Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon. So, are you ready to wind up these trialogues for a while? If you've been with us here in the salon since last December, well, you know that I've been working my way through the first series of trialogue tapes that Ralph Abraham loaned to me for podcasting. The tapes were labeled 1989 and 1990 and I've been told that these conversations, which took place between Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake, actually took place first in September of 1989 and again the following year. But there wasn't any marking or other indication on the tapes as to which year they were actually recorded. In any event, today I'm going to play the last side of the tenth tape in the series where they conclude their conversation about the apocalypse. Now if you're a long-time listener to these podcasts, you'll also remember that I kind of screwed up and didn't get tape four digitized. And of all the tapes to miss, the one that I thought had the most interesting title was tape four. It was called "The World's Soul and the Mushroom." But don't give up hope. Right now I'm trying to raise the funds to rent a car and return to Santa Cruz where I can not only interview some of the original merry pranksters who are still around, but I also hope to re-borrow that tape number four from Ralph and get it digitized and into podcast form for us. But for now we'll just have to imagine what exotic thoughts it may hold. So let's pick up at the end of last week's podcast where Rupert Sheldrake discusses the historical origins of the Christian view of the apocalypse as a journey through time and as the source of human migratory urges. And after we hear today's concluding talk, I'll come back and let you know what's in store from the psychedelic salon in the weeks ahead. 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? Daniel. Oh yes, Daniel. That it pervades the thing and it pervades, it comes very early on because the promise of the, 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 eleventh 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 are 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. We need to direct it towards a non-lethal satisfying conclusion. Well the momentum can't be... I don't think the momentum of the technological effects of all this can be stopped, or at least certainly not in the short... But you're now considering this possibility that I mentioned at the beginning Ralph, which is that there is this intuition is of something profound. That it isn't simply a lethal neurosis, it's the actual anticipation of what is now made inevitable by all this technology. Well in that case there's no problem. No, well I'm not sure... We're not going to reject the inevitable, just as you suggested, sort of like get used to it happening. Yes. Well get used to the fact it could happen at any time. You see Terence is so much like St. John, both in his St. John the Baptist form and in St. John the Divine. In the Gospels there's these passages of Jesus which Terence could easily quote and add to his Alimentarian... Is that Nicodemus, what Christ told Nicodemus? No, it's his prophecies in St. Luke's Gospel about how when the kingdom of heaven comes, it will be like a thief in the night. And in the parable of the seven wise and foolish virgins who are not ready for the end, many stories that say that when it comes it will come suddenly and you won't know when it's coming. And you have to live... Yes, I would call it a thief in the night and no man will know the moment of my coming. Exactly. And that's yielding now to Terence's view that there's no way to save this vehicle, that the basic scriptures are riddled with a self-fulfilling prophecy of apocalypse and either there is an inevitable apocalypse on the horizon or, in case there's not, one might be created by the self-fulfilling prophecy, the mechanism of paranoid delusion, then we would have to diffuse the time bomb of the Bible. That's a good way of thinking it. Yes. And the Koran. People should be allowed to let the apocalypse happen, not make it happen. Yeah. And if culture is a fantasy coming out of the unconscious, then we have set ourselves up for this. It's now going to be very delicate to ride this through, understand it, stop it, back out, and create it. So the myth of apocalypse, is this then one of the major weaknesses of this system from the evolutionary point of view? It's what enabled us to understand and discover the evolutionary point of view. The evolutionary point of view is the apocalyptic vision of history writ large, surely. I mean, the very fact that the notion of human progress made progress... Progress requires the beginning, the middle, and the end to even grok it. Yes. And the thing is that from the idea of human progress, which was widespread by the end of the 18th century, the idea of biological progress, i.e., the same process recognized in the human realm but extended to all life, seemed increasingly plausible to many people, because the idea of life as totally static and the whole of nature as utterly frozen, with only humans developing in this mode. You see, when Hegel showed the dialectical development of thought, it was a fairly obvious idea that Marx and others took up, of thinking of a kind of evolutionary development of matter as well. In other words, seeing the evolutionary process as not just a human one, but involving all life and then, since 1966, the entire cosmos with Big Bang