What's Wrong with Time?

How the West's artificial 12:60 "timing frequency" programs us for chaos and apocalypse, and what we can do about it

Hi folks,

I am developing my YouTube channel with the help of producer Jordan Albert Byrne and editor/director Krista Chael. Krista just produced this wonderful video on the nature of time and the problem with the Gregorian calendar, which, as José Argűelles noted, traps us in the artificial “12:60 timing frequency”.

I would love it if you would take the time to watch the video, and please like and share it if you can (plus subscribe to the channel!). We intend to build @LiminalNewsPod into a major source of well-researched and carefully reasoned alternative perspectives on politics, technology, and even the nature of reality. But we do need your help to get there. Today’s video asks:

Do you ever find yourself racing against time? Do you ever feel that time is running out? What if it’s not just you? What if our society’s relationship to time is broken in some fundamental way What if addressing the time crisis is the only way we can get to the root of our anxieties and reckon with the meta crisis? In this video, we explore the secret problem with modern time.

Months were originally “moon-ths,” and there are 13 lunations in a year. We live in a desynchronized, abstracted and patriarchal time construct, which may be a major reason for our alienation and disconnection from nature and natural cycles. We may need to fix the “programming device,” the calendar, before we can address the internal flaw in our culture’s understanding of the world. Here is the video, with describtion below:

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII erased ten days from history with a single decree. But what if this administrative fix did something much deeper? Explore how the Gregorian calendar acts as a subliminal programming device—severing us from natural cosmic cycles, locking humanity into a hyper-rational "12:60" frequency, and driving modern societal breakdown. We look to the Maya, Carl Jung, Terence McKenna, and Jean Gebser to ask: is it time for a radical temporal mutation?

The year is 1582. To fix a drifting Easter, the Vatican deletes ten days from the calendar. While history treats this as a simple correction, the underlying truth is far more profound: a calendar is not a passive instrument. It is a programming device that shapes the human mind, dictates human labor, and separates the sacred from the profane.

By replacing the organic 13-month lunar cycle with 12 unequal, arbitrary months, modern civilization trapped itself in an artificial temporal grid. In this video essay, we dive deep into the "12:60 timing frequency," exploring how our broken measure of time fuels alienation, environmental collapse, and existential crisis.

We step outside the Western mind-set to examine the multi-layered cyclical genius of the Mayan Long Count and Tzolkin, Terence McKenna’s Timewave Zero, Carl Jung's synchronicity, and Jean Gebser’s theory of consciousness mutation. Are we living at the wobbly peak of a tower built on an unstable foundation? And is a new timing device exactly what we need to build a sane planetary culture?

If you enjoyed this deep dive, please like, subscribe, and leave a comment below with your thoughts on the nature of time.

CHAPTERS
00:30 - Act I: The Great Erasure (1582 & 10 Deleted Days)
02:09 - The Calendar as a Social Programming Device
05:40 - The 12:60 Frequency vs. Organic Cosmic Cycles
06:33 - Linear Progress & The Myth of the Apocalypse
07:52 - Act II: The Split in Time (Jung & Synchronicity)
09:19 - Terence McKenna, Novelty, and the Mayan Calendar
10:35 - The Tzolkin and the Long Count Matrix
13:00 - The Noosphere, Technology, and the Metacrisis
14:26 - Act III: The Mutation (Jean Gebser’s Five Structures)
16:48 - The Integral Structure and the Transparency of Time
18:15 - Designing a New Timing Device for a Sane World

Here are a few other recent videos from the channel you might enjoy: