ZenGlop

Art in Response to The Eschaton: What is Ekpyrotic Art?

I'm going to start  working on a series of posts looking  at an aesthetic reponse to the Eschaton.  

The first time I used the word Ekpyrotic, I was looking for the title of a new quartet - same instruments as Messiaen.  I like to use an alphabetic bestiary, with titles like Dreams of a Debauched Dodo, Aprocryphal Aardvaarks.  Yodelling Yaks.    Ekpyrotic Emus (unfinished).

Ekpyrosis is a model for the creation of our  universe derived from string theory.    There's a concept of Hyperspace with Brane objects floating, and their collision causes the creation of our universe...one of many.  In Stoic philosophy, ekpyrosis is the inward path of a universe that cycles through creation and destruction.    

Ekpyrotic art is music of the Eschaton.  It is a liturgical expansion of Space Art.  People have been practising space art since  the first cave paintings.  Hidlegard was a space artist, with her visions of the sky.  Recently, Space Art refers to artists who are directly influenced by the changing perspective brought on by a movement in to outer space.  Some of this is technology providing opportunities to reach new places with new media.  Some is conceptual, the change in what it means to be human as we see the rest of the universe in more details.  

Different categories of space art (I'm paraphrasing and extending a bit from  the introduction to Burgess, The Quiet Axis:

• Art executed on the earth but at a scale to be seen from space.  
• Art that captures the experience of a rocket launch, or that documents the surface of other planets.  
• Art designed so that it is complete only when it has moved into outer space, that trajectory changing the piece.   
• Art that is executed away from gravity.  Sculpture that can be exquisitely thin and hugely long at the same time.
• Art where the content and the architecture is formed by an analysis of data.

Ekpyotic Aesthetics is primarily  concerned with experience. It is an aesthetics based on the mechanics of a common experience.   The anticipation of the experience of space, and the recapitulation of the memory of Earth.    Anticipates the departure from earth, the end of time, the death of a species.  Ekpyrotic art will provide a sacramental framework for memory.   Of the past.  Our evolution, our place in time, ontogony.

To begin, the Ekpyrotic must impact physiology:  captivate the nervous system, entrain the nerons.  Loudness.  Extreme quiet.  Mesmerizing complexity.  Unequivocal simplicty.    An idea so compelling that all else falls away (zen koan).  Shake loose the hard-held notions, then generate new ideas, new experiences. 

A first example?  Start with Ive's Universe symphony, a piece written to be performed  with orchestras and choirs arranged on hilltops, in valleys.  It's  not explicitly written anywhere, but lets assume that he envisions the Universe symphony performed across  the land as it is etched in his own psyche.  

This is a piece written before orbiting satellites.  We have to imagine that we're hearing while  suspended hundreds of feet in the air,  looking down on a landscape that has been sacralized by the composer's actions.  Ives has embodied  memory around  the ground.

The first I heard this piece was last summer, on the final weekend of the Aldeburgh Festival.  The work is complex, a timed pulse coordinates musical lines played by a couple dozen instruments each independant except for this pulse. 

 According to his notes  Ives was

"striving to  paint the creation, the mysterious beginnings of all things known through God and man, to trace with tonal imprints the vastness, the evolution of all life, in nature, of humanity from the great roots of life to the spiritual eternities, from the great inknown to the great unknown." 

The  piece is unfinished (either missing or never written down).  But let's assume that there's a sense, a Mind-Sense (the ZenGlop?) in which Ives has this piece completed.  That's where our ears have to go first.   I'm not talking about the score - although there could be a score. It's a step outside of time, a full-fleshed dream.  The form of a memory as it precipitates from the individual consciousness.   Now we have to extend up, high  above the hills, rivers and valleys.  Ives would have envisioned Danbury.  I choose to look down on Pittsburgh, to the Point where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join to form the Ohio.  Instruments are on the West End Overlook, they are up on Troy Hill, and also on Observatory Hill. We are freed from the restrictions of traditional instrumentation, the orchestra is embellished by seraphim who play their Futurist machines and sound devices.   Human?  Alien? It's breathtaking, and quite besides the point of an actual performance.  We are immersed in the adumbration of the sound.  

