This is the first of three tapes of Terence McKenna at the Ojai Foundation under the teaching tree in April 1985. I think of myself as a teacher primarily or at all. I think of myself as a researcher who, because of the unorthodox nature of the research, has to submit to this kind of situation for peer review. That's what this is. This is peer review of my rap, not teaching in any sense of the word. So before I get into it, I'll say a little bit about my attitude toward epistemology and system making generally. This is one of the slightly uncomfortable moments because I have to make distance between myself and large numbers of other people and say, "I do not believe in the wars of Atlantis. I do not believe in reincarnation. I do not believe in the healing power of crystals." And a whole string of alienating "I do not believe" - the fact of the matter is I don't believe in belief. I think belief is a tremendously stultifying force. What I'm interested in is freedom, and I noticed very early that a belief absolutely precludes the possibility of holding to its opposite, and therefore if you believe something you have signed away its opposite and limited yourself. This comes close to the ideal, but not the fact of how science is supposed to be waged. So I'm a impression and fact collector, and I will propound a number of ideas that are very controversial, I guess, and I want you to understand they appear controversial to me, and the controversy over their applicability to reality rages in me at least as strongly as it will rage in any dialogue that I have with any of you. The area that we're working in at the fringe of science, at the frontier of psychology, is too chaotic and disorganized to be called a science at this point. We're in the Baconian phase of it where you merely collect facts, catalog facts, and wait for emergent patterns to be visible, and this is what I've done, and I did it, I began as a skeptic, fairly confident that this kind of examination of reality and collection of facts would support the rationalist, reductionist, minimalist mapping of reality, and I discovered to my delight and amazement that the world is quite a complex place, quite a large percentage of it goes on outside the descriptive power of any metaphor that we presently have a handle on, and so I just want to put that out, that my attitude is one of a kind of skepticism that allows, and I am well known as the proponent of the notion that there is an extraterrestrial or transhuman intelligence accessible through certain psychedelic drugs. I have that experience often, but I am not a believer in it. I'm very puzzled by it. I return again and again to reason as the measure against which all these things have to be played, so peer review is very important, I think, because we're moving in an area where very little is known. We're somewhat in the analogous position to the early explorers of the Amazon who would sail up the main flow of the Amazon and note in their logs past a river mouth that noon two miles wide, origin unknown. This is what we are charting, enormous unknown flows of which we are only able to chart the most gross expression of these things. Okay, so that's enough about method. The, as I understand it, the matter around which this council is spun is the journey beyond history, and the notion in that implicit is that there is an end to history. So what I want to talk about this morning, and it's the most difficult lecture that I give, because it is, the goal is not to convey a feeling or an impression, but to actually convey an idea, and ideas you either get or don't get. It isn't like you can halfway get how to factor a quadratic equation. You either know how to do it and it's trivial, or you don't know how to do it and it's inconceivable. What happened to me was a series of channeling, although I hate that word. It's so obnoxious. I prefer maybe the word psychosis. Anyway, a series of self-amplifying revelations springing from an interior source that appeared to my best judgment not to be me, right? And it was an unusual example of this sort of thing, although I do not immerse myself. I have never read a word of what Seth has to say or any of that, but I gather these things are largely urging people, their moral teachings is what they are, urging people to straighten themselves out and fly right and care for the earth and be aware and be decent. And the thing which I received was more in the character of an unraveling of a mystery, somewhat analogous if any of you are familiar with Robert Graves' book "The White Goddess," where in a series of continuing revelations he gained great insight into early Celtic and Godelic poetic alphabets and encryption methods. The object of my experience was the I Ching, and I noticed, discovered a number of things about the I Ching which led me to the conclusion that what we possess in the King Wen sequence is in fact a fragment, an archaeological chunk of a piece of broken cosmic machinery. I concentrated entirely on the I Ching as a prehistorical artifact. I unburdened myself completely of the necessity to be a sinologist by concentrating on the I Ching as it existed in the pre-Han period, that is before 400 BC, 200 BC. All the commentaries on the I Ching, all the exegesis is Han or post-Han. So I didn't deal with that at