Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the
 psychedelic salon. But I'm not the only one involved in producing these podcasts
 for you. I've had a lot of help from quite a few generous donors who are
 helping to offset the expenses of producing and publishing these podcasts.
 And this week I want to thank John A, Debra A, and longtime listener and
 frequent contributor Paul D. I want to thank you for sending some money our way.
 So John, Debra, and Paul, hey thanks again. Your generosity is greatly appreciated.
 As promised, today I'm going to pick up on the trilogues between Terrence
 McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake that took place sometime in
 1992. And if I'm not mistaken they were held at Esalen Institute on the
 California coast. And I didn't think I'd ever say this but by the end of today's
 trilogue Terrence McKenna comes away sounding like the conservative one of
 the three. Well first of all I guess I should warn you and particularly any
 new listeners to the salon that not only is today's podcast overly long there are
 a couple of points in this trilogue that even get way too esoteric for me. And the
 reason I'm mentioning this is that I don't want to scare you away from future
 programs that will be a little bit more down-to-earth. Of course that said I also
 have a hunch that parts of this conversation may really resonate with
 you. And I have to admit that until now I haven't been all that keen on some of
 Rupert's ideas. Maybe because he was too grounded in reality or something like
 that I don't know. But in this trilogue he really hits me close to home when he
 states that he believes that our son is alive and has a mind of some kind
 associated with it. You see I felt like this was true for quite a few years now.
 In fact a couple years ago I was even into solar gazing and gained some amazing
 intuitions about the Sun. But that's another story for another day. Anyway I
 too have felt some sort of living kinship with the Sun. Enough about my
 strange belief system. Let's join Rupert Sheldrake as he is setting up
 today's trilogue by putting into context what he means when he invokes as the
 topic of discussion the heavens. This evening the subject we're going to be
 discussing is the heavens. The context for this discussion is what I'd like to
 sketch now. In the past in all traditional cultures people have assumed,
 taken it for granted, that we live in a living world. Not only is the earth, Gaia,
 Mother Earth, a living organism, but also the entire heavens are alive pervaded
 with gods, angels, spirits and celestial beings of every kind. The ancient Greeks
 shared this traditional view and it pervaded their view of the universe. The
 whole universe was alive for them. The whole universe was like a great
 organism with a body, a soul and spirit. And the soul of the entire universe was
 called the world soul, the anima mundi in Latin. Anima being the Latin word for
 soul. The soul of the world, not just the earth but the whole cosmos. This was the
 view that persisted through the Middle Ages and through the Renaissance. But it
 was a view that was shattered by the mechanistic revolution of the 17th
 century when the universe simply became a great mechanical system consisting of
 matter in motion with no spirit and no soul. So the heavens became a great
 mechanical system and the earth just became a misty ball of rock hurtling
 around the Sun in accordance with Newton's laws of motion. We're now
 undergoing a process whereby we're coming to see nature as alive again. And
 this is the theme of my book "The Rebirth of Nature". The aspect of this process
 that most people are most familiar with is the recovery of the sense of the
 earth as a living organism. The Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock puts
 forward a scientific view of the living earth which in one respect is modern
 empirical scientific, in another respect reawakens an ancient archetype which in
 fact is so clearly suggested by the very name of the hypothesis Gaia, the Greek
 name for Mother Earth. So for many people in the green movement and the
 ecological movement, the idea of the earth as a living organism has become a
 powerful image and one which is already beginning to shape the way that people
 think about our relationship to the world in which we live, this earth, this
 planet. But this is part of a much wider move in science which I describe in
 detail in "The Rebirth of Nature". I'm not going to go into that now except to
 summarize some of the essential features. The mechanistic worldview is being
 transcended by science itself. It's still the dominant model within biology and
 medicine which are like living fossils of an earlier mode of thought. But in the
 physical sciences in many respects we've gone beyond old-style mechanism. The
 mechanistic worldview as originally formulated was entirely deterministic.
 Everything was supposed to happen in a completely fixed way. Everything was
 fixed in advance. There was no freedom or spontaneity in nature. People couldn't
 predict it in detail but that was regarded as simply a limitation of
 scientific knowledge and technique. However this deterministic view has now
 softened and in fact been abandoned in most respects first through the quantum
 revolution in the 1920s when indeterminism was recognized at the
 quantum level. And more recently the chaos revolution has given us permission
 to recognize that almost all aspects of nature are in fact chaotic in the sense
 that they're not rigidly predictable. They can be modeled in terms of chaotic
 dynamics, or at least some of them can be. But the old idea of Newtonian
 determinism has been abandoned. The weather's not like that, the breaking of
 waves is not like that, the way our brains work is not like that. At every
 level of nature there's a non-Newtonian quality which has now been recognized.
 Another way in which this has been expressed is through Prigogine's idea of
 non-equilibrium thermodynamics where far from equilibrium small fluctuations can
 be amplified to give pattern and order. So there's a kind of resurgence of the
 sense of freedom and spontaneity in nature. From nature being bound into a
 rigid deterministic model, a freedom of spontaneity and an openness are emerging
 once again. It's now recognized the future is open, not determined by the
 past. And this is true in many realms, the astronomical realm, the human realm, the
 meteorological realm, in many ways. Then the mechanistic view said the world was
 a machine created by God, conceived of as a divine machine maker. And the machinery
 had no creativity within it. All that machines can do, at least machines of the
 old kind, is go wrong. And God had to intervene from time to time in Newton's
 model to wind up the machinery again. Laplace at the beginning of the 19th
 century perfected the equations of celestial mechanics and got rid of the
 need for this kind of maintenance man, God. And in fact got rid of the
 idea of God altogether by assuming that it was an eternal perpetual motion
 machine, no need for a creator, no need for a maintenance crew. Everything just
 went on by itself forever. However, with the development of thermodynamics in the
 19th century, perpetual motion machines were outlawed and it was then thought
 that the universe was gradually running out of steam through an accumulation of
 entropy. And so there was the idea of a devolving cosmos. But certainly not one
 that was creative. The universe had either always been the way it was, or it
 was created in the beginning by God. There was no creativity in nature, no
 freedom, spontaneity, creativity. With Darwin's theory of evolution, creativity
 came back in the biological realm. It was recognized in the development of animals
 and plants over the millennia, over millions of years, over billions
 of years. Creativity was recognized in biology, but not in the rest of nature.
 The cosmologists held firm to a mechanistic universe. It wasn't until the
 1960s with the cosmological revolution, the Big Bang Theory, that the entire
 universe was conceived of in evolutionary terms. We now have a model
 of the cosmos starting small, with a Big Bang, which is a bit like the ancient
 myths of the creation of all things through the hatching or cracking of the
 cosmic egg. And since then the universe has been growing, and as it grows, forming
 ever more complex structures and patterns within itself. In other words,
 it's far more like a developing organism, or a growing embryo, than it is like any
 machinery with which we're familiar. We've now effectively got a model of the
 cosmos as a developing organism. And since we now have this radically
 evolutionary view, which puts creativity throughout the entire developmental
 process of the cosmos, it becomes possible to challenge another of the
 great assumptions of mechanistic science, namely the idea that everything is
 governed by eternal laws. This is the basis of my own work on memory in nature,
 my hypothesis of morphic resonance or formative causation. This is discussed in
 detail in my books, "A New Science of Life" and "The Presence of the Past." The
 basic idea I'm proposing is that the so-called laws of nature may be more
 like habits. They may depend on what's happened before and on how often it's
 happened. So there may be a cumulative memory in nature, largely unconscious,
 which gives rise to habits and things that accounts for the stability of
 nature as we know it. But this is not all governed by eternal laws that were all
 there at the moment of the Big Bang. I don't think there was a kind of cosmic
 Napoleonic code in place at that moment of origin. Habits have grown up.
