Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the
 psychedelic salon. Well today's program is the first of what will be a long
 series of podcasts of the famous trial logs held by Terrence McKenna, Ralph
 Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake. I first heard about these lengthy conversations
 when I read a little book that provided a few highlights of the first two public
 trial logs that were held at Esalen in September of 1989 and again a year later.
 Although the book was published in 1992 I didn't come across it until the summer
 of 1998 when I was attending a workshop that Terrence McKenna was holding at
 Omega Institute in upstate New York. The bookstore there had all kinds of
 interesting items that us East Coasters seldom came across, books like Sasha
 Shulgin's Fakal along with copies of most of Terrence's work. Since Ralph
 Abraham and Terrence McKenna were going to be conducting a dialogue one night
 while I was there, on a whim I bought a copy of "Trialogues at the Edge of the
 West". Mainly I have to admit to get the two of them to autograph it for me. Well
 I got their autographs all right but I also got a whole lot more. For one thing
 their dialogue that hot August night was the inspiration for me to write "The
 Spirit of the Internet". The other was the great ideas that I found in the
 "Trialogues" book. By the way if you would like to hear the dialogue between
 Terrence and Ralph that night all you have to do is go to my website and
 download podcasts number 19 and 20. I'll give you the address URL at the end of
 the program. So now we flash forward eight years to a meeting that Bruce
 Dahmer and I had with Ralph Abraham a week ago and if you can just try to
 imagine my astonishment to be back face to face with Ralph who I'd only
 previously encountered just long enough to get his autograph. And there find
 myself the recipient of a big dusty old box of cassette tapes which were Ralph's
 collection of the majority of the public "Trialogues" that the three of them held.
 To tell the truth I'm still flabbergasted at my good fortune. The
 reason I'm telling this story is for those of you who may find yourselves
 right now in the situation I was in just ten years ago. At that time I was still
 living in the cubicle world of corporate America. Granted I was earning a nice
 salary and had a generous expense account and was flying around the world
 in an attempt to help my company get people interested in doing business on
 the Internet. But in my quiet moments to be quite honest I was really a miserable
 wreck. And how I got from there to here still seems like a strange and largely
 unplanned journey. But that's not the point I'm trying to make. The point is
 that no matter how bad the situation you think you're in right now, even if you
 have no resources and don't have the connections you think you need to be
 able to move into the flow of the worldwide psychedelic community, you can
 still do it as long as you don't give up on your dreams. Well, enough of my story I
 guess, at least for now. Let's get on with the trilogues. So here's my plan. Each
 week I'm going to try to first of all podcast some of the many other talks
 I've got stacked up along with a few live interviews I've scheduled. Then I'm
 going to attempt to get two more podcasts out each week, those being part
 of this long series of trilogues that these three unique minds held during the
 period from 1989 to 1998. My plan is to publish them in the approximate order in
 which they were given so that we can follow the progression of their thinking
 over that decade. In all I've got about 50 hours or so of this material, so this
 project is going to take a little time to complete. But I think it's going to be
 fun and an interesting series. So without any further ado let's get right to
 today's program, which is from the introduction tape to the series
 appropriately titled "Cast of Characters." This is an experiment. It's also sort of
 living theater because Rupert and Ralph and I have by natural inclination been
 discussing the kind of things we're going to discuss this weekend privately
 and with each other in many circumstances in all times of the day
 and night for a number of years. So it's our natural mode, it's just that we've
 never done it before with a lot of people looking on. So hopefully we can
 attain to the level of spontaneity and non-recursive chance-taking that
 goes on in those kinds of conversations. Maybe that's enough to say. I should
 introduce my two co-presenters. Most of you know them already of course. Rupert
 Sheldrake is the author of "A New Science of Life" and "The Presence of the
 Past," books which stirred more controversy in British biology than it
 had seen in 30 years and got the British journal Nature to call his first book a
 "candidate for burning," which suddenly turned the thought of Rupert Sheldrake
 into a civil liberties issue because that's pretty strong talk. Rupert's idea,
 which he will I'm sure unfold for you in his inimitable style, is very dear to my
 heart because they dovetail and support each other. We're both rowing our canoes
 the same way. Rupert and our colleague of many years standing and my
 acquaintance since 1972, a hellraiser from the 60s, the man who, well no I won't
 even say that, a hellraiser from the 60s, a man who brought mathematics to a new
 fever pitch in the field of dynamics and systems modeling. Ralph has been sort of
 the Rock of Gibraltar of the psychedelic end of eggheadism, at least for many
 people that I've lived around. So he runs the Center for the Study of Visual
 Mathematics in Santa Cruz, is a professor at UC Santa Cruz, author of
 foundations of mechanics and countless other books, plays, papers and so forth
 and so on. So it will be the three of us attempting to sort of weave together our
 different perspectives on a very large and sort of hard to grapple with
 paradigm shift that is taking place in the way the Western mind does its
 business with reality. And you know it may be the last paradigm shift we ever
 get, so when this cat lands it's going to have to land on its feet because
 immediately facing it will be the theater of activity that is the
 consequence of the old way of doing it, which was a very bad way of doing it. So
 we have to be prepared for a whole new dynamic, whole new way of linking systems
 together, thinking about solutions, thinking about the past and ourselves in
 the world.
