from “The Climax of History, the Fifty-six Years of Hiroshima – Artificial Time Runs Out”, chapter five of  Time and the Technosphere, Jose Arguelles

 

            “Understanding a calendar as the instrument that locks the conditioned programs of a given culture into place, we can now understand how the unconscious metaprogram of the macro-organizing principle of the Gregorian calendar cumulatively recycles all its millennial programs every twenty-eight years.  Since its inception in 1582, the Gregorian calendar has been dragging forward a host of conditioned thought forms and perceptions, including those inherited from 1,500 years of the Julian calendar that it had reformed.  At points of dramatic break in the continuity of human consciousness, a new set of cycles is set to recur.  Such was the case in the year 1945, with the awesome blast of Hiroshima.  The entirety of the mind field conditioned and held in place by the Gregorian calendar then reaches its full fruition during the two subsequent 28-year cycles, fifty-six years in all – thus bringing forward two millennia of conditionings, conflicts, and unconscious death wishes or apocalyptic programs.  The first cycle was initiated in the year 1945, the year in which Vernadsky died, the atomic bomb was tested once and used twice, and the Second World War came to an end.  That year, 1945, marks the beginning of the technospheric bubble.  It is most telling that the Second World War was concluded at the beginning of this 56-year cycle of the technosphere, for it was a war concluded not with peace but with instruments of mass destruction and terror.  Thus began the 56-year era of Atomic Terror.

            The technosphere has its origins with the full capture of the human mental field by the 12:60 frequency in 1618.  From 1618 onward, the noosphere is increasingly obscured by a mental field known as the technospheric sheath.  Slowly but surely, the technospheric sheath replaces civilization.  This is first done by the introduction of mechanistic linear time.  It is important to note that the Julian count, the basis of all modern scientific calculations, is a scale created by Thomas Scaliger in 1583, twenty-one years after the 1562 Mayan book burning.  This linear time scale, like the Gregorian calendar reform itself, was intended to co-opt the Mayan thirteen baktun Long Count by setting a count of days that begins the first of January, 4713 B.C., or some 1,600 years prior to 13.0.0.0.0, the beginning of the thirteen baktun count in 3113 B.C.  This deliberate historical act, the Julian count, along with the Gregorian calendar and the mechanical clock, established the paradigmatic notion of the linearity of time in the ripening field of scientific thought.  Reflected in the noosphere, this linear, irreversible time concept levels and stunts the realization of human mass-consciousness.  In fact, during the technospheric cycle, especially after 1754, the ceiling of human consciousness is maintained by a preoccupation with mechanistic third-dimensional operations while becoming increasingly alienated from the organic order of reality.  This creates the 12:60 consciousness constant, a mental ceiling that actually diminishes in proportion to the increasing rates of multiplication, propagation, and intrinsic velocity of the machine.

            With the actual rise of the Industrial Revolution, dated in the noosphere to A.D. 1754, the synchronic point at which mechanization becomes an irreversible factor of the biosphere, the technospheric sheath, henceforth enters into its next stage, going from a purely mental sheath to the industrial sheath, the prelude to the proto-technosphere itself.  The industrial sheath spreads throughout the biosphere between 1754 and 1901, the official beginning of the twentieth century.  At this point we enter the forty-four years of the proto-technosphere, 1901-1945.  During this critical stage of the proto-technosphere, the actions of human behaviour interacting with machine technology make the expression of true culture increasingly difficult, if not impossible.  Civilization becomes a set of symbols purveyed through museums, galleries, and theatres, and recorded and reproduced in ever more advanced technological forms.  But what of culture, which is not the same as civilization – what becomes of culture?

            To begin to answer that question, some further definitions are in order.  The technosphere is defined by and based upon one key term:  technology.  According to the common dictionary definition, which already reflects the mass mind, technology is “the totality of the means employed to provide objects necessary for human sustenance and comfort.”  Today virtually all the means employed are themselves mechanical in nature.  In common parlance, therefore, technology refers to the complex apparatus of mechanization.  In fact, technology is mechanization;  it is the ability to convert human labor into processes carried out purely by machine-oriented or mechanical means. This is also inclusive of the entirety of computer technology, which represents the mechanization of the more purely mental processes of thought and communication.

            Mechanization, we must remember, originated in the clock, in the mechanization of time.  It is the mechanization of time that presupposes the tendency toward mechanization as a state of mind within the noosphere.  Since artificial time is characterized by the illusion of an inexorable and irreversible linearity, the compulsion toward materialism is also experienced in the same way, an inexorable motion spearheaded by the advance of ever more improved machines.  The machines themselves are the products of and means of industrialization – the technological transformation of raw goods into consumer goods, a process accounting for much of the free energy introduced into the biogeochemical combustion of the biosphere…

 

            Globalization represents the absolute triumph of capitalism as the dominant economic doctrine of the human species in the biosphere, and the absolute basis of the technosphere in its final phase of development…

 

            From the point of view of the biosphere, globalization is the cancer of the human species consuming non-renewable resources and, through the release of free energy, effecting the final critical increase in biogeochemical combustion.  The planetary instrument for furthering the entire process and philosophy of globalization is the technosphere.  The technosphere may be defined as the entire apparatus of mechanized technology and its support philosophy (globalization), understood as an artificial sphere encompassing the globe.  As such, the technosphere is discontinuously interspersed within the biosphere.  More precisely, the technosphere is located physically and mentally between the biosphere and the noosphere, in other words, between the Earth’s vital sphere and its mental envelope…”