[silence] There are given themes, and this is what the hexagrams are about. This was the genius of the Chinese, to realize that time has elements. The orthodox, or let me put it this way, Western science had to go through a whole conceptual reformulation to realize that space is not simply where you put things. That's how space is treated in Newtonian dynamics, and up until Einstein. It's just the necessary dimension for three-dimensional description. But then Einstein said, "Well, no, no. Space is a thing affected by magnetic fields, and it's torqued in the nearby vicinity of a star." And so then this notion that it was a thing, and that it could have various properties of curvature, became allowable. Now what I'm suggesting is that time has elements, 64 of them, as a matter of fact. And the formulators of the I Ching simply, by stilling the heart, by eliminating noise from the body, were able to see these states, which we could call quantum mechanical, but since they are not material, we don't need to invoke the holy god of quantum mechanics to bless this effort. Anyway, whatever these things are, and in whatever dimension they exist, you could think of them more, I think of them more like platonic archetypes. The way in which they interpenetrate three-dimensional being is what gives three-dimensional being its primary qualities. The qualities of color, of tone, of emotion, of feeling, all of the descriptive qualities that science has left out, and called epiphenomenal and subjective, but which are the things we all experience. What science has achieved is a tremendous devaluation of primary experience. And what this notion is trying to say is that there is possible a physics of experience, an understanding of history that will make it coherent, so that the coherency which we know must be resident in the universe is no longer a value-dark dimension to us. The order becomes visible. Now, how does this work? I always use this rather idiotic example, but it amuses me. It's that if you find yourself in Hadrian's hamburger joint, having a burger, there is a direct causal relationship between your doing that and the campaigns of the Roman emperor Hadrian. You are in fact passing through the Hadrian analogic moment. Now, I think the only person who has really understood this to bedrock is probably James Joyce, who realized that a walk to the store is the Trojan War. It is the Trojan War. You cannot pass through a gate without passing through the gates of Thermophile. You cannot... We... And so a notion like reincarnation or past lives is seen in a whole different light. What we are are harmonic adumbrations of events in the past. Now, this comes fairly close to Rupert Sheldrake's notion, and we've talked a lot about this. What is absent in Rupert's scheme is an explanation of novelty. What he is saying is that the past has a tremendous influence on the future, and that the very fact that something has happened sets up all following time for a higher likelihood of this thing happening. What I'm suggesting is that that's true, but that then the mystery of why there is novelty is solved by realizing that the way in which the morphogenetic field impinges upon reality is through a fractal expression. And there would be nothing surprising about this. Fractal, the electromagnetic waves described by Maxwell's equation, that is essentially a fractal transform. It is how waves work. So, another way of thinking about this notion that we are adumbrations of larger historical epochs is the aphorism "Rome falls nine times an hour." This is the idea, and it does. I mean, I always notice it. It's just there. We are very state-bounded in our self-observations, and we only tend to value what is relevant to profane existence and communication. So the fact that as you sweep the house, you notice Rome falling nine times an hour, there's not much to say about it. It's just, I think weird things. I wonder if everybody thinks weird things. I think the answer is yes, and that not only does Rome fall nine times an hour, but the Celts move out of Spain and into England nine times an hour, and so forth. But really, the present is an interference pattern caused by epochs in the past coming together to create a certain particular situation. So what has been happening since 1945, since the dawn moment over Hiroshima, is that the entire history of the universe is being recapitulated. Now, it has many cycle levels of cyclic expression. On one level, the first land animals have yet to appear. We are truly in the inchoate darkness. On the level of the 4,306-year cycle, we are deep in the dark ages. And on the basis of that, the barbarians, the time when the barbarian hordes poured into Europe, the sacking of Eleusis and all that, I see punk culture as the harmonic response to the fact of this happening. On the basis of it, I would predict that in the late '80s, the new wave punk phenomenon will give way to an almost gothic religious sensibility, which will be, in fact, a recapitulation of the early Middle Ages. - God help us. - Feminine--oh, no, no! In the mariological cults that found their expression at Chartres and places like that, in the early '90s, we will have a feminist revival, which