Greetings from Thailand! (not sure who I'm greeting, I think I'm the only one who reads this blog!!) I just finished a four day motorbike tour in Northern Thailand with my motorcycle gang (OK, I ride a scooter). We had a few good conversations along the way but one conversation in particular on our final day stuck with me that I would like to expand upon.
We were talking about "happiness" and how it can be achieved and I was spewing my "Way to Love" stuff about how happiness comes from within and it is hope in and desire for external things (whether it be material objects, people, a job, etc) that causes unhappiness. Despite making some valid points, the guys didn't buy it and after considering their responses, I don't think I buy it either.
How could the external world not influence an individual's happiness? First of all, we are all biologically and socially programmed to desire certain things. Even if you could somehow overcome this programming (potentially impossible) wouldn't external reality still influence your life? Also, if this idea of unity in all things (the "One") holds any truth (and I believe it does) then this "you" that is happy or unhappy is not limited to the spatial confines of your physical body. I am still somewhat of a solipsist though, so for me, "I" is the symphony of spatio-temporal reality in which I-the body/mind exerts an influence (if I take a stone and throw it in the ocean, I've influenced the world's oceans, maybe the atmosphere, etc). But beyond these intellectual problems with happiness being totally internal, there are definitely some pretty powerful experiential ones.
Certainly I am much happier when I am doing something that I enjoy with the people that I love than I am when I am sick and doing something which I detest. And it is impossibly easy to think up life situations for which happiness would be easier or harder to achieve.
The trouble with attributing happiness to external factors is that people tend to want to create a linear formula, such as more money = greater happiness. It is here that I think the idea of happiness coming from within can be very useful. Instead of saying "Oh, if I only had ______ I could be happy," [insert: new car, beautiful girlfriend, new job, etc] people must first look to themselves as the main source of their own happiness. Once you look at yourself you will better be able to identify the external sources in your life which impact your happiness. For example, maybe your job doesn't make you happy, maybe it produces the opposite effect or maybe you realize that you find a certain activity enjoyable. At any rate, only upon examining yourself will you be able to make the necessary internal and external adjustments to put yourself on the path to happiness.
I must offer a disclaimer regarding happiness: Happiness, though a worthwhile pursuit, is not an end in itself, nor is it something which can be "achieved." In fact, happiness without its inverse (sadness) is nothing and the two form a sort of dualistic unity. There is always (and must always be) unhappiness; though certainly unpleasurable, it is not "bad" and is always necessary.
All emotion we experience is only experienced as a deviation from the mean. If your entire life existed with precisely the same external inputs, we would have neither happiness or sadness (or boredom either, which requires the perspective of a different experience to exist).
It is for this reason that happiness requires sadness. Our highest high only means something in relation to our lowest low and vice versa. If you consider a sine wave running along the x-axis (with happiness being the y-value and time the x-value) a happy moment would be registered as the line running above the x-axis and a sad moment would run below the axis. This method allows an accounting of the degree of happiness as well (the further from the axis, the greater the degree of emotion). But a normal sine wave is quite boring and reality is never as simple. Most people's lives change a great deal over time and their general happiness (say, the level of their mean (average) happiness) can increase or decrease over time. Many people seem to get progressively less happy as they grow older so their graph might not be level but would be sloping downward. Over time, if this downward trend continues, their mean would continuously creep downward as well (at a rate determined by the rate of their decline). Here, the x-axis would no longer be the mean as it is with a plain sine wave, it is merely the starting point. The mean continuously changes with respect to the current level of happiness. This person could still experience "happiness" if their current happiness level rose above the mean though unless it rose to its initial height (the highest previous point) they would still remember a time when they were happier.
So if happiness is all about deviation from the mean, then what is the point of worrying about it? Well, just as someone can get progressively unhappier, they could just as well get progressively happier. Take a line rising diagonally toward the right, the person whose unhappiness graph looked like this would always be getting progressively happier. In the past, they would have experience some instances in which they were happy at the time (above the mean) but upon reflection (and after raising their mean) they realize that they now know greater happiness.
So then, if it is possible to increase your happiness over time, how can it be done? If you value something like money, than you will always want more (because you can always have more) and your graph could likely be downward sloping. If you value something like learning, you could spend the majority of your lifetime in its pursuit quite happily (and raising your mean), though as anyone who has met an elderly person distressed by their mental decline would know, eventually this could lead to tremendous unhappiness.
I think then, that the trick is to value experience--the "good" and the "bad" alike. Experience is something that you will always be guaranteed to have and will always be acquiring (even the experience of gaining or losing money or of going senile is an experience) and you can never have any more of it or less of it. It is possible for someone to have more varied experiences than another, but only if value is placed on variety will this impact their happiness (this is something that I am guilty of, so I better keep changing it up!). But even the "bad" experiences such as having your heart broken, getting fired from a job, etc, seem to make sense or even have been necessary in hindsight. At any rate, whether all of your experiences make sense or not they certainly led to the you that exists right here and now. So--bringing it all together--if you are happy with yourself than you can recognize and appreciate the value of your experiences.
Happiness then, is a self feeding loop (rather than some linear map that I've made it out to be) that necessarily involves unhappiness but can always move forward--provided that you enjoy the ride!!
Friday, October 30, 2009
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Nature
There are it seems, two ways to view nature: as a cruel, unforgiving, and thoughtless force which man must overcome, or as Gaia, the mother and great balancing force of the Universe.
Modern man, or Western society at least, has come to view nature as in opposition to humanity. We may have risen from nature, but that ugly little truth is merely an additional inconvenience in the endless battle to wrest our fate from the hands of Gaia. We look at the world and see the death and destruction caused by nature, we see the massive hurricanes and devastating earthquakes. On our television programs we watch sharks tear apart unsuspecting seals and lions devouring infant gazelles. Our science tella us that the supreme law of nature is "survival of the fittest" and man, surely the fittest of all, must do what he can to oppose the rest of nature and to rise to his rightful place above the rest.
It struck me the other day how truly separate humanity sees itself from nature. I was taking my brother to school when a bird struck the side of our car; it just flew right into it. My brother remarked, "I didn't know that could happen." I asked him what he meant, and he explained that he didn't realize that a bird could actually fly into our car, he didn't think such a thing could occur. I questioned him further, "You thought they were incapable of flying into our car? Don't you bump into things all the time walking around the house? And the house doesn't even move!" Yes, he explained, it made sense, he just never realized that birds could hit us, he had never seen it happen before and it seemed to him like something very odd.
Thinking about this incident with my brother further, I realized that for most American's, nature is something that occurs beyond themselves. Birds don't regularly fly into us, most of the time they are just there in the background, able to be seen and heard but rarely interacted with. Nature is not something that we experience or engage in regularly. As a society, we even suppress and diminish the significance of our own natural functions such as going to the bathroom, making love (having sex), and aging. These reminders of our status as animals are tabooed in our society to the point that it is by far more acceptable to see a decapitation than a love scene in a movie.
While only the occasional bird actually comes into direct contact with our balkanized existences, there is one constant reminder that nature exists beyond our doors and often, even sharing our home: insects. Bugs, spiders, creepy crawlies and the like seem to be one of the only constant sources of continued interaction with nature. And so what do we do? We exterminate, banish, and expel these unwelcome connections to the greater world. Us humans, we want our sterilized, quarantined, hermetically sealed homes where we can eat, sleep, fuck, shit, and die in privacy. We have become so caught up in our own myth of superiority, that we have forbidden any remnants of our relationship to the great unity of mother nature. I am not suggesting that we should allow bugs to overrun our places of dwelling, but I am suggesting that our "fear" of these mostly harmless cousins of life is perhaps rooted in our own insecurity as the wayward son of mother nature, always yearning to break away and prove that we are worthy of our imaginary independence.
But to break away is impossible, for there is nothing external to nature. We are born of her, when we die we return to her, and while we are alive, try as we might, we cannot deny that we are her. We are not only of nature, we are nature. To remain in opposition to nature is like the liver saying it is in opposition to the body. Occasionally though, the liver does deny the body, but like with the denial of nature, all that can result from this denial is death.
So it seems that the two views of nature proposed in the beginning are not after all at odds with each other. If nature is treated as the enemy, as something which must be overcome and superseded, than the great balancing force that it is, nature will resist with great fervor. And so, it is not only naive of man to believe that he has some sort of ability to combat nature, but it is even naive of man to think that our resistance will have any lasting effect on nature at all in the first place. This is not to say that we should not yield to nature when making decisions--not in the least--but nature will not mind one way or the other whether the totality of mankind chooses to fight her or worship her. Rather, it is in the interest of man that we ought to lay down our arms against the great mother of us all. If we can do so, we may find that Eden was not lost after all; it has been here all along.
