Timewave Zero and Language
by Terence McKenna

The First Three Minutes is a book in which author Stephen Weinberg leads the reader through all the complex physics as matter is crystallizing out of hyperspace, and the universe is undergoing its initial expansion in the first three minutes of creation. When you consider this model of exploding galaxies, colliding quasars, and mega this and mega that, it's worth noting that these distant parts of the universe register only as faint tracings on our instruments, until they are interpreted through the fishy fiat of a bunch of stacked up theories and formulas. And where is our data sample coming from? Radio telescopes, which are responsible for building our current picture of the universe, were only invented around 1950. All the energy that has fallen on all the radio telescopes on this planet since the invention of radio telescopy is less energy than would be generated by a cigarette ash falling a distance of two feet. It's pretty flimsy stuff folks, compared to the meat of the moment in which we find ourselves.

It seems more likely to me that all this complexity is better directed toward the end of the cycle when, after billions of years of evolution, everything finally comes together. Alfred North Whitehead proposed this same idea. He said that history grows toward what he called a "nexus of completion." And these nexuses of completion themselves grow together into what he called the "concrescence." A concrescence exerts a kind of attraction, which can be thought of as the temporal equivalent of gravity, except all objects in the universe are drawn toward it through time, not space.

As we approach the lip of this cascade into concrescence, novelty, and completion, time seems to speed up and boundaries begin to dissolve. The more boundaries that dissolve, the closer to the concrescence we are. When we finally reach it, there will be no boundaries, only eternity as we become all space and time, alive and dead, here and there, before and after. Because this singularity can simultaneously co-exist in states that are contradictory, it is something which transcends rational apprehension. But it gives the universe meaning, because all processes can be seen to be seeking and moving in an effort to approximate, connect with, and append to this transcendental object at the end of time.


The remainder of this article is available on the USB flash drive.

Articles on the USB flash drive