Greetings from Cyberdialoguespace, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon. Those of you who have been with us here in the psychedelic salon for a while know that for the past four weeks I've been producing three podcasts a week and you've also probably noticed that each week the podcasts seem to come out a little later and a little later. In fact today's podcast by my schedule is over a day late already so obviously three a week is probably more than I can keep up with at least if I'm going to ever finish reworking my website, do a little email and most importantly listen to some of my own favorite podcasts. So for the next month or so I'm going to cut back to two shows a week but with all of the good programming coming out of the Cannabis Podcast Network, the Sea Realm and quite a few others you should have plenty of mind candy to keep you engaged during the holiday season. And to introduce today's program I'm going to follow a suggestion that Fig sent in and once I read it it seemed obvious that I'm surprised at myself for not doing it before and what she suggested is that when I play the second side of one of the trilogue tapes that I introduce it by playing a few minutes from the end of the previous side first. That way we can all hear where the conversation left off and get back into the flow of conversation from the previous podcast. Brilliant idea Fig and thanks for sending it along. So without any further ado here is a brief soundbite from the end of side A of tape 5 in the series of trilogues with Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake that were held in the month of September in 1989 and again in 1990 at the Esalen Institute on the California coast. And we begin with Ralph Abraham's speculation about the human brain. So the 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 of 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 the chemical and the psychic or the morphic realm. You know if 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 mental planes. But Ralph if you feel that the electromagnetic field is inadequate to what Rupert's asking of it then you must be equally skeptical of the morphogenetic field it sounds to me like what you're saying. No I'm not skeptical. I think that what we're trying to do is through the revision of the actual phenomenon of light of our experience to make up a model for some of the phenomenon which now modelers, I mean scientists, prefer to totally ignore. And the electromagnetic field and its history as a modeling effort you know it's it's hermeneutical history is an excellent history to imitate and that what we must do is try to fashion a field concept around the phenomena that have been ignored and it does seem very attractive to think of the electromagnetic field as some kind of favored intermediary among all the physical fields. Well let's just put it this way that the perhaps the M field or the mind of the world, the oversold or whatever, will end up with a mathematical model which is simply field theoretic maybe with many dimensions and that is coupled only to the electromagnetic field. And the electromagnetic field of course is coupled to all the other physical fields and through that intermediary so this is a combination model, a sandwich model, which might be successful in explaining perception, cognition, idiosyncrasies of time and that there would be sort of eventually a general relativity theory for the M field which would explain time anomalies like clairvoyance and so on. And in that case I think what we're talking about now is the conception, the struggle to envision the coupling between the M field and the electromagnetic field including wave metaphors, particle metaphors and so on. That's kind of what it's about, at least model one you described at the beginning explicitly in these terms. That's right. Well my first model you see has always been that the perception and mental activity must have a kind of field-like structure. They'd be morphic fields of some kind. These perceptual fields are in turn part of these behavioral fields which involve action as well as perception. The perception and the action are linked together. It's not motiveless perception that one's usually carrying out. It's linked in some way to action. Bergson said all perceptions are potential actions or possible actions. There's a sense in which they're very closely related. So this was my first model and I thought of the sense of being stared at as a way of testing for the existence of this other kind of field. It then occurred to me that there's this mystery of light. I still think you see that Maxwell's electromagnetic formulations of light are much too simple. You see, whereas you were saying the model of the brain to get the complexity out of it that's in it would have to be more complex than his equations, that's obviously true, but when I'm seeing you all the information about you, everything that's transferred to me through my vision is coming through the electromagnetic field and Maxwell's equation could... Well is it? I mean, are we not then buying the oversimplification of the physicist in assuming that? Why not have a full mental wave traveling from my mental being to yours as a wave phenomenon or a particle phenomenon, resonance phenomenon that takes place in the mental field alone? Plus you exist in a cloud of pheromones that are also transducing information. Yes, but in parenthesis about pheromones, this staring at test can exclude those by being done through glass window, double glazed glass windows and... But in fact in all cases when it's been done that we're aware of, hasn't the possibility that the pheromone was carrying the effect been... No, it's been done through windows. One of the most common anecdotal sources of this is people who tell me that when in traffic jams they're stuck in traffic jams or traffic lights with the windows rolled up, you know, and the air conditioning on and the window, they look at the back of the neck of women in other cars who turn around. I mean there are a lot of men who find this a favorite pursuit at traffic lights. I've had many anecdotes told me of this kind and that's through two lots of glass. No, that's pretty... So I think