Modern man, or Western society at least, has come to view nature as in opposition to humanity. We may have risen from nature, but that ugly little truth is merely an additional inconvenience in the endless battle to wrest our fate from the hands of Gaia. We look at the world and see the death and destruction caused by nature, we see the massive hurricanes and devastating earthquakes. On our television programs we watch sharks tear apart unsuspecting seals and lions devouring infant gazelles. Our science tella us that the supreme law of nature is "survival of the fittest" and man, surely the fittest of all, must do what he can to oppose the rest of nature and to rise to his rightful place above the rest.
It struck me the other day how truly separate humanity sees itself from nature. I was taking my brother to school when a bird struck the side of our car; it just flew right into it. My brother remarked, "I didn't know that could happen." I asked him what he meant, and he explained that he didn't realize that a bird could actually fly into our car, he didn't think such a thing could occur. I questioned him further, "You thought they were incapable of flying into our car? Don't you bump into things all the time walking around the house? And the house doesn't even move!" Yes, he explained, it made sense, he just never realized that birds could hit us, he had never seen it happen before and it seemed to him like something very odd.
Thinking about this incident with my brother further, I realized that for most American's, nature is something that occurs beyond themselves. Birds don't regularly fly into us, most of the time they are just there in the background, able to be seen and heard but rarely interacted with. Nature is not something that we experience or engage in regularly. As a society, we even suppress and diminish the significance of our own natural functions such as going to the bathroom, making love (having sex), and aging. These reminders of our status as animals are tabooed in our society to the point that it is by far more acceptable to see a decapitation than a love scene in a movie.
While only the occasional bird actually comes into direct contact with our balkanized existences, there is one constant reminder that nature exists beyond our doors and often, even sharing our home: insects. Bugs, spiders, creepy crawlies and the like seem to be one of the only constant sources of continued interaction with nature. And so what do we do? We exterminate, banish, and expel these unwelcome connections to the greater world. Us humans, we want our sterilized, quarantined, hermetically sealed homes where we can eat, sleep, fuck, shit, and die in privacy. We have become so caught up in our own myth of superiority, that we have forbidden any remnants of our relationship to the great unity of mother nature. I am not suggesting that we should allow bugs to overrun our places of dwelling, but I am suggesting that our "fear" of these mostly harmless cousins of life is perhaps rooted in our own insecurity as the wayward son of mother nature, always yearning to break away and prove that we are worthy of our imaginary independence.
But to break away is impossible, for there is nothing external to nature. We are born of her, when we die we return to her, and while we are alive, try as we might, we cannot deny that we are her. We are not only of nature, we are nature. To remain in opposition to nature is like the liver saying it is in opposition to the body. Occasionally though, the liver does deny the body, but like with the denial of nature, all that can result from this denial is death.
So it seems that the two views of nature proposed in the beginning are not after all at odds with each other. If nature is treated as the enemy, as something which must be overcome and superseded, than the great balancing force that it is, nature will resist with great fervor. And so, it is not only naive of man to believe that he has some sort of ability to combat nature, but it is even naive of man to think that our resistance will have any lasting effect on nature at all in the first place. This is not to say that we should not yield to nature when making decisions--not in the least--but nature will not mind one way or the other whether the totality of mankind chooses to fight her or worship her. Rather, it is in the interest of man that we ought to lay down our arms against the great mother of us all. If we can do so, we may find that Eden was not lost after all; it has been here all along.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Time and the Eternal Present
On a recent psilocybin mushroom trip, the concept of "time" was a major theme that carried on for the duration of my experience. As can happen during miserable experiences such as being ill, undergoing a difficult physical experience, or waiting for the work day to end, during my trip past and future seemed completely irrelevant and were nothing more than elusive concepts. My trip however, was not a miserable experience--far from it in fact--but was a wonderful, beautiful, profound experience.
Being only my second trip with psilocybin mushrooms, I've had to follow the advice of other people whom I respect and who are far more experienced than I with psychedelics for dosage recommendations, set and setting pointers, and various other details. One of these recommendations which I chose to follow was to record my trip using a digital voice recorder. This seemed a brilliant idea to me as I frequently wish I could record thoughts I have while driving or otherwise unable to take the time to write them out. Given the fact that the psychedelic experience is notoriously easy to "forget," the recorder seemed like it would prove invaluable.
But as I hit the peak of my trip, I found myself talking to the recorder, trying to capture the experience so my future self could appreciate it more. Not only was this at the expense of the appreciation of the trip that I was undergoing at the time, but it also proved to be a barrier preventing me from going further. At one point, I was lying under the Milky Way and some entity
(whether of my own invention or external to me is irrelevant) tried to "show me" the raw experiential beauty of the Universe but my ego kept trying to capture and record all that I was experiencing. The entity, which was pulling me upward in an effort to show me, continuously told me that until I could let go and allow myself to just experience this journey in the present that I would not be able to see what it is that I needed to see. Each time it would try and show me, I would tell myself, "Okay, here we go, you've got to remember this." It was as if my ego would try and explain this situation to itself. It kept trying to capture everything, to articulate it into language to process it, to remember it, but the entity kept telling me that this experience could not be captured, could not be experienced other than in the present, yet each time it tried to show me, my ego would not let go. And so, after a while, the entity gave up. "You are not ready," it said.
After this, my trip went on with minimal interaction with anything I would classify as an entity, but I kept the recorder with me. I spent the majority of my trip lying under the Milky Way on a blanket at my family's tree farm in upstate New York watching the Perseid meteor shower. At one point, I remembered how afraid I had been in the darkness prior to starting my trip and was amazed that I felt absolutely no fear at all. I thought about it and I realized that in the present, fear does not exist. Fear REQUIRES past and future in order to exist; if you are completely in the present, you could never be afraid. What I realized was, all of fear is based off of some past memory and some future expectation. If all that exists is the present, then there can be no such thing as fear. I am not arguing that fear can not be experienced in the present, just that it requires the past and the future in order to be experienced at all.
I was completely unafraid during my trip because I was COMPLETELY in the present. I could not fear some animal jumping out of the woods and eating me because 1) that could only be an event that happened in the future and 2) the basis for this fear only existed in my mental past.
As I tried to fathom the future, I struggled to imagine anything other than the present. The notion of "Monday" seemed comically absurd to me. There is no Monday, there is only right now! Going to work at some point in the future was an absolute absurdity, a figment of my imagination. The experience that I was having at that very moment was the only experience I would ever have, it was eternal. I experienced the present so powerfully--for the first time in my life (or at least what I remember :-)--that I completely forgot who I was. I don't mean that I forgot my name, or was confused or something. I completely forgot who I was. My name, my memories, my body, my relationships, all didn't exist in the present, they had no meaning. I couldn't remember a thing about my childhood and was completely unable to come up with a single idea or memory that could satisfactorily identify me as me. I just was, that's all. Eventually, I came up with a few vague concepts that I knew that I had formally identified myself with: the street I grew up on, my own name, the image of my girlfriend, my major, but these things held no meaning, they all lived in my past and the past after all, did not exist anywhere but in my mind!
Just as the past exists only in the memories of my mind, the future also exists only in my mind, the only difference being that we call the ideas of the future dreams rather than memories. In really examining these two concepts, they are more difficult to differentiate between than initial inspection would lead one to believe. How should one think about the past? It is traditionally regarded as some point in linear time that happened prior to "now." But you cannot hold the past in your hand, it is not right in front of your eyes like the present is. It can only exist in the memories of the mind and memories can fade or change through time. The trout caught by the fisherman always grows in time. And since the past only lives in memories, it must be mutable and therefore cannot be thought of as holding any "objective truth."
As with the past, the future too only exists in the mind in the form of dreams. The traditional definition of "future" would be some point in linear time beyond "now." And like memories, these dreams are completely mutable and, though they can contain as much truth as the past, also cannot be thought of as holding any "objective truth." Really, the only difference between the past and future is the arbitrary distinction of being either prior to or beyond the present. The problem is, it is always the present. It is the never the future just as much as it is never the past. Past and future, far from being opposites are in fact, the same thing. As with all dualities they merely represent different sides of the same phenomenon.
