Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon. As I mentioned in my previous podcast, I'm going to try and keep my own chatter to a minimum for a few podcasts now while I get back in the groove again. And so I'm going to continue playing the recordings of the Hazelwood trilogues that I began a couple of days ago. Basically I've left this conversation unedited. However, there were several sections where people in the audience made long statements but the microphones were so far away from them that I couldn't make out what they're saying, even by enhancing those sections of the audio. So I did cut out a few parts of this section of the trilogue. So now we'll pick up where the last podcast left off with Terrence McKenna on a riff about redefining what he means by science. And then they will finish their discussion of the unknown force field or whatever it is that homing pigeons use to find their way home. And at about the halfway point, which will be the beginning of side B of this tape, Terrence McKenna introduces a new topic, time. So now let's join Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake at Hazelwood House in England sometime in 1993 as they conduct their first trilogue held outside of California. 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. And I suppose ball bearings rolling down slopes and things like this fall into that category. But the things which interest us, love affairs, the fall of empires, the formation of political movements, these things always happen in different ways. There is no theory for much of what happens in the human world. And I maintain it's because in the human world the invariance of time forces itself upon us. And so we create categories of human knowledge outside science, like psychology, or that's sort of a fence sitter, but advertising and political theory and this sort of thing. So that addresses the invariant time, or the, yes, the variable time that we experience. And then we hypothesize a theoretical kind of time that is invariant and that's where we do all this science that has led us into these incredibly alienating abstractions. This goes back to Newton. Newton said time is pure duration. He visualized time as an absolutely featureless surface. Well now notice, Ralph, Aristotle's effort to describe nature with perfect mathematical solids has been abandoned long ago because nowhere do we meet perfect mathematical forms in nature. The only perfect mathematical form that has been retained in modern scientific theory is the utterly unsupported belief that time, no matter at what scale you magnify it, will be found to be utterly featureless. There is absolutely no reason to think this and considerable evidence to the contrary. The problem is if we were to ever admit that time is a variable medium, a thousand years of scientific experiment would be swept away and we would be back to Z. So it's just simply a house of cards and better left where it stands, I think. But the fact of the matter is there is no reason to believe that time is invariant and experience argues the contrary. No, but the thing is the invariability, I mean this seems to go a little bit beyond the problem of pigeon-hanging. Well it addresses the problem of experiment as a notion. But I don't think it actually touches it, you see, because I think what you've been saying, if we take it down to the level of the pigeons again, it does, as you yourself say, turn out to be an elaborate version of the rubber band theory, the rubber filly-breed or something like that. Anyway, the rubber band theory would say that they'd be drawn back to the loft and the experiment of moving the loft and seeing if they can find the moved loft, and let's say they can do that, there's an experiment. It would show us something that goes beyond anything contemporary science would expect. It might or might not fit with your all-time theory. It does fit. But nevertheless here we'd have an experiment, crude though it is, which would show that the existing scientific models are inadequate. We need something that goes beyond them. We need something that shows how the pigeon can be linked to the home. The rubber band theory does involve a kind of attraction to the home, in that sense involves a pull in time. So it does raise all these questions, perhaps. - Well, do you have a theory about how this works? I mean, I don't see how morphogenetic fields are particularly helpful here, unless we... or if they are helpful, then in the boil-down it's the same thing I'm seeing. - Yes, I think the more... I wouldn't... If there's a field that includes both the pigeon and its loft, say, here's the pigeon, here's its loft, normally they're together, it's normally at the home, you separate them, you can either do it by moving the loft or you can do it by moving the pigeon, but either way they're separated, they're part of a single system, because the pigeon's world includes its loft, its home, its mates and all the rest of it. You move them, they're now separated parts of a single system, they're linked by a field, and the pigeon is attracted within this field back towards the home, which functions as the attractor. This is where me and Ralph have this different view of attractors. In dynamics, things are drawn towards attractors, and if the loft is an attractor within the field, then the pigeon is, as it were, pulled back towards the field. It doesn't need an AA roadmap of the whole of Britain. That's irrelevant. It just feels a pull in a particular direction. And so the trouble with the map theory is it has all this information, the whole of Britain, you know, the star rising, all these kind of features of this roadmap. It doesn't need that. You don't need that. You only need it if you're trying to work out where you're going to go by some method of rational calculation. - Oh, this is an angel theory, that when I come to the fork in the road, a guardian angel appears from behind a tree and tells me which way to go. - Roughly speaking, yes. Or you just feel a pull in a particular direction. You don't even think about it. You just feel that's the way to go. You're drawn that way. I think that's how the pigeon does it, subjectively. I don't think it necessarily needs to see the whole of its future from egg to grave. I think it feels a pull towards where its home is by this kind of invisible rubber band, which is actually, if you like, a gradient within the field towards an attractor, which is its home. I mean, that's how you could model it mathematically. - Yes. - But you wouldn't need to bring in the whole of the rest of Britain and a roadmap. Now, if you did need a roadmap for the whole of the rest of Britain and all the rest of the world, then we'd have the question, how would it get it? Well, I've got a theory how it could get it, but I think it might tune in to the collective memory of all the other pigeons that have ever gone homing races. All of them see the ground they're flying over. If a pigeon could access the collective pigeon psyche or take it further, even the collective memory of other species, not just pigeons, if all birds could link up to what all other birds have seen, then they would indeed have a global map of the world. They could gain access to it. But I think that's possibly going further than we need for this rather limited case. It may be more relevant in the case of migrations, where you have birds migrating over thousands of miles, in the case of cuckoos, young cuckoos, migrating to South Africa independent of their parents that leave in July from England. The young cuckoos leave in August. They've never met their parents because they're cuckoos. And their parents, in any case, push off before the young ones are ready to fly. They go all that way. And I think that in that case, they must be tuning in at least to a kind of collective cuckoo memory that includes features of the landscape over which they fly. But the rubber band theory wouldn't necessitate even that, you see. It would necessitate maybe some degree of collective memory, but it would essentially have this kind of pull, directional pull. Well, there still seems to be some kind of