that... No, but even if you could handle this, if you could explain this with pheromones, that means that I would have to have the capability to focus my pheromones on a single person with mental power alone or visual or looking or whatever it is. So it's not a very good hypothesis. Anyway, I think it could be empirically excluded at a very early stage through these glass partitions. So back to the physical, the electromagnetic field. If one wanted to model the information coming, you know, through... If one did want to model it properly, how I could see you through the electromagnetic field, you'd need more than Maxwell's equations. And the thing is that the way we treat light is we take for granted the information that travels through it. Virtually everything we read is going through the electromagnetic field. All the information in libraries we access through it. I mean, there's all the... Everything that human knowledge is capable of in a stored or written form is mediated through it. We'd be in a pickle without light. We'd be in a pickle without light. And so Maxwell's equation does seem a little simple to model the transfer of the entire stock of human knowledge. Well, we've come to the crux of the problem because Maxwell's equations was made up to model the observables and it did a really good job. And here we're kind of stuck for lack of observables, in spite of this anecdotal evidence, which to me has the same force as a report from the Argonne National Laboratory. Nevertheless, I think that we ought to think about the possibility that this effect will not be confirmed in laboratories, which is already the experience of so many experimental efforts over these years with the cards and so on to confirm the so-called paranormal. Whereas there is evidence, it always seems to be just the slightest bulge of the curve to the right or left of the absolutely insignificant result that these phenomenon that we want to capture in a model don't seem to be very robust. And they come and go because, due to the fact perhaps that they live primarily in the mental field, they're very subject to the noise, the heat bath, and the mental field, which maybe all the time I'm trying to get the person to turn. Somebody else somewhere trying to get them not to turn, or they're trying to get somebody else to turn. I mean, I don't know. For whatever reason, these effects are very difficult to confirm. And I'm thinking of that as being a kind of evidence in itself, that on the one hand we have the very widespread impression that these things exist on behalf of many people dousing and so on, and on the other hand the impossibility to confirm them in the experimental paradigm of modern science. That somehow this is just suggesting to me the necessity for a thicker model, a richer field in which to try to do the modeling, where there's just chaotic attractors everywhere and no homeostasis or anything like that. Well, yes, I agree we need a thicker field to deal with most of these parapsychological phenomena. I suspect the sense of being stared at may be different under laboratory tests, you see, whereas the others have proved evanescent and hard to pin down. It's not that this has proved like that, it's that this is something that parapsychologists for some mysterious reason have assiduously ignored. And there literally are three published papers in the literature, and I gave a lecture on this three or four months ago to the Society for Psychical Research. I gave a lecture called "The Sense of Being Stared At," and there all the veterans of the British Society for Psychical Research were present, you know, ghost investigators of yesteryear and hardened experimentalists and so on. You know, veterans of many seances and so on. They were all there, and all the luminaries of the Society, and not one of them had ever thought of this as a paranormal or psychical phenomenon after 50 years of psychical research. They told me so afterwards. They were fascinated by the lecture because in a sense this has been, really has been, a blind spot of parapsychology. And if you look through any textbook on parapsychology, there's nothing, no mention of the sense of being stared at. Well, will this result in some new experiments then, or what must we do to stimulate some research? Well, I'm working on it. First of all, I've decided that I've got to try and train myself. I've got this biofeedback training system for this. You have two people. One sits with their back to the other. The other tosses a coin. If it's heads, you stare at them. If it's tails, you look away and think of something else. And so you make a click when you've done the coin, you're ready to stare. If it's heads, you then stare. And the other person from the click knows the trial's begun, and then they say yes or no, depending if they think they're being stared at. And they're right or wrong. You record the result. And then you tell them, correct or incorrect. So there's instant, like, biofeedback. And one can train oneself to test various subtle - I've done hundreds of trials of this - test on various subtle sensations. And the interesting thing is that most people are more often right when they are being looked at than when they're not. But the reason I wanted to discuss this in the first place is that I actually don't know which to think. I don't know whether it's better to adopt the electromagnetic hypothesis, which has certain adva - I mean, it has the attraction of giving another side to the phenomenon of light, which most people think is just physical, and it's all in textbooks. Because I think light's far more mysterious than that. And it also - that's one advantage. The second is that it then takes us into a whole other area, which is that this metaphorical use of words like the light of consciousness, and the fact that when we dream we see things in a kind of light. We do have a kind of inner light which illuminates psychedelic visions, dreams, daydreams, you know, visual images with your eyes closed. There's some sense in which our imagination, our image-making facility is self-luminous. Now, is that kind of light - if understanding or perception, if vision, is related to normal physical light, here we may have something