It’s obvious by now the October dip into novelty is different than the one we tracked in June. The previous was based on shared global and highly
public events which carried with them the change that registered on the graph as a palpable turning point. Although that period was indeed novel for
many people personally, the change experienced was mainly achieved through the Iranian Revolution and Michael Jackson’s death. This one was and
continues to be highly novel,
but on a different level altogether.
Before I continue I need to clarify what ‘
novelty’ actually
is given that I’ve recently seen the term thrown around in reference
to this expected event everyone was waiting for. McKenna based the program on the idea of novelty, which was coined in this context by Alfred North
Whitehead in his essay entitled ‘
Process and
Reality’ (1929). Whitehead defined novelty throughout his career as “the emergence of new states of connectedness.” These states, via the
process of individual and group experience, are approaching a state of infinite complexity and interconnectedness. Here’s more from an
essay on Whitehead's work summarizing the idea:
Creativity and Novelty
Every fact in the Universe is the exemplification of creativity, including God. It is the ultimate metaphysical principle allowing for Novelty. (The
emergence of the new, for “creative advance.”) This novelty may inhibit and delay the creative advance and thus provide the condition for the rise
of evil (loss). However, when the creative advance attains its final phase or its satisfaction, the universe is better off for the fact of evil. All
inhibiting novelties somehow contribute to a greater good. The “satisfaction”, or the final phase of the becoming, is richer in content by reason
of the particular cosmic contrasts. In the creative advance of the world, particular evil facts are finally transcended.
Actual occasions and the societies they form are in a process of growing together (concrescence) until they reach a final phase which is called
“satisfaction.” Every occasion is at once the subject experiencing and the super-ject of this experience;—the present experiential datum, but
also the future result or aim of its present experience. This aim or future project is the “subjective aim” which controls the becoming of the
actual occasion, luring it to final satisfaction. Actual occasions perish, but they enter into the internal constitution of other actual occasions, in
which they become objectified. Every present fact of the universe is thus constituted by its antecedent phases. So also is every present fact of the
universe thus constituted by its potential for future realization by its subjective aim.
So novelty describes our progress as a conscious species – our evolution, our thought, our technology, our total essence is progression towards
concrescence and ultimately a sort of ‘satisfaction’ experienced by the collective (or driving force behind the collective).
The fractal nature of reality, time, and experience of both is actually referred to as well by Whitehead. He uses the symbology of a ‘Chinese box’
rather than a spiral, Russian dolls, fractals, etc. Again, from the essay:
What we experience and call in the everyday “human consciousness”—(or for that matter “see” and call a “person”)—Whitehead
counts as only one type of occasion among others, saying that “philosophers have disdained the information about the universe obtained through their
visceral feelings and have concentrated on visual feelings. The feeling that we have and call “human consciousness” is in Whitehead’s
construction, actually only the briefest of percipient experiences—a person is a sequence of felt experiences characterized by “his or her” own
individuality. And a person’s lifetime is primarily a society of such occasions of personality.
This complex understanding rest upon Whitehead’s particular way of ordering nature and his understanding of the order of things not so much as an
order of given “stuff,” but rather a series of occasions to be experienced—that is, a process, and a hierarchy of relationships—an image of
Chinese boxes each lodged one within the other. Each box provides more specialized and limited types of societies, and each box presupposes the wider
social orderings of which they are a part. The first so called “box” might be considered being what Whitehead calls “the extensive
continuum”—the general type of relatedness that holds or our whole physical world together. Within this set of general relatedness can be found
the “box” of geometric relationships, within that, the “box of electromagnetic society,” which he identifies as our cosmic epoch. In this
“nesting,” there results an organismic coherence in which every event in the universe is a factor in every other event.
More on Alfred N. Whitehead
What are experiencing now as humans on this planet, both as individuals and as a whole, are changes that are accelerating towards speeds approaching
the maximum level we’re capable of comfortably cognitively processing. With these changes come new connections which help both carry and displace
the burden that is being placed upon our minds. These new connections are knitting themselves together to form a solid sphere - a sphere made of
varying themes of connectivity:
1. Technological (web, media, social networks),
2. Consciousness (the collective mental internet),
3. Experience of time (which ebbs and flows along with change), which all lead to:
4. overall awareness that those themes are not only related, but are becoming knitted together as one.
The above themes of connectivity contribute to the collective thread of novelty. This is what I've come to realize the Timewave tracks. It does not
merely track linear time. It doesn't merely track big events in history. It doesn't track merely our conscious awareness of those events. It tacks
our growing coherence as a species via all the above. It's all about
connections.
There is another theme that should be included in the list above, perhaps as a subset of number 4, and that is the theme of
Synchronicity.
I've talked about this many times before, but this latest shift has really opened my eyes to a few things. Unfortunately the whole experience has
been very personal, and I will undoubtedly find it difficult to convey the magnitude of what's happening - I can only hope that in sharing my
experience that perhaps you might agree given your own odd sets of circumstances.
For Synchronicity to have any relevance to overall Novelty, that would mean that individuals can contribute to (and be affected by) the timewave with
their experiences. Synchronicity is a special type of new connection that occurs not to hasten our approach to zero point (as with all other
connections), but to act as a 'release valve' for the 'novelty pressure' accumulated from all other coinciding connectivity. The pressure is
siphoned off to nearby areas of lower novelty pressure like a bolt of lightening connecting two or more threads of reality that should otherwise not
be connected. These synchronisitc new connections are individual by-products of the real collective process and give glimpses of just how close all
these threads/possibilities/realities are being squeezed together. Although synchronicity doesn't directly affect the acceleration (and is a result
of it), it does so in an indirect way by harnessing the awareness of the conscious observer experiencing it, who then uses that new awareness to
inevitably achieve total connectiveness by attaining new levels of consciousness.
With this description in mind, now look at the Timewave. The graph tracks the ebb and flow of this 'novelty pressure' which happens to be building
towards a crucial, or possibly infinite, amount of pressure. Shifts in the graph can mark either building in the pressure or an easing off (like
tipping points and turning points). The event window of October 24-28 marked a critical build-up of pressure that was met with a release and
subsequent allowance of new connectivity and complexity. How this release was met differed from June 17-25 (no shift is the same obviously). In June
we had specific events that shouldered this burden, siphoned the pressure, and then allowed for new connections to flourish. See my
post on June 21 that detailed these 'new states of connectedness.'
This time we had a good mix of events that allowed for the shift to take place, but nothing matching the nature of the previous. One of the possible
lead-ins to the event window was
Swine flu
declared national emergency given that is probably the precursor to many other countries following suit, and the decision gives the government
more power to sidestep certain previous legalities originally put in place to protect the people.
Anyway, to know what else contributed to the shift, we need to look at numbers 1-4 above and see how connectivity was affected. Large events can give
rise to new connectedness pertaining to technology - people talk about them and actually create new methods of communicating and sharing their
experiences. Direct changes to technology itself also bring about the expected novelty. Refer to this
previous post for a list of things contributing to the shift.
Continued below:
[edit on 3/11/09 by Evasius]