Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic
 salon and happy winter solstice to all of you out there or as Steve from South Africa
 pointed out it may be the summer solstice for those of you in the southern hemisphere
 of this lovely little planet. Just six more of these solstice celebrations before 2012
 gets here and what are you going to be doing on the December solstice of 2012? More importantly
 what do you think you'll be doing on the solstice in 2013 and beyond? Well that's just too far
 ahead for me to be thinking right now because if I don't focus on the here and now we aren't
 going to get to the next tape in the trilogue series. You might remember that in the last
 program I mentioned the fact that these conversations build on one another and that if you haven't
 heard the preceding part of a trilogue you might not understand all of the references
 being made. So with that thought in mind I want to play a brief little sound bite of
 Terrence McKenna from the previous podcast. And that involves opening our lives to chaos
 in whatever way becoming much more a part of the will of the world soul and recapturing
 that Greek sense of fate that has been replaced in our minds by this Faustian sense that is
 an illusion of control and dominance. And now to do my part in shattering the illusion
 of control and dominance I'm going to do what I can to inject a little more chaos into the
 psychedelic salon. Unintentionally I might add, as you know for four weeks or so now
 I've been putting out three podcasts a week, two of them being part of the trilogue series
 with Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake and the other program each week
 coming from other sources. The program I started to put together for today was to have included
 two of this year's Burning Man talks, one by Mark Pesci and the other by Amanda Fielding.
 And while the talks are ready to go I haven't yet received an okay from Amanda so I decided
 to skip that program for now and get the next trilogue tape out. Now if you heard my last
 podcast you might want to remember me saying that the title of the next tape in the trilogue
 series is "The World Soul and the Mushroom". I think you'll probably be able to imagine
 my disappointment in not finding that tape because my disappointment is probably on the
 same order as your disappointment might be right now as it slowly dawns on you that this
 long introduction is my way of saying I screwed up. Apparently when I was digitizing all of
 these tapes the mushroom tape came up during one of the all night sessions when I was getting
 up every 90 minutes or so to change tapes. And guess what? I apparently recorded the
 third tape in the series twice but I labeled the second copy as tape four. So I'm afraid
 that the mysterious mushroom tape is going to have to wait until I can mount another
 expedition to Santa Cruz where I can borrow it again from Ralph Abraham and get it into
 mp3 format for a podcast. So I've decided to mask my disappointment at not being able
 to hear the trilogue about the world soul and the mushroom by being thankful for this
 wonderful solstice gift from the goddess of chaos. I'm sure that she's held back the mushroom
 tape from us until the end of the trilogue series when we'll be better prepared to grok
 its wisdom. So how's that for putting a pretty face on my screw up? Anyway, let's get on
 with today's program which is from the fifth tape in a series of ten that were made in
 the September's of 1989 and 1990 at Esalen where Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and Rupert
 Sheldrake got together and held a trilogue on the topic of light and vision. And we begin
 with Rupert Sheldrake setting out a few of his thoughts about light.
 I've been thinking a lot about light. One of the problems that I've been thinking about
 is the connection between physical light, the kind we study in physics, and light used
 in a whole host of other senses like the light of consciousness, the light of reason, the
 light of understanding, or the light of God. And it seems to me that if these two kinds
 of light, it's not that one's physical and the other's just kind of metaphorical, but
 that in some sense they must be aspects of each other, they must be talking about the
 same thing of which we're seeing different aspects. So this suggests there's some relationship
 between light and understanding, or light and vision. And then of course we realize
 there is a connection between light and vision. Light is the medium of vision, vision not
 just in the visionary sense, but in the sense of ordinary visual perception. So then if
 one thinks about ordinary visual perception and thinks, well, how much do we understand
 about the nature of vision? What is vision? What is seeing of which light is the medium?
 Then we find that science doesn't really tell us very much. What it tells us is that light
 moves from the thing we see, goes through the eye, inverted image on the retina, patterns
 of electrical and chemical activity in the optic ganglia and nerves and in the cerebral
 cortex. And then somehow what we're seeing seems to spring up in a totally unexplained
 way as in a subjective image of what we see somewhere inside the brain. And we then falsely
 imagine according to the standard theory that this image inside the brain, subjectively
 experienced we know not how, is then projected outwards until it appears to be in the place
 where the thing seen is. So if I'm looking at you, Terence, the light rays come into
 my eye and then I have a subjective image of you which is actually just my understanding
 or my subjective awareness of an electrochemical pattern in my optical cortex. That gives me
 somewhere in the brain a subjective image of you which I experience subjectively and
 imagine is where you are, but actually it's inside the brain. That's the standard theory.
