[ Music ]
 >> I was not an I Ching scholar.
 I was not a signologist.
 I certainly was not a mathematician.
 But this inner prompting would give me no peace
 until I proceeded along this line to its conclusion.
 Well, I of course, the bewildered recipient
 of this information, was trying to figure out to get ahead
 of the game and say, you know, where is this headed?
 What is this thing trying to show me?
 And I decided it must be that what's happening here is I'm
 discovering an ancient Chinese calendar.
 Because, you know, there are 64 hexagrams and six lines
 in each hexagram.
 That gives a grand total of 384 lines or yow.
 That's an interesting number.
 A lunation, a lunar cycle is 29 point something days.
 Anyway, 13 of them are 383 point 89 days.
 It's within a decimal fraction of 384.
 And I thought, aha, I'm sort of like the guy
 who decoded Stonehenge or something.
 This is an agricultural calendar of 13 lunar cycles
 from ancient China, apparently.
 And of course, the obvious objection
 from people was, but what a lousy calendar.
 It slips 19 days per year against the sun.
 It's 19 days more than a solar year.
 But I think that there may have been a reason for that.
 You see, we in the West are static freaks, stability freaks.
 So we have a calendar that does not move
 against the fixed stars.
 The equinoctial and solsticial points only move
 with the precession of the equinoxes,
 which is this very large cycle that you can't do anything about.
 But in an ordinary human life, it's hardly noticeable.
 It only moves one zodiacal sign every 2,000 years.
 So that tells you how slowly it moves.
 We are stability freaks.
 But if you had a calendar that precessed 19 days
 against the solar year, a lunar calendar,
 then you would have a calendar whose entire message was change,
 flux, flow.
 You would be born, if you were born at Christmastime
 and Christmas fell in winter at your birth,
 before you saw death at age 60,
 you would have celebrated Christmas in the springtime,
 at high summer, in early fall, in late fall.
 The entire sliding and slipping of the cosmic machinery
 would teach you a lesson the Western mind doesn't want to learn,
 which is, as Heraclitus said, "Pante greia,"
 all flows, all flows, nothing lasts.
 So I played with that for a while and it was interesting,
 but I was not given peace by my muse who said, "No, no, this is,
 Terrence, this is stupid stuff."
 You know that poem by A.E. Hausman?
 Anyway, there was more to it.
 And so finally I realized, or I was told,
 treat your wave as though it were the lowest unit
 in a modular hierarchy that is structured the way the I Ching is structured.
 OK, so that sounds arcane, but I'll explain what it means.
 It's fairly straightforward.
 It means take the wave with the 384 Yao,
 the 64 hexagrams running in two directions.
 And by the way, there are old sayings in the I Ching which say stuff like
 the forward running numbers refer to the past,
 the backward running numbers refer to the future.
 Well, in the I Ching as we have it today,
 there are neither forward nor backward running numbers.
 There are just numbers.
 So I had the confidence, aha, I'm like an noetic archaeologist
 with nut pick and toothbrush.
 I am reconstructing a crushed intellectual object,
 which if I can get it all cleaned off and going again, it will be
 it's the original cuckoo clock or Ferrari or whatever it was.
 Bear with me, we're almost over the top here.
 I took the little wave and I put six of them in a row
 to represent six lines.
 And then I took the wave and I magnified it by a power of three.
 So there was three times bigger than it had been.
 And I laid two of those over my six
 to represent the two trigrams that are components of each hexagram.
 And then I took my original way and I magnified it by a power of six
 and I laid it over the six little ones, over the two middle sized ones.
 I laid one big one representing a hexagram in its unitary totality.
 Well, and I felt a great sense of satisfaction when this was all done.
 And these had all been generated from the same point.
 And now what I had at this point was an eight and a half foot
 long piece of paper, graph paper covered with colored pen strokes
 and tiny crab like numbers, which I kept rolled in a bamboo tube.
 And I would corner people in dime stores and bus stations.
 And I would say, you know what this is?
 This is a math of history.
 This is a picture of time.
 This is how things happen.
 Well, it triggered a lot of alarm in my immediate circle.
 And my friends were having the what should be done meetings, you know,
 which it's always a bad sign when your friends hold meetings
 to decide what should be done.
 And finally, Ralph Abraham, who's a great friend and mathematician.
 He said to me, he said, you know what you have is an occult object.
 Nobody understands this thing but you.
 And it may make sense and it may may not make sense.
 But the point is, no one can tell.
