Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the
 psychedelic salon. Well, just as promised, today we're going to hear the
 continuation of the previous podcast in which Ralph Abraham and Rupert
 Sheldrake were discussing creativity and chaos. And this is from the first series
 of trial logs they held along with Terrence McKenna at Esalen in September
 of 1989. There's one little hitch here I guess and that is that the first 12
 minutes of the tape had a really bad hum in it. I guess there's some sort of a
 problem with the line connection from the board but it magically cleared up
 about 12 minutes or so into the recording. And I did my best to remove
 that annoying hum since it was really pretty loud but unfortunately taking it
 out sort of distorted their voices just a little bit. But it's only for the first
 few minutes and it's not nearly as bad as listening to that hum. So let's not
 delay any longer. When we left them in our last program, Rupert Sheldrake was
 just beginning to describe his understanding that mathematical
 attractors pulled from the front as he put it. And so we'll pick up with Rupert
 concluding his thoughts about chaotic attractors and he'll be immediately
 followed by Ralph Abraham expressing his surprise with both Rupert's and
 Terrence McKenna's take on attractors which he didn't quite buy into.
 But the fact is however one tries to get out of it, they do seem to be dealing with a new
 conception of pulling rather than pushing, something that's more Aristotelian
 than mechanistic, something that involves pulling from the front for a
 problematical reason that I'm going to get to what Terrence and I were discussing this morning.
 The idea that an attractor for the entire cosmic evolutionary process.
 Well I have to admit that when I heard this line from both of you, my god, I was astonished at this interpretation.
 And I can't say it's wrong, but I can say that it's different.
 I'm sure it's different from the way that any mathematician has thought about
 attractors in dynamical systems before. I don't think, I mean I think it's an arbitrary interpretation.
 I mean here we have the track, and here we have the train going down the track.
 Now we know that the train is going to keep on going down the track and it's going to get to the next station in seven minutes.
 This is the station following the train.
 So the dynamical system, like when we think of the dynamical system, is the rule, which is the track.
 When the train is a certain place, it's on the track, and where is it going to go next is going down the track.
 The rule is the train will go down the track. Some trains are going to jump the track.
 But basically the rule is the track where the train now ends.
 And as a matter of fact, it leads on to where the train is going to be next.
 And then the rules play again. I mean we have a game that we're playing here.
 According to rule, if you consent to play, and that is the rules of the game are that when you're at this spot, you go this way.
 When you're at this spot, you go this way.
 And these rules, the rules of the game, the running rules, comprise the agreement.
 That's the dynamical system.
 Now there's some mathematics somewhere, maybe there isn't even, but we imagine that
 and then it has turned the crank on the axiomatic system and says eventually you'll get to the destination, the station,
 which might not be a point, it might be a circular track, or it might be a tangled up heap of track, which is a chaotic approach here.
 That doesn't mean that the attractor is pulling the train.
 So to think of the attractor as pulling the train, I think, is suggested by the word attractor,
 which never, ever, when we thought of this word in the early 1960s, did we ever think that it would be interpreted in this way.
 But now I can see it's the obvious interpretation that anyone would make when they read this word.
 It means nothing.
 I can't stop it. The same problem was confronted by Sir Isaac Newton of Paine when he chose the word attraction,
 the gravitational attraction.
 As Voltaire said in 1738 when he visited London, this was years after, 30, 40 years after Newton,
 50 years after Newton had developed these ideas, they were still not accepted in France.
 And Voltaire said the principal reason the French academicians scorned Newton's ideas
 was that he'd used the word attraction.
 Voltaire said if he'd used a different word, his ideas would have been more readily accepted.
 Because the word attraction, which, for the French then, as it still does for us today,
 has connotations of sexual attraction, and is steeped in sort of animistic and subjective associations,
 seemed to them perfectly absurd.
 The idea that the earth could be attracting the sun in a way that had anything to do with the way that an attractive woman could be attracting a man
 seemed to them absurdly animistic.
 And Newton was, Voltaire said if he'd chosen a different word, his theories would have been adopted 30 years earlier in France.