 And it seems to me an extremely peculiar theory of vision because it has a one-way movement
 of light into the body, it has things going on inside the brain, and then the visual world
 we experience is imagined to be located inside the brain and not around us where it seems
 to be. So what I've been considering is the idea that when the light comes in, the
 visual image is a mental image, it's definitely a mental and subjective image. My image of
 you is interpreted by me, it's a mental construct. But I think this mental construct may not
 be inside the brain but right where you are, namely outside me. And this is an idea which
 is developed with great clarity by Bergson, who gives in Matter and Memory, who gives
 the notion that what we see, our perceptual world, is all around us. And the idea that
 it's inside the brain corresponds not at all with our actual experience, it's just
 a theory. It's a theory of remarkable hallucinatory power because we forget it's a theory quite
 quickly. Anyway, so if there's an outward projection of images as well as an inward
 movement of light in the process of vision, then if this outward projection has anything
 to it, if I'm not just playing with words, producing a different metaphor, there must
 be something moving out, some influence moving out as well as the light moving in. And if
 so, people or things might be affected just by being looked at, if some influence is going
 out from the eyes as well as an influence coming in. Now at this stage, we recognise
 that the idea that things go out from the eyes as well as come in is a very old and
 traditional view of vision, it was present among the pre-Socratics, it's present in an
 implicit form all over the world, in the fear and practices associated with the evil eye,
 which is supposed to be the outward movement of influences from the eye to the thing or
 person looked at. And we find there's also an enormous folklore in our own culture, known
 to everybody, about the phenomenon of the sense of being stared at, the feeling that
 people have when they think they're being looked at, for example, from behind and turned
 around and indeed someone's looking at them. There seems to be an influence of the eyes
 that is actually detected by people, and 95% of the normal population in England, according
 to a recent survey, have actually directly experienced this, it's very common. Now there's
 not been much empirical research on the sense of being stared at, three published papers
 in a hundred years, and it's a subject that parapsychologists have ignored as well as
 psychologists. And it's, I think, oddly enough, the biggest blind spot in our whole view of
 the world, because I think it holds the key to moving to an entirely new paradigm, an
 entirely new understanding of the relation between mind and matter, or spirit and body.
 I've been doing experiments to test for the sense of being stared at. Most people aren't
 very good at it under sort of initial conditions. The only way is to do long series of experiments
 where people train the ability to do it under the artificial condition of experiments. But
 let's assume for the purpose of discussion that it can be established empirically that
 there is such a thing as the sense of being stared at. I mean, that's an empirically investigatable
 point. Assuming that there is some influence passing out of the eyes, which can be detected
 empirically in the sense of being stared at, then what kind of influence could this possibly
 be? What kind of influence could be moving outwards through the eyes as part of the image-forming
 perceptive process? And this outward projection in some sense projects the image we see, or
 the image we see is part of this outward flux, or this movement outwards, the opposite direction
 to the incoming light. Now, there's two possibilities for explaining
 such an outward movement. One of them is that this outward movement is in a kind of mental
 field, let's say, which I'd think of as a morphic field, which is somehow over and above
 the electromagnetic field and has nothing much to do with it except for the fact the
 electromagnetic field sets up all the normally understood electrochemical changes in the
 brain and then somehow an organizing or morphic field organizes and meshes in and relates
 to that field that is not itself part of it and then projects out the image. That's one
 possibility. The other possibility, a more economical one, is that the outward projection
 process takes place by a reverse movement along the photons of light which are coming
 in. In other words, that when the photon comes in, it corresponds to an antiparticle moving
 out, a kind of opposite of a photon moving out, and that these outward moving influences
 that move along the exact track of the photons are associated with vision, perception, comprehension,
 subjective experience of an object, that they're, as it were, the grokking, the grok wave, if
 you like, or the outward moving... Somehow this vision is born on the reverse movement
 of photons. Since, physically speaking, from the point of view of a photon, no time elapses
 as it travels, the connection between the source from which it leaves, the reflection
 from my skin, and the place where it arrives, namely a rod or a cone cell in your retina,
 that there's no time taken and therefore the contact is, from the point of view of the
 photon, instantaneous between the source and the sink. But an instantaneous connection,
 if there were a reverse flow of action, could mean that there'd be this kind of instantaneous
 grokking, as it were, and that the two would be connected together, and one is the subject,
 the other's the object, as it were, but through this connection together there's this reverse
 flow between them. And so vision may be very closely related to light. Vision may... It
 would be too crude to say that the antiparticle of the photon is the vision, but there may
 be... The missing link here between vision and light may simply be that the photon is
 in some sense reversible, and that the electromagnetic field is in some sense the field of vision
 as well. So that was one of the lines I've been thinking about, because it has further
 implications, but... So I just wanted to see what you thought about it.
