[Music] Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon. And before I get into today's program, I need to apologize to those who downloaded the previous podcast in the first 12 hours after it was posted. It seems that I mislabeled the MP3 tag and it'll show up in your menu as a second number 107 program. So if you have two podcast 107s, take a close look and you'll see that one should say part one and the other part two. I fixed that problem now, but of course that won't help you if you're on automatic download, because there are a lot of those that take place in the first few hours after I post a new program. So even though it's a small inconvenience for you, well, maybe you can just think of it as having a collector's item. Of course, I don't think there's much of a hot trading market for collectible files right now. I don't know if there is such a thing. Well, since this is a somewhat long podcast, I want to begin by thanking a few people now so that my thank yous don't get missed if I put them at the end. First of all, I think we'd all like to thank Ralph Abraham and Bruce Dahmer for making these tapes of these trilogues available for me to play here in the psychedelic salon. And I also want to acknowledge those who have made donations of all kinds to help get these messages out to a wider audience. I know that many of our fellow salonners are students, young parents and even old guys like me who are living on Social Security. And and to even make a small donation is really out of the question. Well, I'm in the same boat. So I want you to know that you shouldn't feel guilty about not donating. Just simply taking some of your time to listen to these podcasts is more than enough payment for me. And then if you tell a friend about the show or blog a comment somewhere or make a CD of your favorite program and pass it along, all of those things, including spending the time you're using right now to listen to this. All of these things, I think, go into our larger salon, Holon, and and we're all the richer for it. And finding myself now older than I planned on getting and living on a fixed income. Well, I have to tell you that when donations do come in to help with the expenses of these podcasts, it's like having my wildest dreams come true. Here I am having fun listening to all these great talks and also getting to mess around with a little technology here and there. In short, I'm having the best time of my life. And then to top it all off, this week, the salon received donations from Vipel P. Hey, Vipel, how are you? And thanks for yet another donation. That's really nice of you. And I also want to thank Mona F., who also made a very generous donation. Thank you both. And I want to make a special mention for Elena, who started to make this donation, but in the process helped me unwind some buggy code that kept her from making a payment. But by telling me about the problem, she provided a very valuable service for the salon. And so thank you, Elena, who, after all her problems, persisted until her donation made it through. I probably would have given up myself. So thank you so very much for hanging in there. Well, there's some other things I want to mention today, but first we better get into the trilog. As I was thinking about how to introduce today's program, I was trying to figure out how best to recapitulate the end of the last tape in this series. But when I began playing tape three, which you're about to hear right now, I discovered there was a disconnect between the two. I'm not sure how much of the trilog, if any, was lost or what led up to the part we're about to hear. But what you're hearing with me is exactly as it came off the four cassette tapes that Ralph Abraham loaned to me to play here in the psychedelic salon. But hey, being psychedelic doesn't mean that you're strung out on drugs. It means having the ability to think outside the box and to change mental directions without getting psychic whiplash. So it shouldn't be too hard for you to get right up to speed as Rupert Sheldrake asks a question that leads to a discussion of stellar pathology, among other cosmic topics, in a trilog with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham that was held at Hazelwood House in England sometime in 1993. So just the question really is how limited is this vision? I mean are we just talking about the destiny of this planet, which has come under, 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've thought a lot about it. It's a difficult question. If we extend the search for a universal crisis beyond the earth, the only evidence that has been offered by anybody is there is some kind of problem between nuclear theory, which has been very well established for 40 years, and the neutrino output of the sun. And in trying to account for this, your choice is either that nuclear theory requires serious modification, which doesn't seem likely since it's worked in all other cases up till now, or there is in fact something wrong with our star. That searching for pathology beyond the solar system in the cosmic environment is outside the present reach of our technical ability. I tend to think, though the time wave that I've elaborated can be extended back into the pre-biological domain, I tend to think that this is a phenomenon of biology that I'm talking about, and that it is just one small planet, and that biology is a process of conquering dimensions, which once it starts, as a primal slime, it accelerates and it bootstraps itself to higher and higher levels at tighter and tighter turns of the spiral, and that we are now in the process of seeing it essentially exhaust and abandon the planet and carry itself into this other dimension. So it's a phenomenon of biology. That's why all these metaphors of Gaia and Gaian interactions seem cold-shouldered to me. But the whole point about biology is that the earliest forms of life came with plants, so related to the light of the sun. And the whole of biology, the whole of the plant kingdom, the whole of the transformation of the atmosphere of the planet is dependent not on merely terrestrial events, but on our relation to the sun and the wider cosmic environment. Since the elements of carbon and so on produce the dust of supernovae, of exploding stars. So biology on earth is rooted in a much larger ecology. And so first of all, I don't think the evolution of life on earth can be regarded as merely terrestrial or merely biological in that sense. And secondly, every human culture that's talked about some light pulling it from ahead, some vision that's gone, has tended to talk in terms of images of celestial influences of one kind or another. Sky, planets, stars, heavenly influences of one sort or another, which suggests to me that if we're to take them literally, and you take most of these things quite literally really, that we have to look for influences from outside the earth working on us. The transcendental object may be located or channeled through the sun, other stars, planets, constellations, something to do with the astronomical environment. Well, if it is truly a higher dimensional object, then it