will be slightly wrongheaded, because it will make those same mistakes that those gothic people made. We will not even reach the threshold of the Industrial Revolution until about 23, 2003. So you see, the notion of us sitting around making sense of things is quite preposterous. I mean, we are still waiting for Newton, let alone for Maxwell and Einstein. We are not prehistory, except on the highest level. So this intensification will occur. Now, what is it leading to? This is the part--you know, Christianity insists that the world will end, and that it will just roll up like a scroll, and the triumphant Christ will come to judge the living and the dead. Now, why do they believe that? Obviously, apocalypse haunts history like a ghost in the kind of cosmology I'm defining. There must be anticipations of it. The death of every human being is an anticipation of the apocalypse. The collapse of every empire. Any cessation is a part of the sensation. It is the archetype of the ending. So this knitting together, this compactification of novelty and connectedness, which is emanating out from the most densely compactified and connected thing in nature, which is the human cortex. This is an interesting thing. We've worked so hard to move ourselves out of the center of the mandala. But the fact of the matter is the most complex object in nature is the human brain. Curious. This knitting together that is emanating from the human brain is accelerating at such a rate that we are rapidly going to become unrecognizable to ourselves. The end point, which I have come to feel is correct, is the end point 67 years 104.5 days after the Hiroshima blast. And that would be dawn of the 16th day of November in 2012. Now I had worked all this out and the thin thread on which I am here in a conference devoted to the Mayans is that after I had worked all this out, I discovered that the long count of the Mayan, the calendar of which you have heard so much, contains 13 bactoons. Now the emergence of Mayan civilization as we currently understand it is around late in Bactoon 6 and the complete collapse of the Mayan is in around the middle of Bactoon 11. But their whole calendar was generated from the end of Bactoon 13. There is no Bactoon 14. They said, "That's it. That's the end." The end of Bactoon 13 is the winter solstice of 2012, 34 days later than the date I reached through this series of involvements with the I Ching. But then I discovered there is what's called the Thompson correction. The Thompson correction is a different reading on certain calendrical material which would locate the end of Bactoon 13 only four days after the date that I had chosen. So the question seemed to me then, what is it about psilocybin mushrooms that a civilization in Mesoamerica in the 8th and 9th century and an individual in California in the 20th century would both, through an elaborate series of mathematical contortions, different mathematical contortions, reach the same point in time? What is happening there? And we were talking last night about how the... My little story about what happened to the Mayans, to the Maya, and Peter pretty much agreed, was around 970 and probably at Copan, which was the Alexandria of the Mayan world. It's where the mathematics and these things were brought to their peak. They figured it out. They figured it out. And they ended the long count. It was obviously ended as an order. It took about 20 years to emanate out from Copan and to reach the most remote Mayan centers, Kiriguay and to Palenque and so forth. But within 30 years, the long count had been ended, the stela had been pushed over face down in the grass, the cities emptied, and the Maya returned to being primitive agricultural pastoralists. I think it was because they figured it out. They saw what was coming. And once you have figured it out, the curious thing about this notion I'm propounding is that it carries no obligation. It is a way of making you free by admitting you are more deterministically bound than you ever dreamed. You know? You had to go into Hadrian's hamburger joint. It was settled when Hadrian invaded Scotland that you had to go into that hamburger joint. And so we are bearing an unnecessary burden of guilt and responsibility. We are living in a cosmos, not a chaos. The universe is doing what it wants to do. It is calling forth the kind of novelty that it wants to call forth. The fact that we cannot understand its purpose is our problem. You know? And we are not its victims. In these short epochs, what is happening is something that I think can only be understood by having recourse to the metaphors of alchemy. Alchemy and modern science, these are anticipations of taking control of energy, of binding, as James Joyce says, all space in a nutshell. It's where what the concrescence is, is the flowing together of everything in a higher spatial dimension. We mentioned last night the saying in the I Ching, "The person who correctly understands this sacrifice can hold the universe in the palm of their hand like a spinning marble." This is absolutely true. It's a statement of physics. It is not a metaphor, an analogy, or anything else. It is that reality is being knitted together into a spinning