That's the space art, that's Ekpyrotic.  The intersection of memories, the intersection of universes.  

 

 

The Eschaton, continued: Guest Post by Earrach of Pittsburgh

ERK!

Eric is the founder of Sassafras Grove, a group that follows the practice of ADF Druidry here in Pittsburgh. His blog,  The Book of Sassafras , is worth a read (but be warned, the ancient Druidic mind is a gnarled and orogenic place to visit).   Astronomer and naturalist - always willing to scrabble in the dirt for ramps, or cast a hopeful line out for trout. A devotee of John Kirkpatrick's concertina playing.  Something of a Richard Thompson groupie.  Look carefully at the slides in this earlier post, you'll see Eric's secret past as a morris dancer revealed.    

If I could wish one thing for anyone, it would be for a monastic cell in Jarrow, next door to the Venerable Bede, where Eric could discuss the history of the British isles, and argue over different models of the calendar.

Eric wrote this poem in reponse to my request for posts about the Eschaton, and it surely  gets across the idea of a great shift, one that resonates across dimensions, between chronological planes, and within the patterns of a human life.  I'll confess to being a bit surprised, never having heard him quote Nietzsche*.  (See above, my warning re: the ways of Druids.)

ESCHATVS

Perhaps it did happen,
And we didn’t notice it.

The tide has turned,
Or perhaps it was the
“Great Noontide” itself.

Yes, the Übermensch now awaits
To grin at us and sport at our absurdity
Through the bars of our self-wrought cages.

Farewell the Golden Age
Farewell our time in the Sun.

Could it ever have been better than this?

egc @ 12/27/2012

* To save you all some time, diligent readers,  here's the general reference: "And once again shall ye have become friends unto me, and children of one hope: then will I be with you for the third time, to celebrate the great noontide with you".  Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book For All And None 

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Happy Christmas, from Pittsburgh

 

I was on someones  holiday email list a few years ago,  and received this soundfile.  It's a recording  of carols played on the whistle that would have announced changes in shift at one of the steel mills around here.  

The file came without attribution, so I called up the Doctor and together we figured out that it was a Smithsonian Folkways album, Calls and Whistles , field recordings by Tony Schwartz. This selection is under the track called  "Improvisation of Instruments").     I don't know  anything about the recording  circumstances , whether it was a staged event, whether Schwartz   happened to be in the right place.  There is a spoken introduction where Schwartz refers to an imaginative factory operator, but beyond that ...

I assume that at some point during the year, the engineer has to practice.  Does  he practice off-hours, maybe during the night shift?  Does the community around the factory grow accustomed to the sound of  mistakes, missed notes?  The same frustration that a church organist feels, practising in an open building.  I imagine the technique involved is  similar to making a tune with a bicycle pump, or with the same skill required to play a Theremin.  

Is  this something handed down, from senior to apprentice?  Is  it the bailiwick of one visionary, someone who will eventually retire?  Does  each factory have their performer?  Could  there ever be combined performances, a Pittsburgh Symphony of Sirens?

All the machinery, all the noise, the grime and pollution  - all gone now.  What's left is this recording. That factory whistle is a carrier wave, modulated by the landscape, captured in stasis by early  recording technology.  Now an artefact, laden with human activity.  

The picture is Steel Works in Winter, by Roy Hilton.

 

http://explorepahistory.com/displayimage.php?imgId=1-2-A1B

 

Live blogging the Eschaton (2012) part 8: Guest Blog Mark Lunt

Oh Mark.  Mark Lunt.  Lunt.  

Mark has written one of my favorite pieces of music, "Hebrides Shipping".  I've lost my copy, and he hasn't been able to come up with a new one.  

When I mentioned this Guest Editor bit to Mark,  I said "Your thoughts on the eschaton/end of the world/etc would be a bracing tonic to my vague fappery."  Mark is a poet and musician.  He's the  most rigorous political thinker I've ever met - no, really. For sure, I don't move in the political thinking  circles, but neither do most of us, and Mark is fecking spot on.  I hold on to a letter written from Seattle that is tender, demonstrative, illustrative and prevocative.    I miss his cat Beckett, and we should all listen to more of this:

Here's his post: say your foulest, he'll appreciate it.