cosmology. So I would say that the Big Bang cosmology, which is an apocalyptic vision of history with an explosive beginning and therefore implying an explosive end, is simply a projection - well, I shouldn't say simply - but is a kind of projection of this Judeo-Christian model of history. It's not just confined to churches and synagogues. It's something which has come to be. It's the myth which encloses our entire scientific world view, which has grown up within this Judeo-Christian matrix. And it started in the human realm, then it spread to... It's becoming an apocalyptic terrium. It seems inevitable. It is inevitable. It used to. But you see, the evolutionary view gives us a sort of vast timescale for this process. Basically, it's still in the same model. It says, sooner or later, maybe in five, maybe ten billion years, our sun will explode. It will follow the course of a grade three star or whatever its class is. Not that we know what the course is. But the typical course of such a star, we say, having observed stars for a few... A few years. A few decades. Fifty years of careful observation. And big supernovas that tell us what happens when a star blows up are things that we've observed occasionally, like one in 1987. Anyway, so the theory is, it's just a star. It will, like any other star, burn out. It'll either become a red giant or a black hole. I've forgotten which it'll become. But at any rate, that's the end for us. So the scientific world view actually does have the same thing. I think the sun becoming a supernova or a red giant and killing everything in the solar system, that would be our end. And it would be one that mirrored the Big Bang as a kind of incandescent beginning. That's the scientific view. That is an apocalyptic view. But the view is a few years. It's just that it transfers the apocalypse to the remote future. Conveniently, finally. So that you don't have to... It doesn't get rid of it. It has it. And the heat death of the old thermodynamic 19th century universe, the steam engine running out of steam, was a kind of slow but inevitable ending of time. The heat death of the cosmos was when entropy was at a maximum and processes work, and that kind of thing came to an end. And so it was a kind of... But you see... So now we're down to this, we're accepting the apocalypse myth because it's an integral part of the historical concept as the Israelites invented it. And we can't do anything about that. And nevertheless, this has no implication at all as to the overall longevity of our human habitation on Earth. No, I disagree. I think it's a strong intuition. So therefore, the paranoia of our culture is manifest in the assumption that it's happening tomorrow. Except that there's ample evidence it isn't paranoia. Who else has nuclear stockpiles? Who else has agent or nuclear... Who else has CFCs dissolving the ozone hole? This is not paranoia. Paranoia? The Earth is on fire, haven't you heard? There's no reason to worry about being too paranoid. You can lift your foot off that pedal. It's okay. You can go with that intuition now. The planet is on fire. To fasten the fire to a complete incineration in a certain year, no matter what the response is. No, that's not what's being said. You can interpret it as the smeared apocalypse that takes 200 years but still ends with everybody dead at the end of it. Or the fast apocalypse that takes 15 minutes and could happen today or tomorrow. There are all these styles of imagining it. The style matters. I think the style of the projection of the apocalypse in the year 2012 I think is actually damaging of our chances of having a future. No, I think it's a way to manage it. If it's just it could be tomorrow, it could be 200 years from now. That's a little weird. Why not manage ourselves through a narrow neck in a state of high awareness by... You know, there should be tremendous pressure on governments to get rid of nuclear stockpiles by 2000. Yes, sure. To actually... Well, but to use the calendar as a club saying, you know, do you want to enter the third millennium armed like barbarians? Do you want to be just like King Canute? He was who was in charge at the turn of the last millennium. Do you want them to hold you up to King Canute and say, "Canute, bush, two Viking warlords, two knotheads," or do you want to drape yourself in the olive of peace and be, you know, the savior of the world, the unifier of mankind and so forth and so on? It's a great thing to... What I'm suggesting is that the coupling of the apocalyptic vision of the revelation of St. John with the concept of the end of time in the year 2012 makes most likely the response of the Secretary of the Interior who says, "Well, so what? I mean, there's nothing we can do about it, so let it go." Yes, well, you're going back to the revelation, John, which I would have seen... I could have seen this discussion go on with never a mention of it. That's just an obscure Christian text, interesting to fanatics, but the overall world... But the whole idea... ...toward this issue... That idea is evoked in people's minds through use of the word "apocalypse," our subject here. Well, I call it the end of the world. Good. That's much better. It was my notion. That lets John off the hook and the Bible. The end of the world. All right. The proposal of the end of the world happening in a fixed year is not inclining people to do something about nuclear stockpiles by the year 2000. But who cares if the last 12 years have or