[Music]
 Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon.
 So, today I'm going to pick up where we left off last week with the trialogue between Terrence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, and Ralph Abraham.
 While you won't hear Ralph on this particular program, which is side B of tape 1 in the first series of trialogues that were held at Esalen in September of 1989,
 you will be pleased to know that Ralph will be joining in the conversation in the next program when Chaos Theories enters the discussion.
 As I mentioned in the podcast before last, this particular trialogue tape is titled Creativity and Imagination.
 And in this, the second part of that discussion, we join Terrence and Rupert in their speculation that having a psychedelic experience is like tapping into the Gaian imagination.
 But first, we begin with Rupert talking about the creative process and dreams.
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 I think that creativity seems to involve, like the Jungians talk about the welling up of forms from the unconscious.
 And it's as if there's a kind of creative process like welling up or boiling up of new forms, an incredible diversity.
 And they're forms which are conditioned by memories of what have gone before and existing habits.
 But they're forms which make new syntheses, new patterns.
 And it could be that if there's a kind of unifying process working upon a boiling up of new forms,
 that anything that comes out, as it were, above the surface of the unconscious or the darkness or the boiling process or the chaos,
 has to take on a kind of unified form, as it were, to come above that surface.
 The light, as it were, into which it comes is a unifying principle, so it has to take on a unified form.
 But it could be any unified form.
 And as long as it's a kind of unified form, because it's a unifying principle into which the creativity is occurring or tending.
 So, I think in our own case, the one model for this is dreams.
 That dreams involve the appearance of these strange stories and narratives and symbols and images,
 which we don't create with our conscious minds.
 In fact, we usually just forget the whole lot, this wonderful display of psychic creativity that happens to each of us nightly,
 is usually just forgotten or disregarded.
 But when we remember our dreams, they're bizarre and unexpected.
 It seems almost impossible to have an expected dream.
 And most of them have a continuous element of surprise somewhere hovering around them.
 And this curious feature of dreams raises the question of where they, how they come from.
 Jungians would say that they come from some structuring process in the darkness of the collective unconscious.
 And they'd see that as separate, a kind of imagination of matter or imagination of the psyche,
 not a kind of descent from some higher world, but a welling up from a...
 And so, what I'm interested in is that the human imagination obviously works through dreams.
 It works during discussions, through language, through conversations, through fantasies, through novels,
 through our dreams, our aspirations, through advertising.
 And it also is revealed through psychedelics in a particularly extreme form.
 Now, in what sense is this imagination that we actually know about, that we know about from experience,
 related to the imaginative creative principle of nature?
 Is Gaia, as it were, awake on the side that's in the sunlight
 and in the side that's in the darkness as it rotates, dreaming?
 At night, are the plants, the animals, the whole ecosystems, the oceans, in some sense, in a dream state,
 when dreams and spontaneous images of what might be possible come to them?
 So, is there a kind of Gaian dreaming and does it happen on the night side of the planet?
 So, is the imagination, as it were, located? How is it rooted in cosmic events?
 What would the Gaian mind feel like? What form would a Gaian dream take?
 Or what form would a Gaian psychedelic experience take?
 That's how I'd like to know how you're thinking of it.
 I think a Gaian dream would be human history.
 That human history, perhaps it isn't that the planet sleeps each night,
 but that perhaps it's been sleeping for 50,000 years
 and is having a dyspeptic dream that causes it to toss and turn.
 But if it could only awaken from that dream, it would just shake its head and say,
 "My God, I don't know what it was, but I hope it doesn't come back."
 That human history has that quality.
 I mean, James Joyce should be mentioned here saying,
 "History is the nightmare from which I'm trying to awaken."
 And the whole structure of his novels, the integrating of historical data with daily newspapers
 and this sort of thing to give reality the quality of a dream.
 I think your mentioning of the psychedelics is important.
 You said it was an extreme and intense example of this.
 I think that it's so intense and extreme an example that it argues strongly
 that the imagination is not the human imagination.