problem, either a mathematical or cognitive problem. When the loft is moved, then the dynamical system, which extends essentially over the whole of the planet, wherever this pigeon may be released and all the way back, has to receive the feeling which direction to go, from the guardian angel or whatever. And that directional field all over the planet has changed when the loft was moved. So the question arises, how does the attractor, the loft, extend its field and directional instruction all over the planet? And I don't think that the idea of morphic resonance helps here, because no other pigeon has flown to that particular loft. No, I'm not talking about morphic resonance. I'm talking about the field itself. Morphic resonance is a memory of how to do it. If you have a magnet, say you have a magnet of pyroline filings here, and you have a magnet over here, and you put the magnet there, these iron filings will be drawn towards it, and you'll see lines of force moving towards it. If you then move the magnet over here, you don't have to... There's an immediate adjustment... The loft itself simply functions as a magnet, as it were, in another field which is not an electromagnetic field, but it's sort of an emotional field. Yes, and the loft's like a magnet, and so you move the loft, it's just like moving a magnet, automatically, now the iron filings or whatever will go there. That's basically the model I'm suggesting. And the reason that I can't find my car in the parking garage is because I'm not emotionally attached to it, and I've never been in love with it. I could get an Italian car. Well, it's a thing about... I mean, in the human realm, it could apply to finding people. And Jill does an experiment as well. She does an experiment in her workshops where people form pairs, and they can first find each other by humming with their eyes closed and quiet person. Then after they've got good at that, you can then find your partner with your eyes closed so you can't see, just by feeling where they are and heading for them in that direction. And now that's an example of this possible magnetic pull in the human realm. I've tried doing this experiment with our children on grounds that it ought to be particularly strong. It turned out that Merlin was extremely good at finding me. And then I discovered he was peeping. [LAUGHTER] So I'm afraid this experiment, he couldn't quite see the value of totally objective, utterly controlled scientific study. So I mean, maybe you see that the bonds between pigeons and their home are comparable to the bonds between people and other people. And indeed, they may be related to the kind of social-- that which holds societies together. When we say there's a bond between people, we may mean something more than a mere metaphor. We may be-- it may be that there is an actual connection between them. And so we have many examples from the human realm. Someone falls ill, a child falls ill hundreds of miles away, and their mother immediately starts worrying and rings up on the telephone. This may be another manifestation of the same kind of thing. And it may be part of the social bonding. I mean, the motive of the pigeon to go home is social. It's not merely geographical. If it hasn't got mates and so on, it doesn't bother. If you try racing them in the winter and they've got no social motivation, they hang out wherever they can. They join into other people's lofts and so on. And it may well be that the pigeon who spent such a pleasant 10 days here at Hazelwood, like most of us, discovered this is a really nice place to be. And it didn't have a sufficiently strong motivation to get home. And so we may be looking here at something that's essentially a social bond, but which because we're never in exactly the same place as somebody else, two fathers can't exist, we're always separated to some degree, however small, from those we're bonded to. And often, in the case of birds that fly, foraging for food, in the case of migratory birds, in the case of all animals that have to go out, bees that have to forage out from their hives and then come back. There must be some way in which these social bonds extend into a geographical dimension and then become spatial directional bonds to find a home poop. In the case of wolves, there are these cases reported by naturalists of packs of wolves that go out hunting. A wolf may be injured, sometimes they're injured, and then they stay behind in a kind of lair while the whole pack goes hunting. And there's this book by W.J. Long called How I Must Talk, about his tracking of wolves in Canada in the snow. The pack would go out hunting at about 20 miles and went around and then killed an animal quite silently, no baying, they do it quietly. And then from the tracks, he found that the wounded wolf had taken the shortest line from where it was to the place where they had just come and joined the rest of the pack and got them in. And the track shows that it was gone on a straight line, not followed the scent of where they were. And he showed it couldn't just be sound and it couldn't be smelling because the wind was blowing the wrong way. So this kind of social bond, this kind of linkage, may be utterly fundamental, you see, and the pigeon-honey may be related to the social field in some sense and its extension over the geographical realm. Well, I'm sensing a kind of convergence here, where even Terence could find something to agree with, that there is a sixth sense. It is a field phenomenon, like the quantum field. It's a social field that's involved with the flocking of birds, the schooling of fish, and with herds of animals and packs of wolves. You had a question, you started us off. What would this teach us, or what would that mean to us in terms of our future? And it could be that humans are somehow divorced from the significance of this field. So whenever the guardian angel speaks, they always do the opposite or something. And if we wanted to understand the population explosion, the demise of the planet, and all these wars and the manifestation of hatred and the sources of evil and so on, a candidate for the disharmony of the human species would be its disconnection with this field. And here's where Terence comes in, that somehow it's the implication of language is to submit to it, is to lose your connection with the field. So we all have done experiments in not speaking. For example, meditation, for example, dreaming, where the antithesis of language has an opportunity to come forward and to attempt to reconnect us to this field, a harmonizing influence that entrains us, but not for long. Especially for people like Americans who watch television for seven hours a day, there is somehow not enough time away from language. But notice that most prophetic episodes are dream episodes. I think that supports my point, that we've lost connection with a kind of fourth dimensional perception that for the rest of nature is absolutely a given. Why do you think it's a given in the rest of nature? I mean, I don't still see why you need to have a pigeon knowing the home of its future. Well, because you have many, many cases of this kind of thing. Animals that are put in the pound by owners who are moving, and then the owners move 700 miles, and the animal escapes from the pound, and it doesn't return to the ancestral home. It returns to the new apartment in a different city. The monarch butterflies, the homing pigeons, a whole host of mysterious phenomena become utterly transparent and trivial if you simply hypothesize that for them, the future doesn't have this occluded character that it has for us as a result of our acquiescence in the language behavior. It seems to me-- But it's not just a problem in time. It's a problem in space. You could say that they know they're going to wind up at the new home, but still you've got the problem of how near which way to go. And I don't quite see why it's a given. Well, presumably, they see themselves at every point in their life, not just the high or low points. In a minute in the future, they're a minute ahead of where they are, so they just go that way. In a minute in the future, they're that