[Music]
 Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon.
 So how's it going for you today? Personally, I've had a hard time getting going this week.
 If you've been following these podcasts for the last couple of months, you'll probably remember that sometime in June,
 I started whining about how much work it was taking to get ready for Burning Man.
 And then after I got back, I complained that I was out of energy and had to recover from Burning Man.
 Well, now it's October and I seem to have run out of excuses.
 So it looks like my lack of get up and go is primarily due to the aging process, coupled with my own inherent lethargy,
 which can make things difficult to get up the energy once in a while.
 But then I check my email and find it full of comments, suggestions and thank yous from so many of our fellow salonners
 that my energy level shoots back up to the max. And well, here we go again,
 getting ready to listen to the end of the Hazelwood House Trilogue.
 And again, today's program will be a bit longer than the one hour I like to keep them to.
 And so I want to be sure to get my thank yous in before you get lost in the thicket of thoughts that our merry trial augers create.
 And in addition to Ralph, Rupert, Terrence, Bruce and Shatul Hayuk, whose music you hear in the background right now,
 I also want to thank three people whose financial donations to the salon have been significant.
 So thank you very much, Elliot Kaye, Jim and my fellow grandfather, Robert O.
 And how is your little granddaughter doing, Robert?
 I'm sure she's bringing you as much joy as my grandchildren are bringing me.
 They really make my life worthwhile. And I'll bet it's the same with you.
 Anyway, thank you all for your support of these podcasts.
 I couldn't do it without all of your help, love and support. And it's deeply appreciated.
 Well, for today's program, we'll be picking up where we last left the Hazelwood House trial log that was held between Rupert Sheldrake,
 Terrence McKenna and Ralph Abraham back in 1993.
 And we'll begin with Ralph's tale that he calls Fractals on My Mind.
 Now, as I've been listening to these trial logs with you over the past couple of years,
 I've come to expect to hear new insights about our physical world coming from Rupert and over the edge metaphysical ideas coming from Terrence.
 But throughout them all, it's been Ralph who quite often provides the steadiness or ballast or rudder or whatever you want to call it,
 that gets their cargo of new ideas safely ashore.
 You know, I've got a good friend like that myself.
 And believe me, he saved me from a lot of embarrassment on more than one occasion by forcing me to think through some outlandish statement that I'm about to make.
 And his advice is often the first I seek because I know he won't cut me any intellectual slack.
 In the realms we all seem to enjoy talking about it, it really pays big dividends to have a well-grounded friend covering your back.
 And that's one of the roles I see Ralph playing here, and that is sort of the wise elder guiding a couple of precocious young friends.
 So it was kind of interesting for me that in the talk we're about to hear, I guess maybe about 10 minutes into it,
 is when Rupert points out the fact that we're actually listening to a lecture on mathematics in his tale of fractals.
 Well, I couldn't believe it at first.
 So I went back and listened to Ralph's talk again from the beginning and was blown away when I began to think of myself sitting in a college classroom
 listening to a teacher who could actually inspire me to dig deeper into the beauty of mathematics
 in order to better understand how math directly impacts my everyday thinking, even my metaphysical thinking.
 And by the way, my undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering, so I had a lot of math along the way,
 but never was I taught by a poet who also happened to be a mathematician.
 So just listen with me right now and I think you'll hear what I mean.
 Fractals on my mind.
 An epic in four parts.
 Part one, the sandy beach.
 The three boys put on their wellies.
 They ran down the field.
 They swung on the swain.
 They rolled down the corn circle.
 They came to the river.
 They sat on the edge, dangling their feet over the stream.
 "Look," said Rupert, "a sandy beach."
 Sure enough, they saw there was a little tiny beach of sand.
 Terence said, "The land reaches down into the water."
 And Rupert said, "No, the water reaches up into the land."
 "Well, then, it's both water and sand. It's the sandy beach. It's a fractal object."
 They stood then. They walked in the stream.
 "Look," said Terence, "it circles to the left."
 "No," said Rupert, "it circles to the right."
 "It's turbulent flow," said Ralph, "it's a mathematical object. It's chaos."
 On the other side of the stream, there was no beach.
 There was a concrete wall.
 It was not a fractal object.
 Rupert said, "It's a straight line."
 Terence said, "It's a Bauhaus excrescent of post-linguistic humanoids."
 Thinking of peanut butter sandwiches, then, they walked back up the slope.
 Rupert said, "Nature has given us a lesson. Nature is our teacher, and we have learned about the sandy beach."
 The sun had set.
 Ralph pointed to the sky. "Look," he said.
 They looked and saw there was a silver stripe in the sky shining there.
 They hadn't noticed it before.
 It girdled the entire celestial vault.
 It sprung from two legs to the south.
 That way, they saw that its two legs pierced the zodiacal belt.
 It sprung across the mid-heaven, going somewhere near the polar constellations.
 Rupert said, "I think those constellations over there, those are all watery."
 "The Pisces, the fish, there's biology projected on the sky."
 Terence said, "The Chaldean astrologers call that the celestial sea."
 And Ralph said, "It's a sandy beach in the sky."
 Rupert said, "Father Sky is our teacher, too."
 Ralph said, "Well, there's a sphere above the sky with the sandy beach in it,
 and a kind of astral projection imprints its shadow on the celestial sphere
 and on the terrestrial disk as well."
 They went back to the kitchen and tugged off their wellies
 and looked for peanut butter in the fridge.
 That's part one of "Sandy Beach."
 Part two is called "Two Roads Diverge in a Yellow Wood."
 This is about bird flight.
 We have to recall that pigeons live in a loft,
 and the loft radiates a field throughout the atmosphere of the planet Earth, all the way around.
 This is a field of intuitive flying instruction.
 Wherever a pigeon might be released, it can consult its intuition in its heart
 and see a snapshot of itself a moment later in a certain direction.
 And by following itself, it gets the instruction to fly in a certain direction,
 which, even though it's not a straight line, will eventually lead back to the loft,
 which is the attractor of the dynamical system or intuitive field of directions.
 And we'll assume this for the sake of discussion.
 This is the morphogenetic field of the loft.
 And now we have to put ourselves in the position of someone reading Rupert's book soon,
 when it's published, and trying to do the experiment with the removal of the loft.
 First we dispose of monotheism, leave that behind.
 Now we have two lofts.
 The two lofts each radiate morphogenetic field instructions wherever the pigeon might be.
 That's the fixed loft at home and the movable one just taken off the truck, or out of the boat, or whatever it is.
 The pigeon has spent time in each loft and been trained,
 and feels the impulse of the morphogenetic field,
 a beat in a conga combination averaged by mathematical functions built into the heart of the bird.
 The result is that after flying, the bird will arrive either at the fixed loft or at the movable loft,
 depending on where it starts.
 This is sort of a mathematical fact, but I hope that experimentalists will try this out.
 That would mean training a whole bunch of pigeons in the same fixed loft, in the same movable loft,
 and then releasing not all of them, but a certain proportion of them,
 from different locations sort of neighboring in a region,
 and later on marking the starting points in that region with a color red for all the starting points of birds that flew to the fixed loft,
 and green for all the birds that ended up in the movable loft.
 Then we end up with this region is painted part red and part green.
