Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the
 psychedelic salon. Well I hope you haven't given up on me getting a podcast
 out this week and to be perfectly honest I didn't think I'd get this one out
 myself. I've been kind of under the weather so to speak ever since hosting
 my last program and once the pain and agony part was over I was left with
 practically no energy and I've been kind of lethargic these past few days. So when
 I finally fired up my computer and logged into the net this morning it
 wasn't with the expectation that I'd get a podcast out today. But then I checked
 my email and I had a whole bunch of wonderful emails from some of our fellow
 salonners waiting for me and on top of that I discovered that several of you
 have very generously made donations to keep these podcasts coming and so now
 I'm fired up once again and I'll keep them coming. So my thanks go out to all
 of you who have written and especially to Janus Gate Creative, James H, Jason H,
 John M, Michael better known as a dime short, William R and Bailey otherwise
 known as Beaded Bohemian. And I also want to thank Yarov. I hope I'm pronouncing
 your name correctly. Yarov sent a donation last February and while I thanked
 him in an email I don't think I remembered to mention him in one of the
 programs. Sorry about that Yarov. I very much appreciate your support. In fact the
 generosity of all of you touches me deeply. So much in fact that you have
 succeeded in restoring my energy to the point where I once again feel like
 coming back here to the salon to be with so many of my good friends. I guess one
 of my motivational issues is that there's so much to talk about regarding
 some of the comments our fellow salonners have sent in that I just kind
 of keep putting off recording this week's program until I feel more like
 talking for a while. So I'm gonna get back up to speed in stages and by that I
 mean I'm right now going to take the easy route and play the second tape from
 the June 8th trialogue with Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and Rupert
 Sheldrake. The tape runs about an hour and 20 minutes but I'm only gonna play
 part of it right now and then I'll finish it off in a shorter supplemental
 podcast in a few days where hopefully I'll quit procrastinating and also read
 some of the interesting emails I've been receiving. So let's get to it and join
 the merry trialogers in yet another of their famous conversations.
 It's Monday June 8th 1998, 2ish in the afternoon, trialogue number two.
 Family fields. I'm interested as you know in the fields of social groups, flocks
 of birds, schools of fish and packs of wolves, groups of human beings and I
 think all of these have morphic fields and I think that the morphic fields
 underlying schools of fish, flocks of birds, insect colonies help organize the
 movements of the different animals within them and the ones in packs of
 wolves enable them to keep in contact with each other over many miles. I think
 these fields underlie the telepathic bonds between wolf and wolf or between
 separated animals and other separated animals and the same things apply in the
 human realm. Telepathy mainly occurs in the human realm between mothers and
 daughters, sons, parents, children, close friends, lovers and the great majority of
 spontaneous telepathic cases do not involve guessing Xeno cards in darkened
 rooms but rather feeling of a sense of emergency by a mother, she calls home and
 the child's had an accident. Someone feeling a sudden disturbance and
 suddenly flash about somebody feeling they're in great distress or some sense of
 alarm it turns out they've died. This kind of thing. This is true of dogs and
 cats too. It's mostly to do with these sorts of feelings that telepathy is involved and
 emergencies, alarms and so forth rather than with the transfer of visual
 information for its own sake. Anyway these fields I think underlie all social
 groups and in the dog and owner thing I'm looking at the fields between pets
 and their owners but when we look at human families these fields should also
 be at work in the human family. It would be a classic example of a social field. In
 chimpanzee groups, in horse groups, these live as family groups usually and female
 with children and an associated male. Sometimes young males live free of the
 social group in many species they do but they're very often family based groups.
 Horse groups usually know more than about five in wild and feral horses.
 Wolf packs are usually female with her cubs and a male and then some sort of grown up,
 more grown up wolves but they're family groups and so in human family groups
 we'd expect the same kind of morphic field. Now this is rather a general and
 abstract kind of consideration but it would mean that family fields with their
 morphic fields would have a kind of memory from the families that
 contributed to them. The father and mothers, families of origin, would come
 together in the family. You'd have the husband and wife, the father and mother.
 You've got a fusion of family fields coming together into a family one with their
 histories and patterns. In fact a whole science or therapy or practice of
 family fields has been worked out in recent years in Germany by what I think
 the most interesting therapeutic person I've come across for a long time,
 Herbert Hellinger. Have you heard of Hellinger? No. H-E-L-L-I-N-G-E-R.
 Hellinger's work is extremely well known in Germany and has a large influence and
 there's a great deal of interest in his work. He has people following his methods
 and so on. Hellinger used to be a Benedictine. He then went or perhaps as a
 Benedictine went to Africa where he spent a long time living with a Zulu and
 although he says this isn't the direct influence on his therapy, the sense of
 the ancestral connection that the Zulu have and all traditional people have the
 role of the ancestors is a major part of his therapy. Anyway he just he I've been
 to one of his things in London and I'm meeting him again soon and I've become
 quite friendly with him and his followers because the main theory they
 use to try and understand what's going on in these family fields is morphogenetic
 fields, morphic fields. They think it's the different theories or models.