where the physical light comes first and vision comes second when we're looking at somebody. You know, if you turn the light off you don't see them. But in this other case it may be the other way around, and their relationship may be expressed in the reverse sense. That if you have vision, in the visionary sense of vision, that vision may itself generate light through an association between vision and light, so that at least subjectively they're self-luminous. And then if somebody has visions enough, according to all traditions, they start developing halos and their bodies actually become luminous, according to mystical and spiritual traditions. It's interesting, according to one school of pharmacologists, attention is the thing they most suspect of being mediated by DMT, because DMT is so quickly able to be brought forth and degraded. It's very - has a fast reaction time, which is exactly what you need in a system where you're going to throw attention first from one object to another. And these tryptamine halosinogens certainly fill the head with light. I mean, if you take the visionary - the intensity of the visionary experience as an index of the intensity of inner light, then they release this. And they're near relatives in brain chemistry. Serotonin is transduced to melatonin by a light-mediated reaction. In other words, light actually enters through the eyes and a part of the visual pathway breaks off and goes to the pineal gland, where photons work a chemical change on serotonin and turn it into melatonin. And so the tryptamines, they're near relatives, all this stuff is going on in the pineal, and it's all light-driven chemistry. Nevertheless, it seems that this kind of vision has nothing to do with light, with the electromagnetic field. So even though these neurotransmitters are very photosensitive, the fact is that in the dark you have very bright visions, so that the neurochemical activity in the visual cortex or somewhere is, as it were, mimicking the effect of the photons falling upon the visual, on the retina, producing a chemical wave, etc. So in the alternation many times back and forth between electromagnetic and chemical waves, and well, neurophysiological level, these psychedelics, for example, are taking over at some point and supplying what appears to be the result of the previous train of several reversals. So this illumination on that level, actually, the photons can be replaced, as it were, by this other messenger. Well, it's interesting, this business of light. I probably tried this out on you in the past, Ralph, but one of my cosmological fantasies of years past was, you know, there's this curious problem with the fact that the photon has no antiparticle. It's the only particle without an antiparticle, and this is a really sort of disturbing asymmetry and things. And so who preceded me in this? I think Hans Olven, the Swedish cosmologist, he suggested that at the Big Bang, the reason there is such a low incidence of antimatter in this region of the universe is that actually the Big Bang was not a spurting of matter into the continuum, but that it went in two directions and out of a single point, like a double jet, and two bubbles were blown at once, in other words, and we are in one universe with a very high proportion of matter versus antimatter, and there is a twin of our universe, the anti-universe, and we cannot detect it or see it or transmit information between ourselves and it in any way. And in this anti-universe, every particle's antiparticle exists. Well, in a higher dimensional manifold, these things have gone off into the great void, but they are actually on a collision trajectory of such a nature that after a certain amount of time, they will re-encounter each other. And when this happens, because it's happening in a higher dimension, it isn't like a collision of two solid objects, it's more like the sudden instantaneous superimposition of two objects, so that this cosmic collision, if you will, could actually occur across the entire face of the topological manifold instantly. It would be as though every particle in the universe underwent collision with its antiparticle at the exact same moment. Three-dimensional blackout. Yes, and at that moment, parity would be conserved. All particles in the universe would cease to exist except the anomalous photon, which would be in this moment in which all the rest of matter disappeared. The photons would then be left to obey the physics of a universe made entirely of photons, and what this would be we can't say, but the form would be preserved in that final moment, of all form would be turned to light. And the body of the cosmos. Yes, and so since tradition is so keen on resolving things into light, and what's also amusing about this kind of cosmology is that it's a totally apocalyptic cosmology. There would be no warning this collision with the antimatter twin could occur at any moment. Another vision of the end. Terence McKinley. Of cosmologies, there is no end. And of apocalypses, there is no end. I think it might be useful, Rupert, to think about the habits of electromagnetic nature, and the behavior of the electromagnetic field as according to, evolving according to habits of the motor magnetic field, explaining in this way the resonance between them, as above so below, that the EM field has created, the EM field, through its bidding in the quantum matter level. Well, certainly, you see, if the electromagnetic field, it is the bearer of all visual information in the world. I mean, of everything we see, of everything in every book, in every diagram. Now, this brings me to another fantasy or idea, as the electromagnetic field is an interface, not just between the matter fields in us and the mental aspects, or psychic or morphic aspects of our being, but also the electromagnetic field is playing a similar role in the mental structure of the soul of the world. You see, if the soul of the world, if there is a world soul which permeates the entire cosmos, which in its bodily level is mostly expressed in the gravitational field, but which at its sort of knowing or psychic or perceptual level is mainly expressed through some kind of interface with the electromagnetic field, the