Terence McKenna - Timewave Zero

The TimeWave graph is supposed to depict the ebb and flow of novelty and habit in the universe. When the timeline climbs up, habit (routine, convention, ruts to get stuck in) increases. When the line dips down, novelty (creativity, connectedness, weird shit) increases. A built-in feature of the wave is that at a certain point it hits the bottom of the graph — it goes off the scale. Novelty is maximized, as far as the variables of this system (the universe) go.

With this graph in his hands, McKenna tried mapping it onto the historical record, looking at key points where things seemed to have really taken off, and matching them to the big dips in the line. Specifically, he opted for the bombing of Hiroshima as an unarguably novel event. The structure of his TimeWave dictated that extremely novel events unfolded in cycles of 6 x 64 x 64 = 24,576 days (67.29 years). [64 being critical to the I-Ching.] Adding this sum to the date of Hiroshima gave him an end-date in November 2012 A.D.. It was well after settling on this date that he found out someone else had come to a very similar conclusion. The calendar of the time-obsessed Mayan culture appears to come to the end of a 5,125-year cycle on 21st December (the winter solstice) of the same year, and McKenna adjusted the end-date to conform with this venerable tradition.




As it stands, the TimeWaves predictions for the run-up to 2012 A.D. are staggering. Comparing our own age... we can see that the start of the 90s resonates with the emergence of life onto land 400 million years ago, and the hominids debut 4 million years ago. Furthermore, McKenna states that, due to the acceleration of noveltys ingression, about half of the total evolution of our 72-plus-billion-year old universe will occur in the last 0.3 seconds before 6:00 am on 21/12/2012 [December 21, 2012]! If we take the formation of the cosmos, the rise of life, or the discovery of language as examples of key barriers that universal evolution passes through, McKennas calculations tell us that thirteen such barriers will be passed in the last 0.0075 seconds!!
According to the timewave graph, great periods of novelty occurred about 4 billion years ago when Earth was formed, 65 million years ago when dinosaurs were extinct and mammals expanded, about 10,000 years ago after the end of the ice age, around late 18th century when social and scientific revolutions progressed, during the sixties, around the time of 911, and with coming novelty periods in November 2008, October 2010, with the novelty progressing towards the infinity on 21st December 2012