 Well, there are a number of questions to be asked here. I noticed you were careful to
 say that it wasn't... That the vision was not simply the antiparticle of the photon,
 and I imagine this was because you anticipated the objection that if it were simply the antiparticle
 of the photon, then the phenomenon of light pressure should not exist, and it in fact
 does exist and is well studied, because the vision would cancel out the impelling force
 of the forward-moving photon, and so solar sails and things like that would not work.
 Or it could be polarized differently. No, this is no problem at all. We can allow
 that the photon is a particle with physical properties in the physical realm, and therefore
 exerts a physical pressure. Now, if the vision is in some sense to do with the conscious
 properties or properties of... Let's say properties of understanding, that's moving in the opposite
 direction, sending up a wave in the opposite direction, and the sense of being stared at,
 for example, would be sensing that wave impinging on you.
 Right. Is it where there'd be a kind of pressure
 in that direction of the psychic kind? Well, I think then a more elegant description
 of what you're trying to say is not to call the vision a particle which accompanies the
 photon, but to call this reverse wave phenomenon a quality of the photon itself. As you point
 out, from the point of view of the photon, the travel time to and from its destination
 is zero. Likewise, travel time from destination back to origin is zero. So why not simply
 take a page from super string theory and visualize the photon as a kind of a particle which is
 stretched in one dimension and is both co-present at its origin and its destination simultaneously,
 and thus able to impart information at a distance by that means. You see, if you don't do that,
 if you say that the vision accompanies the photon but is not an anti-photon, then you've
 violated a major symmetry in the edifice of physics, because the question can then be
 asked, well, what about every other particle? Does it have a ghost particle which is not
 its simple anti-particle, but which partakes of some of its properties, but not others?
 And I think you unleash a lot of messy speculation at that point. So I prefer a more complex
 photon. It might not be so messy. It might not be so messy, you see, because the anti-particles
 of most other particles are anti-matter, and anti-matter in some sense doesn't exist.
 Well, in what sense? Well, first of all, that the universe is not
 symmetrical. If the universe had mostly its same amount of matter and anti-matter, they
 would self-annihilate and we wouldn't be here. We're only here because there was an enormous
 change in symmetry between matter and anti-matter, so that matter is predominant in our universe,
 for a start. In this part of the universe.
 At least in this part of the universe. Yes, all right. But then in this part of the universe,
 you see, there's a tremendous asymmetry between the two, and anti-matter has a symmetrical
 relationship to matter in our mathematical imaginations, but it doesn't in physical reality.
 As we know it. As we know it.
 That's true. So I would have thought that to follow this,
 if one did want to see... You see, I'm not so wedded to particle theories of... Let's
 say that light moving in one direction, which already has pattern, quality, etc., is associated
 with vision moving in the other, to put it in the most general terms. We needn't bring
 in the photons, necessarily, but we see still that the thing that moves in the other direction
 is in some senses its opposite, but in other senses it's different, because it doesn't
 have as physical a reality as the light does. And that's exactly the same is true of the
 anti-matter, which is supposed, by symmetry considerations, to be, at least originally,
 equal and opposite to matter. Yes, I see what you're saying. Ralph, how
 do you take to this? This discussion is very hypothetical. In fact,
 as hypotheses go, this is the big, bad foe. Certainly, if there was established that there
 was no effect could be produced in a person by looking at them from behind and so on,
 then this discussion is less interesting, although there still remain some serious outstanding
 questions about the M-fields, about morphogenesis, and special foliage...
