With tape six. And then you see everything that the church fathers tossed out. Because you see the canon, the New Testament is a group of accounts that were able to survive the sorting process of the Council of Nicaea. And there was a huge literature which was just tossed out as being too weird. I mean, read the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Thomas. Have you all looked at the Nag Hammadi Library? Do you know what this is? The Nag Hammadi Library is 42 texts which were dug up in Upper Egypt in 1948 at a Coptic monastery called Chenaboskion. 42 texts that went into the ground A.D. 220. Means nobody has been able to put a finger on them since A.D. 220. It's like a fossil of Christianity in the 3rd century. Well, my God, you can barely map it on to the cheerful religion that we inherit as Christianity. I mean, it is an exotic and complicated situation. It's very well worth reading. James... Why don't you go to research something? Oh, I'm sure the metaphysical bookstore in Berkeley, I mean in Boulder, will sell you... James M. Robinson is the editor and it's called the Nag Hammadi Library. 42 texts reflecting early Christianity, Gnosticism, so forth and so on. Hans Jonas is a brilliant... his book Gnosticism, the message of the alien God to infant Christianity. If that's not a title to die for. [Audience laughter] Huh? Oh, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrypha of the New Testament by Charles. And that's a... that weighs in at about 35 pounds. But theological libraries will have it, but it's in the locked case. You don't want seminarians mucking around with this kind of stuff. I'd mention the Urantia book too, which has about 2,000 pages on the life of Christ. And covers those years after 30... I guess after 20 or so. That's right, the Urantia book is a very spectacular and early example of channeling before it was even named. And very interesting, of all the channeled material, the Urantia book for pure grandiosity puts everybody else to shame, right? They talk about seeding the planet. Yeah, well, these are persistent themes, you know. I mean, all of Gnosticism is the perception that we don't belong here. That we are creatures of another realm. Beings of light who, because of some horrible cosmic mistake, have been trapped in the world of matter. And the Gnostics take the Pentatech, the first five books of Moses, and turn it into a nightmare story. And say that, you know, the God of this world, which in Jewish tradition is called Yawa, who is the creator of the world. For the Gnostics, he is not the real God at all. He's the Demiurge. He's a kind of mad God who has entrapped the light. And the task of salvation is to gather the light and then release it back to its hidden higher source beyond the machinery of cosmic fate. Well, that's good. It's sort of like, you know, the Mandukya Upanishad. It's my favorite Upanishad because it's the shortest. It's only a page and a half long, which, you know, others should have been so similarly inspired to brevity. But it's the breath of Brahman. It traces, it's the description of one exhalation, inhalation cycle. Yeah. I know people quote it and say, "Yawah." Yeah. "Yawah." Well, you're not even supposed to say it if you're orthodox. G-D. Yeah. [inaudible] Well, I don't know too much about Rastafarianism. It was founded by Marcus Garvey and had this notion of return to Africa. You know, syncretism is always with us. Gnosticism was characterized by syncretism. The whole late Hellenic religious efflorescence was largely syncretic. And certainly that's what we have now. I mean, you know, the New Age, you go to these fairs and the people who are talking to the Pleiades have the booth next to the people who are talking to Zinebel Genubi. And both have world plans from the Saucerian Allfathers. And the two plans are different. And you just, "Hey." You know. [inaudible] No, I agree. There are two sentiments loose in the world. And you're going to not get through this life without taking sides. You know, do you believe that our destiny is in another dimension made of light on the other side of the universe? Or do you believe that we should, you know, clean up the rain forests and save the planet? You want to be very careful with your political agenda. One of my sub-interests, which sort of has a relationship to this, but it's oblique, is asteroidal impacts. I think asteroidal impacts are one of the great undiscussed factors in evolution. That every solid body in the solar system is heavily cratered with impacts by in-falling bodies. There's this thing down in Arizona that only happened 50,000 years ago. It was a piss-ant sized object. And everything within 800 miles of the impact point died instantly. It dug a whole half a mile into the ground. It was a nothing burger. This thing which came down 65 million years ago, they now think on the Yucatan, it killed everything on the earth larger than a chicken died. You know, I mean, you want to talk about ecotastrophe. I mean, we have never, you can't even conceive of what it's like when something like that happens to a planet. They estimate that at the velocity this thing must have been traveling, it was five miles into the planet in the first