 Creativity has given rise to myriads of new forms and possibilities, only some of
 which survive. And through a natural selection process, the surviving ones, the
 ones that are repeated, become increasingly habitual. Well, that's the
 view that I've suggested. It's controversial within biology and the
 other sciences, needless to say. It leads to many predictions. The idea, for
 example, of a collective memory within each biological species. The best-known
 example being that if you train rats to learn a new trick in one place, rats all
 around the world should learn the same trick quicker, just because the rats have
 learned it here, for example. The more that learn it, the quicker it should get
 everywhere else. So an eternal memory, a collective memory, based on the process
 of morphic resonance, the influence of like upon like, similar things resonate
 across time. And this is the basis of the memory process in nature. Well, this gives
 a sense of the cosmos as a living organism, once again. The earth is alive, a
 living cosmos, and gives a new sense of the life of animals and plants. According
 to mechanistic science, animals and plants are just machines, and so are we,
 except for the presence of some mysterious rational mind located inside
 the brain, which interacts in a mysterious way with the machinery of the
 nervous system. That is the current view still within our culture, and it's
 totally different from the traditional view that all Europeans had until the
 scientific revolution, when the whole universe was alive, the earth was alive,
 animals and plants had souls. The very word "animal" in English comes from the
 Latin word "anima," soul. Plants, too, were believed to have souls in the Middle Ages,
 and this was the official teaching of the Roman Church. The cosmos was a living
 organism, peopled by innumerable spirits. So this sense of deanimation, the
 deanimation of nature, happened through science. The cosmos just became matter in
 motion, animals and plants became just machines, the soul was withdrawn from the
 whole of nature and from the whole of our bodies, until all that was left was
 the rational mind inside the brain. Everything else in the world was
 inanimate, mechanical, lacking any meaning, sense, or purpose of its own. The only
 beings in the universe, or at least on this earth, with true purpose were human
 beings. The only ends or goals that mattered were human goals or human ends.
 The only values were human values. Nature had no value in itself. This is the
 underlying philosophy that's given rise to the ecological crisis. Well, a
 recovery of the sense of the life of nature, which is going on for a variety
 of reasons in a variety of ways, through the archaic revival, the revival of
 animistic modes of thought, where we're talking now about the revival of animism,
 a new animism, a new sense of the life of nature. The archaic revival and the
 shamanic revival is part of this. The Gaia hypothesis is another part. Deep
 ecology and the ecology movement in general is another part. I'm suggesting
 that science itself is pointing us in this direction, a recovery of the sense
 of the life of nature. And this, I think, is happening now all around us. But
 there's a further step which I think we need to take. That's not only to see the
 natural world as alive, but to see it as sacred. In the past, the heavens were
 sacred, and so was the earth, and especially the sacred places on the
 earth, which were the focuses of power, power points, which were recognized in
 every land by every culture, by American Indians in America, by Europeans, both
 pre-Christian and Christian within Europe. And these were by Australian
 Aborigines, by Africans, by Jews in the Holy Land, the sacred places of the Holy
 Land, which we still, of course, call the Holy Land. This sense of the sacredness
 of the land and the earth was found in all cultures. And in all cultures there
 was a way in which people related to it through journeying to places of power
 through pilgrimage. Pilgrimage was suppressed for the first time in human
 history by the Protestant reformers in northern Europe at the Reformation,
 creating a void, a desacralization of nature, a loss of the sense of the sacred
 out there. The sense of the sacred became focused entirely on man. The only
 sacred thing was man, and most men were sinners, and most women too,
 perhaps even more so. But only the drama of religion was the drama of
 fallen redemption played out between man and God. Nature had nothing to do with it
 except as a kind of backdrop or as a means of people enriching themselves,
 becoming prosperous as a sign of God's grace and providence. Well, the English
 couldn't bear this void for long, caused by the suppression of pilgrimage, and
 within a few generations had invented tourism, which is best seen as a form of
 secularized pilgrimage. And I've suggested in The Rebirth of Nature, and
 something that's going on anyway, is a recovery of the sense of pilgrimage, a
 paradigm shift from tourism back to pilgrimage. I think this can go a long
 way to helping to re-sacralize the earth. Another way in which the natural
 world was sacralized was through seasonal festivals, through which the
 whole community, not just individuals but the community, participated in
 festivals that marked the changing seasons of the year. The solstices, the
 equinoxes, the festivals associated with them, which we in the Christian world
 have inherited through, from their pagan roots, through festivals like Christmas
 and Easter. And of course the Jewish religion is pervaded by a sense of
 festivals and sacred time. And these again were inherited from the Canaanites,
 the inhabitants of Palestine, when the Jews moved in. They took over the old
 sacred festivals. So seasonal festivals and pilgrimage are ways in which we can
 help to re-sacralize the earth. And these are movements already, to some extent,
 underway, and probably many people here are aware of a need to recover a sense
 of the sacred in the earth. What I want to move on to now, as although that's
 only just begun, it's got a lot further to go, there's a sense in which this idea
 is established. However, re-sacralizing the heavens is what I want to talk about
 this evening, and that involves going considerably further than anyone I know
 has yet gone. It's one thing to recover a sense of the life of the earth, and we
 are doing that to varying degrees. The awareness of the ecological crisis,
 tropical rainforest being cut in British Columbia, this kind of thing is well
 known, widely lamented, and many people, including myself, feel moved to various
 forms of activism in trying to do something about it. But when we come to
 the heavens, we're still in a state of great ignorance. The vast majority of
 modern people know almost nothing about the heavens. I mean, of course, lots of
 people have books showing pictures of the earth from space, or children are
 given books about space travel fantasies. My own children, I'm sad to say, learn
 more about the heavens from the idea of sitting inside spaceships and pressing
 buttons than from actually looking at the sky. And this is the way that
 children are raised now. The actual sky is something of which most people are
 abysmally ignorant. In most traditional cultures, most people could tell the
 stars. Mariners had to know them. Shepherds knew the sky. Ordinary people
 knew the basic constellations in the sky, could pick them out, and knew the pattern
 of change of the stars. The Egyptians, for example, had special ceremonies at the
 rising of Sirius, when Sirius came into the sky. It was there for a certain season
 of the year, and then it went invisible again. And so this awareness of stars, of
 the phases of the moon, of the general movements and positions of the planets,
 is widespread in traditional cultures. And of course the information is there
 in our culture, but it's hard to find someone who actually knows it, who can
 point to the constellations in the sky. So first of all, we have a general
 ignorance of the skies. Secondly, the skies are now regarded, from a scientific
 point of view, as just matter, and that's the domain of astronomy. But oddly enough,
 astronomers don't know that much about the sky as you actually experience it.
 They've got a lot of equations about the life cycle of stars, about the nature of
 pulsars and other strange mysteries in the heavens. But very few know about them.
 I was having dinner a couple of years ago with the professor of astronomy at
 Cambridge, whose wife is the godmother of one of my sons. And he's head of the
 Institute of Astronomy there. We went out after dinner. It was a beautiful
 starlit night. There was a particularly bright star there, and I said,
 "What's that one, Martin?" He said, "Oh, I haven't a clue. Don't ask me." He said, "I
 don't know what these stars, constellations are." He really didn't know, because he
 learned astronomy from books, from computer models, not from looking at the
 sky. And Steve Rook, who's here this evening, who's here with us in this
 workshop, he's worked with astronomers in Arizona, at some big
 observatory there, told me that going in there, and they're looking in this
 telescope, they're focused on a particular star. If you ask them, "What
 constellation is this in?" They don't know. They've got to, they punch in the
 computer to get to that star. They don't know the bigger picture. They're not
 seeing the wood for the trees. And Steve said that to find out, you had to go
 outside, look to see which way the telescope was pointed through the dome,
 and work out which constellation it was in. So astronomers are not really
 leading us in a true knowledge of the heavens as we experience them. Amateur
 astronomers are probably the only people who still keep alive the sense of
 observation and relationship to the heavens. Astrologers have retained a
 sense of the heavens as meaningful, and having a relation, an organic, meaningful
 relationship between the heavens and the earth. This is part of the old cosmology
 that everybody shared. But since the scientific revolution, these astrologers
 have continued with that sense of meaning, which is very valuable, but it's
 become completely detached from the actual heavens. So it's no use asking
 your average astrologer, if you see a bright star in the sky or a planet,
 what's that? Because most of them don't look at the sky any more than anyone
 else does. It's all done from computer programs and books. So that's become
 detached from astronomy. I think a great move forward would happen when astronomy
