Greetings from Cyberdellic Space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic
 salon. So are you ready for some more trilogues between Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and
 Rupert Sheldrake? When we left our three merry trilogers in the podcast before last, they
 just had concluded their discussion about creativity and chaos. And in today's program,
 we're going to hear them talk about chaos and the imagination. I should say and the
 imagination. We begin with Ralph Abraham going into the history of the word and the concepts
 about chaos. And then Terrence McKenna joins in with his thoughts about how chaos and imagination
 are connected. If you caught the last podcast from the psychedelic salon, you might remember
 Sheldon Norberg talking about how as he progressed into the world of psychedelic medicines, his
 experiences began to shift from those focused primarily on pleasure to journeys that involved
 a deeper understanding of his consciousness. Well, at about a half hour into the trial
 log you're about to hear, Terrence McKenna begins to wax poetic about the lone fisherman
 on a tropical sea with his net, where he's referring to the net of human imagination
 on an ocean of chaos. And the fisherman, of course, is the psychonaut sailing on the seas
 of consciousness. Now, I can't actually say that that's how things actually are, but it
 sure is a nice image to use when beginning a psychedelic voyage, don't you think? So now
 let's listen to Ralph Abraham and Terrence McKenna discuss chaos and imagination.
 Chaos and the imagination. Now, someone asked about the relationship between the chaos on plane
 three and the chaos on plane one, and I said there was sort of a resonant relationship. My
 appreciation of it had increased over these past years. I'm wearing the mask of chaos,
 but I'm not constrained to stick to the mathematical plane. So I should like now to
 speak about the chaos of ordinary life and the relationship of this chaos to the imagination.
 And along the way, I'll try to explain to you why I think chaos is the biggest thing since the wheel.
 I know, Terrence, you've emphasized the importance of chaos and fractals in your own thinking and
 so on. So here will be either more of the same or maybe a further reason
 to regard the chaos revolution as good news.
 Somebody came to me last year and gave me a splendid quote about chaos, knowing that I was
 writing a popular book on chaos, Guyon-Eros, and it said, "All creation begins in chaos,
 progresses in chaos, and ends in chaos." It's perfect for my book, especially considering
 that it comes from Homer. But I couldn't find it in Homer. I called a classics professor in my
 university, told me about all the lexicons and concordances where every single word in Homer,
 word chaos never appears in Homer. It is known where it occurs for the first time,
 and it occurs for the first time in Hesiod. He was kind of contemporary, more or less,
 of Homer, if a person at all, around 800 BC, the beginning of the Bardic tradition of ancient Greece.
 And in Hesiod, this word chaos appears in a piece called Theogony, which is a theogony,
 that is to say, more or less a creation tale, but the stories of the creation of the gods and
 goddesses one by one. Well, they're not gods and goddesses, really, they're abstract principles,
 three main ones are chaos, Gaia, and Eros. So in this way, thanks to this gentleman,
 Augustine de Melo, I'll be forever in his debt, I found out about the Hesiodic theogony and the
 Orphic trinity. Now, the meaning of chaos, the first time the word appeared in literature,
 has got nothing whatsoever, apparently, superficially, to do with what we mean by
 chaos in the English language and in ordinary life. It meant only to Hesiod, according to the
 lexicon, the gaping void left, the gaping void, sort of the gaping void between heaven and earth,
 out of which the creation came. So creation out of chaos, yes, but the chaos did not mean disorder
 or anything negative, it only meant this gaping void. Well, after reading in detail about the
 significance of this and the other, those proper nouns in Greek literature, beginning with a
 capital letter, they don't mean people or anything like people, they're more abstract principles,
 particularly in Homer and Hesiod, and in the Orphic literature, the Orphic hymns.
