The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (48 page)

Seabury, a small publishing house in New York originally established in the early fifties by the Episcopal church, seemed an unlikely venue for us. Its backlist included many religious and theological books, and the closest they’d come to a radical work like ours was
The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin
by Michael H. Murray (1966). Lawler, however, may have been pushing the company beyond its usual repertoire. Around that time, Seabury also published the Polish sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem’s weird surrealist drug novel,
The Futurological Congress.
Lawler’s support was great news, but he insisted on a title other than
Shamanic Investigations
. I took a walk in Tilden Park in the hills behind Berkeley, and after a little assist from Sister Mary I came up with
The Invisible Landscape
, which both Terence and Ev liked. We got a modest advance ($1,200 split between us, as I remember) and a deadline: Seabury needed the final manuscript before the end of the year to release our book the following spring.

We had a lot of work to do. Certain parts of our exposition had to be supported, if possible, with scientific evidence, and our wildest assertions needed to be toned down. Importantly, the mathematical basis of the timewave had to be developed and a computer program devised to generate the numbers. This task was beyond us, but luckily one of Terence’s friends had access to the university computers and wrote some code. (Other programmers would later contribute to the timewave as well.) Terence and I had a lot of fun working together over the next few months. We knew we were on a creative roll, and the revisions forced us to reexamine our assumptions as we tried to render them comprehensible to the outside world. By mid-September we’d finished a version and submitted it to the publisher.

Chapter 36 - The Timewave

The Timewave (Illustration by T. McKenna)

Before resuming my account, I want to give my take on Terence’s Timewave Zero theory, which figured centrally in
The Invisible Landscape.
Briefly stated, what Terence first conceptualized (or channeled) at La Chorrera is a mathematical model that supposedly reveals the structure of time. As a means for mapping the past and future, the timewave can be used, in Terence’s view, to chart the advent of “novelty” and its impact on later events. The “wave” aspect refers to the belief that novelty levels predictably ebb and flow, and that periods of intense novelty coincide with disruptions in the patterns of culture, evolution, and even physics. As for “zero,” that marks the point of “maximized” novelty, which as I write purportedly lies just months ahead. Anyone familiar with Terence’s timewave knows that he settled on the winter solstice in December 2012 as its end point, which is also the generally accepted date for the “end” of the Maya Calendar. At different times he cited both December 21 and 22 as the actual day.

Though I wrote certain sections of
The Invisible Landscape
that dealt with my own experiences at La Chorrera, I’m actually one of the harsher critics of the timewave theory. In fact, I don’t believe it is a true theory, in scientific terms. There are gaps and loopholes in Terence’s construct that, under scrutiny, are hard to defend. As the brother of the person who arguably has done more than anyone to turn the winter solstice of 2012 into a global meme, some might accuse me of being at best unsporting on this issue, and at worst an annoying curmudgeon. I plead guilty on both counts.

Terence and I became fascinated with the idea of novelty, as Whitehead understood it. His concept of novelty can be loosely characterized as the belief that there really
are
new things under sun; and the “ingression” of these unexpected events can affect the ongoing process we think of as reality. Based on his metaphysics, I’m willing to grant that there is such a thing as novelty, and that its appearance can trigger massive change. But Terence and I disagreed over how this actually happened. Indeed, some of our more animated discussions over the years were about defining novelty. What qualifies as a truly novel event? How does it enter the continuum, and how do you know when it has? More specifically, how can the timewave map and predict the arrival of novelty if you’re not precisely sure what novelty is?

Terence favored what might be called the “punctate” theory of novelty. Novelty arrives in the form of dramatic events with global impact, like the atomic bomb blast over Hiroshima in 1945, the Kennedy assassination, the crucifixion of Christ, or the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. In his view, events of that magnitude have enormous impact on history and the subsequent unfolding of human affairs. As truly novel occurrences, he saw it as possible to “fit” the timewave to such moments in human history, or even to events like the impact of the Chicxulub asteroid that is thought to have killed off the dinosaurs some sixty-five million years ago. Once calibrated to past events, the timewave could then be extended out beyond the realm of what has already undergone “the formality of actually occurring,” in Whitehead’s irresistible phrase, to predict, among other things, the future moment of its own end.

In contrast, I argued in favor of the “gradualist” theory of novelty. Major historical or geological events may appear to erupt into time, but that’s an illusion, one that ignores the chain of cause and effect that must precede them. Which event is truly novel—the nuclear explosion over Hiroshima, or that of the test device in the New Mexican desert a few weeks earlier? Or was it when Enrico Fermi first engineered a sustained nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago in 1942? The mathematical basis for the bomb can be traced to 1905, when Einstein stated that mass was a measure of energy, and vice versa, a brilliant insight he boiled down to a famous equation, E=MC
²
. And surely Democritus contributed by intuiting that the world is made of atoms back in the fourth century b.c. My point is that novelty does not “erupt” so much as “ooze” into history, thus making the identification of a truly novel event that much more problematic. The wave is hard to fit against the historical, geological, or evolutionary record because there are few points at which one can reliably align the map. And there is no way to quantify these events; Terence defined no criteria for measuring whether one event is more novel than another.

This is, to my mind, a major flaw in his novelty theory. Science works on measurement and quantification; to qualify as a scientific theory, it must be validated using measurable, quantifiable, and ideally mathematical criteria. A true theory must also state what new data or discovery can invalidate it. (Here it is worth noting that a theory can be disproved, but never definitely proved; there is always the possibility that new data will overturn it.) The timewave does none of this. Thus it is not really a theory. It is a speculation, an interesting idea, a hallucination, a fantasy—but not a theory. Terence never provided a quantifiable definition of novelty; I don’t think he knew how, and I’m not sure anyone does. But the result is that novelty in his “novelty theory,” as it is also known, was defined as whatever Terence postulated it to be.

