Terence’s tetherball analogy describes the quickening process nicely: A ball tied by a long rope to a pole will swing around and around very slowly, but as the rope wraps around the pole and the ball draws closer it revolves more and more quickly. The closer the ball gets to the center, the more quickly it is drawn toward it. The center point is when the ball theoretically reaches infinite velocity. In truth, the mathematical wave form doesn’t really describe a constant acceleration; the staccato up-and-down pattern of the wave implies an ongoing vacillation between habit and novelty. The wave trends, however, with each successive iteration, toward infinite novelty. The mean average trend is one of increasing novelty, experienced as accelerating change. A requirement of the Time Wave Zero theory is thus that infinite novelty will be reached on a specific date.
Terence suspected that notable events in history could be identified that would help him locate the time wave’s end date. He took the atomic explosion of 1945 as an extremely novel event in human history and the signal that a final phase had begun, a 67-year fractal subpattern of the entire wave. Thus, add 67 to 1945 and 2012 was a possible target year. Population growth, peak oil, and pollution statistics also pointed him to the early twenty-first century. In The Invisible Landscape he mentions the year 2012 but goes no further in precision. He later admits that his original calculation was to November 17, 2012, but after he learned of the Maya calendar end date on December 21, he recalibrated the wave form and found that December 21 fit even better. Thus, Terence’s model was forever after correlated with the end date of the 13-Baktun cycle of the Maya Long Count.
Although Terence would sometimes mention the Maya in various contexts, usually for their psychoactive shamanism, the fact that his Time Wave also pointed to the cycle ending of the Maya Long Count was merely an ancillary confirmation of his theory. In one rumination on the topic, Terence noted that both he and the Maya were aficionados of psilocybin mushrooms and wondered if somehow this could explain why both his system and the Maya calendar pointed to 2012.
In all the hundreds of interviews and recorded talks that Terence did, many of which are freely available on the Internet, one finds scant details about the Maya calendar. In fact, the length of the 13-Baktun cycle is mistakenly reported as being either 5,128 or 5,200 years. The reasons why the Maya calendar points to 2012 were not things he pursued. Yet the precessional alignment of sun and galaxy (the galactic alignment) was there in The Invisible Landscape, mentioned briefly and obliquely. In his introduction to my book Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 Terence took the opportunity to elaborate a recommendation he had for further investigation of the galactic alignment:
[I]s there some scientific basis for the idea that when the winter solstice sunrise “stands” on the galactic center that any unusual physical effects might be expected? Today science answers in the negative. But science, unlike religion, is ever growing and revisiting and revising its own past simplifications…. Is human fate and the larger drama of the galaxy somehow linked? Coupling mechanisms may be difficult to prove, but elucidation of subtle coupling mechanisms is what the new science of dynamics is designed to do.6
As so often happens in the process by which ideas develop into breakthroughs, the key to understanding 2012 was noted early on as an oddity but passed by. After all, one might note both the alignment and the end date but not believe they were close enough to each other in time. This would be a prima facie conclusion that, upon some consideration, could be disposed of—primarily because the alignment must be conceived as a range extending over at least thirty-six years.
Furthermore, how would one go about proving that the Maya intended their end date to target the alignment? It simply wasn’t something that Terence was drawn to elaborate—it requires a long-term commitment to carefully researching many different areas of Maya thought and tradition. My own interests and studies were to converge with this alignment concept, however, and by 1992 I was on it. And to his credit Terence encouraged my work, even though it would call into question his requirement that something drastic and sudden should occur on December 22, 2012. (Terence often used December 22, perhaps because the twenty-second would be the “first” day of the new era.)
Another idea I proposed to Terence in our conversations—and he was always willing to entertain ideas—is based on the idea that the flow of time is subjective. One’s experience of time, fast or slow, is a function of the state of mind one is in. This can be noted in the reports of elderly people, for whom time seems to go very quickly. How many times has Grandma said, “Why, it seems like I just woke up and now it’s time to go to bed,” or “Last Christmas seems like it was here just yesterday!”