 So these chaos, Gaia, Eros, are, I mean, it's a trinity and it's associated with,
 they're the gods of, or concepts of, the primitive types. Chaos is a sky concept, and Gaia, of course,
 is an earth concept. And Eros is, Eros is actually a bisexual, it says in the literature, but that
 means what we would call an androgyne, you know, a double-sexed person or concept. Whereas chaos
 is definitely a feminine word, as it appears in Hesiod. Gaia is feminine, chaos is feminine,
 and Eros has got this ambivalence. And they're the most abstract, earliest proto-concepts of sky,
 earth, and the creative tension in between. Well, after understanding that, you look up,
 you think of these different interpretations, sky, god concept, the gap and the opening,
 and so on. When you look at the sky, the most obvious chief characteristic feature of the sky
 is the Milky Way. And it does appear as a kind of a gap between this and that, the two sides of the
 Milky Way. The sky, as understood by primitive people, is sort of like an Easter basket.
 And you have the ecliptic, is around the waist, kind of a snake, and all what is below that is
 considered the underworld. And then you have this handle across the top to hold it, which is
 the Milky Way. It's the royal road of the gods traveling between the underworld and the overworld.
 And this is, it's analyzed in extensive detail in a thick book called Hamlet's Mill.
 So, looking further, then, at chaos as the Milky Way, you see, like the photograph that
 Terence has just shown, the prototypical chaos in the sense of randomness or disorder and so on.
 Understanding that, you can then connect the word with an earlier word, concept, or god or goddess,
 meaning the same thing as what you visually see represented in the Milky Way itself. And that is,
 in one of its most popular representations, Tiamat, the goddess of chaos, from Enuma Elish,
 the creation poem, the greatest epic poem of Babylonian literature, discovered in the library
 of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Recent discovery. How to read the text, another recent discovery,
 1950s, came out, maybe 1870 or so was the first discovery. There was this story of the origin of
 the gods and the creation of the world by Tiamat and Apsu, the god and goddess of chaos who lived
 in the water, one more sweet water and the other salt water. And they created then the whole pantheon
 and the whole world and so on. But eventually, along came Marduk. Marduk was a younger generation
 of gods, and the next generation. And there was a conflict between the older and the younger gods
 over how the world ought to be run. And apparently, this conflict was taking place in the form of a
 social transformation, a transformation represented in the mythological by the demotion of Apsu and
 Tiamat from the pantheon of Babylon, the city Babylon. And the replacement by Marduk eventually
 became the god, Mr. Big of Babylon, around 2000 BC, coinciding with a sweep of patriarchy over
 that city, propelled on a new type of war chariot with spoked wheels instead of solid wheels.
 Am I digressing too much? No, you've reached the wheel.
 Well, I've reached the spoke wheel and its association with, is this accidental? I don't
 know, with the patriarchy and the fact that the wheel itself as a mathematical model is the
 paradigm of order. What we mean by order is either the thing is static, it's constant,
 its order is that of homeostasis, like more or less the temperature of the planet Earth,
 or it's regularly changing in a circle, a divine mathematical form, according to Plato,
 as the planets were supposed to move before Kepler, who introduced the ellipse. Fantastic
 transformation, punctual catastrophe in the history of consciousness.
 In short, according to this epic, Enuma Elish, Tiamat was killed in the most violent way,
 ripped to pieces, creating the world, creating a new order by our hero of Babylon, Mr. Marduk,
 also Baal, Baal and so on. His New Year's celebration was honored at the New Year time
 all over old Europe, including at Stonehenge. At the New Year's festival, this epic poem was read,
 so annually was the reminder that chaos is bad, chaos has been killed, chaos has been replaced
 by order, an order associated with perfect periodic, the wheel, the cycle, the perfect roundness,
 and so on. For 2,000 years, this poem was read every, in a festival lasting 11 years called
 the Akitu Festival, in Babylon, with similar, almost identical festivals, in Egypt, the Osiris
 Festival of Denderah, in Crete, the Dionysian ritual of the New Year, and in Canaan, in the
 Israelite festival surviving to this day, Sukkot, which begins next month. All of this, just to the
 importance of the chaos revolution now, is that chaos has recovered from being demoted, from being
 banished to the unconscious, in around 2,000 BC or so, from then up to now four or maybe five
 thousand years of the repression of chaos. I mean, chaos is, to this day in our culture,
 a bad word. We have to watch out for chaos. It ruins your love life, it has to be replaced by
 order, scientists most especially hate it, and so on. The fact that scientists, of all people,
 in the temple of science, the Tiamat has to be accepted as a friend and replaced upon her throne,
 this is big news. Now, a little bit of lore about chaos, and now, about the imagination.