As my trip wore on and lost its intensity, my experience of the present slowly dissolved so that I was able to incorporate more and more of my memories into my experience, but I continued to think about this notion of time. One of the biggest lessons that I took out of the whole experience was that all we have is the present. Memories can live inside us, and can be experienced in recollection, but they interfere with and limit our experience of the present (this may be a "good" thing or a "bad" thing). But just as one can live in the past, so too can one live in the future with similar consequences. Someone living in the future might put off their present situation in order to make a better future for themselves, but that person runs the risk of always putting off the present for some idealized future that never comes. After all, when has it ever been tomorrow?
Just as I experienced that fear cannot exist without the past AND the future, so it is with fear's opposite: hope. And just as fear can be dangerous, so too can hope. The notion of hope removes us from the present. It causes us to put off our present for some desirable future. But just as I mentioned above, it is never the future, it is never tomorrow. And if all that we have is today, then lets live for today.
Some think of this world as Hell, or a purgatory, a staging ground for a future eternal bliss, but if you are living your life for some paradise lying beyond this world, than you're missing the paradise right in front of your eyes. No god put us here to suffer and toil and labor for some future salvation. Salvation is yours if you open your eyes and live in the present. God's Paradise is among us here and now. We were not banished from Eden, it is not hidden in some ideal past or future, but it is hidden in the one place that modern man would never look: the present.
Being only my second trip with psilocybin mushrooms, I've had to follow the advice of other people whom I respect and who are far more experienced than I with psychedelics for dosage recommendations, set and setting pointers, and various other details. One of these recommendations which I chose to follow was to record my trip using a digital voice recorder. This seemed a brilliant idea to me as I frequently wish I could record thoughts I have while driving or otherwise unable to take the time to write them out. Given the fact that the psychedelic experience is notoriously easy to "forget," the recorder seemed like it would prove invaluable.
But as I hit the peak of my trip, I found myself talking to the recorder, trying to capture the experience so my future self could appreciate it more. Not only was this at the expense of the appreciation of the trip that I was undergoing at the time, but it also proved to be a barrier preventing me from going further. At one point, I was lying under the Milky Way and some entity
(whether of my own invention or external to me is irrelevant) tried to "show me" the raw experiential beauty of the Universe but my ego kept trying to capture and record all that I was experiencing. The entity, which was pulling me upward in an effort to show me, continuously told me that until I could let go and allow myself to just experience this journey in the present that I would not be able to see what it is that I needed to see. Each time it would try and show me, I would tell myself, "Okay, here we go, you've got to remember this." It was as if my ego would try and explain this situation to itself. It kept trying to capture everything, to articulate it into language to process it, to remember it, but the entity kept telling me that this experience could not be captured, could not be experienced other than in the present, yet each time it tried to show me, my ego would not let go. And so, after a while, the entity gave up. "You are not ready," it said.After this, my trip went on with minimal interaction with anything I would classify as an entity, but I kept the recorder with me. I spent the majority of my trip lying under the Milky Way on a blanket at my family's tree farm in upstate New York watching the Perseid meteor shower. At one point, I remembered how afraid I had been in the darkness prior to starting my trip and was amazed that I felt absolutely no fear at all. I thought about it and I realized that in the present, fear does not exist. Fear REQUIRES past and future in order to exist; if you are completely in the present, you could never be afraid. What I realized was, all of fear is based off of some past memory and some future expectation. If all that exists is the present, then there can be no such thing as fear. I am not arguing that fear can not be experienced in the present, just that it requires the past and the future in order to be experienced at all.
I was completely unafraid during my trip because I was COMPLETELY in the present. I could not fear some animal jumping out of the woods and eating me because 1) that could only be an event that happened in the future and 2) the basis for this fear only existed in my mental past.
As I tried to fathom the future, I struggled to imagine anything other than the present. The notion of "Monday" seemed comically absurd to me. There is no Monday, there is only right now! Going to work at some point in the future was an absolute absurdity, a figment of my imagination. The experience that I was having at that very moment was the only experience I would ever have, it was eternal. I experienced the present so powerfully--for the first time in my life (or at least what I remember :-)--that I completely forgot who I was. I don't mean that I forgot my name, or was confused or something. I completely forgot who I was. My name, my memories, my body, my relationships, all didn't exist in the present, they had no meaning. I couldn't remember a thing about my childhood and was completely unable to come up with a single idea or memory that could satisfactorily identify me as me. I just was, that's all. Eventually, I came up with a few vague concepts that I knew that I had formally identified myself with: the street I grew up on, my own name, the image of my girlfriend, my major, but these things held no meaning, they all lived in my past and the past after all, did not exist anywhere but in my mind!
Just as the past exists only in the memories of my mind, the future also exists only in my mind, the only difference being that we call the ideas of the future dreams rather than memories. In really examining these two concepts, they are more difficult to differentiate between than initial inspection would lead one to believe. How should one think about the past? It is traditionally regarded as some point in linear time that happened prior to "now." But you cannot hold the past in your hand, it is not right in front of your eyes like the present is. It can only exist in the memories of the mind and memories can fade or change through time. The trout caught by the fisherman always grows in time. And since the past only lives in memories, it must be mutable and therefore cannot be thought of as holding any "objective truth."
As with the past, the future too only exists in the mind in the form of dreams. The traditional definition of "future" would be some point in linear time beyond "now." And like memories, these dreams are completely mutable and, though they can contain as much truth as the past, also cannot be thought of as holding any "objective truth." Really, the only difference between the past and future is the arbitrary distinction of being either prior to or beyond the present. The problem is, it is always the present. It is the never the future just as much as it is never the past. Past and future, far from being opposites are in fact, the same thing. As with all dualities they merely represent different sides of the same phenomenon.
As my trip wore on and lost its intensity, my experience of the present slowly dissolved so that I was able to incorporate more and more of my memories into my experience, but I continued to think about this notion of time. One of the biggest lessons that I took out of the whole experience was that all we have is the present. Memories can live inside us, and can be experienced in recollection, but they interfere with and limit our experience of the present (this may be a "good" thing or a "bad" thing). But just as one can live in the past, so too can one live in the future with similar consequences. Someone living in the future might put off their present situation in order to make a better future for themselves, but that person runs the risk of always putting off the present for some idealized future that never comes. After all, when has it ever been tomorrow?
Just as I experienced that fear cannot exist without the past AND the future, so it is with fear's opposite: hope. And just as fear can be dangerous, so too can hope. The notion of hope removes us from the present. It causes us to put off our present for some desirable future. But just as I mentioned above, it is never the future, it is never tomorrow. And if all that we have is today, then lets live for today.
Some think of this world as Hell, or a purgatory, a staging ground for a future eternal bliss, but if you are living your life for some paradise lying beyond this world, than you're missing the paradise right in front of your eyes. No god put us here to suffer and toil and labor for some future salvation. Salvation is yours if you open your eyes and live in the present. God's Paradise is among us here and now. We were not banished from Eden, it is not hidden in some ideal past or future, but it is hidden in the one place that modern man would never look: the present.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Another day, another dollar
It is absolutely amazing how slow the time ticks by when you're at work. Seconds and minutes and hours just completely lose all meaning and yet, as I sit here now, that eternity that is my work day seems a distant memory, a fuzzy dream. I mean, today was horrible. Absolutely terrible. If I really think about it, I can remember telling myself a half a dozen times that it just isn't worth it, that I should just quit and leave and make a big fuss so I can never come back. But yet, every day I wake up, roll out of bed, and head over to that inane job with those inane people, seemingly having forgotten just exactly how mind numbingly miserable it is.
You would think I would learn. You would think WE would learn as a society. But each and every day I, as well as millions upon millions upon millions of other Americans, wake up and get in a car to spend the best hours of my day doing something that I absolutely hate. And why? Well, because what the hell else am I supposed to do?
Right now I'm at a point in my life that I realize and recognize the pointlessness of the "American Dream." A life of material consumption, escalating debt, 50 hour work weeks, and two weeks vacation is something that I'm not willing to settle for. The problem is: what alternative do I have? Already I'm trapped under a mountain of debt from doing the "smart" thing and going to school; $68,000 to be exact. If I pay the minimum--$540 a month--I'll be free and clear of my student loans by 2026 at a total bill of over $110,000, at which time--if I do what I'm supposed to do--I'll have 2.5 kids and a mortgage. The thought of this absolutely horrifies me.
Forget the fact that no one really talks to you about the cost of college or really explains to you just what it means to sign the dotted line on that student loan--what is done is done--what I want to know is: now what the hell am I supposed to do? What is someone who, like me, sees the futility and pointlessness of "careers" supposed to do with monthly loan payments bigger than weekly paychecks? Have I already lost? Am I already doomed to life as a wage slave?