 He's a therapist of human families? Yes, human families.
 They think this is the most appropriate kind of model. You need a
 field that links the members of the group together and there has to be a kind of
 memory in it. That's what they want and that's what their family fields are and
 morphic fields are that. I mean there may be other fields that could perhaps give
 the same effect. But anyway so that's why I was interested in their work and
 their interests in mine and I have been to their and I've been very impressed by
 Hellinger's work. How it works is that you have somebody comes and they
 present their problem. They tell Hellinger this is done in a group with a
 lot of people in the kind of audience and they say what their problem is and
 why they're upset or disturbed or something and then he asked them to
 constellate their family field and what that means is that he asked them who is
 your mother, your father, how many brothers and sisters and so forth. Then
 he says now please pick anyone to be your mother and they pick someone from
 your family. Pick anyone to be your father, they pick your brothers and so on.
 The members of their primary family and their family of origin and then he asked
 them to arrange them in order, place them and when they've placed them on stage
 on a tableau, yes and when they do that you get the most
 interesting things. You see how some people are placed close to each other,
 facing each other, some are placed on the periphery sort of facing away from the
 rest of the family and these people can make models. Each one is completely
 different and quite surprising. I saw two or three days of this and a
 whole series of different family models and you see these extraordinary
 patterns which immediately for the person there this is their best
 representation of the family field from the family they come from. But when you see
 this it's a whole gestalt like a snapshot of a system of relationship
 who's close together, who's further away, who's facing who, who's related to whom.
 And sometimes this is so obviously sort of dispersed and not in relationship
 that then the question is how did if that one's right out there facing their
 back to the rest of them, what's happened, why are they there and not close to the others
 and what dynamics are involved in this whole family group. And in order to
 understand that he often has to go to the family of origin of the father or
 the mother in the family field. So then he'd ask the person to constellate the
 father's family field for example and then you know they pick someone to be
 the father and then if the father had two or three brothers the brothers and the father and
 the parent and they have to put them where they were. And sometimes they don't know
 that well so they have to guess where they constellated this field. And it often turns out
 that the pattern in that first family field and mirrored in the second one you
 can see you can just see it in front of you in similar patterns. It sometimes
 happens that something extraordinary happened in the first field. Say for
 example an uncle drowned as a boy, a ten-year-old boy in that family was
 killed drowned in a pond and then they have they often leave them out and then
 he then says was there anybody in this family that died as a child or that died
 at birth? Quite often they say yes he says find someone put them in and very often
 the whole imbalance in the field is rectified when the missing members put in
 even if it's say someone committed suicide or a child that died in infancy
 in a previous family field. Unacknowledged members of the group cause grave
 distortions to the system and his method by putting them in creates a whole field
 sort of can be rearranged. He then rearranges these fields by so what would
 happen if sensei was brought in he asked the person bring them into there bring
 them into there and then in the father's field asked them to acknowledge the
 child that died and put them in and then the child they say we acknowledge you
 the people actually say we acknowledge you and then they put the child that
 died in the right order of children right in their place between the first
 born the second born the third born because the order of birth has a huge
 impact on these fields and the number of siblings. So here you have a system
 practically used by Hellinger and his followers a fascinating thing and when
 you see these missing members in the field constitute and then the family of
 origin of the person that field is sort of readjusted to see a whole field
 pattern and their role within the field pattern is incredibly therapeutic and
 releasing for a lot of people they see that a lot of problems they thought were
 just their problems are actually their relations to this whole field of
 interaction in the family. So they take seriously a field model of this process
 and with these sort of tableau representations one can see this and so
 that made me think whatever the merits or demerits of Hellinger's system which I
 think is very interesting apparently very effective the idea of making models
 of family fields seems to me something that one could address in a more general
 sense because there would be certain patterns of dynamics you'd expect if you
 have a family consisting of mother father and then one child the simplest
 ones two three four five what kinds of flows of energy is some of this would be
 kind of common sense in eldest children and in relation to second children most
 people have had two children say that the oldest ones were more trouble as
 baby is hard to deal with the younger ones somehow much easier to get on with
 but then you get this kind of rivalries going up sibling rivalries and so then
 families more complex family fields where you have stepfathers or stepmothers
 stepbrothers and sisters then you get on his stage that you get these very
 complicated family fields and what happens in those in real life those are
 common nowadays so one could make some models of these fields one could also
 see how the balance the balance of energy if you have a field model like
 this and you take someone who's in the model move them further away in whatever
 space you've modeled in and turn them to face out from the rest of the family
 what kind of dynamics happens there with the rest of them what happens to them in
 any group into which they enter so any new family they form how what effect is
 this one could perhaps model this kind of thing so I wanted to suggest that
 maybe it's possible to make this family field thing more scientific investigate
 it further make models and in some way perhaps come up with tests or empirical
 studies that could further the science or investigation of family fields
 well that certainly sounds very interesting I'm not sure I understand to
 what degree the use of the word field is justified here and do do they think of
 like an extended spatial field like the gravitational field or something is