second and a half. It raised a wall of rocks 6,000 feet high that moved outward at Mach 7. [laughter] I mean, yeah. And the planet rang for a million years, you know. But if it hadn't been for that, there would be no flowering plants, no triumph of the mammals, no Whitney Houston, no-- [Audience member] It's a sperm entering egg. Well, but suppose, you know, there's all this tumult in our psyche about the great change that's supposed to happen and where are we supposed to put our political energies and what are we supposed to be doing? Well, it would be pretty ironic if we, you know, beat ourselves over the head and save the rainforest and all this malarkey, and then this something came down and just turned the whole thing into hash. Then people would say, "My God, how could we have been so stupid? We should have been extracting and sequestering U-235 and plutonium. We should have been building starships the size of Montana. We should have been sparing no effort." And what did we do? We replanted rainforests. And now look, the whole thing-- So you have to--you know, good intentions are not sufficient. You have to locate where the threat is coming from and act accordingly. There are no points for good intentions in the game of evolution. So mind--and we have to decide, you know, what does life want? Is it that life at its most basic level senses the finite duration of the star's life? And so it wants to use this moment of sunshine to build something that could carry us out into the mainstream of the galaxy to the denser star fields? Or, you know, is that some kind of Titanic, Apollonian, male-dominated, techno-fascist, materialist trip? And what we need to do is cultivate gentleness and attention to the bugs and the grasses and the water. I don't have an answer to that. I think it's a real dilemma. I think people who think they do have answers but haven't really connected with how ambiguous the situation really is. How can you do both? What says the mushroom? Well, no, I mean, some people can do-- Well, what the mushroom says is it's a total apocalyptarian. I mean, it says, "Rouse your camels. Pack your tents. We're moving out. This has been fine for a while, but ahead lie worlds of unimaginable challenge at great distance." But, of course, the mushroom sounds like a techno-fascist, hortatory, male-dominator when it talks like that. You take ayahuasca and it says, "Clean up the rivers. Care for the children. Replant the forest." Well-- But then you have to look at the mushroom, possibly being the universal traveler that it is, it has that urge. It's got the wanderlust. So, of course, it's going to be a-- That's right. It has nomadic ethics, so it pushes nomadic solutions, where the ayahuasca, an enormous jungle plant, a flowering plant, a creature born out of the last catastrophe, just like we are, has a different agenda. No, the demons are of many kinds. Some are made of ions, some of mind. The ones of DMT you'll find stutter often and are blind. It means, you know, just because somebody-- just because-- Somebody once said of channeling, "Just because somebody's dead doesn't mean they're smart." So-- It could be, you know. Everybody has their own agenda. Well, why don't we break-- Yeah, question. Last question. What's the logical defense? Are you aware of Fred Hoyle's work? On the steady state or something? On viruses. Oh, yeah. The panspermia theory. Yeah. And, again, that argues strongly for high tech. Even AIDS may not have come out of Fort Detrick, but it may actually have come out of space. And Hoyle has an impressive array of statistics that link planetary presence in near orbit to viral disease. Yeah, well, I think that the next revolution in biology is so obvious that you can be totally radical and completely confident you're on safe ground and say the next great revolution in biology is the realization that space is not a barrier to life and that technology is only one method for traversing between the stars. If, in fact, planets are regularly pulverized by cosmic catastrophes, then they must be like bursting seed pods and everything is subjected to a tremendous evolutionary hammering. But spores, viruses, stuff like that, particulate matter, it just drifts out between the stars and then when it finds another suitable environment, it breaks out. We don't know what the constraints on life are. The oceans of Europa could harbor life. These hot vent, sulfur vent organisms that we find in the deep oceans here, they could survive in the oceans of Europa. If there were hot sulfur vents at the bottom of those oceans, those organisms wouldn't bat an eye. Is Europa covered with ice? Europa is covered with ice, but underneath the ice is water and there are fractures. And, you know, the exotic chemistries and pressures and temperatures of the Jovian environment could produce life. We don't know what the constraints are. If cometary environments are a better place for life to arise than a warm pond on a newly condensed planet, then all bets are off as to what, you know, planetary surfaces may be unlikely places for life to get going. It's hard to say. It seems to say there are gaseous creatures on gaseous planets. That's right. We don't know. You could have life