 Since we have developed this theme, I think, to all our satisfaction,
 the connection between chaos and creativity, the creative as... Now we're connecting...
 I'm going to try to make a direct link from chaos to the imagination, but
 it's completely unnecessary because we've already got the line from chaos to creativity and the line
 from creativity to the imagination. So we know that imagination is linked to chaos. The repression of
 imagination, the evil shadow, the bad name of chaos, must therefore result in an impedance,
 a resistance to imagination. So the creative imagination manifests most profoundly by people
 like Euler, like Beethoven, like Wagner. This imagination should, of course, be functioning
 in everyone, but people have a resistance to their own creative imagination, and I'm suggesting that
 this resistance has a mythological base, a ritual base, and historically represents a very deep
 creode, a runnel in the morphogenetic field of a depth of three to five Waddingtons.
 Well, this is a unit that Rupert and I have worked out for measuring the depth of runnels.
 So we've got a really... It's not only a personal failing if you find it difficult
 to write poetry when you sit down at your desk, you see. Repeat what?
 Yes. So $30 or $25, as the case may be.
 I could try another pass nearby, but I can't remember where we are.
 The Waddington. They just want to hear the word explains.
 Stealing a line from Terrence's current book. There are habits. Habits, according to Rupert,
 are tunnels. They're, you know, deeply worn paths, labyrinths in the morphogenetic field.
 But habits is a habit. There's a habit of habits. That's the line I'm stealing from
 Terrence's book. And the habit of habits has, as a mathematical model, these creodes. That's the
 attractor and the basin. Any state in the basin tends to the attractor. The attractor is the
 teleology of its habit. So the habit of habits is the habit of living in a landscape, a landscape
 with peaks and valleys, where we have the tendency to go down the track to the attractor.
 Do I digress too far? So the habit of habits is good. And some habits may be harmful. And one
 thing that creates a really deep runnel is the repetition for 11 days a row, once a year, for
 two to three thousand years. So that makes it a more serious matter. I mean, it's going to cost
 you a lot if you're going to a psychotherapist to get cured of your difficulties in creative
 imagination. It's going to be cheaper to fix up something that only started last year.
 Like thinking bisexuality is bad or something. So we felt that we wanted to quantify the depth
 of a runnel. And I'm not going to say it's proportional exactly to the number of days
 of the repetition and the frequency, the annual, or the, you know, but there's...
 Since Waddington introduced the concept creode in connection with embryology, as Rupert has
 explained, we thought it appropriate to take his name, like resistance, ohm, you know,
 there's Maxwell's, Henry's, there's Faraday's, there's Gilbert's, and...
 Ampere's.
 Ampere's, Watts, as in Watts Tower, and Waddington, as in the depth of the creode.
 And for a really deep creode, I recommend for your consideration the New Year's Festival of Akitu,
 together with its complete descriptions, the subject of numerous books of length,
 300 pages or so, by a fantastic field of scholarship known to few. We know about archaeology,
 anthropology, history, comparative religion, and so on. What about OT, Old Testament studies,
 the most voluminous, incredible field of the greatest scholarship of the most minute details,
 all interdisciplinary, has produced, among other things, a comparative study of New Year's
 festivals around the world. Amazing evidence of morphic resonance on a planetary scale,
 in society before radio, before sailing ships, global manifestation, evidence of
 resonance with the guy in mind, on the same level as the distribution of these
 so-called Venus figurines of the Gravettian culture all over the planet.
 So, chaos and the imagination, the repression of chaos, the obstruction of imagination,
 the final development over these thousands of years of serious and perhaps fatal
 ecological problems that we have today, the suggestion of the growth of a problem beyond
 all bound, with nobody even trying to do anything about it, as associated with a lack of imagination,
 and therefore an artifact, a consequence of a cultural flaw that came in with the patriarchy.
