[Music]
 Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon.
 Well, even though it's been less than a week since the last time we got together here in the salon, I just couldn't stay away.
 There are at least a dozen pressing matters at hand right now, like all the things I put off doing before my holiday.
 But to tell the truth, all I actually feel like doing is listening to some trilogues I've not heard before.
 So I guess this is sort of my way of goofing off by listening to Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake
 hold their first public trilogue outside of California.
 The conversation we're about to hear was actually held sometime in 1993 at Hazlehurst in England.
 And their weekend-long trilogue was captured on four cassette tapes that Ralph Abraham loaned to me for the use in these podcasts.
 And each of these tapes is 90 minutes long, but rather than break them into two programs as I've done in the past,
 I've decided that since we don't have the commercial constraints of radio, well, why am I conforming to a one-hour format anyway?
 You obviously can just pause your player whenever you want.
 It's not like turning off a radio program and missing something.
 So from now on, I just plan on keeping these tapes, side A and side B, all in one podcast.
 And since I did this once before in the past and solicited comments about it, I'm sure that this will be agreeable with most of you
 because the email I received was essentially all in support of the longer format.
 And by the way, I want to express my thanks to all of you who wrote to me about that.
 I really do appreciate your comments and I apologize for not getting back to all of you personally.
 But rest assured, I'm thinking about you and now that I've got some of your faces in mind after meeting at Burning Man,
 well, you're all becoming much more clear in my mind.
 It's really nice to be here in this cyberdelic space with you.
 And I hope that you can feel the energy of this mind storm that we're all setting in motion here.
 I just don't have any better idea than you do right now about what seems to be bubbling up from inside of us.
 But whatever it is, I'm sure that in the end, everything is going to be all right.
 As Terrence said in a dream to a dear friend of mine one time.
 OK, that's enough romanticizing for now.
 Let's get on with the program and begin with Ralph telling Terrence how much he thinks of him,
 but doing so with a lot of humor and back and forth teasing among the three of them.
 I really like the way this trilogue begins.
 It sounds as if they were actually having a good time together way back in 1993.
 So let's join him now.
 So chanting together.
 So our process, this particular peculiar process of triloguing began a long time ago.
 For more than 10 years we are doing this, but primarily in private.
 And out of this ongoing process for more than a decade, we have become, I think, a kind of a unit or a triad.
 And that's why we've been going to introduce ourselves individually, but by this other trick.
 So later on during the weekend we'll speak more about the process of triloguing, and of course you'll see it in action.
 But to introduce ourselves, this is not a trilogue, but just a trick.
 My idea is that we would describe each other as we appear to ourself in the context of this process, triloguing.
 So I'll start by describing Terrence to himself, from ourself.
 So Terrence seems to be known, better and better known, whenever we walk anywhere, someone will come up and recognize him.
 As it says in our program, ethno-pharmacologist.
 Well, almost a pharmacologist is sort of a herbal doctor or something.
 But this kind of pharmacology is important to us also in our process.
 For me, Terrence is a special person because of the breadth of his knowledge and the evidence of a phenomenal integrity within it.
 So first of all, when we first met, Terrence was a person asking me about mathematics,
 the kind of mathematics that I was interested in at that time that nobody else had even heard about.
 And as our relationship developed, I saw that he had this philosophy of time, let's say,
 or maybe even a mathematical model for the structure of time.
 That is an odd thing for a person to be obsessed with.
 And from this obsession, he had to learn a great deal about history.
 So in our process of triloguing, we find it very much enriched by Terrence's phenomenal knowledge of history,
 and not only that, but his special way of saying it is sort of a, you're familiar with this here, a bardic skill.
 So that whatever he says will have more effect than it actually deserves.
 [laughter]
 Because of his phenomenal way of saying it, and his apparent conviction in it.
 And... [laughter]
 Is he Irish?
 Yes, that's the part of it, to deal with it in a cooperative process.
 Furthermore, what seems to inform or maintain the integrity of his total presentation is some kind of spiritual belief.
 I don't know exactly the right word for this, but I can tell that more.
 I mean, anyway, this spiritual belief is outside of any organized system.
 So we can most easily understand it in the connection with the archaic revival, or pagan spirituality, or shamanism.
 Anyway, this aspect of Terrence, every person is a spectrum of all kinds of things,
 and here are just a few of Terrence's things that I think are the most obvious in our process of interaction.
 The primitive spirituality, which always speaks against any church guru or leader.
 And, I'm almost done. I don't know who's glaring there.
 Finally, besides this information-based personal style and integrity, there is something else which I think is very important to us,
 and that's the adventurer, that's the willingness to risk going to some kind of edge.
 And also the propulsion to talk about it upon coming back, fulfilling some kind of responsibility to the community which is beyond,
 which risks more than simply individual development.
 Is this too long?
 Yes.
 [laughter]
 Good, good.
 Well, so it falls to me to share with you my view of Rupert,
 who, I'm not sure when I first became aware, probably it was the Nature Review,
 which I think Rupert should certainly be very grateful to Nature,
 because in their perverse way they saved him perhaps from obscurantism by calling for the burning of his book.
 And my intellectual method has always been to seek out the heretical.
 And so when I heard that Nature had called for the burning of a book,
 I burned up my tires on the way to the store to see if I couldn't obtain a copy.
 And it was very interesting, and I added it to the slow-rising intellectual edifice
 that I had been building for years in the area of theoretical biology.
 I was very interested in Dreesch and Kemmerer and the school of vitalism
 that refused to genuflect to the idea that life could be reduced simply to physics and chemistry.
 That seemed to me inadequate. But nevertheless, after reading Sheldrake's book,
 it just seemed like an intellectual war being well fought in a distant land
 by someone I was probably not likely to have crossed my path.
 And I discussed it with other people, and I was amazed at the animosity
 that rained down upon what seemed to me a fundamentally interesting and not easily dismissed concept.
 I can remember one person telling me, "You have only to heft the book in your hand to tell that it's bogus."
 Well, I thought they must have an intuition into the nature of scientific theory far beyond my own,
 because I couldn't make the judgment at that stage.
 And then Rupert, I believe it was through Ralph, contacted me and came by bus to see me.
 I live in the wine country north of San Francisco, and I didn't know what I expected.
 I was mentored by Eric Jansch, who some of you may know.
 And so my vision of the European academic was of a corpulent, elderly, animated person,
 and I projected that and expected that.
 And when Rupert arrived, and Ralph vectored in for that first meeting as well,
 "Isn't that interesting?" "That's right." And there he was.
 And I thought I immediately fell under the spell of his personality, his spirit.
 Scientists, I don't know if you spend a lot of time with them, but they tend to be pretentious boors, most of them.
 And the higher they rise, the more this quality seems exacerbated in their personality.
 And I have found Rupert to be an incredibly generous, intelligent, forgiving person.
 I feel very privileged to be in the presence of these people.
 I'm sure you all know the cliché when Newton was asked how he did it.
 He said, "I stood on the shoulders of giants." That's how it was done.
 And to whatever degree the mathematics of Ralph and the theoretical constructs of Rupert have supported my own work,
 and not only my work, but the building and maintaining of a personal vision,
 I felt that I've stood on the shoulders of giants.