 Right, well I'm Rupert Sheldrake. As you've all gathered I'm here with my
 wife Jo. Oh there she is. I just said I was here with you and you vanished but
 then you appeared just on cue. And with our little boy Merlin, who you may see
 around, he's nearly two, and with our babysitter from England who's called
 Mandy, who's just 18. Six weeks ago she was in her village in Yorkshire
 and when then she came to work with us and didn't realize that within a few
 weeks she'd be at Asselin. Well she's here too. I'm a biologist by background. I
 studied biology because I was interested in animals and plants and when I was
 studying it at Cambridge I began to have terrible doubts about what I was doing
 because everything that really interested me about animals and plants
 somehow vanished when I got into biochemistry laboratories. I was majoring
 in biochemistry and I did a PhD in biochemistry there. But there's a curious
 thing about biochemistry. You're doing biochemistry to study the molecular
 basis of life, yet the very first thing you do in the laboratory is kill
 whatever you're studying, grind it up, extract the enzymes and then in a test
 tube study the properties of some of these molecules extracted from this
 killed organism. And it began to occur to me that perhaps this wasn't the best way
 to understand life. But I didn't quite know what to do about it because
 everybody else thought it was definitely was the best way to study life and in
 fact there was no other valid way. So this set me thinking and I then came to
 realize there was a whole tradition of biology called vitalism which had tried
 to adopt a totally different approach to the understanding of life. A school which
 flourished in the 19th century and which went on till the 1920s. When it underwent
 a transformation into the organismic or holistic philosophy of nature which
 really treats the whole of the universe as alive. This was a totally new idea, a
 new perspective for me and I began to see that the science of biology could be
 reformed. That this idea that living organisms are truly alive rather than
 being just machines. That's the official doctrine, the mechanistic theory says
 living organisms are just complicated machines. Believe it or not, still the
 official doctrine of academic biology and academic medicine. And this set up a
 tremendous tension and I began to see there was a new way of doing it and I
 began to see the outlines of a new theory. I had several insights into how
 this might happen. I stayed at Cambridge for about seven or eight years doing
 research. Then I went to India where I worked in an agricultural institute.
 These ideas went on developing. I then saw how I could bring them all together
 in a synthesis and into a new way of seeing how biology could be done.