 associated with with the family and the individuals have a field like vibrating
 aura or something or does it just mean that the field in a general sense that
 could be described let us say just by giving for any two individuals in the
 family some strength of the connection plus or minus or something that would be
 represented in the tableau when the actors are placed on the stage by the
 geographical distance to them or something so that bringing one member in
 closer would correspond in this model to just strengthening the community the
 bandwidth of the communication channel or the positivity of the regard of some
 other like simple parameter that would be a more of a connectionist model with
 like a undirected graph with nodes and links and so on is it like links between
 the people could be just represented by a number or would it be essential in
 order to understand the experiences of Helmer to actually have a kind of
 extended three-dimensional spatial field around each individual but has memory
 well maybe a connectionist thing with nodes would be an adequate model but
 then you could say that what can the connections the nodes you could just
 sort of draw a line around the whole thing say this was a set no connections
 or something which would be perhaps just a different way of trying to model the
 field you see the connections insofar as you draw it will say there's a
 connection a B and it has a given strength you're presupposing an
 invisible bond between people that would work when the other person was in the
 next room at the very least and therefore you're proposing a bond which
 whose reality is not physical in the normal sense it may be mental emotional
 psychic I mean whatever word you choose but it's not sort of smell touch to
 hearing I mean those are involved if you're in the same room and so the
 really function of field models it frees you up from thinking that the
 connections must be normal face-to-face communication then they can still exist
 even if you're apart the family feel the flock the school and so on this is kind
 of a extrapolation backwards of psychic pets into more of a psychic bonds in the
 wild well I think that the bonds even between
 members of the family you know when people go away and they they want like
 me I mean I'm attached to my family so from here I feel a strong need to ring
 up my children to speak to me so you need to bed even though I'm six thousand
 miles away that bond is a strange strong bond for me and so and for most people
 if they're near so these bonds are not severed by getting on an airplane so
 whatever model you have is the connections the connections have to be
 of such a nature that they still persist well I'm just going to whatever the
 model is to have the same model as the model we have for the psychic pets
 because pathologists or say these are therapists like the animal equivalent of
 Hellinger that analyze cats for example they describe the relationship of the
 cat to the owner person as a form of the relation of the cat to the cat's mother
 that's been replaced the cats even as they age regard themselves as kittens as
 it were with the owner is the mother cat the way they play and rub against you
 and so on is derived behaviors from what the cat version of Hellinger would
 describe as the family field on the cat yes level and therefore if we are as we
 have been been thinking about mathematical models for the field that
 describes the attachment of the cat and owner we would be tempted to use the same
 model for the family field in the human family for example or flushing the
 people so and that would be then some kind of well telepathy is the word I
 think or a non-specific communication channel in between the people or
 animals at a distance yes other telepathic communications
 wouldn't need to be passing between the tools and maybe a connectionist model
 would be fine yeah as long as you leave open the nature of the connection so
 that the connection is it doesn't have to be presupposed to depend on normal
 sensory communication probably in a in a neural net if you took one of them it
 was capable of say parsing natural speech or something and then you took
 one of the nodes out of broke one of the connections and wouldn't be able to do
 that anymore so this the connectionist model might be adequate for modeling
 this having a strategy of bringing in the missing sibling or something
 replacing the node in the connections which make a functional unit yes or what
 happened what would have happened is before the sibling died the family
 field had a different structure because it included that sibling if the that the
 death of the sibling changes the field but his point is unless it's
 acknowledged and unless in some sense the ancestors are acknowledged and
 unless the dead siblings acknowledged and recognized within the field their
 presence within the field is recognized their unrecognized presence can cause
 terrible disturbances so it's on you sue recognizing a kind of virtual node in
 the field let's see how that would be a model about how could that be important
 that what is what is this recognition consist of so you are a fish okay now
 you recognize you as a fish is it would they're coupled oscillators and the
 family thing works because people really are complex chemical systems with
 genetic affinities you could even suppose a kind of physical mechanism
 they are coupled oscillators that in part their wave form to the local space
 which encounters the wave forms of these other oscillators which are very similar
 to them physically more similar to them than any other person or thing and so
 there's a kind of entrainment often the things are these feeling tone something
 has happened to someone or I should call so it indicates they are like coupled
 oscillators so the recognition and the non recognition means what the
 oscillators are coupled and therefore this one is and then it's not understood
 because I'm not aware of my father's sister Carrie died when he was young so
 she was never even a person she was not real if I had interactions with a place
 in some structure or say our family field where she belonged but I didn't
 acknowledge it then I would always be confused about what's going on in my
 life something like that yes because the family field is you see that if it had
 because you see the kind of memory in these fields and so that the fields and
 the dynamics of the field are influenced by the memory why see it yes a person
 who was there but knows longer there and so the memory is actually working in the
 dynamics of field because all these fields have this kind of memory but if
 you don't recognize it so you don't understand what's really going on in the
 interactions and you're always in the dark as to why certain puzzling
 conflicts or whatever or suicides there are cases where amazing cases where you
 get members of families young people commit suicide in a way that mimics the
 unacknowledged death of an ancestor like suicide by drowning when an ancestor of