 Now, Voltaire may have been wrong, but the fact is that he liked those much accepted in France.
 And from the very beginning, the notion of gravitational attraction, because of these animistic associations,
 was a difficulty for people.
 But the fact is that Newton, by substituting gravitational attraction, managed to build a mechanistic cosmology
 that replaced an animistic cosmology by introducing animistic principles, by subterfuge.
 In Aristotle's view of the world, stones fell because they were attracted to the earth.
 They were attracted to their proper place. They were attracted to the view of going home.
 It was a kind of attractive process.
 And the early physicists said, well, they know it's completely wrong to think of nature working on attractions.
 So it was called the "Code of Attraction."
 [laughter]
 And then he said, well, wait a minute, isn't that rather a funny word to use?
 And that's another thing, you know, for years about the, any sort of animistic association, this is a totally technical term.
 Now, sir, we've been through this particular thing before.
 We have, yes.
 The point is that everything that we've heard in science since the mechanistic revolution of attraction has been reinvented again and again.
 And its inventors choose the name, and places this, what is that?
 This is a problem, that this is what they're saying, because the name has such an inherent appeal and plausibility.
 It seems to correspond to the way nature's going.
 They don't remember that science isn't meant to be like that, and sort of pretend that actually it's just a coincidence.
 You could have called it something else.
 The new-term in physics and the triumph of the mechanistic system, in my opinion,
 only works because what it was seeking to deny was introduced into it by a kind of self-defuse,
 and pretended that this was a mechanical principle, whereas it was something else.
 I suspect that the same is true of your dynamical attractors, myself.
 And, you see, I think even if you take the example of the train, the station is putting the train,
 in a sense what's motivating the train is the purpose of the people getting to New York or Los Angeles or London,
 unless human beings were purposive and had destinations they wanted to get to,
 unless Melbourne counties had schedules and planned the way they ran the trains in accordance with what they thought supply and demand was,
 that train wouldn't be running.
 There's a sense in which the station is an attractor.
 If I want to go by train to London, I get on a train that's going to London because, in a sense, it's my purpose to go to London.
 And I don't think the train can be modelled as if there's an attractor,
 but actually it's just a thing, just a dynamical system running along the rails that happens to be in that one.
 If you observe enough trains on the London Railway, you see lots of games and understandings in the model that London's an attractor,
 but it's got nothing to do with attraction.
 That's, in a sense, a subterfuge because it has not a great deal to do with the tracks that people walk.
 There are railway lines, and I mean there in particular, very few people travel on the outbound trains.
 Well, they can't just place them down because they say there's no demand.
 So, I think you see that there is this implication, and I think Ian, you want to show us an example that's really there.
 Well, I think it's a good analogy with Newton's attraction,
 and there are, with his theory, or equally in general, relatively,
 some unresolved difficult problems about action at a distance, action at a distance in space.
 And I think that we have the same thing here, but it's a question of action at a distance in time.
 And there are two different times that I'm being confused,
 and I think the idea of two-dimensional time that a couple of people have already suggested could aid us here.
 The train that goes down the track and arrives at the station, and that's the attractor, but it's not actually pulling the train.
 So, there is an action at a given instant before the train arrives at the station,
 the amount that the station is doing in the future.
 The problem with thinking of the station pulling the train is that the cause is then in the future.
 That's the problem with this geological approach.
 Now, we can argue that the station pulls the train because the people who go there arrives through a different kind of time,
 and that's the time on the scale of the evolution of the train system.
 People used to get off the train there and there was no station.
 They asked the conductor for a stop, and after many people did, and then they built a station there, and so on.
 So, I think the more interesting thing, rather than a dynamical model,
 with attractors and so on, as the exerting an influence over the past to approach the future,
 the more interesting idea is to make a model for evolution itself,
 in which the train system, with its various distribution of stations, even the location of towns,
 the size of London, as opposed to the size of Brighton, and so on,
 all of this is evolving slowly in the course of another kind of time, a time in centuries.
 And now we have this pattern is coming forth on the trajectory in another space,
 which is also going to attractor, which is the final configuration, the city plan,
 the location of cities, the network of train tracks, and so on.
