Terence Mc Kenna and the I Ching

[jilt]

Dear people,

Some years ago I popped into the 2012 forecast. That will be a real doomsday. All the doomprophets seem to concentrate on that day, be it Christian, hindustan, or something very new and independent. According to the maya's all the collected doom and Karma and inherited sins and bad deeds come together in line with the black hole in the centre of ourself and the milkyway. The predictions differ, from a minor ecological disaster to a complete solving of us into neo-quarks, tachyons and electrons. Also aliens and martians could take over. The antichrist is coming (manifesting already).

Doomsday is something from every time, nothing new in it. They come and go. Although I think dooms-days very interesting, you can learn a lot from the phenomenon, they are from the perspective of the I ching kind of silly. Doomsdaying is very much agianst the "spirit" of the I so to say. Just think about hex 63 and 64, contemplate on it and realize change goes on, life goes on, chi goes on, tao is forever, hex 23 passes by.
OK, I also think humanity is creating an enormous ecological disaster, perhaps in resonance with all kinds of natural fluctuations in geological time. Also thinks these are days of miracle and wonder, interesting times. But that doesn't mean doomsday, it only means crises, with bad luck and chances, after which life goes on, one way or another, with or without us. And I sure think we should stop our evil ways in consumption and abusing mother earth, and not only pay lipservice to this thought, but actively stop consuming and warring about “scarce?” resources.

So, I was searching YouTube for I Ching, and then, to my great surprise, I Ching and 2012 popped up. I never realised and imagined I ching had to do with those predictions.
The name of Terence McKenna appeared. He made a computer-program showed that the long term cosmic rhytms of the I that coincided with the predicted Maya end-date.

I know about the computations with the heavenly stems and the celestial branches. Following Sherril and Shu I made some very fine and precise predictions. Those cumputations are very precise, nothing about guessings and abouts. It's not my thing, but it has integrity.
McKenna claims to be a very scientific scientist that knows about computations, he even makes a computer-programs. Impressive you should think, someone you should listen to.
It appeared I had an unread book in the house, : "The invisible landscape" (mind hallucinogens/ and the I Ching). The whole thing was explained in the book. I stopped half way. I have a scientific training, I am trained with the I. This is no way to organize patterns from the I. When there are some vague resemblances in period and time between different calendar systems he calls it immediately “resonance” or “synchronicity”. Based on an base-point of his own, in itself logical a choice (the bomb on Hiroshima) he starts the computations. An era ended somewhat in november 2012. Later he thought it was resonating with december 22 2012, and let the date coincide.
Then in all publicity it started: Maya's and I Ching predict doomsday, it will happen. A whole circus of doomsday involving the I, giving it weight with the I, took of.
And, repeating my earlier words, we humans should change our ways, else we make terrible ecological disasters. But there will be no end of days on the 22 12 2012. If that happens it will be a “selffulfilling prophecy”. Because we believe it will happen, we let it happen. When we see the antichrist everywhere, we will create him (politically correct, her), when we see bad people perhaps we should be aware of projections (39-1).
Terrence McKenna made bad science. Because he is an scienetist he gives his work an “odeur” of reliability. It is't. his method is hopelessly flawed. So is his approach to the I Ching. Apres nous le deluge.
I asked the I about McKenna and 2012. Came 56-3. Indeed we are destroying our own house, mother earth, indeed McKenna is abusing the name of the I. Indeed I am a newbee on this forum, perhaps only passing by.
But it is a heartfelt feeling that we should stand strong, keep our minds and hearts clear in times of trouble and crises, not go with the ebs and flows of common opinion. For that we have the help of the I.

 

[jilt]

very well balanced addition, thanks.

 

[Sparhawk]

It should be noted though that when the McKenna brothers published the First Edition of the "Invisible Landscape", back in 1974, if I'm not mistaken, they had no clue of the connection between the year 2012 and the Mayan Calendar. They came up with the date all by themselves and the help of some heavy chemicals... Also, it was the chemicals and visions of King Wen, etc., that pointed them to the Yijing. The recent editions have corrections and different prefaces, etc.

But yes, Watkins refuted Terence's theory and all. Still, one must wonder why that date came up independently of the MC, regardless of the flawed theory.

 

[rosada]

Can someone give me some clarity about this whole Mayan Calendar / 2012 prophecy?
As I understand it, based on the Mayan Calendar the world comes to an end in December 2012? Only now we're hearing we don't know as the calendar is predicting the world will come to an end, but that Something major will happen then. But now we're hearing the actual calendar doesn't predict that date at all, that that date was just someone's peyote experience? So what does the actual calendar predict, if anything? Clarification, please.