at temperatures and pressures where we couldn't exist for a microsecond, like at the bottom of the Jovian atmosphere, something like that. No, there's more mystery than anything else. Okay, the notion here is I've always felt that the psychedelic experience should be good for something in a very practical sense. And I always felt that there was something that you should be able to learn that was very hard to bring out. And we talked a little bit yesterday about this strange episode that happened in the Amazon where instead of an ordinary trip, it was locked in for weeks and weeks, and then people differed as to whether it was a transformative incident or a psychosis or what exactly it was. But what happened was, or what I think wants to happen in every psychedelic experience is that there is a totality symbol. You know, Jung tried to get his patients to make mandalas because he said they were totality symbols. Well, eventually, the totality symbol is more than a symbol. It actually becomes a true map of the totality. And what this boils down to is a kind of very strange revelation about the nature of the I Ching that takes very seriously the idea that the I Ching is a tool for studying time, but then takes the idea much further. It's hard to give this lecture. It's hard to listen to this lecture because the learning curve is steep, and you just have to stick with it for a while, and then there will be pay dirt. But you have to bear with me. And I had to bear with the entity which was revealing this stuff to me because it took the form of a-- Are you all familiar with the idea of a koan? This is something that your guru, a little saying or something that your guru gives you that if you can figure it out, then you move on to the next stage. Well, so the koan that I was presented with had to do with the I Ching, which I was not that passionately fascinated by. I was just sort of mildly interested in it like a lot of other freaks, and I was not at all mathematically inclined. I mean, that I am the author of a theory of pure mathematics is as astonishing to me as it is to anybody else, I'm sure. Basically, as you know, but let me review it, the I Ching is a Chinese system of divination that uses 64 structures called hexagrams. And hexagrams are made of broken and unbroken lines stacked one above another, and they are--the sum total of the possible set of such structures is 64. And it's been remarked by a number of people that the I Ching has peculiar structural affinities with the DNA, but nobody has ever really known what to make of that. Well, this dialogue with this mushroom entity began by posing a very simple question, which is, as you know, most of you, the I Ching hexagrams occur in a sequence which is called the King Wen sequence, which is very old. In fact, portions of the King Wen sequence are scratched on shoulder scapula that are 3,500 years old. It's possible to argue that the King Wen sequence of the I Ching is the oldest abstract sequence in the world. The question is, or what the koan was, was, is the King Wen sequence a sequence, or is it simply a jumble of hexagrams that over time has become traditionally sanctioned as the sequence? In other words, if it's a sequence, you should be able to write the rules that generate that sequence and no other. So let me dig into this here. The first hexagram--can you see this colored chalk? We have two other choices. We have an orange and blue. Here, we'll do a visual test. Ooh. Is this the stuff? Okay. Why is this so half-acid, as they say? So here's the first hexagram. It's called the creative, and it's made of six lines. This is no news to anybody, I hope. Here's the second hexagram. It's called the receptive. The yellow? Okay, let me do these this way, and then I'll switch. So when I started looking at this question of the order in the I Ching, the first thing I saw--it only took me about ten minutes of just looking at it--and I noticed, and I'm not the first person to have noticed this, that it isn't 64 hexagrams. It's 32 pairs of hexagrams, and the second member of each pair is formed by turning the first member upside down. Do you see? So that only took ten minutes. That was no problem. Now, there are eight cases in the I Ching where inverting the first hexagram causes no change because of the nature of its structure. You meet the first case here. Obviously, if you turn this thing upside down, it's still six unbroken lines. So in the eight cases where inverting a hexagram causes no change, a second rule is generated. The second rule is if inverting the first hexagram causes no change, then all lines change. Very straightforward, right? But now, the problem, the koan, has changed, and the question is what rules order the 32 pairs? And this was much trickier, much trickier. And after a while, the prompting voice said, "Look at the first order of difference." This is just a fancy way of saying, "Count how many lines change as you go from one hexagram to another. If you go from this hexagram to this hexagram, how many lines change?" Six. So the first order of difference is six between these two hexagrams. Similarly, we can go from two to three, and there will be another first order of difference. Now, logic