textfiles/magazines/MISC/intzine.2

From: aleph1@stein.u.washington.edu (Mitch)
Newsgroups: alt.psychoactives,alt.zines
Subject: INTERZINE #2: Peter Meyer
Date: 11 Jun 1993 06:24:53 GMT
Message-ID: <1v98flINN4ci@news.u.washington.edu>

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                       |                            Not copyright         
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                       |  n  t  e  r  z  i  n  e
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		       {  Issue #2 : Peter Meyer  }
_______________________________________________________________________

Peter Meyer is best known as the developer of the MS-DOS software
_Timewave Zero_, which demonstrates Terence McKenna's fractal model of
time and history. In the "About the Authors" section of the software
documentation, we learn:   

   Peter Meyer received the first double honors Bachelor of Arts degree
   awarded by Monash University, Melbourne, majoring both in Philosophy
   and in Pure Mathematics. His mathematical research has been published
   in _Discrete Mathematics_. He has travelled extensively, and spent
   several years studying Tibetan Buddhism in India and Nepal. Peter is
   an experienced software developer and has worked internationally as a
   computer consultant. His interests include history, travel, cryptology,
   geopolitics, anthropology, religion and psychedelic research. In 
   addition to _Timewave Zero_ he has written and published three C
   function libraries, a Maya calendar program and a data encryption
   software package. His DMT research has been published in _Psychedelic
   Monographs and Essays_ and in the _Yearbook of Ethnomedicine and
   Consciousness research_. His exploration of little-known areas of
   consciousness has confirmed for him both the reality of other
   dimensions of existence and of the Eckhartian/Buddhist undifferentiated
   unity underlying all phenomena. He hopes to be present at the end of 
   history in 2012, 5125 years after its beginning.

		- some questions and answers -
 
Q1.  When you got your double honors degree in Philosophy and Pure
Mathematics at Monash University, what did you foresee yourself doing
in life?
 
A1.  When I finished my five-year course of studies at Monash
University I was still somewhat naive and idealistic. During those
years I seemed to have access to some intuitive source of metaphysical
knowledge which apparently I have now lost - or perhaps it is more
accurate to say that I am now less inclined to accept what I imagine
to be the case as actually being the case (without confirming
evidence).	As a university student I felt (probably like many
university students, at least in the 60s) that there were realms of
knowledge waiting to be explored, and deep truths waiting to be
discovered.  This was why I studied Philosophy and Mathematics (having
switched over from earlier undergraduate studies in natural science),
searching for deep truths.
 
When I graduated I had no clear idea of what I was going to do in
life, beyond the general aim of continuing this search for deep
truths.  I gave little thought to a career, or to the question of
earning a living.  I had seriously considered doing graduate work in
AI with John McCarthy at Stanford University, but my interest in
psychology (especially that of Jung and of Piaget) won out.  I had
inherited some property following my mother's death in 1970, and upon
graduating I sold this and left Australia to travel to Europe via
Asia, which I did.
 
Q2.  What was the nature of the research you have had published in
"Discrete Mathematics"?
 
This was a paper entitled "On the Structure of Orthomodular Posets",
in the 1974 volume.  It was my final-year undergraduate thesis in
mathematics, which I wrote in 1970.  It is exceedingly abstract.  In
it I prove a number of theorems about the construction of orthomodular
posets of various kinds from sets of sets satisfying certain mathematical
conditions.  As far as I know no mathematician ever extended this line
of research any further.  It was a path I went down that none cared to
follow.
 
Q3.  What motivated you to study Tibetan Buddhism?	Where in India and
Nepal did you go to, and who did you study with?
 
A3.  As a first-year university student at the age of 18 I inclined to
atheism and agnosticism, but I then read Christmas Humphreys' book
"Buddhism", and immediately felt that this was a philosophy/religion
that made sense to me.	However, I still cannot quite accept what
to some is the first principle of Buddhism, that this life is an
unmitigated realm of suffering.  I prefer to see all sentient life as
an expression of a divine creativity, a viewpoint somewhat more akin
to the Hindu view of the world as divine play (illusion though it
ultimately may be).
 
I was, like many people, first attracted to Tibetan Buddhism when
I discovered Tibetan art, especially the thanka paintings of the
tantric deities.  This was around the time, in 1967, when I began
doing acid, which really opened me up to metaphysical and religious
dimensions.  In the late 1960s I (with many others) read the works of
Lama Anagarika Govinda and of John Blofeld, and I came to believe that
the deepest truths were surely to be found in Tibetan Buddhism.
 