way. In other words, they can always see it from where they are. It's always ahead of them, in the same way that we navigate through space. I mean, if you were a two-dimensional creature, the things that we do navigating in three-dimensional space would be absolutely mysterious and generate all kinds of metaphysical speculation and hypotheses and so forth and so on. But I mean, why should nature imprison itself within a temporal domain? Clearly, for us, it's an artifact of language. I mean, we talk about future tenses, past tenses. Those aren't descriptive of the future and the past. They create it. That's why I put in the possible exception of perhaps there are human languages where this is not happening, and therefore, they are much closer to animal perception. The mysterious, quote unquote, "mysterious behavior of the Australian aborigines," the Hopi, these peoples, they seem capable of things that to us are like magic. But the magic is all done by knowing what's going to happen. So if they simply imbibe that animal understanding, then to them, it's trivial. That seems to me the most elegant explanation. And it doesn't require new undetected fields or any of these other somewhat cobbled together mechanisms. Just another dimension. Well, we know it's there. There's no debate about that. Here, an example, then, to carry that forward, I've always felt that the role of shamans in aboriginal society, especially the ones that were using psychoactive plants, that all the magic that they do suddenly becomes not so mysterious if you simply assume that by perturbing the ordinary brain states and ordinary language states, they then let in this hyperdimensional understanding. Because look at what shamans do, really. They predict weather. That's classical. That demands a knowledge of the future. They tell the tribe where the game has gone, also requiring a knowledge of the future. And they rarely lose a patient. That means they know who's going to make it and who isn't. And they refuse all cases perceived to be fatal. Here are three examples of shamanic magic, all easily explained by the simple assumption that they can perceive, to some degree, the future which is occluded to ordinary people, locked in ordinary language and brain states. QED. [LAUGHTER] Do the pigeons do a ritual, then, to get in touch with it? No, animals are in this place to begin with. You see, look at the shaman, to push this point in. What is the shaman's strategy for attaining his special knowledge? He becomes like an animal. He is master of animals. He dresses in skins. He growls. He talks to pigeons. He talks to the animals. He perturbs his brain state with ordeals or drugs or something like this. But the very close association of the shaman to the animal mind suggests that that's the clue to entering this atemporal or 4D perceptual sphere. And as Jo mentioned at the beginning, in the Christian tradition, the principal symbol of the Holy Spirit, which is that which gives inspired prophecy, shamanic-type gifts of healing, all the gifts of the Spirit, including speaking, tongues, prophecy, healing, and so forth, discernments and intuitions of various kinds are symbolized by the pigeon. So there's some curious way in which to do it, well-known at the biblical times for its homing powers. The Egyptians had a homing pigeon service in ancient Egypt. So the choice of the pigeon was not just plucked out of nowhere. Noah's Ark is the first biblical story of the pigeon, where the pigeon is sent off and comes back with the homes with an olive twig. So right from the beginning, the pigeon is seen as a messenger that can find out things in distant places and come home and bring back the information. So you could say that central to the whole Western tradition, this shamanic thing of becoming like an animal, in this case, somehow entering the mind of the pigeon, or in some way assimilating to the state of the pigeon, is the basis of the gift of knowledge, prophecy, and spiritual power. It sounds right to me. So should we now-- Yes, I think so. Let us now open this up. I'd like to ask you a question. Do you suggest that if we extend our language of life in our mind, that we don't-- [LAUGHTER] I'm totally going to a moment. You feel it all. You know away and you can still constantly get that clarity of it. Do you suggest we might grow this extra thing? Essentially, yes. I mean, I think it might take some time. But I think as a strategy for expanded awareness, that's how it would present itself experientially. Trappist monasteries do this. All aboriginal peoples sequester the young men and women, often by themselves, for a period of silence. Somehow, language is a strategy for holding at bay a much more complex world, that if we can, by any means, remove the language-forming capacity, even-- What's the trouble, then? The trouble is the complete contradiction of everything you're saying. You're using the language to-- Well, who was it said, I contradict myself? I contradict myself. The obsession with intellectual closure is inappropriate to talking monkeys, because nowhere is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to achieve a complete understanding of reality. I think part of what we have to do is live with unsolved mysteries that are, in principle, insoluble. They're not simply unsolved problems. They are, in principle, mysterious. All would agree that the highest understanding resides in silence, but it's the death of conversation, hardly to speak of weekend workshops. So if language is so detentive and contagious, and the principle of survival is the fittest, why do you think it developed? [INAUDIBLE] Well, maybe it's a maladaptive trait. Many maladaptive traits develop. I'm not willing to say that. I think it has-- for us, it's a substitute for other forms of cohesion, like pheromones, which are a kind of language that knit together insect societies. Originally, we were possibly fairly unsocial creatures. In other words, human beings may have paired and reared their children in secret. We've created societies of billions of people, and the linkage is language. And it's an unsteady linkage, as we can see. I mean, I don't have an answer for why language evolved. Presumably, we were pack animals, like wolves or horses, and tribal cultures. Pack animals are the animals that produce complex signaling systems to coordinate themselves in space with barks and yips and yells. They coordinate hunting activity and this sort of thing. It may be that that relatively benign adaptation carried further becomes something else. What we do, I think, that no other animal does, is we carry out symbolic activity. And it's this symbolic activity that has closed us off from the reality of what lies outside the symbol system. Do you mean the zombi-cat? Symbolic activity? Everything we do-- I mean, for instance, think of a child lying in a crib with an open window, and a hummingbird comes through the room. Well, this is like a miracle. It's all light and iridescence and whirring sound. And the child is sucked into the presence of a miracle. And then its nurse or its mother comes into the room and says, it's a bird, baby, bird. Suddenly, the miracle is collapsed into a lexeme. And by the time you are five years old, the entirety of reality has been very carefully mosaiced over with words. And to burst through that to whatever reality lies beyond is the task of a mystic or a shaman. And it's extraordinarily difficult. That's what I mean by trading in the world for symbolic signification. But we think in words. And I'm not sure you speak the language. But we talk words of communication of reason, because we think in words. And we are the words that we are thinking in are, as you said, communicated to us by our parents. The first communication to maintain the living formation at all. Communication. And what would happen, how would we develop our thinking processes in alternatives to words? Well, I question whether we actually think in words or to what degree we do. What you notice when you experiment with these shamanic tools, such as psychoactive plants, is that as the intoxications deepen, thought becomes vision. And one