should tell you that the values of the first order of difference are going to be whole numbers, one through six, right? What I did was I went through the I Ching and actually checked on these, and I discovered it again immediately. What jumped out at me was there were no fives. So we wrote computer programs to randomly arrange hexagrams and check for fives, and we discovered fives are as common as any other number. The exclusion of fives in the King Wen sequence was a human decision. Someone didn't want fives to show up in the first order of difference. Okay. So then I looked at these values, and what I discovered was when you-- inside the pairs, when you invert one to get the other, the first order of difference is always an even number. So within the pairs, you have no freedom. It's going to be an even number. Between the pairs, you can arrange them so that you get odd numbers or even numbers, and what I discovered was between the pairs, half are odd and half are even. Again, human agency did this. We wrote computer programs to randomly throw hexagram sequences and test for this quality, and we found that only one in every 7,500 times could you expect to get a sequence which would be 25% odd, 75% even, which is what this enforces. So I was very excited by this because I said, "Wow, there's all this hidden stuff in the yin-yang that I've never-- Why is this thing inching up on me? This thing? Okay. So I thought, "How weird that all this structure is in there," and I'd read all of Wilhelm's commentaries and Lama Govinda and these people, and it didn't seem that they had noticed this kind of stuff, so I was very excited. I thought that I was really onto something, and I made a graph of the first order of difference, and it looked something like this. Of course, it has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 on this axis. [Audience member speaking indistinctly] Blue. And 1, 2, 3, 4, to 64 this way because there are 64 hexagrams, and then I drew the first order of difference. Now, notice--Remember, this was 6, so up here we put a point, and the next one is something else, and the next one is something else, and then we connect the points, and what you get is a structure which looks like this, roughly. In other words, it looks stochastic. It looks random. It doesn't look like you're on the track of any kind of order here, except that I noticed a really funny thing about this. What I noticed was that this section and this section are mirror images of each other, so imagine for a moment that you have a copy of this right here. What you're then able to do is rotate the copy 180 degrees within the plane, and you'll discover that it fits perfectly in here. It dovetails at the beginning and at the end, but nowhere in between. This is, again, a product of human decision. Someone made it so that it would do this, and the question is why. Why would anyone want to do that? And when it works, you have hexagram 1 across from hexagram 63, and hexagram 2 across from 62, 62. In other words, these always sum to 64 when it's in the right position. So I just thought that I was uncovering some kind of like, you know, the equivalent of Chinese Kabbalism, some kind of lost intellectual system, but the voice said to me, it said, "This is a picture of time," and I couldn't understand what exactly was meant by that. It seemed to me a fairly esoteric thing to assert that it was a picture of time. Now, remember there are 64 hexagrams in the I Ching, and they have 6 lines each. 6 times 64 is 384. When it told me that this was a picture of time, I began to entertain the idea that this somehow could be used as a calendar. So then I said, "Well, what it is, is it's the whole I Ching running one way, and the whole I Ching running backwards the other way, combined into this peculiar structure which has 384 data points in it, which are the lines or so-called Yao of the I Ching. Now, 384 is 19 days longer than the solar year length. So if you had a calendar of 384 days, it would precess against the equinoxes 19 days every year. So it doesn't seem a good candidate for a calendar if you're trying to keep solar dynamics central. But I discovered something weird about this number, 384 days. Now think of it as days. And that is that peculiar things happen when you multiply this number by numbers that are inherent to the structure of the I Ching. When you multiply this number by 64, you get a day number, which when you break it down into years, is 67 years, 104.25 days. Now, what's interesting about that number is that it is six sunspot cycles of 11 plus years. There's also a major sunspot cycle of 33 years. So it meant each line in a super hexagram made by multiplying this number will be associated with one sunspot cycle. And the trigrams inside the hexagram will be associated with the major sunspot cycle. Well, when you take 67 years, 104.25 days, again by 64, you get 4,306 years plus some days. This number is very close to twice the amount of time that it takes for a zodiacal era, such as the age of Pisces or the age of Aquarius. They last roughly this long. Well, if you take this number by 6, not 64, but 6, which is a legitimate number because it's built into the I Ching, you get 