marble. Everything but that spinning marble is an illusion. It has many reflections in linear history, which is like the shadow cast into three-dimensional space-time by this higher dimensional reality. It is the telos at the end of time. Its modern manifestation is the flying saucer. The flying saucer haunts time like a ghost. It only exists at the end of the historical process, but it is somehow co-present, spread throughout the historical process. It is the proof that the apocalyptic moment exists. Another metaphor for this concrescence, this spinning marble, is the Holy Grail or the Philosopher's Stone. The Philosopher's Stone is an object which is made out of mind. It's called the -- one gloss on it was it was called the Sophic Hydrolith, the water thought stone. It is something which has the quality of mind and matter. And this is what the human function is, I think, is through technos to eliminate the distinction between mind and matter, to free us into the imagination. That's where we're going when the novelty wave runs to zero and we are released into this trans-historical space. It is the imagination, and it will not be miraculous. It will be created by us, through us, through a number of disciplines, technologies, ideas, and innate abilities that we cannot currently hope to do more than glimpse because we are so far back in the historical continuum from where this thing is going to happen in 2012. So basically, this is a funny explanation of almost everything. They say when you create a funny explanation of almost everything, you have to be careful that you don't unexplain a whole bunch of things. And I don't think this unexplains too much because it is not an extension of a current paradigm. In other words, it is not physics. It says nothing about particle physics or quantum mechanics or anything. It talks about time, which is not matter. We have been obsessed with matter for millennia, and thought of time as just something passing by. You couldn't really get a handle on it. But maturity will mean getting a handle on it. And everything I've said about the historical process and how puzzling it is, is true in our own lives. For instance, you may have noticed that every day is sort of like every other day, and yet every day is different. This is this fractal nature of things working. And there are days of great advance, but they are embedded in this larger matrix of a pretty steady-state situation. I studied with Wes Churchman, who was a futurist, and he used to like to say that most of the future is already present in the present. And it's this kind of idea. So, what I was able to do with this I Ching wave, and what I offer as the proof, or at least the place where pressure should be put on the theory, if we want to falsify it, is we wrote a computer program which very rapidly sorts through the wave on many levels, and will draw the graph of novelty for any point in time. And it will draw it on different scales. We can, like, say you were interested in the French Revolution, 1789. We can throw a picture up on the screen which shows you 1788, '89, and '90, and you can then ask yourself, does this line fulfill my intuition of how a novelty curve descriptive of the French Revolution should look? But suppose you're a specialist, you're interested only in the assassination of Marat. Okay, then we can look at the 19 days in 1789 surrounding his assassination on the 20th of July, and so forth. But where it is really interesting is in application to our own lives. And there, then, you have a personal body of information that you can try against the wave to see if, in fact, it fits your intuition of how your life should work. There are a couple of people here who have counseled with me one-on-one, where we've actually looked at their life, and then on into the future. It goes right on into the future to 2012. And, of course, 2012 is just my choice. After a lot of reflection, I chose that as the apocalyptic zero date. The program is set up so early in the program you can enter any apocalyptic zero date. And then you search for best fit. And the way I use it is I like to go to the scale where there are 19 years on the screen, or I mean 3 years on the screen, or even 200 years on the screen. And then I'll go way back, and then it has a continue function, and I just fly over the mountains of time. And when I see a steep valley, I dive into it and blow up the fractal landscape. And then the program has a function called near, which is a historical data file. And you can just hit a button, and it will tell you, "Ascension, Nevada Xerxes, 514 BC." There it is! Look! His son was an idiot, but then he came on, and the wave, it fits, it works, this is it, it's all clear. And so it's a way of modeling history. And if I could contort it into a video game, my life would be much easier. [laughter] At this moment of levity, what I'd like to suggest is that we have a very short break. I was about to suggest that. Joan has offered to moderate with me, and we'll see if we can't generate some fast-paced repartee. Kihei has indicated a willing take part. So, Ralph, Peter, Kat, would you like to join? Well, maybe I'm close enough. Yeah. I don't know what this will be, since