RESCUE THE PRINCESS

Terrence McKenna’s idea was that the universe is an engine designed for the production and conservation of novelty and that as novelty increases, so does complexity. With each level of complexity achieved becoming the platform for a further ascent into complexity.

The basis of the theory was originally conceived in the mid-1970s after McKenna’s experiences with psilocybin mushrooms at La Chorrera in the Amazon led him to closely study the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.

In Asian Taoist philosophy the concept of opposing phenomena is represented by the yin and yang. Both are always present in everything, yet the amount of influence of each varies over time. The individual lines of the I Ching are made up of both Yin (broken lines) and Yang (solid lines).

When examining the King Wen sequence of the 64 hexagrams, McKenna noticed a pattern. He analysed the “degree of difference” between the hexagrams in each successive pair and claimed he found a statistical anomaly, which he believed suggested that the King Wen sequence was intentionally constructed, with the sequence of hexagrams ordered in a highly structured and artificial way, and that this pattern codified the nature of time’s flow in The World.

With the degrees of difference as numerical values, McKenna worked out a mathematical wave form based on the 384 lines of change that make up the 64 hexagrams. He was able to graph the data and this became the Novelty Time Wave.

Peter J. Meyer (Peter Johann Gustav Meyer) (born 1946), in collaboration with McKenna, studied and improved the foundations of novelty theory, working out a mathematical formula and developing the Timewave Zero software (the original version of which was completed by July 1987), enabling them to graph and explore its dynamics on a computer.

The graph was fractal, it exhibited a pattern in which a given small section of the wave was found to be identical in form to a larger section of the wave. 

McKenna called this fractal modeling of time “temporal resonance”, proposing it implied that larger intervals, occurring long ago, contained the same amount of information as shorter, more recent, intervals. He suggested the up-and-down pattern of the wave shows an ongoing wavering between habit and novelty respectively. With each successive iteration trending, at an increasing level, towards infinite novelty. So according to novelty theory, the pattern of time itself is speeding up, with a requirement of the theory being that infinite novelty will be reached on a specific date.

McKenna suspected that notable events in history could be identified that would help him locate the time wave’s end date and attempted to find the best-fit placement when matching the graph to the data field of human history. The last harmonic of the wave has a duration of 67.29 years.

Population growth, peak oil, and pollution statistics were some of the factors that pointed him to an early twenty-first century end date and when looking for an extremely novel event in human history as a signal that the final phase had begun McKenna picked the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

This worked out to the graph reaching zero in mid-November 2012. When he later discovered that the end of the 13th baktun in the Maya calendar had been correlated by Western Maya scholars as December 21, 2012, he adopted their end date instead.