do not have nuclear stockpiles? No, I didn't link the two together. I meant that the year 2000, everyone wants to celebrate the millennium by feeling like there's a new style, a breath of fresh air, a new order. So the year 2000, forget 20... Peristrict and the United States. There should be a thorough examination on the part of everybody of their society as we approach the third millennium. That sounds good. That would be a fine thing, I think. You know, it's interesting when they tested the first atomic bomb at Trinity site at Alamogordo. Of the 19 physicists who observed it, there were six who believed that the temperatures were high enough to ignite the atmosphere and that the entire planet was in a... there was a 30% chance that the entire planet's atmosphere would be set on fire by this experiment. And they went forward. They had no reason to believe that this wouldn't happen. That would be an interesting experiment. Well, it didn't happen, obviously. It's not hot enough. And I wondered how hot it could be. That was a close run. That was a close one. And this comet coming back in 2012 looks like a close one. That's the definition of a close one. That's a close one. And the toxicity... The population explosion. What about projecting the population explosion to the year 2012? How many people would that be, if it continued apace? I don't know. It depends on whose figures you use, but probably approaching 10 billion. 10 billion people. And there's a lot of people who are going to die. And there's a lot of people who are going to die. And there's a lot of people who are going to die. And there's a lot of people who are going to die. And there's a lot of people who are going to die. And there's a lot of people who are going to die. And there's a lot of people who are going to die. And there's a lot of people who are going to die. And there's a lot of people who are going to die. And there's a lot of people who are going to die. And there's a lot of people who are going to die. biological informational soup of intentionality but what is it's intentionality? It's not in the hands of any person in the organization, anything we can figure out it's just the Gaian will and it's incomprehensible what is happening on this planet it is like the metamorphosis that goes on inside the chrysalis except this is a planet that is having its forests liquefied, its oceans boiled, its populations moved, its genes streaming in all directions with all these exotic toxins mixed in and it has this it isn't for death that it's moving it's moving towards some kind of other thing not death. Yes well this is the new the new gospel of Saint John is what you're raving. Gnostic apotheosis. This is the green version of the apocalyptic vision that the apocalypse is actually this, this ecological poison through the rampant infection of the of the planet by the human species. Well but is it poison? I mean you have to remember that oxygen was a deadly gas that totally destroyed the biotic organization of this planet and in fact a billion years was spent responding to the presence of oxygen yet it is the basis of all present life. Yes. No I think we're at the edge of the apocalypse. I would call that an apocalypse without having the complete sterilization of the planet something on the on that order that took a mere billion years to recover. The asteroid. The whole of the erosion of life on the planet begins again from scratch at the microbial level. That's right if these asteroids strikes nothing larger than a chicken. You have to say that's that's satisfied the original Saint John's description of the apocalypse. Yes. So that's it then the green version the green reinterpretation of the of the bible identifies the present moment as the apocalypse. Oh I'm sure. It's not even in 2012. We're on the edge of the apocalypse. It's a time storm. Since 1847. It's a time storm whose diameter is impossible to estimate and all we know is that the barometric pressure is dropping faster than you've ever seen it drop and there's an eerie stillness and the light in the sky looks very strange but nothing has happened yet. It does seem to be out of hand as far as you know the scale of something that we could interact with and in any way I mean we're the passive observers of this problem. Well if we could model it. Well are we the passive observers? I mean we're also... Magic you mean? Well no we can prepare... Fractal dynamics the apocalypse must have its own inner laws and dynamics. This is what we're attempting to do I assume. Yes but it also I mean before we get into the actual mechanics the bit more speculation is called for. Surely not. Assuming that human consciousness doesn't simply become extinguished at death we have the question of what happens when millions of people die together and what happened in Hiroshima when all those people died or in Dresden and the firebomb attacks caused this fireball and firestorm in Dresden. All these people suddenly die together they all pass through the state of the death experience not the near-death experience because this is for real the death experience which from the descriptions we have involves going through a tunnel entering a new kind of realm and a different order of reality rather like the birth canal but into another dimension. Now however we conceive of what happens at death leaving aside only the materialist hypothesis that all just goes blank. The end of the world through any of these scenarios billions of people more