 one or two generations before has committed suicide by drowning but they've
 never been told about it because it's never acknowledged and you get these
 extraordinary patterns that repeat sometimes literal ones like that other
 times sort of morphed ones and then we have to think of different models for
 the same thing so that there would be a model like a connections diagram of a
 family as it were and then there's another drawing for the family as I see
 it and then if I haven't acknowledged my aunt Carrie then in my model of the
 family there's nothing there that's right but in this other model of actual
 interactions so it is there maybe we need a directed graph where the channel
 between you and me for example would have two lines one going that way as
 when I speak or send you a message and another one going this way yes they'd
 have to be the connections that have to have sort of direct both directions so
 there could be in the case of a family member who's not acknowledged that
 there's a directed line from that one to me because I'm receiving but not knowing
 yeah and then I'm sending nothing back because I'm not acknowledging yes so the
 acknowledgement of a missing family member would just consist of the
 addition into the model of one link that's right that would be enough and in
 his in his therapeutic workshops and where he does this for the family and
 the whole therapy the particular person they last half an hour three quarters
 of an hour really constellating these fields and then in these things he he
 asked the person to come say that the members of the family have there's
 somebody representing them you see in the family field there's somebody
 standing in for themselves they're sitting outside it with him oh so say
 that it was your family field you choose someone to represent you oh I see so
 there'd be Ralph in there and so you're sitting back telling you now see Ralph
 in relation to the instruments and then you see how we remodel it it's remodeling
 yes and then you see the other ones and he readjusts the field and puts in the
 absent or members and then he asked the members actually standing there to
 acknowledge the unacknowledged ones or whatever and then he asked you to go and
 stand in the position of Ralph in this remodeled field and turn to the
 unacknowledged one and say you were my aunt I acknowledge you and turn to the
 others and so on and experience that new constellation from within and this has a
 dramatically dramatically changing effect on family fields it brings them
 to consciousness it recognizes these things and the acknowledgement is done
 and it changes them so any model of the fields you see would mean the kind of
 thing you were saying still applied you'd have a model of the fields as well as you have a
 map of its perceived today and if you're able to bring about the remodel or at
 least bring your model of the field into much more into place connection with
 what the field actually is or was then this has a therapeutic effect
 this is the opposite of institutional therapy where people go into a
 corporation for example which has an actual structure and then the directors
 have their model and instead of changing the model to fit the actuality they change the
 actuality to fit the model yes but they're in a company where you've got
 you can actually have a more broad model of flow diagrams I mean this is sort of
 artificial organizations but family organizations although there's a kind of
 archetypal model like the nuclear family model or something like that although
 there are sort of idealized models socially approved and recognized each
 family is different and each is different in its own way to paraphrase
 Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, every happy family is the same but every unhappy
 family is unhappy in its own way so there's a sense of shape as it were
 the field is sometimes distorted or whatever so his model
 any model were made would have to take into account those two things so it's a
 question of to how far can one just say well this is an interesting therapy it's
 just one among many and it's just that this is a particular trip but how far
 can one take so as to the idea that family dynamics are not an arbitrary
 invention of having their in obvious reality and we don't have adequate
 models for these family systems nor the influence of ancestors within them which
 my interest in morphic resonance makes me very keen on the fact that there must
 be this historical memory habit dimension. Well then the network can be
 extended indefinitely it's simply that people outside the family but in the
 neighborhood or in the past are weakly coupled. Important teachers in primary
 school. Yes. Things like that. That sort of thing they're weakly coupled yes yes and
 then you can have you can have the way that are given you could then extend
 this Arnold Mendel is the person who's pioneered this model in different in
 non-family groups. Are you familiar with this one? No. Do you know Arnold Mendel? In his book
 the year one he talks about the modeling of social groups how you have a social
 group and that each social group is a kind of organism and therefore there'll
 be different roles taken up by different people within the group and in lots of
 groups for example that we tend to be somebody who's a grumbler or a
 complainer and who sort of focuses and vocalizes the sort of grumble takes on
 the role of making complaints which other people in the group might be too
 shy or too restrained to make but somehow they have made and then they can
 also project onto the grumbler a kind of negativity or hostility. This is a
 dynamic that happens within groups and quite often if one grumbler leaves the
 group or is expelled someone else has to take on that role of being a grumbler. So
 he has a kind of field theory what I'd call a field I don't know if he calls it
 a field theory but I'd call it a field theory of groups which is less
 interesting than Hellinger's in the sense that Hellinger has this family dimension
 this time dimension with innumerable examples. He has hundreds of videos of his
 doing this with different family groups you can see one
 after another of these groups before your eyes in video. They're very interesting. But
 Mendel is a more abstract theory based on him working with groups in therapy
 sessions or in town meetings or workshops. We've got 30 people for a few
 days. It doesn't have the same kind of historical depth but it's still dealing
 with the same kind of group model. Well the the idea of memory then Hellinger's
 interest in memory in the field concept has to do with having the ancestors in
 the tableau. Yes. Well how do you understand the influence of a
 acknowledged or unacknowledged ancestor generation or two back on this the part
 of the family unit that consists of the currently living members? How to
 understand that if it was a two generations back you've never met them?