There are real neurological reasons for this experience of the elderly, based in the brain’s synaptic processing of information, which slows down with age. The bandwidth, you might say, has narrowed and therefore events (time) must pass through a smaller conduit. Consciousness thus restricted experiences time moving more quickly. Visionaries experiencing ecstasy, however, undergo a heightened and intensified cerebral processing, an enlarging of the synaptic bandwidth, resulting in time slowing down. When it slows down so much that the experience of the flow of time has ceased, the door to eternity is opened. Eternity isn’t a long period of time; eternity is the cessation of time.
Being deeply in love provides another example. When two people are having a peak experience of intimacy, the heart and mind (even the eyes) will dilate. It can be a profound experience in which both feel they have, together, entered a timeless inner sanctum and eternity has been glimpsed. Eternity is the experience of the cessation of the passage of time, time slowed down because the mind and heart have been completely opened in love. The consciousness expansion that frequently occurs after ingesting psychoactive plants can also provide an experience of glimpsing infinity or eternity, as explorers have reported. In ancient mystery religions, the experience was an initiation into the eternal Mysteries.
The thought experiment I shared with Terence is as follows. Imagine that a garden hose is your consciousness. A bigger hose diameter means a larger consciousness. The water flowing through the hose represents events occurring in time. The volume of water that wants to pass through the hose represents the number of events that are passing through the mind. Even if this amount remains constant, the speed at which the water travels through the hose (the mind) depends on how dilated or constricted the hose is. (Pinch the end of the hose and the water flows faster and more forcefully.) This model suggests that our minds determine whether or not time speeds up.
Time acceleration may not be an inherent property of history, the necessary consequence of the passage of time, but could also be the result of an increasing constriction of consciousness. This idea gains meaning in consideration of the ancient Hindu doctrine of World Ages, the Yugas, in which each successive Yuga is characterized by a diminishment of spirituality, an ongoing restriction of consciousness.7 Time speeds up because consciousness closes down. If the speed of time’s passage is indeed a function of the dilation of consciousness, then the acceleration of time is a direct result of the collective constriction of consciousness (the disconnect from a larger spiritual context and the rise of materialism) that the end of a historical cycle brings.
Terence was a fan of the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, whose Omega Point and noosphere concepts also influenced José Argüelles (his “techno-sphere” concept is a type of technologized noosphere). Chardin’s work basically applies Darwinian evolution to spiritual unfolding. It was an attempt to marry science with a spiritual theology. Chardin was a Jesuit scientist-priest. His concept of the Omega Point suggested that humankind was approaching a new unification of consciousness on a higher level—a breakthrough into a new level of organizational complexity, in the same way that cells create an organ and organs work together in an organism.
The Omega Point is much like McKenna’s Singularity, his “trans-dimensional object” that is supposed to be born from the concrescence to occur o
n December 21, 2012. This new state of being touches and reflects more intimately the infinite and eternal ground state from which it originally came. Beings thereby evolve to progressively and more fully reflect their infinite Creator. An objection to Chardin’s model, which would equally apply to McKenna’s, is that infinity can’t possibly “evolve.” It’s already there, latent, and nothing in the material of historical process can “build” it. It is more accurate to think of it as being progressively revealed. How else can we explain the inner visions of mystics who have glimpsed eternity? Darwin’s idea is a bottoms-up model of new forms and species evolving over time. Chardin adds a wrinkle by suggesting that discrete levels preexist in the very architecture of the universe, just as electrons tend to group into distinct orbits around a proton, giving us law-defined predictable elements. But it’s still basically a spiritualized Darwinism, in which mutations result in a being fully conscious of its eternal ground and origin. But here’s the key difference: For Chardin, as for Terence, the process was teleological—meaning it is pulled forward by the end state, not pushed from behind by historical evolution through time.