 And the evolution of that is also going toward attractor.
 But is it being pulled by the attractor?
 So, I think it's not, because the people are exerting their will by getting on and off the train wherever they want,
 and that's the real cause, as it were, the determinant of evolution, is the free will of the moment,
 is the collective action of the citizens of the present.
 Just one more thing I'd say before we ask Terence for his opinion.
 There's a sense in which we face this problem in our own psychology, the sense in which our own motivations,
 you see, motivations in the olden psychological sense are not pushing from behind, but pulling from ahead,
 and in courts and law, seeking to establish the cause of what happened,
 motivations, very important, did so and so willfully, and did so and so willy,
 but if so, what was their motive?
 The motive isn't what they did in order to kill them, in order to inherit knowledge that they would inherit through their will.
 There's a sense in which a future state, or an imagined future state, is not pulling.
 And there's a sense in which our own motivation, we have desires and goals, we have purposes and aims,
 even if just like coming to Exeter on this weekend, all of us have the intention of getting here,
 and the intention preceding our coming here.
 And there's a sense in which the goal of being here at Exeter on this weekend drew our behavior towards it,
 and that goal is in the future.
 As I said, we face the same problem in dealing with our own psychological motivations,
 which we know most about, we know more about our own motivations,
 and about the functioning of the course of nature,
 and I would have thought exactly the same problems arose.
 The concept of morphic attractors, and morphic resonance theory,
 and Aristotle's notion of the soul, the concept of the eternity,
 is trying to deal with this fact that somehow, in the present,
 the system, the person, the developing animal, the developing plant, in the present,
 is subject to the influence of a potential future state that hasn't yet come into being.
 And that future state is what directs and drives and attracts the development of the present system.
 Now, is that future state existing in the present in some other dimension or direction of time,
 or is it actually out there in the future and coming from tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow,
 through time, I mean, these may be just different ways of trying to imagine how this is possible.
 Well, we've arrived at the imagination.
 Exactly, I was a terrorist.
 Paul, very interesting.
 I have a lot to say about the earlier part, but I'll work backward through it.
 I think Whitehead had a phrase called "appetition for completion,"
 which is, I take to be, what this attractor notion is seeking to concretize.
 If we didn't use the word "attractor,"
 if we tried to be true to the notion that the thing was being pushed from behind the process,
 then we would have to use a word like "the propeller" or "the motivator."
 And in these cases, I think, intuitively, or perhaps it's just the habit of my own thinking,
 these seem to be inelegant terms.
 They seem to immediately raise questions of operational detail that attractor doesn't.
 We know how things are attracted to something.
 They simply move toward them.
 But if something is propelled toward something, if something is motivated toward something,
 then we have to visualize an engine strapped to it that is moving it toward an end state,
 which it somehow is able to magically find,
 where if you view the attractor as the bottom of an energy well,
 well, then anything put into the energy well will make its way to the attractor,
 because the attractor is the least energetic state.
 So the whole system tends to move in that direction.
 The idea that the cause is in the future makes hash of the notion of causality.
 And so this is, I think, on the part of science,
 something that they are very concerned to eliminate,
 because the backwash from that assumption will make the practice of science much more difficult.
 Nevertheless, you know, Ralph and his colleagues have been modeling for many years now
 plant growth, dripping faucets, coupled oscillators like groups of cuckoo clocks hung on the wall,
 and this sort of thing.
 The modeling task, Niklas Ultra, is history.
 This is where you are no longer playing a little game to demonstrate something to a group of students or colleagues,
 but where you actually are saying our models, our methods, are powerful enough
 that now we will take on the real world, not even the real world of biology,
 but the real world of the felt experience of being embedded in human institutions.
 Well, when you look at history, I think the whole reason history has bogged down in the 20th century
 is because of the absence of belief in an attractor.
 This is the hideous legacy of existentialism and all the philosophies constellated around it,
 that there is no attractor, there is no appetition for completion.
 Everything is referent to the past up through the present and no further.
 So that's what I think about the last part of the thing.