 

[fkegan]

Deciphering the Mayan language or the Mayan calendar has been a major puzzle for quite awhile with folks finding connections with the Linear A script of ancient Greek from Crete and to the details of cycles of observed Venus positions and many other things. There isn't a clear simple explanation available today.

The Mayans had several calendar systems, some for short time spans like what was happening this year or next and others for long time spans with units of 52 years. Overall, referring to the Mayan calendar is looking in a glass darkly and finding what you like to see. McKenna used his computer to find patterns that would fit together for him. His work with the I Ching involved noting that there were 64 hexagrams of 6 lines which is 384, a bit more than 365 or about 13 by 29.5 which he took to be an annual calendar measure that he then processed further to get a correspondence between his 2012 date and a Mayan calendar important date to make a Grand confluence.

The way things are going currently, a guarantee that the world will keep muddling along for at least another 4 years seems to be a positive omen.

Frank

 

[bradford]

I've gone on record as predicting that immediately following the year 2012
there will be a whole lot of new age fruitcakes scrambling to find a new
date for the end of the world and not bothering to look back to examine what
was wrong with their earlier mindset.

Eschew eschatology!

 

[rosada]

Thanks, Guys!

Yeah, I'm thinking four more years is a tad optimistic myself.

 

[frank_r]

The book McKenna wrote was a interesting book, worthwhile to read, at least that is my opinion.

And what the other Frank already wrote the Mayan's have different calenders. One has 260 days(Tzolkin) and one of the longer ones is a litle bit more than 5125 years.(13X400X360=13 x144000. )

This era started on 13-8-3114 BC, about the time the civilisation started in Egypt with the first King. And this calender will end on 21-12-2012, in in the idea's of the Maya's there will be a new beginning of something. Than there will be a new start of a new calender a new time era.

Some years ago I looked for a connection between this maya calendre and his sgns and the Yi http://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/friends/showthread.php?t=4002

 

[jilt]

eschatology

thank you all for this crash course in McKenna.
A few things though,

firstly, when in mythology, wordview or calendar (or whatever evident or hidden agenda) there is an absolute beginning, ther will also be an absolute end, like genesis and the final judgement. So when you creatively make the dropping of the atom bomb as your beginning, the end will also be rather crude. Anyway, if following this rule of thumb about beginnings and ends, you realize that the calendar, agenda, mythology is setting the structure voor the view on history and future, and will produce the evidence that the view is right: it makes a self fulfilling prphecy. Evedence can be seen with the big 3 (islam, judaism and christianity). They share the same structure in their mythology. That resemblance is good ground for conflict between primates.
Secondly: perhaps the I ching is originated in the heartland of shamanisn, and shamanisn is associated with all kinds of trance-techniques. But trance techniques, like meditations and matra singing does not need to go accompanied with drugs.
Because the use of drug is going with a hangover, users will have a feeling of world-end, that's a projection of the hangover.
I have the feeling that the I came into practice as a reaction on heavy ritual and shamanisn. It also means easy. The lack of ritual and shamanistic forces make it so easy. But this is very hypothetical.
thirdly, Mc Kenna indeed makes a nice exercise in how far the circles of resonance go, in all its consequences. In that sense it makes it's own circles in the water. Resonance and sychronicity are also concepts, that is, tools with limits. So what's byond those concepts? Tao? Chi? the zero field? the Akasha field? Mana? Pneuma? Voudoun?

 

[unsubscribed_cm]

You say Watkins scrutinized Terrence's theory. This is true.
But what I heard is after his scrutinization and rejection of his "occult folorn" theory.

Another mathematician named Sheliak revised the mathematics and put the timewave on stable mathematical foundations.

... And I'm pretty darn sure that Terrence never refuted his own theory by any means but saw after watkins pointed it out that the mathematics was flawed. But Sheliak did do a revision and when you look at the time wave the program uses the "Sheliak" number set.

I don't think Terrence misunderstood or abused the "name" of the Yijing by any means.

I think many people are quick to reject someone who is easy to criticize simply because he is unique odd and has the courage to inspire radical changes in thinking and doing things.

Thats the way it has always been and will always be.

Thats why we elect people like George W Bush, and constantly attack and destroy that which is different from us or not ritual domesticated like us - like the Native Americans, or the deep thinkers and sensitive people or explorers.

We ostracize them and then we use what they brought us like some satatic ritual sacrifice.

and thats the way it has always been and will always be.

 

[fkegan]

Was McKenna the next visionary like Napoleon?

I agree that radical new perspectives tend to be rejected to protect what folks are used to and comfortable with. Certainly the current climate crisis makes a prediction of Doomsday about 4 years after this current Presidential election in the US quite probable. Exponentials tend to move very fast from noticeable to catastrophic and with all possible means being used to maintain status quo stability until after this election and then those same interests on all sides will be just as eager to see as much upset as possible in the new president's first year and certainly next re-election.