than ever before dying at once or by the by the million is going to create an extraordinary flux of souls to put it in traditional language an unprecedented rate of flux and an unprecedented passage and perhaps those who die in the same moment through the same cause undergo some kind of fusion. There may be some kind of psychic being a kind of humanity. What one way of picturing it in Christian terms is that what's happening to the earth is a global crucifixion. The whole of humanity is undergoing a kind of crucifixion and there'll be a moment when the crucified body of humanity is through the there's a collective moment at which humanity gives up the ghost or at least large sections of it. The nuclear scenario incidentally Ralph according to its script since the second world war is essentially meant as the auto-destructive Christendom because all nuclear targets bar those in Turkey which is on in NATO but NATO and Warsaw Pact countries with the exception Turkey are all Christendom and it's western Christendom in western Europe in the United States and there's eastern Christendom in the Soviet Union in Greece and essentially a nuclear weapon nuclear thing would be the auto-destructive Christendom which would be very much in the self-fulfilling prophecy mode of you know this particular apocalyptic but the environmental one is much more global. It's no longer as we shift from our focus of attention to the dangers of nuclear war not that there's any reason to shift from it all the weapons are still there but or as the fashion changes and we turn our attention to the global thing we now see that this isn't just Christendom it's everybody. Anyway if it does involve everybody then part of the Omega point or the thing that Terence is trying to describe obviously involves some kind of transition in consciousness which might be achieved through mass death and might be achieved without mass death through something like that I think Terence rather vividly portrayed on one occasion as being like a kind of collective BMT experience. The glory. The glory. I'm not sure that I can explain the glory. It's a rap or they also call it the rapture fundamental. The rapture yes. The eminent expectation of this thing that they call the rapture which will be the opening note of the end of the world scenario and they're carried up into the heavens in the rapture they're actually drawn a lot. It's a transect. Their clothes are left behind as they use the automobile going vertically to the sky. That's the one the rapture. See it's interesting because we all die there is an apocalypse built in it's just that it only happens to you and so every human life becomes ultimately an approach to this question of final time. What difference does it make that you're the only one that's going to die after all that's the one you're standing in. So it isn't that if you don't live in the age of the end of the world you don't get to deal with the question of final time. It's just that in this age the death of the individual and the death of the species are somehow both possible to contemplate. Yeah and the death of the other species. And the death of the other. It may be you know I mean lots of traditions teach that life is organization for the purpose of creating a kind of after death vehicle or some kind of structure in a higher dimension which is it carefully made will survive some kind of transition that is potentially could fail and that you're supposed to spend your life doing this. Well if the sun were to explode then the entire biological shell of organizational soul ecoplasm would be liberated in a fraction of a second. Yeah. We don't know what life is for or what death is for. Well I think it certainly makes a difference the way it certainly makes a difference to the way that individuals face death in what they believe happens to them afterwards. And people who've had near death experiences where they've experienced this going through a tunnel as altered state of consciousness out of the body experience so they have the sensation that there's something in them that leaves the body and survives it. An experience which I think is related to lucid dreaming which in turn is related to dreaming which is the experience we all have every night whether we remember it or not of traveling in other realms with another body not the same as the physical body in bed but an implicit body at least. And if the state of being after death is like dreaming without being able to wake up so that when we die we're captured in the realm of our dreams we pass through this tunnel and we enter a realm which is more like the realm of dreams than the life of waking experience that there is indeed a post-mortal act of life in such a form. A form glimpsed in dreams in some kinds of psychedelic experience where the barrier that's penetrated may be like the membrane or the barrier that we penetrate at death and they may therefore be akin to near-death experiences which I think DMT probably is. Then if there is indeed this state of individual survival after death we have to ask ourselves what would be the state of collective survival if indeed our billions of people were wiped off the earth and most people don't want to think beyond that moment it's a catastrophe we must do everything we can possibly do to avoid and let's start by recycling our beer cans. That's the usual approach but if you carry it through and see what might happen afterwards vast numbers of people going through this