You would think I would learn. You would think WE would learn as a society. But each and every day I, as well as millions upon millions upon millions of other Americans, wake up and get in a car to spend the best hours of my day doing something that I absolutely hate. And why? Well, because what the hell else am I supposed to do?
Right now I'm at a point in my life that I realize and recognize the pointlessness of the "American Dream." A life of material consumption, escalating debt, 50 hour work weeks, and two weeks vacation is something that I'm not willing to settle for. The problem is: what alternative do I have? Already I'm trapped under a mountain of debt from doing the "smart" thing and going to school; $68,000 to be exact. If I pay the minimum--$540 a month--I'll be free and clear of my student loans by 2026 at a total bill of over $110,000, at which time--if I do what I'm supposed to do--I'll have 2.5 kids and a mortgage. The thought of this absolutely horrifies me.
Forget the fact that no one really talks to you about the cost of college or really explains to you just what it means to sign the dotted line on that student loan--what is done is done--what I want to know is: now what the hell am I supposed to do? What is someone who, like me, sees the futility and pointlessness of "careers" supposed to do with monthly loan payments bigger than weekly paychecks? Have I already lost? Am I already doomed to life as a wage slave?
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Terence McKenna, 2012, and the Eschaton
In 1975 an obscure, nasally voiced young man and his brother proposed what they claimed to be an empirical formula capable of mapping time—both past and future. The young man was Terence McKenna, who would later be referred to as the “Timothy Leary (and much more) of the discretely psychedelic 90s,” (Gabriel 1993) and the formula was the basis for a program known as Timewave Zero, which offered desktop access to McKenna’s alleged map of time. Such an allegation is certainly a hard swallow, particularly to the uber-rational, reductionist mind of the modern man; but to brush aside McKenna’s proposal as absurd without proper examination tastes of the very dogma which modern science purports to eliminate.
Any discussion of Timewave Zero must first begin with a discussion of novelty. To McKenna novelty is more than just a cute happenstance, it is a natural law—perhaps the most fundamental law in fact—for the “conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for,” (McKenna 1994). Before jumping into Novelty Theory however, a definition of the term is in order and who better than to provide that definition than the late bard himself: “Synonyms for ‘novelty’ are ‘degree of connectedness’ or ‘complexity.’ Note that these are not terms that make a moral judgment. Novelty is not ‘good’ while entropy is ‘bad.’ Novelty is simply a situation of greater connectedness and complex organization, while entropy is the opposite of these qualities: it is less organized, less integrated, less complex,” (McKenna 1991)
But what of novelty as a law of nature? To McKenna,
Continuing in reference to dark matter explaining the structure and organization of galaxies:
To McKenna, it is novelty which is the “missing” law of science that accounts for both the structure of things from atoms to nebulae and the seemingly exponential increase in technological advance seen in recent history.
McKenna’s theory seems greatly at odds with modern scientific thinking yet oddly in line with subjective experience. Things do seem to be progressing and growing increasingly complex at an ever increasing rate. The technological progress made by our culture in the last twenty years alone has been unthinkably swift. As McKenna suggests (McKenna 1998b) to try and extrapolate this forward 500 years into the future is an impossibility. If this is no mere stochastic trend, how could it be that science has somehow managed to overlook one of the main characteristics of our universe? McKenna answers,
To Terence then, the psychedelic experience in a sense completes science, and it is through the psychedelic experience that Terence arrived at Novelty Theory.
Through Novelty Theory, McKenna hopes to reconcile science with subjective experience through the kind of empirical method on which modern science is built. The basis from which McKenna built this theory (or more properly, the actual source of data for McKenna’s theory itself,) is the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.
By concrescence, McKenna is using the term as defined by Alfred North Whitehead, “ ‘Concrescence’ is the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the ‘many’ to its subordination in the constitution of the novel ‘one,’” (McKenna 1993). We will address more specifically what McKenna interprets this eventual concrescence as later, for now we will turn our attention to how McKenna and his brother created this map of novelty, which they call Timewave Zero.
Timewave Zero is based off of the belief that the ancient Chinese had an acute understanding of some relatively complicated astronomical phenomena such as the procession of the equinoxes and the sunspot cycles as well as “the assumption of hierarchical or resonance thinking in Chinese intellectual constructs,” (McKenna 1993) for which he attempts to illustrate in his book The Invisible Landscape. McKenna establishes that the Chinese knew the length of the lunar cycle to be 29.53 days by citing the scholarship of Joseph Needham (1965). He then suggests that it was recognized that 13 lunations equaled roughly 384 (383.89) which is equally to six (the number of lines (yao) in one of the hexagrams of the I Ching sequence) times 64 (the total number of hexograms).
McKenna then uses these patterns, which seem clear enough, and then a fair amount of fractal geometry and wave dynamics to create his Timewave Zero map of novelty. Let me take a moment to be explicit: Timewave Zero (see image below) is intended to be a map of the total novelty over time, or in the words of McKenna, “these time maps or novelty maps show the ebb and flow of connectedness or novelty in any span of time from a few days to tens of millennia,” (McKenna 1993).
In an interesting contrast to our Newtonian or even Einsteinian notion of time, the wave characteristic of Timewave Zero predicts a “progressive spiral involution of time toward a concrescence;” in other words, an endpoint (McKenna 1993).
Above is an image from the Timewave Zero program of the novelty wave over the course of 1500 years. Shown on the image are a number of significant events which were used (among many others) to help fit the wave to our Gregorian calendar. Here “novelty” is maximized when closest to the x-axis, therefore a singularity will occur at any point that the wave has a value of zero. This however, only occurs once, at December 21, 2012, at which point according to McKenna, the universe will reach a concrescence as novelty reaches a singularity. The events shown above are just a few of the many events which McKenna used to map the novelty wave.
McKenna himself remarked at his own surprise in the conjunction of the end date with the Maya calendar. After fitting the data to the past, he claimed astonishment that the end date was “not hundreds or thousands of years into the future,” (McKenna 1998a) but in 2012, in conjunction with the Maya calendar end date.
Despite initially claiming independence to the Maya calendar (“The only thing that I have in common with the Mayan calendar is that both I and the Maya took psychedelic mushrooms,”) (McKenna 1998a), McKenna grew intrigued at this synchronistic turn of events and began to speculate about the possible meaning of this correspondence:
Irrespective of what the Maya knew, Terence McKenna certainly appreciated the astronomical significance of the period as the possible end of the 26,000 “Zodiacal great year” and the so-called alignment with the “galactic center”:
It is noteworthy that McKenna does not throw his full weight behind this claim of further correspondence between his theory, the Maya calendar, and the “galactic alignment.” Terence clearly went to great lengths to attempt to make his theory as empirical as possible and in lectures even went to some effort to explain the ambiguity of the concept of a galactic alignment (McKenna 1998b). What McKenna did not shy away from however, is that irrespective of the Maya Calendar, galactic alignment, or even Novelty Theory, we are in a period of great flux and change of a magnitude unparalleled in recorded history.
But the McKenna’s referred to The Invisible Landscape and their introduction of Timewave Zero as their magnum opus, clearly they believed their work to be more than merely a coincidence of the times. So what did Terence really think of Timewave Zero and the coming singularity?
McKenna further defines the concrescence as an achievement in which, “ego and the Tao are perceived as one, or rather, only Tao is perceived, but as though it were ego,” (McKenna 1993). This fairly abstract explanation is aided by a further expansion on the idea:
Throughout his career Terence was asked to expand upon his own personal opinion of what 2012 might bring but perhaps there is no articulation of his own ideas laid out any more beautifully than as he put it above. What always remained more elusive however, was a personal guarantee from Terence as to the absolute validity of his theory: “I am still willing to argue that what I put down about the I Ching is true, or that a truth is very close to the surface in all of that,” (McKenna 1998a). Or as he put it in his introduction to the 1994 edition of The Invisible Landscape:
McKenna was always very careful to avoid pegging himself down and saying, “Yes. Here it is! I’ve got all the answers,” because he knew that he didn’t. He would likely say it is for that reason that science is failing us today and it is perhaps along this vein in which he has proposed this theory in the first place, at least in the eyes of friend, colleague, and creator of the Timewave Zero software, Peter Meyer:
It is the above message which the user of the Timewave Zero software sees as she exits the application. McKenna is not alive today to confirm his former colleague’s conclusion, but it is not an unreasonable assumption to make. Terence often lectured on the absurdity and hypocrisy of modern science (though equally as often, its merits) and made an art of proposing ideas from the lunatic fringe and then showing them as completely plausible. McKenna was a master of using the rules of science and logic to illustrate the dangers of dogma and expectation among our modern society.