This tops-down concept is a key idea in the Perennial Philosophy, a view of the cosmos inspired by direct experience of universal truth. Such a perspective on spirituality is found, for example, in the metaphysical wisdom taught by the twelfth-century Persian sage Suhrawardi. It is an echo of Plato’s preexisting Ideas, which are a bit closer to the concept that all change descends from above, from the immaterial spiritual realm that pours itself into lower realms of physical manifestation. The idea is alien to all but the most esoteric forms of Christianity and is central to Islamic and Oriental meta physics. Indeed, teleology threatens causality, the cause-and-effect principle at the heart of Western science, which is why it is anathema.
In order to avoid irking the priests of scientism too much, both McKenna and Chardin attempted to discreetly incorporate into the deficient models of Western science certain ancient perennial insights regarding how time and consciousness really work. But importing Oriental insights into containers built by Occidental minds is like trying to squeeze the ocean into a bottle. The implications of the Omega Point, the Singularity, and 2012ology require a radical revisioning of Western philosophy’s approach to reality. In a nutshell, consciousness doesn’t evolve, it remembers, or awakens, to its full potential. From this top-down perspective, physical brains evolve in order to accommodate awakened minds.
My friend Curt Joy noted that Terence mentioned, at one point or another, virtually everything about 2012 so it is not really possible to nail him down to one official position, especially when he’s no longer around to engage in a dialogue. His theory, however, is most known for two things: Time speeds up and something definite is going to happen on December 21, 2012. We’ve already addressed the unacknowledged subjective source of the experience of time speeding up. On the other point, the future may be predetermined but our subjective experience of it is not. So the idea of a predictable definite “something” happening for all of us specifically on December 21, 2012, seems incredibly unrealistic.
It’s possible that, for Terence, the idea made sense as a projection of the sudden “rupture of plane” experienced in the psychedelic breakthrough. Projected onto historical process, a global rupture of plane should occur at the precise moment that the molecules of time-events avalanched en masse into the central pineal gland of our collective consciousness. In other words, the subjective visionary breakthrough experienced by the shaman perhaps became a model, for Terence, for a collective breakthrough of higher consciousness. There may be some truth to this, but the main issue with this scenario is, I think, the role of individual free will.
The warning to newcomers that I would offer here is that the idea of something suddenly occurring on December 21, 2012, is highly unlikely. I don’t personally believe that it is built into the architecture of external events in quite the way that Terence laid out in his Time Wave Zero theory. Similarly, the experience of time speeding up probably has more to do with the state of our consciousness than with the boiling over of external events in history.
Finally, I’d like to offer a topsy-turvy twist on Terence’s Time Wave Zero theory. To use one of Terence’s favorite terms, it’s quite the conundrum. His Time Wave Zero theory, or Novelty Theory, describes an intensification of novel or new events as we approach 2012. In his examination of historical events, Terence saw novelty increasing when unusual or unexpected events occurred. The Berlin Wall coming down, for example. So the ultimate novel event, the most bizarre and unexpected occurrence, should occur on December 21, 2012—and that would be for the theory itself to fail, with a grand business-as-usual occurring. But with the fateful day transpiring in this way, the theory then instantly vindicates itself. The grand Nothing-In-Particular at the end of time would be the most unexpected and novel thing that could possibly occur, according to the Novelty Theory itself. Its own failure would prove its efficacy. Now, that’s a conundrum. I hope that somewhere Terence is smiling at that one.