all. I dealt with what's called the King Wen sequence. How many of you are well familiar with the I Ching? Good. The rest of you, good luck. The King Wen sequence is the oldest, if you give up Atlantis, Lemuria, etc., the oldest ordered human abstraction. It is, we find fragments of it on shoulder bones that are four to five thousand years old. So it's a human-generated abstraction that has been preserved through the millennia. Now the question is, is it an ordered sequence? And this was the first koan that the interior voice posed to me. What is the order of the King Wen sequence? As you know, the King Wen sequence begins with the creative, and which is all solid lines, then the receptive, which is all broken lines, and then whatever it is. I noticed immediately that it was obviously organized in pairs. In other words, each hexagram, the subsequent hexagram, can be generated by turning the first one upside down. That's all that's happening. Now there are eight cases where turning a hexagram upside down affects no change in it. In those eight cases, a second rule has been applied, which is, if turning the hexagram upside down causes no change, then all lines change. You meet the first exception in the first two hexagrams. Clearly, when you invert the creative six solid lines, you obtain the creative again. Therefore, all lines change, and you get the receptive. So then that solved a problem of partial ordering. That showed that we were dealing not with 64 hexagrams, but with 32 pairs of hexagrams. And the next question was, what is the order of the 32 pairs? Now this is a deeper question, and not so easily solved. But it was easily solved for this interior voice that had my attention. It said, "Look at the first order of difference." Now this is a very fancy way of saying, "Look at how many lines change as you move from one hexagram to the next." Obviously, as you move from the first hexagram to the second, six lines change. As you move from the second to the third, I forget how many it is, four, I believe, and so on. So that you can make a linear graph of the first order of difference as you move through the King-Wen sequence. And I rushed out and bought graph paper and did this, and looked at it. And it's a sawtooth. All of these figures, by the way, are in the book The Invisible Landscape. It's a double challenge to give this lecture without visual aids, let me tell you. But as you all are probably expert visualizers, why, you should have no problem here. So when you graph the first order of difference in this way, an anomaly just jumps out at you. This is clearly not a random stochastic process that you're graphing. If it were a stochastic process, you would expect the possible values, which are one, two, three, four, five, six, to occur in more or less similar proportions. However, you notice immediately there are no values of five. There are no first order of different changes in the King-Wen sequence of five. Now, what is the prohibition against five about? I don't know, but it's worldwide and Neolithic. A straggly are the knuckle bones of sheep that have been used since the late Neolithic into Roman times to gamble with by burning dots into the knuckle bones. And in fact, playing dice is called throwing the knuckle bone. There are no Neolithic a straggly with five dots burned into them. It's a number which is just strictly avoided. So there is some curious thing going on with the number five. You know, in the Timaeus, as people are coming in and sitting down for dinner, Plato turns to Timaeus and he says, "The one generates the two, and the two the three, but where oh where is the fourth, my dear Timaeus?" And this, the first four numbers, seem to lie in a much more archetypically intense relation than the number five. Five has been called the first human number. In any case, that was not the anomaly which leaped out at my eye when I graphed this thing. What I noticed was that there was a sawtooth stroke at the beginning and at the end, such that if a reflection, or to use the technical term, if the stereo isometric reflection were rotated 180 degrees, the two ends would fit together perfectly. They would dovetail like the joint of a cabinet maker, and it would not fall into this kind of parallelism or congruence at any other point. Only at the beginning and the end, and only I then noticed, if the hexagrams were paired across from each other in such a way that they always added to 64. In other words, 64 is across from 64, that's the exception. 63 is across from 1, 62 is across from 2, 63 is across and so forth. Okay, so that sums in all directions to 64. And so I looked at that for a long, long time, and then I saw that what I had done, that though there were parallel, these congruencies at the beginning and the end, there were also approaches to parallelism at six points in this figure, rather evenly spaced. And I realized then that what I had done is I had taken the entire King Wen sequence, run it forward, run it backward against itself, and created a kind of macro hexagram, a super hexagram, which contained the entire sequence twice, running backward and forward. And at that point I had insight into a curious passage in the Confucian commentaries where it says of the I Ching, "The backward-running numbers refer to the future, the forward-running