[Music] Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon. So, how are you today? I hope that the letdown after the holiday season, coupled with some strange winter weather, hasn't dampened your zest for life. I know that too much rain, fog, and just general dreariness can get to you after a while, but before long, spring will have passed us by and the big panic will be getting ready for your holiday, or something like Burning Man or some other exotic location like that. But in the meantime, I guess we just have to press on. And that's just what we've done with this first series of Trilogues, because today we're going to hear the first side of the last tape in this series. But when you hear Terrence McKenna begin by saying that this is the last of the Trilogues, please don't despair, because there are really many, many more hours of Trilogues ahead here in the salon. What he was referring to was the fact that this recording is the last of the 1989 series of Trilogues that they held at the Esalen Institute. And as it turns out, they continued having these three-way conversations until the summer of 1998. At least that's the last one I've got a recording of. Today's program, which is the first side of the tenth cassette tape in this series, is titled "The Apocalypse." An interesting title, don't you think? So without any further introduction, let's hear what Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake have to say about the Apocalypse as seen from their perspective in 1989. Well, we've reached the last of our Trilogues, and so it's fitting that we should cast our minds toward last things, since this both seems to be the theme of the crisis of the present moment and also the unique unifying thread throughout the Western religion, that most insistently of all religious systems on Earth, it is the Western systems that have insisted in appointing an end to their world. The cyclical worlds of Hinduism are cycles of time so vast that they lose all force on the popular imagination. But what uniquely distinguishes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is this insistence that God will come tangential to history in a way that will create a scenario of last days, of a great uptaking of souls into the mystery of God. This idea, which is called apocalyptic in its more catastrophic version, and millenarian in its more pastoral version, is the idea that is the necessary correlative to the concept of Eden and the unique moment of man's creation by God. If man's creation occurred at a unique moment in the history of the universe, then presumably after the expiation of the sin of Eden, God will gather man once again into the mystery. So this idea, which when encountered outside the religious framework in individuals, in a secular or desacralized vocabulary, is labeled pathology. The expectation of eminent transformation of the environment with the individual somehow playing a central role. This recognized pathological symptom in the individual is nevertheless the driving force behind much of our own civilization. We as educated rationalists, the most rational 5% of society, in spite of our pretensions to intellectual revolution, we are far, I believe, from feeling the real force of what this is. But at the folkloric level, the attractor of the end of the world is very strong. And you may recall some five years ago, the Secretary of the Interior was asked why he wasn't saving more of America's forests. And he replied that since Jesus was coming, he saw no reason to save the forest because the end of the world was imminent. So I find this thinking very interesting and I have personally certainly experienced its power. What is this intuition of the end of the world? And now that we're beginning to gather more data, that science is actually beginning to pay back on the promises made in the 18th century and give us a complete and deep description of at least the physical and astronomical universe, what we're seeing is a highly chaotic domain. There isn't a stable body in the solar system that isn't deeply pockmarked with asteroidal impact from the inner planets to the moons of the gas giants. There is tremendous visual evidence of catastrophic episodes throughout the history of the solar system. So we discussed in another meeting inconsistencies in nuclear theory with the output of neutrinos from the sun. Is there a problem there? Human history itself, to my mind, can be seen as a kind of shockwave attendant upon the eschatology. That if we were to imagine for a moment that God or a super transmundane mind were to enter into the ordinary biological and evolutionary life of a planet, then I think we would have to agree that there would be some kind of shockwave of anticipation, some kind of sense of the eminence of the disruption of ordinary events before it was in fact eminent. And this very brief period which we have experienced over the past 20,000 years is this thing, I believe, and these religions which have anticipated this thing in this rather crude end-of-the-world scenario are somehow on to something, something that is, I think, a message coming from the biological level, if you will, about the inherent instability of the world. Ralph's models and Prygogine's models and all