 What's the difference? Well because say when you have a
 partner you get married or not married. It's the case maybe you have children. You
 then have a family field and assuming the parents are together your
 expectations of the way you behaved your children. No one's ever trained you how to
 raise children. You've never mentioned at school. So how do
 you know how to treat your kids? Well the only model you've got is either looking
 at friends doing the maths. The one that runs deepest for you is what happened in your
 own family. And so you bring to the situation a kind of memory of the whole
 dynamics of your family of origin. And the same goes for your wife or your
 partner or the mother of the children. She brings to it the dynamics from her
 whole family of origin. You and she then have different
 expectations of how the family is going to work because you've got two different
 kind of fields and she may expect quite different things of you and of the way
 you treat the children and of the kids than you expect of her and of the kids.
 And this can either lead to some kind of compromise. In fact over time
 somehow it has to accommodate in some way. But it can also lead to a lot of
 conflicts. There are different models and expectations. So you bring these fields
 with you as it were unconsciously because they're the fields in which you
 you were in that group there with the sort of field pattern. You're now in a
 new family group and you helped you bring that field pattern in and it sort
 of fuses with that of your partner. But that's the only thing. You can learn from other
 models. You can know other families. You can live with other groups. So basically
 you bring it with you. So then do you think cross-cultural marriages are more
 fraught than marriages within class and cultural domains? Well that would be an
 empirical question. You know one would predict that there would be certain
 kinds of problems. Say you take marriages between English people and Indians or
 Pakistanis. Then you could do a model, the Hellinger type model of the
 Indian family field. You could interview Indians, look at Indian family
 structures. They'd probably have quite different sort of expectations and field
 patterns from the people from nuclear families growing up in suburbs in England or America.
 And if that's the case you could actually predict what would happen when
 you put these two, what kinds of conflicts are likely to result, what
 kinds of expectations the man and woman from these different kinds of
 backgrounds are going to have. You could talk to people who deal
 in marriage counseling with mixed marriages and see whether these are
 indeed the kinds of recurrent problems they encounter. So you could by talking
 to sociologists, social workers and people who actually deal with
 dysfunctional families of various kinds or functional families. You could
 this have been an empirical study on family dynamics from different
 backgrounds. So you could actually approach it all. You could make
 models and you could actually test them because there's all different kinds of
 families and fields coming together. So I think the model then of the family
 field would have to consist of more than the nodes and the connections and so on.
 The creation of the tableau with the patient director includes not only
 where the actors are standing but also which direction they're facing. Yes. And
 maybe their posture or any kind of a body language representation, facial
 expression, things like that. Yes, well it doesn't usually, it can
 involve posture. Because when we think of animal behavior in the sense of how you
 raise your children and so on, there are many many attributes of a node,
 an individual member of the family, their attitude of servitude or their
 willingness to sacrifice, compromise and all these things that we know varies
 from culture to culture. The division of labor of the mother and father and so on.
 The father drives the other species of birds away from the nest and so on.
 So some kind of modeling or even a simple representation of these behaviors
 would have to be attached. Otherwise the model would be too simple to really
 indicate the difference between different generations and people from
 different families, coming from different family groups, marrying and so on.