25,000 years, roughly. This is the precession of the great year or the equinoctial year, as it's called. So I thought, "Wow, this is really far out." It's some kind of multileveled resonance calendar. Oh, and I forgot to say about 384 days--this was central, excuse me-- that this is 13 lunations. A lunation is 25--is 29 point something days, and when you multiply that number by 13, you get 383.89. So I said, "Aha, what this thing is, is it keeps track of the moon on this level, it keeps track of the sunspots on this level, and it keeps track of the great year of the zodiac on this level, all naked-eye astronomical phenomenon, not hypothesizing any advanced technology, but hypothesizing an advanced intellectual point of view." Well, so I thought I was finished, and that somehow it wanted to tell me about a Neolithic calendar in ancient China for some reason, but there was more. Popeye had spinach, I have this. The prompting voice said, "This structure which you have created"-- and by the way, some of you who are scholars of the I Ching, remember in the second half of the Wilhelm Baines translation, there are a whole bunch of very ancient sayings that nobody knows what they're talking about. They're so esoteric. And the most mysterious of these sayings is the saying which says, "The forward-running numbers refer to the future. The backward-running numbers refer to the past." Well, in the I Ching, there are no forward or backward-running numbers unless you do something like this. And then look what you get--1, 2, 3, 63, 62, 61, 60, 59. You get forward and backward-running numbers. So I said, "Wow, we're digging this thing out." The I Ching is not an oracle as it's been done at country fairs for three millennia. The I Ching as we possess it is a piece of broken machinery. It's as though you had the main gear out of a machine and you're trying by archaeological reconstruction to rebuild that machine. So I was sort of stuck at this point, and the prompting voice turned on and said, "This structure which you've made, which is the entire I Ching running forward and backward against itself," which would place it then at the top of a hierarchy, "should be placed at the bottom of a hierarchy. Treat this thing as a single line," it said. And I was calling this at that point the simple wave. It said, "Treat the simple wave as a line in a hexagram." Well, when you do that--bear with me, folks. Remember, I said the learning curve was steep. However, it's not long. [Audience member] Can I ask if we have a vote on what color chalk to use? Oh, yeah. What color? Yellow. Yellow? Let me see. Okay, well, so if we treat this module as the bottom of a hierarchy, then we want to treat it like a line. So what do you do with lines in I Ching land? You stack six of them on top of each other. So I'm going to symbolize this thing with an "S." Okay? So here's what I did. I took one of them and another one and another one and another one. And I said, "Did I do good?" And it said, "Sort of, but a hexagram is more than six lines, isn't it?" And I said, "Well, what more is it than six lines?" And it said, "Well, it's two trigrams." It said, "Oh, okay." So then I went like this. Do you see how I superimposed the thing over the six, two larger ones which were superimposed over three? So then I said, "Is that right?" It said, "Yes, except you forgot one thing. A hexagram has an identity as a whole, as a hexagram." I said, "Okay. Good?" It said, "Yes, good. Now what are you going to do with it?" And I'll show this to you just so you can get the idea. I don't know how visible this will be. This is what you get if you do that. And what it looks like is exactly what it looks like, which is a hodgepodge of crazy lines running everywhere on three levels. And the thing said to me, it said, "This is a map of time." And I made the mistake of saying to my friends and acquaintances, "This is a map of time." And they said, "You know, we're very concerned. Apparently you didn't get better even though you claimed you got better. And now you run around showing this thing to people." And notice everything is in closure up here, and then everything attains closure down here. And then there are sub-closures, six on one level, two on another, and the final one on this one. And finally, my friend Ralph Abraham took pity on me, and he said, "The problem with this thing is that it's an occult dogma. Nobody can understand this thing except you. You are necessary for its interpretation." And I said, "So what do I do?" And he said, "You must learn how to change this into a more orthodox mathematical object that mathematicians can then discuss with you." And I was completely stuck. And I sat with it for two years, because it just seemed-- I'm not a mathematician. I had no clue as to how to do that. And finally, one afternoon, the pot was good enough, or the stars moved into position or something, and in a single instant I saw how to carry out the mathematical reduction of this wave, and I did it. [Audience member] [indistinct] [Ruth] On this? [Audience member] [indistinct] [Ruth] Well, if you look at it closely, you'll see that because they are at different scales, it isn't that one side is exactly like the other side. You