this has established the role of the unexpected perturbation in the creation of the cosmos, but I don't think we've quite factored it into our day-to-day model of what's going on. One of the startling things that I find when I look back on my own life of slightly more than 40 years is the number of things that have happened in my life that we were told would never happen. I mean, I have seen presidents assassinated, human beings landed on the moon, robots to Mars, all of these high improbabilities in a single lifespan which we all share. So I think that we are sort of on automatic pilot with our assumptions that in spite of all our theory-making we are living in basically a probabilistic, synchronistically flattened universal plane. What if the urgency and the uniqueness of the human historical moment actually signaled yet more urgent and even more exotic moments to come, and that we are somehow witness to a major phase transition in the career of self-reflecting bios in the universe, and that for us it's the end of the world. But, you know, this is a meaningless phrase. It's simply a complete systemic reorganization on the scale of metamorphosis in Lepidoptera. It's just a complete meltdown of the previous world system and then a recasting at the behest of higher mind, Gaian mind, the world soul, it isn't clear. But if we could strip the provincialism from the message of these apocalyptic religions, I think they are, they explain what history is. They have a deep intuition of instability, and in the same way that I described the reluctance of plants in a botanical garden to venture out on an unstable tree limb, I think these apocalyptic religions are trying, they are all prophetistic religions. They are trying to extract something out of the human future that is of no casual interest. It may in fact involve the survival, yes or no, of the planet. So I'm interested in ideas like that the transcendental object is somehow leaking information back into the past at a 3% rate, or something like that, that shamans and mystics and psychedelic travelers are in fact getting a very incomplete low-grade signal about this event that is, I think, based on what we talked about last night, that it's somehow built into the structure of space and time, that the presence of our minds indicates that we are very near this enormous, concrescing singularity. Minds cannot exist except within 25,000 years of complete concrescence of one of these things. It cannot arise in parts of the universe where concrescence is not approaching its climax. So I don't really know the relevance of all this for theory-making. If in fact the concrescence is upon us, then really all we can do is chat about it as it comes down around our ears over the next 25 years. We are in such a tidal grip of the field that it really doesn't matter. We can only observe it knowing, having the meager satisfaction that we made an amusing model of it. If longer periods of time are available, then it might be worthwhile to undertake to study this phenomenon and its role in human history and so forth and so on. But it's more than simply the calendrical pressure from the approach of the second millennium. It's also all these graphs drawn by very straight people of resources and population density and demand for hydroelectric energy and levels of strontium in milk and all of this stuff. I mean, who can look at all this stuff and not say it's either the yawning grave or there's going to be a complete... the lake is going to turn over. There's going to be a complete system reversal because this cannot go on. It's abiotic. And I think life has a terrifying tenaciousness. I mean, life seized hold of this planet a billion years ago, a billion and a half, two billion years ago, and managed it through hellfire again and again, managed it back towards stable equilibria that were supportive of biota. And, you know, there were asteroid infalls and continents ground to dust, and we don't even know what went on. And life kept hold of this chunk of ground. So I think the advent of intelligence must signal a crisis of a greater magnitude. That's why I suggest that the stellar dynamics should be looked at very carefully or something like that. It's a different order of magnitude, and it's seeping into our religions and into our politics and into our psychedelic experiences and into the general imagination. I think we're standing on the lip of a hyperdimensional volcano of some sort toward which all history is being poured at a great rate. We have the peculiar good fortune of fulfilling the wish conveyed in the Irish toast, "May you be alive at the end of the world." So that's it, gentlemen. Now we can just kick this around. Some questions come up. Yes. There seem to be two stages to this apocalyptic vision, this particular one. The first stage is the confidence in an apocalypse coming sometime. And the other component is the location of the date, 20 years or so hence. You mean in my personal belief? Yes. So about the first one, it does seem sort of logical somehow that if there is a big bang at the beginning, there would be a big bang at the end. And the creation story and Genesis and the precedent myths might somehow be seen to imply that, but I don't know. I wouldn't