Robert Anton Wilson (and a little later) Terrence McKenna – when he was just on the right side of sanity (decide for yourself which side that was) – used to speak a lot about the “immanentization” of the Eschaton. I saw McKenna give a talk at the University of Washington in the early 1990s. The audience was enraptured as if listening to a latter day Sibyl. I sat there wondering what the fuck he was talking about, and I remain ignorant to this day.

I mean, all these ignorant nutters across the globe panicking because of some bizarre Mayan inscription – the 13^th Baktun – were getting on my nerves so much that I longed for my own personal fucking Eschaton – but which one? Do we get to choose? Some see the Eschaton as “the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell.” Bearing in mind that I only believe in the first of those things, my Eschaton will be brief, final, covered with shit, and devoid of any meaning or enlightenment.  

I abhor flabby mysticism; I laugh in the face of the religious dolt; I loathe any form of prayer; I refuse to kneel before anyone or anything (I might consider it for Ba’al, because it’s such a cool name), I piss on religious icons.

I think those who eagerly await the arrival/descent/manifestation/immanentization of the Eschaton are all going to be rather disappointed. Sorry, ladies. It’s going to be – it already is - a slow-motion convergence or confluence (if you prefer) of rather predictable, tedious, and nasty events. The starting gun for the show was fired long ago. One can pick a date or an event at random. It’s of no real consequence.

I have chosen the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the cheeky young chap, Gavrilo Princip, in 1914. I need not recite European or world history from that point on. The Eschaton is like the hound of heaven or the hound of hell or – in my case – a local miniature schnauzer with a skin disease – pursuing us, dogging our every move through this brief temporal stay on earth.

The Eschaton is not some magical fucking Broadway show, or something that makes (pick a god, any god) appear to start handing out “get out of jail free” cards. Probably about 60% of the people on the planet are already enjoying the benefits of the Eschaton – we just arrived a little late to the process.

I shall end this – not like an Eschaton – but with a few keywords and phrases to pay more attention to: WARS, GLOBAL WARMING, DROUGHT, BLIGHT, FLOODING OF COASTAL AREAS, NEW AND BETTER EQUIPPED VIRUSES, MASS UNEMPLOYMENT, CIVIL WARS, WELCOME TO WORLD MART, DICTATORSHIPS, INCREASING MESSIANIC CULTS, ALIENATION, DEPRESSION, SUICIDE, A MALAISE INDUCED BY THE POOR STANDARD OF TV PROGRAMMING, THE SHINY TOILET PAPER, THE END OF THE GOOD OL’ USA… AND ALL WHO WAIL ON HER.

 

 

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Live blogging the Eschaton (2012) part 8: Guest Blog by Doug Lazorick

I met Doug when we were young, callow fellows at Bates.  I recall him being something of a druid then - a thread which continues in the post he has provided for  the ongoing ZenGlop Guest Editor/Live Blogging the Eschaton event.  Doug lives just outside Pittsburgh, we've recently discovered a shared fondness for Harry Chapin, and it is one of my post-Eschaton/ NewYears resolutions that we meet up for dinner in town.  Here's his post (thanks, Doug!)

"Goodbye my love, Maybe for forever Goodbye my love, The tide waits for me Who knows when we shall meet again If ever But time Keeps flowing like a river (on and on) To the sea, to the sea" Time Alan Parsons Project

So today, the Mayan calendar ends. The Mayans possessed an advanced understanding of the predicable movement of celestial bodies. Will those repetitions stop? All of us tend to assume the current state of affairs will be perpetual. Maybe the Mayan would have continued to walk their calendar into the future if their carving tools and rocks weren't so unwieldy. Imagine if the Mayan scientists could take advantage of Intel's 22nm micro-lithography process. How far in the future would their calendar reach then?