McKenna was acutely aware of the potentiality for dogma in the acceptance of his Timewave Zero theory and in his other ideas and musings as both a lecturer and writer; it is for this reason that he went to such extraordinary lengths to provide a mathematical foundation for his theory.
Certainly one of the main themes of Terence’s life’s work was to expose and subvert the cultural programming and dogma of our society. One of McKenna’s most recognizable and memorable lines is “culture is not your friend,” as he viewed our cultural programming as “the most powerful imprisoning factor in our lives,” (McKenna 1994). In fact, many of his lectures were devoted to anti-dogmatic rants which found Christianity and modern science but also the New Age movement and guruism among his favorite targets. It is the latter two which McKenna seemed especially adamant in attempting to distance himself from, and understandably so as both some of his ideas and his audience partially overlapped with the two movements which he viewed as just different flavors of cultural programming.
McKenna’s distaste for the New Age ideology is evidenced by the following quote in which he discusses the difficulty in being perceived as credible while pursuing a common academic interest:
Despite his clear disdain for any New Age association, McKenna undoubtedly seems to walk that dangerous line to those unfamiliar with his work. However, to those familiar with McKenna, he provides an invaluable service as a brilliant thinker willing to stray outside of the narrow confine of what is deemed acceptable in modern society.
Just over a year prior to his death, McKenna gave a lecture in San Francisco in which summed up his later views of his work with the I Ching:
The second sentence of the above quote, (which was quoted previously, in less context) betrays to us what seems likely to have been Terence’s ultimate motivation in creating his Novelty Theory. Terence recognized, quite early, that science has stripped man of his place in the universe, reduced him to a cosmic accident, and disallowed purpose from having any meaning in our universe. Novelty Theory, it seems, is McKenna’s effort to rewrite humanity back into the great cosmic play.
Regardless of whether or not Terence McKenna believed that on December 21, 2012 a switch would flip and the universe would be forever changed, it is clear that he believed that the universe needed to change. To claim that “Terence believed this” or “Terence believed that” regarding the literality of Novelty Theory would be to miss the very point he was trying to make.
Terence McKenna passed away in early 2000 before he could ever see just exactly what kind of truth his Novelty Theory held. In the years since his death, the further complexification and integration promised in his Novelty Theory seems to have lived up to its billing, though its ultimate test still lies beyond the horizon. Will 2012 bring the monumental change that Terence and others have speculated it would? Who knows? Terence certainly did not.
Bibliography
Gabriel, Trip.
1993 Tripping, but Not Falling. New York Times 2 May. New York.
Jenkins, John Major and Terence McKenna
1998 Maya Cosmogenesis 2012. Bear & Company, Sante Fe, New Mexico
McKenna, Terence
1991 The Archaic Revival. Harper Collins, New York, New York.
McKenna, Terence and Dennis McKenna
1993 The Invisible Landscape. 2nd ed [1975]. Harper Collins, New York, New York.
McKenna, Terence
1994 From Eros to Eschaton. Lecture. Seattle, Washington
McKenna, Terence
1998(a) In The Valley of Novelty (Part 3). Podcast 29. Psychedelic Salon
McKenna, Terence
1998(b) Dream Awake. Lecture. San Francisco, California.
Meyer, Peter
Timewave Zero. Dolphin Software, Berkeley, California
Any discussion of Timewave Zero must first begin with a discussion of novelty. To McKenna novelty is more than just a cute happenstance, it is a natural law—perhaps the most fundamental law in fact—for the “conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for,” (McKenna 1994). Before jumping into Novelty Theory however, a definition of the term is in order and who better than to provide that definition than the late bard himself: “Synonyms for ‘novelty’ are ‘degree of connectedness’ or ‘complexity.’ Note that these are not terms that make a moral judgment. Novelty is not ‘good’ while entropy is ‘bad.’ Novelty is simply a situation of greater connectedness and complex organization, while entropy is the opposite of these qualities: it is less organized, less integrated, less complex,” (McKenna 1991)
But what of novelty as a law of nature? To McKenna,
It’s not a coincidence that electrons spinning around an atomic nucleus and planets going around a star and star clusters going around a gravitational center of a galaxy…observe the same kind of order on different scales and yet science would say that is a coincidence. PW Bridgeman, who was a philosopher of science, defined coincidence as what you have leftover when you apply a bad theory. It means that you overlooked something and that what jumps out at you as coincidence is a set of relationships whose casuistry, whose relationships to each other, are simply hidden from you, (McKenna 1994).
Continuing in reference to dark matter explaining the structure and organization of galaxies:
I don’t believe that 90% of the matter in the universe goes unobserved… It’s not that there’s mass missing–it’s that there’s a law missing…Why does the Milky Way tend to stay the Milky Way? The answer is: because, as a spiral galaxy, it’s a more complex organism, a more complex structure, than it is as a dissipated, homogeneous mass, (McKenna 1998a).
To McKenna, it is novelty which is the “missing” law of science that accounts for both the structure of things from atoms to nebulae and the seemingly exponential increase in technological advance seen in recent history.
The way the universe works is upon a platform of previously achieved complexity…new forms of complexity can be built that cross these ontological boundaries, in other words what I mean by that is that biology is based on complex chemistry but it is more than complex chemistry, socials systems are based on the organization that is animal life and yet it is more than animal life. This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine, (McKenna 1994). [Italics mine].
This perpetual creation and multiplication of complexity however, is not some homeostatic process but is in fact increasing, “each stage of advancement into complexity occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded it…Time is, in fact, speeding up,” (McKenna 1994).
McKenna’s theory seems greatly at odds with modern scientific thinking yet oddly in line with subjective experience. Things do seem to be progressing and growing increasingly complex at an ever increasing rate. The technological progress made by our culture in the last twenty years alone has been unthinkably swift. As McKenna suggests (McKenna 1998b) to try and extrapolate this forward 500 years into the future is an impossibility. If this is no mere stochastic trend, how could it be that science has somehow managed to overlook one of the main characteristics of our universe? McKenna answers,
Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck, (McKenna 1994).
What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. And I use ‘higher dimensional’ in the mathematical sense, (McKenna 1994).
To Terence then, the psychedelic experience in a sense completes science, and it is through the psychedelic experience that Terence arrived at Novelty Theory.
I discern patterns in nature that cause me to believe that science…has overlooked very important aspects of reality that you don’t need an atom smasher or a DNA sequencer to register, (McKenna 1998b)
Through Novelty Theory, McKenna hopes to reconcile science with subjective experience through the kind of empirical method on which modern science is built. The basis from which McKenna built this theory (or more properly, the actual source of data for McKenna’s theory itself,) is the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.
[The I Ching] is a mathematical notation system… for the purpose of creating a physics of Time…based on human observation, and… it arises in a context, we presume, of shamanism and proto-Taoist values, (McKenna 1998a).
What is unusual about this approach, if not unique, is the effort to give a formal mathematical description of the ebb and flow of this quality. I might have called it Tao, but I chose instead to call it novelty to stress the fact that it is process growing toward concrescence, (McKenna 1991).
By concrescence, McKenna is using the term as defined by Alfred North Whitehead, “ ‘Concrescence’ is the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the ‘many’ to its subordination in the constitution of the novel ‘one,’” (McKenna 1993). We will address more specifically what McKenna interprets this eventual concrescence as later, for now we will turn our attention to how McKenna and his brother created this map of novelty, which they call Timewave Zero.
Timewave Zero is based off of the belief that the ancient Chinese had an acute understanding of some relatively complicated astronomical phenomena such as the procession of the equinoxes and the sunspot cycles as well as “the assumption of hierarchical or resonance thinking in Chinese intellectual constructs,” (McKenna 1993) for which he attempts to illustrate in his book The Invisible Landscape. McKenna establishes that the Chinese knew the length of the lunar cycle to be 29.53 days by citing the scholarship of Joseph Needham (1965). He then suggests that it was recognized that 13 lunations equaled roughly 384 (383.89) which is equally to six (the number of lines (yao) in one of the hexagrams of the I Ching sequence) times 64 (the total number of hexograms).