 And I wrote a book while still in India called A New Science of Life. In it the
 basic idea I'm suggesting is that there's a kind of inherent memory in all
 kinds of animals and plants. Each species has its own collective memory. So each
 member of the species draws on this collective memory and in turn
 contributes to it. This means that the instincts of animals, for example, the
 behavior of cuckoos, the spinning of webs by spiders, are like a memory, a habit of
 the species. This inheritance takes place by the process I call morphic resonance
 by a kind of invisible intangible memory, a kind of resonance between present and
 past organisms of the same kind. The same theory helps explain how our own memory
 works by a resonance between our own past and our present states. It leads to the
 idea that our memories aren't stored in our brains but that we're tuning into
 them by this process of morphic resonance. Anyway, this theory which I'd
 been developing, as the more research I did the better fit I found it made with
 the facts. I found there was already considerable circumstantial evidence for
 this idea. But as you can imagine, this idea wouldn't be very popular in the
 realms of academic biochemistry and it didn't win over instantly all my
 colleagues in the biochemistry department at Cambridge either. So when
 my book on this subject was published, which I wrote in India, there was a
 considerable controversy in the scientific world. The theory is
 testable by experiment. Various experiments have been done, it is being
 tested. I've been developing and working on this theory for the last ten years. My
 last book, The Presence of the Past, that came out recently, it develops it in more
 detail. And currently I'm writing a book called The Rebirth of Nature, which is
 about the idea that the entire cosmos is alive rather than just inanimate and
 mechanistic. What difference that makes. Well, when A New Science of Life came out
 in 1982 in America, it came out a year earlier in England, I came to California
 because it was published in Los Angeles by Tarture. I'd never been to California
 before and I suddenly found myself in a wonderland which I hadn't even thought
 about. I'd lived in India for the previous seven years. Before that I'd spent most
 of my time in Cambridge, England. I had been educated in America at Harvard,
 spent a year there doing philosophy. But California was something that I hadn't
 even dreamed of. I found myself here at Esalen, I found an extraordinary new
 range of things going on I hadn't known about. And when I was in San Francisco, a
 friend who I knew from Europe said to me just the day before I left, "There's
 somebody you must meet. He's called Terrence McKenna." He said, "You get on this
 bus in San Francisco, you get off at Santa Rosa two hours later and Terrence
 will appear in a large 1956 Buick or whatever, and that'll be Terrence
 McKenna." I didn't know much about Terrence so I went up there and in this
 large 1956 Buick we headed off into the woods in Sonoma County where Terrence
 lives and there I met both Terrence and Ralph who was there for the day. We had a
 most interesting time. I found that part of my interest in these other realms
 of reality, of course, like many people in this room, was stimulated by experience
 with psychedelic substances. This was before I went to India. When I arrived in
 India I found that India is a kind of psychedelic realm anyway. It's just
 an amazing place. So in Terrence I found somebody who knew about that whole realm,
 who shared with me an interest in India since it played an important part in his
 development and who had views about the nature of reality which complemented my
 own in an extraordinary way. My own theory is about memory and habit in
 nature. Terrence, I found, had developed a theory about novelty and creativity in
 nature, a theory about the quality of time and the creative process as it is
 related to the ongoing flux of events. And Ralph had a kind of mathematical
 theory which was just the kind of thing that the view of nature I was trying to
 develop needed. The idea of nature being drawn by goals or attractors. In the
 mathematical science of dynamics there's this model of the native reality being
 pulled from ahead by things called attractors. It's a teleological animistic
 view of nature which dressed up in the guise of mathematical models which I
 found most fascinating. And so for me the meeting with Ralph and Terrence was a
 step further towards seeing how one could begin to dream of a world in which
 nature was seen as alive, in which the imagination permeated all reality, in
 which animals and plants are seen as part of the living texture, the living
 the living components, the cells and the life of Gaia and Gaia in the life of the
 cosmos as a whole. In fact a view of the world as alive which recalls in some
 respects the old cosmologies of the ancient world where the cosmos was seen
 as a living organism, where they thought of the whole cosmos as having a soul, the
 soul of the world, the anima mundi. And so I found Terrence and Ralph both people
 who were interested in looking at trying to form a new understanding of what we
 could call the soul of the world. So our discussions over the years, over the last
 seven years, have spun around many aspects of these things and when the
 idea came up of us coming here together at Esalen to do something together in
 public, we've so far talked a great deal in private and react synergistically in
 a way that I found extremely stimulating and inspiring. When this opportunity came
 up I was delighted that it was possible to be here and I'm delighted you're all
 here. And what we're hoping to do is to talk about aspects of the world soul and
 it turned out when we were discussing this each of us seemed to be
 representing a principle and these three principles in interaction form a
 kind of trinity and the structure of our triologue is going to reflect the
 different interactions of those principles. The principle which I'm
 representing is the principle of evolutionary creativity. How is it that
 the whole of nature is somehow creative in an evolutionary sense? The basis of my
 entire theory suggests that the laws of nature are not fixed eternal truths that
 have always been there, but habits which have evolved in the course of evolution
 itself. So I think there's a kind of habit principle in nature, there must
 also be a creative principle in nature to give the universe its evolutionary
 and yet regular way of behaving. So in these trilogues I'm going to be
 representing the principle of evolutionary creativity. The
 evolutionary principle including the habit that builds up and the creation
 that leads to new forms.