barrier at the same time collecting a kind of creating a kind of group mind of a kind never before seen post-mortal plane possessed of a powerful imagination perhaps. I mean if all of them passed through and believed in the new Jerusalem the new Jerusalem might indeed manifest in this plane and there might be some kind of post-mortal state which is the attractor. The point is that the there are various ways of thinking of what it is that's drawing people to this millennium both in expectation and in dread. I mean this is the approach of another metaphor is the last judgment meeting God as Terence put it like the mind of God coming into history. It's a mixture it's no longer just the loving God but it's the it's the image of God that certainly has the shadow side in it because it's the it's a dreadful moment. Yes day of wrath and doom impending as the DA's ear I puts it. It's an interesting question as to why the apocalypse is such a strong attractor and the attractors that somewhere beyond that or the doom and and and this moment there's some other state of being which is extraordinarily blissful compared with anything we know here and is utterly more perfect and it's the same fantasy or dream that was the recovery of Eden the going to the promised land the coming to America the transformation of the world through science and technology. There's something quite magical and infinitely attractive that's motivated the entire historical process and if in Terence's view what we experience is some kind of shock wave coming back from the future that this thing is going to happen and its approach is sending back these kind of shock waves through time quite a I mean a powerful image I think. Then we have to consider that this that this this is what really is happening it's the blissful state or whatever this might be that is actually acting as a historical attractor. It's so powerful an attractor is it that do as we whatever we do we can't escape from it once that's been conceived and and and allowed to infiltrate not just our religion but our entire secular political intellect and scientific and intellectual life. So the justification for the omega point concept of Deschardin is actually this mechanism built into the apocalypse vision. The omega point is apocalypse it's it's it's Deschardin's conception of the apocalypse not just at a human level but at a cosmic level. Yes yes it happens to all nature. And let me just add one more ingredient to this particular line of thought when we were at Hollyhock recently Brian Swim came up and was talking about his cosmological views and and he was exploring the idea that the universe like a developing organism has ages at which things happen it has an inbuilt cosmological time. It's not like the old universe where galaxies were coming into being others were dissolving it just all went on forever in endless cycles. There was a time when atoms came into being first in the universe there was a time when galaxies formed or at least the great majority of them. There was a time when planets could form. Planets couldn't have formed a minute after the big bang. There was only a time after supernovae had been in existence. Stars had formed and stardust from supernovae. The time when planets could form. So in a sense just as in a developing embryo the development has particular times or phases or synchronies. So if there were life on other planets that the stage it's at might not be that very different from the stage ours is at. So I said to him this was the most interesting line of thought and if since I'd also been thinking about parallel evolutions and their possible effect on us through morphic resonance interplanetary morphic resonance similar Gaia's in other solar systems planets of the species Gaia will be in resonance with ours and planets of the species Venus will resonate with Venus and so on but we're interested in Gaian resonances and I said well how far you know in just sort of rough estimate order of magnitude in in time do you think they'd be from within a billion years of where we are within a million within five hundred thousand within fifty within five you know what just where would you put it he said just guessing fifty to five hundred thousand years of where we are so there might be you see similar processes really a big bang I don't understand why he assumes that because of this developmental theory I understand that but my guess would be five hundred million years I mean you have to be reasonable no yes but take into account morphic resonance if there is indeed morphic resonance between the planets so that when a new form appears on earth it's vastly more likely to appear on other planets you could have a greatly accelerated evolution on other planets until they almost caught up so if any got in far in the lead the morphic resonance effect would tend to make the others catch up a little bit like your time where yes there's cosmic synchronization principle the nearest place you can check this is 4.5 light years away and that may not be suitable there is a sun type star in centauri 1.1 solar masses if there were an oxygen rich water heavy planet there you could it could be a twin earth called haven't we been here somewhere before this islander what are you doing about your apocalypse problem but the thing is you see that the the christian apocalyptic version the vision has several forms one's the local human one it just happens to people like the jews going to the promised land