However, McKenna's work is a separate issue. There is no objective mathematics to use. His work, in terms of the Yi takes the total number of lines in the 64 hexagrams and equates that to 13 lunar months by modern astronomical measure. However, the Chinese only use 12 months to a year and an integral number of days to a month. This makes for problems with the solar year which they deal with by throwing in an extra month whenever it seems needed. Not quite the kind of detailed mathematical mysticism McKenna's reasoning required.

I did manage to have a bit of an email conversation with McKenna while he was still alive and a Chinese scholar of calendar systems. McKenna did accept, at least in email with me that he was using modern mathematical/astronomical data to turn the Yi into a calendar counter for his Time Wave and that such had no connection to anything Chinese or Yi scholarship based.

However, there can be little doubt that late December 2012 will be a very different reality than we are used to today which many could easily call the end of the world as it was known before. The question most folks care about is what reality will be starting then and coming into focus in 2013. Generally folks assume that if the world they are used to in the past ends, that there could not possibly be anything left at all. This is getting a pretty old and obsolete notion.

The modern or modus hodie which became popular starting in the 11th century as all about accepting that the prior world (Roman Empire) was truly over and now folks had to adjust to the new reality without that central focus and control. That end of the world was followed by the Black Death, the bankruptcy of the Spanish Hapsburgs despite their wealth and power,Napoleonic permanent total war, the two devastating World Wars of the 20th century, the Great Powers doctrine that dissolved in the last decades of that century, and Y2K, and now Global Warming...

The world has been ending a lot lately, and is now doing so ever faster and more intensely. None of that has much of anything to do with the Yi. McKenna's ability to discover 2012 as another of those dates and then impose that insight on everything he could put though his computer systems only has relevance beyond McKenna's admirers only in terms of what will be left and still actively continuing after his Time wave crashes into history.

Clearly the Yi will continue on as ever, and its inner workings and principles may well be useful for the development of thinking and understanding when the tangents and detours of this entire so-called modern millennium finally crumbles away...

Frank

 

[unsubscribed_cm]

I don't see any doomsday involved in anything about 2012.
I'm not trying to even put a positive spin on anything just to be happy.

It's just Doomsday is very much a fantasy. Doom does not exist as a finality in any way.
As far as I can see what happens when terrible fate comes upon somone or something,
it is only that fate for that one thing, and is immediatly flanked by a seed that sprouts.

And death isn't a final CLAP and end. After a completion like 63 there is allot of redeux, there is a remembrance or reflection or a echo from that that goes on and fades - forever. It seems like when somethings dies or ends, it ends for forever. So here it's interesting to notice how a duality of eternity coexists with a finality of death...

I myself do not expect anything dramatic on 2012 or into 2013. The only drama I expect is from people or things which really don't matter anyway. I frankly do not care as far as my own life is concerned - who runs the show, or what the mass collective decides to do. I see and feel daily how it affects me. But I also feel daily how it is much bigger than me and really has nothing to do with me, and I can't really do anything to change it.

Tao Te Ching:

You cannot improve the world
If you try to you'll ruin it

Things that matter in life are things that I can personally change and have relationship with. I don't really have a relationship with the culture or the systems of control. The system does not need me in any way. Thus I cannot do anything to it to really change it. I really don't have a relationship to it in anyway but of hexagram 12. A standstill. Nature used to be our master, we would follow it's lead and seasons - but now virtual realities and human beings are our masters, and these people are the opposite of nature.

As far as 2013 goes perhaps some of what is natural will sprout through the cemented box of human made artifices of heaven and earth. One thing is for sure is that we really deserve on a humanity level to get our asses handed to us. Sounds bitter but it's only because or our sincere lack of appreciation (and our full devotion to ignorance) for the depths of power in the universe that allow our existence that this must happen.

I see 2013 and "History" as TM put it as a self-limiting process. It's like a drug, the drug sets in does it's work and then your forced into sobriety again (if you survive that is . The drug's illusions finally wear off and people return to reality.

I'm only 25 and don't have much experience of anything. But I am smart enough to tell, that our pop culture and media and politics and just plain culture in many ways. Are incredibly naive. And In fact I was able to notice this ... the day a television or message from the culture could be received into my soft ears for the first time. Our culture uses petty childish emotional intelligence and reasoning (always based on short terms) in order to make changes. We are profoundly infantile in every emotional way on a cultural level. I think it is because we reject reality and live in a virtual fantasy of reality we've created from the pieces of the earth we destroy.