I'm being reviewed. [laughter] Being reviewed. Well, then don't say a word. [laughter] I think it's rave to be rave. [laughter] Why don't you begin, Ralph? [laughter] Yeah, we should do that. Why don't we introduce ourselves, starting with... My name's Adele Getty. And what do you do? I'm a ceremonialist. I'm Francis Huxley. I'm a visitor at Ojai. [laughter] But that says everything. When you see what Ojai consists of and who's here, to be a visitor here is a large honour and a peculiar onus. [laughter] I'm Barbara Smith, and I'm a performance artist and sort of ceremonialist as well. Lloydina Arguelles, co-precipitator with Jose. I'm Jose Arguelles. I'm a harmonic convergenist. [laughter] I'm Ralph Abraham. I'm a precipitate. [laughter] I'm a regenerate precipitate. My name is Kat. I'm Terence's partner and mother of our children and an artist, when I have time. And I'm Peter Ballan. I'm the painter of the Sultan Tower. [laughter] Terence McKenna. And Joan Halifax, inciter. [laughter] Frenzy. How do you incite? Do you make incisions? [laughter] Incisor. [laughter] Inciset. Oh, dear. Terence introduced the pre-existing notion of peer review into Council. And since the peers were assembled, and it's not only been a view, but for some of us a review of Terence's material, but not only that, a review, interestingly enough for quite a few of us, of our own epistemologies, I thought it might be timely at this moment in our day to hear from various of the Council faculty their perspective on what Terence has been saying this morning, which is what it has been, and what they might have to add by contrast or parallel. So I'd like to throw the gauntlet, the straw dog, into the middle of Council and not move linearly, but just to see what cooks out in terms of reflections. Who's got the nerve? I would think someone would be outraged. [laughter] Well, I'm outraged. [laughter] You are the straw dog, please. What is it you're outraged about? Well, I just really expected more from Terence because... [laughter] Because obviously the mushroom must speak the truth. So we have to take this seriously. But yet it's just another calendar. As Terence said, well, we just have another calendar. Isn't that what you said? I said that at a moment. Then I explained how that wasn't true. So, but isn't it... This fantasy of time is based upon the certain linear image that one date follows another and so on. And if time really existed, then calendars like this would be true. Or they could be true or false. They would be proposition. We take the calendar and as your computer program does, hold up to the line of history, which you seem to have memorized. [laughter] That line of history. It fits or it doesn't fit. If it doesn't fit, move it. Now, I find it amazing that you could fit, you know, on the point of 1945 and then come up with 2012 and then this turns out to concur with the other calendar of these other folks that probably never, in their worst shamanist nightmare, imagined 1945. But... You never know. You never know, right? So that's when they quit, right, and left the cities. But I think that there is no such thing as time. And that if you think there's time, then there will be. So the illusion of time is created by the having of calendars. Well, I agree. What I've said about this theory is that if it were widely accepted, the future would cease to exist. Isn't that the same thing that you're saying? Exactly. So let's reject it immediately. No, because if you have a graph that shows you what the next five days of your life are going to be like, just in terms of novelty, and you live through those five days, and it's true, and you do it again, and it's true, and you do it again, and it's true, you finally accept it. And then a peculiar quality of the future has been eliminated. And some people have said to me, "But what would life be like without the future?" Well, this hinges on a misunderstanding. The fact that we have excellent maps of South America is not an argument to never go there, you see. All I am saying is that it will keep you from falling off cliffs if you have a map. And you will--all that this novelty factor is, is the novelty factor. What goes into realizing the prediction is entirely undetermined. All the wave says is that on a certain day, there will be more or less novelty than on the day previous. But it doesn't constrain it even as much as astrology does, which says, you know, expect money or a visit from a stranger. But then does this moment of high or low novelty-- these moments do not correspond to hexagrams. You can't read the face of the moment in a hexagramic fashion. No, you can do that. You can read across to a position number in the wave, which can then--the hexagrams which are causing this thing to happen can be reconstructed. That gives you so much information that it is like an astrological reading. And I have just stayed away from that because I mistrust all that historical commentary on the I Ching. But it's simply-- Why do I mistrust it? The Han Dynasty was just-- Well, how about just the imagery? No, no, the image is old, older than the commentary. The image I trust. The commentary I don't trust. But if you have a prediction that on a