didn't change all nature it just meant they got other people's vineyards and took over other people's fields and killed the native inhabitants or reduced them to some second-class status a repetitive pattern in history and um but this was a limited vision of where this whole process was then we then it got more and more elaborated this apocalyptic vision until in time of the shadow it's the end of the evolutionary cosmos and it's not just the big crunch it's much more immediate than that somehow and so it's this attractor pulling forward so it's this cosmic vision but the thing is that it seems to us unlikely given our standard old-fashioned cosmological view that anything that happens on earth would affect the rest of the cosmos but if lots of earths are synchronized and if there are these you see then then we do indeed begin to get the sense of the possible cosmic apocalyptic i don't know how much you're an interesting idea that's interesting cosmic scheme that at the end time of the end of the soul of the world the end of the yes or the total transformation of the soul of the world that it may be a maturation process or that's you know because present cosmology hasn't got very much to offer in the way of what happens in the future as you've got endless expansion which seemed persuasive to people in the 1960s when it was generally believed that economies could go on expanding forever and forever so a cosmos that went on for years then people got worried about the big stock market crashes that all gained the whole thing ending in tears then we got more big crunch scenarios on the market you know it may there may be just enough dark matter close to the indeterminate value they can't exactly now they've got into a very subtle position which i'm sure the medieval school men would have admired as a solution to the problem saying that we're hovering on the very brink between an ever expanding never collapsing much so close to the margin that it's impossible ever to tell yes so but you know these are these are rather uninteresting visions of of the future you've actually created another mechanism for an apocalypse it happens somewhere else and and then by this kind of imploding process once one pops it's a chain reaction the stars would fall from heaven and the lights of the galaxies would go out and well it's similar to this time travel problem of collapsing time the god whistle god whistle that's right it's a spatial version of the god whistle yeah a synchronization of god whistles cosmos wide yes a cosmic chain reaction at a certain developmental stage that just pulls everything down into it we have to believe that the universe is stranger than we can suppose yes and that's the way by avoiding closure and keeping that in front of us i think we will not go far wrong the trouble is that at the apocalypse if it happens the hermeneutic cycle will come to an end yeah if it happens in 2012 i'm sure i'll get no credit whatsoever for having been right it'd be a bit late for credit to be much value to you i suppose so well a raptural new jerusalem might have to take its physical existence in another universe i mean only this universe will pop yes well what is it this new jerusalem that everybody leaves this machine of sapphire and emerald and chalcedony that descends from the sky and in which there is you know a world of delight before the presence of god i mean this is the promise this is the covenant this is the fulfillment of the covenant is that the ocean will boil everything will be lost and do not give up the faith because at the landing of the ark the covenant was made not with abraham but with noah with humanity and it will be redeemed there was all this yes this the pledge will be redeemed the the promise will be kept don't throw away your coupons they'll be cashed in due time that's right the promise will be kept i think it probably will be kept well i do believe we've i think we're done the apocalypse myth suitable for the purple and green church you think that we've uh we've transformed it yes well the the green church of brazil already has a version of the apocalypse myth which is um they believe in very strongly and and they in theirs the the dragon in the last days comes and eats up the forest they say it's an inca prophecy and burns and destroys a dragon incidentally which is prophesied at the very beginning of anglo-saxon liberal political theory in hobs's model of leviathan because the dragon that's destroying the amazon forest is the great monster leviathan which society in hobs's view is the aggregate like cells in the body individuals are like atoms in the body of the one there's a dragon in in the revelation of saint john yes so here's heaven crushes the head of the serpent so here's the serpent which is and and in the last days the the the struggle between the the the serpent and the forces of light grows ever more intense people are forced to take sides because it no longer is possible to sit on the fence because the fence itself is crumbling and there will be an intense polarization through the 1990s in their view you know towards the coming of the millennium because these forces become ever more powerful preparing for the final battle well this is a fairly traditional version of millennium this is already one adopted by what one could call a green church and it's one that sees the struggle that's going on as being of uncertain outcome in a sense although through faith in the victory over the dragon though