At this point in the process, it is reasonable to suppose that the Chinese love of cycles, hierarchies, and resonances would have led them, having cognized the 384-day year as a hexagram, to assume that 64 x 384 [64 x 64 x 6] days was a natural division of time [approximately equal to six minor sunspot cycles]…And indeed, 384 x 64 x 64 [64 x 64 x 64 x 6] also shows interesting resonance periods [roughly 2 zodiacal ages, further multiply this number by 6 (64 x 64 x 64 x 6 x 6) and you get 25,836 years, a very close approximation of the time of the procession of the equinoxes]. In fact, several phenomena that have been found to be cyclical appear to have relationships of correspondence to the cylindrical hierarchy on one of its levels, (McKenna 1993).
McKenna then uses these patterns, which seem clear enough, and then a fair amount of fractal geometry and wave dynamics to create his Timewave Zero map of novelty. Let me take a moment to be explicit: Timewave Zero (see image below) is intended to be a map of the total novelty over time, or in the words of McKenna, “these time maps or novelty maps show the ebb and flow of connectedness or novelty in any span of time from a few days to tens of millennia,” (McKenna 1993).
The story of the universe is that information, which I call novelty, is struggling to free itself from habit, which I call entropy… and that this process… is accelerating… It seems as if… the whole cosmos wants to change into information… All points want to become connected…. The path of complexity to its goals is through connecting things together… You can imagine that there is an ultimate end-state of that process–it’s the moment when every point in the universe is connected to every other point in the universe, (McKenna 1998a).
In an interesting contrast to our Newtonian or even Einsteinian notion of time, the wave characteristic of Timewave Zero predicts a “progressive spiral involution of time toward a concrescence;” in other words, an endpoint (McKenna 1993).
Implicit in this theory of time is the notion that duration is like a tone in that one must assign a moment at which the damped oscillation is finally quenched and ceases. I chose the date December 21, 2012 A.D., as this point because with that assumption the wave seemed to be in the “best fit” configuration with regard to the recorded facts of the ebb and flow of historical advance into connectedness. Later I learned to my amazement that this same date, December 21, 2012, was the date assigned as the end of their calendrical cycle by the classic Maya, surely one of the worlds most time-obsessed cultures, (McKenna 1991).
Above is an image from the Timewave Zero program of the novelty wave over the course of 1500 years. Shown on the image are a number of significant events which were used (among many others) to help fit the wave to our Gregorian calendar. Here “novelty” is maximized when closest to the x-axis, therefore a singularity will occur at any point that the wave has a value of zero. This however, only occurs once, at December 21, 2012, at which point according to McKenna, the universe will reach a concrescence as novelty reaches a singularity. The events shown above are just a few of the many events which McKenna used to map the novelty wave.
Let me explain that we chose the end of the Mayan Calendar as the “end date” for this graph because we found good agreement between the events that comprise the historical record and the wave itself when this end date was chosen. The end date is the point of maximized novelty in the wave and is the only point in the entire wave that has a quantified value of zero [infinite novelty]. We arrived at this particular end date without knowledge of the Mayan Calendar, and it was only after we noticed that the historical data seemed to fit best with the wave if this end date was chosen that we were informed that the end date that we had deduced was in fact the end of the Mayan Calendar, (McKenna 1993).
McKenna himself remarked at his own surprise in the conjunction of the end date with the Maya calendar. After fitting the data to the past, he claimed astonishment that the end date was “not hundreds or thousands of years into the future,” (McKenna 1998a) but in 2012, in conjunction with the Maya calendar end date.
Despite initially claiming independence to the Maya calendar (“The only thing that I have in common with the Mayan calendar is that both I and the Maya took psychedelic mushrooms,”) (McKenna 1998a), McKenna grew intrigued at this synchronistic turn of events and began to speculate about the possible meaning of this correspondence:
In the early 1990’s, while in correspondence with John Jenkins, we discussed the possibility that the end-date of the 13-baktun Great Cycle was intentionally chosen by the Maya because of the conjunction of the sun with the intersection of the ecliptic and the plane of the Milky Way on December 21, 2012—the 13.0.0.0.0 of the Long Count calendar. In my revised 1993 edition of the The Invisible Landscape, I stated that the end date for my own mushroom-revealed model of the cosmos ended on the same date as the Maya calendar but that my calculation had been done by different methods than those of the Maya and without the knowledge of those methods, (Jenkins 1998).
The Maya believed, for reasons which are perhaps forever lost, or perhaps soon to be revealed, that the coincidence of the winter solstice sunrise with the part of the Milky Way that they called xibalba be would not be, as some have stated, the end of the world, but its moment of true creation, (Jenkins 1998).
Irrespective of what the Maya knew, Terence McKenna certainly appreciated the astronomical significance of the period as the possible end of the 26,000 “Zodiacal great year” and the so-called alignment with the “galactic center”:
This will occur sometime in the next two hundred years. It is difficult to be more accurate, since the term “galactic center” is ambiguous…the galaxy may by presumed to have a gravitational center, a radio center, and a spatial center…the most likely heliacal rising of the galactic center with the solstice sun occurs on December 21, 2012….That such a situation would have noticeable effects on life on earth is totally speculative, (McKenna 1993).
It is noteworthy that McKenna does not throw his full weight behind this claim of further correspondence between his theory, the Maya calendar, and the “galactic alignment.” Terence clearly went to great lengths to attempt to make his theory as empirical as possible and in lectures even went to some effort to explain the ambiguity of the concept of a galactic alignment (McKenna 1998b). What McKenna did not shy away from however, is that irrespective of the Maya Calendar, galactic alignment, or even Novelty Theory, we are in a period of great flux and change of a magnitude unparalleled in recorded history.
But the McKenna’s referred to The Invisible Landscape and their introduction of Timewave Zero as their magnum opus, clearly they believed their work to be more than merely a coincidence of the times. So what did Terence really think of Timewave Zero and the coming singularity?
My interpretation of the zero point is that it is the point at which the ingression into novelty and the degree of interconnectedness of the separate elements that comprise the concrescence will be such that the ontological nature of time itself will be transformed, (McKenna 1991).
McKenna further defines the concrescence as an achievement in which, “ego and the Tao are perceived as one, or rather, only Tao is perceived, but as though it were ego,” (McKenna 1993). This fairly abstract explanation is aided by a further expansion on the idea:
It’s reasonable to suggest that by the end of the Mayan calendar—which is in 2012 A.D.—we will be unrecognizable to ourselves, that what we take to be our creations, computers, and technology, are actually another level of ourselves…we will recover what we knew in the beginning: the archaic union with nature that was seamless, unmediated by language, unmediated by notions of self and other, of life and death, of civilization and nature. These are dualisms that are temporary and provisional within the labyrinth of history…We are not alienated and outside of the natural we are somehow the cutting edge of it. And this vast output of buildings and highways and all the things that characterize the modern world is actually a feature of the natural world, (McKenna 1991).
Throughout his career Terence was asked to expand upon his own personal opinion of what 2012 might bring but perhaps there is no articulation of his own ideas laid out any more beautifully than as he put it above. What always remained more elusive however, was a personal guarantee from Terence as to the absolute validity of his theory: “I am still willing to argue that what I put down about the I Ching is true, or that a truth is very close to the surface in all of that,” (McKenna 1998a). Or as he put it in his introduction to the 1994 edition of The Invisible Landscape:
My faith that the ideas explored here will be found to have an extraordinary explanatory and persuasive power remains unshaken. As for Truth, I will argue today—as I did in 1971 at La Chorrera—that these ideas are, in Wittgenstein’s wonderful phrase, “True enough,” (McKenna 1993).
McKenna was always very careful to avoid pegging himself down and saying, “Yes. Here it is! I’ve got all the answers,” because he knew that he didn’t. He would likely say it is for that reason that science is failing us today and it is perhaps along this vein in which he has proposed this theory in the first place, at least in the eyes of friend, colleague, and creator of the Timewave Zero software, Peter Meyer:
Perhaps the real value of Novelty Theory, at the end of the technological war-driven 20th century, is that it is a parody. It is not a scientific theory, nor is it a pseudo-scientific theory—it is a parody of a scientific theory. It basically mocks the pretensions of 20th century physical science. It purports to explain the nature of time and to elucidate the inner workings of the temporal world, yet it is obviously absurd, at least to a more than superficial examination. Novelty Theory says to us: This is what any Cartesian-Newtonian scientific theory really is—basically absurd. And since it is absurd, we should not, and do not have to, believe. This basically knocks the foundations out from under the assumptions of modern Western society, built as it is on a faith in modern physical science as being the authority as to the nature of the real world. In this sense Terence McKenna's thought is both liberating and subversive, (Meyer).