numbers refer to the past." This was an anagram which makes no sense whatsoever unless you posit the kind of structure that I'm talking about. So then I wondered what could this thing possibly be for, and I experimented with... I said, "Okay, this thing I have built in accordance with the principle of hierarchy construction, which is completely expressed at every point in Chinese history and must therefore be assumed to antedate Chinese history and be prehistoric, this hierarchical principle can be used to manipulate this strange figure. Now the lines of a hexagram are called yao, and there are 384 yao in the 64 hexagrams. Obviously, 6 times 64 is 384. So I said, "I will take my figure and I will treat it as the yao of a hexagram." And so I made six of them, end to end. And then I said, "Okay, now I have the six lines of a hexagram, some kind of hyper or macro hexagram. But a hexagram is composed of more than six lines. It is composed of two trigrams. So I took my figure and I multiplied it by a value of three, and I laid those two over the six, generating everything from a common point of origin. So then I said, "Okay, now I have everything that is in a hexagram except the hexagrammatic wholeness that is embodied by the thing as a gestalt, as a wholenomic entity. So I laid a big one over the six little ones and the two medium-sized ones, generating everything from a common origin point and having everything return to a common origin point. So it looks and it's figured in the invisible landscape like an oscilloscope tracing, a multi-, a three-leveled tracing of lines, a tremendous mishmash. And this was the problem. The voice then was by this time saying, "This is the map, the fractal map of all space and all time. It exists on many levels of resonance." And I personally could feel that. And I spent literally months, and it was madness. Much of this was generated in the Amazon jungle. You have to picture a man in a thatch house on stilts with the Amazon flowing by, the Indians, the drugs, everything raging outside, and me with my slowly deteriorating pad of graph paper just drawing these lines hours and hours a day and looking at them and finally realizing, convincing myself that it did in fact map time in a certain way, but realizing that it had the quality of a mystical doctrine. The interpretation of these slashing, paralleling, intersecting lines was impossible to convey to another person. I had to have a method of reducing this compound complex wave to a single wave moving in a single direction on a single level. Fortunately for you, I'm going to skip over the mathematical details of how this was accomplished, but I assure you that it was accomplished. And to me it was like a series of revelations. I didn't even care about the I Ching. And the notion that out of myself I could extract the techniques to collapse this wave and to produce something coherent out of it, it was like a revelation. And I don't even today know that much about the mathematical ways of handling waves. I'm sure that I reinvented the wheel in some sense, but the point is that I did reinvent it all by myself. And when it was over, I had something which I could show to people. I had the notion that there is a factor in reality which we have previously missed, which is called novelty. Right? And novelty is something which comes and goes. Taoism is talking about this. In the Tao Te Ching it says the way that can be told of is not an unvarying way. Way is clearly a mistranslation for wave. And so then, okay, you have this thing, you've reduced it to one level, you can, it is now an object of reasonable research. But what are the periods? What are the frequencies? What are the harmonic resonances by which this thing expresses itself in time? In other words, what I had generated up to this point was a wave unscaled against the world. And the teaching voice said, "Now we will show you how to scale this against the world. Remember that there are 384 Yao in the complete sequence. 384 is a number that has not been well regarded by calendar makers. It fall, it's 19 days longer than a solar year. However, there have been lunar calendars at various times among the pre-exilic Jews and other people where 384 day lunar calendars were used. I found out all this after the fact. What the voice proposed was that I look at lunations and I discovered what seemed to me an astonishing fact, which is a lunation is 29.53 days long. 29.53 times 13 is 383.89. So it comes very, very close to being exactly 13 lunations. So I looked at that and then I said, "Well, I constructed this wave through application of these principles of hierarchical ordering that are inimical to Chinese thinking. I will now, using the same periodicities, apply the thing to time and see if I get astrological correlations at higher levels." So I took 384 days and I multiplied it times 64. That's the obvious multiplicand. And you get 67 years 104.25 days. Now, if we think of that as a hexagram, it should have six lines embedded within it. If you divide 67 years 104.25 days by six, you get a number which is very, very close to the average duration of a sunspot cycle. 