the victory will be achieved through faith so it's another form of seeing faith motivating faith in some future state motivating the struggle and it's a powerful inspiration and actually without some such inspiration i don't think the green movement can function properly and that means that any apocalyptic vision that either sees the apocalypse as inevitable or as something we can't do anything but is as you were suggesting earlier perhaps destructive in effect but an apocalyptic vision which sees it as a process in which we're participants and to which we can make some difference then unleashes this kind of heroic archetype incidentally i think that both the conquest of nature and the environmental movements are under the aegis of the heroic archetype in one of them the hero's saving humanity from the ravaging powers of destructive nature like the battle of doctors against cancer in the other one the environmentalist is saving the virgin virgin nature from the onslaughts of this destructive dragon of leviathan which is devouring the forest polluting the world shitting everywhere so anyway they're both under this under this archetype and maybe it's too late for us to escape that particular heroic archetype either because the only thing that can motivate the green movement is a heroic archetype whether it takes the form of actual guerrilla fighting or whether it takes the form of non-violent resistance a kind of gandhian and christian version which will generate martyrs who will then have this great archetype of appeal but only some such millenarian faith i think could motivate the green movement sufficiently fast enough and sufficiently deeply enough to change the scenario and so i think that we're this is another way of saying we're so in the fold of this millenarian in its field that only another millenarian scenario could possibly help undo it rubbing it out getting rid of it forgetting it suppressing it psychically engineering it out of our psyche i think we're past all that yeah that's why a jihad to save the earth doesn't sound like a half-bad alternative from chaos we came and chaos shall return the middle name of chaos is opportunity well we have to end somewhere if like me you listened to last week's podcast before uh picking up on today's you uh probably right now have your head so full of new thoughts that you don't know where to start thinking about these things first one of my favorite lines in today's podcast was when terence said people should be allowed to let the apocalypse happen not make it happen and uh i wonder if i'm the only one who had to stop for a minute uh when terence called bush a knothead had to stop and remember that he was talking about bush the first the father of the current knothead in the white house i can hardly imagine what the good bard mckenna would think about the moron in charge today and actually you know it's uh it's kind of sad in a way to hear terence ralph and rupert talk so positively about their hopes for change in this new millennium i guess that way back in 1989 when this talk was recorded no one on the planet could imagine how a single psychopath like bush jr could make such a horrible mess of things but enough of the dark side let's let's go for a little light and i don't know a better way to lighten up than to kick back and listen to a podcast of the sounds of the worldwide weed in case you missed it queer ninja's world music podcast is back online after several disasters that included a flood and a trip to the emergency room hey ninja it's good to have you back again and even though the dope fiend did a really good job of filling in for you i think it's safe to say that your beautiful podcasting personality was greatly missed by listeners all around the world and it seems like queer ninja wasn't the only podcaster to suffer a series of near disasters recently from what he's had to say on his latest podcast it sounds like kmo has had a battle with the elements as well but hey they just keep on podcasting and you can find links to their programs on our website at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts you know a couple of you also have written to ask why some of the back podcasts you've already downloaded have begun showing up in your aggregators as new material well i'm sorry for any confusion or inconvenience that is caused by this but i'm in the process of moving all of the mp3 files to a new server but never fear any of you who have made direct links to the programs from your websites i'm not going to remove any of the original mp3 files from their locations this move is just to point new people to these somewhat refurbished files and by that i mean i've tried to fix the problems in the id tags that cause some of the old programs to be difficult to find in your directories i've finally gone to a consistent naming format that i think will work on most of the popular mp3 players and once this project is completed all of the programs from the salon should show up in one place and be numbered consecutively which will make it a lot easier to find a specific program that you may want to go back to for another listen of course all of this work isn't going to help you if you've been with us for a long time unless you want to download the refurbished files and in that case if i were you i'd wait until i let you know that the project's completed just in case there are any more last minute revisions that i need to make and by the way our new server and the improved