 and astrology link up again. I was particularly struck in 1987. There was a
 massive supernova in the southern hemisphere, the biggest supernova since
 1604, an exploding star in the skies which Galileo and Kepler saw, and which
 played a major part in the scientific revolution. All through history, these
 supernovas, exploding stars in the sky, have been regarded as major omens of the
 most important, of the greatest importance. Here was the biggest one since
 1604. Now I asked my astrologer friends, you know, "Well, what do you make of this?"
 Well, the answer is they didn't make anything whatever of it, because it
 wasn't in the ephemeris. It wasn't in their Macintosh computer program. It was
 just ignored. The astronomers took a great interest in it, but saw no meaning
 in it. So that's the state we're in today, and I think that a lot of good will come
 from recovering a sense of the life of the heavens. And I'm just going to say a
 little bit more about that to try and make it clearer what I mean. Well, we know
 that Gaia is a living planet. I think we also have to take seriously the idea
 that the Sun is alive. I think myself that the Sun is conscious, or has a mind
 associated with it. And if one wants a scientific rationale for thinking this,
 one comes ready to hand through the discoveries of modern solar physics. It's
 now known that the Sun has a complex system of magnetic fields. It reverses
 its polarity every 11 years, associated with the sunspot cycle. And with this
 underlying rhythm of magnetic polar reversal, there are a whole series of
 resonant and harmonic patterns of magnetic and electromagnetic change,
 global patterns over the surface of the Sun, of a kind of fractal nature, patterns
 within patterns, highly turbulent, highly chaotic, showing extremely varied, highly
 subtle, sensitive, changing electromagnetic patterns the whole time.
 Now, if we believe that the electromagnetic patterns within our
 brains are the interface between mind and the nervous system, which is what
 most people do think, a reasonable hypothesis, then here we have a possible
 interface with the physical behavior of the Sun through these complex
 electromagnetic patterns that go far beyond anything our brains can do. So it's
 perfectly possible, if you want to stay within the present scientific imagination,
 of thinking how the Sun could have a mind which interfaces with the activity
 that we can actually observe, the electromagnetic patterns that go
 throughout the whole Sun. Now the solar system, of course, is an organism. It's not
 just the Sun, the entire system around it, the planets, and the Sun constitutes an
 entire system, which we call the solar system. And this is largely what
 astrology has concerned itself with. But we also recognize now
 that the Sun is part of a galaxy, the Milky Way is part of our galaxy, all the
 stars we see in the sky are within our own galaxy. With the naked eye we can see
 one or two other galaxies. The Andromeda Nebula is the main one. But that's all we
 can see with the naked eye. All the stars we see are within this galaxy.
 And this galaxy, like other galaxies, has a galactic center, and galactic centers
 often have things called quasars in them, which may be gigantic black holes as a
 kind of nucleus to the whole galaxy. And galaxies have structures, and we can
 think of them as organisms too. And they seem to come in clusters called galactic
 clusters, and those come in super clusters. So if we think of each of these
 as an organism, we have vast organisms of which our Earth is a tiny part, a tiny
 part of the solar system which is part of a vastly greater organism. And if the
 Sun has a kind of consciousness, then so what about the entire galaxy with this
 mysterious center? They all seem to have these cores that relate to the rest of
 the galaxy in little understood ways. What about galactic clusters, and what
 about the cosmos as a whole? We have levels of potential consciousness or
 awareness or mental activity vastly beyond anything we experience ourselves,
 of ever more inclusive natures. When we turn to ancient traditions, we find that
 this has always been the general belief. The entire cosmos is believed to be
 animate. God has been seen as residing in the sky, beyond the sky, but also in the
 sky, "Our Father who art in heaven." Now of course most modern people, including
 most modern Christians, when they hear those words, "Our Father who art in
 heaven," immediately respond, "Oh well of course that doesn't mean the actual sky,
 oh no no no, it means a state of mind, a metaphor, a state of being, but certainly
 not the actual sky." But what I'd like to entertain is the view that it does mean
 the sky, that our Father, if we have the idea of a Father God, then he is in
 heaven. If God is omnipresent, then he must be present throughout the heavens.
 And since the heavens are vastly greater than the earth, about 99.99%
 of the divine presence must be in the sky rather than on the
 earth. Now if we take the same crudely quantitative approach, we arrive at the
 same conclusions about the celestial goddess, because of course the heavens
 can also be seen as the abode or the being of the goddess. In the
 Egyptian mythology, the sky was the abode of Nut, the sky goddess, who was the womb
 of the heavens, who gave birth to the sun and the moon and the stars. She was the
 cosmic space of the night skies, the womb from which these things come forth.
 And that was the image also of Astarte, and it's been assimilated into
 Christianity through the image of Mary, Mother of God, as Queen of Heaven,
 portrayed as in images of Our Lady of Guadalupe, as wearing a blue robe, the
 sky blue robe studded with stars. So this is also a Christian image of the
 goddess and the image of Mary as Mother of God. You see, it has this idea of
 this primordial womb of space or the sky from which all things come. The
 angels were believed to be celestial hierarchies of beings. In Christian,
 Jewish and Islamic belief, there are nine hierarchies of angels, perhaps
 corresponding to superclusters of galaxies, galaxies, solar systems and so
 on. And the planets and the stars were believed to be the abode of
 intelligences. Even our English names for the planets are the Latin names of the
 gods and goddesses, the Venus, Mercury, Mars and so on. We still preserve those
 days. We name the days of our week after them, Monday, Moon Day, Sunday, Sunday,
 Friday, Freya's Day in English, corresponding to Venus's day, the goddess
 day. Freya is the northern equivalent of Venus. So there was this sense of all
 these angelic beings associated with the stars. In the 16th century, there was a
 revival of ancient star magic. This is something I know Ralph has studied and I
 hope we can take up. John Dee and others connected with particular stars and
 invoked the spirit of that star to connect with that intelligence, asking
 for its guidance, help or inspiration. So there's an attempt actually to contact
 these beings, these intelligences and communicate with them. Well, since
 science, since the heavens have been secularized and have become the domain
 of physical astronomy alone, then the idea that they're peopled has never died.
 There's still a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, at present
 I think rather narrowly conceived. Beam out the decimal points of pi and beings
 on other planets will pick it up and realize that we're intelligent because
 we know about these kinds of mathematical formulae. That's the general
 kind of approach. And meanwhile, the idea of the beings within the heavens, this
 idea of the heavens as the abode of many kinds of beings, has been left to the
 rather banal imaginations of science fiction writers. It still lives on, but no
 longer in the form of angels, but in the fantasies of science fiction. Well, I want
 to raise the possibility that we can indeed once again link with the living
 heavens. We have first of all to recognize there's a kind of life in the
 heavens beyond that, well as maybe as well as that of maybe other technological
 civilizations like ours that think like we do and may indeed be beaming out the
 formula for pi through radio waves. Maybe one day we'll pick it up. But I
 think these would be the least interesting civilizations to contact in
 a way. They'd be far too like ourselves. I think that if we are to contact beings
 on other planets, that the way we're going to do it is not through hardware,
 not through the NASA approach, not through spacecraft that are going to
 take many many years, thousands of years, to reach other stellar systems, and
 billions of years or many millions to reach other galaxies. To have astronauts
 on them who are drugged or go into a kind of state of hibernation and wake up,
 these are all far too clumsy. They won't work. If we're going to make contact it
 has to be through some kind of mental relationship. Now I think morphic
 resonance is not limited by distance. Morphic resonance works on the basis of
 similarity and provides a possible basis for a kind of resonant mental
 communication with beings on other planets or other stellar solar systems.
