Return of the Timewave

Summary

The transcript presents an extended introduction and lecture centered on Terrence McKenna’s psychedelic thought, with the host Lorenzo framing the recording as a rare final session from a Yemenite workshop. The opening portion emphasizes McKenna’s habit of recommending books and building a psychedelic library, and he surveys a range of influential texts in ethnobotany, hallucinogen studies, shamanism, and plant lore. He cites Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann’s work on psychoactive plants, Michael Harner’s anthology on shamanism and hallucinogens, Peter Stafford’s psychedelic encyclopedia, Marlene de Rios’s cross-cultural perspectives, and lesser-known books by Anthony Ando and William M. Bowdoin. He also highlights periodicals such as Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, and he praises Rupert Sheldrake’s ideas about morphic resonance as highly relevant to psychedelic inquiry. Other references include Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, which McKenna interprets as a broader cultural argument with implications for social organization, gender, and the history of consciousness. He also discusses his own mushroom cultivation book, presenting it as both practical and transformative, and notes the Codex Seraphinianus as a surreal object that evokes psychedelic imagination. The lecture then shifts into McKenna’s central speculative framework: the time wave hypothesis. He recounts the Amazonian experience at La Terrera in the 1970s with his brother Dennis McKenna, where an experiment involving ayahuasca, sound, and the idea of bonding psychedelic molecules into DNA led to an unexpected stream of insight. Dennis’s original notion involved making psychedelic states permanent through a kind of molecular or superconductive stabilization, but the experiment instead produced what McKenna describes as a teaching voice and a revelation about time itself. From this, he develops the time wave as a model of novelty and habit, arguing that time is not a neutral container but a patterned, wave-like process embedded in matter, biology, and consciousness. McKenna explains the theory through the I Ching. He focuses on the King Wen sequence, the 64 hexagrams, and the first order of difference between successive hexagrams. He claims that the sequence reveals hidden mathematical intent rather than randomness, and he describes how graphing the changes produces a wave pattern. He then links the 64 hexagrams to DNA codons, suggesting a deep formal correspondence between the structure of the I Ching and the molecular structure of life. He also expands the system into a calendrical theory, using the number 384 derived from the hexagrams to connect lunar cycles, sunspot cycles, and long historical rhythms. He argues that ancient calendrical systems, including pre-exilic Jewish and Islamic lunar calendars, may preserve traces of this deeper structure. In his view, the I Ching is not merely an oracle but a fragment of an ancient resonance calendar that encodes the organization of time at multiple scales. The lecture broadens further into cosmology and history. McKenna presents the universe as a cascade of increasing complexity: plasma, atoms, molecules, life, sexuality, language, culture, and electronic civilization. He argues that each stage arrives more quickly than the last, implying an accelerating process of novelty. This leads to his controversial claim that the wave culminates in a maximum point of concrescence on December 22, 2012. He presents this not as prophecy but as a best-fit historical model that he believes can be tested against the rise and fall of civilizations. He cites ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the fall of Rome, Islamic civilization, the Khmer empire, the Maya, and other historical peaks and collapses as examples of the wave’s apparent fit. He also notes that the Maya independently arrived at a calendar endpoint on the same date, which he treats as striking corroboration. A major theme throughout is that novelty is the opposite of habit, and that the wave can be used to identify periods when change is likely. McKenna argues that science has tools for describing what is possible, but not for explaining how one possibility is selected into actuality. He proposes that the novelty wave fills that gap by showing how events emerge from a deeper temporal structure. He connects this to Taoism, Whitehead’s philosophy, Jung’s totality symbols, and the idea that time is a topological manifold rather than a simple linear flow. He also suggests that the model could reduce anxiety by giving people a way to understand the rhythms of resistance, breakthrough, and reinfoldment in personal life, relationships, and history. The closing material, added by the host, reflects on hindsight. It notes that Y2K and the 2012 end-date excitement did not produce the anticipated transformation, but it also emphasizes McKenna’s enduring influence on psychedelic culture. Lorenzo suggests that McKenna became popular not only because of what he said, but because of the imaginative space he created for others. The transcript ends by portraying him as a source of a psychedelic community “morphogenic field,” with his ideas still alive in listeners’ minds as a continuing invitation to think differently about time, consciousness, and the future.