FRANK WATERS AND THE MEXICO MYSTIQUE
Frank Waters was a brilliant thinker and an engaging writer. His classic book on the Hopi was published in 1963 and opened the discerning reading public to the vast and mysterious psyche of a misunderstood Native American group. His novel The Man Who Killed the Deer was a compassionate and profound account of the inner world of the Pueblo Indians. Waters, himself part Cheyenne, was born outside of Colorado Springs in 1902. He lived among the Hopi in the Four Corners area for many years and retired to the mountains near Taos, New Mexico. His observations in his book Mexico Mystique are those of a mature, elder philosopher, presented in sure-handed tones. We see in his explanation of his book’s title the belief that ancient worldviews can have great meaning for modern people:
Since Jung’s discovery of the collective unconscious, we are no longer obliged to regard ancient Nahuatl and Mayan gods as idolatrous pagan images concocted by a primitive people merely to bring rain and ward off evil spirits. They are primordial images of soul significance rising from the unconscious into consciousness where they are given form and meaning. A universal meaning as pertinent now as it was two thousand years ago. So today, despite the flood of archaeological and anthropological reports, documented histories, and popular writings of all kinds, there is still a Mexican mystique.8
In writing his book on the Mexican calendar, Waters practiced something that has been, in recent years, winnowed out of books on 2012 as a kind of irrelevant annoyance. He actually researched and studied the Maya tradition. Based on his general knowledge of indigenous cultures, tempered with specific details on the Maya gathered from his studies, Waters drew some insightful conclusions about the Long Count and its cycle ending. For example, it was patently clear to him that the 13-Baktun cycle was part of a World Age doctrine. This is a clear conclusion to draw, and Maya scholars such as Gordon Brotherston and Eva Hunt supported and explored the idea, but in more reactive and defensive quarters my emphasis on the idea has drawn an incredible amount of scholarly backlash.
Waters also concluded that the importance of the 13-Baktun cycle must involve astronomy. He thus presents an astrological interpretation of the cycle-ending date, based on a planetary horoscope for the date and an astrologer’s assessment of it. Unfortunately, Waters’s academic source for the end date (Coe’s book The Maya) contained a flaw, resulting in a mistaken calculation for the end date that he used. Strangely, in Mexico Mystique Waters cited the book Hamlet’s Mill but didn’t seem to catch the oblique reference to a precessional alignment model. Waters’s book was the first one dedicated to the end-date question, and he can be considered the man who launched the 2012 phenomenon. It planted a seed but did not spawn a great legacy of followers, as Shearer’s book drew attention away from the Long Count to the 1987 date while the 2012 meme morphed in other directions in the hands of McKenna and Argüelles. A later edition of Coe’s book provided a corrected end date, which for all inten
ts and purposes must have rendered Waters’s theory irrelevant, although as late as 1990 I attended a talk by an astrologer in Boulder, Colorado, who utilized Waters’s horoscope charts.
Efforts to track early references to 2012 reveal a lack of coherence and agreement. Peter Tompkins’s 1976 book Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids makes a wry reference to “2011” in the final pages, reporting that “sensitives say the Serpent People are due to return to earth in 2011 to help create a world government.”9 Peter Balin, an artist and traveler, published a book in 1978 called Flight of the Feathered Serpent and put another astronomical observation for 2012 on the table, setting the stage for seeing the Maya calendar as a teaching game and oracle. Balin’s book is a well-illustrated poetic treatise, somewhat after the fashion of Shearer’s books, that presents a tarot-like game/oracle that spiritual seekers could engage and learn from. The artistic presentation of the system anticipates and resembles the Dreamspell game created by Argüelles in the early 1990s.
Balin also mentioned, briefly, the Venus transits of the sun that were to occur in 2004 and 2012—an idea taken up later by Swedish author Carl Calleman. Good diagrams of the Venus transit are provided, along with a brief discussion of the facts that such a transit occurs roughly once every 130 years and one will happen in June of 2012. It’s interesting that Balin points out this fact, but the next step would be to demonstrate how the Maya were aware of Venus transits and how Venus transits evoke a known theme in Mexican cosmology. For example, the myth of Quetzalcoatl involves the morning star rebirth of Venus from the sun, which takes place after the inferior conjunction of the sun and Venus. This event occurs once every 584 days. The Venus transit is a much more precise, and therefore rare, version of inferior conjunction, such that the planet Venus actually transits across the disk of the sun. Balin listed Waters’s Mexico Mystique in his bibliography, and he states that the end date falls on December 21, 2011—a partial correction of Waters’s erroneous sourcing from Coe. With these examples, by 1980 there were clearly several books in print that mentioned or explored more fully the cycle ending.
The 2012 Story Page 10