You said you'd not heard of Terence McKenna and his Timewave Zero cycle
concept, so here is an excerpt;
> So Terence learned a bit about a certain mathematical function,
> later found to be a fractal, but hey this was back in 1971 before
> fractals had even become trendy. He started playing with numerical
> sequences in the oldest section of I Ching, a numerical system of
> 64 hexagrams which encompasses most of the astronomical cycles
> observable to the naked eye, i.e. state-of-the-art Chinese tech
> 3000 years ago for those bicameral enthusiasts in the audience.
> From this he arranged a table to generate a function, which math
> buddies at Berkeley ID'ed as a really trippy fractal..Timewave Zero.
> TWZ, as the docs state, 'correlates history with the ebb and flow
> of novelty, which is intrinsic to the structure of the universe.'
> The fractal zig-zags through advances and declines, extropy and
> habituation, leading to a zero point at 21 Dec 2012. This is a
> singularity, which corresponds with the end-of-the-line for the
> Mayan calendar as well. Hmmm... McKenna's work charts Time as
> the ebb and flow of Novelty and Habit. His friend Rupert Sheldrake
> cites periods of habituation as morphogenic, i.e. developing form.
> Their friend Ralph Abraham describes the zero date as a chaotic
> strange attractor leading to some event or non-event. Maybe 2012
> isn't Armageddon, but rather a launching point for an ultra-chaotic
> suprahistory. Okay, so just how many shrooms did Arthur Clarke
> ingest while writing 'Childhood's End' and Whom did he meet?
> Programmer-au-poil Peter Meyer has done an exquisite job of
> presenting TWZ on a common denominator PC platform - DOS 2.10 or
> later w/o even any graphics adaptor card required. Peter's
> implementation of TWZ provides a solid, intuitive framework for
> exploring the fractal, from any target date or timespan.
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McKenna is a radically different kind of guy and promotes the use of a
hallucinogenic drug which causes the appearance of 'elf-like' entities
which he claims can be questioned about all sorts of things...but that's
another topic....the best compilation page I've seen on him is;
Look for the Timewave Zero links.
-- Jerry W. Decker / jdecker@keelynet.com http://keelynet.com / "From an Art to a Science" Voice : (214) 324-8741 / FAX : (214) 324-3501 KeelyNet - PO BOX 870716 - Mesquite - Republic of Texas - 75187