performance it promises as our audience continues to grow is thanks to some of you salonners out there in the past few weeks i've noticed that several copies of the shogun's books were ordered from our amazon store along with several other books and memory cards and stuff like that i want to thank those of you who ordered through our amazon store because we get a four percent commission on your purchases and while it only adds up to a few dollars a quarter it all does help and i'd like to give some particular thanks to yarav and rj both of whom very generously made donations to the salon this week and i'm very happy to report that thanks to our wonderful donors all of our out-of-pocket expenses for the first two months of this year have now been covered so yarav rj jason and bill all of us here in the psychedelic salon thank you for your very kind generosity thanks for keeping us going and where will we be going from here you ask well there are a lot of choices but here's what i'm planning on doing in the next few podcasts next week as promised a while back i'll be playing the recordings that i made at burning man last year of mark pesci and amanda fielding's talks the following week i plan on presenting an interview that i'll be doing with daniel siebert who many of you know as the proprietor of sage wisdom.org and who is perhaps the world's leading researcher and expert on salvia divinorum and i'll also be interviewing nick sand hopefully sometime next week so if you've got any questions for the creator of orange sunshine well please send them to lorenzo@matrixmasters.com and i'll ask nick for you also in the next week or so i'll be interviewing matthew palomari who is a novelist and shamanic traveler of great repute in some of the more esoteric circles out here in the west and there are a few other interviews that i'm trying to set up as well so if you uh heard kmo's interview with the dope fiend last week where they were suggesting that i do more live interviews well i guess you can tell that i heard them loud and clear in fact with all of the podcasts that i've done of terrence mckenna talks it was a kind of a surprise that it was my interview with sheldon norberg in podcast 64 that brought the complaints from my web hosting company you know apparently the number of simultaneous downloads of the great sheldonis talk actually swamped the server so i guess it's fair to say that i've got your message and will be peppering these podcasts with some live interviews from time to time in fact one of the interviews that i hope to do sometime this year is with graham hancock whose new book supernatural is something you're going to be hearing a lot more about on these podcasts in the months ahead and i'm about two-thirds of the way through it right now and my wife already finished reading it so we've been having a lot of discussions about what we think is a truly seminal work and if you're like i was about 20 years ago and are having to fend off your friends relatives neighbors and co-workers who try to make you feel guilty about using entheogens then i think this book might really be for you one you might not want to miss i don't have time to go into it more today but i think that the historical and scientific connections that graham hancock makes in supernatural make it really clear that there is no more important work to be done today than what is being done by you brave psychonauts who are taking great risks to venture into in theospace and search for what guy noir calls the answers to life's persistent questions anyway it's a great book and i hope we can get graham as one of our guests here in the salon one day i haven't even mentioned the interview i did with myron and jean stolaroff when mary c and i stayed with them late last year i hope to get that edited and then in podcast format before too long as well not to mention the fact that there are still quite a few trial logs left to hear i haven't scheduled the exact date yet but the next series of trial log podcasts will be from what i believe uh is probably the last one they held which was in june of 1998 and i thought that rather than continue listening to these three-way conversations in chronological order it'd be more interesting to jump from the first ones which we just concluded today to the last one in an attempt to see how if at all their thoughts of some of these topics might have changed in the intervening years so there are a few of the programs that will be coming your way in the weeks ahead and if you have suggestions for other interviews or program topics please let me know and i'll see what i can do to accommodate you before i go i should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the psychedelic salon are protected under the creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike 2.5 license and if you have any questions about that just click on the link at the bottom of the psychedelic salon web page which you can find at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts and if you still have questions uh send them in an email to lorenzo@matrixmasters.com and thanks again to uh jacques cordell and wells otherwise known as chateau hayuk for letting us use your music here in the psychedelic salon and for now this is lorenzo signing off from psychedelic space be well my friends (upbeat music) (upbeat music) {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.64 sec Decoding : 1.58 sec Transcribe: 3223.42 sec Total Time: 3225.64 sec