is in some sense everywhere in this universe. And so all routes of evolutionary progress may lead into this. It's a kind of universal hologram, like time and space, into which we enter into some kind of galactic community of intelligence or something. In other words, biology, I understand what you were implying in the early part of your statement. I agree, yes, that spores or viruses or bacterium probably percolate and permeate through the physical universe and wherever they come upon a planetary environment in which they can work their magic, then life takes hold and from then on, it's a battle in which life attempts to modify the abiotic environment and control it and keep it at equilibrium sufficiently for the program of bios to be put into place. And that program is to go from this essentially, this initial seed, to a return to the higher hidden source of all outside the pleroma of three-dimensional space. It's a kind of Gnostic return idea. It's an idea of alchemical sublimation and rarefaction. I see the cosmos as a distillery for novelty and the transcendental object is the novelty of novelties. And when we formally define that, we discover we are getting something like a Leibnizian plenum, a monad of some sort, a tiny thing which has everything enfolded within it. And that means that you are in another dimension where all points in this universe have been collapsed into cotangency. And it is an apotheosis. It is an apocatastasis. It is something else in Greek. I'm not sure why. While trying to listen to this, did I not observe a consensus that as a matter of fact it's provincial? Is that right? That I'm suggesting... We're part of a biological catastrophe on planet Earth. Yes, the Earth is giving birth to a hyperdimensional being. In spite of the fact that the eschaton permeates as a higher dimensional object the entire universe, as a matter of fact, it's got a special sub-eschaton with a more accelerated program of just for us. Salvation proceeds on many schedules, my son. The fact that the galaxy is spiral suggests to me that in the interest of modesty, we should probably confine this supposition to the notion that it is happening within the galaxy. It's perhaps what spiral galaxies are about. Well, the sun is burning out. People believe that. A mere half billion years to go. Well, a little bit longer than the 18 and a half years. Well, but excuse me, if there is a problem with the neutrino output of the sun, the orthodox interpretation of that is that that means the sun has stopped and gone off the fusion boil and is in fact just sitting there. And the amount of time it would take for evidence of this having gone off the boil to percolate to the surface is about 25,000 years. And the moment that it happens, eight minutes later, the radiant energy reaching the earth will drop 60 percent. I'll accept your lower bound of 25,000 years without further discussion. Just to shock you and let me take a position much more pessimistic than yours, there have been several close calls lately with comets. Some people, William Whiston, for example, or Immanuel Delacroix, felt that the beginning of our planet, the Big Bang as a matter of fact, was a collision with a comet. And in the last couple of years, there have been several close calls. In fact, the closest call in history is only three or four years back. It seems to me, especially after a good look at the sun with and without glasses, that it's quite likely we would get hit by a comet, and even pretty soon, sooner than 25,000 years, maybe sooner than 18 and a half years, though suppose that this happens. And then we have an extinction such as we saw 65 million years back when Jurassic Park vanished into the ocean. And then all of this biological miracle, accelerating to its own omega point anyway, according to a schedule with exponential condensation to the concrescence of the eschaton and the shockwave from the transcendental object at the end of time, would be rendered totally insignificant because the cause came by a car crash on the highway of the solar system, totally independent of the progress of biology on planet Earth. No, I don't. You don't get it. It's entirely, it's entirely possible. I didn't want to bring it up because it's a little Halloween-ish, but it's entirely possible that the transcendental object at the end of time is nothing more than a five kilometer wide carbonaceous congregate asteroid that in a single moment will stand us all at the gates of paradise. And that is what it means to... You're trying to destroy my argument by appropriating it. Didn't I say, didn't I say that the dissolving of boundaries would eventually mean the dissolving of the boundaries between life and death itself? Well, why then, if the eschaton is a comet rapidly approaching New York City, why is it necessary to have this increase of complexity, the population explosion, the destruction of the ozone layer? Well, you know, it's very interesting. Did you know that immediately preceding, by immediately preceding, I mean in the million years preceding the impact that killed the dinosaurs, some enormous extinction was underway that they can't figure it out? It's like the Earth knew or something like that. There was an extinction underway when that cometary impact hit. And so what I'm suggesting, Ralph, is that biology knows this is back to this morning's discussion about the homing pigeons. Biology has a complete three, four dimensional, five dimensional map of the planet's history. What the hell, the comet's on the way. Let's get it on. The planet said the comet's on the way. Let's get these monkeys moving toward the production of sufficient complexity that when this impact event occurs, it will have a transcendental relevance simply. An opportunity to escape into another dimension. Yes. So all of all of history is this curious relationship with this intuition that nobody wants to face, but nobody can quite get rid of. And so here we're sacrificing goats and we're doing this and we're doing that because we have this very restless feeling that all is not well in three dimensional space and time. And, you know, history keeps bearing it out. And now it's it's upon us. It's who don't quite make the extinct of the moment. Well, the instruction. Well, you know, here's the idea. Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine surrealist, he had an interesting idea. He felt that a species could not enter hyperspace, whatever that means, until the last member of that species perished. And so what is happening here is that vast numbers of souls are accumulating in some dimension, waiting for us to decently depart this mortal coil so that the human family in a body can find itself at play in the fields of the Lord. Crypto question after all. Crypto question. All along. All along. Yes. But what I want to do to think this through a bit further, given that there'll be this, we used to think that this great transformation of humanity, a kind of collective near death experience, except it would be an actual death experience, would be brought about by a nuclear cataclysm. Well, although the bombs are still there, that model has gone out of fashion for some reason. And it could easily come back. But currently. Currently. We're now more into ecological. I mean your list, apart from nuclear proliferation, have the ecological apocalypses. Anyway, we've got all these models. Let's assume that it happens, that this happens, that this sudden transformation of humanity and dogs and cats and everything else, into this new, they're taken up into the transcendental attractor. Now what effect does this have on the rest of the universe? That's my question. I mean, leave aside the details on that. Well, I think it's not an answerable question, but it is in fact what we will then set out to understand. That we are literally packing up and preparing to decamp from Newtonian space and time for the high road of hyper dimensional existence. And we may find ourselves, you know, the least in the grand councils of the who knows what. Or we may find something, I imagine, entirely unsuspecting. I mean, in fairness to the audience, I should say, these things don't spring de novo for me. I mean, I talked this morning about shamanism anticipating the future and that that was how that magic was worked. Well, if you pursue these psychedelic, shamanic plans, there is inevitably this conclusion scenario or this apocalyptic intuition. And I think that shamans have always seen the end, that the human enterprise in three dimensional space has always been finite. And in the same way that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny as we look back into the past, it seems reasonable then to assume that death, which we have spent a thousand years turning into a materialist vacuum, is in fact not that at all. And that there is an enormous mystery that hovers over our existence and that it is only unraveled beyond the grave. And I would never in my life have thought that I would have been pushed to this kind of a position. I mean, I spent the first half of my life getting away from this. But the evidence of these shamanic hallucinogens is in fact that shamans have always done what they do via ancestor magic and higher dimensional perception. And that death is not what naive positivism in the last 500 years has attempted to say that it is. And I realize that it's incredible to suppose that here at the apex of materialist, positivist, scientific civilization, we're going to make an orthogonal turn into an understanding of what lies beyond the grave. But in fact, I think this is probably the paradigm shattering world condensing event that is bearing down on us. >> R.C. Sproul, Jr. Conversion in progress. >> R.L. Stephen Walker All right, well, given all that, I want to know whether this has happened somewhere else. Because if it could happen on our planet, change the entire conditions of dimensionality throughout the galaxy, or perhaps the cosmos, what makes you think that our planet is the first? >> R.L. Stephen Walker No, I don't think that. >> R.L. Stephen Walker Ah, well, if it's happened elsewhere, what effects will it have elsewhere in the galaxy, on planets elsewhere in the galaxy, what effect do you expect it to have had on us already? >> R.L. Stephen Walker Well, it seems to be the content of it when you explore it, when you explore the adumbrations of the transcendental object and you see all this transhuman alien data, that is essentially what it has become in its past history. It wears upon itself the imprint of, because see, all life is finding its way back to some kind of source that is in a higher plane. And that's why it has this alien presentation, because it has maybe a thousand civilisations poured into it, or ten thousand, or fifty million, who can know? The universe is old already. But it is, you know, it pervades the universe like a gas in a higher dimensional space. What I can't work out then is whether we are talking here about some planetary virus that gets hold of civilisation after civilisation, or planet after planet, and causes them to auto-destruct in this particular way. Or whether we are talking about some cosmic process, because whatever it is, it seems to be pretty local to planets. >> R.L. Stephen Walker It seems to me it's just a continuation of life's programme of conquering whatever dimension it's up against, that it has not yet conquered. And probably that process is endless. That's what life is. It's a chemical strategy for the conquest of dimensionality. And it carries out this programme come hell or high water. >> R.L. Stephen Walker Just like striking a match, you know, biology comes to a planet, and then the flame leaps up. And then pretty soon it burns out through the exhaustion of resources and the arrival of the shockwave of the eschaton to that particular planet. Biology there is extinguished once again. >> R.L. Stephen Walker And what is left in the ashes is the alchemical lapis, the soptic hydrolith, the one thing. >> R.L. Stephen Walker Right. I wouldn't expect you to buy into it wholeheartedly. But it's interesting because it provides a way of imaging what is happening that doesn't fall to some of the dualisms that haunt either a reductionist view or an out and out, gung-ho, no questions asked, religious conversion view. And let me say one more thing while we're on the subject, because it shouldn't be left unsaid. There are orthodox cosmologies that support my contention of the possibility of a universal collapse. Hans Altven of the Swedish Academy of Sciences has suggested that the universe is what's called a vacuum fluctuation. Now a vacuum fluctuation is a situation where it happens in quantum mechanics where a group of particles and antiparticles spring into existence and then annihilate each other. And because parity is conserved, this creation ex nihilo of matter is allowed by quantum physics. But an interesting aspect of these vacuum fluctuations is that quantum theory sets no upper limit on their theoretical size. It merely says that the larger they are, the more improbable they are. Well, the universe itself could be a vacuum fluctuation of some 10 high 68 particles which sprang into being completely according and allowed by quantum physics, separated into a higher dimensional space and are in fact eventually at some point in the future going to reconnect and conserve parity. And Altven says that in this kind of a higher dimensional collision, all points in both systems would appear to an observer to become cotangent instantly. And what that would mean is he's saying that the material universe potentially could disappear in a single moment across megaparsecs of space and time, and all that would be left, Altven says then, is light. Because light does not have an antiparticle. It is different. It is the exception. And no one knows what the physics of light, a universe made only of light, would be like. And I suggest to you that our many myths and intuitions that link light to the process of spiritual advancement and talk about the generation of the light body and so forth, may anticipate something like this. So even within the toolbox of ordinary quantum astrophysics, there are ways of tinker-toying the syntactical bits together to produce incredibly