 These colored regions, in dynamical systems theory, are called basins.
 The basins might be particularly important if you were of the gambling sort,
 and were betting on a certain pigeon whether it would go from one loft to the other.
 You could certainly win your bet if you knew this colored map from successive experiments with the same two lofts and flocks of birds.
 Yes, I am talking about you.
 So it's important to know where the green and red regions are,
 and it could be all red over there, sort of toward the home loft, which is in the south,
 and all green over there, toward the movable loft, which is in the north.
 But it could be much more complicated, because during flight there are all these hills you have to go around,
 and there are certain nests of sparrow hawks that have to be avoided by a wide detour.
 And one possibility is that between the red and green regions there is a sharp line,
 like that Bauhaus concrete wall on the other side of the river.
 And another possibility is that the red and green have been stirred and mixed, like the colors on this carpet,
 into a pattern with the boundary as a practical object, as a sandy beach.
 Sandy beach in the multigenetic field, so that the separation between the red and green, which might mean life and death,
 might be the red eschaton and the green eschaton, is a fractal.
 And that means that whatever you would be in the supposed boundary, like wherever you are on the sandy beach,
 if you are a pinhead, you might be either in water or on land.
 And even the tiniest puff of wind could blow you from land to water, or vice versa.
 So, unless it was an entirely windless day, you couldn't even predict whether you were going to end up in the home roost,
 or the movable roost, in life or death, in the good or the bad eschaton.
 It's the fractal boundary, the sandy beach, which destroys determinism.
 The Milky Way, as a mythological object, is Chama, the early Assyrian goddess of chaos.
 And her mate, Apsu, are those two branches of the river, which is a projection of the Tigris and the Euphrates.
 The identification of chaos and Milky Way and Chama and indeterminacy and the creative source of all form
 is traditional, at least for 6,000 years. I didn't make up this fable.
 That's the end of Part 2. Two roads diverge in the yellow wood.
 These two roads are the red and the green.
 You might as well toss a coin, because you can't get where you're going on purpose.
 That's down at the river, and that's the homing pigeons.
 "We're pigeons, and the eschaton is our home," Terence would say.
 Now let's take a deep breath. We've survived two lessons of mathematics
 without the despicable, frightening word being mentioned.
 Now I want to apply the concepts in the context of a single individual mind.
 We have in mind different parts, which are somehow dynamical objects,
 where there's a cycling about, a roving over, that repeats a pattern or follows a track for a long time
 until we get out of that track into another one.
 This could be an entire paradigm, whatever that is.
 Let's say a paradigm is a bunch of basins.
 Like, instead of the red and the green, we could have a hundred different colors,
 all of them kind of mixed up practically, like this rug.
 And each of these colored regions might be a group of basins,
 but between the basins are thicker boundaries that make it more difficult to go through,
 reflect you from the boundary, so that it takes a bigger perturbation in the world of thought
 in order to change the, we could call them paradigms, or personalities, or cubbyholes in the mind.
 For example, when language came over us, I don't mean 25,000 years ago,
 well, this process started 25,000 years ago, but in the history of a single individual,
 then at the age of one or two or three or something, when speech is beginning,
 what was going on before that?
 Presumably that was what everyone was doing before speech came altogether,
 there was such a time, and that childhood paradigm is not vaporized and replaced
 when the linguistic phase arrives.
 Instead, it's like covered over and covered. It just makes another one of these basins.
 So that's an example of, we could call it, multiple personality.
 These regions in the mind, normally, the boundaries should be fractal,
 that is to say, more like the sandy beach than like the Bauhaus concrete wall.
 In the case that some training influence creates, instead of the natural sandy beach, a concrete wall,
 then it becomes very difficult to get from one to another.
 When there would be fractal beaches everywhere, then the slightest perturbation,
 a strange idea coming on the radio, would bop you just that millimeter,
 sorry, fraction of an inch, to get from the water to the sand,
 from the one paradigm to another.
 In a normal day in the life, with a lot of perturbations, one would rapidly be visiting them,
 all of the different regions or multiple personalities making up the self.
 So noise in the environment is sufficient to integrate the personality.
 But if there are iron curtains here and there,
 then it takes a very big perturbation to get out of one paradigm into another,
 and then you would see an individual manifesting the multiple personality syndrome.
 So since this difficulty, in this model which is inspired by Kurt Logine, the founder of social psychology,
 he had a kind of mathematical model for a mind, individual or social,
 at the basis of his invention of social psychology.
 In this model, the healthier state has these sandy beaches, and the basins, the colors are all mixed up.
 The pathological state has too much order, like after toilet training or something,
 with these concrete walls, iron curtains.
 So these iron curtains, I call them "dischaos".
 So replacing the disorder binary with a dischaos and chaos binary,
 because we need more sandy beaches.
 So I wouldn't call this, as they do, the multiple personality disorder.
 I call it the multiple personality dischaos.
 So that's a sandy beach model of a mind, which, if we were into clinical psychology,
 we could try developing, inventing a therapeutic strategy to increase chaos.
 For example, visiting the river, listening to the sound, walking in nature,
 as opposed to listening to the radio and watching the TV.
 Watching TV would be good, if they somehow put birdsong on there, chanting.
 So, while there are many applications of this that I won't go into now,
 I'll just mention a possible application we could come back to someday,
 just to point to some possibilities for individual psychology
 before I go on to the fourth and final lap of this course.
 And this has to do with the question, "Why do people believe in UFOs?"
 Or, "Why do people want to believe in corn circles?"
 Or, this is quite independent of whether UFOs are real or imaginary,
 it hardly matters, not to put down UFOs.
 And, "Why would they want to believe in God or monotheism, or if there is one God?" and so on.
 I think that the multiple personality, this chaos phenomenon is pretty universal in our culture.
 And there are heavily walled off regions.
 Walls were built at different stages in life.
 And the child part was sealed when there was an authoritarian, trustworthy emotional environment
 that had the illusion of absolute truth or something.
 So, that part is sitting there, yearning for some validation from the outside world.
 Something like that would, if you wanted to try experiments,
 or you could write a book recommending experiments in social psychology,
 in which the tendency of people to believe in God, you could try to affect it by playing music.
 Music therapy for this chaotic religious belief.
 And, in case of success, then restore pantheism, which is maybe badly needed at this time.
 Instead of going on with applications to fractals in the individual mind,
 I'd like to just go on to the collective mind, to our social sphere,
 and in this fourth and final part, and then I'll end with a couple of questions for you guys, based on this idea.
 Well, I wouldn't have thought of this exactly, but I think Terence suggested that I was guilty of making a mathematical model for monogamy.
 And, since that's true, I might as well share it with you.
 And this is it, in fact. We are there.
 So, this is about the sandy beach in the collective mind.
 And, well, we could get to this collective mind stepwise, as in the Zhuangzi.
 From nothing comes one, and then two, and then three.
 He says, after three, any mathematician can make infinity.
 So, we've got one. Now we can just step to two.
 What would be, then, the application of the sandy beach model to a social system consisting of two people?
 Now, you have the two people, and there's some kind of mathematical model for the psyche.
 Not to be taken too seriously, but this is just what psychology does, makes Curt Levine-type models for the psyche.