 It's hard to say what the fate of morphogenetic fields will be in the history of ideas,
 but I am convinced that given even a halfway level playing field, the best ideas always win.
 And so I'm very keen to stand close to this man, because I'm absolutely convinced that the light of glory will fall upon him.
 Mechanistic biology has failed, and for 20 years has been involved in the cover-up of the catastrophic failure
 of its program of reducing life to physics and chemistry.
 It will not happen soon. It will not happen ever.
 And when the history of biology is written, I'm convinced that Rupert's work will stand at the turning point,
 because the key problem in biology is form, and the ideas that have been put forth in the past have been inadequate.
 And I think the last thing I would like to say is I'm tremendously admiring of Rupert's simplicity,
 and what I mean by that are two things.
 Number one, his unwillingness to submit himself to the hegemony of scientific, well, the mafia of scientific correctness, essentially.
 He is not an academic. He feeds at the trough of no corporation or university that I'm aware of.
 He is a true independent thinker, and finally, he brought back and revivified for me something my mother was very keen to inculcate into me as a child,
 which is the primacy of observation, the importance of going to the field, the importance of facing the phenomenon unaided by apparatus or even mathematics,
 the importance of the existential confrontation with the thing one wishes to understand.
 And if you know Rupert, to stroll with him through an art gallery or a forest is to feel the mystery of life and the immediacy of that mystery,
 and to have a very strong sense of its accessibility, and that's very important.
 I don't want a Gnostic god that resides outside the imperium. I want a kind of pantheistic richness that is right there on the surface.
 So I enjoy playing Byron to Rupert's chalet and hope to do so this weekend.
 Happy Valentine's Day.
 Now I'm going to introduce Ralph.
 I met Ralph and Terence as Terence has described when I got off the bus at Sonoma. Was it Sonoma?
 Santa Rosa.
 Having been sent by a friend in San Francisco to meet him. This was in 1982.
 And Ralph was there too. So I met Terence and Ralph together.
 And that's when we found we had this way of relating together, which for us has been very helpful.
 Well, Ralph is a mathematician, a chaos mathematician.
 But he's much more than that. Most mathematicians are peculiar, and he's no exception.
 He's peculiar in a very interesting and accessible way.
 One of the things that he's done, which some of you may be aware of, is made mathematics accessible to ordinary people like ourselves who haven't studied it.
 The secret of maths is that for those who are skilled practitioners, it's in fact a kind of inner landscape that they see.
 Some of them at least have an amazing visual intuition. They're seeing internal pictures.
 It's a visual and aesthetic experience. Things can go into this landscape, balls roll along, answers come out, and they don't quite know how it happened.
 Something that's hard to imagine. But this is what it's all about.
 And then they write the thing down in symbols, in a notation.
 And when you look at these symbols, which is what we see when we look at maths, it's like music as if you've never heard a symphony, all you've seen is the score.
 And if you've only seen the score of the symphony, the notes on paper, it doesn't mean much. It's alienating. It seems somehow dry, abstract.
 But what Ralph has done, among other things, has made this mathematical, the visual intuitions that lie behind maths, accessible to everybody.
 And this is partly because computers have made it possible to do this. And he's at the leading edge of computer graphics.
 He's at the University of California at Santa Cruz, which is right next to Silicon Valley.
 And partly through simple diagrams, his books on visual dynamics, visual mathematics, have no equations in them whatever,
 and introduce you through pictures, through diagrams, seen or imagined in three dimensions, to the fundamental principles, not only of classical dynamics, but of chaotic dynamics.
 And for me, this was the first time anyone had unveiled the inner mysteries of what's going on in maths, and made it something that one could grasp intuitively.
 It's rather like having spent one's life just seeing musical scores. You suddenly hear the music. And this is one of Ralph's gifts, to be able to do this.
 His ability to visualise mathematics, I'm sure, is innate. But I think it was enhanced in the late 60s and early 70s by certain inner experiences,
 which would fall into the category of what Terence calls "hands-on pharmacology".
 And these he took. Ralph doesn't look like it, but he's an extremist. And when he does something, he takes it to extremes.
 For the last 20 years, he's been taking moderation to extremes.
 But when he felt that the secret to understanding the deeper parts of the mathematical landscape was substances like DMT, he took that to extremes too.
 And he's also travelled in India. One of the things the three of us have in common is we've all spent quite a long time in India.
 So Ralph has been in India. He took that to extremes as well. He's also studied here in England. He was at Warwick for a while, Warwick University.
 He lives in Santa Cruz in the Midsome Woods, in a very beautiful place with wonderful woodland and a little valley down beside his house.
 Deer and wild animals graze around. He observes the stars. He's got the most agreeable system for observing the stars of India I know,
 namely a hot tub located outside his house. You can sit in wonderful hot water, gazing at this clear star, these brilliant stars.
 So he knows the stars from many hours spent observing them in the most comfortable of circumstances.
 He eats in the most spartan way simple vegan food with chopsticks. This is what I mean by taking moderation to extremes.
 He's a total abstainer from all known noxious substances and leads this almost monastic life which I think is part of the spirit of mathematics.
 But he's also a very sociable creature and although he's always saying, "I never go anywhere, I never meet anyone."
 It's amazing how often you meet him in all sorts of places. He also has a great gift for dialogue and a great ability to summarize things briefly
 and a great ability to empathize with people of all different kinds. He's one of the few people I know who's totally unshockable.
 Now Ralph, what happens next?
 Oh yes, I was just thinking that over.
 It all seemed so simple back in the room.
 We're not done yet. We're only half done. Now I'm going to introduce Rupert.
 So Rupert is into nature. He's into nature and into the spirit. In nature he's into it as a scientist.
 A lot of people hate science and I must confess I feel very ambivalent about it myself.
 But Rupert is a scientist as a scientist should be as opposed to how most scientists actually are.
 In science he's really a biologist so that he's fascinated by life. Although he likes the stars, the mysteries of life seem to really absorb him.
 As a biologist he's really a botanist. In fact, he is so into plants that I think when Rupert speaks,
 you're hearing the leafy green speaking through his mouth. And like Terrence, he has a phenomenal ability to stand up after seeing a subject printed on a flash card
 and carry on for an hour or two as if he had written books on this subject all his life.
 And this gift seems to be pointed at communicating on behalf of the mute biosphere, the plants of the garden and the world.
 And there is also, in Rupert like Terrence, a special kind of spirituality which also probably comes from plants.
 But in Rupert's case this spirituality is expressed in a Christian form. So, unlike Terrence who is a pagan, or me, certainly not a Christian,
 there is in Rupert's integrity a kind of living proof, for us a constant reminder of the fact that the ordinary and familiar spiritual paths actually work.
 So, with the voice of the leafy green and this integrity of a true spiritual connection from the other realms,
 has come this heretical posture of the scientist who cannot say other than what is obvious from plants about nature.
 And to say that, I mean, you would have a choice if you perceived this, either to say it or not.
 Here is another aspect of Rupert that I think is singular and maybe for him unfortunate,
 and that is the courage, the adventure, the dedication, the responsibility to report on the weaknesses of science.