 What interested me more and has appealed more to my own kinkiness
 because it caused me to think something I had never thought before,
 even though on one level Rupert was taking liberties with my material,
 this notion about complexity and cooling, I saw, perhaps because I heard it from his lips rather than my own,
 I saw a dimension which I had never seen before,
 which is my tendency is always to carry any principle to the ultimate extrapolation.
 And if in fact the increase of complexity in the life of the universe
 is directly related to falling temperatures in the universe,
 then it seems to me it's reasonable to suppose that the most complex states
 in the projective history of the universe will occur at very low temperatures.
 Well, isn't it interesting then that phenomena like superconductivity and stuff like that
 has to do with low temperatures?
 And superconductivity is fascinating to cybernetic engineers
 because it's a way to preserve information from decay.
 You see, if you put information into a superconducting circuit operating around absolute zero,
 it will be impossible to disrupt that circuit without destroying it.
 And people like Erwin Schrodinger as early as the mid-30s suggested that
 since life seeks to stabilize itself against mutation,
 the obvious principle to be brought in to aid in that task
 would be something very much like superconductivity.
 Well, I don't want to belabor the point in my little space of time,
 but in fact the way in which charge transfer and things like that occur in DNA
 suggests that nature may have incorporated this principle into its mechanics.
 What this says to us in the present that is particularly poignant, I think,
 is that our cultural phase transition that we are going through vis-à-vis machines
 may signify that we are not, as I have always thought,
 very close to the maximized state of novelty,
 that we're somewhere out in the middle of that wave that goes from the beginning to the end,
 and that what the cultural transition that we are doing is about
 is we are downloading all novelty so far achieved into a much colder and stabler regime,
 the cold and stable regime of silicon crystals and arsenic-doped chips and this sort of thing.
 And this is a fairly appalling idea,
 because I think we all have a horror of being replaced by machines,
 but on the other hand prokaryotes were replaced by eukaryotes,
 and there have been several of these replacement scenarios in the history of life.
 So I think it's interesting that you make this point about cooling and complexity.
 It seems to me to imply that in my own theory the zero point may in fact be the absolute zero point,
 and that what the time wave or the fractal of time really describes
 is the fluctuation of the career of heat over the life of the universe,
 and that in domains of high heat information is degraded and novelty is lost,
 and there is a kind of recidivist tendency,
 and when temperatures fall order reasserts itself,
 and stabilizes.
 Well I think that this storage in low temperatures is interesting,
 because I think one of the things when Ralph said that mathematics is like language as a modeling system,
 I think there's a very big difference between spoken language and written language.
 When you get written language the first ones we know about are written on rocks,
 the ultimate low temperature crystalline storage system,
 the Ten Commandments as given to Moses were written on tablets of stone,
 I mean this is this kind of permanent storage system,
 and you know putting things in silicon crystals is a more sophisticated way,
 but this is essentially a low temperature storage method,
 you couldn't do it, you couldn't write on water or in the wind.
 So I think that the written language creates the illusion for us of an independent world,
 I myself think the notion of platonic forms and this transcendent eternal world,
 couldn't have arisen until written language had arisen,
 because written language produced the model,
 and by what I think of as a kind of idolatry,
 these man-made symbols and structures, languages and mathematics when written down,
 can be imagined to endure forever in some kind of other realm,
 as if there's some kind of celestial rock or celestial stone or celestial crystal in which they endure forever.
 But the reality of language as it's existed for a far longer period of its history,
 and as it exists right now here as we talk to each other is in spoken language,
 and spoken language is a process that happens in time,
 and the memory involved in spoken language which comes when stories are retold,
 like the birds and the transmission in oral cultures,
 there is no written record, so the spoken record, the story, organically develops as time goes on,
 and there's nobody around to say, "Look, you've got the story wrong because in the book it's written like this."
 The thing organically evolves, and so I think a model of language is a kind of model of reality,
 an oral tradition has this constantly evolving and yet conserved model,
 but as soon as you've got a written one, as soon as you've got written records, or written mathematical formulae,
 you get the impression, an imaginary realm of sort of eternal forms,
 by just sort of projecting the notion of things written down.