 And now you've got, like, two of them, and then they start talking to each other, touching, cooking and eating together, or something like that.
 And then these two systems are coupled in to one.
 And, of course, the behavior of the coupled system is much more complicated than the behavior of the parts.
 And the behavior of the coupled-up complex system can't be predicted or even guessed at from the full knowledge of the behavior of the two parts.
 And besides, you would only know one of the parts if you were involved in this to a degree.
 This system, then, also has this dynamical system.
 I mean, the model is, not the people.
 And in the model, this complex system has attractors, that is to say, roost, loft, the movable loft, the fixed loft, and so on.
 And the base is colored red, green, and all the other things, and the boundaries in between either ironed curtains or sandy beaches.
 And I suppose that monogamy means a contract or behavioral epiphenomenon in which some of the boundaries between the parts are heavily walled off.
 So that it is, as a matter of fact, a situation, unstable situation of dischaos.
 I'm not saying that order is always bad, but cosmos and chaos just have to be balanced.
 I wouldn't elevate chaos above cosmos or vice versa, but systems probably, to be healthy, they need a certain balance.
 And understanding monogamy as an ironed curtain, then, to make it stable, would require a balancing chaos elsewhere.
 That's the idea. Otherwise, this multiple personality, that's the system of the two people, would have the multiple personality dischaos,
 an out-of-balance situation in the direction of order, which, like the concrete wall doing its best to hold up the bank for life, is highly unstable.
 That's one application. Then, I won't go into details, but considering two nations instead of two individuals, one also gets a model of this sort,
 in which the stability of the complex system would require adequate balance of chaos and order.
 So those are the four parts, and let me just end with these questions for Rupert and Kare.
 So, Rupert, this model suggests that you have to consider experiments with multiple lofts,
 and even with a single loft, you have to consider experiments with multiple pigeons.
 And, anyway, that's a consequence of your idea, your model of what is going on.
 And so I wonder what you think the results, maybe you already know the results of this, that have been tried.
 It could, for the ancient Egyptian government, of course, mean the success or failure in the war with the Hyksos.
 And for Terence, I think, I just wonder what would this do to your idea to consider multiple attractors at the end of time, two, three, or more eschatons.
 Nothing in what you said seemed to me prohibited this, other than a misplaced iron curtain of the monotheistic type that perhaps filtered the speech of the mushroom that came through your lips.
 Can I just try and summarize, Ralph, what I think you said, because I'm not sure I've got it.
 One element seems to be that personalities, and of course social relationships and international relations,
 and the behaviour of different groups of pigeons fall into different basins.
 And we can visualise that like being a landscape with different values in it.
 And so sometimes in a particular region the ball will roll down in a particular value, and in another region it will roll into another one.
 And each of these basins represents a different kind of sub-personality.
 And within a marriage or a relationship, then each of the basins represents what we normally call a personality, each of which has sub-personalities within it.
 These are the different basins.
 And you seem to be pointing out that personalities are made up of different sub-personalities.
 A very fashionable view. Everybody is talking about sub-personalities.
 James Fillman says you can do polytheistic psychology where you have all the different gods and goddesses,
 not only representing the archetypes that we all go through, all these different ones,
 we're possessed by different gods or goddesses at different times.
 And we move from one to another.
 And we're not a single personality with different functions, but we're a kind of emulsion of all these different personalities.
 Then there's the multiple personality craze in America where people are fascinated not just by serial killers,
 but by people with multiple personalities, and preferably both.
 Multiple personalities and serial killers.
 Anyway, there's a fascination with multiple personalities.
 There's the Hillman thing, there's the computer model, Minsky and the MIT multiple module.
 Daniel Dennett, the materialist philosopher, has the multiple-draft theory of consciousness.
 So everywhere we find these multiple models of which laws is one.
 And all of them seem to be saying that to get away from monotheism, which is reflected in psychology,
 by the idea of a central ego, a dominating ego, you've got to get away from that too.
 So these more democratic models where you have a kind of grassroots democracy, all these different personalities,
 that seems to be one drift in what you're saying.
 And that's one discussion, is whether or not a polytheistic model is possible,
 or whether indeed there have been any.
 Because in India, which is frequently called polytheistic, you have many gods,
 you have all through all Indian traditions the idea of some state beyond all this, Brahman or Atman.
 And in every system where you actually have polytheism, you have some sense of an undifferentiated unity as well.
 So that's one point to discuss.
 The second point which you'll seem to be making is that the boundary between these different basins is not a straight line or a rigid wall,
 but rather a fractal boundary, namely one that has many in's and out's and curves and filigrees and patterns.
 And therefore moving with that kind of boundary, moving from one to the other is very easy,
 because you never quite know where you are and you could cross the boundary without realising it.
 Whereas if it's a rigid wall, it's difficult to get from one to the other.
 Is this so far?
 Right. Well I'm not sure which points to take up first. I think I'll leave pigeons aside for the time being.
 I think the idea of the plurality of models, I mean I'm sure you're right, Terence's model is monotheistic,
 in that he has a single eschaton. And this takes us immediately to the plurality, to the polytheism versus monotheism argument.
 My view of polytheism is that polytheism in all its actual functional forms, even in its Catholic form,
 Catholicism is in a sense a kind of polytheism, you have all the angels, you have all the saints,
 you go into a cathedral, there's all those side chapels and shrines, it's just like a Hindu temple.
 You go into a Hindu temple, there's the goddess of this, then there's the planets, the planet gods,
 and then there's this goddess and this local god, and then there's Ganesh, and then there's various other gods, Hanuman,
 and that there'll be a central shrine, say Shiva, or Vishnu, which would represent the central unifying principle.
 So most forms of polytheism are not radical polytheism.
 They're a plurality with some, however vaguely defined, overarching unity behind them.
 So the first point is, are you denying an overarching unity?
 No.
 A radical polytheism?
 I think my main message is what you described as the second point.
 It has to do with the rigidity of boundaries in between.
 I think that everybody would agree that there's plurality in religion, in life, in the mind, in the stream, in the sky, and so on.
 And I think it's more important, the rigidity of the boundaries in between.
 Do you worship in the Shiva temple and then you go to God, is that okay?
 Or do you have to be faithful to God and never admit the existence of others and so on?
 It's more the denial of what obviously to children seems to exist that brings about a disintegration of the personality.
 Through excessively rigid boundaries rather than crack-down boundaries between.
 So it's easier to go from one to the other.
 Yes.
 They're porous to the point of, I mean, when you're in the stream it's much more watery than when you're on land,
 but the job of getting into the stream doesn't really have a shot of cold water in it,
 because it's like a permeable membrane, I guess, between basins.
 And I think in this religious or mythological context it's appropriate to think of Shiva and concepts of that sort as attractors.
 And then there's multiple attractors, everybody knows, considering the population of the planet through all time.
 There's zillions of attractors, and some people have visited one, and other people have visited two or three, and so on.
 And this openness, I guess I would say, to all attractors is some kind of prerequisite for stability,
 for the longevity of a culture or the health of an individual.
 And this idea is based on the cosmology in which the stream has the same morphology as the heavens,
 which has the same morphology as some abstract mathematical object.
 Therefore, under the ambiance of this idea, our experience of nature is that these rigid walls are very unstable.