know, there are dissimilarities. So I finally figured out how to mathematize and conserve all the qualities of that wave, and I put it into an ordinary Cartesian object, which I doubt you can see, but you don't really have to see it anyway. All this is--see what that is? It's just one--it's an ordinary graph of some sort. Huh? [Audience member] [indistinct] [Ruth] It's the sum of certain qualities. There was skew, parallelism, angle of approach, crossover. There were about five things that I felt were important, and I figured out how to mathematize them all so that this, which is an ordinary Cartesian graph, is in fact a topological equivalent of my occult diagram. And--yeah? [Audience member] [indistinct] [Ruth] Yeah, right. Uh-huh. So then--and then I started saying to people, "This is a map of time." [laughter] And they said, "Is it?" "Well, where are we?" And I said, "Well, we--hmm. In order to know where we are, we would have to know where the endpoint is. If you have a wave, you have a wavelength, so we have to find the endpoint." So then I began collecting historical data and fitting curves to it, trying to define the endpoint. Now, remember yesterday at the close of the day or in the afternoon, we got off on what appeared to some people to be a tangent about novelty and science and time and whether it was--whether it should be viewed as a flat plane or a fractal or something like that? Well, what the thing was telling me was that novelty is something which can be charted in time and that these waves were actually pictures of the ebb and flow of novelty, that this wasn't charting stock prices or population rise or average temperatures. It was charting the ebb and flow of novelty through time and that-- Como? [Audience member] Novelty is a newness? Novelty is--how about density of connection? As opposed--you know, if complexity can be quantified, then you say complexity ebbs and flows. I mean, if we had a device which measured complexity and we measured this point right here as opposed to this point an inch behind my finger, I'm hoping it would tell us that an inch behind my finger is a more complex environment than this point right here. So space and time is then seen to be a medium with density-- densification of complexity embedded in it like raisins or something, yeah. [Audience member] What are the boundary conditions for that graph? In other words, how do you establish origin and the endpoint on that particular graph? Well, until you scale it against time, you don't have to. I mean, I think-- [Audience member] But if you didn't scale it on this graph, that doesn't have to be-- Well, I think what you're--I think if I understand your question right, remember how I said that over here it was at closure? It goes like this. That's both lines. They're running--that's both sides of the graph. They're perfectly superimposed over each other. At this point, they cease to be superimposed. One goes that way and one goes that way, and then you start getting this kind of stuff. And then when you come down to the end, they fall into closure again. [Audience member] It's a thing of fate. Yes, it's a thing of fate. Exactly, you got it. Okay. [Audience member] What would be the beginning of time? Well, to this point, we haven't discussed this thing scaled against calendrical time. We're just trying to look at it as a mathematical object. Then what I realized was if these are part-- if this thing has 384 points in it and this has six, then what the thing was telling me was you have to map the-- you have to map the wave back over itself. So you take all 384 points and you cram them into this space wandering up this hill. Then you go to this space and you cram all 384 points in here and you create a fractal infinite regress. Do you understand? Say you understand. You will understand. Okay, so then that was the time--that was the time map. It was saying novelty can be described by an infinite fractal regress that is contained in the I Ching. Now the main objection that I was meeting from people who wanted to lock me up was they were saying, "Now, let's get this straight. You want to revise modern physics based on a pattern which you found in an ancient Chinese book of divination. Is that correct?" And I could feel the force of that criticism because that's how I think, you know, where somebody from some nut piece of data then wants to build castles in the air. And so I created a metaphor which is satisfying to me. I hope it's satisfying to somebody else, trying to explain why we should seek a law of physics inside the structure of the I Ching. And here's the metaphor. Think of sand dunes. Picture them in your mind. Since this is the new age, you may even close your eyes if it helps. Picture sand dunes. Now, notice that sand dunes look like wind. Sand dunes look like wind. And sand dunes are made by wind. So now let's analyze the situation. Let's think of wind as input. And let's think of sand grains as bits inside a computer. So when the wind blows, the program runs, and the bits rearrange themselves, and they arrange themselves into a lower dimensional slice of wind. Essentially, wind, which is a pressure variant phenomenon variable in time, turns into a pictorial