 Yes, well it might help. The geometry wouldn't be enough. Well it might help in starting
 these models with different species of birds for example, where you've got more
 standardized patterns and where you can actually observe what happens. Because
 there is a division of labor with birds and say a gander will defend the nest of
 the goose and young. Sunbirds, cuckoos, do it a totally different way of course,
 and the baby cuckoo is like a pathology in the nest of other birds. So there are all
 different patterns among birds in the division of labor but they're fairly
 consistent within the species. So if one had a model that would work for these,
 the family fields are more complicated. Human family situations are far more
 complicated than those of many animals. And the beauty of looking at bird families
 is that you could have 20, 30 different kinds of behavior, already documented by
 naturalists. The family life of different birds, the number of little birds they have,
 the way they teach them to fly, whether they have social groups or not, like
 flocks, some birds have flocks, some don't. There'd be a lot of scope. Anyone who could
 come up with a good model would have a large amount of natural history at their
 feet as territory to explore with this modeling technique. Because right now the
 kinds of models that ethologists have of groups are not terribly... well their
 focus has been distorted by the Richard Dawkins type people where it's all the
 selfish genes and it's seen as individual competition and struggle. And
 maybe that perspective has something to offer to this modeling process but it
 hasn't led to any kind of emphasis or attempts to model the dynamics of
 these groups very effectively.
 The other thing you have to take into consideration is a family is an organism
 evolving through time. The arrangement, the tableau is a snapshot in time. It
 also... I mean one could assume it's the patient or the client's relationship to
 their family at the present moment. But on the other hand if you're going to
 bring in ancestors, is the ancestor influencing the field as a
 child, as a middle-aged person, as an elderly person? Did their influence on
 the field change through time? And then there seems to be sort of a
 dichotomy. There's a static now but it's being modified by a shifting past as
 these ancestors exert differing influences on the situation depending on
 where in their own life history they are.
 Yes and in some tribal cultures like the Saura in India, this is the kind of thing
 ancestors, maybe the role of the ancestors, has actually been documented by
 anthropologists. There's a whole body of anthropological data here. There's the
 Saura where my friend Pierre Sotepsky was an anthropologist and I visited him
 in the field in Bihar. No, in Orissa, in Koraput district of Orissa. He was living
 in the Saura village. He was living with the Shema and they had a whole very
 complicated doctrine about what happened to you when you died. Say you died by
 suicide, you went to the sun. If you died of smallpox, you went to a kind of leopard
 spirit. And there were different groups and the ancestors who died of that all
 went to the same place so you were with them and you wanted to get the living
 into your group when they died rather than someone else who wanted to be with
 them. So there were always competing death spirits, different modes of death containing
 ancestors competing for the living. And the best way to deal with this is to
 make peace with them and to make offerings. Every year there's these
 buffalo sacrifices for the ancestors. If you give blood and appease the ancestors
 then they'll be happier and they won't feel so needy and they're not going to try
 and grab you so much and so you buy them off. But after two or three generations
 their individual identity, their names begin to fade and they're sort of
 liberated over time from that sort of obsessive thing until the souls are sort
 of set free at which time they become butterflies. So when you see butterflies
 flying around you in the forest or in the village, these are the liberated souls of
 distant ancestors whose influence is no longer particularly important in this
 whole economy of death and recruitment. Well this is the memory model for the
 conspiracy theorists. Yes except that there's lots of different, it's like a
 competing, it's not so much conspiracy, well there are sort of competing conspiracies
 and there are certain stones you can trip over in the forest, there are certain ones
 that catch people who stumble and make you stumble in the forest but you have to
 be on good terms with the ancestors and what being on good terms with them above
 all means acknowledging them. It means in the sacrifice of buffalo blood that you
 name and acknowledge the key ancestors, you acknowledge all the dead in your
 lineage and if you miss anyone out they're going to be angry and if they're
 angry that means trouble. So this is their cosmology, the way they see it and
 each tribe, each group has its own theory of the ancestors, the Japanese and
 Chinese, especially the Chinese have an elaborate sense of the relevant importance of
 the ancestors with all these offerings they make of paper houses and whatnot.
 And I think one, if one were looking at this empirically in the human realm, I
 mean one would perhaps have models for different species of birds but coming
 back to the human realm, to compare the dynamics which you could do partly from
 anthropology and partly from modern sociology of say Chinese families,
 typical Chinese families where there's a high degree of acknowledgement of the
 ancestors with modern American families or Western families, fragmented,
 dissociated, chaotic, where there's a very low degree of acknowledgement of the
 ancestors and see what kinds of patterns occur there and then you could look at
 Chinese Americans who may have abandoned all the ancestor worship thing and just
 assimilated to mainstream American society. Do they have
 particular qualities or do they just become like Americans? - They stumble a lot.
 - They stumble a lot. - They must because a lot of angry ancestors were accustomed to a
 great degree of... - Well you'd expect that you see but maybe they go on
 acknowledging them, a lot of the Chinese are very traditional. So you know there's a
 whole field of research here, the role of the ancestors because every culture has
 its own way of dealing with them and its own way of acknowledging them. In the
 Christian tradition the festival of All Hallows and All Souls, Halloween is the
 eve of All Hallows, November the 1st and All Souls Day, November the 2nd, is when
 requiem masses are offered for all the dead, all the departed, in which you can
 particularly hand in the names of particular ancestors of particular people
 and have their names read out at the requiem mass. So I do this myself.