So, interesting as it is, Timewave Zero is utterly useless as a map of time, a predictor of events, or a mathematical theory that describes something fundamental about the world.

The timewave’s other major influence was the
I Ching
and, in particular, an ancient arrangement of its sixty-four hexagrams known as the King Wen sequence. In devising the timewave, Terence appears to have explained how that sequence may have been used in neolithic China as a calendar. It’s too bad he didn’t leave it at that. If so, he would have received kudos from a small coterie of Chinese scholars and very little notice beyond those circles. Instead he asserted that he’d discovered a map, not only of history, or limited to earth, but of time itself.

Here we have to remind ourselves again that, at some deep level, Terence never really escaped the legacy of his Western, Christian past: the existential horror of being trapped in history, trapped in time. As he noted of the timewave in
The Evolutionary Mind
(1998), a collection of his conversations with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham, “This idea is basically Catholicism with the chrome stripped off. It restates Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the Omega Point, the Telos attracting and drawing history into itself.”

In the course of doing so, he introduced another crucial flaw: He took an ancient, cyclical, Chinese calendar and made it linear. He did this by declaring time “fractal”—which means, on close inspection, short spans of time are revealed to be “microversions of the larger patterns in which they are embedded.” What’s more, his model of time became an ever-tightening spiral that had to have a beginning and an end. Built into its structure was the notion that novelty would eventually reach a critical point where the wave collapses, presumably at the instant of an Ultimate Novel Event, whatever that might be. Some call this moment the “singularity,” but this is a vague and perhaps misleading term. The concept implies that at some point we’ll cross a threshold where all of our assumptions—about causality, time, space, and virtually everything else—will no longer apply. The singularity could be just about anything, so the term is not that helpful in predicting what it might entail.

There was no reason why Terence’s timewave had to end; I see this as simply an expression of his acute longing for an escape from history, an escape from death. But once it had an end, the question became where the end should be. Much of the controversy over the timewave dealt with how to fit it to events in the past, which in effect would lock it to an end date in the future. That guessing game posed a dilemma: The end had to occur in our lifetimes so we could witness it; if not, what was the point? But it couldn’t be too soon, because the postulated grand finale might come and go, compromising the predictive value of the timewave (which happened several times over the years). What’s more, the event should ideally be linked to some other widely anticipated historical or cosmic transition, and few were better than a date near the solstice in December 2012, the so-called “end” of the Maya calendar.

As I understand it, such an event would be either a mass disaster or a more hopeful awakening of some sort—but always on a global scale. Examples range from benevolent aliens showing up in their mile-wide ships to help us get our act together (as in
Childhood’s End
), or a wrathful Jesus arriving by golden chariot to smite the wicked and beam up the righteous for an eternity of harp playing and bingo. Perhaps the embryonic artificial intelligence lurking in the Internet will suddenly cross the threshold into self-awareness and realize, in three nanoseconds, that we’re the creatures screwing things up, a problem solved easily enough by causing the world’s nuclear reactors to melt down while launching the world’s entire nuclear arsenal. All these events would certainly be dramatic and novel enough to validate the timewave if they occurred anywhere near the postulated end date. But no event of that magnitude is likely to happen.

Terence’s selection of the timewave’s end date did not hinge on serious mathematical analysis. His theory and the Maya calendar have nothing to do with each other, the delusions of the current zeitgeist notwithstanding. While most credible Mayanists agree that the Maya did have a calendar that ends, so to speak, on the winter solstice in 2012, there’s little evidence the day was imbued with great significance. The end of that cycle—known as the Long Count—may simply have marked the start of a new one. According to various scholars, efforts to associate that date with a doomsday event are baseless and self-serving.

The ancient Maya actually tracked several calendrical cycles. One was a 365-day calendar called the
haab’.
Another was the
tzolk’in
, a 260-day sacred calendar based on a series of thirteen periods, each twenty days long. Those systems aligned on a specific date once every fifty-two years, thus delineating a third unit of time called the Calendar Round. To chronicle longer periods, the Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures relied on the Long Count mentioned above. According to Western calendars, the Long Count began on a late summer day in 3114 b.c.e., marking the start of the human epoch. Certain Maya texts suggest there were earlier pre-human “worlds” of long duration before the gods got it right. And there would be other worlds afterward. For whatever reason, the Maya designed these epochs, including the Long Count, to consist of thirteen
b’ak’tuns
, each 144,000 days in length. According to the math, we are, as I write, somewhere very near the end of that 5,125-year period, and thus very near the start of the next.

In other words, just as Terence based the origin of the timewave on an ancient, cyclical Chinese calendar, so he tied its end to an ancient, cyclical Maya calendar. It appears the timewave tells us much more about him, in some sense, than it does about time. His deep-seated longing to escape time and history is one he shared with millions. Every life has a beginning and an end; we are pushed along inexorably by time from the moment we are born to the moment the plug is pulled and the sheet is drawn up. Nobody has ever escaped from time, though all of the world’s religions are scams predicated on the notion that we can. We all confront our own singularity at the end of time, the end of our own personal history. This is the only eschaton we can realistically look forward to. No one can say, definitively, what happens to consciousness beyond that threshold, whether it is extinguished forever or translates into some sort of virtual reality, whatever that means when we’re talking about life after death. Someday, we may understand this. Someday, technology may advance to a point where it’s possible to consider uploading one’s consciousness or “soul” (whatever that is) into some kind of virtual environment maintained by supercomputer networks that are vastly more powerful than anything we have today. If that day ever arrives, it will mark the collapse of all of the world’s religions, an unintended consequence that I, for one, would relish.