 Well in many ways my history is similar to Rupert's in many ways different. I
 think what we share most notably was a very early involvement in nature and a
 fascination with what used to be called natural history which means bugs, rocks,
 butterflies, and stars. And my own life has not been particularly academic. I
 graduated from the University of California but managed to stretch the
 degree-taking process out over 12 years that went from 1965 to whatever that is.
 And a lot of traveling in India I thought I was a art historian. In my
 early LSD experiences I seemed to see motifs and structures that gave me an
 interest in Tibetan Buddhism. And I went to India with the intent of studying the
 Tibetan language and quickly found that the whole thing was just overwhelming.
 And that I was just you know a human atom in the sea of India and that the
 notion of encompassing or understanding what this was was clearly the task of a
 lifetime. And several times in my life I have acted out this sort of ricocheting
 relationship between the humanities and the sciences. At times you know losing
 myself in the study of certain schools of poetry or literature or painting. And
 then at other times spending years reading philosophy of science and
 epistemic basis of physics and this sort of thing. Always trying to get a
 resolution on the content of my experience, my lived experience, which
 included the psychedelic experience. Which for me from very early on was this
 kind of tremendous mystery or conundrum which was set down in the middle of my
 being. And it still continues like that. I keep returning to that, testing all the
 ideas against the fullness of experience that that represents. Well for
 me just having sort of mind that I do this meant model building and an
 interest in the models of others. And in the 1970s I carried out a critique of
 scientific method and the implicit philosophical assumptions of science and
 convinced myself that it was pretty much just whistling past the graveyard. That
 they you know it was all done with smoke and mirrors. The actual understanding of
 what it means to be a living thinking organism is nowhere tangential to what
 science is telling us about the world. And so I became interested then in
 revisioning causality. It seemed to me that the problem lie somewhere with the
 definition of time. That there had been a misunderstanding. And I of course when
 you read dissident views on time or when you did in the 50s and 60s you read Carl
 Jung who wrote about what was called synchronicity. Which he called an
 a-causal connecting principle. And I spend a lot of time on that. But it isn't
 ultimately satisfying. If you analyze it carefully it isn't ultimately an
 explanation. It's more like a counter mapping. It tells you that connectedness
 can occur differently than in the stream of cause and effect. But it doesn't
 exactly explain to you why this is. So then I became interested in other views
 of time and elaborated my own theory which Rupert mentioned about novelty.
 I began to see that what I was groping toward was the notion that time is not a
 flat plane. But it's some kind of topological manifold. Some kind of
 surface over which events flow sometimes fast, sometimes slow. In the same way that
 water makes its way over a landscape. And where flow is rapid phase transitions
 occur and turbulence enters the picture. And turbulence is mathematically a very
 different creature from laminar flow. Ralph is an expert on all of this. But
 anyway I wanted to follow very deeply and to its ultimate conclusions this
 notion that what we had left out of our model of the world was the idea that
 time is actually composed not of a homogeneous medium but of some set of
 elements or interconnected parts which are in flux. And out of this I created
 progressively more and more formal models. And they were like novelty
 engines. And before the word fractals was even invented these curves, these
 recursive equations that I was working with were in fact fractal of the fractal
 type. So I think what's happening you know is there's a general awareness of a
 need for new mathematical objects and new models of process to connect up the
 world in a meaningful way. I think it was P.W. Bridgman in one of his essays said
 that a coincidence is what you have left over when you apply a bad theory. You
 know if you're getting a lot of coincidences after you get your theory in
 place then maybe the theory is not so good. Well our world is haunted by
 coincidence. The main difference between our world and the world that science
 tells us we're living in is that science denies the quirky, freaky, cosmic giggle,
 high plottedness, completely improbable, totally quirky humor that binds
 everything together and that makes it something other than an engine in which
 atoms blindly run in Whitehead's phrase. Well this kind of thinking and looking
 for colleagues and support led me first to Ralph who was great good support but
 you know he held my hand long years before I even thought I understood him.