think that's enough to go on. But then you said that in these traditions, Hebrew, Christian, Islam, that there is a definite tradition of an end in the mild form, the millenary, and in the strong form, the apocalyptic. Correct. Well, what is it exactly? What is the Secretary of the Interior referring to? He's referring to... And the Gospels or somewhere. In the revelation of St. John, this thing is laid out. It's very complex. Angels come and pour down diseases. Oceans boil. It takes a long time. There are plagues of scorpion-like creatures that come from the interior of the earth. Certain people are marked with a sign and they are the elect. It's just this completely bizarre production that is one of the most puzzling pieces of literature in the Christian canon. And the textual basis for this fantasy is entirely this revelation of St. John the Divine. That's right. Is that the apocalyptic, the millenarian, or both? Both. Yes, because at the end you see the twelve-gated city, the New Jerusalem, a flying saucer, comes. I mean, you can tell. I mean, the description is, you know, it's covered with jewels. It has twelve gates. It's God's kingdom come to earth and it comes to receive the elect. And as the oceans boil away and the damned are dragged into hell for eternity, these people with these special things shining in their heads go into this thing to be with God in eternity. And the whole thing is flushed. We'll have these sunglasses specially ready to sell them. In this textual basis for this fantasy, is there any idea about the date? Well, yeah. At the time of Christ, the people who immediately followed Christ expected it within their lifetime. "Amen, amen, I say unto you, this generation shall not pass away until these things are accomplished." It was expected immediately? Immediately. And there was this, like, weird... There's been disappointment after disappointment. Well, yes, there was this weird 120-year period where they didn't get the serious job of getting organized together because everybody was standing around waiting for the end of the world. And then after about 120 years, people like Origen and Eusebius and these people came forward and said, "Listen, enough of this waiting for the end of the world. We have to get the scene organized." It's seriously overdue. "Yes, let's get organized and get our hands on some real estate." Now that it's so seriously overdue and people have been disappointed time after time, I would think that the force of the prophecy has declined. In any case, I just want to ask you this. Have you any way of guessing why the Secretary of the Interior thought that the end was coming imminently? I know why you think so. Oh, yes, because there are all these fundamentalist cults in the United States, some whose adherents number in the tens of millions, who believe that it's happening, that it's underway. I mean, within the spectrum of Christian belief, you can go with the Seventh-day Adventists who hold the most extreme position, which is that it occurred in 1847. I love that position. And that we are now living in the millennium. This is the millennium. Yes, can't you tell? So that's the most right-wing view. And then there are those who undergo the formality of at least locating the date decently in the near future. And the year 2000, and it's the end, the turning of the aeon. Everybody has a way of decoding. This is one of the weird things about millenarian speculation. The person who discovers the key to the millenarian date, it always is just a few years ahead. It's you! It's you! Now I just have a couple more questions for the direct examination, then we'll turn the witness over for the cross-examination. What percentage, more or less, of the human population of planet Earth at the moment is involved in this Hebrew, Christian, and Islam religion? A third, I'd say. However, if you're trying to count the adherents to the apocalypse theory, you have to count all the adherents of scientism as well, because they too, with their greenhouse effects and CFCs and acid rain, I mean, they're the most... That's another story. I do think that might be even a bigger danger, but that's another story. Right now, I'm after the revelation of St. John the Divine. No, this is the end of the world scenario of scientism. And then we've had the end of the world scenario of nuclear holocaust. Yes. That's what they've been telling us for decades. That's right. And that's a ready-to-hand scenario. Oh, yeah, the oceans are... It's coming from the same culture. But I just wonder how much credibility to give to the Christian apocalyptic vision when less than half the human population is involved. It doesn't mean that just that half of the planet would be vaporized while the other half kept on going because they... No, see, I don't think it's a vaporizing. What it is is all these scenarios are metaphors for something really weird. Well, that's true. I know about the flying saucer. We're in a much better position to anticipate it than John the Divine of Patmos was. Well, you sort of started on the scientific end with the mention of the astronomical chaos and the craters on all the other bodies and the fall of neutrinos from the sun and so on. Catastrophic scenarios, you mean? Yes. Yes. Well, the