optimistic, transcendental and psychedelic scenarios. There's no way to personally leap into the dimensions of hyperspace in the birth event of the eschaton, not in quantum physics, I suppose. We're talking about a different kind of thing. What about the timetable, Terence? So far it seems like your idea is pretty similar to Teilhard de Chardin, except you said he didn't give us a timetable. So assuming we have sunshine for 25,000 years... When do I think it will occur? Well, it's sort of weird to talk about that because it rests on a formal argument where you have to look at a lot of historical data. What I did was I produced curves that I felt were reflective of the ebb and flow of novelty in time. Then by fitting these curves to historical data, and granted history is not a quantified entity, but nevertheless there's general agreement, for example, that the Greek Renaissance was a novel time, the 20th century was a novel time. So by doing this, I slowly refined down a prediction based on a spiral closure, which makes it happen much faster than you would expect, of the winter solstice of 2012 AD. After I made that calculation, I discovered to my amazement that the Mayan civilization had a very complex cyclical and recursive calendar, and it too indicated that same date. And then I think if you take these World Bank United Nations strict objective data curves and put in the fudge factor of the unexpected, it seems pretty reasonable to suppose that at least there is there a nexus of prophetistic intensity of some sort that has caused a number of traditions for some reason to get focused on the late months of 2012 AD. When I attempted to understand objectively what could be going on there, using computer simulations of the star fields, a program called Voyager that lets you see any place in the solar system 10,000 years in the past or 10,000 years in the future, it turns out that there is something unique about this December 21, 2012 solstice. It's a solstice which will occur at the heliacal rising of the galaxy. What that means is once every 26,000 years in the precession of the great year, there will be a winter solstice sunrise that catches 28 degrees Sagittarius on the plane of the galactic ecliptic. What does that mean? Who knows? Certainly not me. In Handless Mill by Giorgio de Santayana and Helga von Bechend, who were both very well respected historians of science, they suggested that for ancient peoples, these were somehow galactic gates or way stations of some sort through which souls had to transit to make their way back to their higher and hidden home. This is not compelling stuff to me. I find it a little too mediumistic or something. But nevertheless, it is an objective fact that the heliacal rising of the galaxy, which occurs once in 26,000 years, will occur on this date I chose and that I did not know that at the time, nor did I know the why. Well, that's interesting. I agree. But let's look at this. We have here the coincidence of three different things. One is what you did looking at historical data, which I think we could fairly describe as a novel and very interesting and fancy kind of mathematical extrapolation of historical data that does sort of culminate in a point. We agree with that. The other two things, the Mayan calendar and the greatest astronomical conjunction in 26,000 years, these are both periodic phenomena. The Mayan calendar repeats a cycle in 26,000 years and the greatest conjunction in the galaxy, from our perspective, in the galaxy, recurs every 26,000 years. So they could be expected to recur once more before the sun gives its last gasp and biology must extinct. So if we would like weigh these things equally, it would kind of suggest that your mathematical extrapolation, which is good, I like it, but it's not the same as the reportage of a shamanic clairvoyance that you were talking about, of a hyperdimensional investigation. This is more like academic scholarship with huge database of history and this imaginative curve used to extrapolate data. So this suggests that your extrapolation curve could actually be reversed. You take it like this, it ends here, you take it out and you rotate it around and you put it back there. Then you have a completely different model which must necessarily, without a doubt, equally well or poorly fit the historical data up to now and yet it has a future, but only for 26,000 more years. In spite of this, that it's not a shamanic reportage, it's not an ironclad extrapolation, and it's not a coincidence with two other disparate eschatological predictions, then I think the case for this actually being the omega point is weak. You should think about this. It's an important day, it's some kind of transformation. As far as the transition from all of us into the fifth dimension, I don't see a case for it. Well, you'd have to go into, you'd have to look at it, because what it comes down to then is a very fine-tuned argument looking at a particular curve, looking at a standard curve. Look at the curve, reflect it around and put it on the other side. What's to contradict this? History sort of starts running backwards from the point of view of... Well, I'm not sure if I can explain, but there is an answer and I'll try. It's something like this. It's a damped oscillation. It actually does run down. It isn't elegant to try to make it one cycle within a larger or extrapolated set of larger cycles, because it has a built-in spin-down factor in it that makes it pretty clear that it is a single... It's many cycles embedded within many other cycles, but on its highest level it actually has a beginning and it actually has an end. It just seems to you, looking at this radically, implausible that there would be any future after this point. Well, I've thought of many, many ways of thinking about this that would make it not so catastrophically radical. And here's a very simple way that makes everybody feel a little better. Suppose that what happens on December 21st, 2012 is physicists who have been laboring for some time toward the technology of time travel actually succeed. Well, then suddenly the wave is fulfilled and yet the heavens do not fall and angels don't appear to lift us into paradise. It simply shows that the reason history ended at that date was because after the invention of time travel, the notion of a seriality of events ceases to have any meaning. And so everybody agrees, well, history ended yesterday and it did end and we now live in the post-historical atemporal bubble where you not only tell where you live, but when you live. And everything would be very nicely fulfilled then and people would say, well, the people who saw it coming got highly agitated because they didn't realize what it was that was coming. Now we know what was coming. It turns out to be just like the invention of the steam engine or the power of flight or anything like that. There are, you see, we needn't assume these cosmic dimensions to the transformation. You've given this up or this is... But we must assume the transformation. There are still some alternatives. Oh, there are other alternatives. Here's a good one. How