yeah, that is an interesting question.
 People say, "Well, now, is this some kind of permission for irresponsibility?"
 "Are you saying that the world is going to transform itself no matter what happens?"
 I'm enough of an old political activist to sense the anguish behind that question,
 because I don't want to say, "Yes, don't worry about the Palestinians.
 Don't worry about the Bangladeshis. It's a done deal. It's all fine.
 You can take your eye off the ball and your foot off the pedal."
 That seems crazy to me, to give advice like that.
 And yet this thing seems to be saying, "It is a done deal. It's going to be fine.
 It's going to arrive on schedule, under budget.
 You don't have to preach it. You don't have to worry about it."
 And so then, apparently, where it lies is that it is a done deal,
 but how the deal is done is not a done deal.
 That there will be a deal is sealed.
 That is written into the laws of physics, if this is correct.
 No escape from the transcendence.
 But how we present ourselves to it is our contribution.
 It does not say what will happen.
 It simply says where the novelty will cluster,
 and apparently it is still open to what happens,
 is still a matter of human decision and of the unfolding of causal necessity.
 So in a sense it's saying there is a safety net under you,
 but you still should make an effort not to fall.
 Yeah, Al.
 [unclear]
 I hear what you're saying.
 Yes, a strange thing about the Mayan calendar is it begins in, I believe, 3135 BC,
 and it ends in 2012.
 The Mayan civilization began, as far as anybody can tell, around 300 BC,
 and was a done deal by 790 AD.
 So here was a culture that lived by a calendar
 that seemed to have no relationship to its own cultural origins or ends.
 That's odd.
 I mean, that's not how people do a calendar.
 The other weird thing about the Mayan calendar is it begins on a slow Thursday in August.
 In other words, it doesn't begin at a solstice.
 It doesn't begin at an equinox.
 It doesn't begin with a special astrological configuration in the sky.
 It begins on nothing burger day in 3135 BC.
 Well, but it runs forward to a winter solstice and ends precisely on a winter solstice.
 Whoever heard of a calendar that was formed by calculating backward from a point
 thousands of years in the future?
 What kind of squirrely culture would do that?
 And the answer is, we don't know.
 But yes, this is a great puzzle that the Mayans seem weirdly disconnected from their own calendar.
 They were weird.
 Oh yeah, there is...
 The amazing, the reason the Maya are so fascinating is because they had astronomy,
 they had politics, poetry, architecture, and they don't owe anything to Greece or Egypt or Sumeria
 or Babylon or Ur or Chaldea.
 They thought it up themselves.
 They did it themselves.
 They met problem after problem after problem and solved them in astonishingly unique ways.
 And you know, it's just a matter of cultural accident when Cortes sailed in to the Bay of Campeche,
 the difference between medieval Spanish civilization and the civilization of the Aztecs
 in terms of technological level and understanding, they were practically on a par.
 I mean, the Spanish had no antibiotics, they had no advanced weaponry, no advanced communication,
 they had better ships, but had the voyage not been done that way,
 150 years later the Aztecs might have landed on the coast of Spain and claimed it for a Montezuma successor.
 That's how nearly in parallel they were.
 But then of course the bifurcation was tremendous.
 One civilization wiped out and the other, through the looting of the former,
 finances its way into modern science and 500 years later we have atom bombs and antibiotics and DNA sequencing.
 Anyway, that's it for this evening.
 Thank you for your attention and your indulgence.
 I'm very grateful to you.
 (upbeat music)


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