Greetings from cyberdelic space.
 This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon.
 And even though I planned on cutting back to a podcast every other week, I just couldn't
 stay away from you for that long.
 You know, I got to thinking about that wonderful grant we received last week from the Magic
 Mutt Foundation.
 And then in the past couple of days, we've also received very generous donations from
 Courtney M and Carrie T. And they have motivated me to get an extra podcast out to you today.
 So thank you again, Magic Mutt, and thank you, Courtney and Carrie.
 I really appreciate you being such an important part of the salon.
 And I'm sure that all of our fellow salonners send their thanks to you as well.
 So it was quite a day on Tuesday.
 Normally, I wouldn't comment on a US election because politics isn't the main focus for
 most of our fellow salonners.
 And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
 But today I thought it might be interesting to continue to mine the vein that we began
 last week when there was also a little 1960s politics involved.
 As you know, last week we heard a radio interview with Dr. Timothy Leary that was recorded in
 1966.
 And that was essentially at the beginning of what we now think of as the 60s.
 Now fast forward about 26 years from that interview and we get to 1992, which is the
 year that the trial log we are about to listen to was recorded.
 And by an interesting coincidence, it happens to also be the final tape in the 1992 trial
 log series that I started playing a few months back.
 Technically, the title of this trial log should be something like Utopian Thinking, Seeing
 Ourselves in History, because that's how the discussion begins.
 But instead I'm calling today's podcast Reality Check, and partly in memory of a television
 program I produced back in Florida many years ago, but that's another story.
 The reason I want to ask you to consider taking a reality check at this particular moment
 in time is something that I'll get into after we first hear today's program.
 As I said, this is the final trial log in a series that was held at Esalen Institute
 sometime in 1992.
 The participants were Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, and Terrence McKenna.
 And for those of you who aren't really big fans of Terrence's thinking, well, there's
 an added little treat for you in that Ralph and Rupert really beat up on him in this one
 as they point out a few inconsistencies in his thinking.
 It's really one of their more interesting exchanges, I think, but I'll let you decide
 that for yourself.
 So now here is Ralph Abraham, sometime back in 1992, setting up the framework for this
 conversation.
 It is the impossible become possible, and yet remaining impossible.
 Sunday morning it's appropriate for something special, something sacred.
 We have a short meeting and a long agenda, so I'll try to exercise discipline here.
 Our project this morning is either a major breakthrough for ourselves in understanding
 our place in history or brazen egomania.
 We want to try to see ourselves, or rather our self as a trinity, and our self, this
 group, this kind of activity, in a broader view of history, in the sweep of history,
 in the line of some great idea or bad habit, which has characterized the human spirit for
 a long time, and to experiment with the idea of connecting with such traditions as are
 perceived by cultural historians.
 There's two particular themes that I want to describe as just two possibilities for
 understanding ourselves in the historical tradition, and they are utopianism and millenarianism.
 So in a nutshell, utopia is a word that in our language has become pretty much synonymous
 with nonsense, and we may not want to see ourselves in this tradition.
 But as understood by cultural historians, utopianism is one of the major currents of
 the European mind, and not an old one, according to the view of the specialists of the subject.
 Utopianism, although it has ancient roots, for example, any kind of idealistic fantasy
 of the future, we would call that utopian.
 So we have the concept of the ideal city in the ancient world, most especially the ideal
 city of Plato's Republic.
 So casually we might call that utopian fantasy, although Plato did try to actually realize
 it in the political organization of a particular city.
 He ended up in jail for that effort.
 Another thing to kind of keep in the back of your mind as we choose whether or not to
 associate with this particular strand of the human endeavor.
 But according to these historians of the European mind, utopianism begins on a particular day,
 at a particular moment, and it's recent.
 It's less than 500 years old, and in that time became a main theme, a chief characteristic
 theme of the European mind.
 And that day was the day of publication of a book called Utopia by Thomas More, M-O-R-E,
 in 1516.
 And this word, utopia in the title, is a translation into Latin of the Greek utopos, meaning nowhere.
 And this was its initial chief characteristic feature, is that it was acknowledged to be
 nowhere.
 This was a dream not to be made real.
 Also it was fiction.
 It had, you know, characters and plot and story and kind of like a soap opera, presenting
 in fictional form various themes of ideal achievement that our culture could strive
 for.
 After 1516, there was a tremendous rise in popularity.
 Well, this book sold real well and had a lot of imitators.
 So there was a huge genre, a body of fictional works, which became the foundation of the
 utopian trend, but eventually branched into nonfiction as historians began writing literary
 criticism about this tendency.