 Anyway, that was just what I wanted to say in response to what you said,
 and I think that's one way in which we get this, or we could easily get,
 I'm not saying for sure the mathematically Platonic or Pythagorean realm is an illusion,
 but it would be easy to see how such an illusion could be produced.
 Well, I imagine, just to be contrary, that mathematics preceded not only writing,
 but mathematics probably preceded language as well.
 Certainly, mathematics preceded writing, and in mathematics we have, for example, a circle, a line.
 I mean, these are, for Plato, the ideal ideals.
 So, do we need writing on stone to think of a line, or a circle, or a triangle, as being eternal form?
 And the evolution of this kind of mathematics preceding writing was probably done by drawing in sand.
 And writing evolved by drawing in sand, and only later you had drawing on stone.
 So, I think, I mean, it's just possible that the idea of eternal forms laws and so on emerged before writing on stone,
 and that writing on stone was just, as a matter of fact, a concretization of those.
 It just suggests a migration in evolution from the immaterial to the material, from the abstract to the concrete.
 I mean, it's the opposite of what a lot of people think.
 Your theories are the theories of chaos, using this gentleman's terminology here.
 Is this a model? How does it relate to, is it a model for the chaos in society, in our world today, and what does it tell you about that?
 Yeah, I used to answer, when I went on the airplane, and the person in the next seat would say, "What do you do?"
 And I'd say, "Oh, well, I'm a math professor. I do research in mathematics."
 And I'd always say, "That's my worst subject," and the conversation would end.
 So, I soon learned to pretend that it was something else.
 "Well, I write books." "Oh, yeah? What kind of books?" "Well, textbooks."
 Well, that would end the conversation.
 Once, as a kind of accident, I said, "Well, I study chaos theory."
 And the person immediately said, "Now, that's a subject I know a lot about."
 That was many years ago, but I rejected that.
 And so, at that point, I would have answered to your question, "No."
 I didn't think there was very much relationship between mathematical models with chaotic behavior on the one hand,
 and the chaos in life, what people are talking about when they say, "That's something I know a lot about."
 They're talking about a problem in their relationship. We're in the middle of an argument with their mate or something.
 But my attitude has changed over the years, and more and more, I've been trying to make models in the social sciences in general.
 And now, I have, for example, a project in psychoanalysis to model, working with a group of psychoanalysts, to model the therapeutic situation.
 And their idea was, I mean, in the experience of their practice of psychoanalysis,
 they had the feeling that the patient would present, that's a technical jargon, I gather, of that field, would present chaotically.
 That the presentation would become more chaotic, and that was to them a clue that a trigger was approaching for an episode or something.
 So, they came to me saying, "Could you model this? Could we have data where we could sort of meter the extent of chaos?"
 Like my parameter GN in the ocean. And that was a few years ago, and so it's progressed.
 And now I'm working on, I call it aerodynamics, E-R-O, models for the love relationship, and for the synergy in society,
 and social synergy in a group of nations, for example, what does lead to war and what leads to cooperation.
 How do you resolve conflict and so on. So I do feel that it is, I won't say possible, it's conceivable, in course of time,
 given its adequate evolution of the modeling art of this hermeneutical circle the gentleman has described so well
 in the context of the ships and the models for the ships, that we could reach a point where we had models that were decent,
 in some sense, to aid us in the understanding of complex social relationships. A group of people like two, three,
 a group this size, a group of nations, a world of nations, the evolution of society, and Terence's dream, a model for history itself.
 This is kind of, it's thinkable. It's not unthinkable. We're not at a point where we can meter the chaos in the room and say
 they're about to break for dinner.
 Isn't what you've done today and yesterday, sort of evidence of that with the thing that she's done, with the humming and so forth,
 it is presuming that we're all somehow going to get together through this and some way make it better for us to communicate
 and be in the room through this particular instrument. And in relationships, what I know about relationships and working with people,
 it's a lot about energy and the energy that gets, or doesn't get, focused with the two or three or get a group of eight or whatever.
 It's a lot of working with that energy.