I had some first-hand contact with the Tibetan tradition during my
first visit to India in 1971.  I continued on to Europe to study
Jungian psychology, then returned to Australia in 1972 to do some
graduate work in Kantian philosophy.  I returned to Europe in 1974,
where I met H. H. Sakya Trizin, the head of the Sakyapa Order of
Tibetan Buddhism.  I expressed to him my wish to study Tibetan
Buddhism more deeply, and he suggested I return to North India (Dehra
Dun) to study with him, which I did.  I spent most of 1975-1979
studying with, and in the service of, this lama (who spoke good
English).  I also received teachings from another lama, H. H. Chogye
Trichen Rimpoche, head of the Tsharpa branch of the Sakyapa tradition,
and abbot of the Tibetan monastery at Lumbini in Nepal.
 
Q4.  As a software developer and computer consultant, have you always
been freelance, or did you ever work for large corporations?  I am
also curious about the nature of the "three C function libraries" and
the data encryption software package.
 
A4.  I learned to program in FORTRAN IV in 1965, while working for a
year with the Post Office in Melbourne.  I did no programming during
the 70s.  In the early 80s I was a freelance software developer in
California, and developed software for the Apple // which was
published.	Since then I have sometimes been employed at small or
medium-sized corporations and sometimes have been a freelance
consultant or developer.  In the mid-80s I got into MS-DOS software
development and during the last five years I have programmed mainly in C.
 
In late 1989 I found myself in California, having just returned from
18 months in Europe, and was broke.  The idea of getting a job and
being a wage-slave for the rest of my life did not appeal to me.
Instead I resolved to develop and publish software for a living.  I
managed to eke out a a bare existence while developing software on
others' PCs, and during 1989-92 I created four C function libraries
(these are tools useful to C programmers) and three application
programs: a Maya calendrical conversion program, Timewave Zero
(illustrating Terence McKenna's theory of time and history) and some
data encryption software.  The last incorporates an encryption method
which I developed during 1990-92.
 
Q5.  What are "Psychedelic Monographs and Essays" and the "Yearbook of
Ethnomedicine and Consciousness Research"?  Who puts them out?  What
is their audience?	Their content?
 
A5.  "Psychedelic Monographs and Essays" (published by Thomas Lyttle,
first issued in 1985) evolved from the "Psychozoic Press" (published
by Elvin D. Smith, first issued in 1982).  Both were/are collections
of essays and informative material dealing with all aspects of
psychedelics and psychoactive plants and fungi, with occasional
articles about psychedelic researchers and their work.	The latest
volume of Psychedelic Monographs and Essays is #6, and has articles
classified under the headings of Spirituality, Psychotherapy,
Literature, Parapsychology and Pharmacology.  It is available from
PM&E Publishing, P.O. Box 4465, Boynton Beach, FL 33424, for $20.00
postpaid within the U.S., $27.00 outside the U.S.
 
The "Yearbook of Ethnomedicine and Consciousness Research" is similar.
It is edited by the German anthropologist Dr. Christian Raetsch and
contains some articles in English and some in German.  The first
volume was published in late 1992.	It is available from the publisher,
Amand Aglaster, VWB, Postfach 11 03 68, 1000 Berlin 61, Germany.
 
Q6.  How did you get into psychedelic research?  DMT research?
 
A6.  My initial awareness of the existence of psychedelics came from
reading Aldous Huxley's "Doors of Perception" in 1966.  I knew
immediately that this was a field of research I wished to explore.	My
opportunity came a few months later when an artist friend in Melbourne
informed me that some LSD had shown up.  It was probably synthesized
locally, and was quite impure, but blew me away.  Life has never been
the same since.
 
I know of nothing more interesting and worthy of study than the
multitude of conscious states available through the use of psychedelics.
Had psychedelic research not been made illegal (this is itself a crime
against humanity) I would presumably have pursued my biochemical/-
psychological/philosophical studies under the auspices of academia.
Instead I abandoned the academic world for the study of Tibetan
Buddhism in India and later got into software development in the U.S.
and in Europe.	But I have never ceased to do psychedelics occasionally,
and sometimes frequently, garnering such information and understanding
as I can under the circumstances.
 
A couple of years after I began doing acid I discovered the delights
of marijuana and hashish, which subject I researched enthusiastically
in Asia beginning in 1971 (when the hash shops in Kathmandu were still
open and legal, before they were closed down at the insistence of the
U.S. Government).  Morning glory seeds in 1974.  In 1978 I discovered
psilocybin mushrooms at Palenque in Mexico.  In 1983 MDMA in Berkeley.
In 1987 DMT in Hawaii.	In 1988 Ketamine in Switzerland.  In 1990
5-MeO-DMT in Berkeley.
 
