Time is a fractal, or has a fractal structure. All times, moments, months and millennia, have a pattern; the same pattern. This pattern is the structure within which, upon which, events "undergo the formality of actually occurring," as Whitehead used to say. The pattern recurs on every level. A love affair, the fall of an empire, the death agony of a protozoan, all occur within the context of this always the same but ever different pattern. All events are resonances of other events, in other parts of time, and at other scales of time.— Terence McKenna, "I Understand Philip K. Dick", In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, ed. Lawrence Sutin
(that is, the remainder of this chapter of the user manual) are available only on the the USB flash drive.
- Introduction
A study of the timewave by means of this software will reveal that there are parts of the timewave which have a similar shape, that is, the wave pattern looks the same, even though the values on the horizontal and vertical axes are quite different. For example, the first graph below shows a 40-year period of the wave and the second graph shows a 2560-year period, but clearly the two graphs are identical in shape:
The periods of time represented by such parts of the wave are said to be in resonance with each other, and one is said to be a resonance of the other (this terminology is due to Terence McKenna). Of two regions of the graph which are in resonance, the one closer to the zero point (and later in time) is said to be the lower resonance of the other, and the one further away (and earlier in time) is said to be the higher resonance of the other. Points in time occupying corresponding positions in parts of the wave which are in resonance are said to be resonance points of each other. In the example above, the 2560-year period from -3371 through -811 is said to be the first higher resonance of the 40-year period 1970 through 2010., and the latter is said to be the first lower resonance of the former. (For information about the astronomical system of numbering years, where -811 = 810 B.C., see Astronomical Year Numbering.)
A study of periods in resonance with each other reveals that often there are mathematically definable relations between them. A number of different mathematical relationships have been identified, and various kinds of resonance points may thus be defined precisely.
At present it seems there are basically two kinds of resonance points, geometric and linear. The geometric resonance points are more usually termed major resonance points (explained in the next section). There are two kinds of linear resonance points, namely, yao and trigrammatic resonance points (explained in Section 3 below).
The major resonance points of a given point in time form a doubly infinite geometric series extending toward and away from the zero point. The yao and trigrammatic resonance points of a given point in time fall into an infinite number of levels, and within each level there is a linear sequence of resonance points which is infinite only in the direction of the past.
Formal definitions of the varieties of resonance points will now be given, then an explanation of how to graph the resonances using the software, followed by some remarks on the interpretation of resonance points.
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