 While we may be able to analyze dreams and see the acting out of wish fulfillment
 or repressed sexual drives or whatever, depending on our theory of dreams,
 in a psychedelic experience it's preposterous to attempt to analyze it
 in terms of human motivation at its intense levels.
 It seems rather to be an ontological reality of its own
 that the human being has simply been privileged to briefly observe.
 But it says no more, your deep psychedelic experiences say no more about your personality
 and that the continent of Africa is making a statement about your personality.
 They are in fact independent objects.
 To my mind the divine imagination or the imagination is the source of all creativity
 in our dreams, in our psychedelic experiences, in the jungles, in the currents of the ocean,
 in the organization of protozoan and microbial life.
 Wherever there is large-scale integration rather than simply raw physics,
 but integration of laws of physics, integration of properties of membranes
 and electrophoresis and this sort of thing, it is the creative principle.
 Beheld. Beheld.
 So do you think then that in psychedelic experiences you're actually tapping into,
 tuning into or experiencing something of the Gaian or the cosmic imagination?
 Absolutely. And I think that psychedelic experiences and dreams are only different in degree,
 that they are chemical cousins somehow.
 And this is why I could see human history as a Gaian dream,
 because I think every night when you descend into dream,
 you are potentially open to receiving Gaian corrective tuning of your life state.
 The whole thing is an enzyme-driven process. We are like an organ of Gaia.
 We are the organ which binds and releases energy.
 I mean, a liver cell doesn't need to understand why it binds and releases enzymes of the liver.
 We bind and release energy for reasons perhaps never to be clear to us,
 but which place us firmly within the context of the Gaian mind.
 We have been chosen out, and this is not something to have great hubris about.
 I mean, indolecetic acid has been chosen out in plant metabolism to play certain roles.
 We have a role, but our role seems to be a major one.
 We are like a triggering system.
 Out of the general background of evolutionary processes
 mediated by incoming radiation to the surface of the earth and then natural selection,
 suddenly we come with an epigenetic capability.
 We write books, tell stories, dance, sing, carve, paint.
 These are not genetic processes. These are epigenetic processes,
 and they bind information and express the Gaian mind very well.
 As an example of how willing I am to entertain this idea concretely,
 I've been talking to a lot of people about ecological crisis and the fate of the world and this sort of thing.
 Well, imagine in hindsight the wisdom that we would impute to Gaia
 if we were to suddenly realize that what is happening on this planet
 is that nature knows that the sun is going to explode.
 And what we are is a kind of response to the anticipation of a wounding
 that 50,000, 5 million years ago, the geoheliocentric relationships began to vibrate out of tune.
 And as a consequence of this, a species was called forth that could organize an escape, and we are it.
 In other words, we are in a divine play.
 In line with this, and what made me even entertain these ideas,
 is I had a very bizarre experience recently.
 I was in Hawaii, and in our botanical garden there is a very large dead tree,
 and one limb of this tree sticks far out over the land.
 And Banisteriopsis capi, a large hallucinogenic South American vine,
 is planted at the bottom of this tree,
 and it just has swarmed up this tree and covered it with greenery,
 but it wouldn't go out onto this one limb that stuck out.
 And it bothered my sense of symmetry that this vine would not completely cover this tree.
 And I even thought about trying to climb up into the tree and thread it out onto this limb
 to get it to do what I wanted.
 So I was sitting looking at this tree and this situation, and actually thinking about it,
 and suddenly the limb fell.
 It broke off.
 And then I thought, and I thought, the vine sensed that it was unstable.
 It would not invade this domain that it sensed was structurally unstable.
 Well, then I said to myself, but how could it?
 What is the mechanism of this sensing of instability?
 And a friend of mine said, well, perhaps the wind impacts on weakened wood differently than on unrotted wood,
 and perhaps rhythms in the tree tell it to stay away from it.
 And then I realized, if one plant has that kind of sensitivity to the entering into a domain of danger,
 what must the ecosystem of this planet be doing in reaction to what we are doing to the planet?