 And it is very expensive to be a heretic if you had a choice and you wouldn't be one.
 And the reason for being one is a kind of unyielding integrity which it would be easier not to have.
 So, as part of our group, this is a kind of a skeletal structure. We can never waver too far into a speculation which is not based on the integrity of our direct observation of a certain something.
 It has to come back to the reason for risking it all, which is the obligation to tell the truth.
 Now Rupert will introduce Terence.
 No, no, I will introduce you.
 Or would you rather do me?
 Ross wept out of the mathematical system.
 Now Rupert will introduce Terence.
 Very good.
 Well, I was on my way to meet Terence who I had never heard of in San Francisco.
 The friend who arranged this meeting gave me a tape of his which I listened to on the bus.
 I think it is the only time I have ever listened to one of those tape things, earphones on your ears.
 And I heard this extraordinary lecture about the effects of DMT, a powerful hallucinogen, and an entire family of hallucinogen derivatives.
 And I was amazed that a subject such as this was being discussed in such a fascinating, interesting and coherent way since previously I had associated this subject with total incoherence.
 When I met him I found that really he is a kind of naturalist.
 Fraser, hello, welcome.
 You must find your seat.
 So this is Fraser Clark.
 We will ask you to introduce yourself to my room.
 We are just completing the process of introduction where everyone has introduced themselves and we are introducing each other.
 So I was just talking about Terence.
 Terence once told me that as a child he lived in Colorado near a jam factory or a fruit bottling plant.
 I forget which.
 And at night he would go there and out of the night sky there was all this fruit being made in sheds.
 And out of the night sky, out of the darkness, would appear moths of every different description attracted by the bright lights of the bottling plant and the delicious fruit jam or whatever they were making.
 And how he used to go and watch there is out of the darkness coloured moths just flew in from the sky.
 And it seemed to me a wonderful image of what he does.
 I mean partly he is known for his visionary qualities, looking for visions which come out of the darkness of the mind if you like.
 But also he is quite literally a naturalist.
 He has spent years travelling through Indonesia with his butterfly net, collecting butterflies of various species.
 And he has spent a long time exploring the jungles of the Amazon.
 And so he is a kind of naturalist of the mind and of nature.
 Has an extraordinary knowledge of biological subjects including surprising ones like octopuses.
 And at the same time he has got a curious reductionistic streak in his thinking which can come out under certain conditions.
 He turns into another person and can become a savage critic of speculative thought,
 of anything that doesn't reduce everything to the biochemical or molecular level, of hallucinatory belief systems, of false beliefs of every kind.
 And I haven't quite worked out what conditions bring about this phase change in Terence's being.
 But you will probably see examples of it over the weekend.
 So he takes on many different personae but all of them, as Ralph has already indicated, come out with this gift of the gap,
 which comes from his Irish ancestry and also from his Welsh ancestry. He is a mixture of Irish and Welsh.
 Anyway, it's always a great stimulation to talk to Terence.
 And you never quite know where it's going to take you except that sooner or later it takes you to the 21st of December 2012
 when it's his fixed belief that the world as we know it will come to an end.
 So part of him is a millenarian prophet. Part of him is a Dominican.
 He professes to be a pagan but his Catholic upbringing, his Dominican reasoning and his experience as an altar boy have never left him.
 And in his vision of the end of the world in 2012 and of the entire historical process throughout the whole of evolutionary history
 being drawn towards some culminating point, namely 2012, he has a vision of the end which exceeds in zeal and fervour
 that of a great many professional preachers of this sort of belief.
 And although he appears at times to be reasonable, at other times to be open to new ideas and so on,
 there's one point which is fixed in all this which is it's all going to come to an end in 2012.
 Sometimes this apocalyptic view is tempered by a utopian view that it wouldn't all come to an end in 2012
 or at least it needn't if people all started taking DMT or other such things.
 But then it turns out that if you actually try to envisage what would happen
 in the total change of consciousness in human beings in the entire cosmos in 2012,
 it would be just like everyone taking DMT.
 So these themes weave together but they always come to the same conclusion
 that it's put forward in such an extraordinarily varied set of ways in kaleidoscopic forms
 that one's always amazed how many different ways there can be of putting over a simple single idea.
 I'll forswear the desire to rebut. Yes, I'll yield to the momentum of the program.
 I think I first heard of Ralph years before I met him and it had nothing to do with his professional mathematical accomplishments,
 which are many, but a person who had made a great contribution to the 60s youth rebellion in the United States
 had come upon such bad times that he was essentially living on the street,
 a brilliant Princeton biochemist.
 And in inquiring after his fate and knowing that he had become an indigent person,
 I learned that a mathematician in Santa Cruz had invited him into his home
 and taken care of him like a child or a son for several years.
 And that fact and an infamous photograph taken at the height of the 60s youth revolt,
 which was published far and wide in the United States,
 inflamed and outraged the population because this photograph showed a full professor of mathematics
 leading the charge at the barricades of the revolution attired in a flag made of the flag of the United States of America.
 And if you follow American politics, you know we hang for flag desecration.
 So it was an extraordinary thing, a member of the establishment, to be caught out in this kind of behavior.
 And then a few years later in 1972, a person I went to high school with came to me and said,
 there's someone you absolutely must meet.
 Well, usually when I hear these words, I make an automatic inner decision to, at all costs,
 to avoid meeting whatever is being offered because experience is a hard teacher.
 But this friend of mine persisted and eventually Ralph came to see me.
 I was living in Berkeley at the time.
 And it's impossible not to fall in love with the man.
 He's the teddy bear of advanced mathematics.
 And a person of extraordinary history and accomplishment.
 He grew up in Vermont, which is one of the poorest and least populated of the American states.
 It is truly a remote area.
 And there he gained a love of skiing.
 He, I don't really recall the early details of his career,
 but I remember I was extraordinarily impressed by the news that he had been a fellow of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies,
 where the only other person I was aware of who ever held that title was Albert Einstein.
 No, Ralph didn't get Einstein's office.
 But I think he got his bicycle stand, his consolation prize.
 And Ralph was such a maverick, such a chance taker,
 that the tremendously comfortable world of East Coast collegiate mathematics held no sway over him
 when an opportunity arose to go to California,
 where the University of California was establishing an experimental campus
 where all kinds of advanced experimental educational ideas would be tried out.
 Ralph was there either in the first year of its operation or very shortly after.
 He, I hope it's all right to tell this, Ralph, because it impressed me.
 Before he, eventually he had tenure, but he was so loathed by the administration for his political activism
 that I think for 35 years they gave him no raise.
 They couldn't fire him, but they could make life hell.
 And he stuck with it until now I think even the most hardcore of the administration
 recognize that in Ralph they have a real gem,
 one of the major thinkers and contributors to what may seem like an arcane field, research mathematics.
 But in fact, mathematics rules the world from far, far behind the throne.
 Ralph estimated to me at one time that there are only about 2,500 people in the world
 making a living as research mathematicians.
 And Ralph's work has always been forward thinking, extraordinarily creative in the abstract realm,
 but never without a human dimension.
 And mathematicians are extraordinary aesthetes.
 This is not a quality in your work that is respected in mathematics.