11 plus years. However, people who study the Sun know that there isn't only the famous 11-year sunspot cycle. There is also a larger cycle of 33 years where the peak reaches a greater height. Well, that then would be the trigrammatic level of this hexagram. So what I seem to have was a lunar calendar which was also capable of keeping track of sunspot cycles. Now, the earliest observation of sunspots occurs in China and is a naked eye observation from around 12 AD. So obviously, and we don't know whether there was part of a tradition of observing these things or not, so then I was very pleased with that and I said, "Well, that's interesting. So what happens if you take 67 years 104.25 days and multiply it by 64, the same multiplicand used before?" And the answer is 4,306 years, something like that. And I thought that was very interesting because that is exactly two zodiacal ages. It takes approximately 2,200 years and there's argument about the length of zodiacal ages because there's argument about the width of the sign, the number of degrees to be assigned to each sign. So, but it was remarkably good correlation. And then the voice said, "Now multiply that not by 64, the previous multiplicand used, but by 6, the number of lines in a hexagram. When you do this, you get 25,800 years within 1% of the value accepted for the processional great year in which the zodiacal signs move around the earth in a 26, roughly 26,000 year cycle." Well, you know, great thrills for the person who discovered it. But so far all we have is a Neolithic calendar constructed out of the I Ching. The notions that then began to be put forth were that the ancient Chinese had assimilated this notion through their early development of what are called stilling of the heart techniques, which are this particular stripe of yoga that aims for complete suppression of bodily functions in order to contemplate the mind in its nakedness, you know, uncontaminated by the gross attributes that are being reflected upon it by the body. And the notion was that they were actually observing a fact in nature, that this is not simply a calendar, it is the calendar. It is some kind of previously unnoticed thing present in the world which is mitigating change. The... recall that I said that what we had was a figure which was together at the beginning, flowed apart in a series of interference patterns, and then flowed together at the end and restored the value of zero. In other words, if you think of zero as parity, parity is conserved by this way. So the notion was that this hierarchical calendar is not an eternal calendar, it's a calendar with a built-in closure. And this is hard to visualize, so I won't spend too much time on it, but the last three values in the wave are zero. Consequently, as you approach the last three positions on the wave in any of these duration schemes I've mentioned, 384 days, 67 plus years, 4,300, as you approach the last three positions, the higher level in the hierarchy is given a value of zero and it ceases to contribute its valuation to the lower levels. So you get a sudden drop in the mathematical value of the wave. And these things, for a long time I called them passages, and I called them necks, and I call them different things. Jose calls them harmonic convergence, something like that. And I saw them as places where novelty rushed into the world at a much faster rate than it had done before. And yes, and then I saw that the entire career of being in space-time is affected by this curious property of intensification of novelty and acceleration of time. And we have tended to, because we view the universe as fragmented, we have tended not to connect this up to the universe. We believe human history is an abomination unrelated to biology, and modern times an abomination unrelated to sacral and mythical civilizations, and so forth. But what this notion was suggesting was that matter, I don't know how far back you care to go, but that something is in the process of becoming, and that this process of becoming is not gradual, but proceeds in a series of telescoping leaps into density of connectedness. And that if you look at the history of the universe, it was very active the first 10 high 16 nanoseconds, but then things settled down for a long, long time, and there was just cooling until finally a point was passed in the cooling process where electrons could maintain orbits around atomic nuclei, so that we were no longer in the era of free particles, but we entered into the era of nuclear chemistry. Further cooling of the universe allowed a much more intensified form of novelty to come into being through the molecular bond, which then allows a fantastic variety of structures and possible combinations. You no longer now have free atoms winging around in the void, you have the complete cornucopia of molecular structure that we're familiar with, physical chemistry I'm talking now, life has not yet appeared. But then further levels of order, further inclusions of novelty into the becomingness of being, and you begin to get self-replicating molecules, then you get life in the seas, then life on the land. Now each one of these phases of novelty is taking less time than the previous phase. Finally you get land animals, finally then you get higher mammals, then the Pongy deradiation of the primates, and suddenly 50,000 years ago you arrive at the threshold of self-reflecting consciousness. Instantly you have thermonuclear weapons, parallel