about this one? December 21st, 2012 AD, I drop dead. Then everyone says, well, how peculiar. It was only a bathtub. That's really provocative. It was just we were all swept along for 45 years in some bizarre mathematical hallucination that this very glib Irishman was able to foist on. And it's totally fulfilled. And yet again, the heavens don't fall nor the oceans boil. So, but I'm telling you, Ralph, there's something out there. There's something out there. And I'll know when I see it. I expect you at my elbow. Well, I'm sort of a bad person to try this all out. And I'm kind of an unfortunate bearer of this message, because if you knew me, you would know that I'm actually not a very pleasant or nice person. And I'm very hard on there's nothing. Believe it or not, I hate unanchored speculation. And yet I find myself in the position of leading the charge and the greatest unanchored speculation in the history of crackpot thinking. So it bothers me. You see, my method, which I can't really go into tonight, but it's very formal. What I say is if it's very easy to predict the future, because who the hell can say you're wrong? You know, it's just fire free zone. Predicting the past, on the other hand, is very, very difficult because it's happened. So if you're wrong, everyone will know. So what I have done is make the career out of predicting the past with the wave, which proceeds right past the present moment into the future. And my argument to my skeptics is my wave has correctly predicted any past moment that you can conceive of. Therefore, there is a certain intellectual obligation to at least take seriously the contention that it predicts the part of history that has not yet undergone the formality of actually occurring, as Whitehead would say. And if, you know, under different circumstances, I would demonstrate this wave because it gets down to a very, very finely grained argument about the vicissitudes of history and where the great changes lie. And without that, it's a sort of arm waving at this point. >> R. Campbell, Jr. Terence, I've just got one final question I want to ask you about this, which is that other people who tell us the end is at hand, as in placards, the end is at hand, prepare to meet by doom, suggest that this requires some kind of special moral preparation on our part. Now, does yours come willy-nilly, no need to get ready for it in any particular way. Would you recommend some special kind of preparation? >> Well, this is a very difficult question for me because much of what I was involved in many years ago was political activism, political struggle. And yet, when I go to my sources on this matter, they assure me that it's a done deal. And that possibly one might spend one's time reassuring other people, but only if you felt like it. The walls are now so high, the creode so deep, the momentum so tremendous, that I really don't think anything could swerve or divert us from what we are being drawn into. >> I wasn't thinking in terms of more recycling and so on. I was thinking in terms of moral preparation or conscious preparation. >> Well, conscious preparation, I think people should drive out and take a look at the eschaton at the end of the road of history. And what that means is psychedelic self-experimentation. I don't know of any other way to do it. But if you drive out to the end of the road and take a look at the eschaton and kick the tires and so forth, then you will be able to come back here and take your place in this society and be a source of moral support and exemplary behavior for other people. Because I think that as we approach the eschaton, remember I called history its shockwave, literally the Q forces, as engineers call them, the vibrational forces that will rip the wings off an airplane as it approaches hypersonic speed. History is good. That's what I meant when I said it will be a white knuckle ride. There is an outlandish amount of vibration in the next 19 years. It's going to look good, then bad, then worse, then good, then bad. And if you haven't driven out to the end of the road and taken a look at what's waiting, it will just drive you nuts what the next 20 years are going to be like. Because all the resonances of all past time are now in the close packing phase as the thing is squeezed down and the contradictions are rubbing up against each other. Boundaries are dissolving all around us. The Soviet Union? Gone! Yugoslavia? Gone! America is a great power? Gone! Good taste? Gone! Boundaries dissolving all around us. This is going to happen faster and faster and faster. And governments now, all they're doing is managing a spreading wildfire of uncontrolled catastrophes and trying to keep us in the dark about how bad things really are. And so it's good to go out and take a look and reassure yourself that it's there. I think we should, it is a possibility, I think we could discuss it now. Or do you have another point? No, we've reached the time to open it up. Terence, you sound to me like a psychedelic version of Karl Marx. Well, Marx was the last great millenarian theoretician in western civilization, that's right. He was convinced that history was the result of interplay of conflicting classes. And once that conflict has been removed, history itself will cease. And I hear a similar story, except the players are not the classes in society, but the various forms of global problems that we have. And it could be that it's a kind of test arranged by this attractor down the end of the road there, that's leering at us, and saying, let's see if you guys can get yourselves together enough to get around this one and show us that you can reach a higher stage of evolution. If you don't make it, you don't survive. If you do make it, then you go to the next step. It's an initiation ritual. A series of hurdles to be leaped as we approach the end. I'm trying to get to your kind of language. It's not that I can't express it, but it's a fun way of talking about it. So it might not be the end, it might just be like entering the Masons or something like that. Yes, well, it's impossible to say, but you're right, certainly, that all of these factors are coming together. I don't see it as class war. I see it as a kind of universal Manichaean struggle between habit and novelty. And habit is forever dragging novelty back down to its level, and novelty is forever conniving new ways to escape the control of habit. But the good news is, over vast spans of time, novelty always wins. And what we're simply seeing is novelty crossing a particularly significant milestone in its infinite journey outward towards self-expression. What about all these people that say we're really crossing from the Piscean age to the Aquarian age, and the emergence of high-speed electronic communications, etc., etc., is the typical symptom of the Aquarian age, and it's high-speed communication. I'm not an astrologer, but all this turbulence is because we're right at the point where we're crossing. See, I think that as we approach this eschatological object, the number of interpretations of what it is will just proliferate exponentially. I mean, false prophets of all sorts