 There could be a kind of commerce, a kind of communication between us and other
 beings which doesn't involve billion-dollar budgets or multi-billion
 dollar budgets, enormous expenditure on hardware and so on, but relies on a
 completely different approach, not one at present taken very seriously, if considered
 at all, by the astronomical community, but one which I propose we might consider
 here this evening.
 [Applause]
 Ralph, what was John Dee trying to do? Perhaps that's a historical fact, maybe you could fill us in on it.
 Yes, well, the star magic idea in Elizabethan England preceded the nucleation of
 science as we know it and represented a transmission from the ancient world with
 a lot of changes, simplifications and additions and so on. But the central idea
 of it, I would think, is the ancient idea of the great chain of being, and
 that's, I think, an idea which is represented in your view that you just
 described, and a view that we, as soon as I describe it, I think everybody here
 will have a certain amount of trouble with it. Let me see. The ancient
 model of the universe with the angels in it and everything came down to us from
 pseudo-Dionysius. So this was some kind of encapsulation of ancient wisdom that
 they like to do in Alexandria, like wrap up a package and send it into the future,
 and this one actually reached us through the world of Islam. And there were these
 concentric spheres with, I think that there are nine, ten or eleven, depending on
 the view, whether the human mind, the lowest, scummiest part, might or might not
 be distinguished from the sphere of the earth and so on. But basically the earth
 is in the center even after the time of Copernicus, and even for us, of course,
 when we sit in our hotel and look at the sky, of course we are in the center, and
 the earth is a sphere around us. And outside the ninth, tenth or eleventh
 sphere was nothing. The top sphere was the unmoving sphere of God, and the other
 spheres of the planets and the Sun and the Moon, of course, intermediated in a
 kind of a transmission that morphic resonance over such a long distance, all
 the way from God to us, would be too difficult without some midway stations.
 And there were these radio amplifiers along the way which are these other
 spheres. So the whole motive for this model is the great chain of being, the
 transmission of God's will, as it were, from the unmoving sphere of God to us.
 And I see here is a book on Giordano Bruno, who is just sitting here in front
 of me. So I want to remind you why Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake
 on Easter Sunday in the year 1600 in Rome. And that was because, besides his
 many heresies, very interesting to us, for example, his theory of comets, which is a
 chaotic cosmic phenomenon, probably as important as supernovae in a history of
 consciousness. That's not why they burned him at the stake. It's because he
 insisted, after Copernicus, on the infinity of the universe, that is, that
 the stars were not, you know, there were the planetary spheres, all the stars that
 we see occupied one sphere. That's the celestial sphere. And the sphere of God is
 the one outside that. So Giordano Bruno believed the stars were not on one
 sphere, but outside this sphere of Jupiter, that they filled space. And the
 reason that the Church objected to this was that it left no space for God. Our
 Father in Heaven had no place to go. And that was very threatening to the entire
 system. So as you've presented, I'm seeing this cosmology, or an
 opportunity for us to construct a new cosmology of our own, that this is upset
 if we don't have our God in Heaven, or our Goddess in Heaven, to occupy the
 upper sphere. Because what are the purpose of all these spheres? What is the
 purpose of the angels, the nine choirs of angels, the potentialities,
 the dominions, the cherubs and the seraphs? So I think that the idea of one
 God can't be resurrected, that it's a casualty that a religion of the
 future would have to have a whole pantheon of gods, goddesses, and so on. And
 this could include the living and sacred sun, moon, the planets, the Milky Way, the
 quasars in its center, the nearby galaxies, the clusters of galaxies, and so
 on. But the geocentric picture has to be abandoned. So this, it comes down to
 this question, what is the purpose of SETI? I mean, do you think that because
 for 25,000 years of our evolution, the evolution of our habits, that certain
 phantasmic mythical figures have been projected on the constellations of the
 sky, that that's our sacred heritage, and because of these creodes in the
 morphic field, we can somehow make use of them, and try to have a
 conversation with them or something? Or is it that we have to rediscover our own
 cosmology in SETI, where we try to find out what are the real intelligences
 in the sky and the heavenly realms by conversing with them? SETI in
 parentheses means search for, SETI is an abbreviation for search for
 extraterrestrial intelligence, is that it? That's right, yes, yes, SETI is
 extraterrestrial, and we've certainly given up any hope of finding terrestrial
 intelligence, although coin circles are promising. So anyway, that's a general
 response, and I just want to put in a word for angels here, and then I'll turn
 it over to Terence, that I think personally the SETI is of interest
 because of our own journeys, where we depart the body, then we also have left
 sometimes Earth far behind, reaching this realm so difficult to name, the
 transcendent other, the logos, and so on, but a realm well traveled by our
 forebears, superb, brave travelers of the past who've left all kind of written
 records of their journeys. On these journeys of ours, we do have the
 experience of meeting extraterrestrial intelligence and conversing and
 learning and being taught, and indeed our whole hope for the future, little as that
 may seem, is based somehow on these travels, on the conviction that we have
 had Gnostic experience, direct experience of extraterrestrial intelligence. This is
 our interest, not because we need to search and find, but because we have
 searched and have found, and what do we make of this experience? So I think the
 relationship between the, as above, as below, this is the idea, the relationship
 between the experience of our own journeys and the evidence of our eyes in
 looking at the sky, the inner and the outer, what is the relationship? That is
 the program of SETI in our perspective, and I think this
 overall idea of the great chain of being can actually be salvaged in our
 cosmology without reference to our Father God in heaven or any, even the, see
 the ideas of gods and goddesses, angels and so on, is not exactly the right
 verbal equipment to describe our experience, that's what I think, but
 extraterrestrial intelligence, that's better. I mean, there may be a physical
 location in space and time, somewhere in the universe, for this intelligence, and
 there may not, there may be no correlation as above, so below.
 Nevertheless, it's the conversation with the intelligence which is most important
 to us, not the identification with the physical matter, energy, and morphic
 fields of these. I'm not sure if I could connect an intelligent being I've
 encountered in out-of-the-body travel with the Milky Way or the planet Jupiter.
 It makes sense to me when you say you believe that they're intelligent beings. I
 can imagine the sunspots running across the face of the sun in this furious
 speed as a kind of cephalopod communication between one sun and
 another. I presume they can see each other, and Saturn is having a conversation
 with the Sun that goes like this, Saturn's got its rings, waves them like
 that, and then the Sun blinks, you know, and sends a sunspot whirling across and
 has like a semaphoric conversation. And in this way, the order of the universe is
 maintained by discourse, by consensus, by voting in committee, and so on. If this is
 so, whether there's a correlation between this intelligence, which is associated
 with the universe, the cosmic structures like galaxies, and the space of our
 inexperience, our inner experience, this possible correlation is an interesting
 question. So I wonder, since, you know, in your travels does this make sense to you,
 Terence, on the basis of direct Gnostic experience? You mean that we have
 re-traveled in the universe or without it? So are you saying, does it seem
 reasonable to connect up the entities in the psychedelic experience to particular
 places in space and time? Yeah, does Rupert's question pertain to direct
 experience we've already had, or is SETI something we have yet to begin to make
 contact with these galactic intelligence? So the Milky Way would be a good friend
 to make. Well, we've had this discussion before. It's hard for me, I can
 imagine that the Sun is intelligent and an organism, but only if I imagine it
 exists on that scale in some way that it's fairly hard to relate to. In other
 words, it's like the Pacific Ocean. I can imagine it to be intelligent, but I would
 imagine that its intelligence is of such a nature that it and I probably don't
 have too much to do with each other. Meanwhile, out in the universe, somewhere,
 these entities exist which we do contact in the psychedelic experience. I've
 always sort of imagined, well, I'm never sure. I mean, are they creatures of other
 levels or simply other places? And then if other places, they seem to be places
 so far away that the laws of physics are different. So it's not just like the
 difference between Chicago and Memphis, it's like the difference between Chicago
 and Oz. You know, there's an ontological thing going on of
 incommiserability. Sometimes I think that perhaps, you know, we've talked about how
 the morphogenetic field is a necessary hypothesis, but hard to detect the way
 you can detect an electromagnetic field. Well, then the creative response to that
 is to say, well, perhaps the imagination is the detection of the morphogenetic
 field, that the imagination is somehow that the mind, the brain-mind system is a
 quantum mechanically delicate enough chemical system that incoming input from
 the morphogenetic field can push these cascades of chemical activity one way or
 another, and that in the act of daydreaming or psychedelic tripping or
 something, you're actually scanning the morphogenetic field. Well, in that case it
 means that what we call the imagination is actually the universal library of
 what is real, that you couldn't imagine it if it weren't real somewhere, sometime.