processing in computers, superconducting colliding waves, and all of the accoutrements of modern modernity. This is a continuous process that has been going on since the moment the universe was born. Now what is so interesting about it, and what boggled my imagination, and what caused me to wonder if I wasn't in fact losing my marbles and headed by some dark path toward Christianity, was the notion that this process that we have now entered what I call the short epochs, the epochs now do not last a billion years, or 18 million years, or 275,000 years. The short epoch is history. The first short epoch is history, and we entered it around 2300 BC. See, I, this is why I'm not fond of pushing back-ism. What the amazing thing to me about humanity is not not how there are cities in the Bermuda Triangle that are 50,000 years old, but that how man emerged almost instantly out of the background of a planet covered by forests and populated by animals. Something happened. I mean, it is the thumbprint of God. It does push you almost to the notion of a deus ex machina intervention in the course of nature. We have entered the short epochs. We entered the 4,306 year epoch, as I say, around 2300 BC. Around, you know, there is a hiatus. Pre-dynastic Egypt is the Egypt which built the pyramids. It, that all closed down around 2400 BC. Then there's a period of about 350 years where we have very little information. I'm talking Egypt. Then suddenly you get the rise of the dynasties and the thing that we are familiar with as the Egyptian stereotype. So I believe that there was a significant cultural change at that point. It may be Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind. It may be the ability to epigenetically code information through writing to no longer depend simply on the genetic machinery to carry information. I see this whole process I'm describing as the career of information. It is information that is loose on this planet. When people say DNA, they mean information. DNA is the vehicle of the information God and all nature is the vehicle of the information God and so is all culture and all individuality. Okay. Dividing 4,306 years by 64, you see the need for a 67-year epoch. The next short epoch. And this occupied me for a long, long time trying to figure out where it began. And then finally it hit me where it began. It began about 830 in the morning on August the 6th, 1945 over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. And at that moment, the Big Bang, its tiny parallelism, its little self in the world of history was born as a thermonuclear explosion, or not a thermonuclear, but a nuclear explosion. And we are now living out that last epoch. Now why did this push me toward Christianity? Because the next short epoch will only be 384 days in duration. And the one after that will only be six days in duration. And the one after that will only be an hour and a half in duration. And the one after that, two and a half minutes. So what I had done is I had constructed a cosmology that five hours before its complete dissolution, it was only halfway to completion. Do you see? Because these rapid closures mean that half of the novelty that the universal being will express in its career of becoming will occur in the last 384 days of time. Of time. And so this explains to me the chaos at the end of history, which is what we are living through. And the mushroom has said, you know, many times, no big deal. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for the stars. There is nothing wrong, nothing wrong with H-bombs and super colliding. This is all part of the narrowing neck. You know, monkeys don't go to the stars. And you must go through the monkey net to find yourself on the other side. But what I'm not, I'm not talking about a historical transformation in quite the same way that I think Jose and perhaps Peter were indicating. I'm talking about a change in physics, not a change in the human heart or the human political structure. I'm talking about the collapse of the entire space-time continuum as a necessary consequence of the laws under which it operates. And so we are not responsible and we have no choice. And it's not a question of who wants it and who doesn't any more than death is open to that kind of fiddling. And in fact death is the reflection in the macrocosm of every individual experience of the wave running down to zero into the ultimate novelty, which you can call a zero or you can call the concrescent essence of everything, depending on your ontological bent. Now there's a funny thing about this, which is, and to talk about it requires introducing the notion of fractals. Fractals are curves of a peculiar variety because they seem to have fractional dimensions. They are one and a half dimensions, two and a half dimensions, three and a half dimensions. And the reason for this is that when you take a portion of a fractal and blow it up, it looks exactly like it looked before. Now this is easy to visualize in the simplest version of a fractal, which is a circle. I mean think of a segment of a circle. If you blow it up, it looks just like, and then take a piece of it and blow it up, the two blow up. [BLANK_AUDIO] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.64 sec Decoding : 1.80 sec Transcribe: 2304.16 sec Total Time: 2306.61 sec