and thousands of variants will arise because everyone can feel it, and yet everyone has a unique perspective on it that then distorts their description of it. I mean, I think that all the messiahs and mystics of human history can be seen in this light. You could almost have a geometric theory of messiahhood, and just say if you were in the big league, the Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, Mani, Mahavira league, then you just caught a very bright reflection from the distant spinning eschaton, and then you embodied it and became a microcosm of that distant macrocosm, and religions are set marching by this means. Well, then the guy parading down at Hyde Park with the sign, the only difference between him and the big leaguers is he got a smaller scintilla of the noetic energy. And so then with each of us, we each have a perspective on the eschaton, and to the degree that we cultivate and fan that flame, we get an insight through the filter of our personal circumstance, the infinite interprets itself to us, something like that. So we're all a bit like a core. Falling, we're all carrying a tiny piece of the whole, and at the end of time, each person will make their contribution, yes. We're like motes being drawn in. We're like leaf mulching ants. [inaudible] Yes, although I think God is a contaminated term, but we're all aspects of the transcendental other, and our deployment in three-dimensional space and time is just one aspect of its being, and we are in the process of finding our way to a noble point of transition into a different dimension of its self-expression. [inaudible] Creativity, complexity, density of connectedness, and one reason I love this notion, you see, is because even the posthumous agree that the most densely ramified physical material known in the universe is the human neocortex. So suddenly, no longer are we observers of the cosmic drama. It turns out it was our opera all along, and the universal drama of the production and preservation of complexity is met in us. We represent the most precious distillation of this four, five, six billion year process of the production and the conservation of novelty. It returns us to the center of the cosmic drama and ennobles the human condition thereby. Well, so now there are new technical salvations being offered. The possibility, no one knows, well not some people think they know, but it is assumed possible to perhaps migrate into some kind of dimension of electronic micro-storage or something. We're all going to live in a gold deterbium super-cool cube buried a thousand feet beneath Copernicus and abandon the earth to animal life. That's not very attractive to me, on the other hand. I've never been downloaded into a chip, so I suppose one shouldn't knock it till they've tried it. But the virtual realities that I have seen have been hideously sterile and cartoon-like. On the other hand, you know, predicting the pace of technological innovation, especially with these new technologies, is very, very tricky. The study of neural networks, parallel arrays, they are pushing out in directions where there could be unexpected breakthroughs in the imaging of human intelligence, or take the cold fusion thing a couple of years ago. It turned out not to be so, but for a moment the whole thing hung in the balance there, you see. There could be more of this kind of thing. No one is directing or controlling the creative energies of this species. It's being driven by thousands of micro-units called companies, all pursuing agendas they won't discuss with anybody who hasn't signed a non-disclosure agreement. So God knows what they're doing out there, and they're fiddling with life and mind and intelligence and micro-dimensions and you name it. So given the past history of technological development, I certainly wouldn't rule out breakthroughs that could make the timetable of my scenario even seem conservative. Even less than a miracle could, as a matter of fact, sort of turn it around, push it to a new phase, like cold fusion. Yes, or super-conductor thinking machines, or any of a number of things. But what's the future? It's the future we're living in. Hollywood creates it, and we have to swallow it until something better comes along, or until we get sick enough of that system to do something about it. Like what? Like what? Well, the design process of human civilization has been left to Bauhaus brats with their eye on their checkbook. That has created this international airport style of human coral reef that is absolutely abiotic and toxic. So art, I think here in the final moments of human history, we should push the art pedal to the floor and attempt to pour as much beauty into the human design process as we possibly can. Too long have we wandered from the notion that the good, the true, and the beautiful are somehow inextricably linked, and modernity teaches otherwise, but modernity has failed. Well, a revivified shamanism, which would be the culmination of this program of art that I'm suggesting, essentially on one level shamanism is the art of gaining a familiarity with death. And this is what we must do, I think, because we've become so alienated from it. So part of what I talk about is a neo-archaism, that what we are, by leaving history, we're returning to the values that preceded history, where there was a great de-emphasis on material culture and a great emphasis on human bonding, feelings, cognition, that sort of thing. We have to re-empower our sense of self. We have accepted our place in a very rigid hierarchy as consumers of images, products, and ideas, and as everything dissolves, responsibility will flow inward to the individual, and we will be more and more held responsible for ourselves, our actions, our presentation. No more can we say, "Well, I'm white," or "I'm American," or "It won't work." We are entering into a domain of such freedom that the responsibility will be tantamount. And this is a beautiful thing. This is what all the struggle was about, human unfoldment. This is why all those kings were hung and all those enemies of the human spirit turned back and defeated. So each individual must die to be reborn to the collectivity. That sounds right. That sounds right. Yes, well, somehow the modalities of both must be preserved in a higher union. This is the union of opposites, the coincidencia positorum that Jung and alchemy is all about. Well, I really see, I mean, now that we're on to this metaphor, what I've really been saying here this evening is that history is an alchemical process. This novelty that I'm talking about being conserved, we might as well have been talking about the Sophic waters or something. History is the act of calling into existence the perfect tool, which is discovery to be the self itself. In a sense, what history is, is a process of turning ourselves inside out so that the soul becomes visibly manifest in three-dimensional space and the body becomes an object freely commanded in the imagination. You know, the patristic Father Justinian taught that the resurrection body would be spherical, just to the joy of even controversialists, I might add, because