Leon asked me to talk about time. Leon is off on alone time, so he'll miss this. The
 thing that really interests me or draws me back to the psychedelic experience again and
 again is the notion that there's something that you can learn that would somehow have
 an impact on society at large. That when you have the psychedelic experience, it's like
 you're a sailor on some kind of a vast ocean where you let down your net into the deeps.
 And the hope is that you will snare an idea of some sort and of some size. And it may
 be that you come up with the equivalent of tuna, which is many small ideas. And perhaps
 you bring up your nets and see that they have just been shredded by something so large that
 you scarcely care to imagine it. But the hope is to land an idea of intermediate size that
 you can then fully explore and understand. When you go into that ocean as a swimmer,
 you see these things passing in review, things of such beauty and intricacy and complexity
 that you are literally speechless and even speechless in terms of an interior dialogue
 about what you're seeing. It just blows your mind and washes past you in such profusion
 that there seems to be the notion of capturing, it seems to be like the notion of a child
 emptying the ocean with a cup. But if you have a net, and I'm not sure what a net is
 exactly, but it's a way of somehow capturing these psychedelic ideas and then bringing
 them back for examination. And I think part of it is that you're not just capturing the
 ocean, it rests on a technique of cyclical recitation to yourself of what you've seen
 so that you carry a vision to a level of reflection in memory as you pull away from it. And then
 ten minutes later you tell yourself again what has just happened, and then twenty minutes
 later again, so that you get a series of telescoping images which are granted a compression of
 the original event, but nevertheless they bear the stamp of what the thing was.
 So the thing of this class that has happened to me is a very peculiar idea about time,
 which was developed fairly suddenly, as I would imagine ideas develop in me in the early
 and mid-seventies. And then it was pretty much formulated in my head, but it took the
 invention of small computers to make it possible to write software so that I could actually
 talk to other people about this idea. Well, since we have no computers and not even a
 blackboard, this will be a kind of feeling-toned excursion into talking about this theory of
 time. It has an abstract foundation and a practical foundation. Its abstract foundation
 is the notion that time is different than we have come to conceive of it as the legacy
 of Western science. The legacy of Western science is that time is duration, that time
 is a dimension necessary for process, and it's usually thought of as a flat plane against
 which some other fluctuating variable can be plotted. This is called linear time.
 And Newton's physics took the same view of space. The Newtonian view of space was that
 it was essentially emptiness. It was something which you had to have if you wanted to put
 something somewhere. So it was a kind of an abstract plenum. But Einstein showed that
 space is actually some kind of thing. It has properties of thing-dom. It is distorted in
 the presence of a large magnetic field. And so it rose out of the realm of abstraction
 and then was cognized as an objectifiable entity, a topological manifold that was real.
 This is, I think, the same step that has to be taken for time. Time is not simply the
 dimension of duration required for the successive occurrence of occasions. It is rather some
 kind of conditioned topological manifold. We can think of it as a fluid medium flowing
 across a surface, a river, in other words. In some places, the river is very broad and
 shallow and meanders because the pitch of the incline over which it's moving is so slight
 that it can barely discern which way to move. You see this often in the Amazon. In other
 situations, the incline increases and the speed of the flow increases and the depth
 of the channel increases and the distance between the banks decreases. So time runs
 slowly and it runs quickly. It has a kind of modulated speed. Well, it's been a common
 place of Western cosmology since Darwin, although it's never been elevated to the status of
 a law or even a principle, that steady complexification has occurred in the universe since its very
 beginning, that this is something that we see in the very first moments of physics and
 proceeding right up until our own day. In other words, in the era before physics, that
 period of time so short that it's less than the amount of time necessary for the photon
 to cross the radius of the nucleus of the atom, there was absolute chaos and a complete
 absence of physics. And then what sprang into being was a physics of pure electrons, of
 pure energy. And it was not for many seconds that temperatures fell to a point such that
 other factors could come into play, such that free electrons could fall into atomic orbitals
 and this sort of thing. And at each successive level of cooling, new forms of order became
 possible. At first, everything was just this plasma of particles and energy. And then atomic
 systems sprang into being. And then at still lower temperatures, these atomic systems were
 able to form molecular systems. The energy level in the general medium dropped below
 the level at which it would disrupt the molecular bond. So then molecules came into being. And
 then at that point, there was the aggregation of stars and the cooking out of the heavier
 elements through the process of cooking hydrogen so that iron and carbon and these things then
 arose. And by this time, the universe is much cooler than it was at the beginning. And then
 finally, you get temperature regimes and environmental situations where very large colloidal systems
 where very large colloidal molecular species can come into being, large polymerized molecules.