 And that to me is very empowering, because I think that's the
 truth that you learn at the center of the psychedelic experience that's so
 mind-boggling that you can't really return to it with it, that it's real.
 And if thinking about the heavens in this way, as organic, integrated, and
 animate, makes that more probable, then I'm all for it. I think Rupert, you and I,
 and perhaps to some degree Ralph, come out of the influence of the school
 called Organismic Philosophy that Alfred North Whitehead and Joseph Needham and
 L.L. White put forth. Clearly the reason that organism, you know, Rupert made the
 very eloquent case for organismic organization at every level, clearly the
 reason that's been unwelcome in science is because it raises questions about the
 signal systems which hold these organisms together, and that is pointing
 back toward a theme that I know is dear to Rupert, he touched on it this evening,
 which is the systematic elimination of spirit from any explanation of what
 nature is. I mean, a machine communicates mechanical force through direct
 contact, basically. An organism operates through chemical systems of diffusion, or
 color signal, or even language in some cases. So it's these higher
 order forms of function, if called down to explain large chunks of nature, that
 begin to look like a re-infusion of spirit into nature. Strangely enough, this
 is of course exactly what we need, but orthodoxy is fighting it, you know, tooth
 and nail. This is because it's still reacting to the 19th century battle
 where deism had such power that it appeared potentially capable of
 frustrating Darwinian rationalism, but that battle was won long ago. Now it's
 time to realize that trying to reason upward from the laws of atomic physics
 to organisms is not going to work, that there are what David Bohm and other
 people, I suppose, called emergent properties at every level. There's
 nothing magical about that concept. I mean, think of one molecule of water. It's
 absurd to call it wet, you know. Wetness is something that you have when you have
 millions of molecules of water. It's an emergent property that comes out of
 millions of molecules of water, and at every level in the evolution of physical
 complexity, complexity itself has permitted the emergence of new
 properties with, you know, the iridescence of mind and culture emerging finally at
 the top of this pyramid. I don't know, I think it's interesting the way the
 culture has changed its attitude toward the heavens. I mean, a revolution in our
 thinking that is fairly fundamental is that no one at this point, I think,
 believes in the human conquest of space. This has gone from a national commitment
 in the 60s to the chicest thing you could be into in the 70s on a
 par with virtual reality and MDMA today, to it isn't mentioned, not by
 freaks like us, not by presidential candidates, not by right-wingers,
 left-wingers, middle-of-the-roaders, or anybody else. It's all over. The heavy
 lift launch capacity that resided in the Soviet military-industrial complex
 has been allowed to drift into obsolescence. They held the keys to
 reaching near-Earth orbit, and it's slipping away. So I appreciate your
 attempt to animate the cosmos, because apparently we're turning into the worm
 dimension. We're turning away from all that. It has become, like so much, a part
 of a past era of grandeur and glory seeming not to be repeated. We held a
 virtual reality conference here a year and a half ago, and Howard Rheingold had
 a revelation in the middle of the night down on the platform in front of the
 big house, when he said, "My God, now I understand what virtual reality is for.
 It's to keep us from ever leaving the Earth." And, you know, it bears
 consideration. Your talk made me think of Olaf Stapleton's The Star Maker, which
 is a wonderfully eloquent statement of an animate cosmos, which if you've not
 read it, it's a very up-book. It seems to me, in terms of what you said, in
 terms of communication with other planets, probably the SETI, the S-E-T-I
 program now, which is based on radio telescopes, heavy technology and stuff, is
 maybe worth doing, but I myself don't think we'll get very far. If we take this
 other approach, possibly involving psychedelics, there seem to be three
 points here. Firstly, are we trying to communicate with beings of our own kind
 of level, i.e. biological-type organisms on planets somewhere else in the
 universe? That would be a kind of peer conversation, and it may be that
 psychedelics would help that. It may be that shamanic journeyings into the
 heavens, which are a long part of a very long tradition, it may have gone on for
 hundreds of thousands of years, those may have been contacting beings of that kind,
 of a similar order to ourselves. Then there's this thing you rather dismissed,
 the communication with a higher kind of mind or intelligence, the Pacific Ocean,
 the Sun, the solar system, the galaxy. I think you dismissed it too soon, because
 in a sense the idea that our minds are very much smaller parts of a very
 much larger mental system, incomprehensible to us, because it's so
 much larger than our own, so much more inclusive and working on a different
 time scale and order of magnitude. This is of course a very traditional idea
 that our intelligence is lower in the scale than much higher ones, but we can
 communicate with these higher levels of intelligence through prayer, through
 mystical insight or intuition. We don't have to stay at our own level, that there
 are these possibilities. Most mystical insights are about contacting higher
 levels of being or higher levels of intelligence, and most forms of
 mysticism today are extremely fuzzy, because people, as soon as you get beyond
 the human level, that we lack maps. I mean, is it a sense of connection with a
 particular place, you know, the earth of the California coast and the sea,
 the locality extending maybe 20 or 30 miles around us, a sense of
 absorption into the nature of that place, or the whole planet Earth, or the solar
 system, or the galaxy, or the cluster of galaxies, or the cosmos, or God, who may be
 a spirit pervading the entire cosmos, the unifying spirit of everything. Most
 people don't quite know where one leaves off and the next begins, all they know is
 that it's bigger than them, and it may be that we're not, in the past people may
 have had a better sense of just how far they were going. I think these doctrines
 of hierarchies of angels was an attempt to recognize that there are many
 different levels of intelligence or mind beyond our own. So, and there's a third
 point, which is that in order to contact beings, possibly with the help of
 psychedelics, possibly in meditative or altered states of consciousness induced
 through chanting, or possibly by a combination of all known means, all these
 together, to do it in a darkened room with one's eyes closed is one way, but
 then that's rather random. There may be much more directional ways of doing it.
 If, for example, we follow the ancient law about the benefits of stars and
 take the idea of the star Regulus, for example, is considered a star of good
 omen, a good one, we have a stellarator, a tube, or a telescope fixed on Regulus. We
 then go into this altered state having invoked Regulus and made appropriate
 prayers and preparations, and then go into this state connected by our eyes in
 the most direct way we can be, through the light coming from that, to that star,
 and go into that star and its associated solar system. This would be a form of
 directed mind travel that would go beyond possible random journeyings to
 occur with closed eyes in darkened rooms. And it may be that very few people have
 actually started, there may be some, I don't know anyone who's doing this, but
 this seems to me a new frontier of space exploration that can be done on a very
 low budget. And would open up a great range of possibilities, because it may be that some
 stars out there do have beings with whom we'd link through, for example, DMT or
 psilocybin type experiences might resonate. I would say by morphic
 resonance, you could say by telepathy, you could say by some kind of affinity,
 doesn't matter about the terminology, with beings either with that star
 itself or with beings on planets within that solar system. And a channel of
 communication might be opened. Then there are stars that only the bravest would
 dare to look into, such as Algol, a variable star of ill repute in the
 ancient world, believed to be an evil star. We now know that its variability, its
 changing intensity every two or three days, it gets brighter and darker, is
 owing to the fact it's part of a binary star system, probably revolving
 rapidly around, or is in association with a black hole, or at least some other
 non-visible body. It might be that communicating with Algol would have, one
 would enter into a kind of dualistic, a yin-yang type stellar system that might
 have a very peculiar quality of consciousness to communicate. Well, do you
 know anyone who's actually consciously undertaken this mode of space
 exploration? No, but I think it's a wonderful idea. I can envision enormous,
 you know, why use a stellarator? Why not use the Keck telescope and just punch up
 Algol on the screen and then smoke DMT and sort of put your hand on the radio,
 as they used to say. Hey, it could work. Don't doubt it for a moment. Well, I do know
 somebody who undertook a program something like this. It was me, actually.
