The theory of Timewave Zero was revealed to Terence McKenna in the wake of an unusual psychedelic experiment conducted deep in the Amazon jungle in Colombia in 1971, which led to his being instructed in certain transformations of numbers, derived from the King Wen Sequence of I Ching hexagrams, relating to the occurrence of temporal phenomena. This eventually led to a mathematical description of “the timewave”, which allegedly correlates time and history with the ebb and flow of something called Novelty, claimed to be a quality intrinsic to the temporal structure of the universe. A remarkable quality of the timewave is that it is a fractal. Another interesting part of the theory of Timewave Zero is the notion of historical periods “in resonance” with each other, in which the events of the earlier period are in some sense repeated in the later.

A peculiarity of this correlation is that at a certain point a singularity is reached which is the end of history — or at least a transition to a supra-historical order in which our ordinary conceptions of reality will be radically transformed. The date of this point was chosen by McKenna to be December 21, 2012, the date of the winter solstice of that year and also the end of the current era of 13 baktuns in the Maya Calendar (according to the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation 584,283).

Clip courtesy of Google Video.