 And this sets the stage for DNA, which once it emerges... And the thing to notice at each
 of these stages of complexification is that it requires a shorter time than the processes
 preceding it. If the universe is, let's take the long view and say 20 billion years old,
 then the first 10 billion years not very much happened that was interesting in the realm
 of complexity. There was star formation and the percolation of heavy chemistry, but not
 life or it's doubtful that life occurred in the early universe. So what we see then is
 the emergence of more and more complex animal forms at a greater and greater speed. And
 then finally, the emergence of self-reflection in the primates and then epigenetic methods
 of encoding information. In other words, writing and storytelling and language and the evolution
 of the human mind. And at each point, what is happening is there's a progressive time
 binding of energy and a progressive intensification and speed up of the complexification of certain
 parts of the universe. Right now, the most complex part of the universe that we know
 is the human brain mind situated in its network of computers and cultural conventions and
 expectations and hopes and fears and historical aspirations, etc. This is the realm of the
 densely packed that the Buddhists are talking about. So it seems to me that this should
 be seen as the operation of a general law and we are not outside of this. We are in
 fact the cutting edge of it. Somehow of all the animal species on the earth, the human
 beings are carriers of this temporal speeding up process, which is now engulfing the entire
 planet. And so that's the general law or the general perception upon which this idea I
 elaborated was based. The notion that complexification is being conserved through time and being
 built up as some quality that the universe is very interested in maintaining.
 And then I looked at the Qing, which I hope is familiar to most of you. I'm sure it probably
 is. It's a very ancient Chinese oracle system that uses what are called hexagrams, which
 are six leveled ideograms of broken or unbroken lines. And the possible subset of these things
 is 64, which is an interesting number because it's the number which DNA operates on because
 it uses 64 codons. And in fact, I came to see that as no coincidence that actually life
 was organized around this number and the Qing as well, because both were subject to a set
 of rules which was surfacing in the phenomenon of biological organization and the organization
 of a Chinese oracular theory for understanding past and future time.
 And I looked at what is called the sequence, which is the way in which you move from one
 hexagram to the next. And I sought order there and found order that I think had been lost
 since pre-Han, perhaps pre-Zhou time. And I came to see the Qing as we possess it today
 as an archaeological artifact, a piece of broken machinery. It's like the turbine of
 a jet plane. You puzzle over it and you see that it could be used for something and you
 do use it for things and it's very effective. But it's really a piece of broken machinery
 from a very ancient technology which ceased to exist before the rise of the Han dynasty.
 And what it was, it was like a Taoist technology of understanding time that by the practice
 of certain techniques whose historical echoes I think you get in the stilling of the heart
 techniques of Vajrayana Buddhism, these people were able to see into the quantum mechanical
 foundations of thought and consciousness. And they noticed there a flux which they called
 the Tao. And it was a thing which came and went. The Tao Te Ching says the way that can
 be told of is not an unvarying way. And they stilled their body functions and they looked
 inward with a cataloging analytical mentality. And they noticed that while this flux was
 variable, it seemed to be not infinite in its contributing factors, but that in fact
 it seemed to have a pattern. And they discerned the pattern as revolving around the number
 64. In other words, they discerned through this process of meditation temporal elements
 that had a kind of ontological validity that the material elements of the periodic table
 have for matter, that there is not one kind of time or two kinds of time, but actually
 64 facets of the possible temporal jewel. And they saw that any moment in time was the
 combination and the overlay of this wave system which they called Tao. And it was a harmonic
 wave system. It had periods of self-expression which were very short in duration, on the
 order of seconds or hours or microseconds. It had levels of expression which were cognizable
 in the human world as years and decades and centuries. And it had vast resonant periods
 which were as large as history and then larger many times, periods of historical or periods
 of temporal resonance which could only be referenced to the life of the planet. And
 this is, I think, part of the Chinese notion of the Tao of heaven, earth and man. These
 are different speeds at which these temporal waves of conditioning of the world of phenomenal
 appearance are moving. And if you take an idea like this seriously, even as a personal
 discipline of thought, to picture it, to visualize it in a Vajrayana spirit, then you see that
 what's really being offered is a map of time. It's saying that the condition of knowing
 a fading past and facing an unanticipatable future is not an ontological condition. It
 is not an ontologically given necessity of existence, that it is possible to imagine
 an existence in which one saw into time the way we as animals see into the space in front
 of us so that we are able to run and leap and dance among the rocks. It's because we
 can see into space a creature or a culture that could see into time, could anticipate
 where the river of time would flow quickly, where it would broaden out and move slowly
 with a rich sense of the conservation of accomplishments achieved, where it would cascade and break
 up its previous patterns and produce great cataracts of novelty. A civilization which
 knew these things, or a person which knew these things about their own life, would claim
 a new dimension of existential freedom for being. I was having this whispering entity,
 this demon, this logos, show me these things. It was expressed on a very, very practical
 level. I mapped what is called the first order of difference in the sequence of the I Ching.