electromagnetic field would be a perfect medium for the world soul's omniscience, and then through the world soul for divine omniscience, because that nothing that happens doesn't affect the electromagnetic field. The holographic reality of the electromagnetic field at any one moment is what's happening, at least it's in exact correspondence with what's happening. And so all the light in the universe, including this kind of cross-currents of memory that would be set up, for example, by the continued presence of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the fossil light of the Big Bang, it's still there as a kind of background, so that there'd be even a kind of light memory built into the whole universe. So this similar model you see gives us the universal electromagnetic field as the universal basis of the world soul, as of its knowing or perception or interfacing with other planes of reality, and as a medium of divine omniscience. Well I like the idea of the electromagnetic field being the chosen representative, the ideal intermediary that is positioned in the hierarchy of fields. In that way, it's positioned in the hierarchy of fields, it's very much as the position of our individual consciousness in the hierarchy of consciousness in the world soul. And therefore we have in our individual consciousness a particular affinity with the electromagnetic field, with electromagnetic perception, reception, and so on, as epitomized by vision. And if this fantasy has any reality, then it seems like it should be easier if there would be phenomenon of mental effect of the action of mind over matter. Then the easiest thing to affect should be the electromagnetic field, as in dousing as a sensitivity, direct sensitivity to magnetic field. Then you'd wonder is it easy to, for example, to mentally influence the magnetometer. Let me tell you one fantasy I've had for an experiment of this kind. You know those puzzle pictures that I did experiments with? You know, you have those black and white blotches. Did you see those ones I used in my experiments? When you recognize it, there's a visual gestalt is set up. You see the man on the horseback against the pattern of blobs, and you now see it differently. So if there's anything in this sort of thing coming out as well as coming in, when you look at that picture of black and white blotches knowing what it is, as opposed to scanning helplessly for trying to find what it is, you should be seeing it differently. And in particular, where the lines, the outlines of the horse are, which you sort of fill in mentally, those lines should be reinforced as above other parts of it. Now if this picture were produced by means of a liquid crystal display or something of that kind, where you could actually work full of sort of probabilistic processes that could actually be monitored in some way, I'm not quite sure how to do the technology of this, but some probabilistic light-sensitive processes that were built into this picture that you're looking at, you know, little units, it might be possible to pick up, when you explain to somebody, you have somebody look at it, you then show them the answer and they look at it again, and the pattern of output from this thing, of these pattern of probabilisms, may change, because it may be less random now that certain lines and directions have been recognized and reinforced. And that might be a way, if one could possibly design the sensor side of this apparatus, it's a matter of finding something that's probabilistic. I would imagine that in the photographic film, whether the silver grains go or not is probabilistic, except with high light intensity they'd all go very fast, but I should imagine with very low light intensity it must be probabilistic. So one could possibly do it with some kind of suitably fine-grain photo-immersion thing, where one has a light intensity where it's a probabilistic matter, whether you get the thing going over the edge or not. Do you see what I mean? Some experiment of that kind, some sense of... Maybe with a computer terminal or a photo-luminescent screen, there might be a way to to affect it by looking that someone else could see. That's right. If it's a photo-luminescent screen that's working probabilistically at a low level of intensity, you might be able to get a kind of enhancement of the luminescences along the outline, as it were. Just one more word on divine omniscience. You see, it seems to me that any theology of divine omniscience would require any all-knowing mind. Any theory of any omniscience, whether it's the world soul as an intermediary, or God directly, or the goddess, or any form of omniscience would require the divine mind to know everything. And since knowing everything would include knowing all the properties and states of the electromagnetic and gravitational fields, one can be pretty sure that what's going on in those fields is essential to divine omniscience, just on general principles. But the usual model I find when people think about divine omniscience is to think of it as an entirely miraculous process, totally disconnected from any kind of physical reality, somehow standing outside it. Yet any reflection on the subject would show that divine omniscience must involve not just somehow standing outside all things, but in some sense being imminent within them as well, knowing from within, not just seeing from outside. And therefore must in some sense pervade the electromagnetic field, just as Newton thought the medium of divine omniscience was space, absolute space, which he called the sensorium of God. Everything happens in space, and therefore if space is the sensorium of God, everything happens in God's sensorium, and God therefore knows where everything is, and how fast it's moving. Why is divine omniscience a necessary concept? We need a little primer on divine omniscience. I mean, can't the universe get along just being partially aware of what's going on? Well, it depends whether you think there's any... there are a lot of people who think that if they're pantheists, they think that the universe is in some sense conscious, or the soul of the world in some sense is perceiving what's going on, not just entirely unconscious. Or, and there