 My project involved, my technical equipment that made this possible, that
 empowered me to travel to the stars, my destination, was my hot tub. This is an
 instrument that makes it comfortable to sit outdoors for a long time watching
 the sky. I explored primarily the polar constellations in the Milky Way, and some
 kind of conversation with the Milky Way is possible, and also with the zodiac and
 the zodiacal constellations, but particularly the lunar constellations,
 the polar constellations. They have a lot to say about the morphic field. But I
 forgot to answer your question about John Dee and his conversations with
 angels, and maybe now I see that might be appropriate here, because
 mathematics was interpreted by him as being a healing art, in which the stellar
 influences would be used for healing. He had in mind particularly human diseases,
 but in light of our current circle speculation, we could also apply this on
 a larger scale, where we feel that our future and the biosphere's future is
 threatened somehow by the human infection. We might reach out here for a
 more radical solution to the problem, following the ideas of John Dee. So this
 is sort of how he did it, traditional means. There are the nine celestial
 spheres, and there are the nine choirs of angels, and they're associated each with
 one sphere, although they can travel plus or minus one sphere. The more powerful
 ones can travel a little farther, but through their cooperative activity they
 can pass messages up and down, and the disease is called by imperfect resonance
 with these forces. In the lowest, the lowest choir of angels, which are just
 called angels, they are particularly the messengers between the gods and the
 other spheres and people, and individual people have individual angel guardians
 and so on. So, I mean, this was the accepted worldview of everybody in the
 time of John Dee, and he was a major expert of this view, but his intention
 was, like ours, to get in contact with these intelligences as seen through the
 worldview of his time, the Elizabethan worldview, just as we're trying to do it
 in. What's our worldview? Well, anyway, Hollywood science fiction. So through the
 aid of his pal Ed, over a period of eight years, explicit conversations in ordinary
 language took place, with the aid, you know, of the show stone, and the language
 they spoke was not an earth language. This was sort of the program that I had
 in mind in my experiment, but I don't have a pal Ed who can manipulate this
 stone around a board with letters of a mysterious alphabet and so on. So I was
 looking for, following your idea, for guidance in a visual form, a vision, in
 fact, of my own, of the sort that we are familiar with having, of the kind that I
 have struggled with machinery to reproduce. And as you see, I have not
 received a solution of our problems, but I do think this is a program that an
 individual can pursue, even without psychedelics, but it requires a
 considerable commitment of time. And I think that my experiments would have
 been enormously assisted by a computer-controlled stellarator. I do not
 think the Keck telescope would help. It's too indirect, because we have in mind, I
 don't know if this has come out in our recent trial arc, but we've had in mind
 photons, the electromagnetic field, as one aid in the materialization, as it were,
 the communication of the morphic resonance, actually, to our minds and
 individual soul. So the indirectness of the Keck telescope is such that, first of
 all, there's the segmented pseudo-parabolic mirror, and that focuses
 the photons eventually on a CCD. This is a photosensitive plate. And finally, the
 astronomer actually sits away downtown, in this way, with the cafes around and so
 on, looking at a video screen. So I think that the indirectness would defeat the
 program. Better to have a stellarator, which is a telescope without glass, an
 empty tube, basically. But if you wanted to study, to communicate a particular
 star, then it would be nice to have this tube pointed at it, maybe a fairly large
 tube, so it just indicates what circle of sky, you know, where that is, so that you
 could focus on it for a long period of time. This is easy to do with the polar
 constellations, however, any favorite one, Beta Cassiopeia, for example, is a star
 that everyone knows. And not only now, but in earlier times, when the pole was
 actually located in the faraway galaxies, another location in the polar
 constellations have always been polar constellations. So for a
 million years, we've been looking at Beta Cassiopeia, and so on. So I'll recommend
 this to you and you and anyone else has a program. Even without a hot tub, you can
 use a sleeping bag. But of course, you don't want to fall asleep during, just
 before an important communication is transmitted, so you have to keep awake.
 And we can start near a home with the Sun, of course, and it's hard to look at
 the Sun in midday, but in sunset, for example, there was a wonderful one this
 evening over the sea. At sunrise and sunset, in many traditions, people have
 communicated with the Sun. And our own civilization is based to a degree, to an
 extraordinary degree, on what's often jocularly referred to as Sun worship, as
 millions of the urban rich and middle class, even working classes, spend their
 entire winter fantasizing about which beach they're going to go to for the
 summer. In England, since it's usually rainy, people like going to Spain, the
 Costa del Sol, and that kind of thing, and lying around on beaches in the Sun. I
 mean, it's referred to as Sun worship, but we should perhaps take that a bit
 more seriously. There's this, the way in which people like to be in the Sun, it's
 now known to be dangerous, bad for the skin, and so on. It doesn't stop people.
 That's relatively recent. In the 19th century, very few people lay in the Sun.
 So there's a curious movement of our whole civilization towards this new
 relationship to the Sun, through lying in it. In India, it's a traditional part
 of the daily ritual of Indians to greet the Sun as it rises in the morning. The
 Surya Namaskar, a yogic practice, a prostration to the Sun, which I actually,
 I've done it myself every day for maybe 15 years, is, I don't always get up and
 do it at dawn, pointing to the Sun, but it's a greeting of the Sun in the
 morning that forms a conscious relationship to it. And this conscious
 awareness of the Sun is probably, well, and of the Moon for that matter, but the Sun's
 more important in this respect. Is there something we can start with? Well, I think maybe we
 should reconsider the Moon, since it's hard to have visual contact with the Sun
 unless you get special glasses, which is a possibility. We could have, instead of a
 stellarator, just these dark lenses. The Moon, however, is quite interesting.
 It's a special, it has its own sphere, of course, the lunar sphere, and among the
 nine spheres, the lunar sphere is somehow the most important one. It's the membrane
 for our kind of life. Everything inside the lunar sphere decays and dies, and
 everything outside the lunar sphere is eternal. So the Moon was somehow
 always seen as the boundary of mortal life. Furthermore, it is visible at night,
 and you can look at it, and everyone loves to look at it. And you do get some
 kind of powerful, well, I used to say that consciousness evolved by starlight, and
 probably love and the emotional structure of the human and mammalian
 system has evolved by moonlight. So it's very good for us to study the Moon.
 The problem in learning to communicate with the Moon is that it moves so
 rapidly, it changes its phases. So if you have the habit, for example, to observe in
 the evening, or you always do your observation in the morning, then there's
 only a few days a month when you can actually do it, to communicate with the
 Moon. And that makes it difficult, because after the lapse of almost a
 month, when you start again, and then you've sort of forgotten, nevertheless,
 the Moon has definite possibilities, and it might be the strongest experience. Our
 likeliest possibility of actually having a conversation and renewing our contact
 with the living and intelligent world, the universe, would be through the Moon.