it made him so open to attack. But it's an incredibly modern anticipation of ourselves going into a kind of quasi-union with our technologies. What is it Yeats says in Sailing to Byzantium, the part about how I would be a thing of gold and gold, and once out of nature, I would be a thing of gold and gold enamelling, set upon a branch to sing of what has been and what will be. That is the idea that we change ourselves into an eternal, golden, superconducting, perfected object that transcends death, transcends space and time, and has no apparent connection to our physical image as animals. It's the alchemical sublimation. All alchemical processes are like fractal anticipations of this final rendering of the stone itself. [INAUDIBLE] No, no, the alchemical idea is not that one goes against nature, but that one aids nature and catalyzes it. And it's very explicit in alchemical thinking that what one does is one makes it happen faster. One accelerates, catalyzes natural processes. And so this is what we would be doing. We would essentially be, by transforming ourselves in this way, we bring ever closer the final apocatastrophe. [INAUDIBLE] Well, no, that... [INAUDIBLE] No, one has stepped from the mortal coil. Yes. [INAUDIBLE] Plato said time is the moving image of eternity. And so eternity is outside the wheel. And that is what I mean by this higher dimension of completeness. It is eternity and all time rests within it. [INAUDIBLE] Well, if it happens in the individual, then it's a property of the species. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and vice versa. There are only these fractal adumbrations of the transformative process on every level. [INAUDIBLE] Yes, that's what I mean. Well, we're past time, I see. Thank you for your indulgence. And thank you again for your indulgence. [MUSIC] I have to admit that after listening with you to the first tape in this four tape series from Hazel Woodhouse, I was a little disappointed in it. I guess they kind of lost me with the long discussion about homing pigeons. But by the time that got going with the tape we just heard, I thought they were back in the best of form. In particular, I was taken by some things Terence said about the transcendental object at the end of time that I hadn't heard before. If I understood him right, it could be anything from a comet impact to a revelation about what happens after bodily death. And that, that thought has opened a whole new door for me. It isn't all that difficult for me to envision what our planetary state of mind would be if we knew that a comet impact was imminent. But what if, just what if, every human on the planet suddenly knew with absolute certainty exactly what is going to happen to them after their body dies? Now, if you already have a preconceived idea of what that means, try to put it aside for a moment and think about having absolutely no doubt at all about the revelation that you and everyone else on the planet just had about life and death. As Terence said, that would definitely qualify as a world-condensing event. Now, I know that I'm not talking to everybody here in the salon right now, but I'm sure that there are a few others besides myself who have experienced one of those world-condensing events. For me, two of them came during ayahuasca ceremonies, and there have been others. But if you've been there, you know what I'm talking about. Unfortunately, such experiences are truly ineffable. They can't be put into human words. But what you can take away from these experiences, rare though they are, is an absolute certainty that in the end, everything is just going to turn out just fine. I can't even tell you why I feel this way, but we are really getting close to something completely new and unexpected in the realm of consciousness. At least, that's my hunch. Now, if you think back to where Terence was just now talking about a revivified shamanism, or archaic revival and the form of human consciousness back before what we now think of as human history, well, just stop for a moment and consider the possibility, even if it's only a very remote possibility. But what if, as the Yuga cycle says, there once truly was a great golden age, and that we are finally on our way back up to do it again? Well, if that actually is the case, then what Terence is talking about isn't just some form of primitive, live-in-the-jungle existence. If he's talking about some form of consciousness that either can exist or maybe even once did exist in some past age, well then, finally, I think I'm beginning to understand what he means by an archaic revival. I guess I'm maybe a little slow on this, but reading Terence for me is sometimes like when I read Emerson. They both seem to make sense to me, but I find it difficult to explain to somebody else what they're saying. I guess I'm rambling now, so I better wrap this up. But one last thing about the trilogue we just heard. If you remember, at one point Terence McKenna put down on cold fusion technology as being not real or a hoax or something. And I think it's important to note that while that was a case presented by the mainstream media back in 1993, the facts since then have borne out the fact that this is a very real technology, and one that is now being widely investigated in many places around the world. So I guess that's at least one thing Terence would have been happy to learn had he stuck around a while longer. Okay, now how about a little podcasting news. The other day I was listening to KMO's Sea Realm podcast and heard him read an email from two of the Salonners who I met at Burning Man. And in it they told of a shared vision they had for a moment on the Playa. I remember them telling me about that just before one of the Playa logs, and it sounded like one of those extremely rare experiences that lets you know that we haven't even seen the tip of the consciousness iceberg yet. And I noticed that the Burning Man stories KMO was relaying came in basically two flavors. The first-time burner experience and the somewhat jaded long-time burner experience. Now I've been there just enough times to begin developing a somewhat jaded edge about that event, but I'm still new enough to the experience that I'll probably go back a few more times. In a few weeks I'll be playing Dale Pendle's Playa log in which he discusses the changes that have taken place at Burning Man in the last few years. In fact Dale has even written a follow-up essay on the topic, and I think you'll find the entire discussion quite interesting even if you've never even been to an event like that. Another news item is that thanks to Xandor and a helper or two, there is now a psychedelic salon forum on thegrowreport.org. And if you go to that site and click on the link for the forums, you'll find quite a wide range of discussions taking place. All of the podcasters on the Cannabis Podcast Network have their own forums there, and I try to stop by there a couple times each week. Maybe I'll catch you in their chat room one day. Actually I tried the chat feature, which I think is coming from dopetheme.co.uk, which is the network's home, and I found Queer Ninja and