 The more abstruse, the more incomprehensible, the more removed from the human world,
 the more kudos your colleagues will shower upon you.
 Ralph has made major contributions in the area of model building for natural phenomena.
 Everything from population theory to models that prove the impossibility of monogamy
 to models of the functioning of anorexia nervosa and so forth.
 An extraordinary, rich, and varied career.
 Indian musician, student of the magical systems of the Renaissance and of Dr. D,
 founding member of the John D. Society, founder of the Institute for Global Analysis, IGA,
 and founder of the Institute for Visual Mathematics,
 the author of several books on dynamics that have brought dynamics from the closet of obscurity
 into a field that many, many people are conversant with,
 largely through Ralph's books and the illustrations of them by Chris Shaw.
 He is not simply a worker on the fringes of advanced mathematics.
 He is author of Foundations of Mechanics, and I dare say anybody who's written a book
 titled The Foundations of Anything gets a lot of respect from me.
 Ralph has been an extraordinary friend over the years.
 We see each other as often as our busy lives permit,
 and I go to him not for insight into advanced mathematics,
 which, other than my own narrow interest in the field, remains arcane,
 but for his insight into the human condition.
 He is better than five psychotherapists rolled into one.
 He always has very insightful advice, and he is, above all, an extraordinary human being.
 So there you have it. Three white guys on a roll.
 [Audience member] Maybe into the dark. Do you want me to do something about the lights?
 [BJ] Yes. I think maybe we better have the lights on.
 [RT] I wanted to ask for a consensus on this question, but it's impossible in the dark.
 [BJ] It's just ten. Stop us getting sleepy. It's just ten.
 [Audience member] More? No, that's fine.
 [RT] There are people in the room.
 All right.
 [BJ] It was beginning to sound like an induction.
 [RT] We've never done that before, and we'll never do it again.
 [Laughter]
 [BJ] Hear, hear.
 [RT] But I'm glad we did it once. It was very interesting to us, at least.
 You might be curious to know what we're going to do next, etc., etc.
 And we have a scheduled plan for tomorrow. I think it's best if I share it with you.
 We want to meet three times tomorrow for a session.
 We've had, as we said, private trilogues over a decade.
 We've had public trilogues twice before. This will be the third.
 And so basically we are following the plan of the other two, because they were more or less successful.
 But on the other hand, they were in California, so this might be an inappropriate plan.
 However, we can start with this.
 [BJ] Yes, silence.
 The focus of this book is on areas of research which have been either completely or largely neglected,
 because they simply don't fit in to the present view of the world.
 And because they've been so neglected by orthodox institutional science,
 there are quite simple experiments to open up these fields that could be done,
 in many cases for budgets of less than £10.
 And as soon as one realises that important research can be cheap,
 then the terrible Stalinist restrictions that institutional science has,
 you can't do it unless you've got approval, peer reviews, grants, committees, and so on,
 terrible stranglehold of orthodoxy.
 But if you can do things cheaply, you're completely free,
 because the only control they have is through money, giving out funds.
 And if you don't need the funds, you can do what you like.
 And science in the past grew out of a fertile field of amateur research.
 Even as eminent a scientist as Charles Darwin never had a government grant or an academic post.
 He lived as a private man, a gentleman, in his own house,
 and did most of his research in the garden with his son Francis.
 Well, he also kept pigeons.
 Now, homing pigeons are kept by 200,000 people in Britain.
 It's largely a working class sport. It doesn't cost much, but it does cost more than £10.
 This experiment would cost about £350, the one I'm going to talk about.
 But this is one of the experiments in the book.
 It's the one with which the book opens, or almost opens.
 And the reason I wanted to talk about it today
 is because I haven't yet discussed this with Ralph and Terence.
 And the present state of play, which I'm going to summarise now,
 shows that there have been investigations of homing pigeons.
 It's one of the few areas where research has been done.
 And it's led to the conclusion that we really do not know.
 We haven't a clue how they do it.
 And in this state of the utterly unknown, I don't know how they do it either.
 So I was hoping that by talking about it with Ralph and Terence,
 it might become clearer, or possibly even more obscure.
 At any rate, it's something that I really want to discuss with them.
 And this is the opportunity to do it.
 And I hope you'll all find this of interest too.
 Because the situation we're in is one of an acknowledged fact.
 Pigeons can home from huge distances.
 You can take a pigeon, a homing pigeon, 700 miles from its loft and release it.
 And it'll be home that evening, if it's a fast-flying bird.
 Pigeon racing enthusiasts do this regularly.
 Every Saturday, today for example, in the spring and the summer,
 people are racing pigeons.
 Sometimes pigeon racing clubs have been released in northern Spain.
 Sometimes they take them to the north of Scotland.
 Sometimes they're released in other parts of the continent.
 And they're taken away, they're taken in baskets on trains or on lorries.
 They're released, the baskets are opened, the pigeons circle around,
 and they fly straight home.
 And then the people whose pigeons come back fastest,
 they have a little time clock, and there's a thing on the leg of the pigeon they stamp.
 And then they calculate the exact distance to that owner's loft and work out the speed.
 The ones that come first win the prize.
 It's a very competitive sport.
 They win cups, there are cash prizes.
 Good racing birds can sell for as much as 5,000 pounds, breeding.
 Ordinary ones cost about 5 pounds.
 Anyway, here's a phenomenon.
 Everyone agrees they can do it.
 And moreover, it's part of a much wider phenomenon.
 Dogs and cats can home if you live a long way away from home.
 Even cows can home.
 Thousands of other species of birds and animals can home.
 It's very widespread.
 It's just that pigeons are the best-known example.
 Now, how do they do it?
 Well, Charles Darwin was one of the first to put forward a theory.
 He said, "Well, maybe they do it by remembering all the twists and turns of the outward journey."
 This theory was tested.
 And to test it, people anesthetized pigeons, put them in rotating drums,
 and drove them in vans, sealed, closed vans, by very devious routes to the point of release.
 And when the pigeons came round from the anesthetic and overcame the ill effects of this treatment on the way out,
 when they were released, they circled around and flew straight home.
 [laughter]
 So nobody any longer believes that's possible.
 They can't remember the twists and turns of the outward journey.
 This experiment's been done many times, sometimes with slow rotating drums,
 sometimes with drums rotating so fast that the poor birds are centrifuged against the edges of the drum.
 And despite these appalling maltreatments, the pigeons go straight home.
 So that's theory number one.
 That's not how they do it.
 Second theory, that they do it by smell.
 That they sniff the air and sniff their home.
 This, of course, smell is usually what people propose when animals show uncanny powers that can't be explained.
 They usually say, "Well, it must be an extraordinarily good sense of smell."
 Well, this has been tested too.
 First of all, it's not very plausible.
 If you release a bird in Spain and it flies to England,
 and the home is downwind from the point where you release it, rather than upwind,
 in other words, it's flying with the wind,
 there's no way smells could blow from its loft in England to Spain against the wind.
 So this theory is inherently implausible.
 Nevertheless, because everything else has failed,
 it's believed impassionately by some researchers in the field, particularly the Italians.
 So, anyway, this has been tested too.
 People have blocked out their nostrils with ceiling wax.