 I don't myself expect the Moon to have a great deal of intelligence or life. I
 mean, it's the most in that heavenly body we know, I think. I mean, Venus is a
 turbulent system with plenty of scope for chaotic perturbations and shifting
 systems of order. Jupiter has this extraordinary vortical system on it, this
 flowing fluid flow system of an incredibly dynamical kind. Saturn has
 these delicately poised and no doubt oscillatory rings, and many of them have
 very sensitive, like membranes, which could pick up fleeting changes and so on,
 which could be interfaces between the physical and the mental realm. The Moon
 seems rather lacking in that respect. Okay, maybe the Moon is dumb. I'm not
 willing to concede that, but I see that some people would rather put their money
 on a different number. So let me still recommend some alternative to the Sun,
 and perhaps one of the brighter planets, Jupiter, is probably the one that most
 people are familiar with. Jupiter and Saturn are visible in the sky almost like
 stars. They stay in the same position for a long time, so it's easy to find them
 without a computer-controlled stellarator, and to watch them, I mean,
 they're simply the brightest things around. So what about that, contacting
 Jupiter or Saturn? What do you think, Terence, some botanical trips should be
 devoted to this form of SETI? Well, I observed someone once who claimed that
 somewhere out between Mars and Jupiter is an invisible topological twist yet to
 be discovered by science. A new twist. Yes, a new twist, and that Jupiter actually is
 the Earth in some peculiar... Twisted reflection. A twisted reflection in
 another order of matter. Well, that would be okay. It's hard to observe the
 Earth at night, and maybe Jupiter is... that this twist is there in order to
 facilitate... Well, there's plenty of exotic chemistry on Jupiter, and even, I
 think, the current thinking is that Europa is actually the most likely place
 in the solar system other than the Earth to have life, because Europa has very
 dense, deep oceans of liquid water. No, Europa has to be as dumb as our moon. Why would it be
 smarter than our moon? No, it has oceans of liquid water, which in fact may
 be that the entire thing is a drop of liquid water. In other words, there may be
 no solid core. Well, is supporting life a sign of planetary intelligence? Is that the idea?
 Well, there is a school of thinking that holds to that. Well, then this
 Earth is dumb because it spawned us. But biological life is but one form. I mean,
 if we're talking about life as the kind the Sun may have, or the solar system, or
 the galaxy, we don't have to go straight for biological life. That would be
 equivalent to the sort of similar level, peer communication type system. Yes, I
 mean, what you're talking about when you're talking about Jupiter or
 something like that is superconducting life at high pressures... We're talking fires of
 angels here. We want to hear the song. I'm talking about the medium is Jovian, where
 something like Europa, it's more a terrestrial thing. These other kinds of
 life, I dare say, live mostly in our fevered imaginations at this point. I
 mean, the evidence for them is extraordinarily underwhelming. But how
 many people have looked? I mean, this is... To the point! Well, a person who's going to disbelieve
 corn circles is certainly not going to have a clever conversation with Madimi.
 No, Madimi is another thing. Or you'd be impressed by Madimi. I like Madimi. I
 liked her act. But from there to the thinking Sun is a long step, although not
 an impossible one. But I think the thing about the whole discussion about
 SETI and that is that the difficulty is not to... The difficulty is to recognize
 extraterrestrial intelligence or non-human intelligence. I think it's
 there on the Sun, on Jupiter, but the very nature of its non-humanness makes it
 either elusive or uninteresting or horrifying, and that it's a probably a
 very narrow spectrum that we would have the experience of an
 I-Thou relationship with. I mean, we can decide here and now that in fact the Sun
 is alive and highly literate and so forth. It doesn't greatly change our
 experience in the way that an extraterrestrial with which we could at
 least exchange information with would be. I mean, the creatures in the DMT place
 are pretty non-human. They're not made of matter. They appear to be some kind of
 plastic energy. Either they're syntactical or... I don't know. They're not
 made of matter. They are cognizable as individuals. In other words, we can say
 there are many of them and that they move through a kind of space. I don't
 know. I think the recognition of intelligence, if it's not like yours, is
 going to be very difficult. I mean, we can't even have Croats and Serbs
 getting along together. So... No, but you've already encountered intelligence.
 Let's say we call it the transcendent other for the moment. Suppose it turned
 out that the transcendent other was not in hyperdimensional space, in other words,
 beyond space and time, living on the other side of the eschaton, but actually
 lived in a crater on the moon, and that this became a personal conviction of
 yours after performing the experiments suggested by Rupert, that during your
 travels you devote a certain amount of time to peering through the stellarator
 at different heavenly bodies, and suddenly you find out that you always
 meet these beings and get this kind of experience and information when looking
 there, and other, completely other, when looking there, and that what you're
 looking at, the vision, actually, and after a bunch of experiments you find out, yes
 indeed, this is so. I now think that the transcendent other lives on the moon, and
 then this other green and purple one is sort of associated with Europa, and then
 that would not only be an interesting discovery, but would completely change
 your whole idea about your shamanic experience throughout your life. No, I think that
 would be interesting. So far, in terms of locating these things, the only locators
 we've been able to find are drugs. In other words, we say this creature lives
 on the other side of 15 milligrams of psilocybin. It does not live on the other
 side of 75 milliliters of ayahuasca. These are not satisfying locators, because
 we're not used to thinking of a molecule standing for a spatial temporal
 locus. Hippomorphic resonance gives us a mechanism to associate a given plant
 species with a particular planet. Hippomorphic resonance, too, or the doctrine of
 signatures. I mean, this is what... Yes, ancient herbals did this. The magic that D built on was the magic of
 Ficino and Campanella and these people. Yes, not only plants but minerals, everything. That's right, and perfumes and musical notes and metals.
 And we would build up these attractor tableaus on the day of Venus, at the hour
 of Venus. You would burn the incense of Venus, play the song of Venus, recite the
 poem of Venus, wrapped in the garment of Venus, in the color of Venus, and then
 something associated with Venus would in fact come to be. I think this is a
 fascinating research project and it could be done for next to nothing. And it
 could be done by networks of people working, you know, sharing their results
 and so on. And I think that where it would really mesh with our whole
 civilization is when this information, through channeling from different stars
 and communicating in this way, can help to bring about a new synthesis of
 astrology and astronomy. I mean, astrology has a much bigger popular
 following than astronomy does. But it's this tragic way it's got
 disconnected from the actual heavens. But the popular belief there's a
 meaning in the heavens and a connection between the heavens and the earth is
 very, very widespread. So I think this ingredient of communication of
 extraterrestrial intelligence and connections with Jupiter, Venus and so
 on, and bringing together of astrology and astronomy, a very elementary
 starting point would be something we thought of a couple of weeks ago at
 Hollyhock Farm in British Columbia, the Essendon of the North. They have a
 wonderful naturalist there, George Serk, who gives talks at night on all the
 stars, pointing out the constellations, the heavens and so on. A weekend workshop of
 astronomy for astrologers would be an elementary beginning. But I think that
 these elements could be brought together. This is a project for the future. I think
 it would have some relevance to the problems we were talking about this
 afternoon. If we're looking for guidance in what happens on earth, and we
 certainly need it, then recognizing how we're embedded within the heavens, within
 the solar system, the galaxy, the context in which we live, and the possibility of
 intelligences at our level, below our level and far above our level, throughout
 the heavens, that could play a role in guiding us, could be an important clue.
 But this research project, it has yet not even begun. I mean the only pioneer so
 far has been Ralph and his hot tub. Do you think we should know?
 I'm not sure that I understood what Ralph said. Neither of you seem to have picked up on it.
 Did you say you did communicate with something on the stars that you concentrated on in your hotel?
 Yes. Well, I'm not going to report a conversation. I invested a year, well more
 actually, but for one year practically every night I did stare at these objects
 for a long time and simply make note of my, you know, visual impressions. And
 there's nothing definite enough to tell you I didn't take a psychedelic during
 that period or something like that. But I did have an intuitive feeling that
 supported Rupert's program and just recommend trying it yourself. I won't try
 to put it in words. So it's just sort of a feeling that you can't express like many others?