 But what about the relation of mind and matter, the nature of vision and light? These still
 remain questions. They still remain questions. Nevertheless,
 it does seem very useful and correct to make this assumption that such effect had been
 established. But this assumption, then, puts us at some time in the future, supposing that
 some time in the past, and so on. In that case, the science that we'd be using to carry
 on this discussion would be a different one than we've got now, and that's a further speculation
 that we're making. For example, if such a thing were established, then that would be
 the first of all the various so-called paranormal phenomenon of recent decades in science to
 be validated and accepted. Exactly. That's why I think it's so important.
 Me too. But probably that means that a lot of paradigms would be shifted, and therefore
 we would also be seeking explanation of telepathy and other kinds of things that have to do
 with vision and distance, remote seeing, clairvoyance. Second sight, as they say.
 Yes, I don't think it would automatically follow if this effect were established, that
 people would think it had anything to do with eyes or light at all. People would say...
 But with mind. Yes, you've established that attention can
 be felt across space. This is an establishment of telepathy. It isn't the fact that I'm looking
 at the back of their head, it's that I'm focusing my attention, and you know it's most effective
 when you really bore in... Well, you carry on for a minute.
 ...output of the optical system is not increasing. Output of the mental act of concentration
 is what is increasing. I just wanted to get to the end of this sentence.
 Field theory. If we agree then in the implication of this
 hypothesis that science has been stood on its head, as it were, by the discovery of
 one paranormal thing, so all of them are fair game, we have to assume that field theory
 and so on would have expanded considerably so that various proposed mathematical models
 for the M-field and so on would abound. And therefore when we come to your argument in
 favor of Model 2 over Model 1 on the grounds of economy, I don't think that would be effective.
 So therefore I'm posing this question to think about, why isn't Model 1 actually more interesting,
 where we would think of the return influence from the receiver to the sender to be carried
 in possibly a different field for which any model would be fair game. I don't really see
 the sense of identifying the... Let's say we have an experimental result that in laboratory
 people can get someone's attention from behind by looking, by boring in as Terence says.
 Would it really be useful to propose the electromagnetic field as in any way an intermediary for that
 influence? Or would we rather just have another field that would be a conceptual model for
 the observed phenomenon including its variation of force with distance and so on, trying to
 measure the speed of light as it were, if it were measurable within that field and see
 if there was any comparison and so on. Yes, yes. Well, I think that this question is actually
 empirically testable. And I'll tell you how. It's just occurred to me that one of the ways
 I thought of testing for the sense of being stared at is first train people to get sensitive
 subjects, you know, so people can do it fairly reliably. Then try the effect of distance,
 staring through binoculars and so forth. Then doing it over closed circuit TV, different
 rooms of the same house, can they tell when they're being looked at through the TV? And
 if that works, real TV, you know, people, do people when they're seen live on the air
 by millions of people feel any different from people being with a blank camera at them where
 nobody's looking at them? Is there any difference? Broadcasters say they can tell a big difference
 when it's live. Maybe it's just imagination, but, just imagination, but whatever the reason
 for it is, if one could find that this worked over TV, that people in a studio could tell
 when people thousands of miles away were looking at them, you know, satellite and stuff, if
 it were going through a reverse circuit, it would then have to go through electrons through
 the TV screen, back through the wires of the TV set, out through the aerial, then through
 the electromagnetic field, and then back through other electronic apparatus to sort of vibrations
 of things inside video cameras. So I think that would be rather, the field hypothesis
 in that case would be more economical. But then one could test out the time, the rate
 of movement of that field, because if one could insert a time delay into the TV transmission,
 for example, two minutes or something, and then tell the person, ask the person to say
 when they felt the thing hit them. I mean, it would be a very crude measure of this,
 but it could tell one whether it was moving at the speed of light, or at least anything
 roughly like that, or whether it took much longer, or what. I think the stack of hierarchical
 hypotheses here is sufficiently thick to call this more or less fiction. And let's take
 an audience survey. Terence, do you think that it's more or less economical to assume
 that this kind of influence is carried in a new or more or less fictitious M-field
 devoted to, invented to model this phenomenon alone, or to try to cram it into the electrical
 wire? I think I'd have to go for a new field. Me too. And furthermore, the idea of identifying
 this field, well, thinking of this phenomenon as mental. I mean, this, I think we're, here's
 the bottom line. Since ancient times, we have thought of the mental, physical and spiritual
 phenomenon as operating in different planes. And I think that these planes used metaphorically
 by the ancients and the rishis of India and all the other mystical cultures are more or
 less what we're calling fields. And so they have found it useful to separate these fields.