 And what you have to do if you want to be taken seriously
 is you have to take this structure
 and you have to turn it into an ordinary mathematical object
 so that fellow mathematicians
 can participate in this dialogue with you.
 Well, essentially, it was like telling a Hottentot
 to fly supersonically or something.
 I had no clue. I am not a mathematician.
 I had no clue.
 And I was sort of hoping Ralph would do it for me, you know,
 that I could con some smart guy into doing it for me.
 So that's where it's sat for a couple of years.
 And one afternoon I was getting loaded and the as I rarely do.
 And the light was slanting in through some curtains.
 And I was watching dust motes swim in the sunbeam.
 And I just like got it.
 I understood almost instantly how to carry out.
 [Bell ringing]
 [Laughter]
 [Indistinct chatter]
 [Laughter]
 Clever, these technocrats.
 Where was I? Help me out.
 [Indistinct chatter]
 Oh, yes.
 It showed me how to take this thing
 and change it into an ordinary mathematical object.
 And the good news for you this afternoon
 is that I'm not going to bore you with this.
 It's done. It's trivial.
 If you're absolutely obsessed with all this,
 you can read the invisible landscape where it's all set out.
 The point being it's all been gone over by experts
 and it's solid as a rock.
 And so we don't have to worry about it.
 But what the transformation of that occult object
 into an ordinary mathematical object left me with
 was a very bizarre fractal waveform
 which I have calibrated to history.
 And I believe at this point,
 this entire rap would have entered the annals
 of exotic pathology and died there
 were it not for the fact that I maintain
 that this wave actually works
 and that we can not only predict the future with this puppy,
 which is an easy enough thing to do
 because who can say you're wrong?
 You know, you just wave your arms and gesticulate wildly.
 But we can not only predict the future,
 we can predict the past.
 Is there a price to pay? I don't know.
 It sounds like a Promethean paranoia to me.
 There may be a price to pay,
 but I don't think necessarily so.
 I think it has a lot to do with attitude.
 Like for instance, I never, ever, ever, ever, ever
 try to do anything in those states.
 Like I don't try to get lovers, lose lovers,
 make money, lose money.
 I do not want to use it in any way.
 I say all I want to do is look.
 I am unworthy to do more.
 And it's not modesty.
 We're all unworthy to do more.
 And a lot of people try to grab at it
 and say, "Oh, wow, this is power."
 I've never thought of it as power.
 And I think that if you are simply content to adore it,
 no harm can come to you.
 But when you start trying to figure out
 how you could fold it into your agenda,
 then God help you.
 Because, you know, it can leave you mad,
 broken in the can in a moment.
 So it's very much about the intent.
 My goals are very modest.
 I'm very pleased that it chose to confide
 so concrete an idea in me.
 But if it had never chosen to do that,
 I still would die a happy man
 with the unspeakable experiences of beauty
 that it has shared with me.
 Because my psychedelic trips these days
 are not about the time wave.
 The time wave is pretty much a done deal.
 So I think it's like everything else in life.
 Intent is everything.
 And impeccability means in that domain,
 do not seek to use.
 Do not seek to use.
 It's a religious mystery.
 And that doesn't mean it's an unsolved problem.
 It means a mystery.
 And life is only worth living
 as long as the mysteries continue to inform,
 transform, and inspire us.
 And the last thing I want to say,
 and then I'll leave you,
 is the truth can take care of itself.
 You don't have to approach the truth
 with eyes lowered and gaze averted
 on bended knee.
 That's how you approach bullshit.
 But the truth is so powerful
 that you can kick the tires,
 turn over the engine,
 check the odometer,
 and nobody is offended.
 Truth is real.
 It can stand the test.
 And that's why, you know,
 I went all over the world
 looking at various spiritual traditions.
 I don't feel it's putting them down
 to say that they were ineffective
 because they were all great aspirations.
 But the only real open doorway
 that I ever found were the plans.
 This works.
 You know, in other spiritual disciplines,
 everybody wants to go faster.
 They want the Roshi to give them
 further empowerments.
 They want further information,
 postures, secret teachings,
 so forth and so on.
 Once you reach the psychedelic experience,
 the accelerator is far less interesting
 than the location of the brakes.
 That's what we're looking for.
 We're not trying to push.
 We all know how to push this so fast
 we can't stand it.
 [music]
 ♪ Nobody can get a grip on things like you ♪
 ♪ You look so beautiful ♪
 ♪ I think it's just like you ♪
 ♪ Above all ♪
 ♪ I'm gonna come back and know ♪
 ♪ That it's me ♪
 ♪ You ♪
 ♪ You ♪
 [Music]


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