 Now, I'm not saying that patriarchal culture is bad because it's patriarchal,
 although I would say that, too. That belongs in another context. I would say, besides all that,
 it's bad because it's repressed chaos. It's made chaos bad. It's made Marduk good,
 the god of law and order. No. We would like to reject that so the planet can be saved,
 so life and love can be saved. And lo and behold, along comes an event as big as the development
 of the wheel, as positive, perhaps, as whatever negative was the discovery of the wheel, due to
 the fact that, without getting rid of the wheel, we don't have to give up our automobiles.
 We are regaining chaos for potential partnership with the wheel. Chaos and order. Chaos and cosmos.
 Chaos and the imagination.
 Yes. Well, chaos and the imagination, and the notion here is in everyday life,
 in the dimension in which we find ourselves. I would like to sort of expand on what Ralph
 has been saying with my own perspective on it. Chaos is feminine. Chaos is intuitional. Chaos is,
 has a very flirtatious relationship with language. And
 the process of creating a culture has to do with how we relate to this thing. And since we're
 talking about everyday life, it seems reasonable to talk about how we come to be in the kind of
 planetary mess that we're in, and whether these extremely rarified and abstract matters that we've
 been talking about can in any way be brought tangential to the burning planet. And I think
 that they can. That the key is the power, number one, of chaos, which is feminine and beyond
 prediction and beyond full rational apprehension, and the imagination, which is our richest legacy,
 really the birthright that connects us to the divine, is our poetic capacity, our ability
 to resonate with an idea of ideal beauty and to create that which transcends our own understanding
 in the form of art through the imagination. So what does all this say about the situation we're
 in and how we got here? Well, I believe that the importance of the psychedelics is primary here,
 and that it doesn't simply have to do with the fact that they synergize cognition, which they do
 do, and the synthetics as well as the natural ones, but it's deeper than that. It's that we have a
 secret history, knowledge of which has been lost to us and only is now recoverable in the light of
 the kind of mindset that becomes possible to us if we accept the new paradigm. And what this secret
 history is and has to do with and how it relates to the Gaian mind and the world soul is that we
 are the victims of an instance of traumatic abuse in childhood as a species because a symbiotic
 relationship with the world-girdling intelligence of the planet, which was mediated through plants,
 through shamanism. I mean, it wasn't an abstraction. It was an experience, was eventually
 broken up and disrupted by progressive climatic drying of the Eurasian and African landmass.
 And so this is literally the fall into history, the expulsion from Eden. All these primary myths
 of a golden age found and lost have to do with the fact that once we lived in dynamic balance
 with nature, not as animals do, but as human beings only could, but in a way that we have now lost.
 Well, how have we lost it and what have we lost? How we have lost it is the way in which these
 psychoactive compounds that were being brought into the diet were acting is they were
 psycholytic upon the formation of the ego. They literally suppressed the formulation of the
 eat, the formation of the ego and promoted instead collectivist, tribal partnership values,
 which were operating intuitionally in a resonance relationship with the feminine vegetable matrix
 of the planet. In other words, nothing was verbalized. Everything was felt. Everything
 was intuited. And regularly at the new and full moon, these small groups of hunter-gatherers,
 later pastoralists, gathered and took these hallucinogenic plants and dissolved boundaries
 and engaged in group sex and annealed, a new word that we've brought in here, annealed the
 irregularities that had cropped up in people's personal self-imaging in the interval since the
 last session. And this kept everything grounded on the plane of that which is important, i.e. the
 values of the group, of the species, of dynamic balance with the ecosystem and so forth and so
 on. Well, when this was disrupted and the supplies of these plants were diminished and new religious
 forms arose and the time between the great festivals grew longer and longer, the ego
 begins to take hold first as a kind of cancerous aberration, but then quickly becoming a new style
 of behavior, which quickly then eliminates all other styles of behavior by suppressing access
 to the chaos. And this is the point I want to make, that there is between the ego and full
 understanding of reality a barrier, a problem, the fear of the ego to surrender to the fact of chaos.