 So if we get a physical perception, whatever that word means, I'm not sure, the same as
 perception. We get, anyway, some photons and then we get a mental picture or we get a brain
 picture, we get a visual cortex picture and then somehow this is, by resonance, becomes
 a mental picture in the mind and so on. Then that has suggested a resonance between these
 two planes, an object as it were in the physical and an object as it were in the mental. Now
 the electromagnetic field is physical, at least I think of it as physical, although
 physicists might think of several parallel planes where there are different fields operating,
 like the strong force and the weak force and so on, the gravitational field, but thinking
 of all of that as collectively as the physical field. And I like, this is prejudice, I like
 the idea of the separate mental field. I like the idea that you had mentioned before, the
 mind somehow follows the eye out and extends itself so as to actually engulf the object,
 so as it were to know it through an intimate touch that cognition could be a kind of engulfing
 like paramecium eats the food. That this motion then is visualized in the mental plane and
 therefore belongs to a different field. Now we're not inquiring as to the actual structure,
 the true structure of the phenomenal mental and spiritual universe, only what kind of
 models are useful to us and economy is not the only consideration. So coming from a deep
 habit, an old runnel of thought with mental and physical being separate fields, I guess
 I'm feeling a bias toward that view. On the other hand, if you could show that this telepathy
 or whatever it is, the transmission of an influence from one person to another could
 be modulated electromagnetically by holding a magnet there that would strengthen, then
 that would strengthen the idea of the association, the actual proximity of the two separate planes
 without even then suggesting to identify them. Yes, well, I mean there's a part of me who
 thinks the separate field idea is more attractive, but I've been leaning over backwards to try
 and see whether instead of introducing separate fields one can come to a new understanding
 of the electromagnetic field and that the connection between vision and light may be
 a very, very close one. And so that even if there is this other field involved which moves
 out and engulfs it, this other field may be in intimate resonance with the electromagnetic
 field as it may be in the brain. I mean, there's no doubt that the changes in the nerves are
 largely electromagnetic patterns and there's scope for resonance there, but the light that's
 coming to our eyes is a complex, so the fact I can see you, all that complexity is in the
 light that's coming to my eyes, and if this thing is resonating with the whole field of
 vibration, then indeed it will connect me through the light because the field of vibration
 is between us and it comes from you and it comes to me. So anything that resonated with
 the light that's in between us would indeed directly connect us, as it were, via the light.
 Well, I have trouble with this particle view. I'm more comfortable with the wave metaphor,
 and since experts assure us that they're more or less equivalent, let's just think of waves.
 Here I am looking at these waves on the ocean and I see that there's a rock out there and
 as the waves pass the rock, their shape is changed and somehow there is a hologram of
 the rock, which is then the wave that comes forward, it crashes on the beach and then
 there's a reflected wave that goes back, and I think that the electromagnetic field, as
 theoretical physicists or something view it anyway, is something very like that. It has
 a mathematical model which is a wave equation, the speed of light and the waves, and you
 see the ripples going along and so on. This does seem a suitable medium for influence
 to go both ways, but somehow I don't see it as having a rich enough structure to model
 all of mental processes. I'm not suggesting all mental processes, I'm only modelling vision
 on this so far. Yes, so to see that the visual part of the mental field as part of the M
 field, the mind, the visual part is maybe just a very thin slice which is somehow in
 very intimate contact and close resonance with the electromagnetic field, that must
 be right, but to identify them for sending influences around between people I think is
 very limiting, but it would be somehow better to carry on the conversation about the model
 of the phenomenon after seeing the phenomenon as a result of actually these experiments
 with the video and so on. Well, yes, except that one doesn't have to wait for empirical
 results to discuss the possibilities, and the reason why I think it's a bad strategy
 to wait for empirical data is that if one thinks it through, one can derive perhaps
 other experiments which are simpler and easier to do, and which might even correspond to
 existing data. You know, sir? It's a question of this. It's the... Terence said... what
 was it you said about... this is your definition of progress, things progress toward a higher
 level of integration. So the urgent desire of Einstein and other physicists for a unified
 field theory is an expression of this universal urge for progress, and here we have Rupert
 I think lusting after this unification that I think is a really... maybe this is a really
 good idea if we can put it this way, that the electromagnetic field is to be thought
 of as an integral part of the M-field, of the mind, of the soul of the world, that it
 just belongs in there, more in the mental part of the picture than the physical. Well,
 I think surely if we do have the idea of interfacing planes, if you were trying to take your metaphor
 of the levels, the old idea of different levels, with the planes being thought of as fields,
 in the physical universe we do actually have a series of stratified levels. We've got the
 quantum matter fields, which are to do with the strong and the weak nuclear forces in
 atoms, and the quantum matter fields are supposed to determine the shape, structure, properties
 of atoms and molecules. But once you get above... I mean, they only work over very short ranges.