 I'm not sure I understand him now and by him I mean only the tiny iota of him
 which is this crusty little theory out of which we make our bread. Rupert, I read
 the new science of life and had read all the other radical biology which
 preceded it and knew that there hadn't been anything for 15 years that you know
 Schrodinger brilliantly anticipated the discovery of DNA and then Joseph Needham
 and L.L. White and well Eric Yonch should be mentioned actually as a
 precursor of us all I think. I mean Eric Yonch was a great pioneer, a great soul
 and he saw very deeply into whole systems as did Ilya Prigozhin, the
 Belgian thermodynamicist and I think a lot of all of what we're doing comes out
 of that. What Prigozhin showed that just brought down the house was that there
 could be perturbations of physical systems that were unpredictable and that
 would cause the whole system to actually move to a more ordered state than the
 initial state and this perturbation to higher states of order looks
 suspiciously like a violation of the supposedly inviolate second law of
 thermodynamics so that looks you know like a doorway into an energetic
 hyperspace somehow a way around the no free lunch rule. We'll talk more about
 this but these guys Prigozhin and Yonch anticipated and were in many ways
 inspirational to what we all are doing. So then before I hand this on to Ralph
 in terms of the way that Weekend will be structured and to give us something to
 hang all this on, Rupert mentioned the triadic structure of the dialogues and
 that he would be representing the creative evolutionary impulse. I will
 represent the divine imagination, the imagination a la William Blake. In other
 words this domain, this legacy of the human mind in which culture and dream
 and personal and historical aspiration takes place. We're seeing all of these
 things as aspects of the world's soul. You see the notion of morphogenesis, the
 notion of fields that shape form. Eventually this question of how
 intelligent is the world soul or how mind like is the Gaian control system
 is just going to give way to the perception that the answer lies
 probably to the left of well more mind like than yourself because it is not we
 who are in a position to define these things. So the the notion of the world
 soul is properly vivified and pictured and endowed with qualities and
 properties that are exponential. So I will take that position. My great concern
 as far as these dialogues is concerned is novelty, the emergence of the
 unpredictable and the truly new out of the background of the recursive and
 iterative processes of nature. How can there be novelty and what exactly is it?
 And since very clearly we are the cutting edge of its self-expression, then
 unraveling this question about what is novelty is going to take us very close
 to the question of what is human nature? What are we doing in this phase space?
 What is the nature of the turbulence that we necessarily have to describe as
 ourselves? Next of all I'd like to introduce Terrence McKenna. This is
 Terrence. Oh yeah, sorry about that. Rupert, Terrence, I'm Ralph. So creation,
 imagination, my mask is chaos. So I was brought up in a field of music, but I was
 attracted to mathematics early. And when I was 14 I played in the State Symphony.
 After that I started in mathematics and I became a professor at Berkeley when I
 was 23. I had an easy way in mathematics and the way the system works, the
 carpet is unrolled in front of you. You know, you have a few choices,
 but basically before you even know what's happening the carpet is unrolled
 and you're down the runnel into whatever you can do that's useful to the
 system. In this process I lost nature. My interest in anything natural atrophied.
 I mean as a child I suppose I was interested in everything. And for this
 loss, I mean I don't know the names of trees for example. I can smell them, but I
 I can hardly tell them apart. But there was a great gain because I love it out
 there. I love to be off the planet. I always did and to this day I spend very
 little time on planet Earth. So it went on in this way and by 1967 I was a
 professor at Princeton. I had written three books on mathematics that you need
 a microscope to read. And I had been studying for a long while chaos, but we
 didn't call it chaos then and we didn't see in it any role in the natural world
 or in social transformation or in the evolution of consciousness because we
 didn't think about anything out there. You know we're just working on this.
 Personally my expectation was that anything I invented or discovered or
 assisted in developing would become abundantly useful in the human sphere in
 about a century or so. So one day after my third book was done and I was
 exhausted and I looked up and all the students were out in the courtyard
 demonstrating about the Vietnam War and to open the university to women students
 and and so on. I said what exactly is is going on? Here they said take this.
 And so like many people in that year or around that time in 1967 my career had a
 bifurcation and I went off the track and maybe I was as far as the track was
 concerned I might have been permanently burned out by then. I mean morning, noon
 and night in the world of mathematical symbols it's enough. So I went off
 the track with psychedelics, with meditation, but especially with searching,
 with trying everything and eventually I was living in a cave in the Himalayas.
 And I got again a call to come back and when I returned to California I was
 standing on a street corner in Santa Cruz in white pajamas and a car stopped.
 An old friend from a previous lifetime said there's somebody you have to meet.
