First off, I don't think there's going to be a physical calamity, an earth shaking catastrophe.    Like this guy, over at Slate.com, who could have gotten in the spirit of things a bit more, don't you think?

I do think that there is a set of senses associated with with mind that are not familiar like the body senses.  This  mind-sense still 'sees' even if the eyes are closed, or if we are asleep. Whatever space this sense perceives is where I think the event happens.  .

I'm comfortable with this, but not everyone is.  That's OK, you don't need to be a monk, a hippy or a stoned quantum physicist to appreciate the 2012 moment.

I think the sense required to experience the hyperspatial bleep (obviously still working on terminology)  is not unusual, is not so unfamiliar to everyone.  We've all undoubtedly felt intimations of that  moment.  it feels like a slight stepping outside of the skin, a skipping outside time - an overlong holding of breath.    It is easier to experience when the body is moving rhythmically, when music and chant are occupying the first regions of the thinking brain. "That moment", the one we are receiving intimations about - it could be the Immanentized Eschaton (thanks, Kenn, for those words).  Maybe it's the moment of our death, or of our awakening.  

Think about a Steeler game.  [If I had an editor...Ed. Note: fabulous transition]   I remember when the Pittsburgh Steelers won one of their many Super Bowl championships.   I stepped outside to watch the victory parade  along with hundreds of thousands of other people, all packed in to downtown PIttsburgh.  There may have been a million people there.  All the members of Steeler's Nation, living and Dead, a hundred million strong descended on Grant street and Market Square to celebrate.  The voices raised in praise, the songs were shared, we all had the same thing in mind (a ring for the thumb...very pagan).   That - now that is surely what Jung had in mind when he spoke about projection "extrapolating its content on to the object".  All of that, the City of Champions, leaping onto the players and coaches.

It was a shared projection that created something  we all felt, something that exists in the mind-sense.  I'm trying to get across the idea that this mind-sense, this space where the Eschaton is a formidable event...this is not alien, not something reserved for practitioners of obscure ritual.

Same thing at a U2 concert.  Plato understood this, and banished music from the Republic.  Too dangerous, too easy to change the world.    This isn't Frippery or Balderdash.  How many political movements have used music for propaganda?  Barack Obama has Bruce Springsteen (Mitt Romney had  wait, who had what? Did I hear some Kenny G.  somewhere? ). No question that sound, image can be used to bring this mind-sense to the forefront and create shared projections.

Terrence McKenna foresaw the opening of a hyperspatial object at the end of a Timewave with a specific temporal reference of this  Friday, 12/21/12.   It's easy to say he was wrong, or that its a shame that he missed it (he died in 1999).  But I think McKenna did find the hyperspatial Omega point and the end of the Timewave..the end of his own Timewave.

I think the moment of transcendence, the moment of death (or birth see earlier Dickinson post) appears as a crumbling of the artifacts we have considered real.  The towers  fall, the horsemen  roam.  But there is nothing unique about that apocalyptic moment.  Each moment holds a potential apocalypse, one accessible through the mind-sense.

The apocalypse is an intimate, universal but unaccompanied moment.  What can be different at 6:11AM 12/21/12 is our attention. 

Consider the evolution of an idea.  A directive offered from  a visionary mushroom consciousness attached itself to the right human carrier, introduced a cultural meme that 'infected' the existing Mayan calendar.  The virus of meaning spread  through the fey new age environment, crossing over to a broader population  via Hollywood blockbuster, and lately ended  up on The Daily Show. 

On my way out of the office today, I heard three people laughing about work tasks for next week that they wouldn't bother about because of the "end of the World".  I did, somehow, refrain from lecturing them on the difference between the End of Time and the End of the World.  How to make friends and influence people, discussing the epidemiology of a meme. 

The mycelium  of a meme is consciousness.   See, that doesn't sound so bad, does it?  Of course a cultural idea ( a meme) exists only in the shared cultural experience.  But what is that?  It's the mind-sense.  None of this weird.  It's just real. A truly effective meme.