are many theological traditions of divine omniscience, there are a lot of people who've got a stake in cosmic omniscience. I'm just stating this as a sociological fact. And what is so good about it? Well, that there's a lot to be said for models of reality. They're very popular, and I think that they're intriguing, to think of models of reality in which there is a knowing, a sense of knowing associated with the cosmos. Isn't that different from, I mean, divine omniscience, we all have a sense of knowing, but we're not omniscient. No. What problems are solved by hypothesizing that notion? It's to do with the question of the nature of our own minds. You see, there are two possible models. One is that our minds are the most advanced in the universe, and that's the standard model of secular humanism, that the rest of the universe is essentially unconscious, and that living organisms crawled out of the primal broth, and then through the miracles of random mutation and neo-Darwinian natural selection, gave rise to organisms such as ourselves with complex nervous systems that happen to have this interesting subjective correlative consciousness. And this consciousness we have has emerged out of the darkness of the earth and the darkness of the universe, and it's the highest consciousness there is. That's dogs and cats, you know, may have been a little way towards us, and it's conceivable intelligent beings exist on other planets, but basically this is it. That's the one model. The other model, the more traditional one, is to derive human consciousness from a much larger consciousness, which pervades the cosmos, pervades the earth, pervades the whole of life on earth, and that our consciousness has arisen by a kind of diminution or descent of some higher kind of consciousness, rather than ascent from a lower and finally from non-existent kind of consciousness, that we're a reduced version, a self-contracted version of a higher consciousness, rather than an inflated version of a lower one or none at all. That's the biophysical background. I find it more reasonable to suppose that our minds are in touch with larger minds, and in many ways shaped with larger mental systems, those of whole societies, the ecosystems, Gaia, the galaxy, the entire cosmos, and maybe a cosmic mind beyond that, or a universal. I think it more reasonable to think that our minds are in some sense... Well, I can go as far as a Gaian mind, because it seems a biological object, not a theological hypostatization. The mind of the whole universe, it seems unnecessary to hypothesize and unlikely to be encountered. It's no problem. Suppose there was another Gaia, another inhabited planet, then it will have its own Gaian mind. And they will be citizens of the universe, even as we are. And between our Gaian mind and theirs, there might be a dialogue in progress. Yes, but nothing of this suggests theology. This is just exotic biology. You just projected theology onto it as an association with Frey's divine omniscience, which is usually associated with Yahweh, the one God, and his divine omniscience. That is unnecessary to make that association. As soon as you have gone as far as the Gaian mind, you can certainly go further, as there is obviously a hierarchy of worlds up into the universe, as it were. Yes, although I'm not convinced that the hierarchy is minded at every level. The universe is obviously a hierarchy, but if there were simply... Does Jupiter have a Jupiterian mind? Well, possibly, but a stranger question is, does the solar system have a mind? I think that's a sort of silly... No, I don't think so. That's the interface to discuss, then. Yes, I think that's the interface, you see, because for me it seems entirely natural, I suppose, on any holistic model of reality, that if Gaia has a kind of mind, the soul of the earth, then the Gaian mind would be embedded in the solar system mind, and that in the galactic mind, and that these higher levels of mind-consciousness-being, which may be hard to conceive by us, are very likely to exist by a simple logical argument. I don't think that... Although not necessarily in a hierarchical order. I mean, chipmunks are not small portions of whales. No, no, no, but chipmunks are not inside whales. Chipmunks are inside sort of terrestrial ecosystems. They're small portions of terrestrial ecosystems. Whales are in different ecosystems, and both these, the oceanic and the terrestrial ecosystems, are part of the Gaia. So the hierarchy is of more inclusive units. The solar system is not on the same level as the earth. It's a higher level of organization of which the earth is part. The galaxy is a higher level of which the solar system is part. So we need to decide whether we can have any interest in a lunar mind or not, or a solar mind. I think it's an earth-lunar mind. Yes, I think the moon's part of the earth as a system. It orbits the earth. It's in its gravitational... It's in our blood, it's in our... It causes our time. If you accept Gaia mind, do you think there's a similar kind of mind associated with Jupiter? Yes, I think planets are animals. ...without having primates and so on running around. Yes, planets are like animals. But I don't believe that... I think that... Then there's a mental ecosystem of our solar system, which is the solar mind. Now we've got to there. And that's... in astrology, you see, there's an island. It's the movement... Now we've got your limit. But a minute ago it was the Gaia mind. Now we've boosted you without rockets to the solar mind. Certain other places in the solar system seem potentially open to the support of recognizable forms of life. The oceans of Europa... No, but does it need recognizable life to have a mind? You see, in the Gaia mind, it is not only the so-called living beings in it, microbes included, that have mind, right? The ecosystem is a mind. Well, but you don't want to define mind so broadly that it's no longer recognizable as what we say when we ordinarily use the word mind. Well, that's the problem, I think so. Well, we don't know what we do use. I think the Gaia system, as described by you yesterday beautifully, as this system of control, self-control, interpenetrating, holistic system, that the functions of