thinks in images. And I imagine that this is the aboriginal thought style. And we must have thought in images for a long time before we downloaded into words. To the degree that people think in images, I think they are a different sort of person than the word-oriented person. I think thinking in words may be an artifact of writing and print, and may have been most intensified in the last 1,000 years. I mean, sensory ratios are incredibly subject to cultural modification. As an example of what I mean by that, St. Augustine, to prove his piety, they would open a book of scripture in front of him. And without making a sound, he would examine it for a few minutes. And then they would close the book and question him. And he was able to discuss what was written there on the page. He was the only man in Europe, in other words, who could read silently. And it was thought a miracle. Well, we all read silently and think nothing of it. So I think the mind is very malleable, and the imprint of culture very deep. You know, McLuhan suggested that the concept of the citizen, the concept of the industrial assembly line, were both artifacts of print. And would have been incomprehensible in a manuscript culture. This is an area where we are very naive how our languages affect our view of the world. We are part of a continuum in nature, but animals nevertheless have a different type of consciousness. They don't have to make moral choices. They are not running around killing each other in Bosnia. They are preying on each other for food. They are limited. All the people in this room are probably concerned about the world. And I think one of the things I would like you gentlemen to address is some way of feeling that things might be moving in some place which is better. And I think to try and bring things into some notion that we, the animals, are in fact some better place than others is not helpful. Well, I didn't mean to suggest they're in a better place. As I hear what you're saying, you're saying the glory of our humanness is our free will. No, I'm not saying that. I'm talking about the words like glory, not the emotional context on this. I'm trying to keep it rather specific. But in fact, you're right. The decisions that we make form us as individuals, not as a species. And so in an animal situation, the individual animal, I think, is not-- that's not what is of interest there. We differentiate ourselves from each other by the choices that we make. And that requires this unknowable future dimension. This-- Did you just poo-poo this? We don't need this illusion. Well, I didn't poo-poo it. I said animals don't have it. Clearly, we are of a different order. I'm not a pro-animal, anti-human sort. I mean, I think the human world is definitely the most interesting world. But I think maybe you've put your finger on it, that without this illusion of an unknowable future, we would not differentiate as individuals. So it's a happy flaw. O Felix Coppa. Right? And some people have always said we're very clumsy. But that's how the world works. Well, it raises real questions about free will. That's for sure. I mean, one can suppose-- it raises real questions. I mean, if a prophecy comes true, does that mean then that in principle all of the future is determined? You see, we have to avoid determinism here, because a true determinism means thinking is pointless. Because in a rigid determinism, you think what you think, because you couldn't think anything else. So the concept of truth is utterly without meaning in a rigid determinism. So perhaps in the pursuit of truth, then the unknown future is a necessity. And it allows our individuation from each other. And that is the particular hallmark of our species, is that we are a population of individuals, not a population that is defined genetically. But it is a challenge, isn't it? These language structures are very provisional. Every culture assumes that it is building an edifice of eternal truth. But every culture has all other cultures as examples before it of parochiality, provincialism, and limited understanding. Why we then should assume that our culture is any more provisional than any other is simply a matter of hubris and historical momentum. I don't think the meaning of human existence lies in culture. It lies in the individual. And to become, to access that meaning, a certain amount of deconditioning, i.e. alienation, has to take place from a culture. If you're just a cheerful representative of your culture, you're a kind of mindless bore, whether you represent Japanese culture, Indonesian culture, or whatever. We require distance between ourselves and the object of our contemplation in order to define ourselves. And I think to go on with this, as Terence earlier pointed out, the animal state is pre-language. But the state advocated by mystics and all great religions is to go beyond language. It's not none of them. None of the great religious or spiritual traditions say human culture is the end. It's where it's at. All of them point beyond it. And all of them point to states of contemplation, mystical insight, prayer, intuition, which go beyond the limitations of language. So I don't think-- I didn't take what Terence was saying to be the denigration of all human culture or language, but pointing out its limitations, which we agreed are by the greatest traditions we have. Well, I think these-- in a sense, all these animals can be our teachers, you see. I think that the-- part of my interest in the homing pigeons, and indeed the other experiments that I've been thinking about lately, is to help to see if there's much more to the natural world. And certainly, much more to the animal world than current models allow. The current models of biology, of institutional biology, say all animals and plants are pure machines, totally explainable in terms of A-level physics. I mean, you don't even take quantum physics into it. If you do, then you get weird phenomena like non-locality, which would mean pigeon homing might not be such a mystery. But so the attempt to reduce all animals and the whole of nature has been going on for a long time. And it's part of the triumphalist culture we have. Our culture is based on the agenda of conquering nature. You can conquer the whole of nature. Now we've told every other culture in the world that's where it's at-- development programs, logging operations, and so on. So this, the ecological crisis, is a result of working out this particular way of thinking about nature and other species. I think that recovering a sense of-- I don't think that anybody here is saying we've got to say animals are better than us and denigrate the whole human race, but to recognize that there are astonishing powers in the animal and the other realms of nature, which we've just simply been blind to. We're blind to them if we think in terms of institutional science. People who actually know animals well, people who train horses, who keep dogs and cats, and who actually observe their behavior, know full well that they have very often uncanny or seemingly uncanny powers of knowing, which go beyond what we would expect on the basis of textbook biology. So I think these are ways of learning more about the world in which we live and more about the biological context of our lives. And when we come to dolphins, then indeed, if we take big brains to be the criteria in our superiority to the rest of the animal kingdom, then we have to face the fact that whales and several other animals have bigger brains than us. What are they doing with all that cerebral capacity? They're certainly not building media empires and constructing television programs and so on. So I think that this interest in dolphins and whales as having a different kind of consciousness and possibly a more harmonious and telepathic consciousness is another way in which people are trying to learn from the animal kingdom. But it creates a kind of humility in ourselves, doesn't it, to realize that here are these astonishing social forms based on kinds of consciousness quite different from our own, possibly more advanced in certain ways. And all we regard, at least all Japanese