 Now, in a pre-modern society, no woman could escape chaos because of the automatic birth
 script that would have women give birth over and over and over unto death in these societies. Women
 are biologically scripted into being much closer to this thing simply because there are certain
 episodes in the life of a female which are guaranteed to be boundary dissolving. And in
 fact, the whole psychology of feminine sexuality, which is the acceptance of penetration,
 is an entirely different relationship to boundary than the male relationship, which is,
 you know, to be able to fulfill the potential to penetrate. So, chaos is what we have lost
 touch with. This is why it has been given a bad name, because it is feared by the dominant
 archetype of our world, which is the ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in
 terms of control. And the furious modeling process, and this will now sound like a knock on
 modeling, the furious modeling process that the ego endlessly carries out is an effort to fight
 the absence of closure. The ego wants closure. It wants a complete explanation. The beginning of
 wisdom, I believe, is the ability to accept an inherent messiness in your explanation of what's
 going on, because nowhere is it writ that human minds should be able to give a full accounting
 of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. You know, Wittgenstein had this idea that
 philosophy should be what he called true enough. And I think that's a great idea. Let's just
 make it true enough, because that's as true as it can be gotten. Well, so the imagination
 is chaos. New forms are fetched out of this chaos. For me, the creative act is the letting down of
 the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt
 to bring out of it ideas, to bring out of it, you know, sometimes, and this is part, this is my
 model for the psychedelic experience, that it is the night sea journey, that it is the lone fisherman
 on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down, and sometimes something tears
 through them that leaves them in shreds, and you just row for shore and put your head under your
 bed and pray, and at other times what slips through are the minutia, the minnows of this
 ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing. But sometimes, you know, you actually can bring
 home something that is food, that is food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on
 and go forward. So we haven't talked that much about art and aesthetics, but I think in the
 human world, the appetition is for beauty, to my mind, and this is another place where the Platonism
 shines radiantly through, you know, because Plato held that the good was the true, and that both
 were the beautiful. And this is a very quaint idea from the point of view of modern philosophy,
 but I think, you know, it's in the bones when you actually connect yourself up to the planet.
 That's why chaos is capable of being the tremendous repository of ordered beauty that it is,
 because there is no chaos in the old definition, which is to say, that which by any definition
 or any test is found to be disordered. That is just a kind of a hell notion, a kind of
 hypostatization of an ultimate state of disorder, but nowhere in the world that is deployed through
 space and time do you encounter that. Instead, what you encounter is embedded order upon embedded
 order, this fractal thing. And then finally, for me, the imagination is the goal of history.
 I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams, and, you know, it's on
 a very crude level when it's you make your mask and I make my mask and then we dance
 around together. And it's even at a very crude level when it's you design your shopping mall
 and I'll design my world trade center and we'll put them on the same piece of real estate.
 But we're coming now into, through media, I believe, through virtual reality and human
 machine integration and this kind of thing, into a situation where the imagination is
 going to be something that we can share, that the path of mind through its own meanderings
 will become something that can be recorded and played back. We will have the possibility
 of living in our own past or, you know, creating and trading realities as art. And art as life
 lived in the imagination is the great archetype which rears itself up at the end of history,
 life in the imagination. The imagination is this auric field which surrounds the transcendental
 object at greater and greater depth as you approach the transcendental object. And as
 we now close distance with it, all of our cultural expression, all of our self-awareness
 is taking on this curiously designed quality. I mean, you must have noticed this, that the
 world is very heavily designed in a way that it never was before. Morphogenetic fields
 of great size and scope, which are international schools of architecture and design, touch
 whole continents. Entire cities are given certain ambiances. This is the summoning of
 the imagination into the human scale. It's like a god that we wish to call down and draw
 to earth. I mean, this is why William Blake called it the divine imagination, because
 it is the forgated city. It is the flying saucer. We are on a journey to meet this great
 attractor, and as we close distance with it, it is more and more a multifaceted mirror
 of our images of beauty. So it's like an ascending learning curve that becomes asymptotic, and
 at that point, you're face to face with a mystery, a living mystery that is within each
 and all of us. It's the imagination that argues for the divine spark in human beings. It's
 absolutely confounding if you try to get biology to produce it for you as a necessary quantity.