 They still get home.
 They've severed their olfactory nerves, poor birds.
 They still get home.
 And they've anesthetised their nasal mucosa with xylocaine or other local anesthetics.
 And they still set off straight away in the homeward direction and get home.
 So it's not smell.
 Next theory, they do it by the sun.
 Somehow calculating the latitude and longitude from the sun's position.
 Well, pigeons can home on cloudy days.
 And they can also be trained to home at night.
 So they don't need to see the sun or even the stars.
 But if they can see the sun, then they use the sun as a kind of rough compass,
 more or less as we would if you want to keep your bearings,
 keep the sun on your right, that kind of thing.
 And if you shift their time sense by raising them so they're shifted by six hours,
 and they think it's six hours early, you switch on lights early in the morning,
 you cover their cage or loft six hours earlier than sunset,
 you can make them think the time's been shifted by six hours.
 When you release them on a sunny day, they set off 90 degrees in the wrong direction.
 So they use the sun as a compass.
 But after a mile or two, they realise they're going the wrong way.
 They change course and go home.
 Landmarks are inherently unfeasible
 because if you release the birds hundreds of miles from anywhere they've been before,
 landmarks couldn't possibly explain it.
 Although they undoubtedly use landmarks on their way when they're close to their home,
 just the final bit.
 Anyway, this theory also has been tested to destruction.
 And this was tested by equipping the pigeons with frosted glass contact lenses,
 which meant they couldn't see anything at all,
 or any of the vaguest blur of shapes when they were very close.
 And pigeons with frosted glass contact lenses can't fly very normally.
 They take off and the whole bird points upwards.
 They're not under ideal conditions for flying.
 But nevertheless, such birds can be released up to 100 miles away or more.
 And some of them get picked off by sparrowhawks
 and immediately see that they're flying in a peculiar way.
 But others can get within 200 or 300 yards of the loft.
 They crash into trees or telegraph posts or flop down on the ground
 within 100 yards of the loft in some cases.
 They need to see for the last 100 yards.
 But it's incredible that they can actually get so close.
 Sometimes they overfly the loft and then within a mile or two realise they've gone too far
 and turn around and come back.
 So it's not landmarks.
 And that leaves only magnetism.
 And this again is something until the '70s most scientists were very reluctant to consider
 because previously magnetism as an animal sense has been associated with animal magnetism,
 mesmerism and a whole range of fringe subjects they didn't want to mess with.
 Plus the fact it seems so unlikely that pigeons could detect a field as weak as the Earth's magnetic field.
 Well, it's been shown that some migratory birds can detect the Earth's magnetic field.
 They can tell where north and south are from the magnetic field.
 They do seem to have a kind of inherent compass.
 But magnetism can't explain how they get home
 because even if they could measure the dip of the compass, i.e. the angle towards it dips down,
 at the north pole it points straight down, at the equator it's parallel.
 If they could measure the dip they could tell how far north or south they'd been taken.
 But if you took pigeons due east or west, the dip would be exactly the same as at home.
 It wouldn't give them any information on whether they were east, west or west.
 And pigeons can home equally well from all compass points.
 So even in principle the magnet won't explain it.
 They do seem to have a kind of vague magnetic compass sense.
 But this wouldn't explain homing.
 If you had a magnetic compass in your pocket and you were parachuted into a strange place
 and said, "All right, get home, here's a compass,"
 you wouldn't be able to do it because you'd know where north and south were
 but you wouldn't know where home was.
 A compass alone can't get you home.
 Anyway, to disrupt the magnetic sense, pigeons have been treated experimentally in two ways.
 Firstly, they've had magnets strapped to them which would, as they flap their wings,
 these moving magnets, have totally overwhelmed the magnetic sense.
 And secondly, they've been degassed by being put in extremely strong magnetic fields
 that would demagnetise any magnetically sensitive parts within them.
 Well, these demagnetised pigeons and pigeons with magnets strapped to them
 to confuse their magnetic sense or with magnetic coils over their heads
 still get home perfectly all right.
 Well, that's the current state of play.
 Every hypothesis has been tested to destruction.
 They've all failed.
 And the remaining ones, the only one that you occasionally hear is,
 "Well, maybe they hear their home from hundreds of miles away
 because of extremely sensitive hearing."
 Even that one won't work
 because pigeons that can't hear can still get home.
 So everything has been tried.
 Everything within the last ten years has finally--
 the most rigorous tests have been done in the last ten years.
 All these theories have failed.
 Nobody has a clue how they do it.
 And pigeon homing is the tip of the iceberg of a vast range of unexplained biological phenomena
 which include the migration of swallows, how they come back to Havelwood every year
 having flown to southern Africa in the winter,
 the migration of cuckoos, the migration of salmon, eels and so on.
 These are usually explained in terms of smell, as the fish runs,
 which only works really within a few miles of the home river.
 It doesn't explain how they can get thousands of miles through the oceans to the right place.
 So there's a huge number of phenomena to do with migratory and homing senses in animals
 which are unexplained.
 Human beings probably have similar powers too.
 Not very well developed in modern urban people,
 although even some urban people have quite a good sense of direction,
 but extremely well developed in nomadic people like Australian Aborigines,
 South African Bushmen, and also the Polynesian Navigators.
 Now they probably use ordinary senses as well,
 but this is a whole range of unsolved problems which is hardly touched by science,
 which leads to the idea that animals, and probably we too,
 may have senses of clouds undreamt of within existing science.
 So that's the present state of play,
 and the experiment that I'm proposing is very simple, I can outline it briefly.
 I think that the evidence suggests there must be some unknown sense, force or power
 connecting the pigeons to their home.
 Now what it is I don't know.
 My image of it is a kind of invisible elastic band,
 taken away and it's stretched and may tend to be pulled back,
 it gives them a kind of directional sense.
 I'm not bothering at the moment about the possible physical basis of this,
 whether it's part of existing physics,
 whether it's an extension of non-locality in quantum physics,
 whether it requires a new field, that question is open.
 But with this simple model of an invisible connection,
 the experiment I'm proposing is the converse of those done so far.
 If the pigeon is connected to its home,
 then the usual experiments involve taking the pigeon from the home and it comes back.
 My experiment involves taking the home from the pigeons.
 This involves the use of a mobile pigeon loft,
 which is essentially a simple pigeon shed mounted on a farm trailer on wheels,
 that can be moved around.
 I've actually done this experiment first in Ireland and secondly in Suffolk.
 So far I haven't been able to carry it past the first phase, the training phase.
 I found however it's possible to train pigeons to come to a mobile loft.
 They don't expect their home to move any more than we do.
 The first time you take them out of it,
 you move their home just a hundred yards the first time,
 and when you release them they can see perfectly well that it's not where it was before,
 but they go on flying round the place where it was before.
 It takes them hours before they'll go into the loft in its new position.
 That's how we'd behave if we went home after being here at Hazelwood
 and found our home a hundred yards down the street.
 Most of us wouldn't just go straight in and settle down to any of our letters and so on.
 We'd probably go round and round in circles round the place where it was before
 and look awfully puzzled. Well that's what pigeons do.
 But if you keep doing this, after three or four times they just get used to it.