 So I see the reason this relates to the imagination is because I see ourselves in communication with the imagination.
 It is sending images back into the past to try and direct us away from areas of instability.
 It really is the guy in mind is a real mind.
 Its messages are real messages.
 And our task through discipline, psychedelics, attention to detail, whatever we have going,
 is to try and extract this message and eliminate ourselves from the message
 so that we then can see the face of the other and respond to what it wants.
 So it isn't for me a philosophical problem.
 It's a problem that relates to the politics and action that we take as a collectivity and as individuals.
 Just one more reflection on that.
 You see, if we tune in through our own imaginations to the guy in mind, which certainly seems to me an attractive idea,
 and I think fits quite well perhaps with dreams, psychedelic experience, imagination, and so on,
 the question for me is this.
 We can relate to the guy in imagination. Let's take that for granted.
 But then how is the guy in imagination related to the imagination of the solar system
 and that of the solar system related to the imagination of the galaxy,
 the imagination of the galaxy to the imagination of the cosmos?
 And then how is that related to what we could call the imagination of the cosmic attractor or God the Father or the cosmic Christ?
 Well, I'm not sure that I want to follow you into the cosmic Christ.
 For me, the mind of the solar system, I think there should always be some physical stuff to hang these things on.
 The guy in mind is not a problem. The Earth teems with life.
 A Jovian mind is not a problem because the complex chemistry,
 the metallic behavior of gas ices under pressure and all of this stuff seems to me to place enough cards on the table
 that mind could well emerge in that situation.
 Similarly, the oceans of Europa.
 There are a number of places in the solar system where there's enough complex chemistry
 that I can imagine these very large self-reflecting entelechies to get going over billions of years.
 But to move from that to the hypothesis of a continuous hierarchy of minds out to the level of the galactic mind,
 you have to ask hard questions.
 I mean, how long does it take the galactic mind to think a thought?
 Does it do it instantaneously via morphogenetic fields?
 And if so, then what are the transducing and signal sorting filters through which it goes?
 If it does it through light, then to say that its thoughts are vaster than empires and more slow
 is to suggest that they're very high-speed phenomena indeed.
 Empires come and go by the thousands before a galactic thought could reach from one side of itself to the other.
 But I think that just to...
 If we're thinking of galactic imaginations in the basis form,
 one would be all the probabilistic processes and the stars and everything within it.
 If the communication is instantaneous, which it may be, or if it isn't,
 we don't really know because I think a factor which changes everything is the discovery of dark matter,
 the fact that 90 to 95, 99% of the matter in the universe is utterly unknown to us.
 This recent discovery effectively tells us that the whole cosmos and every material thing in it
 has a kind of unconscious, a material unconscious, an unknown dark realm
 which conditions everything that happens, the shapes of the galaxies, their interactions, and what's going on.
 But it's utterly unknown to us.
 And so we've now got a kind of cosmic material unconscious
 which could play the same role as our own unconsciouses.
 And so your search for the basis of the imagination in the known phenomena of physics and the visible realm
 is certainly an important one.
 But the fact is that there's so much more that physics itself has revealed which is there
 and could be the basis of any number of processes.
 Yes, I assume that psychedelics, for instance, somehow change your channel
 from the evolutionarily important channel which is giving traffic reports, weather reports, and stock market reports
 to a channel which is playing the classical music of an alien civilization.
 In other words, we tend to tune to the channel which has big payback in the immediate world.
 But that there are these other channels of the imagination not so tailored for human consumption
 seems obvious to me.
 I think that you're right.
 I mean, the memories and hence all objects of cognition are not in wetware, the wetware of brains.
 It's somehow plucked out of a super space of some sort via very subtle quantum mechanical transductions
 that go on at the molecular level in the brain.
 The divine imagination is the reality behind appearances.
 Appearances is simply the local slice of the divine imagination.
 But what you want is a kind of map or a global overview.
 Well, perhaps we should open this up if people have something they would like to say.
