“Things are going to get weirder and weirder until we hit constantly weird, when you won’t believe anything anymore, and we’re moving to a point where everything will be totally different.”

That was Terence McKenna, icon of psychedelic culture, in a 1995 lecture called The End of Time. I was listening to a recording of it recently and he could have been talking about life today.

McKenna was an ethnobotanist, philosopher and one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century. In the recording he said he’d gained knowledge during a mushroom experience about a secret code connected to time, that was hidden in the I Ching (the ancient Chinese divination system known as the Book of Changes). The code was embedded in the King Wen sequence of 64 hexagrams, and it took McKenna many years to understand and decode it. He worked with mathematicians to analyze the patterns of change across those hexagrams, mapping them over 75 billion years of history.

What Is McKenna’s timewave zero theory?

What he found became known as Novelty Theory, or Timewave Zero. McKenna proposed that time is not flat or uniform. It has a shape. Periods of increasing “novelty,” where genuinely new, complex, unprecedented things emerge, alternate with periods of habit and repetition. And when you graph this pattern, it forms a fractal wave that accelerates. The intervals of novelty get shorter and more intense. Technology, consciousness, spirituality, global events: everything crunches together, faster and faster, converging toward a zero point.

At that zero point, the future becomes genuinely unknowable. Not unknowable in the way that next year’s weather is unknowable. Unknowable in the sense that nothing ahead will be a repeat of anything that came before. The wave ends. Time, as we have understood it, ends.

McKenna calculated that zero point as November 2012, then shifted it to December to align with the Mayan calendar. He died in 2000, and his critics were quick to point out that time didn’t end in 2012.

Or did it?

Did time actually end in 2012?

Mayan energies are understood to take around 12 years to come into full expression. And by 2024 it was becoming obvious that things had, in fact, become very weird and have been getting weirder. The pandemic rewired how we live and work. AI went from a research project to something about to reshape every industry, every job, every creative field. Political systems that seemed stable for decades are fracturing. Trust in institutions is at historic lows. And a growing number of futurists, tech leaders and entrepreneurs are openly saying that the future is now unpredictable in ways it has never been before.

This isn’t the usual generational anxiety about change. The world has dramatically transformed several times but the type of future remained imaginable. After a war, you rebuild. After a revolution, you restructure. The template held. People could still picture what “getting back to normal” might look like.

This time, singularity is  on the table. AI alone makes the next decade more unpredictable than any period in human history. When you add in the collapse of institutional trust, the speed of technological change, the shifting of the global order and the strange, accelerating intensity of everyday life, you arrive at something that looks a lot like McKenna’s zero point.

We are right on the edge of the end of time.

Why nothing makes sense anymore

I see clients all the time who are struggling with this. They come in confused, exhausted, unable to make sense of what’s happening in their lives or in the world. They’re trying to hang on to old values, old patterns, old ways of doing things. Get a job. Buy a house. Start a family. Follow the plan. But the plan has collapsed, and trying to force life into that old model is causing pain.

The confusion is a natural response to living through a transition. When the familiar structures that gave life meaning start dissolving, the first thing people feel is disorientation. The ground shifts and there’s nothing solid to stand on. That feeling of “I don’t know who I am anymore” or “I can’t see a future” is a sign that the old model has reached its expiry date.

But now there will be no “getting back to normal” There is no rebuilding or restoring things to what they were. The only option now is transformation.

What do you hold on to when everything changes?

If the external world can no longer provide a stable framework for identity and meaning, the question becomes: what can?

This is where my work comes in, and it draws on something much older than McKenna’s theory. The ancient Taoists mapped the forces of change thousands of years ago through the Bagua, the eight trigrams that form the foundation of the I Ching itself. These trigrams represent the fundamental patterns of how energy moves, collapses and recombines. Thunder, Earth, Heaven, Fire, Wind, Water, Mountain, Lake. They describe forces that operate regardless of what’s happening in politics, technology or the economy. They exist in dimensions beyond time.

The Bagua is a living map of change. And at its centre sits the yin-yang symbol, representing the place of balance between all opposing forces. The key to navigating radical change is learning to position yourself at that centre, so the forces move through you rather than overwhelming you.

In my work with clients, I combine the Bagua with imprint release (based on the work of Timothy Leary), which is the process of identifying and clearing the deep ‘lower circuit’ patterns; the survival fears, territorial reactivity, conditioned responses that were useful in the old world but now keep you stuck. These imprints are what make transformation feel impossible. They anchor you to a version of reality that no longer exists.

Once those imprints begin to release, something else becomes accessible: the higher circuits and your cosmic self. This is your true nature, the part of you that is connected to purpose, that isn’t reactive or fearful, and that has always known what you’re here for. The cosmic self doesn’t need the external world to tell it who it is. It already knows.

Your cosmic self exists beyond time. That makes it the one thing you can hold on to when everything in the time-bound world is dissolving.

Transformation Is the only path forward

McKenna predicted the acceleration but he didn’t offer a practical method for navigating it. That’s what I’ve spent over four decades developing: a science of transformation that combines the Bagua, the forces of nature, imprint release work, strategies for self-healing with the cosmic self, and a process for finding each individual’s purpose in the new earth.

This work is grounded in my Chi Cycle Lifestyle, which aligns your daily rhythm with the eight forces of the Bagua. It creates order from chaos at the most fundamental level: the structure of your day. When the external world offers no stability, you build it from within.

The future is unknowable, but unknowable doesn’t have to mean unnavigable.

More on this in Webinar 5, The Hyperdynamic Shamanic Earth, the final instalment in the Multidimensional Series. Saturday May 30.

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FAQs

Was Terence McKenna right about 2012? McKenna predicted a convergence point where novelty would reach its maximum and the future would become genuinely unknowable. While nothing visibly dramatic happened on a single date in December 2012, the years that followed have seen an unprecedented acceleration of change: a global pandemic, the rise of AI, the collapse of institutional trust and a growing consensus among futurists that the future is now unpredictable in ways it has never been before. Whether McKenna’s timeline was slightly off or whether 2012 marked the beginning of a longer phase transition, his core insight about accelerating novelty looks increasingly accurate.

What is the Bagua? The Bagua is the system of eight trigrams that forms the foundation of the I Ching. Each trigram represents a fundamental force of nature: Thunder, Earth, Heaven, Fire, Wind, Water, Mountain and Lake. Together they map how energy moves, transforms and recombines. In Jost’s work, the Bagua serves as a practical tool for navigating change and transformation, with each force corresponding to a phase in the daily Chi Cycle Lifestyle.

What is the cosmic self? The cosmic self is your true nature beyond the conditioned identity built by upbringing, socialisation and external expectations. Where the “acquired self” needs the external world to tell it who it is, the cosmic self is connected to purpose, free from reactive emotion and capable of navigating change from a place of inner stability. Jost’s transformation work is designed to help people access and embody the cosmic self as a foundation for thriving in uncertain times.

What is imprint release? Imprint release is the process of identifying and clearing deep patterns held in the lower circuits of consciousness: survival fears, territorial instincts, mental rigidities and social conditioning. These patterns were often functional in the old world but now act as anchors that prevent transformation. Releasing them creates space for the cosmic self to come forward and for genuine change to occur.