positive scenarios are simply more far-fetched. I mean, one of the ones I've been playing with recently that I really like is that it ain't no big deal. It's just that time travel is discovered. It's a technological artifact. It's done in laboratories. The door is opened on this little tunnel and you just walk through. And history ends. History ends. Just bang, it ends. And that's the end of history. And people look back at it the way you look back at the Pueblos or something. And say, you know, people used to live like that in linear time. Weird. All, you know, waiting for stuff to happen and all in this weird jelly of stiffened dimensionality. And boy, aren't we glad we've got that behind us. And to the people who were born in it, the previous mode of existence would be mere rumor. And it would be simply a technological artifact. I think that this actually, after reading Nick Herbert's book, this, did I talk to you about the idea about the kind of time machine? Where he hypothesized this notion of a principle which works like this. Time travel is possible. Once it's discovered, you'll be able to travel into the future. When you're in the future, you'll be able to travel back into the past. But no further than the moment of the discovery of the first time machine. Because before that moment, there were no time machines. And how can you take a time machine into a universe where time machines don't exist? With nobody knowing it. Yes. So there is this physical barrier to time travel past the moment of discovery of it, backward, before that moment. Well, I thought this was very interesting because I wanted to imagine, this is a practical apocalypse. This is a, I wanted to imagine what would it be like if this kind of time machine were discovered. And so I imagined that it's December 22nd, 2012 AD at the La Charrera World Temporal Mechanics Institute. And they're counting down and the lady tempo knot has been strapped into the time machine. And they count down and they push the button and she sails off into the future. Now the interesting question is, what happens right there in the next moment? Millions of people arrive from a more populated part of the universe. Millions of time machines arrive from all possible parts of the future. Sneaking through the bushes, pretending they were there all the time. Asking for groceries. Exactly, to see the moment, this historic moment, the first time travel which defines the barrier as far as you can go in your time machine. And people say to each other, have you been to the edge? It's 35,000 years from here. Have you been back and seen the Abraham machine take off? So I loved this idea and I held it for about 48 hours as a great gimmick. And then I realized that there was a peculiar problem with it which has to do with the grandfather paradox. That one of these people from the far future could stop off on their way back to see Ralph's machine take off. They could stop off and kill their grandfather and set this paradox in motion which has been the defeat of all time travel schemes. So then I had what I believe is a serious delusional breakthrough. Which was I said, aha, there's something, oh well here's the model that you have to have to understand the next stage of this argument about the apocalypse. You know how the Bernoulli gas laws work. So imagine a vacuum filled elliptical tank. We introduce a burst of oxygen at one end of this tank. According to Bernoulli's laws what happens? It diffuses evenly throughout and comes to a state of equilibrium, correct? Well let's think for a moment of the planet. Now we'll make a geometric model one dimension down. Think of how today, 1989, on this planet we have all kinds of different levels of cultural achievement. Like we have central Tokyo and Beverly Hills but we also have Amazon rainforest people and pygmies and Berbers and all these people. Well now if you think of cultural values and technological prowess and scientific acumen as particles in this gaseous environment then which way do you think values are moving in order to establish equilibrium? Well the answer is obvious. More people in the Amazon are interested in what the Japanese are thinking than Japanese are interested in what Amazonian Indians are thinking. In other words the higher state of cultural accomplishment is slowly swamping all less advanced states of cultural accomplishment without arguing about what these terms mean in terms of advanced. But one culture is swamping another. Okay to return to the time travel problem then. A weird effect would ensue upon the invention of this forward going kind of time travel that I'm hypothesizing. It can be described with several different linguistic models. One way of saying it is when the lady tamponade goes off into the future all of the rest of the future unto as Wordworth says as long as date shall give a name to time all of that future undergoes some kind of collapse and happens instantly. It happens instantly so that the most advanced state of human accomplishment even if it be billions of years in the future and absolutely beyond our ability to imagine in any way will appear one millisecond later on the other side of this barrier. So then I thought my God we're not inventing time