all these different components of the complex system appear to think. I mean, they fit exactly our model of thinking. Now, to ask if it's conscious or unconscious is a different question, I think, which very much complicates the issue due to the fact that we have consciousness and unconsciousness. Oh, well, I'm definitely into the notion that if you can't have an I-Thou relationship with it, it's fairly uninteresting to call it a mind. Well, do you think that the Gaian mind would then be dead if the human species became extinct? No, any more than anyone else is dead if an acquaintance dies. I communicate with the Gaian mind, Dale. Then why can't Jupiter have a Jupiterian mind without the necessity of microbes? Oh, I grant that. It's these more diffuse abiological systems. Well, no, who said that? If Jupiter has one, the Sun... The Sun is a hard step to take. Well, this is one we discussed the other day. If the Sun indeed is a very complex resonant pattern of magnetic fields... It has neurons. ...with little sort of cells and vortices throughout its whole surface, the whole thing with very complex resonant patterns, as has recently been shown, with complete magnetic polar reversals every 11 years, starting at sunspot maximum, and longer periods of resonance, too, a very complex system of highly probabilistic turbulences, resonances, and so on. There's a physical interface. If a mind has to have a physical interface, then there's a pretty good one for the Sun. And the solar system as a whole involves all that's going on with all the planets, all the gravitational interactions. The electromagnetic field of the Sun, in which everything is made manifest, the electromagnetic field of the Sun includes us sitting here in this room, you know, everything that's illuminated. And if there's some kind of associated mind with the light, which is one of the things we started off doing, the solar mind, which is the source of the light, directly and indirectly, of everything that we see, is, in a sense, we're in it. We're in that solar. The light is coming from the Sun, and in a sense, we're in it. We may be, all things may be seen by the Sun. The Sun is often, in many cultures, called an eye in the sky. And on the dollar bill, that eye of Horus, which is in the triangle there, but it's the radiant eye, it's the Sun. It's not only the seer, but the emitter of light, which brings us back to the sort of theme from which we started, you know, the connection between light and vision. And if the Sun has both this inner dynamics, plus is the field of which all things in the solar system are seen and related, plus is related to them all through the gravitational field, we've got galaxies, clusters, and the cosmos beyond. Yes, there's no doubt that we can jack him up the rest of the way, but I think that the problem has to do with divine omniscience. Divine omniscience. That's more difficult. It certainly is. That put you off, that's... Because it implies a kind of knowing that is never met with. Well, that's surely implicit in the very concept of divine omniscience. Any notion that our consciousness is less than higher forms of consciousness implies there must be forms of knowing that we don't meet with. But omniscience is a kind of mathematical notion, not something you could expect any biological system to attain. Biological systems just get, you know, sentience, and then a little more, and a little more, and then a lot. But divine omniscience is like a mathematical absolute. It means certain knowledge of everything. That's some program. Well, I just was suggesting the simple thought that, conceived for the purpose of argument, that there's some kind of sense of knowing associated with the electromagnetic field. But does divine... Then would that not amount to complete knowledge of everything in the physical level? Well, I'm saying... Does it include knowledge of the future? I'm talking now about perceptual knowledge of the present. I mean, my discussion has been entirely centered on omniscience of... I'm not now thinking of future, knowledge of the future. That's a separate question. Omniscience, the Laplacian thing, wasn't it? Omniscience with a capital L. If you knew the initial positions, i.e. in the present, this divinely omniscient mind could calculate all future. Well, yes, that's the plus, but that was in a deterministic universe where the god was modeled on the plus. But what I'm talking about is divine omnipercipience, let's just say, omniperception. That if there were a mind associated with the electromagnetic and the gravitational fields, the positions and everything that's happening in the universe would be named to it, not through some kind of external mind looking and examining it, but because this name would pervade these fields. There'd be nothing in the universe outside them, and on the physical level. True, although within my own body I have very little understanding of what's going on. Well, the divine omniscience may be as unconscious as your omniscience of what's going on in your body. What you need to know in your body is when something alters. And if you had a pinprick, you'd instantly know it. But you'd know it by contrast with the non-pinprick state, because your present state is different from being asleep or unconscious or comatose. You see, the fact is that our mind is primarily unconscious, and consciousness is not a necessary consideration of omniscience. And I think a major fallacy of the modern system is to emphasize the grandeur of consciousness, and to imagine that our mind is primarily conscious is just to deny the existence of the unconscious, which is part of the rational approach as to the denial of the irrational. The fact is that consciousness is a drop on the bucket of the individual mind, and it could be that the guy in mind is completely unconscious, and that wouldn't matter at all. I think that it still functions as a mental being, and the concept of consciousness is inappropriate for the world soul, the cosmic mind, and so on. It's just not an appropriate concept. There's no need to project that little tiny self-reflection aspect of our own being onto the cosmic mind. It's unnecessary. One could discuss that at a future time. Yeah, what