 But they're not that unstable. If you look at nature, if you look at a plant, for example,
 there's membranes around its leaves, and although they have invagination, stomata, and the air can go in,
 the surface is our skin, it has pores in it, and is not absolutely smooth.
 But nevertheless, these are clear functional boundaries.
 And everywhere you look in biology you find clear functional boundaries.
 There's a cell membrane around each cell, which may have within the lipid structure, the fatty structure,
 some kind of fractal nature, but it's not an infinitely permeable boundary.
 It's permeable to a point.
 Well, it has little holes in it with pumps designed for particular things in the environment.
 So the permeability is, as it were, structured in a way that's rigidly connected with that species.
 But if these holes were plugged up with a tube drum or something, then of course the cell would instantly die.
 But boundaries, you're not denying the importance of boundaries, of course.
 Your whole model is based on boundaries, isn't it?
 That's right. It has to do with their crookedness.
 And their crookedness is your mathematical model for their permeability.
 OK, we've got it straight now.
 But I want to hear how it's proposed.
 Yes, well, I think the hay fever medication must be cutting in.
 It seems extraordinarily arcane.
 Nature is fractal, and this is the new discovery, and it's a very powerful insight.
 But it doesn't wipe out some of the previous accomplishments.
 I'm thinking of all the work that was done to show that it's also hierarchical.
 So without tossing the baby out with the bathwater, it might be better to say it's fractal and hierarchical.
 So that in the case of your suggestion to me that the eschaton could be many, I think the eschaton is defined as one.
 And so the many that you're suggesting are sort of subsets of the approach.
 And then what I'm hearing is that because of the inter-dimensionality of the fractal,
 the boundary transition is, as Philo Judeas said, the more perfect logo.
 You can never tell the moment when it crosses over from being heard to being seen.
 That's another one of these fractal boundaries that you're talking about.
 Well, if that were all there were to say about it, then no boundary would be defined or noticed as such.
 So we're sort of back to Whitehead's notion of certain stubborn facts that are, I suppose, like raisins of resistance
 embedded in this fractal ocean of infinite permeability.
 I don't have any problem with this.
 But nevertheless, I think above all these cycles, boundaries, membrane, there is ultimately a frame that is all-inclusive and defined.
 As far as my, you know, whether this is simply because I've been buying some form of monotheism on the side,
 possibly the form that I've probably fallen under the sway of is some kind of neoplatonic pyramid of ever-ascending abstract hypostatizations that lead into the One.
 I mean, if what we mean by the eschaton is the absence of boundaries, then what we're saying is that the fractalization of reality
 occurs ultimately on such fine scales that from the point of view of the perceiver, the boundary has dissolved completely,
 or the boundary and the thing bound have become so homogenized that it no longer makes sense to speak of boundary and medium.
 You can only speak of this, I picture it as a kind of extremely marbleized liquid or surface where every domain can be found to be lying next to a mutually exclusive other domain,
 and they're sort of like the kinds of diagrams that you get when you carry out four-color mapping problems to fourth and fifth stages of resolution.
 Then you have these extraordinarily complicated structures where every point lies next to the boundary that separates it from points that have been somehow defined as others.
 I'm not sure that we have any disagreement here.
 Oh, we do.
 Oh, we do? What is it?
 Well, I think what we've got here in your description is a speculation built upon a speculation built upon a speculation,
 and coming eventually from some kind of absolute and pure faith.
 My usual method.
 Go ahead. One. The one to protect us with something that you could explore toward but not actually arrive at.
 So we have to understand, then, on the testimony of those early experts, that one is an article of faith in our experience.
 And the best traveling shaman has only been so far, and the assumption of one beyond that is, as a matter of fact, pure, faithful monotheism at its best.
 It's even called "the one." God is called "the one" to make sure that you don't think "perhaps" is "two."
 Now, I agree with your idea that the cosmos is hierarchical. That's fine with me.
 And even I don't care if it has a finite number of layers or an infinite number.
 But however far you would go, that the wildest shaman has traveled has seen only another image, maybe more complex, of what we see in ordinary reality and nature.
 And that is, there are multiple basins, there are fractal boundaries, there are many possibilities, there are different regions, there's complexity.
 And so harmony is hierarchically organized, we have never got to the top.
 Therefore, to say it's one or it's two or it's three could only be an article of faith.
 It cannot be any kind of extrapolation from observation, normal or arcane observation.
 We're talking about pure faith here.
 When you get to the top frame, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't have two basins, and they're separated by a fractal.
 And that means that the shaman who comes back and says he knows which one it is, is lying.
 Well, my understanding of fractals is that they are a kind of homogenization of levels not present, domains distant.
 And that in fact the idea is if you have a sufficient sample of the fractal, not very large, you can in fact extrapolate the contours of the entire system.
 So that it isn't necessary to send a shaman or a mathematician for a total overview.
 But the sample can be, isn't this what the cosmological principle is, that based on local measurement and local physics it is allowed to extrapolate?
 There's another monotheistic religion which is yours in reverse, which says instead of an eschaton it's got a birth at the beginning.
 Without an article of faith you can't get a cosmological principle.
 We don't have any evidence from the boundaries of space.
 Well, isn't the idea that fractals are a kind of holographic plane, that the pattern recurs on many, many levels, but it's always the same pattern?
 So if you have ten levels and you know the pattern on two through seven, you know the pattern on one, eight, nine, and ten.
 No, few fractals in nature have that property, which is a special property of special fractals, which are self-similar fractals, which are, as it were, like integers within the field of all real numbers.
 They are exceptional self-similar fractals, mostly.
 It just means you have the two basins, red and green, and their boundary is kind of stirred up so that it has the following property.
 Wherever you are in it, you're within one millimeter of each side, or even a tenth of a millimeter of each side.
 Like in a math algebra.
 Like in a cantor set.
 Well, I guess I somehow have limited my model building to the use of self-similar fractals.
 Just like Pythagoras.
 Is this so terrible?
 I'm not sure if we allowed the self-similarity in the eschaton, if that would still establish for everyone satisfaction there's only one.
 Well, in my model of the eschaton, at the mathematical level, it is self-similar.
 Well, there's this—let me tell you about the Wada principle.
 If you had three basins fractally entwined, then not only, wherever you are in the sandy beach, you're within one millimeter of the red and green, but the yellow one is there also.
 That means, if you travel as a shaman, and then you see this pattern at the end of time,
 if there would be any jitter in your travel, any blur in your vision, anything slightly human remaining in your travel,
 then you would see it as one, even though it isn't.
 You just like mistakenly see it as a blur of the three colors into a kind of a grey eschaton.
 Well, in some circles this is known as the mystery of the Holy Trinity.
 And indeed, the theological attempts to deal with this problem have led to a variety of models where you have the idea that the ultimate is not an undifferentiated unity,
 but rather a pattern of relationships, which in the Chinese model you have the yin and the yang, the kind of fractal model between them.
 And the circle containing the two is the whole that unifies them.
 And in the model of the Holy Trinity, there's a lot of different ways of dealing with it.
 One way is the Father is the source of the Word and the Spirit.
 And the Word is the primary model, is the spoken Word. The Spirit is the breath on which you speak the Word.
