Does the Chinese I Ching predict a 2012 end-date?
The oracle book I Ching, the Chinese ‘book of change,’ has been in use for more than 3,000 years. Today it’s used much like a horoscope but, as with astrology, it once was a tool of politics and governed decisions of state. The underlying premise of the oracle is a unifying resonance between heaven, earth and humans. The basic unit of the oracle is the line, which may be solid or broken. Three lines make a trigram, and one trigram sitting upon another is a hexagram, or six lines. The trigram for wood sitting on that of water may portend a good sea voyage, but it gets a lot more complicated.
Combinations of lines, solid or broken, make a total of 64 possible hexagrams. In these are read the circumstances of a human at a particular time, a specific place in space-time, and the book claims to contain ‘the categories of all that is.’ Anthropologist F.C. Wallace, working among Native Americans, determined that ‘irrespective of race, culture or evolutionary level, culturally institutionalized folk taxonomies (classifications of local, social knowledge) will not contain more’ than 64 entities.
Brother Terence and Dennis McKenna, in their book the INViSiBLE landSCAPE, look at the I Ching in a totally new way. That their insights were aided by combinations of rainforest heat and psychedelic mushrooms in no way diminishes them. They began by extrapolating the patters of 6 and 64 in the ancient book. 6x64 is 384 days, one lunar year, and the length of a year in neolithic Chinese lunar calendars. 64x384 is 67 solar years, and 6 sunspot cycles of 11.2 years each. 67x64 is 4306 solar years, the length of a zodiac age, and 4306x6 is 25,836, and the approximate length of one complete precession of the solar equinoxes as the earth makes one slow wobble about its axis.
The reality with the ‘book of change’ is that it is dynamic, not static. The brothers found that the patterns within the hexagrams were deliberate, reflected in the degree of change from one to the other. Non-random patters emerged, and when they graphed the changes they found a boundary singularity, with the patterns of change beginning and ending in the same place. What they then did was remarkable. Using a computer program called Timewave Zero, they fit such a curve to the events of this world, a model of time itself. This was called a novelty map, with the curve increasing as ‘habitual’ human activity dominated, and decreasing as ‘novelty’ rules the day, periods of connectedness and innovation with historical advance.
They found waves of decreasing periodicity leading to an end date in the year 2012. ‘The end date is the point of maximized novelty in the wave and is the only point in the entire wave that has a quantified value of zero.’ Other novelty peaks included the emergence of Homo sapiens, 275,000 years ago, the beginning of historical time, 4,300 years ago, and the onset of the nuclear age in 1945. It is the nature of the wave that resonating ‘wavelets’ occur at greater frequency as the end approaches, and this continues through the 67 years, and 6 sunspot cycles, between 1945 and 2012.
‘We (the McKenna brothers) arrived at this particular end date without knowledge of the Mayan Calendar, and it was only after… that we were informed that the end date we had deduced was in fact the end of the Mayan Calendar.’