do you think about that? Well, I think that the cosmic mind may be largely unconscious, because I think that most things that happen in the cosmos are habitual and therefore unconscious. But there's a curious kind of consciousness or awareness associated with habituation. All sensory modes that we know of work on the principle of difference. What you detect are not fixed levels, like when you're sitting on a cushion, you're not sensing the pressure on your bottom. You habituate. And even in the simplest organisms, habituation is the first form of learning. It's the ability to sort of filter out or become unconscious of everything that's habitual in the environment. The way consciousness works... Novelty is the big thing. Yes, what attracts attention is novelty. Anything new in the environment immediately attracts the attention of a person, an animal, or anything. And they usually react with fear, then followed by approach and curiosity, and then if it's harmless, it just accepts the pattern and ignores it. This pattern is shown by pet dogs. It's universal. It's Gregory Bateson's theory of information. So it's the difference that makes a difference. I mean, this is standard sensory physiology. It's not just Bateson. It's that sensory systems work on differences, and sensory perceptions are all based on differences. So you become sensorily aware. If you're just staring vacantly at a whole area of what we call the visual field, appropriately enough, you don't notice anything in particular. But as soon as there's any motion in it, your eye immediately battens onto the moving object. And that's because it's a difference. So this is the way our senses work. Now, I think that if there were to be something like the Gaian mind, or the mind of the solar system, or even the galactic mind, that it would probably work in a similar way, be habituated to anything that stays the same or follows regular cycles. But it may be that consciousness would flare up, as it were, or become associated with anything that challenged crisis, problem, pain, or anything that makes, or any new thing that makes a difference. There might be a kind of rising of awareness about that in the Gaian mind. There might be, against a large background of unconsciousness, which is the way... You mean that what you're saying is novelty would drive this? Novelty would drive it. And it would be driven by... and also discomfort, because there's certain kinds of pain that we have that persist, and act as motivations for our behavior. And I think there'd be some... there'd have to be some kind of... So disequilibrium would drive it, is a better term. Yes. So disequilibrium and novelty. I mean, there'd be a variety of things that would drive it. But the reason I think that this is a reasonable view is that we see the same pattern, not just in our own minds, but in the rising of sensory differences and habituation, right back to unicellular organisms and plants. And it seems to be a kind of universal mode of awareness, or at least of sensory awareness. And since we're talking about perceptual... the perception of the world soul, as it were, if the electromagnetic field is, as it were, its sense organ, or a part of its sensory system, then something of this kind would apply. We're talking about reductionist Gaian psychology. Well, it's not just reductionist Gaian psychology. I mean, the electromagnetic field is any part of this, just as the electromagnetic changes in our brains are any part of the brain. Well, it's valuable to parse the system into parts without necessarily reducing it to its... some of its parts. We're talking at the moment, anyway, only about Gaian perception, nor about Gaian understanding, nor about Gaian hopes, fears, and... Contradictions. ...and goals, and nor about Gaian dreams, nor about Gaian daydreams, nor about Gaian memories. So there's much more to the Gaian mind than its perceptual mode of knowing what's going on now. And light is just one of the aspects of that perceptual mode, as it's just one of the aspects through which we know the world around us. But somehow, the light and what happens in the light has to be related to our vision. And so the question is, first, this question of our own vision, how it's related to light. Gaian vision. And then how Gaian vision, or other forms of vision, are related to it. Yes. So, we're on the track of a cognitive map of the Gaian mind. That seems to be the appropriate level. We've tried smaller, we've tried larger. That feels comfortable this year. Yes, that's right. Yes. A cognitive map of the Gaian mind. Maybe we should rest at this point. Yes. I don't know about you, but I'm going to go back and re-listen to that part where Terence was talking about a possible twin for this universe, but one that has more anti-matter than matter. I want to try to think about that in the context of a possible 2012 event. Of course, I guess the only event that would occur if these two universes, assuming they even exist, of course, but if these two universes ever collided, both would zero out. Poof. And what does that remind you of? How about those first few seconds after inhaling a couple of deep hits of 5-MeO? I don't know about you, but for me, that experience is pretty much an annihilation of my universe. I know it took one of my friends almost half a year to get back to baseline after his first 5-MeO trip, so if you're thinking about taking that journey, be sure you know what you're doing and have an experienced sitter with you, too. I'm also going to have to go back and re-listen to part of today's trial log and see if I can put aside some of my own ingrown bias against the concept of divine omnipotence that Rupert was trying to sell to Terrence and Ralph, kind of unsuccessfully, I thought. It's interesting that this topic came up in today's trial log because I recently received an interesting email from James, who's another Canadian saloner who joins us from beautiful Prince Edward Island. James broached the same subject by asking, "Do you have any interest in the intersection of spirituality" -- I hesitate to say religion -- "and psychedelics?" Well, yes, James, actually, that's basically what got me involved in this work in the first place. In