 It isn't that. It's an emanation from above. It is literally a descent of the world soul
 into all of us. We then become the atoms of the world soul, and our channel to it is by
 closing our eyes and obliterating our immediate personalized space-time locus and falling
 into the imagination, which is running like a river through all of us, endlessly driven
 by the hydraulic momentum of the cataracts of chaos, which usher into the creativity
 of the imagination. These river metaphors are just endlessly applicable to this. The
 flowing of forces over landscapes, the pressure of chaos on the imagination to create creativity,
 and it's looping back into the same. These things are the icons for the world that wants
 to be, but the key is surrender and dissolution of boundaries, dissolution of the ego, and
 a trust in the love of the goddess, which transcends rational understanding. There will
 come a moment which will be an absolute leap into space, and we will simply have to have
 the faith that there is something waiting there, because the dominator style has left
 us no choice. So that's my wrap on that.
 The cataracts of chaos. They roll off his tongue, you see, which obviously has a direct
 connection to the cataracts of chaos. So while we are progressing toward a dialogue, now
 is the idea. But there's so many different ideas to respond to here. I'll try to limit
 myself to one or two. I'd like to try to connect these up, these two statements. And I think
 the key, the intersection, is the Ilyssinian mysteries. And this is not validated by all
 the scholarly research, just speculation. It was generally supposed by historians that
 there's sort of a straight line from Babylon to Ugarit, to Minoan Crete, to Mycenae, to
 Athens, and so on. So it was supposed that there's a cultural diffusion, including the
 festivals, which, as I said, are very similar. But in the Babylonian festival, you already
 had by 2000 BC the extensive domination of the male god of order and the patriarchy and
 so on. Whereas in Minoan Crete, you find, according to the evidence of the excavators
 and all who have examined the artworks that remain, an outstanding, a long-lasting fluorescence
 of partnership culture with no domination by a male god. So there is a little question
 mark there as far as the diffusion from Babylon to Crete. Instead, there's a complementary
 theory of a renewal of the partnership concept in Crete coming from India in the early days
 of Cretan culture in 3000 BC. In any case, it's established that there's the diffusion
 from Crete to Greece. And the last remainder of the Cretan culture, which is a very interesting
 one, it must have been sort of the last vestige of the Garden of Eden. We're talking about
 a tremendous happiness and fluorescence of beauty in all aspects of life. The Eleusinian
 mysteries and the related mysteries of Plua were said to be identical to those in Crete,
 which were celebrated publicly. So they became secret after the patriarchal takeover by the
 Mycenaeans in Crete and the exportation of this dual culture to Greece, where you had
 kind of the overworld and the underworld, the conscious and the unconscious. And the
 goddess and the partnership of gods and goddesses of Crete continued to exist in Greece, but
 as this accepted but still unacceptable secret festival. And among the aspects of the Cretan
 and Eleusinian Plua festivals are the sexual rites and psychedelic rites celebrated in
 a highly specified ritual format and on an annual basis. So is a speculation on what
 happened to the cataracts of chaos in the hands of the patriarchy? I don't know. I think
 you guys know a lot more about this than I do, but our conversation has stimulated this
 speculation. In patriarchy, because of the patrilineal aspect, you have to know who is
 the father of the children, not just who is the mother, and therefore monogamy is very
 important and this was in a strong conflict with the ritual. And so sooner or later, that
 aspect had to go. I don't see that there's any... I don't understand the direct connection
 between the patriarchy and the repression of chaos, but I can see the simple explanation
 for the repression of the other aspect of these rites that were celebrated together,
 but somehow I don't know if they go together, of sexual license and the psychedelic ritual.
 Anyway, the Eleusinian mysteries disappeared and what we are left with is this control
 of Marduk order, the constipation of the imagination, and in our fantasy, it's consequent, the world
 problems. Now there are some open questions here I'm not addressing, maybe you can consider.
 One is, if we consider the practical aspect of what we're talking about in these world
 problems, it seems like a main motor of world problem is the population explosion. So I
 don't know, do you think it would be true if we had a partnership society instead of
 a patriarchal, a dominator society, would we still have the population explosion? That's
 what I don't understand. Can I ask you, you said that you didn't understand
 the suppression of other parts of the partnership society, other than the orgies which confused
 knowledge about who was the father? Yeah, you see the New Year's festival continued
 on to our day, but these aspects of it were removed and replaced with, in all cases, with
 the recital of the conquest of chaos by the god of order. And part of his conquest, I
 assume, was the elimination of sexual license as well as psychedelic ritual.
