Howdy folks,
For a long time now I have been writing this think I call "Life in LA" and emailing it to friends and family every month or so. Well it occurred to me that maybe some folks here might get a hoot out of the last installment. I am curious if anyone has any thoughts about it.
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March 13, 2004...?Life in LA?
?12-21-12?
It is close to Midnight and I have a million things to do, a thousand worries and a dozen hopes and a lot has happened since the last installment of LILA but there is time for that. (I warn you this is a longer LILA than normal so read on only if you have a little time yourself.)
Not a few persons were puzzled by my statement in January's LILA that ?we have 8 years left to go? so I thought maybe I better explain as best I can.
The story begins with Terence McKenna. McKenna, in case you haven't heard of him before, is one of the holy trinity of the psychedelic community along with Timothy Leary and Abbie Hoffman. (Aldus Huxley should really be counted among these but his writings and influence stand like Cronos or T'iamat, the creative body broken and built upon.) McKenna was a true child of the (19)60's, graduating from UC Berkeley where he majored in Ecology, Resource Conservation and Shamanism. After getting in various kinds of trouble he and his brother followed their wanderlust to the Amazon where they sought to explore in depth the psychedelic properties of the well-known shamannic brew, ayahuasca, renown for creating within the partaker extremely vivid and real-feeling hallucinations very much along the lines of UFO abduction-type experiences. (Interestingly, the active ingredient in ayahuasca is DMT, a chemical found naturally in the brain. Some scientists think that elevated DMT levels at times and in certain persons may be the possible explanation for such reports of alien abduction experiences. I would think that if that were the case and there was a genetic component involved in elevated DMT levels that would explain why reports of ?takings? might occur across multi-generations of the same family line. Just a thought.) Anyway, while McKenna was trying to unravel the mysteries of ayahuasca he came across fields of Stropharia cubensis , aka ?magic mushrooms.? These too were well appreciated for their psychedelic properties but no one really knew how to grow them. McKenna learned, returned to the States and got immediately famous when he published ?The Magic Mushroom Growers Guide? thus sprouting a huge cottage industry in ?shrooms? still popular in some circles today.
McKenna's fascination and passion for psychedelic drugs stemmed from his belief that these ?foods of the gods? opened the human mind to greater levels of consciousness. (Not an original thought true.) McKenna was truly a fascinating individual and by all accounts either brilliantly genius or total crack-pot. Non magnum ingenium sine con fuit dementia, perhaps. Anyway, sometime during this period, perhaps during his travels to the East or perhaps as early as his Amazonian days, McKenna began to formulate an elaborate theory, extracted from a formula based on the 64 hexes of the I-Ching, the ancient Chinese divination tool which is structured around time-related issues. McKenna argued that time was a fractal wave of ?novelty? which is in the process of collapsing to a zero point. Hence the name of his theory, ?Time Wave Zero.? Actually, as far as Einstein and other scientists can tell us, time, is the fourth known dimension (in addition to the three spacial dimensions we are familiar with) and has qualities we don't normally associate with it such as bending, stretching and compression. As far we know it only ?moves? or extends in one direction, what we call forward or the future. Stephen Hawking thinks it can theoretically go backward but what does he know. So anyway my point is that the idea of time being a waveform, with ups and downs, and also compressing to zero point isn't totally loony from a scientific perspective. Anyway, McKenna designed a nifty software program (downloadable from the Net I think) to plot out the Time Wave and lined up the resulting graph against human history. Sure enough there were spikes in ?novelty? (that is really interesting events of change) coinciding with the Black Death, the Enlightenment, and the birth of Mohammad among others.
But the most fascinating thing about the resulting data is that this time, our present decade actually, displays an extreme rise in novelty right up to December 21, 2012. On that date, the novelty spikes to infinity and the Time Wave stops cold.
Now some people say what this means is that 12-21-2012 marks the end of the world. Armageddon, the Apocalypse, the Rapture, what have you. Others believe it marks the beginning of a new age for humanity.
McKenna no doubt looked forward to seeing just what exactly that day may or may not bring but unfortunately for him one night on May 22, 1999, McKenna's mind exploded in painful shards that brought hallucinations he had never experienced before but which he described as ?partaking of last week's dreams, next week's fears, and a small restaurant in Dublin.? After collapsing and being rushed to the hospital doctors were able to confirm via CAT scan that McKenna had a walnut-sized brain tumor buried deep in in right frontal cortex, a glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most malignant of brain tumors, and which his doctor ironically described as a ?fruiting body? that sent ?mycelia? throughout the surrounding tissue, very much like his beloved mushrooms. Though he fought bravely, Terrence McKenna died on April 3, 2000.
In one of those great Cosmic Coincidences, totally unknown to McKenna when he first formulated the Time Wave Zero theory and created the computer program which terminates on December 21, 2012, many persons noticed something remarkable about that date. Perhaps you have heard of the Maya? The Maya were pretty smart folks. They had the zero before practically anyone and were therefore really good at math. They also created a rather complex and remarkably accurate calendar that was so superior that it was adopted by other Mesoamerican cultures like the Aztecs and the Toltec. Actually it consists of calendars within calendars, and begins from the time they estimated to be the beginning of the creation of the world. (Or at least their world.) I won't go into the whole mathematics but basically the Long Count, that is the whole Mayan calendar, cycles to yes, December 21, 2012. For the Maya, this date represents the end of time and perhaps also the beginning of a new age.
