Autopsy for a Mathematical Hallucination? by Matthew Watkins I first became aware of the Timewave theory when I discovered a magazine article (in GQ) on Terence McKenna four or five years ago (in 1991 or '92). It briefly mentioned that he had developed a theory which involved mathematically modelling the historical ingression of "novelty" using a fractal generated from the King Wen sequence of I Ching hexagrams. The idea had been revealed to him whilst in an altered state of consciousness brought about by psilocybin mushrooms. I had been studying the I Ching for some time, was working on a PhD in mathematics, and had occasionally contemplated the role of psychoactive plants in ancient religious belief systems, so I was immediately fascinated and searched everywhere for more information. I discovered McKenna's writings and recordings, but although the theory was often referred to and used as a basis for some remarkable speculation, I was unable to find any detailed description of its foundations. Such a description had originally been published in The Invisible Landscape (Terence and Dennis McKenna) in the early seventies, an obscure book long out of print and almost impossible to find.
When, in 1994, I discovered that The Invisible Landscape had been republished, I immediately obtained a copy and studied it thoroughly. I was rather disappointed to find that the mathematical process which was applied to the King Wen sequence to generate the fractal "timewave" seemed worryingly arbitrary (no justification being given for many steps) and mathematically clumsy. Beyond that, the described procedure fails to give the same "data points" which appear in the appendix and which are used to ultimately define the fractal in question. More disappointing, I discovered that the December 21, 2012 date (now generally associated with McKenna's name) was in no way calculated — it was selected to give the timewave the "best possible fit" with the historical occurence of novelty as McKenna sees it. It was difficult to accept that such an exotic, imaginative idea could have such unsatisfactory foundations. I thought that perhaps McKenna had been unable to effectively communicate something very real which had been revealed to him, and decided to get in touch immediately.
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