Wink in there to chat with for a bit, and they tell me that around 2 o'clock Saturday Pacific Time is when a bunch of people from the EU are in the chat room there, so I might try to stop by and catch some of you there too. And while I'm talking about dopetheme.co.uk, I should mention that in just two more days, they're going to be adding yet another program to their already stellar lineup of podcasts. I think that the program's going to be called "BeeBee's Lounge" or something like that, but it'll definitely feature Black Beauty, the lovely-voiced lady from down under, who you can already hear in various places on the network. But now she'll have her very own program, and we're all looking forward to that. So welcome, Black Beauty. It's good to have you here with us. If you've been to the psychedelicsalon.org blog recently, you'll probably notice that on the home page, I'm only showing the complete contents of the most recent post. The main reason for this is to keep Google from thinking we're trying to cheat on them by having two copies of all the posts online. So now after that first post, you'll have to click on the "Continue Reading" link, or just click on the title of the post, and you'll be taken to the full article on its own page. Now, I realize this may confuse you at first, because it looks like the download links don't work. So I'll try to figure out a hack that'll make it a little bit more clear. And in case you haven't visited that blog to view the program notes for these podcasts, you might want to stop by and check out some of the sidebar links. It'll take you to all kinds of current news topics that I suspect you'll be interested in. And the comments section under each of these podcast listings now is starting to grow too, and some very interesting discussions going on there. When I get back to podcasting some of the plylogs we recorded at Burning Man this year, I'll also be talking more about this year's event. Now I want to bring you up to date on three intrepid salonners who you last heard of as they left the UK and made their way to Black Rock City. Well, Martin and his two traveling companions spent some time hanging out with us and talking about their travel plans, which were quite ambitious, I might add. And so now it's exciting for me to yesterday have received an email from Martin, part of which I'll read for you right now. "Morso, it was good seeing you at the Burn. Being there really blew me away. It was bigger, better, and much more profound than I expected. But most of all, the presence of real magic. After the Burn, we flew down to Lima, and we've now spent three weeks traveling around the Andes. The highlight so far is clearly Cusco. Once the center of the Inca Empire, this beautiful city is surrounded by old ruins and is also an obligatory stop on the way to Machu Picchu. For a moment, there's a real buzz happening here. Shamanism is everywhere. With both Ayahuasca and San Pedro fully legal, and a huge Western interest, you see it and hear it all over the place. There's loads of companies organizing treks up to and around Machu Picchu. They've been doing this for decades, but now there's something else on the menu, psychedelics. And it's not cheap kicks. It seems to be done with responsibility and integrity. I had the opportunity to do a San Pedro session up in the hills overlooking Cusco. A truly amazing day with this gentle and bright plant ally. The rocks came alive, and at points in the ruins, the energy became so strong and intense that it was almost overwhelming. Boy, you know, Martin, you're bringing back memory of a time I had down at the ruins in Palenque under similar circumstances. And what you say about the energy is really amazing. You can actually see it. Continuing with his email now. Tonight we're off to Bolivia, where we've got just over two weeks of traveling before we've got to make our way back up to Peru and out into the Amazon for our six-week Ayahuasca retreat. I'm very excited, but also a bit nervous. I've been speaking to lots of people here with lots of experience, and I know that this is sure no walk in the park. Real hard work with real issues, but also, I hope, euphoric ecstasy. I hope everything is well with you and Mary C. Send my love to her and everyone else I had the pleasure to meet on the playa. I'll keep you posted. Lots of love and light, Martin. Well, Martin, we'll be waiting for your next report. And if you get a chance to post some pictures of your travels, please let me know, and I'll pass the link on to your friends here in the psychedelic salon. As you'll hear a few podcasts from now, I've got some mixed emotions about the Burning Man Festival. But there is one thing that became very clear to me this year. No matter what I think about the festival or how it's changing, the real point of the event, at least for me, is to reunite with old friends and to make some connections with new ones. I have to admit that I was really blown away at how many people came up to Mary C. and me at the burn this year and said that they were regulars here in the salon. It's so good to be able to put some faces to the names that I've read in e-mails. I can't say that I've got all of your names and faces correctly sorted out, but I can tell you that your faces are permanently etched in my mind. So even though I might be a little grumpy about Burning Man right now, I'll most likely return again next year, just to be able to spend some more time with Brooke and La, John, Darren, Mark, and all the rest of the wonderful people in the pod cluster. It really felt like family, and I want to feel that way again. So there's a good chance I'll be back again next year. But to be honest, I'm also hoping that John Hanna will produce another Mind States conference before then, so I can get back together with all of you without so much dust in the air. Gosh, here I go on about Burning Man again. It just won't let me alone today. Well, before I go, I want to 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 the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which is 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 I guess I should mention that matrixmasters.com is also my personal website. I know that some of you might have become a little confused and clicking around on the psychedelicsalon.org blog because you often wind up on matrixmasters.com. That's because before I started podcasting, the Matrix Masters site was where I spent most of my online time. But since I started doing these podcasts, I really haven't added a lot of new material to that site. However, many of my essays are there, along with a brief resume or CV for those who are interested in those kind of things. And also, I want to thank Jacques, Cordell, and Wells, my friends who make music under the name Chateau Hayouk. Thanks again for the use of your music here in the salon, you guys. I really appreciate it. And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from psychedelic space. Be well, my friends. [Music] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.65 sec Decoding : 2.25 sec Transcribe: 4828.38 sec Total Time: 4831.28 sec