 This man leads the way.
 Okay, well, of course you've fired every neuron in my brain.
 I have a somewhat different view of the problem of the eternal scientific laws.
 In my opinion, the question of did these laws exist prior to the Big Bang is a non-question.
 It's like the old Zen question of what happens to your fist when you open your hand.
 Because in my view, these scientific laws are not objects in space and time.
 If they were objects in space and time, of course they could not exist before the Big Bang.
 In my view, these scientific laws are linguistic structures that we create, that we choose,
 in order to give reasonably good expression to the regularities that we measure in the world
 and which we use for prediction and control purposes.
 For example, we have an equation to express the gravity relationship,
 and we have a place in that equation to key in the acceleration of the force of gravity.
 It's not 32 feet per second per second.
 It differs somewhat from that, and it differs depending on where you measure it on the Earth.
 And it's even conceivable to imagine that it might change with space and time, with time.
 Because it's been going on for so many billions of years now, in Rupert's view,
 I'm sure that it would be unlikely to change very much, but it's perfectly possible for it to change.
 The point I want to make is that science provides, in that equation,
 an opportunity to clue in this different change, if that change is necessary,
 for purposes of prediction and control.
 I think that the laws of nature can be used for purposes of prediction and control
 within the kind of developing evolutionary cosmology that Rupert has expressed.
 All right. Well, then, yes.
 I mean, the thing is that there are two theological views, you see, that are possible about this.
 If the laws of nature are linguistic structures outside space and time,
 at least in the Judeo-Christian world, the prevailing archetype is the Word of God.
 They're the Word of God. They're the Logos, which is the traditional theological view of the laws of nature.
 So, then it really comes down to a theological question.
 Do we think that the Word of God is a kind of eternally sonorous set of vibrations or linguistic structures
 that somehow permanently there in the permanent mind of a transcendent God?
 Or is the Word of God something that God speaks and, like real words, is a series of processes in time?
 Spoken words are not eternally there. They're things that take time to speak.
 And the underlying basis of a spoken word is the flow of the spirit or the breath.
 So, are the words of God, if we take this Logos model, spoken words that involve a process in time,
 or are they like a sort of encyclopedia that's written words that can be sort of eternal?
 No. In my view, they're not. I don't see... the theological argument is a non-argument to me
 because I reject the idea of the mind of God as having a structure in the universe.
 Again, I come back to these scientific laws of nature as human formulations
 created like tools, created like a set of wrenches in our kit bag,
 not a part of any eternal structure whatsoever.
 But, at the same time, I recognize that certain of these laws that we have created
 are of such a nature that it would be very hard to conceive of us having a science without them.
 Well, I think that there are a couple of issues here.
 First of all, what has always given science its tremendous cachet
 was its ability to produce in the realm of application and technology.
 So, I agree with you that these things are like wrenches,
 but that is not at all satisfying to a philosopher of science
 who doesn't care about the application,
 but wants to know, you know, is this or is this not in fact so?
 Rupert is suggesting that laws are habits and that habits change over time.
 They are incremental. Therefore, in his view, no law is in fact a law.
 It's a tendency or a creeping gradient of some sort.
 Now, the argument for this is that we've only been measuring the constants we use to describe the universe.
 We've only been measuring them for a hundred years on one planet.
 We say that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second,
 and we've measured it on one planet for a hundred years,
 and we extrapolate this statement to the entire cosmos.
 If, in fact, laws are local and invariant,
 then this is going to be a hard swallow,
 because it makes science no more than a series of localized opinions.
 It turns science into folklore.
 The thing that personally I find a personal discovery of,
 and I don't think it comes from reading outside,
 is just a realm of pure geometric possibility, of pure form and symmetry.
 And this seems to me the underlying Pythagorean or platonic concept,
 and that it does exist outside of time,
 and that it's some sort of template off which possibility hangs,
 and that what undergoes the formality of actually occurring
 resonates against this template,
 and also most likely resonates against what has been maturely manifested,
 so that it's going to be a time.