fishermen regard the dolphins as nuisances, forgetting the way of their drift nets. And the whales are simply a resource to be exploited. Norwegians want to resume it because it's good for the people to save job losses in northern Norway, that kind of thing. There's a clash of value systems here. I think the whole of our modern civilization is in a crisis because of this clash of value systems. So what's really going on in the rest of nature? Rediscovering what's happening is very important. It does have wider consequences for our future as a species and a civilization. These are not mere questions of idle curiosity. Well, I find this a little dissatisfying somehow to stop on this point. We didn't resolve what I think is the basic question about the homing pigeon, especially in connection with its significance for ourselves. Because here we have a couple of divergent views, even if we concede that the loft radiates a field, that the homing pigeon follows this field by a process of clairvoyance, in which it has a precognition of its position the moment it hits and just goes in that direction. There's still, I think, the fundamental question has to do with the utter determinism of this, and whether the homing pigeon sees a variety of future positions and has to test them out by some process to determine which one is the most connected to the loved one or to the home. Or whether there is only one vision and it just follows it. That's the fundamental question, because thinking of our species as the homing pigeon-- and we're hoping to get home-- if the future is totally determined, probably the likeliest outcome is the demise of the entire species, if not the biosphere itself. And of course, there's no trouble for parents having expected that. But most people, I think, are seeing a variety of possible outcomes and seeking a way to ennoble their own life by philosophical position of empowerment, in which what you do, which choice you make, by what criteria you prioritize the possible futures, would actually lead in one direction instead of the other one. Thus, in the context of free will for the homing trajectory of the entire species, life obtains a moral meaning. If it matters what we do, that's one thing. If it doesn't matter what we do, that's another. Therefore, it sort of matters whether it matters or not. If you do what I mean. I think Bell's theorem in quantum theory says this principle, that if things have been part of the same system and they're separated, they retain an instantaneous correlation, even if they're miles apart, even if they're going apart at the speed of light. Now, this is part of quantum theory, and it's totally unlike anything in conventional physics. And so the pigeon is separated from its home or from its loved ones. And if Bell's theorem applies at the larger scale, then you could say they're part of the same system. They retain a non-local or non-separable connection. This could be the basis of the rubber band or the homing system or whatever. You could say that. The trouble is that physicists don't-- they don't know whether Bell's theorem applies on the larger scale or not. Most of them want an easy life. And so they say, well, Bell's theorem's fine if you're dealing with these microscopic systems. It doesn't seem to have any effects anywhere else. We'll just regard it as a peculiar feature of microscopic physics. [INAUDIBLE] It could be. There are other physicists, including Ralph's friend Nick Herbert, who's spent years puzzling and wrestling with the consequences of Bell's theorem, thinking it must or may have implications of the larger scale realm. And you see, homing pigeons may indeed, I think, come to be seen as a large-scale manifestation of the same principle. I mean, I myself think that's quite a likely possibility. But Ralph knows-- Nick Fetton has talked about these things more. So what do you think about that, Ralph? Well, what I think is that quantum mechanics applies to a different realm. And it provides us with metaphors. And Bell's theorem is a stimulating metaphor to understand this phenomenon of bonding. But to take this model too seriously seems to me ridiculous. But isn't it-- Why? --you've got to explore this, taking into consideration how complex life is, or quantum mechanics, or homing and all that, that one gravitates towards certain people who are terribly important. It's like when we're part of a certain group of people. You know, the fact that I'm here to train. And if you train from where I came from, it ends up making people's ideas quite extraordinary. And what that's like is quite a conscious way towards certain people. And this is a bit maybe-- we're a part of this, because maybe we share a vision. And there are other levels of this. It's a sort of human talent. And also, the thing about the pigeons, that seems to me, they've always been undervalued animals. They're not seen as having consciousness. So therefore, people say, oh, they're just animals who've got hands on them, and have no willingness. It seems very peculiar. But in fact, there is this pigeon consciousness. It's only when we accept that the pigeons have this talent. There are many talents, but how can we explain a great piano talent? How can we explain any great piano talent? This is an animal talent. It's a talent that they have. It's God-given. It's innate. It's what they do. It's what they're very good at. And it's beyond our comprehension. I don't think religion is beyond our comprehension. [INTERPOSING VOICES] [INAUDIBLE] Yeah, there's probably many of them. [INAUDIBLE] [LAUGHTER] [INTERPOSING VOICES] I just wanted to ask you, do they do anything else? I mean, this is the thing we hear about family visions, about the [INAUDIBLE] thing. Well, this is the thing that they've been trained to do. And if you think about it, you see under normal conditions, no bird or animal would ever do this. In a home experiment, the pigeon is captured by the owner grabbing it, putting it inside a basket, and it's transported on a train or a lorry for hundreds of miles. Well, in nature, that doesn't happen to animals very much. If they go away from home, they usually go under their own steam. And the normal circumstances are the pigeons range out from Trafalgar Square or wherever they live, and they forage in Trafalgar Square. They don't have to go far usually, because all these tourists feed them there. But normally, pigeons live on buildings or on rocks. The original habitat of the homing pigeon is-- it's a rock pigeon. It lives on rocks, on cliffs. That's why they like buildings, like buildings in London, because they like cliffs. And they go out and forage, and they find their way home. That's the biological basis. And they've somehow got this to a very high degree, and they've been selected over many generations. But they have all the normal bird life as well. The talent for it back then as well, isn't it? It kind of operates in the frightening of-- Yes. --brains, circumstances. And these pigeons have also been selected very strongly over many generations. Pigeons that aren't very good at homing don't make it back from races, and they don't get bred from in the next generation. So there's been tremendously strong selection. Anyway, yes, I think that these-- how this relates to human affinities and so on comes back to this question of the social bonding being the underlying basis for all these forms of behavior. And what forms of affinity or bonding are involved? We don't know much-- [INAUDIBLE] Yes. But that's another subject. [LAUGHTER] I think maybe-- [INAUDIBLE] Well, maybe it's-- well, maybe it isn't. [INAUDIBLE] Yes. [INAUDIBLE] And it's the love that's taken back to children, eggs, and nests. I mean-- Well, some people would find that an unflattering comparison because we like to think human love's different. But I think that would be-- But we're all at homing from now on. [LAUGHTER] It's our fault. [LAUGHTER] We've actually passed our point at which we should be breaking up and joking. [INAUDIBLE] Well, the subject for tonight's trialogue is a subject near and dear to my heart. You might even say it has my initials on it. I had decided to