The Norse, despite their barbarian reputation, had their own advanced knowledge. Ragnarok the final battle between Asgard's gods and the elemental hordes of Jotunheim. Odin's forces of order are doomed to be defeated. Odin knows this yet fights anyway. Today, scientists have the second law of thermodynamics; all things proceed to a state of minimum energy and maximum entropy. The end awaiting us is chaos, absolute cold, and inevitable. When my time comes to rage against the dying of the light, I'll be listening to Wagner's Gotterdammerung.

In truth none of us should assume we have any time left. In the reality TV show "Ax Men" this week, a wasted and skeletal Jimmy Smith learned his cancer leaves him 6 months to live. Jimmy was a mean bastard, but that scene touched my jaded heart. Jimmy's battle ended 11/1/2012. No matter which calendar you use, live, fight, love each day as if it's your last.

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Live blogging the Eschaton (2012) part 7 " Messiaen and music as an epiphenomenon of time?"

 

Tomorrow morning at 6:11, I'll be drinking tea. By nature, I'm a PG Tips sort of guy, but a time like this, will probably brew a pot of Yunnan Golden Pu-Erh. I started drinking this on afternoons while off work recuperating from surgery. My wife's family lives in an area that produces most of the commercial mushrooms available in the US. The smell of good manure, massive piles of it, steaming, lit by our headlights, crisp the next morning, ready to cook brussel sprouts for thanksgiving dinner. That's what this tea tastes like.

I'll be drinking tea, done meditating, and listening to Quartet for the end of time.

Jeremy Bebgie, in Theology, Music and Time is looking to show how a study of music can help with a study of theology. He writes about the nature of time. How music engages time. How when we listen to music we are experiencing time. So an understanding of musical experience can help understand time.

"By sharing in the temporarily of music, we share in the temporarily of the physical world"

I'm pulling some of this from notes in a moleskine journal, February 2011. We were all up at a cabin, maybe a dozen of us from all over (picture the same group as Thanksgiving, smelling manure). The cabin is shared by the local gun club, my brother-in-law books it each year for Presidents' Day weekend. There's a quarry down the road where we can go target shooting, and I make sure there's always plenty of beer for later. Some years, we've had enough snow to trouble our awesome Subaru all-wheel drive. One year, we got to borrow a snowmobile from the guys at a cabin further in who had needed a winch to get their truck out of the ditch. I wear leggings under my jeans, a fleece dressing gown over my coat, and get to smoke my pipe in the outhouse for warmth.

Walking at the cabin

This year, that night, I couldn't sleep. I'd had my fill of wild turkey, but I couldn't get away from the snoring. I was wanting to sleep off the drink but it was fecking horrible, that snoring. I turned on a kerosene lamp, sat at the large wooden palette table, and tried to keep my shit together.

I know I was reading Begbie's book, and was either writing in the margins or copying citations to my journal. On page 36, I made this shaky note. "its like he read my first SETI paper and built this whole book around it". That's a dubious and ungracious assertion, but I'll stand by it. Here's what he wrote:

"Our sense of time is radically affected by immeasurable biological clocks...within those smaller-scale kinetic rhythm controlled by the central nervous system ( heart, breath, pulse) and within those the very brief subminiature rhythms of the brains electrical impulses along neural pathways. Music intertwined with al of these in ways we are only just beginning to understand. And interlac with these factors are a host of social and cultural determinants which affect the quality of temporal experiences and hence the way music is practiced, experienced and theorized"

Begbie also paraphrases Stephen Hawking. "Real time is not fundamental, but is an epiphenomenon of imaginary time." I had to look it up to be sure. An epiphenomenon is a secondary characteristic that arises from but is not a cause of some other phenomenon. Consciousness, they say, is an epiphenomenon of biology. Music is an epiphenomenon of time.

Messiaen writes music that stands for, presents time as, an object. Fragments of patterns repeat, appear in counterpoint, return with a different context, placed in a different constellation like the progression of the galactic plane.