 And after nonfiction began to be realized, materialized in actual communities that tried
 to live up to the utopian ideals of some or another novel or nonfiction work in this genre.
 For example, thinking of recent books in this type, we could think of Rian Eisler's book,
 The Chalice and the Blade, one of the most popular books in our group in the world today.
 This is a perfect example of the nonfiction utopian work.
 And I imagine the specialists of this, well, I could name them.
 There's a couple, a husband and wife team of historians who made their life work, the
 chronicling of this particular trend.
 And they're called Frank and Francie Manuel.
 They worked 25 years and produced a book 900 pages long, and they plunked it down and said,
 we just cannot carry this burden anymore.
 We've hardly began, but somebody else has got to carry it.
 They plunked down this 900-page book in 1979.
 In 1979, looking back on the history of utopianism since 1516, they said, well, the last thing
 in their book is entitled Twilight of Utopia.
 Twilight of Utopia.
 They saw the trend ended.
 Five hundred years, that was it, probably under the influence of our common experience
 in the 1960s, when the hippies of California, Paris, and other places, Amsterdam, the provost,
 did try once again to materialize a new utopian ideal in actual practice.
 And this even strove for a planetary society based on ideal lines, which completely and
 totally failed.
 So at the time of their writing, they saw the utopian literary current dried up and
 ended.
 Nevertheless, since then, since 1979, in the publication of the book, there are certain
 surges of renewal in this literature.
 For example, Rianne Eisler's book, published in '87 or '88, I think.
 Another non-fiction work of this type, we could look at Rupert's book, The Rebirth
 of Nature, a year ago.
 This year, Terence's book, Food of the Gods.
 I mean, this is just, I'm not saying we must see ourselves in this tradition, but I think
 certainly if the Mr. and Mrs. Manuel wrote a revised edition of their book, they would
 definitely include these authors in their list.
 My unpublished book, Chaos, Gaia, Eros, could be considered a kind of a chaos utopia.
 Rupert's book, a scientific utopia.
 Terence's book, a psychedelic utopia.
 Rianne Eisler's book, a partnership political utopia.
 I mean, there's different sorts.
 And in this 900-page work, we have a catalog of every author, thousands of works, thousands
 of communities that started and then were stopped.
 All are chronicled in temporal order in this work.
 And Paul Tillich, writing about this trend in 1951, made an interesting identification
 with the trinity of the prehistoric goddess, manifest in Christianity, let's say, as the
 holy trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
 He said that this particular Trinitarian utopian model was presented long before Thomas More
 in 1516 in the works of Joachim de Fiore in the 12th century.
 So let me just read a few words of Tillich's understanding of the Trinitarian structure
 of the utopian genre, and I think this will help us to see ourselves in history.
 The result is that the overwhelming majority of these utopias show a triadic movement,
 the original actualization, namely actualization of the essence, and then a falling away from
 this original actualization, namely the present condition.
 And third, the restoration as an expectation that which has fallen away from its primordial
 condition is to be recovered.
 One of the distinguishing characteristics of this triadic movement is the consciousness
 on the part of those who use this symbolism, almost without exception, that's important,
 that the lowest point of the falling away has been reached in their time, in the moment
 in which they themselves live.
 It is always the last period that gives birth to utopia.
 Illustrative of this, and perhaps also the best formula that has been given for it, is
 Joachim de Fiore's idea that we live in the age of consummate sinfulness.
 Also illustrative is Augustine's idea that the world empires that have come to an end
 with the last one, the great Roman Empire, which he as a Roman loved, and that their
 sole successor is to be the kingdom of God, which is in some measure actualized in the
 church, but whose final actualization will take place only after the close of history.
 The same idea is found in India, where it is always the last period in which the theologian
 who speaks of a succession of ages finds himself.
 In Greece, where the Stoics speak about the Iron Age, the last, the most wicked.
 In Marxism, where the class struggle running through the whole of history is seen to have
 reached a point where revolutionary change has become inevitable, because without it
 the human situation would move beyond all hope of redemption.
 In the biologic fascistic ideologies, where decline, decadence of Nietzsche, has reached
 its final stage, where a counter-movement must set in.
 All of these instances show that the triadic progression is centered on the moment in which
 the reversal is immediately imminent.
 This is characteristic of all utopian thought.
 Now another line, millionarianism.
 There are a lot of these, but millionarianism has roots in the Jewish idea of the Messiah,
 that there will be a coming of God on earth to rescue humanity from a fatal impasse.