It is the above message which the user of the Timewave Zero software sees as she exits the application. McKenna is not alive today to confirm his former colleague’s conclusion, but it is not an unreasonable assumption to make. Terence often lectured on the absurdity and hypocrisy of modern science (though equally as often, its merits) and made an art of proposing ideas from the lunatic fringe and then showing them as completely plausible. McKenna was a master of using the rules of science and logic to illustrate the dangers of dogma and expectation among our modern society.
I’m more rational than I may sound, here…because I doubt. I know absolutely how flakey this sounds… I’m not here to found a cult. I just had a very wiggy experience… The problem with most people’s really wiggy experiences is that it never gets down to the nitty-gritty… and by the nitty gritty I basically mean a mathematical formula that you can then throw up on a blackboard and say to the experts, “this is what God said to me, is it horseshit or what is it?”…[but] the good thing–in my view–of what happened to me is, it actually got down to a mathematical proposition… a hypothesized law…it may turn out to be false, but it is a contender. It played in the highest class of competition of all which is in the realm of formal mathematical theory, (McKenna 1998a).
McKenna was acutely aware of the potentiality for dogma in the acceptance of his Timewave Zero theory and in his other ideas and musings as both a lecturer and writer; it is for this reason that he went to such extraordinary lengths to provide a mathematical foundation for his theory.
Certainly one of the main themes of Terence’s life’s work was to expose and subvert the cultural programming and dogma of our society. One of McKenna’s most recognizable and memorable lines is “culture is not your friend,” as he viewed our cultural programming as “the most powerful imprisoning factor in our lives,” (McKenna 1994). In fact, many of his lectures were devoted to anti-dogmatic rants which found Christianity and modern science but also the New Age movement and guruism among his favorite targets. It is the latter two which McKenna seemed especially adamant in attempting to distance himself from, and understandably so as both some of his ideas and his audience partially overlapped with the two movements which he viewed as just different flavors of cultural programming.
McKenna’s distaste for the New Age ideology is evidenced by the following quote in which he discusses the difficulty in being perceived as credible while pursuing a common academic interest:
The task of appreciating the Maya is not made any easier by the fact that the specious archaeological fantasies of the New Age have poured scorn on all ancient knowledge that does not flow from the putative founts of lost Lemuri, high Atlantis, and even more dubious realism that are far away indeed, (Jenkins 1998).
Despite his clear disdain for any New Age association, McKenna undoubtedly seems to walk that dangerous line to those unfamiliar with his work. However, to those familiar with McKenna, he provides an invaluable service as a brilliant thinker willing to stray outside of the narrow confine of what is deemed acceptable in modern society.
Just over a year prior to his death, McKenna gave a lecture in San Francisco in which summed up his later views of his work with the I Ching:
For those of you who care about my theories in this area of mathematics and deconstruction of the I Ching and analogizing to the Mayan calendar: it is a mathematical game, it is an intellectual game. I discern patterns in nature that cause me to believe that science… has overlooked very important aspects of reality that you don’t need an atom smasher or a DNA sequencer… to register, (McKenna 1998b).
The second sentence of the above quote, (which was quoted previously, in less context) betrays to us what seems likely to have been Terence’s ultimate motivation in creating his Novelty Theory. Terence recognized, quite early, that science has stripped man of his place in the universe, reduced him to a cosmic accident, and disallowed purpose from having any meaning in our universe. Novelty Theory, it seems, is McKenna’s effort to rewrite humanity back into the great cosmic play.
If you will join me in this belief that the universe works as I have described…a light comes on on the human condition… Who are we in science’s story? We are nobody. Lucky to be here. We are a cosmic accident. We exist on an ordinary star, at the edge of a typical galaxy, in an ordinary part of space and time. Essentially our existence is without meaning…But if I’m right…then we are the apple of [the universe’s] eye. Suddenly, cosmic purpose is restored to us. We left the center of the cosmic stage in the 13th century and haven’t been back since. But this idea says “No [to that notion]. People matter.” You are the cutting edge of a 13 billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose: to add to complexity. Your enemy: disorder entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness…suddenly then you have a morality, you have an ethical arrow, you have contextualization in the processes of nature. You have meaning, you have authenticity, you have hope, (McKenna 1998b).
Regardless of whether or not Terence McKenna believed that on December 21, 2012 a switch would flip and the universe would be forever changed, it is clear that he believed that the universe needed to change. To claim that “Terence believed this” or “Terence believed that” regarding the literality of Novelty Theory would be to miss the very point he was trying to make.
Terence McKenna passed away in early 2000 before he could ever see just exactly what kind of truth his Novelty Theory held. In the years since his death, the further complexification and integration promised in his Novelty Theory seems to have lived up to its billing, though its ultimate test still lies beyond the horizon. Will 2012 bring the monumental change that Terence and others have speculated it would? Who knows? Terence certainly did not.
Bibliography
Gabriel, Trip.
1993 Tripping, but Not Falling. New York Times 2 May. New York.
Jenkins, John Major and Terence McKenna
1998 Maya Cosmogenesis 2012. Bear & Company, Sante Fe, New Mexico
McKenna, Terence
1991 The Archaic Revival. Harper Collins, New York, New York.
McKenna, Terence and Dennis McKenna
1993 The Invisible Landscape. 2nd ed [1975]. Harper Collins, New York, New York.
McKenna, Terence
1994 From Eros to Eschaton. Lecture. Seattle, Washington
McKenna, Terence
1998(a) In The Valley of Novelty (Part 3). Podcast 29. Psychedelic Salon
McKenna, Terence
1998(b) Dream Awake. Lecture. San Francisco, California.
Meyer, Peter
Timewave Zero. Dolphin Software, Berkeley, California
Crazy Video
I found this video on the Psychedelic Salon forum over on the Grow Report. It's pretty interesting to say the least, and very short, absolutely worth checking out. To view in full resolution (which I highly recommend, the video above doesn't really do it justice), click here
Lorenzo (of the Psychedlic Salon podcast) really finds some great stuff and posts it to his site over at matrixmasters.net
Monday, June 22, 2009
First Ever Trip Report
Well, after nine months of actively pursuing my first psychedelic experience, I finally got what I asked for. It took me a surprisingly long time to actually find anyone with mushrooms, but it finally happened. The following experience took place at a cabin on a tree farm owned by my grandfather in the Catskills and on an eighth of mushrooms.
In all, it was an absolutely beautiful experience, certainly one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. Originally, I had intended to have a more introspective trip a la the Secret Chief method of just chilling out in a dark room with a couple of blankets and a carefully selected playlist of some of my classical favorites. But about an hour to an hour and a half after chewing them down I decided to move around a bit. One thing led to another and I ended up getting outside for a walk along a path short path I had cleared the day before through the forest steps from the front door. Inside, I did not really visually experience anything of great interest. Certainly I was feeling different ("fucking great" is how I described it), and I think some of it had to do with me peaking as I walked outside, but the second I stepped outside it was as if a switch went off. Right away I noticed a spider web spun the night before hanging a few feet in front of the front door. I immediately was absolutely mesmerized and intrigued--I had seen spider webs before, but I had never REALLY seen a spider web before this one. Normally, I'm somewhat afraid of spiders and easily bothered by anything creepy and crawly, but not in the least when I was on my trip. To skip a few of the details (which were extraordinarily interesting to me, but naturally are difficult for someone else to appreciate) I spent about 2 hours in the 200 feet from the front door and the spider web to the spot halfway down the trail where I first noticed I was beginning to come down. Everything was just so absolutely fascinating, I was noticing normally insignificant details as if they were the only thing one could help but notice. I would glance at a branch and instantly see the seven caterpillars on it or I would notice a fly on a leaf ten feet away. I was even finding single strands of spider silk floating off of the trees in the wind. Particularly fascinating were the water droplets that had collected as morning dew (I tripped first thing in the morning) on the leaves, grass, spider webs, even on the hairs on the caterpillars. I could easily see how an experience like this would be useful to the artist and it certainly was--if nothing else at all--absolutely beautiful, though it was certainly more than that.