 Don't you think it's because the ego is basically a control trip, and so the ego, the person
 who has the ego, becomes the center of the space in which they're operating in. They
 control the women, assuming it's a man, they control the resources, and they, vigilance
 is the key. It reminds me of the national motto of Albania, which is, "Fear it is that
 guards the vineyard." So this is definitely an egocentric, dominator view, and so the
 fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control. And
 even if you approach dominator types today and say, "Wouldn't you like to try some psilocybin?"
 Say, "I'm afraid I would lose control." This is the great... And it's not important to
 maintain control if you are not in control in the first place, by definition. In a tribal
 society, for instance, where there is no property, and where there are no assigned sleeping places,
 everyone behaves according to something which we can only call whim. But whim has replaced
 mine, yours, my spot, your spot, my food, your food, and the psychedelic thing dissolves
 this and makes it all very threatening, and throws it all up for grabs. And then you have
 to rely on group values and not yourself.
 As I was listening with you to Terrence McKenna just now, I was taken by his rap about sharing
 imagination and playing back imaginings when I thought of it in context of his first, and
 I guess maybe his only, encounter with others through the 3D avatar world that Bruce Dahmer
 and Terrence's son, Finn, and some others created to host Terrence's first online workshop.
 I believe that most of that world is still preserved somewhere in cyberspace, and I'll
 try to track it down and link to it from our webpage with the program notes of this podcast
 on it. Not long ago, I saw a homemade video that was taken on Terrence's end of that event,
 and it was really cool to see how almost childlike he was as he interacted with others in cyberspace.
 It was almost as if you could see the wheels turning in his mind with all kinds of new
 ideas about the possibilities that these alternative worlds present for the evolution of our consciousness.
 Sadly, that event took place only about a week or so before the seizure that revealed
 the fact that Terrence had a very large mushroom-shaped tumor in his brain. What an amazing person
 he was, what an amazing mind, and thanks to a lot of people and the advent of podcasting,
 all of us here in the Psychedelic Salon can still hear the words of the irreplaceable
 Terrence McKenna, along with the wonderful thoughts and comments by Ralph Abraham, Rupert
 Sheldrake, and a lot of others here in the Psychedelic Salon.
 One other thing I want to point out is that while there is only a brief mention of Ralph
 Abraham's book, Chaos, Gaia, and Eros, if you haven't had the chance to read it yet,
 I highly recommend it. And if you're worried that the "chaos" part deals with math, well,
 don't worry. You won't find any equations in it. Instead, you'll find a very readable
 and concise history of some esoteric knowledge that you might have missed in school.
 Also I want to thank all of you who sent emails this week. It's always nice to receive your
 comments and suggestions, and it truly warms the cockles of my heart when you say such
 nice things about these podcasts. It's interesting how your emails sometimes seem to arrive with
 comments that are right in line with something that I was thinking just a few minutes before
 I checked my mail. For example, this morning I was thinking that this new schedule of putting
 out three podcasts a week might be a little too much. I know I'm not getting a lot of
 other things done that I want to do, and I was worrying that maybe I'm overloading your
 mp3 inboxes. And then comes a note from a listener calling himself Wooden Chip, who
 writes from the "bald prairies of Saskatchewan" to say that "it's the small dose hits of psychedelic
 info that keep my far-out bone in tune and offer balance in this consciously constricted
 western culture." I sure hear you there. Well, Wooden Chip, you've convinced me to keep up
 these three-a-week podcasts a while longer, at least until this first series of trial
 logs is all online. And since we're only on the first side of tape three right now, it
 looks like we've got at least seven more weeks to go to finish up the 89 and 90 trial logs.