 Yes, well, I agree with what you're saying about a template.
 I mean, this is this idea of a topology that I want to put out.
 Rupert and I were, again, last night after the meeting,
 talking about the idea of God as a mathematical mind had come up,
 and I was saying how much a mathematically minded God would miss
 how impoverished that concept is,
 because the primary qualities of experience,
 which are color, light, tactility, and then even subtler things,
 like appetition for the past and the future,
 all of this would be eliminated from the idea of the mathematical God.
 In a way, the way I see it, it's almost as though there is a wire frame.
 Yes, that the future is almost a kind of mathematical wire frame,
 and that that's what God "knows" in eternity,
 but the whole point of the game is into this wire frame flows the living richness,
 the perverse creativity, the unpredictability, the perturbations,
 the interference patterns that create them,
 the living fact of the felt presence,
 and then that wave of complexification dies down
 and leaves in its wake the fossil imprint of its passage, which is memory.
 So you have the wire frame,
 then the moment of interface of the wire frame with the memory,
 which is what we call the present,
 which is absolutely what's happening, the richest part of it,
 and then the wake, the shockwave of the eschatological moment of the now,
 which is just the historical record of its having occurred.
 I always think in terms of politics,
 so I want to weld us into not three disparate points of view,
 but a movement with a forward thrust.
 So I've suggested that what you're witnessing is the birth of geometric compressionism
 or morphogenetic compressionism or psychedelic compressionism,
 depending on which one of us is talking.
 I'm sure you can figure out who is who.
 But the idea is drawing together that a new phenomenon has been discovered in the universe,
 which is its drawing togetherness, its tendency toward cohesion,
 its tendency to move toward greater and greater states of wholeness,
 and not incrementally, but in sudden, highly punctuated stages
 that allow phenomena like history or the 20th century to come into being.
 These are great leaps forward toward this cohesion that nature pushes toward.
 And as I said, I don't think that it's millions of years in the future.
 I think this millions of years in the future stuff was a very brief phase in scientific discourse
 and that as organisms, what we need to come to terms with is the chaos, the turbulence,
 the turmoil, the ephemerality, and the high-stakes nature of the game.
 You know, even if no asteroid strikes the earth, each one of us in this room will die.
 And so life is guaranteed to be interesting,
 even if you don't live in one of these epochs when there is asteroidal impact or geomagnetic reversal.
 Nevertheless, the ultimate challenge is built into the biological script.
 We each have our own apocalypse, and so I think we should live life in anticipation of it.
 This gradient mind that you referred to, what is that?
 Oh, Gaian mind.
 What is that?
 Well, it's the notion that for me, and I'm sure Rupert has a different notion,
 but for me it's the notion that the Linnaean species are an illusion of the classificatory impulse of the human mind
 and that really what we have on this planet are not distinct species,
 but levels and levels of gene swarming and control
 and that intelligence, creativity is such a positive adaptation for any biological system that possesses it
 that I think the planet wouldn't have waited five billion years
 to allow self-reflecting intelligence in an organism such as ourselves.
 I think probably self-reflection arose fairly early in the history of the earth
 and that the earth is a minded, integrated kind of entity.
 How this works is hard for us to model because we've only had the image to guide us for ten years or so,
 but the planet thinks, it perceives, life has a petition for more life and for an extension of itself
 and the best strategies are cognitive,
 so that all of these things that we see happening on the planet
 that we take to be miraculously ordered results of random processes
 may actually be the result of the creation of a great engine of cognition
 that history is the thought of Gaia,
 biology is the musings of geology and so forth and so on,
 that we have been wrong to claim consciousness as the unique capacity of human beings.
 It is in fact a general property of organization
 and the larger the organization, the more conscious it may well be.
 I don't feel man, human beings are set against nature.
 I think we occupy a special role in nature, but it's a sanctioned role.
 There is no such thing as getting out of control
 because the control system is so deep and so vast that it's inconceivable,
 but what is happening may appear to be out of control
 because we are not in full connection with what the purpose of all this is.