travel here what we're inventing is time death a God with soul. That's what it is. It's a God with soul. You create this technology and it just takes the entire future history of the universe up until its conclusion and compresses it down into the next few milliseconds as the thing spins down and then you are face to face with the end purpose of all evolution and all process and all pattern and all energy space time and matter. I mean you come out next to the big girl and this would work. I think this is not the edge of the West it's the edge of the rest. Yes. So there you have it a complete fulfillment of the monotheistic intuition of apocalypse with and what it is it's wonderful. It's that we figured it out. It's like the universe is this huge conundrum and you're in there and you're suffering. It's just this weird trip and then there's science and religion and magic and you're fumbling and you're fun and then you slowly go toward this thing and it turns out it is the stone is real. There is alchemical gold and when you grasp this to yourself then you know time and space and matter and everything ends and you go into the conclusion the payoff the jackpot. It's you go over the cusp and you meet the management. Probably this hasn't happened yet. No 2012. That brings us to the second question. As to this 2012 as already discussed there were different alternatives in the interpretation of this date as based on the time wave by itself such as reflection point of zero novelty and so on. Well I think that this particular apocalyptic fantasy of yours is actually a syncretism between the apocalyptic paranoia on the one hand and the time wave on the other hand because even if one is convinced of apocalypse but not knowing when is not necessary to associate it to the year 2012. No no it certainly isn't. It isn't necessary to associate it with that. That's a more that you know you enter into the slippery realm of human judgment and data fields and this and that the fact that it fits it so well and that without the time wave there is all this millenarian and apocalyptic pressure because of the turn of the millennium seems pretty suggestive to me. The Mayan thing is another coincidence. I mean really the Mayans and the Christians were within 12 years of each other in a way if you take the year 2012. We have the coincidence of several sacred documents. Yes. The revelation of St. John the Divine. Yes. The time wave another sacred document in software form. The Mayans. And the software. And the Judeo-Christian calendar or the Gregorian calendar. No I don't think a round number like 2000 has got anything to do I mean it didn't happen in the year 1000. No but there was a millenarian hysteria like you wouldn't believe. They didn't get any work done for two years. You see Ruth Benedict had studied 60 different cultures and she charted them out by all different parameters and finally she sorted them into three bins the Apollonian the Dianusian and the Paranoid. Now it just happens that a Paranoid culture having this Paranoid religion or at least with a Paranoid element in it contributed by St. John the Divine happened to get these extraordinary technical powers which are great generators of toxicity and so on. Well the term Paranoid is designed to make you not like it. It the implicit point of view and calling it Paranoid is one of scientism. Having been called Paranoid I know that this is what they do. If you're labeled this nobody's going to look into it. It makes the implicit assumption that there's nothing to be Paranoid about. Yet in fact we live in a very peculiar and dynamic and unsteady universe and it's very important to us as creatures to have stability equilibrium and evenness of conditions. So to argue it isn't Paranoia it may well in fact be a sensitivity to the... They always say that. Yes that's fine but the fact is from my point of view I mean I'm just a person hanging around here. I've never read the revelation of St. John the Divine. Maybe I will or maybe I won't if I do read it. I certainly don't believe that it's any kind of document with any credibility. You see I know that there are some fundamentalist Christians around who take every word of the Bible very seriously and they believe it. But here is like somebody as far as I'm concerned somebody's Paranoid fantasy was put down in a book. Well no I don't... They take it seriously so now they're Paranoid too. I don't think revelations is the interesting thing to discuss. What's the interesting thing? Where... Possible scenarios of sudden catastrophic phase transition in the natural world. Well now nuclear winter I believe in that. Well but these are mundane. I mean I outlined one for you that had a little teeth in it. There are others. You know this thing we talked about where the two... The arrival of the space people. The matter and anti-matter universes collide and leave a photonic shell under the aegis of a new physics. Well that's like a schedule for five billion years hence. Hard to get excited about. Or tomorrow. There is no way to predict when such a thing would happen and the notion that it's far away. You see the presence of minds is the signifier of nearby singularity. That is totally hypothetical anyway. It's just a model. That