 The version that this evolved into in the Christian tradition, the apocalypse that is
 described in the New Testament, where there would be a third coming of Christ in a transformational
 period lasting a thousand years.
 So this was, I think, millionaire.
 It's not only the millennium as, for example, the year 1000 or the year 2000, but also the
 idea of a special period somewhere of 1000 years that's transitional to our final salvation.
 Salvation is an important aspect of the millennial idea.
 But the millennial tradition actually begins after the year 1000, when many people were
 disappointed that there wasn't, well, there were a lot of activity.
 My parents have referred to this three-year period that's centered on the year 999, is
 that right?
 So after that is the beginning of a new millennial hope and an extensive literature and an extensive
 actualization in, well, movements.
 You can call them movements.
 These are characterized always by a prophet, the prophete, the charismatic leader of a
 movement, a group of people, sometimes very extensive.
 So there is another magisterial, historical work on this movement by Norman Cone, published
 in 1950 and revised after new discoveries in 1971.
 In this book, an incredible catalog, prophet after prophet, movement after movement, the
 beginning, the middle, the end, the literature, the analysis, the description of the similarities
 and so on, all these movements, including the Quakers, the Shakers, so many.
 This also, like the Utopian movement, is an aspect of the European mind.
 It takes place within the context primarily of Christianity, and these millennial groups
 are all heretical groups, departing from one or another dogmatic aspect of the organized
 church.
 So besides this Christian heretical tendency, they tried to organize communities which epitomized
 a certain ideal.
 Almost invariably, they included sexual freedom as one of the similar tenets, arising repeatedly
 in reaction to the idea of sin and sexual repression in the Christian tradition.
 In the revised work of Norman Cone of 1971, there is an extensive appendix in which is
 translated virtually all of the extant literature of one particular group, which I think in
 the 17th century was so coinciding with the rise of science in England, was very popular
 in England, and they are called the Ranters.
 This group, I think in particular, reading about it, brought up certain similarities
 with our experience in the 1960s and today, a movement in which the prophet obviously
 is Terence.
 Not Ice Cube?
 One of the chief and to me most mystifying aspects of the millenarian movement, as opposed
 to the Utopian, is triadic.
 We have before that was good, we have now, which is the deepest depression that will
 ever be seen in human history, and we have tomorrow, where the virtues of yesterday will
 be restored together with new enhancements, designer drugs or something that will be even
 better.
 On the other hand, the millenarians are dominated by the apocalyptic idea, where human history
 will end at a certain moment with the eschaton, the eschatology of Christianity, culminating
 in some kind of final moment, which is not found in other religions.
 And certainly two of the most outstanding exponents, I think, of this tendency today
 are Terence and José Arguelles, who both agree not only on the eschaton, along with
 Teilhard of Chardin, but also they agree on the date, the year 2012, based on, in different
 ways, they came to this agreement.
 Between these two tendencies of the European mind in reaction to Christianity, the Utopian
 and the millenarian, there is a certain overlap, and there are important similarities and differences.
 So somewhere in the neighborhood of this overlap, I think we could see our own trinity in our
 ten-year history of doing what we're doing now.
 And maybe if this isn't too egoistic to try to consider ourselves in these historical
 trends, at least we could say that these trends may have influenced us, perhaps unconsciously,
 in coming to the positions that we've taken.
 And in case that's so, we might want to consider the outcome of other people who were under
 the influence of these traditions as they unconsciously responded to these deep runnels
 into the morphic field of our culture.
 So a context for self-reflection.
 Well, I think it's very illuminating, that model.
 It makes a lot of sense to me.
 And I think it clarifies a lot of things.
 I mean, I can see in myself both tendencies at work.
 The Utopian tendency is something that's clearly expressed, for example, in socialism.
 I spent many years as a socialist, and believing that there was this primal state of humanity
 living in brotherhood.
 Then alienation caused by serfdom, the feudal system, the rise of capitalism, the industrial
 state, and so on, imperialism, following a Marxist analysis.
 And then the condition where that is overthrown, and one returns to a more primitive, non-alienated
 state eventually, of people living in communities, sharing their goods, and the state withering
 away.
 This is the Marxist Utopian model, with a millenarian aspect in it, because the revolution
 is the millennial, the idea of the revolution ushering in a new age.
 I myself was much influenced by that.
 I was also influenced by scientific Utopianism, having been educated as a scientist.
