Reply #6: Hey, That's Terence McKenna's Theory! [View All]

He was my favorite pseudo scientist. I have never read anyone who could use such a wide range of insights in so many different fields and put them together in such an imaginitive and bizarre way. He's famous for his writings on hallucinogenics -- he found convincing (to me) evidence of religious drug use in a variety of ancient cultures.

McKenna's time wave has to do with the "introduction of novelty into history". McKenna started with the I Ching, which is composed of 64 stanzas. Each one can be represented as a six-digit binary number (six sticks are read, each one of which can have two values).

McKenna then used some kind of recursive function he got from fractal geometry and expanded the I Ching into a huge irregular function. He then overlaid this function on a historical timeline and claimed it corresponded to the introduction of novelty into history. The function collapsed to zero at the end of 2012, which McKenna referred to as the eschaton. (It also corresponded to the end of the Mayan calendar, which was probably deliberate.) McKenna was very cagey about the meaning of the eschaton, but to him it meant that novelty expanded to infinity and resulted in the end of history as we know it.

Wild stuff. Looks like it's been picked up by the usual gang, including Christian fundamentalists trying to relate it to the apocolypse.