phenomenon variant across the pictorial surface. Do you see how that works? Well, now, sand dunes created by wind bear the impression of wind. Lines of foam and beach detritus deposited by the incoming tide bear the form of waves. So what it was telling me was it was telling me that things formed in time bear the impression of the forces which created them. And I said, "Well, then what is the equivalent of sand dunes or waves of beach detritus in the real world?" And it said, "Human beings." Genes, not grains of sand. Genes are moved by time. And we, as hyperdimensional objects, we human beings and other animals, we bear the impression of the forces that created us. And if novelty truly does ebb and flow the way wind speed ebbs and flows over a landscape, then the creatures that have arisen in time will bear the imprint of this ebb and flow. And I believe that what was going on with the people who created the Qing was that they were practicing some kind of yoga or some kind of psychedelic plus yoga thing, and they were stilling their macro-physical functions, and they were descending deep into organism. And there they were seeing the ebb and flow of variables of some sort. And they watched, who knows how long, centuries maybe, and they said, "You know, in the organism there is the ebb and flow of variables." And then they asked questions like, "How many variables are there? Is there an infinite number?" And they began to create notation systems for these variables. And finally they came to the conclusion, "No, there are not an infinite number. There are 64 of these temporal variables. And think of them as elements. In the same way that the entire world of physical manifestation can be created out of 104 physical elements, the entire world of temporal manifestation can be created out of 64 elements." And so the way I think of reality, having survived this experience, is you have hexagrams moving on many levels. Let's say you have a hexagram which rules this 10,000-year period. For 10,000 years this hexagram will rule, and then on the next level the hexagrams are changing every 100 years, and then on the next level every 10 minutes, and on the next level every 15 seconds. Well, what any point in the matrix called now is, is the perspective you have when you look through the moving film of these temporal elements moving on many, many levels, you see. They create a unique juxtaposition with each other in every single moment, and that is what the unique felt presence of immediate reality is all about. Well, by this time... Yeah, question? No. What you're saying is that becomes a membrane of the divine membrane between reality. What? That exact position where they all come together, like that's the place where you can access both... See, I look at that and always look at the symbol, the eating symbol, as the guiding symbol of this plane of reality, bound by time. So you're talking about the exact membrane that is between time and non-time. Is that true? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you know, Plato said time is the moving image of eternity. It's a wave front. It's a wave front, and it's an interference pattern. Yes, it's a kind of hologram and a set of resonances and interference patterns that are created when these waves moving at many levels of expression superimpose and collide with each other. And through the use of small computers, we can explore various places in the wave, and we can position it against time, because what it's saying is that novelty comes and goes. You know, yesterday was wonderful, tomorrow could be dog shit. Same for last year and next year. Time undergoes changes on many scales. I mean, from moment to moment, if you watch your mind, you're going up, you're going down, and then on the daily scale, up, down, yearly scale, up, down, and then on all scales, there is ebb and flow of novelty. And all these scales can be mathematically collapsed into one wave, and then with a computer, you can not only predict the future, which is fairly trivial because who can gainsay it, but you can also predict the past, which is very tricky, because most people have a good deal more information about the past than they do about the future. Yeah. [Audience member] [indistinct] That's right. That's right. Well, no, you've got the whole concept correct, except you don't need an infinite number, because look what happens. If you start with 384 days, and you start multiplying upward by 64, remember I said the first one was 67 years, well, you only have to carry out about six of these, so you have 72 billion years, more time than is necessary for the universe to have birthed itself and reached its present state. Similarly, if you start dividing, you only have to divide 11 times to reach the realm of Planck's constant, 6.55 times 10 to the minus 23rd erg seconds, in technical parlance known as a Jiffy. Beyond the Jiffy, there is no need to continue the divisions because the Jiffy defines the grain of the canvas on which reality is projected. So what we have are, you know, a cosmology of roughly 22 levels. At the highest level, it's 72 billion years. At the lowest level, it's in the realm of Planck's constant, and we are somewhere suspended in