 That means how many lines change as you go from one hexagram to another. I discovered
 that it looked like a random wave. It looked like a stochastic slice, except that at the
 beginning and the end, there were tongue and groove points of fit if you rotated the thing
 180 degrees and brought it down against itself so that the thing achieved closure at the
 beginning and the end. This satisfied me that I was dealing with an artifact of nature,
 that I was dealing with an organized structure, either of nature or created by intelligence.
 And then, using the principle of hierarchical resonance and stacking of modules into hierarchies,
 which is really the principle by which all Chinese metaphysics has operated from the
 very beginning, I created a cosmic calendar, which had, where each level was a resonance
 of the level below it, but either collapsed or multiplied by a factor of 64. I discovered
 a very, well, recall that because the I Ching is 64 hexagrams with six lines of 64 hexagrams
 with six lines in each hexagram, it's composed basically of 384 yao, or lines. And I discovered
 that this number, 384, has a very interesting property. The cycle of the moon is 29.5 days,
 so that if you take 29.5 times 13, it's something like 383.93. And it seemed to me then immediately
 obvious that part of what the machinery of the I Ching was describing in the humanly
 cognizable phenomenal world was the cycle of the moon using a 384-day lunar calendar,
 which precessed 19 days a year against the solar calendar. And when you take that 384-day
 unit and multiply it times 64, you get 67 years and some months and days. This is exactly
 six 11-year sunspot cycles. And China is the first place where we have historical records
 of the observation of sunspots. So that's one sunspot cycle for each line in the six-line
 hexagram. Also, sunspot cycles have a greater peak every third cycle. So that's one large
 sunspot cycle for each hexagram in that trigram. And I saw then that there were these resonances.
 When you take that number, 67 years, again times 64, you get 4,306 years. And that works
 out to, let's see, 4,306, 200, 150 years for each zodiacal sign. So it's like each zodiacal
 sign is claimed, is slotted to one trigram. And these are all, notice that all these numbers
 that this resonance calendar is predicting are things visible to the naked eye. We're
 talking about movements of constellations, sunspots, and the moon. So I saw then that
 this was a tremendously powerful natural calendar that was a technology developed by proto-Taoist
 Central Asian shamanism very, very long ago. But it had this curious property of when the
 wave was mathematically analyzed in modern mathematical, by modern mathematical methods
 so that we could draw these maps of novelty, we could see then that it showed us the map
 of the temporal river from earliest beginnings to the collapse of the state vector at some
 time in the future. And so it was obvious then that if we could lay the map over the
 portion of reality we had already experienced, we could then propagate the map forward into
 the future and know and begin to take hold of ourselves in this other temporal dimension.
 And so it became a question of what is the best fit of this undulating wave of novelty?
 And I used the word novelty out of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy because he had
 this notion that novelty was the concrescing of a force which knits things together. And
 I like that. That's what I felt it was, that the Tao is making itself and that this compression
 of novelty through the speeding up of time will eventually reach a place where everything
 is connected to everything else. And this is, you know, the universe's self-birthing
 of itself. Well, you must be aware of all these very straight studies which say if we
 keep increasing how fast we go, by the year 2020 we'll go ten times the speed of light.
 If we keep increasing how much energy we release, by so and so we'll release the energy in the
 sun. The propagation of all these curves of development become asymptotic and then nobody
 knows how to interpret what they mean. They just seem to mean that the whole culture is
 going to go kazawe, you know. And this is sort of the idea that this theory implies.
 It implies that far from the universe being a steady state entity, uninfluenced by the
 existence of the human mind, which is going to go on and exist for billions of years until
 the stars burn out and the second law of thermodynamics is going to reduce everything to heat death,
 that that's all wrong, 100% wrong. And that actually the universe is made by mind, within
 and without organism. And that mind is capable of bootstrap leaps in its organizational self-expression.