 So there's an acknowledged social form in our culture for acknowledging and
 naming the ancestors in a traditional ceremony. So there are great
 variations in our own culture between the degree to which people within
 different families and traditions acknowledge the ancestors. The Roman
 Catholics do it more than the Protestants because of this phenomenon of requiem masses
 and the observance of All Souls Day which Protestants don't observe. So it's a rich
 field for investigation you see in sociology, anthropology, model building, etc.
 but as yet more or less unexplored. Do you think these ideas could be
 extrapolated to non-human families with any degree of... that you would learn anything useful?
 Yes, it would have to be exactly the same, perhaps simpler, like a bird
 family, maybe all the behaviors that we could quantify are ones that
 mythologists have been traditionally observing and they might have missed a
 lot of things, like the role of the ancestors among birds. I don't think they
 ever noticed. Was the ancestor acknowledged? Are there any bird
 families with three generations? I guess you could ask what is a family? Does
 an insect have a family? A termite certainly does on the ground.
 Social group, it wouldn't have to be a family.
 Whatever group that you can observe, like you observe a school of fish, you might not know the
 ancestry or the kinship diagram, but if you could quantify the observables,
 whatever you thought was observed about birds, the gander is aggressive and
 attacks other birds, so that would be a number from 1 to 10 of aggression. Then
 the mother nourishes by going and getting food, chewing it up, spitting it in their mouths,
 and then it would be nourished, there's another parameter. So whatever the
 ethologists observe more or less defines the model that I have of bird groups or
 families and likewise whatever species have been observed, I don't think there
 is any mathematical modeling effort that's been going on among ethologists or
 anthropologists for that matter. But really this theory is saying that it's
 genetic similarity that...
 ...intimidates the strength of the bond.
 It may or may not. So twins would then be in a special position.
 Well they are in a special position, it's traditionally acknowledged and revealed by
 long twin research. They are. But genetic similarity, you see, the mother and
 the father, the children have a genetic similarity to the mother and the father.
 The mother and the father have no necessary genetic similarity. And it's
 also possible for members of a pack of wolves, you know, a wolf, a male may join a group.
 So you do have interchange between groups and exogamy, marrying to a group
 outside the familiar group is the rule rather than the exception. So although you
 say that at least one member of the group, the father or the mother, is
 going to have a different, unrelated genetic nature, so it's not a necessary feature of
 these bonds to have genetic similarity. They may or may not have it and it may
 be they're stronger in the social insects where you've got all these casts
 of workers derived from the queen and sharing half the genes of their
 sisters with each other. They have a great many genes in common. Yes, this may give a
 kind of more telepathic type connection between them. But I wouldn't put genetics
 as our key. It's not going to help us much in this particular discussion. So can you imagine a
 strong link between a person and their great-grandfather's second wife to whom
 they have no relation other than that? Oh no, if it's the second wife, it would be
 relatively irrelevant. And Hellinger, you know, if one were doing this
 modeling, one would look at what he thinks, it's the family of origin, what
 would matter is the time when your great-grandfather, when your grandfather
 was born. His family of origin, it may later include when he's 12, 15, his father
 marrying again or something, because it would be the origin field you look at.
 And these later ones have relatively small effect. So you know, they've
 already got their ideas about what weightings you'd give to these different
 people in drama. But the difference between birds and people is that the
 general pattern of a bird family is given instinctively. It's by a morphic
 field, I would say, with such a deep and strong morphic resonance. You've got a
 kind of basic pattern that the whole species lies within. And if you have a
 deviant family, subsequent ones would get morphic resonance from their own deviant
 family of origin. But they'd also get resonance from sort of a huge runoff and
 creative family life. Now in the human world, where there's no genetically
 determined family structure, because it's cultural, a great deal of human cultural
 evolution is sort of decoupled from genetics. It's the difference between
 Italian families and Jewish families and English families and American families
 and stuff. And families in New England and California is not particularly
 genetic. It's cultural. And the fact that families have changed through divorce,
 etc., etc., over the last hundred years, much smaller family sizes. A hundred years
 ago, most of our ancestors would have had six, seven siblings. Mine did. Now you've
 got much smaller nuclear families, higher rates of divorce. It's changed. And so it's
 not genetic. It's much too quick. So genetics doesn't really help us much. And
 that's why in the human realm, the only model that you can rely on is not a
 genetically inherited model, because we don't have that, whereas animals do. But
 there's the cultural experience in which you grew up, and the cultural models
 around you. So that's why I think that although one could have a certain
 class of models that would handle human families and bad families, the human ones
 are always going to be much more complicated. Much more complicated, because you have to
 model the cultures as well. So maybe birds are easier because they're
 monocultural in the sense that culture is also simpler. But once a class of
 models had been built up in one field, it would be a matter of extending it to the other, wouldn't it?