between, and these things are coming and going on every level. Yeah. Well, the way that you arrived at these conclusions doesn't-- I don't follow it all, to say the least. However, it seems to me that you'd be able to use this model. You see some difference in the wavefront around the time of the shadow of Hades compared to the Third Reich. Absolutely. Do you see differences like that? Yes. I'm hurrying us toward the more fun part of this, and I think that we'll do it now. What we're going to do now is look at the wave placed against history with my end date, December 22, 2012, although the machine will accept any end date. And the idea that you should be asking yourself is, you know, this clown claims that this thing describes the ebb and flow of novelty, but does it in fact fit my intuition of the ebb and flow of novelty? Now, here's the good news. The next part of the lecture does not depend on anything that's been said in the first part. You don't have to understand anything I've said in the last half hour to appreciate the neatness of the next level. Lucky for us, eh? Is there any way to get away? Hmm. That's fine, I think. So now, because you know some people aren't interested in this, you tell them you can predict the future and they say, "Well, predict it." And then you predict it correctly and then they say, "Great." It never enters their mind to ask the question, "How did you predict it?" Which is what I, out of obligation to intellectual fairness, feel that I should expose you to. Now, let's look at the wave. F. Now, let me explain the rules of the game here. There are six billion years currently on screen. Today is over here at 98.8%. This is the last six billion years. And let me explain to you how you interpret the wave. And if you want to take a moment and rearrange yourselves, the rest of it is going to be fairly close focus on this thing. So don't be shy and don't make yourself uncomfortable. [Audience] How did you get the end date? Ah, the end date. I got it by fitting historical data to the wave and seeing-- I had certain intuitions. I mean, for instance, I said, "Well, if I have a wave which describes historical novelty, by God, it better do well on the Italian Renaissance. It should do well on the 20th century. And it should do well on the Golden Age of Greece." If a theory of novelty incorrectly predicts those episodes, it's a pretty worthless theory of novelty. Once I had chosen an end date, and I chose December 22, 2012, I got a lot of support for that by realizing that the Mayan calendar chose the same end date. Now, the only thing I had in common with the ancient Maya is that we both take psychedelic mushrooms. Now, is it conceivable that there is a message in the mushroom as specific as no matter where in space and time you are and you take these mushrooms, it says December 22, 2012 A.D.? It appears so, because the Mayans, their civilization rose and fell at a very uninteresting part of their own calendrical machinery. They predicted the end of the world a thousand years after their own eclipse, and they predicted the birth of their calendar, they set the birth of their calendar a thousand years preceding the emergence of their civilization. So, now, this year, 2012, is this what the Mayan has as a completion of a large cycle, or is this what they are believing is the completion of all their cycles? It depends on who you talk to. The Mayan calendar is built up of nested cycles, some 20 years in length, some 240, and there are 13 bak'tuns, which I think a bak'tun is 396 years in duration, and most Mayanists believe that a set of 13 bak'tuns is the complete calendrical set. There's a minority of Mayanists who want to argue that there are greater cycles than that. In any case, bak'tun 13 will come to an end December 22, 2012, so, you know, it was good enough for me. Could you say just a little bit more about the property of novelty? Is it synonymous with complexity? Well, you know, since this is a push-pull theory, and we have novelty versus something, the opposite of novelty is habit. Rupert insisted on that. I was calling it entropy and conservatism and recidivism, and he said, "No, no, it's a war between habit and novelty." Habit means a reversion to a traditional and already established pattern. Novelty means a breaking out into a previous domain, untested domain of new connections and new possibilities. Serendipity, is that the end of it all? You mean as in-- Something that's unsurprising? Yes, the unexpected is built into it, because when you come around some of these curves, there are unexpected things going on. What about the chaos order zone? It sounds like that a little bit. Yeah, well, you could think of it that way. I haven't completely resolved how novelty should be defined, because if you know anything about information theory, you know that they've had a hell of a time getting a definition of complexity together over there. They also are interested in mathematical definitions of complexity, but they haven't made too much progress. This concludes tape six. Our program continues with tape seven. {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.55 sec Decoding : 1.21 sec Transcribe: 3700.80 sec Total Time: 3702.55 sec