 Yes, let me try and put it a different way, answering the same question about the Gaian mind
 because it's obviously one of the things we're interested in talking about here.
 Starting from just from another straightforward starting point,
 the idea of Gaia put forward by Lovelock and other scientists
 is that the Earth, using the name Mother Earth, Gaia is the Mother Earth of the Greeks,
 that the whole Earth is a living organism
 and that if the whole Earth is a living organism,
 I think in that organism we have to include the Moon as well
 because the Moon orbits the Earth and in some sense sets its rhythms of time and tide
 and is part of the Gaian system.
 That the Earth is a living organism, including the Moon, the atmosphere,
 all the living things on it, the oceans and so on,
 behaves together in a way that has an organic, integrated, holistic quality,
 that the Earth is alive and its life involves some kind of organizing principle.
 At that stage a lot of people then say,
 "Well, if the Earth is alive, then in some sense it must be conscious
 or in some sense the Earth must have a mind."
 And one of the questions I think we're exploring is just in what sense
 can we think of the Earth as conscious or having a mind?
 What might the Gaian mind consist of?
 The traditional view of the Earth is that it's an inanimate assembly of a bit of rock hurtling around the Sun
 with a thin film of moisture and life on its surface.
 But the whole thing is just an inanimate mechanism with no life, no purpose,
 no spontaneity, no creativity of its own,
 merely the environment in which other random purposeless processes take place.
 That's the standard view.
 But if the Earth does have a mind of her own or a life of her own, a spontaneity of her own,
 is it entirely unconscious like our own unconscious minds?
 Does it come to consciousness?
 Does Gaia have dreams? Does Gaia have imaginings?
 This is, I think, the questions that underlie Terence's use of the phrase "the Gaian mind."
 And I think it's a question that's bound to arise.
 Millions of people are now talking about Gaia, planet Earth, as a living whole.
 And the question, really, one of the questions we're exploring is what kind of mind would this living whole have?
 Does this living whole have a mind at all? Is it just blind, instinctive?
 If it has a mind, does it have an imagination?
 And if so, what kind of imagination does it have?
 How much is that imagination colored by mathematical principles or geometrical forms which may permeate the whole universe?
 How much of it spontaneously arises on Earth in the evolutionary process?
 How much is it related to the cosmic imagination throughout the whole cosmos?
 So I think these are the questions it raises, and I think that that's another way of coming to it.
 Just starting with the idea of the Earth as a living organism, it implies and raises the question of the mind of the Earth,
 if it has one, or the soul of the Earth.
 Some would say that the mind's just another aspect subjectively experienced of the physical changes in the brain.
 Others would say it's a kind of shadow or epiphenomenon of the functioning of the brain.
 If we take that view of the mind, we would expect the Gaian mind, if it exists,
 to correspond to some set of complex physical processes going on on Earth.
 Well, I think if we wanted to see it that way, we could make a good case for there being a base to the mind.
 I'd put the magma of the Earth's core, these flowing currents, some perhaps like the limbus or the hypothalamus,
 the sort of long-term driving things with a solid nucleus inside, associated with changing magnetic fields
 and polar reversals every few million years, and the whole of this being the underground process,
 virtually unknown to us, which is driving the process of continental drift, earthquakes, volcanoes,
 and is actually shaping the morphogenesis of the surface of the Earth through the distribution of the continents.
 And then there's the Gaian breath, which is the atmospheric flows of the wind.
 Then there's the Gaian circulation of the oceans.
 There are many of these systems, all of which are indeterminate, all of which are probabilistic,
 and all of which could respond to, as it were, kinds of thoughts or impulses of Gaia.
 So one can find many ways of thinking about the physical basis for the Gaian mind,
 which would also include, in my opinion, the Earth's magnetic field, the magnetosphere,
 which trails like a great tail on the dark side of the Earth, which surrounds the Earth,
 and which, as it changes and responds and resonates to sunspots,
 affects the whole patterns of electromagnetic communication through radio waves.