idea that minds signify the nearness nearby approach of a singularity. No the universe and the anti-universe in the synchro clash. Oh yeah I know but you can put 20 or 30 of these things. There are all kinds of... I think the asteroid collision. I mean a comet. I mean that's likely. There was a near pass recently. I think it was last month. Oh yes and did you see when it's coming back? 2012. And it's going to come to us. That's it. That's the last song. Now I believe it myself. I clipped it out of Astronomy Magazine. I knew people would doubt. They said exact computation is impossible but late in 2012. No but the author was a fan of yours. No it was Astronomy Magazine. It was Lick Observatory or something. Anyway I'm ready to admit that there are a number of coincidences about the year 2012 and some of them are ominous. Well I'm very hopeful and I mean the movement. I'm not worried about any credibility of St. John the Divine. I don't give St. John the Divine any credibility except that... The only thing is that from the morphogenetic field point of view there's quite a number of people believing St. John the Divine. Now that I have to take seriously. It's not quaking in the force. That's all. But it's up to cooler heads to figure out what this quaking of the force is. I mean we have much better techniques than John the Divine. So nuclear winter is much more likely than any of these other things we've discussed. Well but see I don't think a nuclear war is likely. But without a nuclear war just with continued toxification, CO2 outgassing, CFCs, this and that, the scenario is totally apocalyptic. We are facing a serious ecological crisis. An evolutionary challenge of unprecedented... You know James Lovelock... If we don't have a miracle every day we're not going to make it. ...said that the present extinction is one of the eighth largest catastrophes of the planet in its lifetime. So far. And so that's happening now. Like we are in something that big. I mean it's not... to be the biggest one it'd be the apocalypse. Well that's why you don't need John the Divine to tell you that there's an apocalypse underway. The scientists say... But it may not be a fatal one because there's not a... There's not a prophecy with any credibility to me that says there isn't some way to make it through. Although I have to admit I'm extremely doubtful of the intelligence of the species to find it. Well it depends on what the limit... what's causing the problem. If you think man is the problem... Man is the problem. Well what about this sudden appearance of large and repeated glaciations in the last five million years? This indicates either something is wrong with the sun or the geodynamics of the planet. There never were glaciers before. No there never were glaciers before. Glaciers are new in the life of the earth. They're not something that you see back and back and back. And all parameters of planetary stability become more and more unstable as you approach the present. Now is that just that the older a planet is... We're hovering in a field of chaos, yes. Well, so maybe man is the problem or maybe human beings are the answer. Well the earth could zip off its orbit and head out to space. That's a possibility. But it does seem to me that the ecological catastrophe is the appropriate interpretation of the apocalyptic vision at the present time. I agree with that. Well so do I, but I don't think there are alternative views because historically speaking, this millenarian apocalyptic tendency in Christianity, which inspired millenarian movements through the ages, inspired among others the Pilgrim Fathers to come to a new world in America, which was seen as the chosen land, you know. It's all part of the same kind of thing, this prophetic tradition. And it also inspired Bacon's vision of unlimited progress through science and technology, through organized research, the transformation of nature, man's conquest of nature, through putting nature on the rack and torturing her. This man's dominion over nature was there in order to bring about a kind of millenarian state, a technological utopia, the first technological utopia, where there'd be peace and prosperity and there'd be these wise scientist priest figures running everything and always finding out ways to make things better. So it's the idea of a kind of New Eden or a new promised land, flowing with milk and honey and material abundance, etc., through the scientific control and conquest of nature. Well, it's that scenario which is now causing the economic catastrophes, that scenario has actually worked. And there's a sense in which the apocalyptic scenario we find ourselves in is a product of the apocalyptic myth of history. Yes, good point. So it's in a sense a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I think that the tendency of mythic... The myths of science have an interesting dynamic, because they start with the Faust myths, where Faust sells his souls to the devil in return for unlimited knowledge and power for a fixed period, 24 years. But when you get to the later development, at the end of the period Faust is dragged down to hell, and then in Goethe's Faust, because he's an enlightenment figure who believes in progress, Faust is actually taken