 Yes, that's why it would be easiest to start with the simplest models,
 simplest cases, and then easily extrapolate upward into human species,
 and eventually to whales and so on. Is it a metaphor?
 I hate to cut this off right here, but my energy levels are running low, and so I'm
 going to call it a day for now. But I'll get the remaining part of this trilogue
 out as soon as I can, hopefully in the next few days. I haven't heard the end of
 this conversation yet myself, but already Rupert has given me a lot to think about
 along the lines of family morphogenic fields. In fact, it may even open up a
 whole new line of dialogue between my cousins and myself. At least I hope it will.
 While I'm thinking of it, I want to say something about the sound quality in
 some of these podcasts. Believe it or not, I actually do edit the talks I play, and
 in some cases I've even been successful in cleaning up the sound significantly.
 But there are some instances, like today's trilogue, that were recorded with
 the hum in them, and as hard as I tried, I wasn't able to remove that hum without
 causing a little distortion in the speakers' voices. And so I decided that
 the hum was less annoying than the voice changes, and left it just as it was
 recorded. I also know that there are among us here in the salon quite a few
 audio experts, like Brian and John H., and I sincerely appreciate your offers of
 help, and that goes to all of you who have written to offer technical
 assistance. My problem is that I've got kind of a tiger by the tail here, and I
 don't want to let go until I fully understand my exit strategy. The tiger, of
 course, is the psychedelic salon. And to be honest, I never really gave any thought
 to having much of an audience, and so I figured it was a nice hobby that I could
 drop if I ever got tired of it. But now it's growing into something much more
 than I expected, and to tell the truth, it's really giving me a problem with
 what I think of as my main life's work, which is to finish a novel I've been
 working on for over four years now. But don't get me wrong, I'm doing these
 podcasts because there really isn't anything I'd rather be doing. You writers
 out there know how easy it is to find something to do other than to do what
 you came here to do. And I do realize that if I'm ever going to get back to
 work on my new book, I'm going to have to figure a way to offload some of the
 back-end work involved in these podcasts and maintaining several websites. So I've
 been working on a long-range plan to turn the salon into more of a community
 project, which of course would allow us to bring in more of the work being done
 by many of our regulars here in the salon. My reason for mentioning this
 right now is that I know some of you are getting frustrated at my slow response
 to your suggestions and comments and offers of help, and I hear you loud and
 clear and I'm pretty much in agreement with most of your suggestions. But I
 don't want to make any false steps because we've really got a nice thing
 going here, you know. When I'm recording these podcasts I really do feel like I'm
 sitting there beside you and having a conversation. And I don't want to do
 anything that will change that feeling for me, because if this becomes a job or
 something I'm not wanting to do most of the time, well then I suspect that we'll
 all lose interest in this interesting cyberdelic experiment. So my plan is to
 continue exploring your ideas and come up with some suggestions that we can all
 kick around until we figure out how to continue growing our connections and
 exchanging ideas among the worldwide psychedelic community. And sometime after
 this year's Burning Man Festival, where I hope to kick around some of these ideas
 in person with you, I'll let all of you volunteers and potential volunteers know
 what I've come up with once we get back from the burn. And we'll figure out
 how all of you can become more involved in this fun project of spreading the
 truth about what I believe to be the only real hope for our species long-term
 survival. And that is the hope that comes from increasing our understanding of
 psychedelic substances. Well that's a little heavier note than I planned on
 ending on, but I want to get the first part of this talk out today so you
 don't think I've disappeared on you like Queer Ninja has. And hey Ninja, I hope
 you're out there in cyberdelic space grooving on some great music right now.
 We miss your podcast my friend, but mainly we're worried about you. So if you
 hear this and you're so motivated, please let somebody know that you're okay. And
 hey, be well my friend. Now before I go I want to mention as always that this and
 all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative
 Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-A-Like 2.5 license. And if you have
 any questions about that you can just click the Creative Commons link at the
 bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can also find at
 www.psychedelicsalon.org. And if you have any questions, comments, complaints, or
 suggestions about these podcasts, well just send them to Lorenzo@matrixmasters.com
 And thanks again to Jacques Cordel and Wells, otherwise known as
 Chateau Hayouk for the use of your music here in the salon. And a big thank you
 again to Janus Gate Creative, James, Jason, John M, A Dime Short, Yarev and William.
 This one was for you guys because without the boost you gave me this
 morning I probably would have put this off for another week. And of course thank
 you for being here. I really enjoy the time we spend together here each week
 and I know that you probably feel the same way. So for now this is Lorenzo
 signing off from psychedelic space. Be well my friends.
 (upbeat music)
 (upbeat music)
 (upbeat music)
 you
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