 The electromagnetic field is what actually holds together atoms and molecules and crystals
 more than anything else, and the electromagnetic field becomes the kind of higher organizing
 field of more complex structures. So one could say the electromagnetic field is the associated
 with, or the medium of the morphic fields, if you like, of molecules and crystals. And
 then when you get to plants and vegetative growth, there's a morphic field of vegetative
 growth which interfaces with the electromagnetic field somehow as the lower level field, sort
 of, intervibrates with it. And then that can be included in animals within what Aristotle
 called the animal soul, which is the organizing principle of instincts and movements, which
 organizes and coordinates the activities of the nervous system. And then you can have
 hierarchically higher planes above that, more embracing fields, perceptual fields, fields
 of sort of higher level understanding, etc., which work down... So you have this plane
 of fields which are like the planes, but they're in a nested hierarchy. And then the gravitational
 field embraces all as the universal field. I got it. Novum Organum, the new order of
 the universe, which there's more fields. If, well, the electromagnetic field, a constituent
 component of the EM field, the mind field, or the world soul, should be utilized economically
 to carry as much of the burden of explanation as possible. And certainly all of these morphogenetic
 phenomena about crystals and so on are so intimately connected by resonance with the
 electromagnetic field that the EM field itself might be enough to explain this evolution
 of structure. Terence, I think it's time to bring up dowsing.
 When you mentioned evidence for this sort of thing which has been ignored, I mean, dowsing
 passed through my mind. Pheromones is another possibility here. There are not only electromagnetic
 fields, but there are chemical fields. And I think pheromones are vastly underrated for
 their organizing power in biology and social systems. And that in fact the whole earth
 may be essentially chemically regulated through very small molecule organic compounds that
 are a byproduct of the metabolism of various species, but which percolate out through the
 environment and set up the field, the ambiance in which a lot of animal and plant business
 is done. I mean, to me the vegetative mind and all this, there have to be mechanisms
 for all this influence. And I think probably easily volatilized low molecular weight compounds
 are running a lot of this. It's even conceivable that Rupert's experiments on the, looking
 at the back of people's heads, would show that it worked in a room of this size, but
 that not, but that the television transmissions would fail. And that would argue to me that
 it was in fact pheromonal. I mean, if materialists can seriously argue that the crystallization
 phenomenon has to do with seed crystals moving around on chemists' beards, then they will
 certainly be in agreement that the percolation rates of nature are effective enough to move
 these control and message-bearing chemicals around everywhere.
 Well this idea I think is very supportive of Rupert's economy move, because the olfactory
 bulb is nothing but a transducer from the chemical field to the electromagnetic. For
 example, in Walter Freeman's model, just a small number of molecules of the scent, the
 pheromone, is enough to excite the identifiable morphology of electromagnetic wave across
 the bulb, which is then identified by some kind of associative memory living primarily
 in the electromagnetic activity of the brain with whatever is the association for that
 scent. So there is a coupling that kind of shows the electromagnetic field as an intermediary
 between the chemical field and the mental field.
 Which it obviously is, because the chemical field is simply a higher-order manifestation
 of the electromagnetic field, because most of these volatile compounds have very electronically
 active ring structures.
 Yes, it's a resonance phenomenon.
 Exactly. Charge transfer and resonance and all of this stuff is happening. It is the
 most electronically active molecules that are the drugs, the pheromones, the growth
 regulators and so forth.