This in itself is heart breaking - because what it means is that any collective energy will be stuck at this base line naive dysfunctional level. That in turn trickles down into our individual lives and renders all meaning and fulfillment we discover in our personal lives to be almost offensive to the establishment of the metronome to which the world marches in it's business. Over and over again the individual must yield to this greater power which is inferior. It's like hexagram 55 line 2.

It puts one in the position as being such a mother to the world. Even though I'm not independent finically, I've very little experiences with the opposite sex. I only speak one language, and I have no PHD or cultural badges of honor. I really very often feel like I'm nursing the external world off my nipple.

You say that the world has been ending allot lately and that December of 2012 will be very different from today. I'm not so optimistic... I have a sort of stubborn skepticism in all this, as a man looking out from where he is today - really very little has changed if anything. It's very difficult to grow up in a world that is ending however. Since I'm moving and it's moving so fast. One has very little relativism of objectivity to be able to judge from. I seem myself changing, and I see what is around me utterly staying the same.

But it does say in the Tao Te Jing

It is by nature in
the final stages
that what is over extended
will be overcome.

So the best is always "saved" for last, and this is in accordance with Terrence Mckenna's theory. Maybe in the last 60 seconds we'll start to see some visible changes from our own two eyes.

 

[gene]

Curiously, I ordered this book just yesterday, as I heard about it at the Dreamland conference in Nashville...

i am not predicting the end of the world or any such thing here, but I am saying, definitely, and conclusively, that this is a very significant marker in the timeline of the human race. In light of all that has been happening over the last ten years, it is utter foolishness to suggest anything else.

As for a self fulfillling prophecy, yes, because there are those behind the scenes that are trying to make it so.

I feel sorry for those who are students of the I Ching, and yet so hopelessly lost in ignorance about the meaning of the signs of the times. I think half of you don't even pick up a newspaper.

Be that as it may, my last point is that it is naive and shallow to accept the common so called "experts" view of any author. To say that one has been debunked or disproven is merely to show oneself antithical to the position. As I Ching practicioners, we have all been debunked and laughed at by many, including the supposedly enlightened scientific community. Do we quit studying because of that? I think not. What are we here for? We know by experience that it works, and that is all that ultimately matters. I am looking forward to reading the book.

Gene

 

[bradford]

Just to be clear, my dismissal of the 2012 hysteria does not mean that
I don't think that we as a species won't facing extremely unpleasant
consequences to our unbelievably stupid overpopulation of this planet
and thoughtless overconsumption of its resources. It only means that
this isn't tied metaphysically to our arbitrary and purely homocentric
calendar numerology.

 

[jilt]

So, as we can see on this thread, 2012 evokes, like every prediction of big change, a lot of controverse.
Did anyone ask the I ching about 2012? If so, please give a detailed reading.
Did anyone ask the I ching about McKenna, 2012 and the I?
Perhaps we should ask someone trusted and enough authority to do this.

About selffullfilling prophecies and consequences: to me it appears that some very important political and religious leaders like to give armageddon a helping hand.

 

[gene]

hello Bradford

I understand what you are saying. I know my posts have been a little overbearing lately. I guess I am in the same boat as this. It isn't the end of mankind, but it is something that we need to go through.

As far as population control, it has been a common theme over the last several years that population controls must be implemented. They are being implemented now, and within a couple years we will start seeing a mass dying off on this planet, not because of some angry God, but because some people consider it their God given right to save the planet from all us "useless eaters." If you don't think so, read Henry Kissinger's writings. This is planned. The present day wars are just one small implementation of the plan, soon, genetically modified foods and purposely created viruses will be reducing the population significantly. This is the beginning of what all religions, Eastern, Western, and what have you, have called "The great purification." It is going to happen, unless we stop it, but we don't have to have this kind of future. It is not set in stone, for, as hexagram 23 says, 'when evil has wholly consumed the good, it begins to feed on itself, as there is nothing left for it to feed on.

But then, is not "good and evil" merely a point of view? Is it not all an illusion? Created by the mind? I submit it is, so then, there is no difference between life and death, except a perception. In effect, no one ever dies.

i for one, do not believe the earth is incapable of sustaining all the life that has been placed on this planet. We destroy ourselves when we destroy the earth. It is not a matter of overpopulation, but a problem of greed.

Gene

 

[jilt]

About selffullfilling prophecies and consequences: to me it appears that some very important political and religious leaders like to give armageddon a helping hand.

I meant this ironically.
When prophecies evoke such controverse, some people craving for power might think in terms of "devide and rule", and exploit the conflict.

 

[jilt]

My dear Elizabth could not resist the temptation and gave me for my birthday (28-07 1954) a book about 2012. In it all the the thought and prophecies about 2012 are evaluated. The book is dedicated to McKenna.

Beyond 2012; Geoff Stray. He has a website: www.diagnosis2012.co.uk