particular day in the future you're going to have a high degree of novelty-- Let's see. It's like saying if-- I heard of somebody who would have premonitions of people's deaths, and there were degrees of premonition. One would be that the person would certainly die regardless of what they did, and the other premonitions sometimes were that there were options. So they found that they never told the person if there was-- Rather, they had the one experience of telling the person that they were going to die in an airplane. So the person tried to avoid that by simply not flying in an airplane. An airplane was going to be the cause of death. What happened was that an airplane came out of the sky and fell onto the person's house. So that, I mean, what if-- I mean, in fact, it did. So what we're seeing is there's a distinction between prediction and prophecy. I mean, prediction says it's going to happen before it happens. A prophecy indicates a tendency. And with a tendency, you can shape-- you can put A novelty or B novelty can come up or C novelty can come up. But it indicates a tendency, not a particularity. That's right. I see. Well, I didn't quite understand when you said what novelty was. Is it a fractal? I mean, is it just an enlarging of-- Novelty is the emergence of new states of connectedness. This is Alfred North Whitehead. Novelty is the emergence of new states of connectedness. And that's all that it predicts. As an example, this past week, I looked at it to check the program, and for me, it's just going along. And on the 10th, I flew from Hawaii and traveled thousands of miles and shepherded my children through all these changes, and there's the blip. And then I had two days of rest, and now I'm speaking here, and there's the blip. And that's all it says. But I can look far off into time. But it gives the blip the face of a hexagram. Does it not tell you what the face of this blip is? Yes, but it begins to add ambiguity as well. The beauty of the novelty system is it's just such a limited number of turns. We achieve predictive accuracy by only attempting to predict something very modest, not what will happen, but only the level of novelty that the situation will fulfill. The tendency toward increased or decreased novelty. That's right. Now, when you say, like, you're charting this, and on the 10th there's a blip, and today there's a blip, is that-- I'm still trying to get this clear. Is that charting, like, for you? Is that charting for all of reality? Well, you can do it two ways. When someone comes to me for counseling, we take their birth date as the point of generation of the wave. And I sort of--my own understanding of it, the voice has never been clear on these kinds of questions. But the way I explain it to myself is it's like statistical probability. All these people are having all these experiences, and the statistical average of the novelty and lack of it in these experiences is the larger overwave. Otherwise, we would all experience the same wave all the time, and that would be a weird world. Well, we are. We are. Well, but we are all sharing a spatial locus. But many people you know may say, "My relationship for the past few months has been in chaos," and someone else says it and someone else says it, or everyone seems to get sick. Many people seem to notice those kinds of-- That's right. And similar insights happen to people worldwide in similar-- Yes, it seems to have a global character. As an example of its global character, the obvious question to ask about the 4,006-year cycle is, where is the steepest dive into novelty in that 4,006-year cycle? Well, it turns out it's about 460 B.C. Well, when you look into that date, you discover Mencius, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Ezekiel, Pythagoras. All of these people were alive at a single moment in time. That moment, the moment which it indicates as this tremendous rush into the self-expression of the human spirit, then you can ask, well, where-- what was the highest level of entropic organization then? Well, it turns out it occurred around the Punic Wars, around 180 B.C., and certainly this was the height of Roman expansionism and the brutality of the ancient world and all these things. And that, you translate, is the opposite of novelty. Yes, I think these things tear down connectedness when you have totalitarian control imposed from the top. I'd be interested to hear from José and Francis about this particular line on history. Well, I'm trying to get at it by saying that the ups and downs really should have faces given from the way in which it's all been constructed, which are hexagonic faces. Now, I have this feeling also, leading us, ascending, that I see the framework and the items which go into the frame, but they have no faces for me anymore. Faces? Well, for instance, in the Mayan calendar, the Mayan calendar is made out of faces, quite literally, faces. And to think that most of the Mayan ideograms are made out of faces, with big noses and small eyes and big eyes and small ears and big ears and small chins and foreheads of all bold, you know, 160 different faces with items of different kinds, you have to visualise and understand, because this face is a