 And that we are privileged to be the witnesses of the final act of life going through some
 kind of immense transformative unfolding from itself in a kind of vortex which has been
 building on this planet for billions of years, but which has been accelerating to such excruciating
 intensities over the last 25,000 years that it has called forth self-reflective intelligence
 from the monkeys and the invention of quantum physics and space flight and shamanism. And
 it is novelty upon novelty, novelty so intensified that the genetic machinery can no longer carry
 it and it bubbles out into the epigenetic, into art and language and poetry and religion
 and religious mania and romanticism and all of these things. It is a progressive, progressive
 knitting together and expression of the universe's will to become that causes me to think that
 we may be in the shorter gyres, as William Butler Yeats called them, the shortening spirals
 of this vortex of novelty and compression. You see a curious quality about this kind
 of cosmology that I'm describing, a cosmology where each epoch is preceded by an epoch which
 is a 64 times greater in duration. The curious thing about that is that you only need about
 20 instances of multiplication before you go from a period of time smaller than the
 duration of Planck's constant, which is 1.55 times 10 to the minus 23, which is a very
 short period of time, to then by 20 multiplications of 64 you reach a period of time in excess
 of the required time for the age of the universe, a period of time on the order of 72 billion
 years. Well, if each time the spiral goes into a state of collapse at the end of one
 of its cycles, then in the last 384 days of the existence of a universe like that, it
 would transit through half of its epochs of transition. Do you see what I mean? It's like
 a screaming Mimi. It really winds up. Instead of the vision which physics gives us is that
 the really rapid transitions of phase and state occurred at the beginning of the universe.
 Whole professional lives are given over to discussing the first 10 picoseconds of the
 physics of the universe, right? Well, I'm saying I don't care about that. I think that
 the really interesting stuff will happen in a big hurry at the end of the universe, that
 the picture that the second law of thermodynamics gives us of just, you know, tumescence, maximum
 detumescence is what it's picturing, is all wrong, and that actually this strange hyperdimensional
 force in the universe called life and information transfer is in the process of working itself
 up into a real tizzy and wrapping all space and time around itself. And what was startling
 and what made me think that maybe I was losing my marbles was that when you look at time
 that way and push these novelty graphs against the historical continuum, I reached the conclusion
 that we entered the last 67-year period before the collapse of the state vector at 8.30 in
 the morning on August the 6th, 1945, when the atomic bomb went off over Hiroshima. You
 see, it was a temporal reflection of the birth of the universe. It was actually a, you could
 call it an event, which was a reincarnation of the Big Bang, because each cycle begins
 with a bang. And that cycle, the fact that human beings had used atomic weapons on other
 human beings meant that we had entered a new era, a new epoch of moral danger. And I think
 moral danger and the stakes had been raised by a power of 64 to a new level. Now, using
 the mathematics inherent in the cycle, if you propagate forward from that date, 67 years,
 104.25 days, you reach late November of 2012 A.D. And I consider that to be a very important
 date. And I concluded, based on all kinds of factors, personal and historical and so
 forth, that that was the fit, that if Hiroshima was day one, then the place where it all came
 together was this date in 2012. And I worked with that for several years before some kind
 of a new date, and I think that's what I'm going to use as a reference. And I think that
 the Mayan calendar, which is a cycle of three, the long count calendar I'm now talking about,
 is a cycle of 13 time periods, which are called bactunes. And the bactune is 396 years in
 duration. After 13 bactunes, the world ends completely. And the 13th bactune of the classic
 Mayan long count calendar is the winter solstice of A.D. 2012, within 30 days of the date that
 I had fastened in on using a completely different path of analysis. And so this raised all kinds
 of questions, one of which is, is it simply that individuals and civilizations, or is
 it that individuals and civilizations who take mushrooms become, I want to say, privy/engulfed
 by a certain mathematical secret about the cosmic machinery? What is so important about
 this date in 2012? You know, the Mesoamerican cultures have the most uncanny history of
 successful prophecy in the world. I mean, the Aztecs anticipated the coming of the Spanish.
 The day, the book of Chilambelum gives the day when the Spaniards would weigh anchor
 off the coast of Mexico. And of course, the fact that it happened exactly as prophesied
 was a major undoing of that civilization. So I put this out. This was a very confusing
 experience for me to channel or transmit this idea, because I was interested in the I Ching.
