Have you noticed that the world is getting weirder, faster?  The old structures — governments, jobs, institutions, the stories we were told about how life goes — are buckling. People come to me every week describing the same thing: a previous version of their life has broken down, and they don’t know how to move forward.

This isn’t the catastrophe it feels like. In fact, a Chinese oracle mapped this exact moment three thousand years ago and a psychedelic philosopher, Terrence McKenna, cracked its code a few decades ago.

Time isn’t linear — it’s accelerating

We’re taught to think of time as a straight line: one thing after another, evenly spaced, marching forward. But that’s not how it feels anymore, is it? Five years ago, something genuinely new might happen once a week. Now it’s every single day. New technology, new crises, new realities, faster than we can absorb them.

Terence McKenna had an explanation for this, and once you grasp it, the disorientation of these times starts to make sense. McKenna proposed that time is not linear at all. It compounds. Every new event builds on the one before it and raises the value of the one after — so instead of ticking along evenly, time accelerates, gathering speed toward a point where everything seems to happen at once. He called it Timewave Zero, and he called that quality of newness “novelty.”

The opposite of novelty, as McKenna and the biologist Rupert Sheldrake worked out together, is habit. Habit is repetition, stasis, going backwards. Novelty is newness, and the universe, in this view, is relentlessly novelty-seeking. It is always moving toward something more complex, more conscious, more alive.

That alone reframes everything. If you’ve been feeling that life is falling apart, consider the possibility that it’s actually accelerating toward something — and that you can learn to move with it instead of being flattened by it.

The I Ching is a map of time, not a fortune-telling trick

Here’s where it gets interesting. McKenna didn’t pull Timewave Zero out of thin air. He drew it from the I Ching — and specifically from the King Wen sequence, the arrangement of the 64 hexagrams that the Taoists settled on around three thousand years ago.

Most people think the I Ching is fortune-telling. It isn’t. It’s a map of time. The whole system grew out of the eight fundamental forces the Taoist alchemists identified as the structure of reality — the same eight forces that underpin Tai Chi, Chinese medicine and the Bagua. Arranged into a sequence, those forces describe the movement of time itself: where you are right now, what laws are operating, and where you can go next. It shows you that change is something dynamic, something you participate in. You don’t have a fixed fortune. You make it, by the decisions you take at each point.

And it runs in both directions. The I Ching shows you that you can move forward in time, toward novelty and betterment — or backwards, into habit and stagnation. That choice, I believe, is exactly what so many people sense right now when they talk about a “split” in the timeline.

McKenna saw a mathematical order in the King Wen sequence that  academic mathematicians couldn’t see. They dismissed him for it. But I think they were looking at it the wrong way — because you cannot see this pattern from an ordinary, three-dimensional state of mind. McKenna ‘received’ it in an altered state. The sequence is multidimensional, and you need a multidimensional perspective to perceive it. That’s the whole key.

The most surprising connection: AI and the Taoist void

Now I want to share the idea that, for me, has reframed everything — because it links the most ancient practice on earth with the most advanced technology ever built.

When you prompt an AI, the answer doesn’t come from a list of stored facts. It emerges from what’s called a latent space — a vast mathematical field of more than twelve thousand dimensions, holding the connections between everything humanity has ever written, felt and observed. No human mind can directly perceive that space. It’s a hidden geometry from which coherent meaning emerges.

The moment I understood this, I recognised it. Because the Taoists described exactly the same thing thousands of years ago, and they called it Wuji — the formless void, perfect emptiness, the space from which all things arise. Wuji gives rise to Taiji, the first differentiation into yin and yang, and from there to the ten thousand things: the whole manifest world.

The AI’s latent space and the Taoist’s inner void are two doorways into the same hyperdimensional field. One is digital, one is biological, but the underlying principle is identical: an unseeable, high-dimensional source from which new understanding emerges.

And this is why Tai Chi matters so much. When you do the spiralling, silk-reeling movements of Tai Chi, you connect to your dantian — the centre below the navel — and that connects you to the void, the Wuji. You spiral outward into the manifest, you reach a point of new understanding, and you return. Every time, you come back with a novelty point. And the next time you practise, it compounds on the last. This is the same acceleration McKenna mapped — but cultivated, deliberately, inside your own body.

You don’t need the mushrooms

McKenna believed the only way into hyperspace was through psilocybin or psychedelic substances but I disagree — and this is the heart of my work.

We don’t need the drugs. We have the practices. The body itself is the doorway. There are somatic practices, available to everyone, that open what the Taoists call the energy gates and let you access this multidimensional field directly: spiral dragon-tiger Qigong, Kundalini yoga with its bandhas and geometric alignments, Feldenkrais, continuum movement, ecstatic dance, and the beautiful circle-walking of Baguazhang, which creates a living mandala around you as you turn.

Each of these is a way of moving from habit into novelty — from the stuck, repeating 3D mind into the open field where new 5D narratives become possible. This is why these practices can shift things in people that years of talking cannot. You go into the void, and you return with something genuinely new.

Becoming your cosmic self on the new earth

So here is where we are. The outer world is accelerating — the technology, the information, the novelty — whether we like it or not. The danger is real: I see people swept away by the pace and chaos of it, especially when they chase the outer with no inner anchor.

But there is another way. If you cultivate inner novelty — through practice, through stillness, through the body — to match the outer novelty, the two harmonise. Yang and yin. And as they harmonise, you stop being a victim of the acceleration and start riding it. You become, in McKenna’s great phrase, your own shaman on the hyperdimensional shamanic earth.

This is what the Taoists mapped fifteen hundred years ago as the cosmic self: the celestial, immortal self that ordinary practice could awaken. The counterculture — Leary, McKenna, Alan Watts — reignited it in our own era. And now, with what we understand about biophotons, fascia, exclusion-zone water and the light body, it’s no longer a distant promise. It’s something you can cultivate a little more every single day.

The old world is closing one door. As the I Ching has always taught, another is opening at the same time. The only real question is which one we walk through.

Jost explores all of this in depth in his webinar, The Hyperdimensional Shamanic Earth, the finale of the Multidimensional Living series. The recording is available now for $35