 Well, I think that if you followed a lot of ancient instructions such as Jill was
 suggesting, with the invocation by name and sound wearing the clothes, and John
 Dee did all of these things. And the invocations are recorded and there are
 many people now practicing this system of angel magic in England and in the
 United States where the invocations are written down in John Dee's notebooks.
 There's the John Dee Society that publishes this material for anybody who
 wants to try it. But do they do it while looking at particular stars? Yes, yes.
 A typical group doing an Inokian invocation does have a so-called
 astrologer who keeps track, who has the clock and keeps track of the exact
 positions with the ephemerides and checks the position and they're
 definitely communicating with the stars. So what do they have to say?
 Well, you have to experience it. Have you been to one of these John Dee chapters?
 Yes. Well, the experiences are extremely powerful. People are possessed
 by the intelligences, act out. We're not talking about some feeble writing in a
 mysterious alphabet here. There are very powerful communications, including the
 waving of swords and self-protective devices, including trying to exit the
 room which is forbidden. It's very powerful. So this is already going on then?
 Extensively. You mentioned the doctrine of signatures earlier. I didn't understand what that was.
 It was an idea in late medieval medicine that things that were similar could be used.
 Well, but physical similarities indicated possible applications to disease.
 So in other words, if you have a plant with leaves shaped like kidneys, this would
 obviously cure kidney infection. So it's where you look in the physical world for
 it's a way of, it's an analogical form of thinking. You look at the physical world
 and you try to bring things together that seem associated and then you use
 this medicinally. Do you see? So that like...
 Well, this form of angel magic that comes out of Ficino and then is
 perfected in Campanella, it takes the idea that you... it was basically Deccan
 magic. The zodiacal signs can be divided into thirds. This is now obsolete, but
 these Deccans used to be very important. They ruled a third of each zodiacal sign
 and each Deccan had associations to it and an image so that a Deccan might be
 associated with the color black and large cats and certain fragrances,
 certain flowers. So then if you were going to invoke this Deccan, you would
 know the hour of its rising and you would bring all these materials together
 and then you would play music. Certain notes were sanctioned for this so that
 people like Michael Meyer, there's actually alchemical music extant to be
 performed at these invocations and through building up these
 sympathies and harmonies you would attempt to capture the power of this
 stellar entity.
 Usually you would pull it down into a talisman, something made of a certain
 metal with certain letters and figures inscribed on it that could be worn
 around the neck or sometimes you would pull the power down into a filter, meaning
 pee, filter with a pee, a liquid that you could take as a medicine or apply on bed
 clothes or it depended on what it was for. This was very strong.
 You see, all of the magical literature of the Middle Ages was basically
 derived from a single work called Picatrix that was not lost in the
 West. All the other magical literature of late Roman Hellenism existed for
 centuries only in monasteries in Syria. It was lost to the West and then at the
 time of the Renaissance all these manuscripts were brought to Italy and
 translated and it created this huge flowering of magical thinking and this
 was the kind of magic they were talking about. It took the figure of
 the magician who was essentially previously imaged as a haggish, royal
 old woman who had spells and strange material and turned the magician into the
 Renaissance magus, the companion of princes, the co-ruler of the
 state in a scheme of magical sympathy and resonances. Popes were in
 the cover of the Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic tradition. There's a picture of
 the mosaic at Siena Cathedral that shows Hermes Trismegistus co-equal with
 Moses. So this is where the Renaissance thinking on this was. You're listening to
 the Psychedelic Salon where people are changing their lives one thought at a
 time. So what do you think about Rupert's idea of directed mind travel or better
 described as psychonauts in space? I like the idea myself. During the period when I
 was solar gazing every day I often spent that time thinking about the Sun as if
 it were a conscious entity and I've often thought about the consciousness of
 stars. Now I realize that this is a little far out for some of our fellow
 Salonners, particularly for the newcomers to the Salon, so I don't often talk about
 some of these ideas but that doesn't mean that they aren't interesting to me.
 So far I haven't come to any conclusions one way or the other but I'm definitely
 going to reread Star Maker again. I think it was about 25 minutes or so into his
 rap when Rupert was describing organic solar systems in organic galaxies and
 organic superclusters and so on that I was reminded of Olaf Stapleton's
 magnificent novel Star Maker and then a few minutes later we heard Terrence
 McKenna also comment about that book coming to mind. And if you haven't read
 it I think it would be worth your time and trouble to track down a copy but on
 the whole without trying to Rupert does a great job of summing it up at least in
 the abstract. Interestingly just yesterday I read a report about some new
 work that has been done which suggests that the entire universe is fractal in
 nature. Until recently this was thought to be true up to up to and through I
 guess structures as large as the superclusters but the latest research
 seems to indicate that the fractal nature of things holds true at least out
 to the 200 million plus light-year range. Now why would I or anyone else care
 about this? Well I'm not sure to tell the truth but I do find it fascinating
 whenever some sacred corner of science is upended. Here's a little bit about
 what this website article said about the fractal universe and I'll post the link
 to it in our program notes. But this site said many cosmologists find fault with
 their analysis talking about the analysis of the fractal nature at the
 large scale largely because a fractal matter distribution out to such huge
 scales undermines the standard model of cosmology. According to the accepted
 story of cosmic evolution there simply hasn't been enough time since the Big
 Bang nearly 14 billion years ago for gravity to build up such large
 structures. What's more the assumption that the distribution is homogeneous has
 allowed cosmologists to model the universe fairly simply using Einstein's
 theory of general relativity which relates to the shape of space to the
 distribution of matter. Modeling a fractal universe with general relativity
 is possible in theory but in reality it would be devilishly complicated. That
 would leave cosmologists without a working model like acrobats without a
 net. Now what does all of this have to do with us here in the psychedelic salon?
 Well I don't know maybe nothing but it's interesting to think about these things
 every once in a while don't you think? However these past few days I've had
 some other things to think about and thankfully I received an email from
 Janice who is a fellow saloner currently living in Denmark and he let me know
 that Google was reporting that our notes from the psychedelic salon website
 wasn't safe. Well it took a little digging but I finally found some code
 that somehow had been slipped into our site that Google and I both found
 offensive. It appeared to be a tracker of some kind. So I took down all of the
 external links and began rebuilding the site, a project that isn't quite finished
 yet but at least the problem has been solved and Google is no longer reporting
 us to be a hazard. And I do apologize to anyone who got freaked out by that.
 Actually I freaked out a little myself at first when I saw Google saying bad
 things about us but now that I know what happened and possibly how it happened
 I'll be checking several times every day to see that it doesn't happen again.
 Hopefully we can move on to our next crisis now but thank you Janice for
 letting me know about this little problem. I'd like to go on and pass along
 some of the thoughts and comments that are coming in by email and through our
 forum over at thegrowreport.com but this is already a little longer program
 than I normally like to do. And the other reason I'm not going to get into some of
 these things is that my little diversion with the hacker on our site has kept me
 away from the forum for a week and just now when I took a quick look to see if
 there's a few comments I could pass along I realized that it's going to take
 several hours just to catch up on all the great posts that our fellow saloners
 have made on the psychedelic salon forum. And on top of that every time I go to
 thegrowreport.com forums I also wind up spending a lot of time on the forums for
 the Sea Realm, the Dopecast, BB's Bungalow, Lefty's Lounge, Max Freakout's
 Psychonautica podcast. All in all Xandor and Mrs. Z have provided a terrific
 resource for our community on their Grow Report site and that's only the tip of
 the iceberg because this is also the place where the medical marijuana
 growing community goes for cultivation help. So I'm going to sign off for now
 but maybe I'll bump into you over on one of the forums in a few minutes. However
 before I go I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the
 psychedelic salon are available for your use under the Creative Commons
 attribution non-commercial share like 3.0 license. And if you have any questions
 about that just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the
 psychedelic salon web page which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org and that's
 also where you'll find the program notes for these podcasts. And for now this is
 Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well my friends.
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