 You breathe out, and as you speak the Word can happen. Of course, the spoken Word, not the written Word.
 And this, as Jill would tell us, is a pattern of vibrations with harmonics and so on, probably some kind of fractal pattern in time.
 And it would be hard to say which is the breath and which is the sound and how you can separate the vibration from the sound.
 There would seem to be the kind of model in another very different form that you have in mind.
 But the principle of unity is not there so much. It's partly, I suppose, a kind of experience people report,
 but it's also the sense that all these things are related or hold together.
 The unity comes from the sense of interrelationship rather than perceiving some kind of undifferentiated sphere.
 Because all these models of ultimate unity are models of the relationship within which something holds them together.
 Now your model seems to me similar because the hidden agenda behind your model is that although these fractals set these boundaries
 and although you can have any number of boundaries and although you can't see unity within these boundaries,
 the hidden unity behind all this is the equation governing the fractals.
 And for mathematicians, the equation governing the fractals, because you see as a mathematical object,
 mathematicians have this representation, you can look on a computer screen for fractal patterns,
 but behind that fractal pattern is a programme and behind that programme is an equation.
 And when it comes to equations, mathematicians would certainly admit there can be many different equations,
 many mathematical functions. But for this given fractal pattern, there's presumably one equation governing it
 and that contains different elements. But they're related together by the equal sign of the equation
 and by the whole structure of the equation is a kind of unity containing diversity as a mathematical object,
 which for most mathematicians exists in some kind of platonic realm beyond space and time.
 Even if this platonic realm is only in the imagination of mathematicians,
 there's some kind of hidden unity containing the diversity that generates this entire thing we've been talking about.
 So I would say unity is implicit in any mathematical model, in the hidden mathematical object behind the manifested pattern.
 Well, that's true, but it still makes a difference if you fly to the home ghost where your mate is
 or you fly to the mobile loft where there's just this army captain waiting to give you your food.
 I think that my point is not so much about the multiplicity or unity.
 I agree that everything is unified in one thing, at least the better if it is.
 The point is more about the boundaries, that if you have the dynamical system with the different basins
 and they have fractal boundaries with the water property, then as a matter of fact,
 no matter how you perceive it, no matter what experiment you do, you will perceive unity.
 When you don't perceive unity, as in the pathological case when you have the iron curtains,
 if you have iron curtains, then unity essentially has been defeated by a disease of dischaos.
 And therefore, when we see this in nature, in history, in social systems, in ourselves,
 we have to beware about these iron curtains because they create, as it were,
 a unnecessarily multiple situation, which is the multiple personality syndrome,
 which is a real problem for some people and is a problem to some extent for all people.
 As we have, for example, here expressed a yearning for a peaceful state beyond language.
 Then I'm calling that one of these boundaries, and if you practice chanting, meditation and so on,
 then you are intentionally increasing the fractality of the boundary
 and therefore the integration of the parts into unity.
 If unity is your goal, then you have to examine the fractal width of all your boundaries
 and guard against things that are too thin.
 So how do you fractalize your boundaries? Can you give a personal example?
 Well, in the emerging science of neural nets, this is called annealing.
 So one thing you can do is take a psychedelic.
 Another thing you can do is go to a different culture, which is really, really different,
 and stay there for seven years on a farm or something.
 Does it go on?
 Well, if you hence, for courage, have a mate of any gender,
 then you're certainly in a more chaotic situation than...
 But these two-person units do definitely have diseases, we know that, and a few of them survive.
 And I'm making a suggestion here as to what's the trouble,
 which might not be validated by further study, but to the degree that it was,
 it would suggest a strategy, a kind of a therapeutic technique.
 And people are trying out, by the way, this idea for therapy in relationships.
 Can you give an example of how it would work in the therapy in a relationship,
 the fractalization of boundaries?
 Not in the model, but I mean in a kind of therapeutic, personal way.
 Well, people... First of all, there's a diagnostic phase
 in which the therapist is trained in chaos theory instead of Freudian theory.
 And when a boundary has been detected with a pathologically low dimension or thickness,
 then a therapy has to be devised especially for it,
 and that would consist of some carefully safeguarded experiments
 into violation of the boundary and mixing the boundaries.
 One common strategy involves play in a sandbox.
 You've seen this.
 Therapist's office has all these toys, and that returns to a pre-verbal mode of expression.
 Well, people are clever at therapies. I'm not. I'm not a therapist.
 But I think that an advance in theory is helpful in devising therapies.
 Now, what's happening with this fad of multiples in the United States
 is that people who suffer this are getting together in a small group for self-therapy
 because they feel that the therapist not having multiple personalities with chaos
 has no idea really what's going on.
 So the theory coming from the therapist can't possibly be right.
 So these groups are studying chaos theory, and the therapy that they've devised
 is a psychodrama which they write, direct, and perform in public in sort of street theaters
 in cities around the United States.
 There's a network of these that base their approach on my paper
 on the multiple, what is it called, personality dischaos, it's called.
 So we'll see. I can give you a report next year how these experiments work out.
 Some therapists believe that they may be fatal and I should be imprisoned.
 But the patients themselves are very enthusiastic.
 They're really having such a wonderful time.
 It applies to bipolarity. Depression is a really serious condition.
 If you're depressed, I mean, you are so unhappy, life is so painful, you can't really go on.
 And if a therapy was devised that cured bipolar personality dischaos without drugs,
 then a lot of people would be helped.
 It's not a fad, it's a really serious disease.
 So this chaos, the psychodrama is designed to break down boundaries, rigid boundaries.
 Yes, to increase their practical dimension.
 What do you do with people whose boundaries are too low already?
 There are certain people, for example, in conversation, who run from one attractor
 or creed or basin to another, so they jump from subject to subject with alarming rapidity
 and you can barely keep up.
 Now these seem to be people who have fractals of high dimension in their mental attractor structure.
 What do you do with them to reduce the dimensions of their fractals?
 Well, I'd start with beer or maybe a shandy and then go on to the high dimension.
 So, Ralph, given what you've said about the goals of this therapy,
 wouldn't it just be simpler to give these people psychedelics?
 Well, personally, I've had good results with psychedelics.
 I'm not sure everyone would.
 And maybe there... well, it'd be nice if we had several alternative strategies,
 some of which could be done on a Sunday evening where you still feel okay about going to work on Monday morning.
 Well, since you have such good luck with psychedelics,
 why are you so reluctant to advocate?
 Well, I do. I have been advocating psychedelics in public,
 or at least, if not advocating, confessing that for me there have been very good results.
 I've had a certain amount, quite recently, of hostile mail and telephone calls.
 Even people coming to the university to hasten my demise,
 they seem to think they're drugs, that psychedelics are drugs.
 There's also the aspect of legality where many people are in jail with 20, 30 and 40-year jail sentences.
 So I think that the atmosphere of paranoia in the world today
 might even make them much less effective as medicine for dischaos and psychodrama and therapy.
 So because of the paranoia, the legal status, but if that barrier were removed...
 I mean, it sounds like you're advocating something fairly close to what Salvador Roquet
 and that school settled into. Is that...?
 I don't know Salvador Roquet.
 Well, he was a psychotherapist who worked in Mexico for many years and gives people psychedelics,
 but he also then assaults them with Auschwitz footage and all of the very highly charged emotional material,
 the idea being to just reduce them to some absolutely basic jelly of dissolved boundaries and psyche.