 Well, I'm delighted to hear this optimism because I had recently, a month or two or three ago, given a talk here to a group of social scientists
 about the possibilities of mathematical modeling. And their response was really angry and hostile.
 The very idea of a mathematical anthropology or a mathematical sociology, they thought, was really offensive.
 They had a different kind of investment in that situation. You would get different kinds of response.
 It reminds me of when catastrophe theory had come out and people were looking at using it on politics,
 especially revolutionary politics. That there are certain political and social changes which occur peacefully and in an incremental manner,
 but those same changes will occur catastrophically if, for example, the economy is in trouble.
 So they were attempting to use catastrophe theory to model politics.
 They weren't able to get enough data, I think, to make a practical model.
 Actually, that's a good case because it was very promising. It's still very promising,
 but it suffered a kind of sociological or historical accident where a wave of popular hostility built up over catastrophe theory
 in a series of newspaper articles and within the mathematical community, and it killed it.
 It killed a very promising strategy of model building for the social sciences.
 Anyway, it was very limited. It was a temporary stage on the way to what we are doing now with these systems.
 And I don't know if it will save the world or anything, but I can tell you it's a lot of fun.
 Ralph, in line with the question about sociology, I haven't asked you this question for a couple of years.
 I ask it every couple of years. Do you still cling to the mathematical proof of the impossibility of monogamy?
 I don't remember your asking that two years ago, Terrence, nor ever before.
 Do you remember making the statement?
 Not only I don't remember, but I say I proclaim to you all it's impossible I ever made such a statement,
 because as I've just explained to Rupert, I don't believe in the resonance between the models and the actuality of ordinary life.
 I think that it emerges, it evolves our understanding to play with models.
 Well, they do have a certain practical value, but I don't consider that the interesting part.
 So if I had a mathematical proof of the impossibility of monogamy in a certain model universe,
 of model relationship in level three, I might have spoken about that,
 and you made what Gregory Basin called a category error and thought I was talking about human relationship.
 But you know I never actually speak about human relationship.
 I wish you told me this years ago.
 Shall we stop?
 This whole notion of the role of modeling I find very central to the discussion,
 especially where it's tied in with the feedback between the abstracting and the concretizing,
 and blends them together so that you're modeling, you sail your model out, and it keeps changing itself.
 And tied to this notion of the attractor, if you model an attractor, does your model have attractive properties?
 Does it begin to become a concrete or attractive entity?
 We'll have to ask Terence about this, since he's been using this word extensively today, appetition.
 I don't know exactly what it means.
 Terence, are models attractive? I mean, are they habit-forming? Is modeling a habit?
 I think so. I think if a model is a good model, it will begin to attract.
 It will begin to pull energy toward itself.
 It's almost like the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
 And in a way, that's what I see the three of us and others mentionable as doing.
 We're trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy where it's such a good idea that it will act as an attractor,
 and the world will move to a certain natural...
 Yes, a good dream for a future with a future.
 Yes.
 Well, maybe it's an appropriate time just to make mention of this area of mythology and ritual,
 that here we have a kind of model which has been thought to be crucial for the evolution of a society.
 And it could be that certain models are attractive in that realm, for example, the Trinity or one god.
 I think that it's possible, I mean, there's an alternative possibility in that the models aren't attractive exactly,
 but you have us bringing up thousands of new societies around the planet every few years,
 and some of them will survive. They're like mutations in the social sphere.
 And some will survive for a while and others not. And some may have a really huge history, like 3,000 or 5,000 years.
 Or our civilization, how old is this one? It starts with the Renaissance or in the time of Christ.
 It's, say, in the Renaissance, this particular model where this very complicated pantheon of gods and goddesses.
 I think it could be natural selection of societies that have adopted a certain model and made it a habit, whether attractive or not.
 And then the longevity is not because the model is attractive, but because it has a certain evolutionary advantage
 or advantage in whatever is the selection mechanism.
 Or it could be that certain models, like the Trinity, are intrinsically attractive,
 and that's why there are so many societies with Trinity as their model, which had a long lifetime.