meaning, and this meaning has its usual four extensions into the world, the literal, the metaphorical, the symbolic and the one that leads home to you. And they have to know all that. Well, I can't see myself thinking in Mayan terms. Maybe, I don't know that anyone can start thinking just with a face as being the meaning and the mathematic, the mathematic symbol of what you're doing. This is what I'd like to ask of Ralph, apropos of your question, because he's dealing with math in terms of what I perceive to be faces. And is there something that you can say to what Francis is saying, as though, you know, your system and your system appears faceless to certain of us, but can the pure mathematics, the dance of the patterns in terms of mathematical forms, suddenly take on character? I suppose so. You know, there are representations of reality on so many different levels, but Terence is speaking of the representation on the most abstract level, and all of the quality of experience of the species on the planet at a single moment of time is to be represented by a single number, the number of novelty. So this is, as it were, the crudest possible representation. Now, you can wish to blow this up, to unfold this into representations with more and more and more details, so that perhaps eventually you would have a representation such as a face, which carried with it some emotional content, which could, upon regarding it, incite within us a certain emotion or a state of mind or something, and we could identify that as the face of history on that particular day. But by adding all this detail, one loses the simplicity of the importance, the real functionality of the most abstract and simple representation. I don't think one loses it. One just sees it at work. And it strikes me very deeply that you mistrust the Han and the post-Han who gave a face to that system, because this tells you that you can, by looking at the Chinese and looking at its etymological sense, because the Chinese are like the Maya, they sought in ideograms and faces, they did not have an alphabet or the syllabary, they sought in terms of the faces of things. And you can begin to sense out how this Li Qing and its original texts, the Image and the Judgment, how that was thought of, and what the kind of world it was in which this was necessary. Then you see the Han coming in with kingdoms and empires and bronze casting and smiths and shamans and all that, and you begin to see how they put a face upon it which actually worked well enough for them. Oh, the Maya did exactly the same thing on their level, and this gives one that understanding of the innate evolving of the face out of its significance. Because I don't see how you can have one without the other. I think there is a place where there's a face, and that's where the wave and the novelty drops off to zero, which Terence called death. And death in a way is a face, we all have it, and there's an aspect of death while in the end being fatal, it's amenable to being fascinated. Fascinated. So there's that, so to speak, the creation of time within the extension of, where now is the moment to die but death is fascinated and it can be put off. We all know cases in which this occurred, and maybe that is the creation of shamanic time, I don't know. But in that bottleneck there, this may be what Jose and I feel that we're on about, is that there's some way of extending that moment to make a bridge. Is that clear? I was curious, I think that moment of the dropping off to zero, which of course is the moment that fascinates a lot of us in 2012. The time when the face gets dropped. Death is, while in one aspect it's faceless, it has a face to all of us. If we were to talk about this last 67 year cycle in the way that I think you would like, then we would have to say it is all operating under the sign of after completion, which proceeds before completion, and then underneath that there are signs which apply to 11 year cycles and lesser cycles. And if you draw a vertical line from the moment where you are up through all these hexagrams, you will get a unique set of influences from a limited set of hexagrams which will give you the unique signature of the moment. The reason I didn't spend a lot of time on that is because that kind of thinking is the kind of intuitive image integrating thinking that you get in astrology and would not have been taken seriously by the kind of people that I wanted to take this seriously. I wanted this, you see the line graph, all scientists can appreciate and understand that. And so I didn't want any interpretive factor to vitiate the starkness of the notion of novelty up down, yes or no, as Ralph says, a point with an absolute number. But what you're describing is certainly a way of using it, a way of thinking of it. I just didn't think it made good ideological strategy to push that as the way of thinking about it. You see the aging has faces and the power of it as a matter of fact is in the abstraction of these symbols. These symbols epitomize mathematics, the value of mathematics in our life. Thank you. {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.64 sec Decoding : 2.00 sec Transcribe: 2604.01 sec Total Time: 2606.65 sec