Ok so that is pretty coincidental and interesting right. Well, I was reading some science magazine or news article the other day, I can't remember which, and it was talking about how the Earth is getting some funky solar radiation, etc. because the Sun is in the middle of switching its magnetic poles. Apparently, the Sun changes its magnetic poles every 11 years. The last change was 2001. Which puts the next change at 2012. Wanna bet on the date?
And by the way, December 21 is also the Winter Solstice. That is when there is equal time of daylight and darkness and the beginning of the lengthening of the day. (The beginning of Saturnalia, the festival of the ?Unconquered Sun? aka Christmas.)
Ok so like most reasonable people I am tempted to dismiss Time Wave Zero, the Mayan Calendar and all of these other coincidences as mere quackery. After all, ?no man knows the hour or day? as the scripture goes.
BUT It is hard for a person raised in a millennialism religion with its constant End-Time predictions and expectations for Armageddon, to not be somewhat sensitive about predictions like Time Wave Zero. Thus as a student of the scriptures and a person of some knowledge, I couldn't help but think about the possibilities.
One of the first things that struck me as I considered McKenna's views on the mind transforming properties of mushrooms and other psychedelic foods and chemicals is that the Book of Genesis has a very real example (at least according to those who accept the story as literal truth) of this very thing happening. Consider the partial ?truth? that the Serpent told Eve, ?For God knows that in the day of your eating from it your eyes are bound to be opened and you are bound to be like God, KNOWING good and bad.?
Is it possible that the ?fruit? that grew on the ?Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad? that expanded Adam and Eve's consciousness was a mushroom? We usually assume the passage means some kind of unidentified fruit of the tree itself. Traditionally, the word is translated ?apple? in English, but the original Hebrew word just means ?fruit? which could apply equally to mushrooms growing on the limbs of the tree or even at its base. (Or there is always the possibility that the fruit had hallucinogenic properties itself like peyote.)
After pondering that thought for a moment, I began to think about the OTHER tree in the Garden, the one that God was afraid, yes ?afraid,? that disobedient man might haughtily eat from, ?The Tree of Life.? God says to (Jesus? Angels? Himself?) that now after eating from the ?Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad,? ?here man has become like one of us, knowing good and bad, and now in order that he may not put his hand out and actually take [fruit] also from the tree of life and eat and live to time indefinite...? And so God expelled mankind from Eden and here we find ourselves, some carrying forward the hope of regaining a paradise.
Most bible students don't think anything of the Tree of Life, its meaning, or ask why no one ever tried sneaking past the guardian cherubs with that flaming sword turning in every direction. For the next 65 books of the Bible, the history of the Jewish Nation, through the beginnings of Christianity, the Tree of Life goes completely unmentioned until finally, it makes a timely reappearance. In the very last book of the Bible, at the end of time or our history as we know it, it reappears. In fact it reappears, multiplied, in order to feed not just one family but all people. The description is startling: ?...and on this side of the river and on that side [there were] trees of life producing twelve crops of fruit, yielding their fruit each month. (The number twelve is symbolic in the Bible for ?completeness? or ?fullness,? so twelve crops in each of the 12 months of year represent complete fulfillment.) ?And the leaves of the trees [were] for the curing of the nations.? Thus the trees of life bring a restoration to paradise and with it the promise of everlasting life.
As I mentioned, growing up in a millennialism religion, one gets a lot of apocalyptic rhetoric and signs that we are living in the last days. True there is lawlessness, man is polluting the world to extinction, and there is all sort of badness in Biblical proportions, so yes it is easy to agree with the folks that think the End is Nigh. (Of course there is a lot of goodness in the world too but lets not think about that.)
Among other signs of the impending Armageddon we cannot overlook, the break-up of Barbie and Ken, the invention of the ?Eggstractor,? gay-marriage and the sudden appearance of Janet Jackson's boob.
Seriously though, at this point I am really going ?Wow? because there are several pieces that seem to be coming together into one big truth or understanding. Want to know? Sure you do.
One of the reasons that it appears that the Mayans set up their calendar the way they did is because they were great astronomers. It just so happens that every 25,800 years, the Sun conjuncts the intersection of the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic. The Milky Way, as most of us know, extends in a general north-south direction in the night sky. This forms a trunk, the ?Axis Mundi.? The plane of the ecliptic is the track the Sun, Moon, planets and stars appear to travel in the sky, from east to west. It intersects the Milky Way at a 60 degree angle near the constellation Sagittarius forming the main branch. Now get this, the Maya had a name for t his cosmic cross formed by the intersecting Milky Way and plane of the ecliptic. They called it the ?Sacred Tree? or in other words, the ?Tree of Life.? The next time our Sun crosses exactly that point, that is it will be exactly within the Tree of Life is December 21, 2012.
Finally, here is a last thought to chew on. Remember what is guarding the entry to Eden that prevents mankind from reentering Paradise? It is a flaming sword turning continuously in every direction (in some translations). Think about it. What would that look like exactly? It would look like a flaming sphere. Maybe even the Sun?
Ok I'm going to bed now. Sleep tight.