 Sounds disgusting.
 To me, I agree. I'm trying to find out how what you're advocating is different.
 Oh, it takes only very subtle medicine to decrease rigid walls.
 Even the very idea of it may be enough, as a matter of fact.
 Well, that's anyway the therapy idea.
 Once your consciousness is adjusted so that your sensitivity to your own process actually observes these things
 and considers them undesirable, then automatically they begin to disappear under the self-creative action of one's own psyche.
 After all, nature is there too, and mathematical necessity reveals itself in the Milky Way,
 in the Sandy Beach, and in the human psyche as well.
 There is a tendency toward health.
 I think that these diseases of the rigid barriers, like other diseases, consist primarily of the rejection of the cure,
 and the cure can be found within, unlike hay fever and a lot of things.
 This can actually be treated within.
 One has to get the idea, thus, when people suffer this, which is essentially universal.
 It is an inheritance from a culture which has the disease itself.
 So the cure consists of identifying the difficulty as essentially a cultural pattern,
 and then disowning it by becoming more of an expatriate of your own culture.
 That's why visiting another culture and living there even for three months is sometimes enough
 to liberate people from a rigid pattern.
 So the diagnosis comes very close to the 19th century diagnosis for most difficulties,
 is a few months at the seashore, in Italy preferably.
 In other words, in both cases, you want to establish this extra-environmental attitude
 through distance from cultural values, either achieved through journeys in eras,
 or journeys to foreign exotic lands.
 A walk in the woods is perhaps all it takes.
 So it's a search for perspective achieved by distancing.
 It's a kind of a mathematical perspective.
 Yeah, well, is there another kind?
 It's only appropriate because our culture has suffered this particular disease over a mere span of 6,000 years.
 That's all we have to recover from.
 The particular disease being boundary anxiety?
 Patriarchal, monotheistic, hierarchical,
 Well, how do you say it? Constipated, linear,
 Toilet-carrying, etc.
 Yes, but is there any culture that has managed to avoid this chaos?
 Well, I think so, but I don't have exact experience.
 The aboriginal cultures, the one we live in, has by now covered the entire globe,
 and the exceptions are near to extinction.
 But there are some. Anthropologists used to go and study wild tribes
 before they were contacted by the external civilization now dominating the entire sphere,
 which arrived, unfortunately, to them in the form of this anthropologist,
 which was the kiss of death for that culture.
 So what you're suggesting, Ralph, is that archaic lifestyles were more boundaries,
 which is a theme near and dear to me.
 I mean, certainly in living Amazon cultures, one of the hardest things to put up with
 when you're there is the fact that there are no boundaries.
 You know, that everybody lives in a wall-less grand house.
 Desiccation, sexuality, death, domestic hassling, disciplining of children,
 everything goes on in the presence of everyone else,
 and no one from age six to ninety feels any constraint whatsoever
 about making comments, suggestions, and offering free advice.
 It's a hard thing to embrace, even with the knowledge that it's going to be good for you.
 Well, there are degrees of boundaries, but I think the permeability of the boundaries is important,
 and our culture has perhaps excess attention devoted to the walled fortress,
 necessitated by whatever the violence of these people, which some would associate with the patriarchy,
 and so-called testosterone poisoning, and whatever it is.
 There has been the necessity of Bauhaus concrete walls around the town,
 locks on the doors of the houses, electronic motion detectors,
 video cameras at the bank card place, and so on.
 Our culture is perhaps there's an increase of complexity as we approach the eschaton.
 Perhaps there's a decrease in that the fractality is actually vanishing at an alarming rate.
 That's what it means, the death of nature.
 Ralph, when I last visited your house in Santa Cruz, I noticed a rigid, straight fence,
 dividing your property from your very undesirable neighbors, who have motorcycle scrambles on their land,
 and make terrible noise.
 Yes, they're all boys with guns, that's right.
 That's right. Well, what we need here is a new product, the fractal fence,
 which would go down very well in California.
 Some boundary instead of old-style posts with barbed wire.
 Excellent. Sort of mazes where people get lost.
 I think we should hack into this and get on with it.
 We'll subvert the world.
 Well then, just for the slightest blow of gust of wind or chaotic event,
 these motorcycles that suddenly zoom past your front door.
 Yes. We'd have these gateways like cell membranes have,
 that nice people could go right through.
 With spirit guides.
 Have we reached the point, Ralph?
 I think we could.
 Yes, it's okay.
 Let's have some questions.
 Yes, well, everyone is stuck there.
 It's Janus.
 We have our individuality perceived according to our own paradigm,
 which is a paradigm of individuality,
 and then there is our participation in a group, another group,
 and a larger group, and so on,
 which is the study of cultural anthropology or sociology.
 And we don't know sometimes if our individuality actually exists.
 And other times we don't know if we belong to any network at all.
 So we could perhaps think of these as two faces, as it were.
 That means that each one is itself a paradigm.
 That means that these different paradigms exist simultaneously within us.
 The individual paradigm where my neighbors say,
 "I can do anything I want on my own property,"
 including smoking tobacco,
 while the other one says, "I exist for the group,"
 or "The group is punishing me now,"
 or "I better get up and cook for the group," and so on,
 and a lot of other ones.
 And the important thing is that if you adopt this view of the self
 or individual as a structure,
 which, like all of these levels, are part of the structure,
 and that's the self, at least from the point of view of a single point,
 and if you're looking from a single point,
 which is probably a different point for each of those personalities,
 then this whole structure, well, that's it.
 That's the self, and it's also the group, seen from different points.
 If you insist on logical consistency, compatibility,
 harmony between all these different individuals,
 then you're in trouble because then you're trying to impose a structure on it,
 say, logical consistency, which is impossible,
 and which, if you're obsessed with it, if you're insistent upon it,
 can only result in the rejection of the consciousness
 of those certain personalities, which then vanish under the carpet,
 where they move around, sort of controlling the show without any supervision.
 So this is, I think, a really important aspect of the peculiarity of our culture,
 that back in those Neoplatonic times, we had Plato and Aristotle.
 They argued, they had completely different, like one is north-south,
 the other is east-west, or something, together.
 They give a good map.
 The transmission of the Greek miracle over time,
 through early Christianity and early Islam,
 gave, by means of some historical accident,
 a phenomenal imbalance, accentuation, to the Aristotelian,
 that is, the perspective of formal logic,
 that is, the insistence upon absolute truth,
 that is, the perversity of modern science.
 That's the Aristotelian, unfortunately, without the balance of the Platonic.
 When this Aristotelian imbalance aspect of our culture comes into our own psyche,
 we then may ask for, with our different parts, some logical compatibility,
 and that's a very unhealthy state.
 So we can accept the individual and the social without conflict,
 even though they're conflicting, just because they are,
 and their partnership too is...
 [inaudible]
 Yeah, it sounds great.
 Never... apparently, Terrence was suggesting everybody take five grams of dried mushrooms,
 maybe one of these little bald-hundred that time would do.
 I might take this opportunity to just speak in defense
 about the image of mathematics that you projected,
 and I think that this could be helpful to everyone,
 because I don't know how many people have come to me and said,
 "I hope it won't be too mathematical."