 Let me just follow up. Where does it make it over?
 Where does the model cross over when Frankenstein's monster gets citizenship papers?
 How does the model stay not part of the real world?
 You see what I'm saying? Or trying to get at here, that the model becomes it.
 The model is just a plan.
 But the model takes on a kind of social reality, doesn't it, in a religious system?
 Like Islam, for example, the model of God, which Islam has, this strongly emphasized monotheism, actually takes on a social reality.
 It's reflected, if you have one God, then the Earth is sacred, but then you have the idea that there should be one sacred place on Earth.
 You have all pilgrimage to Mecca, all mosques pointing to Mecca.
 You have one God mirrored in this one central.
 So you have a model actually becoming a social reality. This is a common thing.
 But there's one... Let me just conclude one further thought on this line.
 I think that the history of religions is one of the things that it tells us, is that all temples, images, diagrams, all the paraphernalia of religion, ritual forms, in some sense have a modeling function.
 Some of them may be symbols that participate with the reality they're describing.
 And one of the constant dynamics in the history of at least Western religions is the way in which the models are taken to be the reality by people.
 It's a recurrent danger of models, and in the Judeo-Christian tradition it's called idometry.
 It's that the model of reality, the image of the God, is taken to be the God itself.
 And I myself think that one of the problems of the mechanistic worldview is that the mathematical models of classical physics were taken by many people to be the actual reality governing the world.
 So the idea was that there was this mathematical mind governing them.
 And this became the God of the materialist or the atheist, this kind of... the mathematical models, the images of reality became the ultimate reality for them.
 Here's a possible interesting example of a religious poetic myth becoming a powerful attractor.
 Between the 11th and the 13th century in Western Europe, there was a very important paradigm shift that took place, namely the recognition of the importance of the Fennelman principle.
 And this affected life in every way.
 One of the ways to do this is to see the shift in the style of architecture, say, between the Romanesque construction that was used in the older portions of the Abbey of Mont Saint-Michel and, say, the Cathedral of the Shark.
 Now, Mont Saint-Michel was built for the glorification of Saint Michael, who was the most powerful of all the angels, and one of the three Satan-out-of-heavens.
 Now, the Satan-out-of-heavens are a very masculine thing. It's a masculine building.
 Very little decoration, thick walls, very little wall windows, solidly built, a masculine style of architecture.
 If you go to Shark, you see the hypothesis of the feminine style of architecture.
 This acted, I think, in the sense of what you're calling an attractor, because between the 11th and the 13th century, beginning around the beginning of the 12th century, hundreds of these Gothic cathedrals were built in Europe, all for the adoration of the Blessed Virgin.
 Hundreds of them at an enormous expense, an enormous effort. Remember, this was a poor time, and Europe put an enormous amount of their effort into doing this.
 I can only see this as the attractive power of a myth created around it.
 Well, it must be something like that, and it must be something to do with the feminine aspect of creativity.
 You see, one of the things that Ralph and I were thinking about earlier today, we were having a conversation after lunch, that we find both masculine and feminine creative principles in mythology,
 and both masculine and feminine creative principles come in trinities quite frequently, the triple goddess, but then in the Christian world, the male trinity.
 And Ralph was saying, well, maybe there would be, since there seems to be this possibility of looking at it either way, there must have been somewhere in which the two threes formed a six, and the two creative trinities interlaced.
 And it occurred to us that the Star of David is just such a diagram, two interpenetrating triangles.
 All the hexagrams.
 Well, any six-fold structure.
 Anyway, this takes us into another realm of archetypes. It's six o'clock, and maybe it's time now to stop, because after supper, we come to Terence and Ralph on chaos and imagination.
 At eight o'clock.
 Eight o'clock.
 And that's where we'll pick up with the next trial log, which will be the podcast after next.
 Because as most of you already know, I'm trying to put out three programs each week, at least for a little while.
 My plan is to put out two trial logs each week with an alternative program in between the trial logs.
 Once I get this first series podcast, I'll let you know what I decide about how soon the next series will come out, because maybe you'll be ready for a break from the trial loggers by then.