 I had carried it with me in India. I used to throw it at each full moon, but I was not
 mathematically inclined. Reading the philosophy of science, and people like Paul Feyerabend
 and Imre Lakatos, and reading the history of science, and Thomas Kuhn, and all of those
 people trying to understand, you know, well, what is a true idea? What is true and what
 is false? And when you have an idea which makes claims as sweeping as these, then you
 want to try to understand just what the limits of knowability are. And I discovered that
 all you can require of any idea is that it be self-consistent, that it not generate any
 contradictions within its own set of rules, you see. And that's why astrology is beyond
 criticism, because astrology is a mathematical theory with an interpretive exegesis attached
 to it. And who can quibble with the mathematical theory? Well, then the interpretational exegesis
 has to do with the sensitivity and subtlety of the interpreter. Well, isn't this true
 of mathematical data in science, exactly the same way? So I discovered that what I had
 created was a self-consistent idea that appears to be sealed beyond refutation in some weird
 and uncanny way, which makes it seem very non-human, because you can't really find your
 way into telling whether it can be answerable to the notion of objective truth. So what
 I've decided about it is that it's a teaching, or it's an exemplary model about how all process
 goes on. And it's a way of learning how things happen, to see time as a modulated flux of
 elements, to see it as a series of waves moving at different speeds, through which you are
 taking a vertical slice and then stacking that slice. And that gives rise to the multiplistic
 ever-changing flux that is called the now. It is actually made up of reflections and
 adumbrations of the past, and it's made up of anticipatory shock waves and intimations
 of the future. The past and the future are co-present in the now. They are, in fact,
 what's making it happen. You can almost think of it as a hologram, or a standing wave, where
 you have two wave systems, one from the past, one from the future, and where they cross,
 an interference pattern forms, which has a curious stability as a system in and of itself.
 And yet it's almost a ghost created by these other two realities. And that is the moving
 present. And mathematically, this notion of time that I evolved delivers the map of novelty,
 a two-variable flux, a wandering line graph that's very pleasing for arguing with formalists.
 But what lurks behind it, and what is so rich for the romantic and the shaman and the poet,
 is this wandering line graph is the composite of the overlay of certain historical time
 periods, which are in a state of flux at various speeds, so that they give rise to an endless
 kaleidoscopic unfolding in what we call three-dimensional space, and of what we call reality. And this
 is why I often mention Finnegan's Wake in my lectures, because Joyce understood this.
 He understood that every moment is caused by everything that happened in the past, and
 everything that happened in the future. And I like to give the trivial example that you
 find yourself in Hadrian's hamburger joint. This is because the Emperor Hadrian invaded
 England in a certain year and conducted a campaign. We are ghosts of past and future
 events. And what the chaos at the end of history that we are now living through is, is that
 for thousands and thousands of years, people have felt a vague thing calling across time
 to humanness, calling us to be a certain way, to practice certain rituals, to observe the
 stars, to observe the plants, to observe birth and observe death, a calling. And that thing,
 which some people have called God, whatever it is, is throwing a gigantic shadow over
 human history now, because now the creode of development that leads to our merging with
 this thing, the walls are very steep, the water is moving very swiftly, and it's almost
 as though the future event is throwing off great sparks that are themselves faceted,
 contradictory epitomizations of this mystery. This is what Mohammed and Christ and Buddha
 are. They are human personalities that were situated in time in such a way that they became
 macrocosmic reflections of the superordinate, edemic humanity that is going to be generated
 at the end of history. And we are close. We are close. It is, all of history can be seen
 as the shockwave of this eschatological event. This is what the prophets were anticipating.
 The culmination of man's God-making effort in time will be the perfection and the release
 of the human soul. And it's not that we are doing it, you see. It's that a natural law
 that we were previously unaware of is inexorably unfolding. And that is what all this cross-connectedness
 of man into matter, plant into animal, earth into space, all of this flowing and interconnectedness,
 this reaches right down into the rocks of the planet. This is not simply a phenomenon
 of biology. This is the unfolding of a general law of which biology is only the cutting edge
 of a wedge of becomingness which includes all being and reaches right down into the
 neutrinos. And it is, you know, to be a being in time is to share in the immense freedom
 of precognitive anticipation that fills the universe in anticipation of this event. And
 that's what being is. And that's why it's so rich and so complete within itself and
 yet always somehow pointing beyond itself. Because the richness of the matrix through
 which we are moving is incomparable and beautiful. And so this is the basis of my extreme optimism
 is I think that everything is under control, that we are in the grip of a force so powerful
 that the notion that we could jeopardize or overthrow it is completely preposterous because
 we are acting in accordance with a resonance that was set going millions and millions of
 years ago. And of course being is fraught with danger but the stakes are, you know,
 to be at play in the fields of the Lord, to be at rest in the mansions of the goddess.
 And it's soon, I think, at least the historical mimicking of it is clearly soon because the
 thrust toward the millennium of this society will not be turned aside. If it is not a law
 of the universe, then it will become a myth of human beings and be created anyway. So
 since we are human beings, I see us as the central actors in that mandala. I mean, this
 is the task of the next hundred or five hundred years to realize the alchemical nature of
 humanity and being and have everything fused into a supernuminous concrescence that is
 time, Joyce said, all space in a nutshell. You know, all time bound into a lenticular
 vehicle which is both everyone's and mine alone and yours alone and yours alone.
 Yours alone.
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