The other thing about Messiaen's music is that if it were allowed to run itself out, the next alignment of repeated patterns would happen only at a point where to divergent lines cross. ( I'm thinking more of something like Chronochromie rather than the quartet. ) Each gesture holds an intimation of a pattern. The end of time is not a point where all the clocks stops, where entropy ceases to accumulate. The end of time is a position outside time. At the edge of time. Memory extracts music from time. Sound becomes an architectural object to behold. Wallace Stevens "the fire-fangled feathers dangle down".

Sound as a physical phenomenon captures an essential aspect of time. Begbie, again:

"[music is ] especially free to offer a peculiarly intense experience of the temporarily of human existence but of the world we in dwell as physical creatures."

I think this is what Hawking is getting at. Newtonian mechanics places time as a background against which activity occurs. But time is much more a part of things, and music is a phenomena that floats on time's surface deeply expressing some of the contradictory ideas that we hold about time-space. Time-Space is a hack word. Lets use instead Timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly.

See you tomorrow morning!

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Live Blogging the Eschaton (2012): Part 6, Kathryn Our Guest Editor

Does Kathryn need an introduction?  I won't embarrass her, but there's a special prize for the first person not on either of our Facebook friend-lists to tell why.  I asked Kathryn to write a short post, one  I could use here as part of the Eschaton Live Blog.  I like it very much.

For me the paying attention, the breath, the movement, all come into the groove of the moment and there is nothing but these things, bigger than these things, simpler than the sum of these things.

Twice lately I’ve had the chance to dance.  Considering how important movement and dance is to me, you would think that I’d do it more.  (Is all movement dance?  Sometimes, often, when I do it.  Be here, be here, feet on the ground. . .)  But dancing to the music, in the second instance to the drums, reminds me of the deeper (sparklier) bits of what it is to dance:  don’t be afraid.  Don’t be afraid to be first, to be ugly, to move as if no one or everyone is watching, to do what the breath calls me to do.  Don’t be afraid of the Eschaton if you breathedancemovebe.  I don’t have a better word for that totality.

Kathryn told me earlier that these comments and guests posts were adding good sparkles to the overall blog - I read 'sparkles' in the sense of adornments to our own thoughts.  Sparkles in the sense of strangeness and charm.  A vastly different quality of light and insight, like a subatomic dance in a cloud chamber.   It comes from the opening of other peoples minds towards each other, perhaps a gentle friction.   

I'm going to  encourage other people to send stuff in.   

Please send stuff in.

I'll add it to the blog.   I'll also post to Facebook, see if I can get some interest there, but if you're not feeling up to writing, pass along the thought to someone else. 

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Live Blogging The Eschaton: part 3 "What do I think will happen"

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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Live Blogging The Eschaton (2012): part 4 A Guest Post from Kenn Day

Kenn and I often find ourselves on the same uncanny page, without actually realizing it.  It's hard to realize you're on the same page - canny or un - when we only speak but once or twice a year.  And I just missed the best chance of each year by skipping out on a Solstice party he and his wife host in Festive Cincinatti.  (Sorry, it's that damn Schismatic, Walkup....I can't be in the same room!!)

Anyway. Early this morning, Kenn  commented on one of my Facebook links to this blog.  "Are we immanentizing?", he asked.    As  a shamen, healer, writer and father, Kenn  has a unique perspective, and a keen writing style. 

 I asked him  to write 250 words or less (I'm a bastard) on" Imanentizing the Eschaton.  "

Immanentize is to bring to fruition. Like adding chemical fertilizer to a fruit tree to force its production, or genetically designing a white calf, in order to fulfill the biblical prophecy and usher in the millennium. This also has a subjective application. We can immanentize our own awakening by thinking, acting and being in alignment with our deeper self or soul. There are many practices, from sitting meditation and compassion to refuge vows and renunciation, which can take us forward along the path of personal immanentization of our private eschaton.

 

Maybe the 2012 event will transform my ability to be open about how I care for people.

Check out Kenn's  internet page  Shaman's Touch...where you can also find info about his book, Dance Of  Stones.   He is @KennDay on the Twitter.

 

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Live Blogging The Eschaton (2012): part 2 McKenna and the Timewave

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. 

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