But as I started to come down, about halfway through the 100 yard trail, I had a quite profound experience. I was standing with my face inches away from a branch of an elm tree in the rain (it was raining by now, but that was perfectly fine) noticing all of the things that I had been noticing all morning, when I glanced a few inches up and noticed that the branch right above the one I was looking at was of a different tree, a maple actually. I followed that branch in to the trunk and noticed that this maple was much bigger, broader, and somewhat dominated the area more. Then I looked at the elm and noticed that the first few feet of its trunk, some 20 feet from the base of the maple, grew straight up but that after that, it grew at an angle moving away from the maple. Then I looked back at the branch I was looking at, I noticed that the leaves only grew where they would receive direct sunlight and that the entire branch leading back to the base of the elm was bare where the maple had blocked out the sky above. I looked around at the other trees in the area and noticed another tree, growing at a 45 degree angle away from the larger maple tree. That it could grow at such an angle and not fall over was amazing to me, even now as I think about it. It's roots would have needed to stretch far beyond the maple in order for it to hold itself up. A fourth tree grew right against the base of the maple. But it didn't grow vertically, rather after the first two or three feet it split in two, growing like a "Y" with wilting arms. But one side of the Y, the side directly under the maple, had died and was beginning to rot, the other though, was growing away from the base of the maple and was thriving. I realized that the tree itself must have cut off the right side from whatever nutrients it was absorbing from the ground and that is why it must have died. That side of the tree couldn't have been receiving much sunlight and must have been a burden on the other half of the tree so it just cut it off in order to live. These thoughts all occurred in a sort of revelation as I recognized--for the first time in my life--that trees were not just these inanimate things which, yes, were alive, but that lacked the sort of defining characteristic of what I considered to be life. But these things were alive in every sense of the word! They were active, they were animate, they even have a sort of conscious intent to their movement. The one short tree even made a DECISION in order to best adapt itself to a particular situation.
As I marveled at recognizing these trees as my brothers in life, the experience merged with the previous two hours and I FELT that all of these things, the caterpillars, spiders, flies, slugs, dew drops, birds, the bedrock under my feet, the clouds over my head, were all quite literally inseparable. When I say that I FELT that way, I don't mean it in the ordinary way ("I feel like a slice of pizza"), I mean that I EXPERIENCED it, I KNEW it but not in the way that I know that 2+2=4, but I knew it experientially, emotionally, I KNEW it in some way that I can't possibly articulate. This wasn't quite the experience of the "one" that I've often read of, but I think I was close. What was missing however, seemed to be me. As I looked around, it was still the "I" that had experienced this, it was still me that FELT this. I felt like a full blown mystical experience was just out of reach, almost as if it was on the tip of my tongue. While still in the moment of this feeling of the inseparability of everything, I looked down at my feet standing on the wet grass, on top of the roots, which were in the soil, which was above the bedrock, which at the time, meant the entire planet itself, which was ALL connected, but "I" was still there, inside my head, observing--externally--the connection in all things. I was what was missing. I say "I" not in the sense of my body, because my body was a part of everything else, but my conscious self was still somehow outside of all of this. And I knew that this particular trip, I would not be going any further.
I don't know if I needed a larger dose to break through, if the circumstances were not quite right, or perhaps I was just not ready for it, but I stopped right there, on the verge of what I knew intellectually must be true, but hadn't yet experientially KNOWN to be true. It was a beautiful experience, and the moment under the tree was profound, but I know I've only touched the tip of the iceberg.
I am sorry (mostly for myself) that it had taken so long to have this experience, but I am glad that I did and am looking forward to future explorations.
In all, it was an absolutely beautiful experience, certainly one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. Originally, I had intended to have a more introspective trip a la the Secret Chief method of just chilling out in a dark room with a couple of blankets and a carefully selected playlist of some of my classical favorites. But about an hour to an hour and a half after chewing them down I decided to move around a bit. One thing led to another and I ended up getting outside for a walk along a path short path I had cleared the day before through the forest steps from the front door. Inside, I did not really visually experience anything of great interest. Certainly I was feeling different ("fucking great" is how I described it), and I think some of it had to do with me peaking as I walked outside, but the second I stepped outside it was as if a switch went off. Right away I noticed a spider web spun the night before hanging a few feet in front of the front door. I immediately was absolutely mesmerized and intrigued--I had seen spider webs before, but I had never REALLY seen a spider web before this one. Normally, I'm somewhat afraid of spiders and easily bothered by anything creepy and crawly, but not in the least when I was on my trip. To skip a few of the details (which were extraordinarily interesting to me, but naturally are difficult for someone else to appreciate) I spent about 2 hours in the 200 feet from the front door and the spider web to the spot halfway down the trail where I first noticed I was beginning to come down. Everything was just so absolutely fascinating, I was noticing normally insignificant details as if they were the only thing one could help but notice. I would glance at a branch and instantly see the seven caterpillars on it or I would notice a fly on a leaf ten feet away. I was even finding single strands of spider silk floating off of the trees in the wind. Particularly fascinating were the water droplets that had collected as morning dew (I tripped first thing in the morning) on the leaves, grass, spider webs, even on the hairs on the caterpillars. I could easily see how an experience like this would be useful to the artist and it certainly was--if nothing else at all--absolutely beautiful, though it was certainly more than that.
But as I started to come down, about halfway through the 100 yard trail, I had a quite profound experience. I was standing with my face inches away from a branch of an elm tree in the rain (it was raining by now, but that was perfectly fine) noticing all of the things that I had been noticing all morning, when I glanced a few inches up and noticed that the branch right above the one I was looking at was of a different tree, a maple actually. I followed that branch in to the trunk and noticed that this maple was much bigger, broader, and somewhat dominated the area more. Then I looked at the elm and noticed that the first few feet of its trunk, some 20 feet from the base of the maple, grew straight up but that after that, it grew at an angle moving away from the maple. Then I looked back at the branch I was looking at, I noticed that the leaves only grew where they would receive direct sunlight and that the entire branch leading back to the base of the elm was bare where the maple had blocked out the sky above. I looked around at the other trees in the area and noticed another tree, growing at a 45 degree angle away from the larger maple tree. That it could grow at such an angle and not fall over was amazing to me, even now as I think about it. It's roots would have needed to stretch far beyond the maple in order for it to hold itself up. A fourth tree grew right against the base of the maple. But it didn't grow vertically, rather after the first two or three feet it split in two, growing like a "Y" with wilting arms. But one side of the Y, the side directly under the maple, had died and was beginning to rot, the other though, was growing away from the base of the maple and was thriving. I realized that the tree itself must have cut off the right side from whatever nutrients it was absorbing from the ground and that is why it must have died. That side of the tree couldn't have been receiving much sunlight and must have been a burden on the other half of the tree so it just cut it off in order to live. These thoughts all occurred in a sort of revelation as I recognized--for the first time in my life--that trees were not just these inanimate things which, yes, were alive, but that lacked the sort of defining characteristic of what I considered to be life. But these things were alive in every sense of the word! They were active, they were animate, they even have a sort of conscious intent to their movement. The one short tree even made a DECISION in order to best adapt itself to a particular situation.
As I marveled at recognizing these trees as my brothers in life, the experience merged with the previous two hours and I FELT that all of these things, the caterpillars, spiders, flies, slugs, dew drops, birds, the bedrock under my feet, the clouds over my head, were all quite literally inseparable. When I say that I FELT that way, I don't mean it in the ordinary way ("I feel like a slice of pizza"), I mean that I EXPERIENCED it, I KNEW it but not in the way that I know that 2+2=4, but I knew it experientially, emotionally, I KNEW it in some way that I can't possibly articulate. This wasn't quite the experience of the "one" that I've often read of, but I think I was close. What was missing however, seemed to be me. As I looked around, it was still the "I" that had experienced this, it was still me that FELT this. I felt like a full blown mystical experience was just out of reach, almost as if it was on the tip of my tongue. While still in the moment of this feeling of the inseparability of everything, I looked down at my feet standing on the wet grass, on top of the roots, which were in the soil, which was above the bedrock, which at the time, meant the entire planet itself, which was ALL connected, but "I" was still there, inside my head, observing--externally--the connection in all things. I was what was missing. I say "I" not in the sense of my body, because my body was a part of everything else, but my conscious self was still somehow outside of all of this. And I knew that this particular trip, I would not be going any further.
I don't know if I needed a larger dose to break through, if the circumstances were not quite right, or perhaps I was just not ready for it, but I stopped right there, on the verge of what I knew intellectually must be true, but hadn't yet experientially KNOWN to be true. It was a beautiful experience, and the moment under the tree was profound, but I know I've only touched the tip of the iceberg.
I am sorry (mostly for myself) that it had taken so long to have this experience, but I am glad that I did and am looking forward to future explorations.
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