talk about time, and then there was a request to do so. So that must be the general drift of our interest and intent as far as what I can contribute. I'm very interested in time. I'm very interested in the largest frames into which phenomena can be fitted, and sort of the various ways in which we view our humanness if we change the way we look at time. And I think that it's sufficiently unsecured by science that we need feel no trepidation about doing this. What I mean by that is examine or recall to yourself for a moment what it is that orthodoxy teaches about time. It teaches that for reasons impossible to conceive, the universe sprang from utter nothingness in a single moment. Now, whatever you might think about that idea, notice that it is the limit test for credulity. In other words, if you believe that, you could believe anything. It's impossible to conceive of something more unlikely. Yet this is where science begins its supposed rational tale of the unfolding of the phenomenal universe. It's almost as if science is saying, "Give us one free miracle, and from there, the entire thing will proceed with a seamless causal explanation." [laughter] But there is an aspect to the phenomenal universe that I think impinges on anyone who undertakes to examine it that is not given any weight whatsoever by science. And that is that when we look at the span of time which stretches from the Big Bang to the present moment, it's very clear, I think, that complexity has aggregated toward the nether end of this process in the dimensions in which we find ourselves. And, for example, the early universe was very hot, and only a kind of electron plasma could exist. Hence, there was no atomic physics, no molecular chemistry, only the physics of plasma. By cooling, complexity appears. This is not argued. But what interests me is that each successive advance into complexity occurred much faster than the stage which preceded it. So the first billion years of the life of the universe was an extraordinarily boring and empty period. Basically, atomic systems were forming, the simplest elements were aggregating into stars. This permitted fusion, the cooking out of heavier elements, and after some long period of time, carbon appeared. And, of course, four-valent carbon then permits a whole new set of properties to emerge, including, ultimately, life. And I'm moving through this very quickly because what I want to concentrate on is what I call the short epoch. And my terminology here is largely drawn from Alfred North Whitehead, who I think is the great unsung hero of British 20th century philosophy. And he had a notion of a progression of epochs leading toward what he called concrescence. And I've taken this notion of concrescence and attempted to construct a temporal cosmology that literally stands on its head the explanation of science. Because I don't believe the universe is pushed outward into substantial existence by the primal explosion. I believe the universe is being pulled and shaped into an ever more complexified and concrescent entity that is, in fact, a transcendental attractor. Transcendental in the sense of residing in a higher dimension than ordinary space. And transcendental in the feeling-tone sense in which we ordinarily use that. Now, this idea is basically just Catholicism with the chrome stripped off. Unless, or you know, Teilhard de Chardinism of a certain sort, the idea of the omega point, the idea of a telos attracting and drawing history into itself. But what I'm interested to consider is that most delicate of all questions in prophetic systems of this sort. And that is, when? When? Science evades this issue by setting us down somewhere between the Big Bang and the heat death of the universe imagined millions of years in the future. Science, notice, also completely marginalizes human experience. We are told that we live on a typical planet, around a typical star, at the edge of a typical galaxy, and that we are animals of a complex type easily identified to more typical forms. My notion is to take seriously the apparent vectoring in of universal intent on the human world and try, and keeping away from the pitfalls of religion, to try and talk about why that might be happening. And I think it might be happening for the following reason. That history is actually the shockwave of eschatology. And that this is a concept that we have not sufficiently entertained, but which we are going to be forced to entertain as the planetary crisis created by modernity builds toward some kind of climax. What I mean by that history is the shockwave of eschatology is something like this. Animal, if this planet were a planet of hummingbirds, woodchucks, giraffes and grasslands, then Darwinian mechanics as modified by molecular biology would be sufficient to explain what's going on. The fly in the ointment of that simple schema is ourselves. We represent some other order of existence. We, this afternoon, talked about language. My notion is that out of the broad moving stream of animal evolution, a species was selected, fell victim to, the terminology can vary, but a higher animal fell under the influence of an attractor pulling us in the direction of symbolic activity. And this is what we have been involved in through theater, dance, poetry, chant, magic, religion, science, politics, cognitive and symbolic activity. And it's only occupied for all practical purposes outside the dreary world of chipping flint and picking fleas less than 25,000 years. It's a blink of an eye on the cosmic scale. It is the shockwave which precedes eschatology. An analogy would be, think of the undisturbed surface of a pond. If the pond begins to boil, it indicates that some enormous protein form is moving beneath the surface and it's about to, in fact, make its presence visible. This is what history is on the surface of nature. It's a boiling anticipation of the emergence of the compressions or the transcendental object at the end of time. And it has been anathema to discuss this in secular society, even New Age secularism, because this has always been the province of beastly priests and their hideously hierarchical and constipated religions so that decent people have tended to turn away from it. But in fact, this is some kind of primary intuition about our circumstance. And the reason it's important is because we now are in a situation of planetary crisis where you don't have to be an enthusiast for Whiteheadian metaphysics or psilocybin or the more arcane metaphors of Terence McKenna to realize that we are approaching our limits. It's inconceivable to speak of 500 years in the human future. History is a self-consuming process and all we need do at this point is extrapolate any of a number of curves. Here are some of my favorites. The spread of epidemic sexually transmitted diseases, the proliferation of thermonuclear weapons, the dissolution of the atmospheric ozone, the rise in world population. When these curves are extrapolated, it's very clear that we have taken business as usual off the menu. And I would prefer, rather than imagine that this is a situation driven by the momentum of bad historical decisions and therefore our responsibility, the wrecking of the planet and so forth, I would rather prefer to believe that what we're witnessing is something like a birth and that it is built into the laws of physics what we're witnessing. That we are literally on a collision course with an object that we cannot exactly discern. It lies below the event horizon of rational apprehendability at this point. But the East is streaked with the blush of rosy dawn for sure. And what it portends, I think, is an end to our fall, an end to our sojourn in matter, and an end to our separateness. And it lies now so close to us in historical time by virtue of our having collapsed our options in three-dimensional space that you need only close your eyes, have a dream, take a shamanic hallucinogen, practice yoga, and there you will see it. It's an attractor which has been working on the species at least a million years. And I maintain that this is actually somehow a universal attractor. And we represent a concrescence of