2012: THE EMERGENCE OF AN ENIGMA



I first became fascinated with 2012 in 1981, when I heard about a book by Terrence and Dennis McKenna, called The Invisible Landscape. It took me 10 months to get hold of the book, and I had to read it twice before I began to understand it, after becoming more acquainted with advanced neurochemistry.

For those of you who may not know the story: In 1971, the McKenna brothers went down to a remote part of the Amazon jungle to investigate rumours that the shamans performed magic using a "violet psychofluid" - a kind of ectoplasm which pours from all orifices and the skin, following ingestion of a hallucinogenic brew called ayahuasca (only visible to others who've taken the brew). They ended up taking a different combination of sacred plants, but which contained the same active ingredients as ayahuasca - dimethyltryptamine, and harmine (a beta-carboline) - both of which are closely related to the natural secretions of the pineal gland (especially in advanced meditators).

After a shared hallucinatory episode, the brothers returned to the USA to develop the insights they had in the Amazon. They were convinced that the ancient Chinese oracle - the I Ching, or Book of Changes - worked because it was a mathematically coded form of the time wave system that underlies change in the universe. The I Ching is a group of 64 six-line structures called hexagrams, which show all combinations of Yin and Yang (like + and - ). Another researcher - Martin Schonberger, in 1973, found an exact correspondence between the 64 hexagrams and the 64 codons in our DNA, at the same time as the brothers worked on advanced neurochemical theories to explain how the chemistry system worked, by which they had accessed knowledge stored in their nuclear DNA.

Eventually, they found a complex fractal wave, where each level is 64 times greater than the one below, consisting of 26 levels, which describes all change in the universe, from sub-atomic event durations, up to a universe-length time-span. When they analysed the peaks and troughs of history, and lined up the Timewave over the wave of history, they found that the end of the wave, when all the sub-waves peak together, will be in the year 2012 !! At the time they discovered this, THEY KNEW NOTHING ABOUT THE MAYAN CALENDAR, or that the Long Count ends in 2012. The Invisible Landscape was published in 1975, and knowledg e of the Mayan calendar did not become widespread until 1987, when Jose Arguelles published The Mayan Factor. Having heard about this later, the McKennas published a new version of the Invisible Landscape in 1993, in which the Timewave was refined to end on the winter solstice, along with the Long Count.

The Timewave ("Timewave Zero") was criticized by a mathematician called Watkins, and then checked and corrected by a nuclear physicist called John Sheliak, so that the new "Timewave One" fitted history even better (see Hyperborea for more details).

More recently, it has been discovered that the Mayan shamans actually used the same mushroom which the McKennas took, leading to knowledge of 2012 in both cases.