 And the primary scientific Utopia is, of course, Sir Francis Bacon's book New Atlantis, published
 in 1624, in which he has this vision of an entirely new order in the world, where there's
 a scientific priesthood that operate in this thing called Solomon's House, which is a college
 that rules this island kingdom.
 Someone's shipwrecked on an island, they find themselves in this kind of ideal state, and
 it's ideal, everything's rationally ordered, and there's this scientific priesthood who
 run the show, live in a kind of college where they have organized research, they have gardens
 where they have plant breeding, they keep animals to study the animals and for vivisection
 experiments, they have wave machines to create tanks of water with waves in, so they can
 study how to make dams and harbors properly, by studying artificial tides and storms on
 a small scale through models.
 They study animals and plants, they try to develop a universal language.
 This was satirized by Jonathan Swift in the third book of Gulliver's Travels, The Voyage
 to La Puta, where there's this kind of mad academy with all these people with insane
 projects, like making sunbeams out of cucumbers, and making things out of spider's webs, and
 making incredibly strong fibers out of spider's webs, and a man there who's trying to develop
 a universal language which will overcome all divisions between human beings by having universal
 language, the kind of sign language.
 He goes around with this heavy knapsack on his back, and when he wants to say anything,
 he fumbles around and brings out various signs, which he shows to people, but he ends up with
 such a heavy bag of stuff, he can hardly move around with it.
 Anyway, there's a satire of this kind of scientific utopianism written by Jonathan
 Swift in the first half of the 18th century.
 That scientific utopianism got built into the ideal of progress, of technological and
 scientific progress, which was going to liberate mankind from the bondage of poverty, of disease,
 in slavery to the elements of nature, from fear of storm, fear of cold.
 In fact, it's given rise to the ideology of the modern world.
 Our modern world is based on a kind of scientific utopianism, the whole ideology of development.
 Go through the world, here are these people living fairly contentedly as they always have
 done in rain forests, but they haven't got a cash economy.
 So to make a cash economy, make the economy grow, to get development in place so they
 can buy video recorders and that kind of thing, cut down the forests, mine the ground, and
 have the whole build roads, import trucks, have Coca-Cola on sale, all this kind of thing
 which is now the dominant ideology of the modern world, is a transform of scientific
 utopianism.
 Then there's the liberal political utopianism that has the idea that the socialists and
 some of the liberals have the idea that you bring about this utopia not just through science
 and technology, but through economic and political reform.
 So there are more just institutions, more truly democratic ways.
 It's through social change as well as scientific and technological that this utopia will arise.
 I believed all this for a long time and I think most of us do because it's so deeply
 ingrained in our culture.
 Then there's another transform of this, the New Age movement, that there'll be a kind
 of new utopia brought about through discovery of ancient religious traditions, through finding
 out about what oriental religions have done, through holistic approaches, harmonious ways
 of doing things, that a new age will dawn on earth when everything will once again be
 in harmony.
 This is another kind of utopianism which I've been strongly influenced by.
 And I think Ralph's right in saying that my own book, The Rebirth of Nature, is an
 example of a utopian book.
 The essence of the argument that in the past people treated nature as alive, the earth
 and the heavens.
 There was a harmonious relationship because a recognition of the life and sacredness of
 nature gave a different way of relating to it than this alienated, mechanistic way of
 treating nature as just a bunch of raw materials to exploit for profit.
 So a restoration of the sense of the life of nature could lead to a new society in which
 heaven and earth are mediated through human beings.
 Human beings would be the mediator of the marriage of heaven and earth, to bring about
 a harmonious relationship of the whole of nature on this earth, and somehow bringing
 human society into a right relationship to the earth and the heavens.
 So that is indeed the vision that lies behind my book, which Ralph rightly points out.
 And of course, some of Terence's, mixed in his thinking, half of Terence's thinking is
 utopian, the other half millenarian.
 The utopian side is the psychedelic revival, where there was this ancient society where
 people had a wonderful time harmoniously living on the earth with tremendous vision of all
 these amazing realms somehow related to botany and their ecology.
 Psychedelic vision, collective orgies, dissolving ego boundaries.
 Then it all went wrong.
 The deserts dried up, the earth dried up, the fungi retreated, the psychedelic visions
 became less and less frequent, became substituted by what was originally the medium for storing
 the mushroom, namely a honey solution fermented, turned into alcohol.
 And one then plumbed the bottom depths represented by modern society to be restored, the original
 paradise to be restored by the mass cultivation of mushrooms, the smoking of DMT, and other
 psychedelic revival processes.
 Thus would dawn the psychedelic utopia.