complexity that is truly transcendental. You know, James Joyce said, "If you want to be phoenixed, you've got to be parked." Up in the Yen prospector, you sprout all your worth and whoop your wings. He said, "The end is nearer than you might wish to be congealed." And I'm essentially carrying this same notion because I think that otherwise we're going to be victimized by an enormous pessimism arising out of the bankruptcy of science, positivism, ordinary politics, so forth and so on. The ride to the end of history is going to be a white-knuckle experience. And I offer this metaphor in the hope that it may make the trip to the transcendental object glittering at the end of time an easier ride. Gentlemen. [laughter] Well. Ah, yes, let me fill in the footnotes. Esk refers to the last things, the final things, the eschaton. The eschaton is a kind of neutral way of saying what some people call the Buddha Maitreya, what some people call the flying saucer at the end of history, the second coming. It's the last thing, the eschaton. And I see it as a kind of-- What I think is happening is that all boundaries are dissolving and the boundaries between men and women, between society and nature, and ultimately the boundaries between life and death. And we are going truly beyond ambiguity, beyond syntax. We have been trapped in a kind of demonic simulacrum for 25,000 years, created out of language. And now somehow this accelerating process of involuted connectedness that characterizes this quite Headean progression of epochs toward the concrescence is in fact being fulfilled. And it's, I think, quite extraordinary. Well, this I think, Terence, it sounds a little more optimistic than I've heard you before. I'm not mistaken that although in this model you accepted the one miracle of science, the Big Bang fantasy, for your creation myth, and then you reflected it into a similar event coming in the near future about which you're concerned with the wind, that I think spared us and didn't mention the date this time. Yes, I thought it should be sort of a generalized discussion of the assumptions that come out of this kind of thinking. But when the forthcoming event, the optimistic part is that, I think for the first time I've heard you describe it at the birth, the optimistic event is interpreted by you as an eschaton. This is, I think, a myth made real like a Christmas tree where the events of history are kind of pasted on it. And as this tree sort of shapes to a point at the top, you've drawn history around it in an ascending spiral that just ends at that point where they put the star. Now, I think this is a myth, and that history can be wound on the form in a lot of different ways, and only by starting with an assumption, which to me is very symmetric and identical to the big birth of the universe for which you make fun of science. I agree with you there, that far we're together. But it puts me in mind of the history of history, where the concept of time in different cultures suits different models of which there are but few. There's the bang to bang model, which you share with Teilhard de Chardin. There's the infinite linear progress model, which is pretty much discredited now by everyone. There's the reflection model, where a cycle is completed and then repeats at the beginning, and four more epochs, or five or ten, in a cycle of epochs which might be never-ending. There's the Kurt Gödel model, in which time goes forward and closes on itself without reflection by going around a torus and coming back. Many ancient societies shared this one, where it was understood that this is something like your theory of the homing pigeon, that every action we are doing today will be repeated again another day. I think also that these different models for history, which are essentially mythical structures, that is, no pseudo-scientific evidence could be given to distinguish one from another, they start on the basis of belief, and then it is thought that what follows from this particular belief of a certain model of history is the actual evolution of that culture into some shape which is to a degree determined by the model, and which has been analyzed in the different cultures, comparing the different evolutions of the culture with the creation myth and model for historical time in each one. Eric Vogelin, for example. Then it's also thought that, well, now that we have archaeology, cultural history, and so on, we know this much. We know there are different models of time historically, that they fit into a certain pattern, and by and large it's thought that they give guidance to the evolution of that culture itself. In other words, if it's not true that tomorrow is already determined, and we just have to do a good job to follow our dream, if it's possible that what we do, think, or say affects the future, then it's important which historical model we choose, because the myth itself guides action, determines evolution, at least influences to a degree the outcome. I'm not saying that belief in an eschaton guarantees an eschaton, because I don't think the influence of our belief is that seriously important. I don't see, though, even accepting the Christmas tree and the point with the star, I don't see why it would be a birth or a death or anything other than a simple cultural transformation, which is more or less timed by, presaged by, announced by, the shockwave at the end of, well, this epoch. Why not just a simple social transformation like the Renaissance? Well, because the planet can't bring forth further societies. We've come to the end of our road in Newtonian space, and that's what I wanted to say. I mean, wouldn't you agree, Ralph, that when we look back over the whole history of life as known to us, what it appears to be is some kind of strategy for the conquest of dimensionality. In other words, the earliest forms of life were fixed slimes of some sort, and then you get very early motility, but no sense organs. The being literally feels its way from one point of perception to another. Then you get sequestering of light-sensitive pigment on the cell, and the notion of a gradient of here and there appears. And then for a long, long time, it's the coordination of, you know, backbones, skeletons, binocular vision, so forth and so on. Then with us, some fundamental boundary is crossed, because we are beginning not-- apparently the conquest of terrestrial space ended with the cheetah or something. But in us, what begins is the conquest of time, first through memory and strategic triangulation of data out of memory, and then with the invention of epigenetic coding, writing, electronic databases, and ever more deep and thorough spreading out into time. And so this eschatonic transition that I'm talking about, essentially all that's happening is that the deployed world of three-dimensional space shrinks to the point where all points are cotangent, and it literally goes into hyperspace. It's no longer a metaphorical hyperspace. And so what we're saying here is, you're right, it's no big deal, and yet what it actually will come to be seen to be is a transition from one dimension of existence to another, but a continuation of this universal program of self-expansion and transcendence that can be traced back to the earliest and most primitive kind of protoplasm. Isn't this a fancy way of saying we're running out of time? Yes, time is speeding up. There isn't much left. You know, someone said time is God's way of keeping everything from happening all at once. Well, my notion is that we are caught, that, think of the transcendental attractor as a kind of black hole into which we have fallen into its basin of attraction, and now we're circling ever faster, ever deeper as we approximate an approach to this singularity. The eschaton is simply a singularity. It exceeds rational apprehendability somehow intrinsically, in principle. It lies outside the framework of possible description. We're on a collision course with the unspeakable, and that explains why we are not groveling around like groundhogs and other animals. We have been selected out for this very, very peculiar metamorphosis via information and