 They realise they're sort of no-mans or gypsies now.
 And they go straight in and they'll find their home up to two or three miles away
 within ten minutes and go straight in.
 You can do this, and in the First World War,
 the Belgian, German and British military pigeon corps had mobile lofts.
 The British had 200 mobile lofts and converted London buses by the end of the First World War.
 And there is still a mobile pigeon loft research project going on in Europe.
 The Swiss Army is the last army in Europe to have home in pigeons.
 And the head of the Office of Commanding Pigeons, Dr Hans-Peter Lipp,
 I'm now in correspondence with, he's at the University of Zurich.
 And he's carrying out a fascinating research programme
 on military uses of mobile lofts in Switzerland at the moment.
 He and I are exchanging notes on the subject.
 It's the only other research project going on of this kind.
 His objectives are quite different though.
 They're to find ways of carrying messages more effectively.
 Anyway, the key experiment is you move the mobile loft 50 miles, let's say,
 after you've trained the birds and see if they can find it.
 If you move it downwind from the point of release, so they couldn't smell it,
 and if the pigeons can find it quite quickly, fly straight there,
 then this would suggest there's an invisible connection between them and their home.
 The next question is, is it between the loft itself and them and the loft itself
 or the other pigeons? You leave some of their nearest and dearest in the loft.
 And you can do further experiments then by taking the nearest and dearest somewhere else
 and seeing whether they find the nearest and dearest
 or whether they find the physical structure of the loft.
 Anyway, this research is relatively cheap.
 I mean, £500 would cover the entire project.
 It's well within the capacity of the 5 million pigeon fanciers worldwide
 who keep pigeons and are well-exposed in dealing with them.
 How the experiment will turn out, I don't know.
 But here is a profound mystery, the tip of the iceberg of a whole series of biological mysteries
 which have been more or less neglected.
 And if there is a new power, force or sense involved, what might it imply?
 What might it tell us? And where would we go from there?
 And that's the question I wanted to raise with Ralph and Terence.
 Well, thanks for the question.
 Maybe I could ask you for just a couple of little details first.
 When they race the pigeons, then the winner is the pigeon returning to the home loft first.
 But these home lofts are all in different cities, different streets and so on.
 So how does it work?
 The wife of the pigeon racer is at home and when the mate comes
 then pulls out the cellular telephone and calls headquarters.
 No, the racing pigeon has a little thing on its leg, a ring for the race,
 with its number and the race number.
 They all have those when they are released.
 When it gets into the loft, it actually enters the loft, the pigeon fancier is waiting there.
 He captures the bird, takes this ring off its leg.
 He has a sealed time clock issued by the local racing pigeon federation.
 He stamps this thing with the time it's come home.
 And then they all send in these tags with the time stamped by these sealed clocks.
 And they then calculate from the point of release, say it's Wick in Scotland,
 they then calculate the straight line distance to each of these houses,
 divide the distance by the time and they get the average speed.
 So there's no account for difficulties and anomalous obstacles encountered along the way, like sparrow hawks.
 No, no, well if they get, no, if they're killed by a sparrow hawk, they don't win the race.
 One more question about the nearest and dearest.
 Now the home loft that they're racing to, which is still at home, that has family members in it or not?
 Yes.
 There's a whole bunch of pigeons in the loft and only one of them or two of them are racing.
 There's two, there's two, several racing systems used.
 They have to have a motive to get home.
 If you race them in the winter, they don't home very well.
 But if you race them, they usually race them in the spring and summer,
 either when they've got eggs and young, so they have an incentive to get back to their family.
 Or there's another system called the jealousy system, widely practiced, where pigeons are monogamous.
 They form pairs at least for the year.
 And it's a kind of limited monogamy, but at least for that year.
 So they wait until they've paired up.
 Then they show, if say they're racing the cock bird,
 they then hold the cock bird and put another cock bird with its mate so that the two start billing.
 Disgusting.
 And then they take it in its basket to the north of Scotland and release it.
 And it gets home real fast.
 [laughter]
 Its competitive spirit will stop it in nothing.
 And does the pigeon home to an empty loft?
 I mean it requires it to be populated with nereus and dernus.
 I'm thinking of Bell's theorem.
 I don't know. No pigeon racer would normally home to an empty loft.
 What about Dr. Hans-Peter Lipp of the Swiss Army?
 Yes, he's done it to an empty loft. And I've done it to an empty loft.
 But not over long distances.
 Well, I...
 Yes.
 Has there been a chance to be in battle with all these pigeons?
 To empty lofts?
 I don't know. I've only done it over short distances.
 But probably they could home to...
 But the thing is they're not very...
 Certainly the practical experience...
 Pigeon racers have been doing this for a hundred years.
 It's been a competitive sport.
 They've found by long experience that the way to run races is to have this easy to understand personal motivation, as it were.
 The stronger the motivation, the tighter the elastic band.
 Yes.
 And now I'm getting the elastic band theory down.
 Well, all right. I'm ready to risk an answer to the question.
 Terence is getting ready to bite.
 So, first of all, I think we could wish for a homing pigeon or a monarch butterfly or something that spoke.
 Then we could ask them the question you're posing and they'd answer.
 But actually, I wouldn't trust the answer because this homing pigeon might also have a theory that, like mine, is much too elaborate and unnecessary,
 when actually there's some simpler explanation, but they don't know it.
 For example, the Polynesian navigators, if you ask them how they do it...
 There was an English navigator who went to the South Pacific and apprenticed himself to a native navigator.
 They go over a hundred miles to the nearest island and get it dead on without compass on cloudy days and so on.
 So they have a theory, but I don't believe it.
 So we'll just have to make up our own.
 So this is my fantasy.
 Well, first of all, I'm accepting the premise that ordinary fields don't do, so it's a kind of an ESP.
 And then we want to learn from doing experiments like you proposed on the phenomenon to get an idea of what it is or how it works.
 And so this is just a fantasy about that.
 Well, how do you know if it's time to get killed?
 Yes. Well, I don't know.
 I'll try talking a little louder and see if that helps.
 So I'm thinking of bats now, which have been studied in a room just like this one with wires just like that.
 And in the daytime, of course, the bat will fly around missing the wires and not flying into the wall using vision, primarily, we suppose.
 And then at night they do the same thing without vision because of sonar.
 So in this case, there is another field explanation and it's well established that it's sonar.
 So I suppose, based on bats, that the brain and the mind are able to image the results of sonar experiments in a kind of image,
 which is the same kind of image that the eyes form.
 In other words, that instead of hearing, "Oh, there's a sound over there," and trying to compute that's an echo and so on,
 that bat sees the room with its ears in exactly the same representation, a three-dimensional visual representation that's dynamic,
 that it can fly through its own sonar receptions and that the representations are the same.
 Then if somebody suddenly turned the lights on, the bat would not hesitate and fall to the ground
 because it has to switch from system A to system B, that the visual representation of the room would exactly overlay precisely the same image as the sonar image of the room.
 Similarly, dolphins, they have this melon that's called a huge sensory organ and receives sonar waves and they form a visual type.
 This is just a speculation. Both in the case of bats and dolphins, the visual representation is three-dimensional, more than ours,
 which gives them, in a way, a kind of a higher IQ.