 Get in the car. I had nothing to do. It sounded okay and in that time I believed
 that everything goes perfectly. You just go along with the flow as they said. I
 didn't know it would be a two-hour drive so I got in the car there's the two-hour
 drive to Berkeley and I was literally dumped out of the car on Terrence's
 front step. I never heard of Terrence at that time, 1972. And I went in and what
 happened then I would still say although we've had many wonderful talks and
 exciting, thrilling and nutritious times in the meanwhile, that that was quite a
 miraculous chat. Many subjects came up, not psychedelics, I mean many subjects
 came up and every, every subject was the occasion of a discovery of a most
 miraculous resonance of ideas. How to grow mushrooms, outer space, I don't know
 anything you could think of all passed by in the course of an hour or two. In
 this way we became friends and this habit we had, this activity that we do, I
 mean we never go for a hike or something like that. We sit in the evening and
 talk and what happens is synergistic, miraculous growth, evolutionary. Well I
 found, I did in the course of time return to mathematics even doing what I had
 done previously, chaos, but then chaos had become known. You see my estimate of a
 century was off. It was a numerical error, one of my worst, one of my best, because life is a lot more fun since a hundred years
 became ten. See, like it's going faster now and I began in my work to think
 about applications to the problems of the world, to the evolution of
 consciousness, to the destruction of the planet and so on. And in this
 revitalization of my work and eventually the whole field of mathematics, my
 conversations with Terrence, whereas I think we thought of them as just good
 fun, that they did have a really fundamental influence on everything I've
 done since. So fun, I would say fun is insulting, I mean thrilling because of
 going to the edge, going beyond the edge, having company there, finding things
 which you can bring back and they work and become part of everything you're
 doing. And along the way Terrence introduced me to this person he
 mentioned, Eric Yonch, who bothered me to write a paper and that was the first
 time that I had tried writing for a journal or a book or something, the kind
 of thing that we had talked about, which I always considered to be just a little
 too far out to be, you know, condensed onto paper to show to people who read, I
 mean who are they, they're scholars in universities or something. So Eric Yonch
 bothered me to write in this way and what came out, I think, although I wrote
 many in a way more practical, understandable and valuable things in
 the meanwhile, if they're worth anything they seem to be worth more than that.
 Nevertheless, that paper contained as a kind of clairvoyance the very
 definite prefiguration of everything that's happened between then 1975 and
 now, which is quite a lot of development on the frontiers of
 mathematics, of reconnection between mathematics and the other departments in
 a university, most especially the social sciences, the things, therapies and the
 understanding of society and history and all what might be the most
 valuable when we come to try to interact with the creation of our future in a
 conscious way. Then a little later, as Rupert said, I was in Terrence's living
 room, the phone rang, Terrence answered and he says, "We have to go to the bus
 station to pick up Rupert Sheldrake." So that sounds vaguely familiar, who's that?
 So in the car on the way to the bus station, Terrence gave me, as only he can
 do, the compressed into a nutshell poetic essence of Rupert's book on the
 hypothesis of formative causation. And we plucked the lad from the bus
 station and took him home to the spiderweb and then we found, I felt,
 another miracle and that the synergy of two was extended to three. For me, a
 totally unexpected new frontier. I mean the close relationship of two people is
 well known and the close relationship of three people is known but rare. And in
 the time since 1982, now there's seven years of this, I think we have all been
 nourished in many ways and inspired by our relationship, by the reception of
 information from the field that takes place without effort in the context of
 our talks in private in the living room. So this weekend, as described as an
 experimental weekend, I think there are several different experiments and one is
 to see if our trialogue can be exported or shared and there have already been a
 few experiments with dialogue, sharing dialogues in public, some more and some
 less successful. Trialogue is more, is the next frontier because it's very
 problematic even in private and another experiment that we will have to attempt
 this weekend is the more, the clear identification or the self-consciousness
 of what each of our roles is in the process that takes place. So my role is
 chaos and the reason is that actually Rupert and Terence have very well
 expressed their expectation for the assistance of mathematics in the
 development of their own thought. You need models, you need structures and
 there is this new language of attractors which seems to apply not only to the
 physical but also the biological and not only the biological but also the social
 sciences. So this language before chaos theory was already a useful tool, an