fact, I no longer am able to use psychedelics without being spun into deep thoughts about spirituality. I totally agree with you that we should distinguish between organized religions and spirituality. Personally, I have a pretty dim view of all organized religions and don't see much spirituality in any of them. To me, the word "religion" is just another way to say we want to control your mind and have you think like we tell you how to think. Personally, I want no more of that. Thank you very much. If anyone wants a truly spiritual experience, all they have to do is ingest six or seven grams of psychedelic mushrooms and I'll guarantee that they'll have a truly mystical and very spiritual experience. I guess I should point out that maybe that shouldn't be anybody's first experience with magic mushrooms. Until you know how to navigate that space, it's probably best to use a lower dose. Maybe three or four grams would be better at first. I can't really say because we're all so different, so you'll just have to follow your own instincts on that. However, I do believe that it's wise to follow Jonathan Ott's warning that we should "beware the dreaded underdose." As funny as that may sound, my bet is that many of you know the truth of that statement. I've seen more people struggle with a low-dose LSD experience than with a heavy dose of ayahuasca. If you don't take enough to propel you over the threshold of that psychedelic boundary, chances are you won't have a peak experience and you might even wind up having a very uncomfortable trip. I don't know what got me hyperlinked into that direction, but maybe I better move on to some more earth-grounded topics, like the flood that recently took place in Scotland where it wiped out Queer Ninja's house and his recording studio too, I guess. As I've mentioned before, Queer Ninja produces one of the most energetic and happiest podcasts around. Although the "dope" theme comes in a close second in that category. I just really love listening to those guys. Anyway, when the sounds of the worldwide weed didn't come out in the week of the flood, I kind of expected a low-key, subdued program once Queer Ninja got back online. But was I ever surprised, pleasantly so, when I listened to his first program after the flood, the one that's just now out? In fact, he was even more upbeat and fun to listen to than before, and I think we could all learn something here. You see, each week at the start of his show, Queer Ninja tells us what variety or varieties of cannabis he's using. So now I know what to take if I'm ever flooded out of my house. It seems like this week's program was fueled by some Naples hash, and from the sound of it, this must have been some pretty amazing hash. In fact, I highly recommend that the next time New Orleans floods, we just forget about sending food and water to the flood victims, and instead send them large quantities of Naples hash. It might not restore their physical losses, but it sure seems to do wonders on the spiritual plane. Anyway, Queer Ninja, it's great to hear you back, and in such good spirits once again, and I hope you get the CAVE Studio back online and in operation pretty soon. And for those of you who haven't yet had the pleasure of tuning in to the sounds of worldwide weed, you really owe it to yourself to check out his podcasts, as well as the other great programs on the Cannabis Podcast Network. I know some of you have been sending emails and asking about what other podcasts are out there that might be interesting, and boy, the Cannabis Podcast Network, they've got a lot of great programming there, and you can find them at dopecast.co.uk. Also, I think you'll find KMO's latest podcast on the Sea Realm quite interesting. It features the second half of his interview with Rick Doblin of MAPS, as well as a soundbite from my recent interview with Sheldon Norberg. You can find links to those podcasts on our main podcast page, which is at matrixmasters.com/podcasts. Also this week I heard from Bill, who joins us from Japan, and who, like Nick and Trey and Fig and many more of you, says he's really been enjoying these Trilogues. So, many thanks for writing you guys, and I'll do my best to keep the Trilogues coming. But if you're looking for some other great talks in addition to podcasts, while you're waiting for my next program, or you've maxed out on some of these others, there's what appears to be a great website that lists quite a few lectures that are along many of the same lines that we play here in the Psychedelic Salon. I believe it was James, actually, who sent me the link. That is futurehigh.net. www.futurehi.net/media.html I haven't had a chance to listen to any of them yet myself, but their speakers include Albert Hoffman, Houston Smith, Joseph Campbell, Marilyn Ferguson, Terrence McKenna, and a whole bunch more. It looks like a great resource, and thank you James for letting us all know about it. I know I'm forgetting some messages that I got through tribe.net as well as from your emails, but if I don't get this podcast finished pretty soon, I'm not going to be able to say that I actually completed three podcasts a week for four weeks. But hey, it's been fun, and I've sure enjoyed being with you here in the Psychedelic Salon so often. It's really great to feel your vibe as I put these programs together. There are a lot of us out there, and between a whole group of podcasts like this one, we're all being interconnected in ways that we may never understand. But in some strange way, perhaps Gaia is connecting each of us in some kind of a new neural network, getting us ready for her next great evolutionary leap. Or maybe I should come back down to earth and close this program and leave the wild speculations to the trialogers. 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 Sharealike 2.5 License. If you have any questions about that, you can email them to me. My address is Lorenzo@matrixmasters.com Thanks again Jacques, Cordell, and Wells for the use of your music here in the Psychedelic Salon. And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. [Music] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.64 sec Decoding : 1.75 sec Transcribe: 3455.81 sec Total Time: 3458.19 sec