If we pay attention at that moment (this moment)  we will experience something.   We will experience something, because paying attention brings up the present moment, which is rich and strange.  Questions like "Who is watching?" , "Who is thinking?",  What is being watched?" . " Where do these thoughts come from, go to?".    Engaging with this, and something happens.  I can't say what that something is, except that  the moment will pass, our attention will move to the rest of the day.  We could certainly say that nothing happened, if asked about the passing Mayan Apocalypse.

But if we pay attention for one moment, we can pay attention for another, later.  This charmed moment. It is easier for the first moment (6:11 AM EST 12/21/12) because lots of other people are doing the same thing.  Fishing for their Big Fish.  Maybe the first question is "What the hell is everyone looking at?".  

There's a structure formed in the mind-sense (really) that we can all hold on to for a moment.  Sit  down, stand up,  do whatever, and pay attention.  Then do it again.  Your  own personal apocalypse,  always available.

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The Timewave.  The timewave is a theoretical model developed by Terrence Mckenna showing a series of cycles.  The cycles are arrived at from an analysis of the patterns in the I-Ching.  The I-Ching is a system of 64 hexagrams, each hexagram an alignment of broken and solid lines.  The I-Ching has been used in divination, each hexagram associated with poetic imagery the interaction of multiple hexagrams provides insight and wisdom.  John Cage throws the I-Ching to remove his conscious artistic self from the process of generating musical structure.  Terrence and his brother Dennis identifed a  pattern in the second order of difference in the King Wen sequence of the I-Ching which they worked out over a couple of years and a few mathematical models to arrive at the Timewave.  The earliest articulation of this idea is in the book Invisible Landscapes.

The insight that Mckenna arrived at was to see this as a pattern of 'novelty', increasing and decreasing over time.  As the timewave progresses, the cycles become shorter and steeper - massively more novelty introduced in ever shorter time frames.

At the end of the timewave is the hyperspatial object we talked about yesterday.  This hyperspatial object acts as an attractor, generatinbg novelty with the end result of increasing interconnection.  (The connection between novelty and Interconection/Information is for a different post).

The relationship of the cycles is true at all scales, from the enormous to the tiny.  The analytical challenge is to find points of increased novlety - or points of regression in novelty - and line that up with the peaks and troughs of the Timewave.  It could be across a day.  Across a lunar cycle.  Or in the most famous case, against the Mayan Baktun cycle ending this Friday at 6:10am EST. 

The timewave is internally coherent.  We can use the language of actual real mathematics - not just archeo-mathematics.  It is fascinating.  But the reason the Timewave is fascinating is not because there is a measured prediction of the end of time.  Goodness, who would take something like that seriously!

The Timewave is fascinating because it comes wreathed with the aura of its orogony.  McKenna talks about it as a Big Idea.  The Timewave is something that he pulled from the psychedelic state, a big fish from that big ocean.  The idea isn't for everyone to believe in, or to care about or even to discuss - although many people do all three.  What I think  McKenna is getting at is that there are many Big/Bigger Ideas out there waiting to be netted. 

Orogony is really a geologic term describing the creation of mountain ranges through the forces of plate tectonics - but that's the scale and endeavor required.  There are many true and beautiful "Smaller Ideas"  that come to us relatively easily. The capacity to swim deep and pull back something like the Timewave is part of the skill of the Shaman.  Our calling is to gain whatever degree of the skills, the werewithal and the bravery to go out there and find something.

Winter Solstice 2012 is a chance to move out farther than I've ever gone before, knowing that there are also others out there.   Maybe we are sharing in a Jungian Projection.  I don't know if the end of the Timewave actually triggers a change in environment.    Perhaps enough people meditating, dancing, watching the stars all at the same time will shift things up a bit.  Like Jung said about UFOs, it's the psychic projection that is powerful, not the originating object. 

All we need is the right meme. 

(All Eschaton 2012 posts here.  Sign up for email notices from this blog.  Follow @Zenglop on the Twitter) 

Finally, I  get to blog about 2012.  (All 2012 posts here) Over the next few days, I'll post as often as possible to talk about the solstice, 2012.  Whatever this is, it's a great reason to dig through a lot of rich imagery and powerful ideas.  Please use the comments thread to elaborate ( Also, sign up for email blog alerts, and  follow @ZenGlop on the Twitter.)