 All of this, the field of the Earth, which would, I think, be one of the bases for the Gaian mind.
 Even the known fields, the gravitational and the electromagnetic fields, stretch far beyond the surface of the Earth.
 So all these would be possible bases for the Gaian mind, or bases of its interaction with what's going on,
 as well as the actual minds of organisms, animals, and plants.
 I mean, the Gaian mind may be able to act directly on these minds through field-like processes.
 I myself would think of the Gaian mind and our own minds as more like field-like processes,
 which interact with our brains, and the Gaian mind as interacting with living processes,
 the atmosphere, the Earth's core, the magma flows, the magnetic field,
 interacting with them, but not being reducible to them.
 I guess my question is really about the relationship to creation and creativity and imagination.
 Is there a qualitative aspect to that that is evolutionary?
 The suggestion I bring up is that there could be a kind of evolutionary field creo,
 meaning that there is a pathway that when conscious beings are on a planet,
 the evolutionary field creo would be looking for a kind of an aesthetic, a kind of sensibility.
 And I would propose a symbiotic relationship as an example of this.
 Well, creos are pathways of change which have endpoints.
 And for those who have not been following the literature on creos,
 the idea is that when an embryo develops, for example, a liver,
 a group of cells develop into your liver, another group of cells develop into your kidneys,
 that the pathways of change they go through are attracted towards an endpoint,
 which is the mature kidney or the mature liver, that they're drawn towards that.
 And this pathway of change drawn towards an endpoint is called a creode.
 It's considered to be an object within a morphic or a morphogenetic field.
 Now, if there's the idea of the cosmic attractor and the idea of an evolutionary creode,
 as I understand what you're saying, is that one could say the entire evolutionary process of the Earth,
 or even of the whole cosmos, is a kind of creode,
 and Terence's description of the cosmic attractor would be the endpoint of the evolutionary creode.
 So in a sense, using the term creode brings us back to that model we were talking about just now.
 I was kind of missing, listening to this discussion, what the meaning of creation and imagination would be for.
 What is the purpose of this subject? What is the fulfillment of this?
 Can I make a shot at this?
 Yes.
 Well, I'm not sure I understand all of what you're saying,
 but in terms of this qualitative thing, which is deepening, which is the purposefulness of it all,
 it's interesting when you look at the whole life of the universe and the way processes have evolved,
 there is a tendency that has been going on for a very long time that has been accelerated at each step.
 And what I call it is language seems to be seeking to decouple itself from matter.
 DNA was the first language, and it's a language written at the molecular level,
 and its faithfully physical replicant is made of it,
 and then that template is used to create proteins, which are the statements in this language.
 Well, that's how all nature does it, except human beings.
 And we have this epigenetic capability.
 We can write books, dance, sculpt, paint, all the things that I mentioned.
 Well, then, when you look at the 20th century, the tendency to dance, paint, sculpt, and so forth,
 has, through technology, become ever more released from the constraints of matter,
 so that now we paint on computer screens, we sculpt with computers,
 we sculpt with light and directions rather than in matter.
 So I think that why this is, who can say, but the only thing as complex as organic life, is syntax.
 And syntax seems to have a life of its own.
 It is trying to shed the material matrix, which was its basis.
 Now, this, I'm sure, we don't have time to discuss it now, but perhaps later,
 this creates strong reactions in people, because we have a tendency to want things to be folded back into nature.
 We don't want this Gnostic ascent to the radiant unspeakable.
 But nevertheless, it appears that language, in a kind of hellish marriage with technology,
 has given us no way out except a forward escape into the further embodiment of language.
 This now is apparently the only way we can keep from destroying the planet,
 is by literally going off into the imagination,
 which is not a dimension of the physics of space and time, it's actually a syntactical dimension.