 Then that's a way of seeing. In other words, for bats and dolphins, in the case of dolphins and whales,
 they can see almost the entire planet as a three-dimensional object with its curvature and so on.
 So if there were a sixth sense that homing pigeons and monarch butterflies have, and maybe we do too, to a degree,
 then I would suppose that it works like that.
 So after the pigeon is rotated, doped, transported 4,000 miles and released,
 then with its sixth sense, it's seeing a very detailed three-dimensional roadmap of the entire planet, essentially,
 which is there in this field, somehow, just as we consult the roadmap.
 First of all, it has to orient the roadmap, the holographic three-dimensional image of its world,
 with the visual world, when it looks, it has to sort of rotate things around to get them aligned,
 and after that first step, it can then fly in the map.
 And then things like smells, which are smells, the sun, the magnetic field, these things are factors,
 and they would be kind of labeled on the map by the road association.
 And so this still doesn't explain how to get home, though, because you have to know where home is marked.
 Like how many times have you parked your car in the three-level structure,
 and then you come out of the department store after too much shopping, you can't remember where the car is.
 You know the map of the three-dimensional garage.
 It has three floors, they're square, they're labeled, there's north, south, east, and west,
 and you can navigate anywhere to a known position in the garage.
 However, the position of your own home is unknown, therefore, you don't know how to find the car.
 So given the sixth sense, with a complete roadmap of the world as a three-dimensional object,
 containing smells, containing trees, containing magnetic fields, containing the sun and the motion of the zodiac
 and the celestial, the polar constellations and so on, there still must be some kind of beacon where the home is supposed to be.
 So even in the sixth sense theory, that's still a mystery.
 Now we've got to the point where you can speak to the pigeon and ask, how is home represented on this map?
 And the pull of a rubber band is one idea, but I have a feeling that if there is an obstacle,
 a serious obstacle between the pigeon and the loft, then it will find a way around.
 It does.
 It does.
 See, so it's better to have a map than a rubber band.
 I think the rubber band theory is too simple.
 Also, the rubber band, well, considering jealousy and so on, I don't know,
 but the rubber band, the longer its pull, the tighter it is.
 And that's the opposite of most fields that we know, where the farther you get away from home, the weaker is the pull.
 So I would think that it more or less appears as a beacon, that part of this field.
 And the question would be, how is the physical information of a location,
 especially a recently moved location, inserted into the field?
 That would be sort of a final mystery in this picture.
 What do I think?
 Well, not that.
 It seems to me, if I can download this into language, that the problem is not with the pigeon.
 The problem is with the experimenter, that we know from studying quantum mechanics
 that things are not simply located in space and time.
 This is what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
 And it seems, I've always felt, that what biology is, is a strategy, a chemical strategy,
 for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy into macro-physical systems called living organisms.
 And that living organisms somehow work their magic by opening a doorway to the quantum realm
 through which indeterminacy can come.
 And I imagine that all nature works like this, with the single exception of human beings,
 who have been poisoned by language.
 And that language has inculcated in us the very strong illusion of an unknown future.
 But that, in fact, the future is not unknowable,
 if you can decondition yourself from the assumption of spatial concreteness.
 So the answer to how the pigeon finds its way home
 is that a portion of the pigeon's mind is already home and never left home.
 And that we, gazing at this, assume that pigeons, monarch butterflies, so forth,
 are simpler systems than ourselves.
 But, in fact, our assumption of the unknowability of the future
 creates a problem here where there is no problem.
 And that it's only in the domain of language, and perhaps only in the domain of certain languages,
 that this can become a problem.
 To put it simply, I assume that if you are a pigeon,
 we speak here of asking the pigeon,
 if you had the consciousness of a pigeon, you would not have a diminutive form of human consciousness.
 You would have a consciousness that we can, obviously, based on this discussion,
 barely conceive of.
 Because the consciousness of the pigeon is a continual awareness extending from egg to death.
 And the particular moment in space and time in which an English-speaking person
 confronts a pigeon is, for the pigeon, not noticeably distinct from all the other serial moments of its life.
 So the problem is in the way the question is asked,
 and in the way human beings interpret the data that is deployed in front of them.
 After all, in the animal world, the future is always rather like the past,
 because novelty is rather suppressed in the animal world.
 Most things that happen have happened before and will happen again.
 So my expectation would simply be that what we're seeing when we confront
 these kinds of edge phenomenon in biology is the beginning of a set of phenomena
 which, when correctly interpreted, will bring the idea of quantum mechanical biology
 out of the realm of charge transfer and intercellular and subcellular activity
 and into the domain of the whole organism.
 I'm not sure this is the solution, but it does cause the problem to disappear.
 Exactly. It's not the solution, but it causes the question to go away.
 I wish I could say that Rupert and I have...
 I thought that's what solutions were supposed to be.
 If Rupert and I had got together last night and tried to predict what you would say,
 then I would have bet on that. But still, you exceeded my worst expectations.
 Are you saying, have I got this right, that the entire life history of the pigeon
 is more or less determined at the outset, including the trip away from the loft
 and the trip back? So as a matter of fact...
 It never went anywhere.
 It never went anywhere.
 Yes, that's what I thought it would.
 It's only when you have a three-dimensional grid imposed by language laid over this
 that there appears to be a problem.
 In other words, there is some kind of a totality about it,
 but we section it and deny it, and then we come up with a dilemma.
 What about the pigeons that get picked off by sparrow hawks on the way home?
 That was predetermined as well.
 They doubtless saw that as well.
 They were born under Scorpio. What can you do?
 Well, I mean, I offer... It's not entirely facetious.
 The real question I'm raising is, to what degree does language create
 the assumption of an unknown future?
 To what degree does it somehow dampen a sense of the future
 that I imagine is very highly evolved in the absence of language?
 I still can't grasp it.
 Do you mean that when the pigeon's released, part of its mind is still at home,
 its return home is in the future, and in some sense that helps it to get home?
 Yes. You and I have talked about this before.
 You've always said the morphogenetic fields drive push from behind.
 No, I've always said they pull from in front.
 Ah, well, so then, yes, so they're attractors.
 Well, so this is partly that, and partly that the consciousness of the organism
 is distributed in time in a way that makes it capable of doing miracles from our point of view.
 But from its own point of view, there's nothing unusual going on here at all.
 Well, you wouldn't be at all surprised then if, as a matter of fact,
 the race was won by the clever pigeon that actually vanished at the point of release
 and simultaneously appeared back in the law.
 Well, if you're suggesting some kind of virtual tunneling as an amplified quantum mechanical effect,
 perhaps we have the solution to spontaneous combustion here well in hand, or something like that.
 But I still think it's different whether the future is totally determined
 or if the consciousness of the future includes several alternatives.
 And in case it contains several alternatives, then sooner or later the pigeon will be presented by a fork in the road
 and have to decide which way to go.
 Furthermore, the pigeon, if it had control of all physical levels, would not have to fly.
 But here we see poor guy is lumbering along, gets tired, stops for food, and so on.
