Fractal Time and the I Ching
10,000 years ago humans began domesticating plants and animals.
The speed of change is rapid. Population, computing power, speed of transport, the sheer amount of known information, and most other things that involve humans, are all increasing at an accelerating rate. The rate at which they are increasing is increasing. We are all part of it, with younger people thinking nothing of it, and the elderly commenting on it, but generally handling it okay. But if we were to transport King Arthur to modern-day New York he’d most probably pass out from trying to grasp what was happening. But can it stop, slow down or reverse. No, for that is not in our nature.
- “Things will keep changing at a faster rate. Every 18 months the power of computers double. Soon they will be smarter than us, and we are already on the verge of cloning humans and close to using nanotechnology to create atomic size mini-machines. Maybe there will come a time when the rate of change will reach such a speed that change is all that will exist. Various fringe scientists have tried to calculate this point of infinity, giving us calculated dates ranging from 2010 to 2050. Dates that many of us will live to see. Perhaps the date is Dec 22, 2012. Ethnobotanists and fractal time experts Terrence and Dennis McKenna believe so, and they present their ideas in Invisible Landscape: Mind Hallucinogens and the I Ching (1993).
The McKenna brothers arrived at the 2012 end date by using fractals. Starting from a table of differences between one hexagram and the next, they developed a Mandelbrot fractal in which each level is 64 times greater then the one below it. They then laid this fractal pattern on top of a time scale. The peaks and troughs of the pattern relate to the level of connectedness or novelty in any span of time, whether it covers a day, millennia or even since the beginning of time. By matching the levels of the pattern with key periods in history, they determined it would fit best if the end of the time scale was December 22, 2012. This is the only point in which the level of novelty reaches its maximum, and everything that happens is new. Change feeds upon itself like nano-machines converting every atom in the universe into gold.
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