 important technology for model building, for trying to understand the complex, the
 mysterious, but particularly with the advent of chaos theory providing us with
 models for chaotic phenomenon that opens up to view, to the process of the
 mathematical assistance of understanding, opens up to this view all of those
 processes which previously were too complex to submit to any kind of
 understanding, verbalization, dialogue beyond some kind of wave of the hand,
 exciting, it's a miraculous, this also works but it does, a kind of a poetic
 resonance phenomenon in which without words essentially the idea is transferred
 from one individual to another. So it's opened up these complex phenomenon
 characterized by chaotic irregular, that is to say not well ordered in the
 previous paradigm, space-time structure. For example, relationships among people,
 the states and change of states of society, the whole process of history, the
 intuitive experience, subjective experience of relationship and so on, all
 of this, what we always wanted to come under the view of a better
 understanding. Suddenly it's possible, but although it's possible it's not done, but
 we can do it. So we can try to do it and that means if this is at all
 possible, that when these tools would be applied in the areas of thought, you know
 what these two guys are thinking about, what they have told you about, that the
 possibility there is to escalate those areas presently troubled by a certain
 vagueness, a certain difficulty in communicating the definite what you
 think about it to somebody else, the vagueness which makes possible the
 condemnation of orthodox scientific community trying to burn the book and so
 on, can sweep that confusion away through the application, the construction, the
 provision of the same kind of definite mathematic trustworthy models in
 these areas, consciousness, creativity, imagination, novelty, evolution, conscious
 participation in the creation of a future well worth living and able to
 live in the long-term basis on this planet. We are trying, it's the frontier
 of our own, our experiment then is not only to somehow reproduce or share
 something we have done, but to continue our process over the frontier of our own
 understanding to a new understanding for us and including you in the process. One
 of the things that comes out of chaos theory that is very important I think
 for everybody to keep in mind because it is anchored in the bedrock of
 mathematics for whatever that's worth, is that the flutter of the moth's wing can
 trigger the hurricane. This is not a poetic statement, this is the fact of the
 matter within this kind of description of nature. In other words, very small
 changes create cascades into where whole states shift and are perturbed and this
 is the kind of situation that we are facing as a society and a planetary
 species. We have the resources, we have the knowledge, but what we seem to lack
 is the will to implement these things, to actually step back from the
 abyss. So it has to come through a change of mind and this new mathematical stuff
 is telling us that the intimations of mysticism, the intimation of a
 possibility of transcendence is all firmly grounded. We just have to now, it's
 almost as though mathematics is the extreme cutting edge of human
 understanding. How can we quickly export these new understandings that release us
 from a need for closure, that free us from an either/or universe? How can we
 quickly export these models from the realm of research mathematics into the
 realm of daily life? Well, I think that the way it's done is through
 replication of memes and generation of new ideas. So for me, more and more the
 motivation to do these kinds of groups is, I really see it as politics almost at
 the viral level, that we are trying to create new languages and new concepts
 and not only create them, but teach them to you and we ourselves repeat them over
 and over again and you feed back into this and then we refine the meme and
 then a meme is like a gene. It can be replicated, it can be replicated by
 either being simply repeated or by being told to others who then repeat it. And we
 have not seen language as the playing field of the creation of the new
 paradigm, but that's really where it is. We can transform ourselves no more
 quickly than we transform our language. And the way we transform our language is
 by really pushing on the envelope of the act of communication. You know, the
 caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland says, "Say what you mean and mean what you say.
 I do." And this is the thing, a search for a clarity in a new domain of
 language. Rupert's notions, revision, causality, that means induct you into an
 entirely new way in which things happen. And this is after all where we're all
 spending a lot of our time. The models that Ralph is working with show that the
 world is not an engine running down toward a heat death, but a tremendous
 kaleidoscope of unpredictable, creative, open-ended activity on every level. I
 mean, it's really a dazzlingly kaleidoscopic vision. It's like a
 Sufi hierophany or something, but we're seeing it on the screens of computer
 simulations of this mathematical domain that is also the neural domain, that is
 also the social domain, that is also the eco-planetary domain. This is not error.