My interest in DMT arose from hearing Terence McKenna speak of it in
some of his taped talks (especially his "Tryptamine Hallucinogens and
Consciousness").  My first experience with it was pretty strange; on
my second I thought I was dying.  My initial encounter on DMT with the
alien entities did not come until two years later.	As Terence has
said, and which I can confirm, the DMT experience is the weirdest
thing you can experience this side of the grave.  The rational mind
retreats in utter disbelief when confronted with it.  Thus I resolved
to research the topic, which I did during 1990-91 in Berkeley, where I
had access to the Biosciences Library at U.C. Berkeley.  I gathered
reports from those few people I knew who had smoked it, and the
article which resulted appeared simultaneously in each of the journals
mentioned above.

		- the blurb for Timewave Zero -

This software illustrates Terence McKenna's theory of time,
history and the end of history as first described in the book
"The Invisible Landscape" by him and his brother Dennis, and more
recently in his "The Archaic Revival" (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992)
The theory of Timewave Zero was revealed to Terence by an alien
intelligence following a bizarre, quasi-psychedelic experiment
conducted in the Amazon jungle in Colombia in 1971.  Inspired by
this influence Terence was instructed in certain transformations
of numbers derived from the King Wen sequence of I Ching hexagrams.
This led eventually to a rigorous mathematical description of
what Terence calls the timewave, which correlates time and
history with the ebb and flow of novelty, which is intrinsic to
the structure of time and hence of the temporal universe.  A
peculiarity of this correlation is that at a certain point a
singularity is reached which is the end of history - or at least
is a transition to a supra-historical order in which our ordinary
conceptions of our world will be radically transformed.  The
best current estimate for the date of this point is December 21,
2012 CE, the winter solstice of that year and also the end of the
current era in the Maya calendar.
 
The primary function of the software is to display any portion of
the timewave (up to seven billion years) as a graph of the
timewave related to the Western calendar (either Gregorian or
Julian).  You can display the wave for the entire 4.5-billion-year
history of the Earth, note the peculiarities of the wave at such
points as the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs (65 million
years ago) and inspect parts of the wave as small as 92 minutes.
The software provides several ways of manipulating the wave display,
including the ability to zoom in on a target date or to step back
to get the larger picture.

A remarkable quality of the timewave is that it is a fractal.
Once a part of the wave is displayed the software allows you to
expand any smaller part (down to 92 minutes).  This usually
reveals a complexity of structure which persists however much the
wave is magnified, a property typical of fractals.  The idea that
time has a fractal structure (in contrast to the Newtonian
conception of time as pure, unstructured duration) is a major
departure from the common view of the nature of time and physical
reality.  That time is a fractal may be the reason why fractals
occur in Nature.
 
The documentation describes the origin, construction and
philosophical significance of the timewave, the use of the
software, the mathematical definition of the timewave (with
proofs of some related mathematical theorems) and certain curious
numerical properties.

An interesting part of the theory is the assertion of historical
periods "in resonance" with each other.  Resonantly we have (in
1993) emerged from the fall of the Roman empire and are well into
the transitional period known historically as the Dark Ages.  The
software permits graphical display of different regions of the
timewave that are in resonance with each other.  This allows the
period 1945 - 2012 to be interpreted as a resonance of the period
2293 BC - 2012 CE.  New in this version is the ability to graph
trigrammatic resonances in addition to the major resonances, and
to construct a sequential set of eleven trigrammatic resonances.
There is a new appendix concerning some recent mathematical results.

The Timewave Zero software at last permits a scientific examination
of Terence's long-standing claim to have discovered the root cause
of the ups and downs of historical vicissitude. If his theory is
confirmed then we can look forward to a rough, but very interesting,
ride in the twenty years leading up to the climactic end-point of
history in 2012.  During this time the events of the period from
745 CE are expected to recur (albeit in modern form).

Timewave Zero 4.12 requires MS-DOS (2.10 or later) and runs on
IBM PC compatibles with and without a graphics adaptor.

			- a final note -

Timewave Zero is currently published by Fringeware Inc., P. O. Box 49921,
Austin, TX 78765, USA, and should also be available from Sound
Photosynthesis in Mill Valley, CA and from Nightbloomers in Berkeley, CA;
or from AO Corporation, 134 Granada Dr, Corte Madera, CA 94925.

Fringeware has a mailing list:
fringeware-request@wixer.cactus.org