 Yes, so here we've got sensors that respond in a kind of electromagnetic resonance to
 these things, which then could, by morphic resonance, bring into play a much larger field
 of memory and association, but the interfacing would be electromagnetic again. And in hearing,
 you see, if we follow through these lines, the smell isn't localized anywhere particularly.
 Our vision, when I see you, you are localized somewhere outside me where you are. If I hear
 you, the sound is also localized outside me. I don't hear sounds as if they're arising
 inside my auditory cortex. I hear them as if they're arising around me in three-dimensional
 space and I can locate, in fact, which direction they're coming from. So this means that we
 must not only be surrounded by a kind of perceptual, visual perceptual field that spreads out from
 us and fills the space of our perception right out to the distant stars when we look at them,
 but we're also surrounded by an auditory perceptual field which is again located around us. And
 it means, therefore, that something must move out. The sounds come in and something must,
 as it were, move out from us in the opposite direction to the sound. Well, this perhaps
 militates against the photon argument because in this case it would have to be a kind of
 antiphonon that was moving and it would move at the velocity of sound, not the velocity
 of light, if it was the kind of shadow side of the sound wave that was used as the medium.
 And its undetectability is going to be troubling. Well, people may be able to tell when they're
 being listened to. I mean, you sometimes doubt it when you see some people talking, but there's
 a simple experiment here. You have people talking, saying a message down a telephone,
 and at the other end, according to some random program, you have somebody listening to what
 they're saying or not listening, and you have to... they have to be able to tell you when
 they think they're being listened to. That's a simple experiment. It can be done by anybody.
 If it's done locally at local call rates, it would be very inexpensive, not requiring
 a large grant or anything. Well, with radio, too.
 I just think it won't work. You look at the ocean and you see it has infinite structure
 and complexity, and nevertheless, it could never function as a brain. I think that...
 I mean, the brain is, in the neurophysiology it presents to the experimentalist, certainly
 much simpler than the mind. It's a poor shadow of a mind. And its structure is definitely
 richer. I mean, it cannot function through electromagnetic field alone, even though all
 of the effects are kind of manifesting the electromagnetic field. For example, a given
 thought might be a pattern where electromagnetic fields in the extracellular space control
 clouds of calcium ion, for example, that we can think of them as clouds in the sky that
 are being pulled this way and that, electromagnetically, and then if there's a large number of them
 adjacent to some empty receptors or something, well, this motion of the cation is through
 the electromagnetic field. But the electromagnetic field, without some charges moving around,
 can't really manage to do, to control all these multidimensional patterns where you
 have the layered structure of cortices with pyramidal cells connecting, and then you have
 solid bodies of stuff like glial cells, that the actual materiality of it, the fine structure
 with the ion channels and this and that. Somehow that structure is much richer than the electromagnetic
 field. Just to think on the level of mathematical models. You have an excellent mathematical
 model, I mean, not to identify these models with the field, but just to think of an idea
 of the measure of the complexity of one of these fields as currently conceived by us
 would be the complexity of the mathematical model currently in vogue. So we have Maxwell's
 model for the electromagnetic field. It's all described by a tensor field, a bivector.
 It has four indices. It takes this much complexity. A simple tensor field describes the electromagnetic
 field in relation to it in regard to an observer moving through it, whatever velocity, in the
 context of special and general relativity and so on. For the physical fields in the
 brain, the usual models are tensors that are much larger, that take into account this physical
 structure, symmetries, the creation and destruction of symmetries moving around, and so on. So
 the brain, as described by currently the better mathematical model, which is, it'll get much
 more complex as time goes on, has, it requires much more mathematical structure to even discuss
 the thing or imitate its behavior than does the mathematical model for the electromagnetic
 field. And that brain is like much closer to the physical universe than to the mental.
 So I think the electromagnetic field is too thin to occupy more than a fraction, a fractal
 dimension of the entire structure of the field, carrying recognition, memory, how to serve
 in tennis and learning a new language and recognizing haiku and all this.
 Yes, well, I mean, I am somewhat inclined to agree, but I think somehow it has to be,
 play this kind of interface role between the chemical and the psychic or the morphic realm.
