Cleaning up Terence McKenna confusions

[duiday]

Hi, I'm new here, and would like to add what I hope will be a bit of clarity to the McKenna perspective. I hope I'm not just regurgitating. That is my objective after reviewing a few of the threads here.

I am new to the Yi but I am here, I am in it, and it's because of McKenna. He was my motivating force. That's one perspective.

A Second perspective I have is the fact that McKenna analyzed the Yi from a mathematical point of view and proved that it "behaved" in a predictable manner. That told me there must be something additional, or more objective about the analysis.

What is not clear from a lot of threads on McKenna is that he studied the Yi for years and developed his TimeWave without knowing about other calenders. He did not start out trying to prove a connection. His work on the Yi was only correlated to the Mayan Long Count Calender as a matter of chance later. This is another angle that hooked me into his work. When one gigantic theory meets another in alignment, without knowledge being passed between their developers beforehand, that is a special kind of event.

Also it is true that McKenna's original TimeWave algorithm had a flaw in it. This was discovered by Watkins, and later fixed by Sheliak, and it appears reasonable to say that Watkins' conclusion of the TimeWave Zero theory as worthless was premature and not justified. Sheliak fixed the TimeWave algorithm, and its output still resembled the original TimeWave more often than not. So McKenna's work still stands years after the fact, including an all-out frontal assault by the skeptic, Watkins.

The TimeWave is also fractal in nature, which is another complexity. If you slice off one part of the wave (a time period) it will look like the whole of time, but at another view or distance of resolution. This is why you can, like the Yi, apply it to any point in time, or any breadth of time, and it retains its original signature or identity.

McKenna's algorithms are another black box that I've tried to crack, with just a little luck since I'm not a mathematician. Also graphing in computer science is not exactly simple stuff when you work from scratch. But if you have interest in this sort of thing what you need to "see" is that all computer programs need data to drive them. They just don't "do something" in code without data that defines what the code should use as input. So all that TimeWave stuff was derived by arriving at a base dataset and doing math operations on it. Where did the base dataset come from - thin air - a hallucination?

The base dataset comes from the number of changed lines between the pairs of hexagrams. That is it . That is the base. This results in 64 base ten numbers, and can be easily figured out by eye, and graphed, but that graph is not exactly the end of the story. That graph is not the TimeWave.

That graph is then put through a series of algorithms to derive a dataset of what turns out to be 384 numbers. Here is how Sheliak describes the algorithm to derive it:

"This wave is then expanded into linear, trigramatic, and hexagramatic bi-directional waves that are subsequently combined to form the tri-level complex wave, or 384 number data set."

See, not simple stuff, there is a bi-directional quality to all three types of waves, and then they are combined (by unspecified magic) into the tri-level wave.

But even that is not even the end of the algorithm. The final phase of it is to take the above dataset and subject it to "infinite series expansions" to get the TimeWave that we have come to know. What this part of the algorithm means is also a black box to me. I cannot see in there, and I don't know if there are only hallucinations in there, but just look at the result. And it did stand up to a lot of scrutiny by people who could in fact decipher what is in the black box.

So I hope I have represented the origins of the TimeWave here, and maybe this helps a few people who think like I do: I'm interested, but show me the money (the numbers or the algorithm.) The fact that this aligns with the Mayan Long Count calendar is a whole other issue, but it's clear that such matters do not happen by chance, especially when precise math and astronomy were used to do the calculations.

Thanks for your patience and any comments.

Paul

 

[fkegan]

Timewave in the simple view

Hi Paul,
The simple way to get to the basic "dataset" of the Timewave from the Yi is to note there are 64 hexagrams of 6 lines each (64 times 6 = 384). In email correspondence with McKenna awhile back he admitted he based his algorithm on the modern notion of a lunar year of 13 lunar months of 29.54 days each which also yields 384. The difficulty is although there are in effect 13 lunar months in a solar year, the Chinese never, never used the number 13. Like most societies they dealt with 12 months to the year and used an extra month as needed to keep the lunar calendar of moon phases aligned with the solar transit through the ecliptic or zodiac.
However, if one deals only with modern computer models and complex details the Timewave stuff generates many lengthy pages of outcome to play with.

Mandelbrot's fractal hypothesis has its own problems beginning with its origin in confusing line drawings and areas--that is playing with the Euclidean definition of the line as one dimensional length without any width which would require infinite extent to even approximate anything with width, such as an area.

The Yi is from ancient China, and 'modern' computer stuff arise from medieval Scholastic notions with a large element of blind faith and complicated calculations to reach pre-determined dogmatic conclusions.

However, if McKenna has introduced you to the Yi that is a good thing. Hopefully your personal experience with the Yi Oracle will bring you good results.

Best of Luck,
Frank

 

[duiday]

Hi Frank, and thanks. Yes, my own Oracle situation is blowing my mind, to the point where I know I'll have to post a few things about it at some point.

Back to the McKenna thing for a moment and the 384 number set. Did they copy the 64 base numbers six times? Or is there some other magic? It appears to me that the 384 is derived well before they began massaging it all with the wave algorithms, but when and how? You could copy the base 64, you could invert it, you could put shifts on it, but there seems to be some secret about exactly what they did. In other words I am perceiving a static data set, not a dynamic set.

Thanks for any insight you have. I have no idea why this eludes me, or why I care, but it just bugs me to not be able to see the progression of what they did.

Thanks so much.

Paul "Dui all the way" LeBlanc

 

[fkegan]

The sixfold symbolic origin of all process symbolism

Hi Paul,
I see things from the ancients in terms of geometry. The radius of a circle divides that circle into 6 segments. This is a great symbolic matrix for all sorts of things

If the Pythagorean number patterns or eidos are counted out in order and placed on the 6 faces of a cube yields dice, and the dice and the 12-spoke wheel (six divisions from the four cardinal points of perpendicular bisector diameters) all are interrelated.

Ramsey theory suggests that anything and everything can be analyzed in terms of a 6-fold pattern. The Yi symbolically represents the ongoing process of perceived flux in terms of 6 stages which can be either background or focus. The first stage or line symbol is the transition from prior conditions to this process, the 6th is the transition to the next and the inner four stages describe the process as an entity.

Given 6 possible process stages to anything, and two possible graphical representations, there can only be 64 overall patterns with a total of 384 individual lines. As far as I could tell from my one email exchange with McKenna, whatever he did with his computer data sets etc had only the co-incidental connection to anything with the Yi.

There are 384 lines in the Yi hexagrams, which is 24 lines or 4 hexagrams plus 360 like the degrees of a circle. There are also 384 days in a 13 lunar month year.
Philosophically there is no connection between the two. McKenna got fascinated by the 384 day year which he used in his work and included the Yi. Following what exactly he did to fascinate himself, is its own strange journey through computers and graphics.

I have my own work using the Pythagorean dice patterns to explain the King Wen Sequence and the Yang lines in the hexagram matrix to explain the meaning of hexagrams and oracles (see my signature for urls).

Once McKenna admitted his work with the Yi was based upon modern computer notions of 29.54 days to a lunar month and 13 lunar months to a year I lost interest in how he came to his conclusions. He was reacting to superficial co-incidences without any fundamental insight. It is amazing the patterns and interactions that can be partially associated to the King Wen Sequence Hexagrams--partially though not fully.

Good luck trying to piece McKenna's work together.
Frank