I'm not going to call it the Coming Mayan Apocalypse.  I'm not going to call it The End of the World, either.  Every moment is the End of The World, so nothing special about 06:11 AM EST, December 21 2012.  I don't think I've ever thought there was a prophetic catastrophe on its way.  

Although  we've been through various planetary alignments  together - to a soundtrack of bleeping/blurping music - including a rioutous reading of R J Stewarts small but powerful book  The Prophecies of Merlin,  still  I'm not sure that anyone I've known has really thought that either. 

This is a riff, an improvisation. Nobody knows anything, but all these shiny objects in the air - ideas cast up like sycamores, clouds of whirling seeds falling in patterns complex and unpredictable.  I've got a stack of books (next to Merlin), including Teilhard de Chardin, John Michell, Rupert Sheldrake.  Alan Watts.  A bit of Stephen Hawking, although I'm better of with Brian Greene , and the source physicists didn't write atractive books for lay people.   James Joyce for a laugh, and some American Civil war stuff, just because that's what I'm reading right now so why mess with it just because we're facing the end of time (I'll have that on the record  player also, Messiaen).

Those guys are great, with lots of mileage.  But I will keep returning to Carl Jung and Terrence McKenna.  Carl Jung sets up a profound  model for thinking about UFOs in his monograph Flying Saucers:  A modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, and I'll propose using something similar to talk about 2012.

 "If we close our eyes a little so as to overlook certain details, it is possible to side with the reasonable opinion of the majority ..., and to regard the thousands of UFO reports and the uproar they have created as a visionary rumour, to be treated accordingly.  They would then boil down, objectively, to an admittedly impressive collection of mistaken observations and conclusions into which subjective psychic assumptions have been projected (my italics)."

Jung identifies the process of projection, where the psychic form  "extrapolates it's contents into an object" .  Up, down, all around or singing the blues, there's a load of psychic form extrapolated on to the idea of 2012.  In Hollywood movies.  In quiet disquisition late night on the fire escape.  Everywhere in between.   It is important that the 'object' could begin as either a psychic,  or as a physical phenomenon.  That disctinction isn't useful so much in the discussion of the UFO phenomenon, and it isn't useful so much in talking about the 2012 meme.

 And '2012' is a meme in the strongest and strangest sense of the word.  NASA gives primary source to Terrence McKenna:

Dennis and Terence McKenna discussed it in The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching. That book at least got the Baktun-13 end date right: Dec. 21, 2012. It also noted that the date is the winter solstice, when the Sun will be "in the constellation Sagittarius, only about 3 degrees from the Galactic Center, which, also coincidentally, is within 2 degrees of the ecliptic." The McKennas continued, "Because the winter solstice node is precessing, it is moving closer and closer to the point on the ecliptic where it will eclipse the galactic center." In reality this event will never happen, but it hardly matters. The McKennas linked the whole arrangement with the concept of renewal and called 2012 a moment of "potential transformative opportunity."

The Mayan calendar is actually incidental to the insight that Mckenna was writing about, which is the Timewave. More on that in the next post.  I first heard of Terrence McKenna in 1992, close enough to 20 years ago.  (That fact alone baffles me more than the immanent end of time. ) I heard him in a track by The Shamen:

What does he say here - he says an awful lot, which I'll keep coming back to.  But this first:

It's almost as though this object in hyperspace - glittering in hyperspace - throws off reflections of itself which actually ricochet into the past illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary. 

I love that image.  This object, whatever an 'object' is when it doesn't reside in time/space, shooting off sparks, substance raining down into becoming.   Beautiful.

McKenna  also talks about history as the "shockwave of the eschaton".  It's wildly sexy.   I've used the word ZenGlop to capture what I feel when I think through the idea of the eschatological object.  ZenGlop....good name for a band, or a blog.  Or maybe a brand new puppy dog?

Anyway.  Thursday night heading in to dawn on Friday morning, I'm going to be sitting, perhaps meditating, perhaps sleeping.  Listening to Messiaen, drinking tea.