up to heaven. He's rescued from the demons at the last minute. That all became implausible, and the modern form of the Faust myth was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where the scientist is destroyed by his own creation, no longer by any supernatural machinery. But the whole of the kind of supernatural machinery of Faust becomes natural destruction by his own monster, in the case of Frankenstein. And it's obvious that the nuclear threat has a Frankenstein quality to it. And it's also obvious that the destruction of the environmental and ecological crisis has this kind of mythological base, which is apocalyptic. Good point. Well, we have to do surgery on the mythological base, due to the self-fulfilling prophecy mechanism, that while we don't understand it exactly, we see it working in history. So, in connection with revision of the religion of the West, I think one good thing would be a modification of the revelation of St. John, or a relegation of it to another place. It has to be, I think, reinterpretation was the word you suggested. You mean you need to switch the vision onto another track. Yes. Yes, well, how can we control the apocalypse, so that even though the self-fulfilling part of it can't be stopped, it can be steered toward a tolerable conclusion? Well, first, one historical note. The revelation of St. John the Divine is not a unique phenomenon in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It's in a succession of apocalyptic books, which abounded around the time of Christ, because many people believed that the end was literally at hand. St. John the Baptist's message was "repent, for the end is at hand." It was a period very similar to our own, in the sense that the idea of the end being at hand was widely believed, only too credible to them, for whatever their reasons were. The book of Daniel, in the Old Testament, is an apocalyptic prophetic book, and is a precursor of the revelation of St. John the Divine. These are just two examples in a large and extensive literature. It pervades the teachings of Jesus, this apocalyptic sense of the changing of everything. So, where was I? About Daniel. Oh, yes, Daniel. It pervades the thing, and it comes very early on, because the promise to Abraham, it starts with Abraham. God promises Abraham that he'll take him and his descendants to another land, he'll give them a land. There's a promise of a land where wonderful things will happen. Abraham's children shall be as the sands of the sea, and he shall be the father of many nations. And these are promises about things that haven't happened, but will happen. And through faith in these promises, history is made. And there's a passage in the 11th chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which is, in the New Testament, a doctrine to Jewish Christians. And there's a whole sermon on faith, how the entire motor of history for the Jewish people was this faith in what they hadn't yet seen. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for," the passage begins. "And by faith Abraham went out to find a strange land, not having seen it, or even glimpsed it afar off. By faith Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt to the promised land. And then by faith Noah built the ark, knowing not for what or when." And so when the rains came, he'd already built this ark, and everyone else was drowned, and he and his family took off. All these things are done by faith, and it ends with this thing about how we are moving by faith towards a new state, a promised land. Because if we belong to the cities of the world as we know them, we'd go back to those cities, but we're moving onwards, and it ends with that famous passage. We're strangers and pilgrims in this land. So there's this sense of being on a journey through time towards some destiny in the future, which can be a different place, like America. The Pilgrim Fathers were inspired by this mythology to come to America and see in it a new promised land. It's inspired the migratory ages of the northern Europeans for centuries now, this vision. And it's also inspired the attempt to change the world through science and technology. But it's so deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition that mere tampering with the Book of Revelation won't make it go away. It's fundamental to the entire historical orientation of the religion. As I was listening to this talk with you just now, it dawned on me that none of the speakers had actually defined the word "apocalypse." So I took a quick look in my dictionary and learned that the first definition of the word, at least according to the Oxford Dictionary, means "revelation." And the second definition goes on to say that it especially means a revelation about the end of the world. So the question, at least for me, becomes, "What do we mean by the end of the world?" Are we talking about the physical end of this planet, or are we only really talking about the end of the human species, our world? And now that I say that out loud, it strikes me as rather presumptuous to call this place our world. We're certainly a part of this world, but to call it ours seems to be the root cause of how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place. But hey, you