 In any event, I've got an embarrassment of riches in new program material right now, so it looks like we're going to have some interesting times together in the year ahead.
 Getting back to today's program, about 22 minutes or so into their conversation, you probably noticed Rupert talked about the difference between written and spoken language, particularly in respect to the permanence of the written word.
 I'm wondering if the Internet and podcasting are going to change his thinking about the spoken word not being very permanent.
 Who would have thought on that lovely September day at Esalen in 1989 that over 15 years later, so many more thousands of us would be able to hear this wonderful conversation.
 So here's a question for you. In terms of the way Rupert and Terrence are talking about attractors, what kind of attractor or series of attractors do you think it was that prompted someone to record those conversations and then give them to Ralph,
 and eventually draw them into being podcast here?
 I'll let you have a toke or two on your own and come to your own conclusions on that one.
 Speaking of having a toke or two, it was only a couple of podcasts ago when I mentioned that when KMO interviewed me for his podcast on the Sea Realm, he told me about another program that can be found at www.dopecast.co.uk.
 Now that I've heard several programs, I have to say that it's one of the best podcasts I've heard so far.
 The host of the Dopecast goes by the handle Dopefiend, and being one myself, I can honestly say I've never met a Dopefiend that I didn't like.
 After KMO told me about this program, I checked their website and downloaded a couple of podcasts by the Dopefiend as well as a couple of other podcasts from what they're calling the Cannabis Podcast Network, all of which is hosted at www.dopecast.co.uk.
 Now let me give full disclosure here. The thing is that ever since losing my MP3 player, I've only listened to short segments of these podcasts because it's just not very convenient to be tethered to a computer, particularly once you've enjoyed the freedom of a mobile MP3 player.
 Anyway, I sent Dopefiend an email and told him I liked this program, at least the parts of it I'd heard. And now, to make a long story very short, out of the blue this weekend I get a package in the mail and lo and behold it's actually from the Dopefiend.
 It's Christmas, just like Burning Man does Christmas, I guess, because just out of the blue someone I don't even know sends me a really cool iRiver MP3 player with a built-in mic that looks like it's going to work perfectly at Burning Man and other road trips that I make to interview people.
 So when I tell you how much I like the podcasts from these guys, I don't want you to think it's because of this wonderful gesture or because he very kindly mentions the psychedelic salon from time to time.
 I just really enjoy these programs and my bet is that most of you will too.
 And I know how you feel because that's sort of been my situation lately. Most of my friends from the tribe are now physically far away and so I sometimes get a little lonely myself.
 Yesterday I got to hear some of Dopefiend's programs on my new MP3 player and did I ever have a ball? You just have to hear these guys for yourself.
 I'm looking forward to working my way backwards through their entire year of podcasting.
 All of these guys are having a real party that we can all join in on, at least in my humble opinion.
 And I think you'll find the production quality of these podcasts significantly higher than here in the salon.
 But they've given me some new ideas and definitely have inspired me to make some technical improvements here in the psychedelic salon.
 So thanks for sticking with us while I'm still figuring things out.
 Also I want to thank Jason and the other tech support people at Dreamhost where I'm in the process of moving the MatrixMasters.com family of websites.
 It's a major task for me, particularly since I'm making some changes to the site as well.
 But once it's finished I think you'll like some of the things like the secure IM chat feature that we're going to eventually be able to use.
 So thanks for putting up with the super long podcast page for now. I feel your pain as the saying goes.
 Before I go I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the psychedelic salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 2.5 License.
 If you have any questions about that you can click on the link at the bottom of the podcast page at the psychedelic salon.
 You can find that at MatrixMasters.com/podcasts.
 If you still have questions you can send them in an email to Lorenzo@MatrixMasters.com
 I want to thank Jacques, Cordell and Wells, otherwise known as Chateau Hayouk, for the use of their music here in the psychedelic salon.
 Thanks again Ralph Abraham, both for participating in the trilogues and then for letting Bruce Dahmer and me digitize your tapes of these sessions and put them online for our friends here in the psychedelic salon to enjoy.
 And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well my friends.
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