 Mathematics is not a science.
 It's sort of the opposite of a science.
 Science is science. You know what that is, or we don't know.
 There's a lot of different images, but somehow it has to do with an absolute truth
 observed about nature by doing it a certain way with a discipline
 which is miraculously good in terms of getting rid of a lot of foggy stuff
 and giving all people on the planet a consensus about what's going on,
 not speaking down science.
 But science is not mathematical, and mathematics is not science.
 Science is discovered about the world through the activity of people.
 Mathematics is an inviolability that everybody has,
 like breathing, pumping the blood, we don't know how it works, and so on.
 It is not an equation behind the picture you see in the book.
 The picture that you see in the book, which you recognize
 and it immediately means something to you in terms of what you're doing,
 that's the mathematics.
 Mathematics is an abstract vocabulary of space-time patterns.
 That's all.
 If somebody figured out some cute way to stuff into an equation
 or a computer diskette or something, they're fine.
 But computer graphics has made visible mathematics,
 like a slide projector put into a parent's head
 would project the shadow of the eschaton onto the wall.
 [laughter]
 So everybody can do it.
 The story I told about the tree boys at the beach, that's mathematics.
 I think once you understand what mathematics is,
 every single one of us, before lunch, could invent a new branch of mathematics.
 Mathematics is simply the formal relationships between defined sets.
 And you can define the sets.
 They could be hexagrams, they could be triangles,
 they could be groups of 11 dots.
 You set up the terms and then watch the system run
 and derive the rules, and that's a new branch of mathematics.
 It doesn't need language. It's pre-linguistic.
 Children can do it.
 As soon as you've observed a similarity between the left bank of the stream
 and the right bank, between the right bank and the Milky Way,
 and so on, you are performing mathematical functions,
 and each... that's all there is to it,
 except that somehow the subject has been misunderstood
 on such a massive scale within the school system
 that everyone's been convinced, incorrectly, that they can't do mathematics.
 And that's everyone, including Nobel Prize-winning physicists and so on,
 have math anxiety because of this school system.
 [inaudible]
 Then there is no chaos and there is no order.
 Chaos is a kind of order, and order is a kind of chaos.
 So I think... I know this sounds like double-talk,
 but the whole idea is just to somehow disabuse yourself
 of the habit of over-emphasizing something
 by perceiving the value in the other.
 You know, Jung psychoanalyzed God.
 This was bold. I think it was the last book before he died.
 "Answer to Job." He psychoanalyzed God.
 He psychoanalyzed Yahweh, and he found a fractal mixture
 of two basins, good and evil, that can't exist without.
 That is, in other words, the ultimate model behind all the mathematical models
 for all the dichotomies before construction or after deconstruction.
 That is, the red and green fractally mixed.
 They're still red. They're still green.
 But they're so close together.
 That's, anyway, Jung's deconstruction of Yahweh.
 Yes. Well, this is, I think, what Rupert was suggesting at one point.
 The idea about the sacred trinity,
 or the original tripartite structure of the goddess.
 Each part is present in every part,
 and there is, in other words, no distinction between the divine world
 and the mundane world.
 And if there is a distinction, where a culture has made a distinction,
 then that distinction is, as it were, creating dis-ease in the culture
 by setting aside divinity from something else, ordinary reality, family, life.
 And then you get a temple with a thick concrete wall around it
 and the divinity within and outside.
 And so on. Then there's the progressive punctuation of,
 it's like unzipping a zipper, where one thing after another is desacralized.
 And now we live in a world which is totally desacralized.
 And the re-sacralization of the world could be as simple as zipping up this zipper again,
 but we don't know exactly where the handle is.
 We can't recover the aboriginal state of consciousness because it's extinct, I guess.
 But we're trying to find it in this, the multiple personality idea then suggests that it's there.
 It's still there in each person, under the wall.
 The aboriginal state of consciousness involves, as far as we know, taboos,
 in other words, boundaries of what's restricted.
 It's not without boundaries at all.
 All the early books on anthropology, Sir James Fraser and all those kinds of people,
 were fascinated by taboo structures.
 As soon as anthropologists arrived anywhere, they found systems of taboos.
 And that's why early 20th century anthropology, Freud wrote a book on totem and taboo.
 They were very interested in this question.
 And taboo means that which is forbidden.
 The idea that there are these boundaries set up by culture seems utterly fundamental to all cultures.
 Not just patriarchal, etc.
 Don't you think they were projecting a lot of that?
 After all, people like James Fraser and Freud came from the most taboo ruled societies that have ever existed on earth.
 Victorian England and Sintiècle Vienna were so taboo obsessed, so constipated, so hidden from themselves,
 that they very probably carried that into their work as a projection.
 But not just that.
 I mean, like among Australian aborigines, the idea that there are certain initiation rites that boys go through,
 when they're shown certain objects which can only be seen by initiated men, not by women, not by boys beneath the age of initiation.
 And this kind of pattern, presumably, wasn't just made up by anthropologists.
 These things are found everywhere.
 Things of that general kind.
 And the idea of boundaries seems fundamental to human culture.
 And the boundaries in so-called primitive societies are much more rigid than in our own in many ways.
 And like in India, for example, the boundary between the left and the right hand.
 You use your left hand for wiping your bottom after going to the lavatory,
 and it's considered untreating and pure and so on, with an actual daily reinforcement of that reality.
 You use your right hand for eating, and if you give someone a present, you must give it with the right hand.
 I was always having to tell my guests in India, for heaven's sake, don't give people things with your left hand.
 They're in a shop, pay with the money. You just don't do that.
 And you have to learn all these cultural divisions when you go and live in another culture.
 It's not just that we're attached to boundaries, we're impacting our culture, many of them have been broken down.
 So I think there's something extremely important about these boundaries which will factor and model.
 Well, I never spoke against the boundaries, I think.
 No, they're not even fractal.
 In traditional cultures, they seem, the ones I've encountered, haven't had a kind of fractal, permeable quality.
 They've had a quality of extreme authority to them.
 Well, the suggestion I think about aboriginal society has to do with the presence of the divine throughout the world.
 The view you share, I mean.
 And that's one particular boundary that we have that those traditional societies didn't have, even though they had other ones.
 So maybe there's a law of the conservation of boundaries, or the maintenance of a certain degree of complexity of structure that you find in all societies.
 And these boundaries have to be put somewhere.
 And we just have to see that they're more or less in the appropriate places.
 And I don't think they're weaker or stronger.
 The taboos we overthrow are the weak ones.
 But we're ruled by incredibly strong taboos.
 I was visited once in Hawaii by a bunch of Germans.
 And I took them down to the beach.
 And this woman immediately whipped her top off.
 And she knew that you can't do that in America.
 But she didn't believe it, because it was so inconceivable to her.
 I could not conceive of doing it any other way and realized that wave upon wave of social disruption would flow from this absurdly trivial act.
 Because a taboo had been violated that was just, one just doesn't do that.
 So we choose.
 So you told us to whip your top off only.
 Absolutely.
 And you were instantly public beach in Hawaii.
 But the main thing is quite interesting one.
 In traditional cultures, it's a mania.
 It's very highly specified.