 This is not mysticism. This is the real facts of how it is, how the world fits
 together. It fits together through the infusion of its invisible soul, the
 mathematical and field-oriented structures that make it into a whole, a
 cosmos in which we are living and which we can find our way in if we will open
 ourselves up to this image, see ourselves as microcosmic reflections of this
 macrocosmic order, the soul of human beings as a reflection of the world soul,
 and then building of a modern vocabulary to describe and revivify these things and
 hopefully make it, the world, into a better place. Well, I think that's the
 notion. Do either of you want to say anything? Yes, I can't resist telling the
 story about the bunny. I'm going to tell you the story about the bunny, which is
 the fastest traveling meme in London right now. The story happened recently in
 London, according to the friend-of-friend network through which it travels. Two
 neighbors on bad terms with each other. One lot of neighbors have a dog, the
 other have kids who have a bunny that lives in a hutch in the garden, or the
 yard as you say in America. Well, the woman with the dog in one house was on
 bad terms with the other and when one evening there was a scratching at the
 door, she opened it and there was her dog with the dead bunny in its mouth, all
 covered with mud. She was absolutely horrified. She couldn't bring
 herself to tell the neighbors what had happened. It was just too awful. So she
 panicked. The only thing she could think of was to wash the bunny, which she did,
 and then she shampooed it, and then with a hairdryer she fluffed it all up until
 it looked as good as she could make it look. And then when the neighbors had
 gone to bed, she crept into their garden and put it back in the hutch. And then
 she went to bed. In the morning, as she'd expected, the dreadful moment arrived
 when there were sobs and cries and sounds of astonishment and agitation
 from the garden next door. So after a while she went and looked over the fence
 and said to them, "What's the problem?" And they were all looking into the hutch.
 The kids were shrieking. And she said, "What's the problem? Is the bunny dead?" And
 they said, "Yes, yes. It died yesterday morning. And then we buried it in the
 garden." Thank you all very much for coming. I appreciate it. I'm sure my colleagues do as well.
 So now the stage is set and you know a little bit about these three characters.
 In a couple of days we'll pick up where this tape left off and begin with side A
 of tape 1 in the series which is titled "Creativity and Imagination." And although
 I know it's never wise to talk about something that isn't finished yet, I'm
 going to put some pressure on myself and let you know about the revisions I'm
 making to the Psychedelic Salon website. In case you've never visited our site
 yet, there are two ways to get there. One is via matrixmasters.com/podcasts.
 Just remember you are the master of your own matrix, so it's matrixmasters.com/podcasts.
 Or you can go to www.psychedelicsalon.net.
 And both addresses will take you to the same page.
 But what I'm in the process of doing right now is to rebuild the podcast
 section in a more friendly format. So before too much longer each new podcast
 will have more detailed program notes and we'll also have a place for you to
 comment on the programs. Starting with this podcast my program notes are going
 to be a little more detailed. For example I'm going to provide the number of
 minutes and seconds into each program when Terrence, Ralph and Rupert each
 begin a new rap. That way you DJs out there who are looking for samples of
 Terrence's words of wisdom can find some of his quotes a little bit easier.
 There will be some other features as well. Mainly I'm going to provide a better way
 for you to contact me via email. Right now I'm getting close to a thousand spam
 emails a day and as a result I'm afraid that my spam filters are not letting
 some of your comments get through. And I do read all of them that get into my
 inbox and I'm trying my best to reply to them whenever I can. But by having an
 email form on the website I think I can better ensure that your comments,
 suggestions and complaints will have a better chance of getting through. So if
 you've sent me an email and haven't heard back I'm sorry about that. Your
 comments and ideas are important to me and so I'll do my best to give you a
 clear channel sometime in the near future. Before I go I want to give my
 deep appreciation and thanks to Bruce Dahmer. Without his efforts this
 collection might never have seen the light of day. Not only did he make the
 initial contact with Ralph about the tapes, he also stayed up with me for
 three days and nights helping to rip these cassettes into digital format. And
 you'll be hearing a lot more from Bruce by the way in a new podcast channel that
 I'll be kicking off after the first of the year. Also my sincere thanks and
 appreciation go out to Ralph Abraham who not only participated in these great
 conversations but who also preserved them for all of us to hear. Also thank
 you to Shetl Hayuk for the use of your music here in the Psychedelic Salon. You
 guys are the greatest. I really appreciate it. For now this is Lorenzo
 signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well my friends.
 (upbeat music)
 (upbeat music)
 >> Thank you.
 [BLANK_AUDIO]


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