 So, the integration of media and human beings and creative processes like CAD/CAM and this sort of thing,
 seem to me to say, language is shedding the primate body that gave it epigenetic articulation,
 in much the same way that language shed the rest of organic nature,
 when in one part of itself it moved off into the potential for linguistic expression,
 that our biological organization makes possible.
 So for my money, language is on a journey to the eternal imagination,
 through the process of creativity, having begun in chaos,
 and having a kind of inevitable end in chaos, more properly, you know, revisioned, remet, re-understood.
 Well, perhaps we should break for lunch, it's after lunch.
 Thank you very much, this was very useful, I think. I hope you enjoyed it.
 If I remember correctly, the next tape in this series brings in Ralph Abraham,
 who will be expanding on the concept of language that Terence just raised.
 Although like many of us psychedelic salonners, I first started listening to these trilogues,
 in search of a new little sound bite or two from the great Bard McKenna,
 but I'm really beginning to appreciate why Ralph and Terence think so highly of Rupert.
 What an interesting way he has of looking at things.
 For example, I've long thought that Gaia was sentient,
 but I never actually took that thought to the next level and wondered about Gaia's dreams and imagination.
 For me, that adds an entirely new dimension to the way I look at life today.
 Now I'm wondering if my life is just another one of Gaia's dreams.
 At times, it certainly seems weird enough to be somebody's dream,
 and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that was the case for some of you too.
 But I guess there's no way we're ever going to know some of these things,
 at least not while we're still walking around in these monkey bodies.
 But if you're still looking for some more challenging thoughts to get your mind around today,
 you might want to check out a podcast that Tim Donovan wrote and told me about.
 If you go to webcast.berkeley.edu/courses,
 you'll find a list of Berkeley courses that have been podcast.
 And among those courses are some by the very talented Dr. David Presti,
 who is Berkeley's senior lecturer on neurobiology.
 And according to Tim, Dr. Presti presents entheogens in a very fair and perceivably reverent context.
 I haven't had a chance to listen to one of Dr. Presti's lectures myself just yet,
 mainly because I've lost my pod.
 I guess that sounds kind of weird, but you know what I mean.
 At least I hope so.
 Anyway, I plan on listening to some of the lectures from his course number PSYCH 119,
 which is titled "Drugs and Human Behavior."
 And thank you, Tim, for letting us know about these podcasts.
 Another audio file you might be interested in is one that my friend Michael Shields told me about.
 Because the URL is a long one, I'll put the link on our podcast page with the program notes about this podcast,
 which is number 61 from the Psychedelic Salon, by the way.
 And the talk that Michael told me about is by Fred Turner of Stanford University,
 and in it he discusses his new book, which is titled "From Counterculture to Cyberculture,
 Stuart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism."
 Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about this new book, and I quote,
 "Less a biography of Brand than a swirl of relationships surrounding him.
 The book shows how the ride of the Merry Pranksters and LSD experimentation led to the early online discussion board,
 Whole Earth Electronic Link, the Well, and into the digital utopianism surrounding the hyperlinked World Wide Web."
 Given my renewed interest in the Merry Pranksters, since meeting some of them just a couple weeks ago,
 I'm taking the synchronicity of Michael's pointing out this book to be a sign that I'd better listen to Turner's commentary and buy a copy of the book myself.
 And if any of you have already read it, I'd love to hear what you think about it.
 Before I go, I guess I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.
 If you have any questions about that, you can click on the link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at matrixmasters.com/podcasts.
 And if you still have questions, you can just send them in an email to lorenzo@matrixmasters.com.
 In a couple of days, I'll get the next Trilog podcast out, which will be the first side of the second tape in the 1989-1990 Trilog series, and it's titled "Creativity and Chaos."
 And in that program, among other things, you'll hear Ralph Abraham give a short overview of chaos theory, why chaos theory is good for you, and his explanation of what mathematics means to him.
 In addition to thanking Chateau Hayuk for the use of their music here in the Psychedelic Salon, I also want to thank Ralph Abraham for making these tapes available, and to Bruce Dahmer, without whom we wouldn't be hearing them today.
 And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.
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