the conquest of dimensions to become something completely other, a new ontological order of being. As we represent now a new ontological order of being when contrasted to animal life, now we're apparently about to take one more step. But it's too early to tell. Let me just respond for one minute, then we'll see what Rupert thinks of this. I'm afraid I'm basically so pessimistic I can't really dispute this or go on. Nevertheless, for the sake of theory, let me say that this pessimism is just a matter of faith, because using these historical arguments and timings you've just described, we have sort of mixed here together the good and the bad. Everything is accelerating. On the one hand, we have the population explosion itself, the destruction of the biosphere and so on, the complexity, the rate, the seriousness of all this, the irreversibility, the finality, the eschatology of this is, as a matter of fact, climaxing. Meanwhile, we have language, as you say, if it's 25,000 euro or 60,000 or even at most 100,000, as some people think. That is really recent on the timescale we're talking about. And then we have such things as agriculture and the urban revolution, and now we have automobiles and airplanes and the computer. You spoke about memory. Computer memory has somehow increased our intelligence by an enormous amount. So on the good side, we have all this increase in the complexity and the fractal dimension of life is more or less to our benefit. So we have, as it were, a race between two processes, both of which are growing faster exponentially. But we don't know for sure which one is growing more. And furthermore, the possibility of a miracle can be ruled out due to the fact that we wouldn't even have got this far without a whole series of miracles, for example, the miraculous appearance of oxygen in the atmosphere. So if there is a race, it's a subtle matter, I think, the way in which the myth of the eschaton could intervene in this race between the two accelerating processes. That's all I wanted to say. What do you think, Ruth? Well, I think, I mean, I agree with you. This is a cultural pattern. The Judeo-Christian tradition takes further tendencies already there in early civilisations. A sense of movement towards some end, apocalyptic prophecy, the last book of the Bible, the book of the apocalypse, speaks of things not unlike those that Terence does. It's very similar. And the, I mean, as he is well aware, this apocalyptic nature of his thinking is a transform of a vision which appears in Christianity and in Jewish, Messianic and apocalyptic literature. So the question is, to what extent is the pattern of acceleration we see in our culture a product of the fact our culture is based on this myth of history? Or to what extent do these visions reflect some true perception of a cosmic process, something far beyond history? That's not easy to decide because although there is a self-fulfilling prophecy built into these cultural patterns, we are now seeing these dreams coming true in many ways, these things that have led to emphasizing novelty, innovation, change, moving faster and faster. These are both prophesied and believed in and coming true and makes it easier to believe in them. So it's all self-fulfilling. But we now spread it to the rest of the world so it seems pretty global. Does it go beyond this? For me this is the big question. Is there a real, in this prophetic vision, a real influence of something beyond humanity, beyond history, which Terence thinks there is, namely the transcendental object, the attractor, or as Teilhard de Chardin would put it, the Omega Point? Or is there not? And if there is, how limited is it in its range of application? Are we talking, as Terence sometimes seems to be, about something just happening on Earth? I mean I have the same problem with Christian apocalyptic speculation. Teilhard de Chardin for example, he talks of the noosphere around the Earth and this growing emergence of consciousness here. Is he talking about the transformation of this planet and of humanity? Or is he talking of the transformation of the entire universe? And you have the same ambiguity in the New Testament when Saint Paul writes, "The whole creation groaneth in travail." The idea of the whole universe groaning in travail for the coming of a new birth, of a new age. So this is the real question I have to Terence tonight is, how provincial is this vision? Are we talking about the future of human culture on this planet? Or are we talking about the future of the solar system, the galaxy or even the entire cosmos? Because if we are talking about this planet, a lot of these accelerating changes, graphs, extrapolations look pretty plausible. If we are talking about the solar system or the galaxy, I don't think astronomers in the last few years or decades have suddenly noticed curves rushing off to some extreme point where we can expect stars all over the galaxy to turn into supernovae, or planets all over the solar system to collapse, crumble or otherwise undergo dramatic alteration. The history that we are so preoccupied with here on earth, human history and the effects of human activities, doesn't as far as we know seem to be mirrored in changes going on anywhere else in the solar system, the galaxy or the cosmos. So just the question really is how limited is this vision? Or are we just talking about the destiny of the small planet which has come under the, for some reason, under some planetary attractor? Whether it's human made or human making, we can leave aside for the moment. And what's your view on that? Well, I'm not intentionally cutting this trilog off right here. It's just where this tape ran out. And I'll get the next one in this series out to you early next week, as soon as I can. And I want to thank those of you who wrote to say that they don't mind the longer format, particularly those of you who were funny about it, like this one I got from Tom Barbalay. Tom, by the way, is the host of the Noble Eight podcast and the Biota podcast. And I'll put links to those in the program notes here and also on our Psychedelic Salon webpage. You can hear interviews with people like Bruce Dahmer and a whole lot of other really fascinating people over there. Anyway, here's what Tom said. "A quick note to say I like the new entire format. The only problem I have found is in hitting pause. When the trilogs were divided by sides, you had taken on the responsibility to create a division, and there was little that could be done bar to wait for the next installment. Giving the listener the power to pause means, I am sure, more exercise will be had. More people will stay in their cars to listen to the end, and people will travel to the end of their train lines rather than stopping the flow. I found this problem myself this morning, although I was able to hit pause eventually. I did feel some guilt, however." Well, for sure I don't want to make anybody feel guilty, so sorry about that. And so that I don't feel guilty about forgetting to say this, I sure want to send my thanks to Stephen B. and Michael M., both of whom made donations this week. And Michael, you'll probably remember better as a Dime Short, who's also been a regular contributor here to the Salon. So thank you both for your kind donations, and rest assured, I plan on seeing that yours and all of the donations to the Psychedelic Salon are put to good use directly in the service of these podcasts. Before I go, I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 License. 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. Shatol Hayuk, thanks again for letting me use your music here in the Salon, and thanks again to Ralph, Rupert, and Terrence for holding these fascinating conversations, and to Bruce Dahmer for obtaining the recordings for us to listen to here in the Salon. Well, that's about it for today, but I'll be back soon with installment three of the Hazelwood Triologues. I'll see you then. For now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. [Music] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.65 sec Decoding : 2.53 sec Transcribe: 4937.18 sec Total Time: 4940.35 sec