 We imagine this is at least the fundamental assumption for our discussion
 that pigeon flight is subject to our own concept of the world, including the laws of physics and so on,
 much as we feel they should be extended and want to extend them by studying pigeons and doing these experiments.
 The idea is to somehow modify our view of the world by engulfing the pigeon view of the world for our greater benefit.
 So I think there's still missing here some kind of mechanism for the pigeon to follow this line,
 this stretched rubber band of its own consciousness that occupies an extended region of space and time,
 to follow it so that its ordinary physical body ends up back where its consciousness is.
 How does it do it?
 Well, an analogy would be when you run a cartoon or a film backwards, there's a spectacle of wild confusion,
 but miraculously everything manages to end up in the right place.
 So what we have, it isn't that there really aren't choices.
 For a pigeon, when it comes into awareness, it comes into all the awareness it will ever have.
 It's like getting your memories at the moment of birth, your deathbed memories handed to you at the moment of birth.
 So then essentially for the pigeon, it's a kind of play. It knows what's going to happen.
 It doesn't even know that it knows what's going to happen because that's the nature of its perception,
 a complete spectrum of understanding of its entire life.
 And then it goes through it and it unfolds as anticipated, although the pigeon doesn't have the concept anticipated.
 We looking at it have that concept and we alone, I think, are tormented by the anxiety of the unknowable future.
 And it's an artifact, I maintain, of culture and language.
 And so it has given us, and we impute it to the rest of nature, but in fact things like monarch butterflies,
 pigeon homing and some of these other phenomena are clues to us that imputing our consciousness into nature
 creates problems like the one we're discussing here.
 I don't know exactly why you resist this because I think it's simply a more elegant statement of the rubber band theory.
 Well that means that except for our ignorance caused by the power of language,
 that we would have the consciousness of a pigeon and therefore see our entire lifetime.
 So according to this view, the baby pigeon, Cech, upon pecking out of the shell is like waking from a dream,
 looking around and realizing that, "Oh damn, I'm the one that's going to have to race three years from now
 and they're going to put this other jerk in there with my mate."
 Well but you see, you use language to portray the state of mind of the pigeon.
 That immediately collapses its four-dimensional vector into three dimensions
 and then it becomes no longer a pigeon, but a person talking like a pigeon.
 Is the pigeon aware or unaware of its entire history from birth till death?
 It's aware, but it's not aware that it's a history.
 You see, history is one timeless moment.
 One timeless moment. And we could go further with this and say this explains our own curious relationship
 with the prophetic and the anticipated, instead of like the pigeon having a 95% clear view of the full spectrum of its existence.
 By opting into language, we have perhaps a 5% view of the future.
 So we're tormented by messiahs, prophecies, we lean toward astrology and computer modelling
 and all of these advanced tools then give us a very weak and wavering map of the future
 which we nevertheless pay great credence to and worry a great deal about.
 I'm suggesting that theoretically, if we could step away from language
 and perhaps this is what Zen anchorites and people like that do,
 that isn't this what they teach? That you fall into a timeless realm where there is no threat
 and all things are seen with a kind of great levelling and anxiety leaves the circuit.
 So I'm suggesting one more version of the fall, that from the fourth dimensional world of nature,
 complete in time, we fell into the limited world of language and an unclear future
 and hence great anxiety about that and hence conundrums like how do the pigeons find their way home.
 Well this suggests that we should stop talking and writing books and just hum.
 I've always felt that. Rather like a pigeon.
 Does this imply, I mean is this as I suspect a polite way of saying that Rupert's current book
 and the homing pigeon experiment is a total waste of time and even if it only costs ten pounds it's a shame.
 Well that's a wider issue but you know very well that I think experiment as currently understood is futile
 because all experiments including I assume all the experiments in Rupert's book
 make the assumption that time is invariant and I don't believe that time is invariant.
 Although we're now going to, I mean I didn't intend to open this up as a general frontal attack
 on the epistemic methods of modern science but in fact the idea that time is invariant
 is entirely contradicted by our own experience and it's merely an assumption science makes
 in order to do its business.
 I believe that we have a case here of multiple personality in action and now I'm going to undertake to prove it.
 So we suppose that Rupert had in his book an eighth chapter, an experiment with homeopathic medicine
 and this experiment was done and the outcome of it was that a flower power was discovered
 which absolutely and instantly cures hay fever.
 Then you would be interested in the result of the experiment or not?
 Sure.
 I rest my case.
 Well, as a practical matter, I don't think we should confuse our ideologies with our sinuses.
 [laughter]
 No, you see, I would like to redefine science as the study of those phenomena so crude
 that the time in which they are embedded is without consequence.
 [music]
 You've really got to love Terence McKenna, don't you?
 He can think those great lofty thoughts and then when it suits him, he can say something like,
 "As a practical matter, I don't think we should confuse our ideologies with our sinuses."
 [laughter]
 Sometimes when I listen to Terence, I think he's actually reciting from Alice in Wonderland,
 the way he can whiplash my mind with those sudden idea shifts.
 And I guess I probably should have warned you that Rupert was going to go on what I thought was
 an insufferably long riff about all of the ways scientists have tried to uncover how homing pigeons find their way home.
 But after thinking about it, I now understand why he took so much time on that topic.
 Had he just said, "Hey, we've done every kind of experiment we can think of and we still don't know how they do it."
 Well, if that was all he had to say about it, I doubt if it would have finally struck me that,
 "Hey, what he's talking about here is a scientific principle, an important one that we still don't have a clue about."
 And that, my friends, is really big news when you think about it that way.
 In a way, it's like we're still living in a world that doesn't understand something as fundamental as gravity or electromagnetism.
 My guess is that we still haven't even come close to the most basic understanding about this universe.
 Maybe we'll learn more about it by listening to the rest of the Hazlehurst Triologues.
 And that's my plan. In fact, if all goes well, I'll have the next installment of these triologues out by the end of this coming weekend.
 And after I get all three of these out, the three remaining tapes,
 then we'll get back to the pliologues that were recorded at Burning Man this year.
 And before I go, I want to thank our fellow Saloners who have searched out and then forwarded information
 that may be of help to Sasha Shulgin in his battle with dry macular degeneration.
 All of your suggestions and comments have been passed along to the Shulgins now.
 And Anne asked me to thank all of you for your good wishes and your help.
 Like me, they're still unpacking from their trip to Burning Man,
 but they sound like they weathered all the storms on the Playa quite well and they're in really good spirits.
 So that's about it for today. But I want to mention 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, just click on the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon web page,
 which may be found at psychedelicsalon.org.
 And if you have any questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions about these podcasts,
 well, just send them to lorenzo@matrixmasters.com.
 And Jacques Cordell and Wells, sometimes known as Chateau Hayouk,
 thanks again for letting me use your music here in the Salon.
 Also, a big thank you goes out to Ralph Abraham for letting us play his Trilog tapes here in the Salon,
 and to Bruce Dahmer, who not only made the arrangements with Ralph,
 but who also stayed up for several days and nights digitizing the box of old cassette tapes Ralph had loaned us.
 And thank you for joining us here in the Salon again today.
 I hope to see you back here again real soon.
 For now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from psychedelic space.
 Be well, my friends.
 (music)
 [ Music ]


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