 And of course that still leaves quite a few more to go, since they continued holding these
 interesting conversations until the summer of 1998. And hey, I love your handle, by the
 way. I have a special affinity for wooden ships myself, since I had the great good fortune
 to do a Pacific crossing in a square-rigged wooden sailing ship. And if you're into that
 kind of a trip too, well, you can see some of my photos from those days on my website
 at www.matrixmasters.com. Or you can also find the entire listing of all 65 podcasts
 from the Psychedelic Salon. Just go to www.matrixmasters.com/podcasts.
 Also I have received some good advice from Chris, who suggested something that John M.
 also told me a few months ago, and that is that I should consider putting up this series
 of podcasts on BitTorrent. And I promise I'm going to follow up on that soon, and maybe
 with a little of Chris's help once he finishes his exams. And good luck on the exams, Chris,
 and the same to the rest of you who are out there cramming right now.
 Hey, shouldn't you all be studying right now instead of listening to this podcast?
 But I shouldn't talk. One of the reasons I'm not getting very far along on my website revisions,
 as I think I should have, is that I've gotten hooked on the podcasts from the Cannabis Podcast
 Network. I just learned about them from KMO a few weeks ago, and he hosts the Sea Realm
 Podcasts. Now I'm going back and catching up on all of their programs. Not only is there
 a lot of good information being podcast on the Cannabis Network, but their programs are
 also a lot of fun to listen to, particularly if you don't always have close friends to
 share a little smoke with, or a little vapor, as the case may be. And just to give you a
 feeling of how upbeat their programs are on the Cannabis Podcast Network, as soon as I'm
 done here and sign off, I'm going to play a little clip from one of Queer Ninja's podcasts,
 which are titled "The Sounds of Worldwide Weed," where you can hear some really good
 world music, a nice wide variety of it. Now I haven't checked with Queer Ninja to see
 if this is okay, because from what I understand, he's right now recovering from a flood that
 ravaged his remote Scottish home. So I don't want to add to your email queue right now,
 Queer Ninja, and I hope you're recovering from your flood. The soundbite, though, that
 I'm going to play is actually sort of a plug that Queer Ninja did for the entire group
 of programs on their network. But his happiness and enthusiasm for life, I believe, would
 come out even if he was just reading a telephone book. I think you'll see what I mean in a
 minute. And as I try to do in every podcast, I want to thank my friends Jacques, Cordell,
 and Wells, otherwise known as Chateau Hayuk, for letting me use some of their music here
 in the psychedelic salon. I hope you guys are having a great year end. And for now,
 this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.
 Hey, how's it going? How's it going? This is Queer Ninja, and this is "The Sounds of
 the World Wide Read," Episode 4, man. Welcome along. This is a big yellow mug edition. It's
 quite a special edition. I want to share with you some of the journey of my very good friend
 that's traveling in Africa, and this is coming up in the second half of the show. In this
 half, though, I just want to say a great big hello to everyone who's emailed and left comments
 from around the world, man. Hello to Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, Japan, East, West,
 and Southern United States, Canada, Bolivia, and Romania. Big hello to Romania. I've never
 been there, man. Hello. Anyways, anyways, music in this half of the show featuring artists
 from Sifu Matu, Blue Dude, Bedouin Soundclash, and coming up after that, we're going to have
 some musical accompaniment where we take a little peek into a vast journey accompanied
 by some tunes from Eastern Africa and beyond. And always listeners' emails and comments,
 which is my personal favorite part. I really like to get all fluffy, you know what I mean?
 Get some nice emails from people, man. So drop me a line, man. You know the drill. My
 email address is queenninja@dopefiend.co.uk. You can also leave a comment there on the
 website, like goodfood, I think it's three listeners last week left some comments there
 on the website at dopefiend.co.uk, home of the dopecast, home of the sounds of worldwide
 weed, and home of Mr. Bud's Grow Shop. So diverse programming to compensate for, you
 know what I mean, the lack of mainstream coverage that our people get, you know, good songs
 that our people get, man. And it's beautiful that it has to come together like this. It's
 great, man. I have so much fun making this show every week, you know. I really don't
 know what I would do without it now. So with that in mind, I want to get this show kicked
 off, man. And the first track, this is an all-time classic. I got lots of feedback from
 Little Fluffy Clouds last week.


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