 You know, it has to interface with morphic fields somehow, because one has to have these
 planes linked together. There's another question you see that arises, how does the electromagnetic
 field interface with the quantum matter fields of the electron? Because the electron and
 the nucleus, the nucleus, its structure and the electrons in their orbit are held in those
 orbits by quantum matter fields, not by electromagnetic fields, in fact, being opposite charges if
 it were just electromagnetic, electrons would plummet into the nucleus. So the structure
 is actually maintained by fields which in a sense are stronger than the electromagnetic
 field, which resist it and override it. And the electromagnetic field sort of works around
 those fields. It's a more subtle field, but it works around them.
 So we've already got one model. I don't know how much attention people have paid to the
 interface of those two fields, but they are separate kinds of fields, and they interface
 because the electron and the nucleus are electrically charged, but at the same time their structure
 is made of quantum matter fields. Yes, well, if Nick Herbert were here he'd
 say that it was the quantum matter field and not the electromagnetic field. Maybe he would
 say that was the intermediary between the physical and the mental planes.
 I guess I should have mentioned in the beginning of this podcast that for the most part, today's
 program was a whole lot heavier on scientific jargon than I normally like. During the middle
 of their discussion, I wasn't sure if my brain was going to explode or if I was going to
 just nod off when their voices started getting lower and lower and lower. I did my best to
 boost the volume along the way, but there was only so much I could do in parts of it.
 That session actually reminded me of a workshop of Terence McKenna's that I attended, where
 during the Saturday afternoon session a guy just flat went to sleep on the floor and then
 he started snoring. Seeing the look on Terence's face when the snoring started was worth the
 price of admission. Terence was really cracking up about it.
 I think I mentioned this earlier about getting an email from Steve, who lives in South Africa,
 and I'm glad to have you guys down there joining us, by the way. He's planning on building
 a 2012 portal to help focus the various aspects of that date, and I got to wondering if any
 others of you out there are doing that too, and if so, I'd like to hear about it.
 I also heard from Lauren about the idea of a new calendar, and one of the things that
 she has done is to create a daybook with illustrations she's created for each of the 260 days in
 the Mayan Zulcan calendar. I'll try to remember to put a link to her site with the program
 notes for this podcast, but the URL is easy to remember. It's www.dharmawakenings.com.
 That's d-h-a-r-m-a-w-a-k-e-n-i-n-g-s dot com. Only one "a" in the middle there.
 Also I'd like to thank Adolfo for pointing out a typo I made, or maybe it was actually
 some kind of a dyslexian Freudian slip where I spelled tri-logs t-i-r-e-logs as if I was
 tired of these logs. I really do appreciate you guys pointing things like this out to
 me. Adolfo also asked an important question about
 the term "universal human" that I used in my Beyond 2012 talk at the Oracle Gathering.
 What I did, not very elegantly I know, was to exchange the phrase "homo divinus" for
 "universal human." If you've been following my essays and talks about this topic over
 the past few years, you know that I've morphed my ideas from "homo cyber" to "homo divinus"
 and now to "universal human." I hope that clears it up a little.
 In case you missed it, KMO's Sea Realm podcast #11 featured an interview with the editor
 in chief of Foreign Policy magazine about his book "Illicit" - How Smugglers, Traffickers,
 and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy. I hadn't heard of this book before and it
 really sounds interesting, so some of you may want to also check out that program. There's
 a link to the Sea Realm on our podcast page, by the way, which you can find at matrixmasters.com/podcasts.
 And also in that podcast by KMO is the first part of an interview with Rick Doblin, the
 founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. In that interview,
 Rick mentions a lawsuit in which his organization is suing the federal government for the right
 to grow its own cannabis for research studies that have already been approved by other branches
 of the government. And if that topic is of interest to you, then you may want to also
 check out podcast #14 from right here in the Psychedelic Salon. I think that's the one
 that includes Rick's talk at the National Press Club the day that lawsuit was being
 heard. 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
 Share Alike 2.5 license. Thanks again to Chetul Hayuk for the use of their music here in the
 Psychedelic Salon and thank all of you who sent emails and messages through Tribe.net.
 I do read everything that comes in and I do my best to reply when I can. And so for now,
 this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well my friends.
 [Music]
 [Music]
 (upbeat music)


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.63 sec
Decoding  : 1.50 sec
Transcribe: 3011.83 sec
Total Time: 3013.96 sec