 And like in traditional Japan, the whole heritage remains from even the formal ones.
 You've gradually got down to less and less boundaries.
 And in England, they don't think how you can hold your hat and show them.
 In India, they do that.
 But now they view that even that's got to be put by the questionnaire.
 And they use the pattern of the commitment.
 And in those terms, the boundaries have gotten more and more flimsy between people.
 Well, the boundaries move.
 That's right.
 But wherever they are sitting at any given moment, they are incredibly rigidly maintained against all reason.
 I mean, I remember when I lived in Benares, that my houseboat was anchored near the bathing ghat.
 And you could watch a thousand women wading into the Ganges in soaking wet like rats in their saris.
 You could watch a thousand women bathing and never see a nipple or so much as a thigh.
 And it seemed perfectly reasonable to them to walk into the river fully clothed in order to preserve a sense of modesty.
 It did not seem to them silly, irrational, or preposterous.
 And yet, wasn't it?
 And isn't it absurd for American women to keep their tops on at the beach?
 Yes, but it goes without saying.
 It's beyond question.
 And then the taboos that are negotiable change over time.
 But they usually don't address the central concerns of the society.
 I mean, for instance, this thing about topless beaches.
 All the beaches of France and Italy are topless.
 That means nothing in America.
 It will never change.
 I cannot conceive of it changing.
 The situation with cannabis is similar.
 Everyone knows that cannabis is trivial and harmless.
 But that doesn't mean that we're on the brink of changing the social taboos about it.
 It feels to me as though they will never change.
 Those taboos are phenomenal and they change all the time.
 Yes, I agree.
 I think that one of the, speaking of all these divisions,
 one of the strongest divisions is the division between the sacred and the profane.
 They seem to be like oil and water.
 And once a profane domain is established,
 it will struggle with all of its resources to resist a re-sacralizing of that space.
 That's what has made Western civilization so toxic,
 is the fact that it is a continuous and spreading profanation,
 apparently to be carried on until the extinction of the planet,
 unless those few heretical voices that dare to oppose the imposition of this boundary are heard.
 And so, in the instance of the Armitian sub-unit,
 it's in fact becoming re-charging it and re-relate it totally.
 Well, so you're suggesting there are pathological taboos and taboos which actually maintain health.
 I mean, the taboo about the hand that Rupert mentioned is probably a health-based taboo.
 You don't want to be transmitting amoebas to your friends or yourself.
 Well, we don't want to eat poisonous plants.
 We don't want to eat...
 But "poison" becomes a word... this is a word so fraught with cultural...
 You're talking about aminita vina or something.
 Well, your first shot of scotch, this doesn't convince you that this is a toxic substance,
 but no, it turns out to be the basis of an entire culture, lifestyle and philosophy.
 [inaudible]
 My rule when taking a shower in the Ganges,
 I would let my little bucket off the front of my houseboat,
 was it's pure, there's no turd larger than a thumb in it.
 So this is how India deals with the sacred river Ganges.
 This is where the bodies are being dumped.
 This is where the garbage is going.
 They don't seem to perceive any contradiction there.
 So why they should be so hoity-toity about taking a shower, it doesn't make any sense.
 They're not honouring the river by keeping themselves...
 They do honour the river.
 They do honour the river, but these particular acts that we're discussing,
 I don't think they're viewed as honouring the river.
 I don't know what the history of Indian prudence is.
 I suspected what I was seeing was Victorian ethos run mad.
 [inaudible]
 Thank you. That's exactly what I meant at the beginning,
 where Jung cycle in like God and found a fractal mixture of good and evil,
 and then of course we see it everywhere in nature,
 and the Ganges is not dirty water, it's actually a fractal mixture of excrement and clean water.
 [laughter]
 Nature is a fractal, and poisonous plants are growing intermixed with the food.
 So that's just the way of it, this planet.
 And when our societies are more like nature, maybe they have more longevity, or maybe not.
 And maybe the mathematical model helps to look at it, or maybe not.
 But in any case, we succeeded to draw back from the eschaton and the humming pigeons,
 and somehow arrived in the society that we live in.
 [inaudible]
 Yes, the boundary is a kind of a materialization of habit, I guess.
 And nature itself seems to have evolved, the structure came out of chaos,
 and a process of creation in which order emerged and structure is made, and matter materializes around habits and so on.
 In our personal life, in our family, in our school and institutions and so on,
 we have a lot of freedom, it seems, to behave this way or that,
 and within some realm we have choices, and that's why I think it's good to have a mathematical view of all this,
 because it does give you a way to extrapolate from nature,
 to make analogies between nature and the structures we're living in,
 and that's kind of diagnostic in itself.
 Maybe we should stop here.
 Do you think?
 Sure, let's feel like we hit the new boundary.
 [inaudible]
 Since this has already been an overly long podcast, I'll refrain from any comments on the trilogue we just heard,
 other than to say that once again it seemed like it was Ralph Abraham who had to gallop in and save the day
 from some of Terence's more ungrounded speculations.
 But what great fun to listen to the three of these guys bounce such entertaining ideas off one another.
 And there still are a few more of these trilogue tapes to go.
 Today's conversation was the end of the Hazelwood House trilogues,
 but there are still others that they held that I haven't had a chance to podcast yet,
 so you can rest assured that over time you'll eventually hear the rest of them here in the salon too.
 Now before I make a final comment, I want to mention, like I do every week,
 that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the
 Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license,
 which basically means you can use parts or all of this program if you want.
 Just go to the creativecommons.org site and you can read all about it,
 or if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about these podcasts,
 just send them to me, Lorenzo@matrixmasters.com.
 And as a final note, I want to mention the passing of my friend Bud Wilkinson.
 Bud had just turned 91 years old shortly before he died,
 quite peacefully I'm told, and with most of his children by his side.
 And while I realize that the chances are slim that you knew Bud,
 one of the reasons I want to mention him now is to point out how
 just being a nice person can help to make the world a little bit better for all of us.
 I only met Bud a couple of years ago when a mutual friend introduced us at the gym
 we both used several times a week.
 And the image of him shuffling into the gym each morning is still quite vivid for me
 because the few moments I spent visiting with him on those mornings
 made going to the gym something that I actually looked forward to rather than dreaded.
 It was his smile that got you first, and I don't think I'll ever hear the word "smile"
 without first thinking of Bud.
 He simply radiated vibrant energy and great joy.
 As it turned out, we figured that way back in the 50s,
 Bud had actually worked at some of the Chicago baseball games I attended as a boy.
 So we spent a lot of time talking about Chicago and, of course, Notre Dame football,
 which was one of his favorite topics.
 Like my own dad, Bud hadn't attended Notre Dame
 but was part of the "Subway Alumni" that the Chicago sportswriters often talk about.
 Now, why am I spending all this time talking about an old man
 that I just casually spoke with at the gym?
 Well, first of all, it's because I miss him.
 And I want to thank him for his smile and for helping to make this world
 just a little easier for me to make my way through each day.
 And I guess that I wanted to point out to you that the next time you smile at a stranger,
 you just may be making someone's terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad day
 just a little more bearable.
 And besides, I'm told that it takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown.
 So relax, be happy, and smile as often as you can.
 For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdellic Space.
 Be well, my friends.
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