already know that. I guess I should refrain from preaching to the choir, at least for today. So let's talk about some of the email I've been receiving. First of all, if you sent me an email message recently, you might have received one of those automatic replies asking you to verify that you're a real person and not a spammer. I'm sorry to put you through this inconvenience, but before I turned on that feature, I was receiving close to a thousand spams a day, and now most of that has gone away. But in the process, I accidentally deleted some of your email that the new procedure was filing in a folder that I thought was junk, but it really wasn't. The bottom line is that I've decided to sweep the decks clean and take the pressure off myself about answering all of the emails that have stacked up in the past few weeks. And if you're one of the more than 100 people who I've not answered yet, well, I truly am sorry about not replying personally to your messages, particularly because I get so much enjoyment out of hearing from you. But if I don't draw a line and try to go forward, my backlog is going to continue growing, and I'm going to keep losing sleep at night by feeling guilty about not answering you. So I'll try to do a better job at responding from here on out, and when time permits, I'll also read a sampling of the thoughtful comments that I've been receiving. Like the one I got the other day from Steve, who writes from South Africa and says, "What caught my ear was the concept of the underground university. Since we are kinda involved in education and designing edutainment programs, I have an idea. Go and have a look at www.gurteen.com, which is designed as a knowledge cafe or knowledge sharing community. Maybe setting up something which allows members to make connections with each other in the underground university, a place where everyone is a student and professor simultaneously. For our part, we have a life skills program that we'd be delighted to make available on such a system." Well Steve, that's kind of you, and I do like the offer of setting up something that allows members to make connections with each other in a sort of an underground university kind of way. So if any of you know of something like that already underway, please let me know and I'll pass it along. Or if you've got some ideas on how to do this as a part of the psychedelic salon, I'd also like to hear about it. I also received an interesting email from Connor, who writes from Down Under in Australia, and he wrote to say that he and his girlfriend have begun a podcast called Dictionary Psychedelica. He went on to say that he is an 18 year old who has just begun university and has become fairly disillusioned with a society that is manipulative and restrictive, and often just plain stupid. And he continues, "Australia is a big continent, so we're trying to find some way to connect the Australian psychedelic community, and a podcast seems like it might offer just that." Well, I really applaud your efforts, Colin, and you bring up a point that several others have also mentioned, and that is how can we all continue to get ever more interconnected through a wide range of special interest podcasts like these. Almost every week somebody tells me about their new podcast, and I always go out and download an episode to check it out. And now, to be brutally honest, I can't say that some of the early programs will keep me coming back, but hey, that was true of the podcast from the psychedelic salon, and even though I still have this crummy old microphone and still don't quite know what I'm doing, they are getting slightly better. So I've decided that before I plug any new programs here in the salon, it might be best if we've already produced eight or ten shows so that the early learning kinks have been worked out, and that you're sure you're going to keep podcasting on a regular schedule. That said, if you want to check out the first couple episodes in Colin's new podcast, you can find it at dictionarypsychedelica.blogspot.com. And Colin finishes email by saying, "Do you know of any other good podcasts that look at the psychedelic world and consciousness expansion?" Well, as I've mentioned before, my current favorites are the programs on the Cannabis Podcast Network, and also I think you might like some of the programs that KMO does over at the C-Realm. You can find links to these and a few others on our main podcast page, which is at matrixmasters.com/podcasts. 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 click on the link at the bottom of the psychedelic salon web page, which may be found at matrixmasters.com/podcasts. And if you still have questions, you can send them to me at an email at lorenzo@matrixmasters.com. Next week I'll be back with the conclusion of today's trial log, and I'll also let you know what I'll be podcasting in the future and when I'll be podcasting some more of these trial logs. Thanks again to Chantal Hayouk for letting us use your music here in the salon. And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from psychedelic space. Be well, my friends. (music) {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.66 sec Decoding : 1.57 sec Transcribe: 3424.14 sec Total Time: 3426.37 sec