 Well, and Ralph, of course, has another version of this, the mathematical utopia, where the
 great regulative eternal, if not eternal at least, objective mathematical structures,
 the mathematical landscape, the underlying principles which unify the earth and the heavens,
 the fundamental principles reflected in all nature, heavenly and terrestrial, become visible,
 not just to a few high priests of mathematics, but visible to potentially anybody through
 the medium of computer modeling.
 And thus there's a kind of democratization of gnosis, that direct knowledge of fundamentals
 which mathematics has had as its guiding light through the centuries and the millennia.
 And that this gnostic seeing behind the scenes into the roots of the way things are becomes
 commonly available, no longer just through psychedelic visions, but through computer
 models which can be shared and entered into by many people.
 This is what we talked about, how long ago, it seems like weeks ago, it was actually about
 36 hours ago, wasn't it, when we were talking about computers and the psychedelics, yesterday
 morning, 24 hours ago.
 And I think that what happened yesterday afternoon in our rather unsatisfactory discussion was
 that Terence, by the rules of that discussion, was denied his usual millenarian way out and
 was asked to consider what would happen if the millennium were postponed, if it didn't
 all happen in 2012.
 And this forced us out of the field of millenarianism into the field of utopianism.
 Utopianism is to do not...
 Millenarianism, especially since millenarians usually have the end conveniently close, not
 too close, but close enough so that it could be in our lifetimes, not too close that it'll
 happen tomorrow or next year.
 2012's a perfect date from that point of view, 20 years away.
 It'll see us out for quite a while, it's not too close.
 So here's this perfect date, and it really means that one doesn't have to think too much
 about what happens between now and then, because part of the millenarian scenario, as in the
 book of the Apocalypse, as in the book of Daniel, which in this Jewish apocalyptic literature,
 of which the Christian apocalypse is a derivative, this is really a Jewish tradition, it's also
 present in Islam to some extent.
 The end of history involves appalling plagues, it involves appalling diseases that sweep
 the earth, great earthquakes, eruptions, the seas turning to blood, a whole series of disasters,
 ecological, social catastrophes, including plagues and diseases.
 And of course it's only too easy to see all these things coming to bear on our society,
 an inevitable collapse and catastrophe.
 And this is always the precondition for the millennium, there has to be this sense of
 not just things, utopianism may have touched bottom now, but millenarianism involves things
 getting even worse, until the only way out is this total miraculous transformation, the
 coming of the Messiah, the descent of angelic powers, or in Terence's version, well he has
 many versions, many ways of imagining this end of history.
 All of them resemble in some way a kind of collective DMT trip, or if you like, a near
 death or a birth experience, where one passes through an appalling time of disturbance and
 then there's an emergence into some totally new realm of being.
 So the apocalyptic tradition doesn't try to stop things getting worse necessarily, it
 regards it as inevitable, as part of a process being worked out.
 And I think that this is the conflict we all find ourselves in, certainly we got becalmed
 yesterday afternoon in this area between apocalypse and millenarianism and utopianism.
 The utopian vision nowadays is not very strong, there are not many utopians around.
 The old utopianism, the socialist one, there's hardly anyone who's into that anymore.
 The scientific and technological utopia, who believes the world will be saved by more science
 and technology, just run by technocrats.
 The idea, the kind of United Nations social, the world government type of utopias, of which
 there have been many proposed this century, embodied in the United Nations or the European
 Common Market, represents a kind of federalist ideal, which still has some vigor and is still
 important.
 And I'm not knocking these, I think they're very important, but I don't meet many people
 who are wildly enthusiastic about the United Nations or even the European Common Market
 as the sole solution to all our ills.
 I mean, they have a role to play.
 So that isn't exactly something that commands incredible widespread popular enthusiasm.
 So these utopian visions that have guided so much of humanistic and socialistic thinking
 in the present century, secular humanism and socialism, have put their trust in this kind
 of rational reform, education, science and technology, world government, rational discussion.
 The Rio Summit was an attempt to bring that model of world agreement to bear on the ecological
 crisis, and according to the old-style utopian international federalist dreams, everyone
 would have agreed this is the best thing to do, gone back and all the countries would
 have hammered out a compromise, put it in place, and humanity, guided by science, would
 have rationally dealt with the environmental problem.
 As we know, that's not what happened.
 So utopianism is still there, it's still important, it's still strong.
 And an element of my thinking is utopian, an element of Ralph's thinking is utopian,
 an element of Terence's thinking is utopian, and probably an element of all our thinking
 is utopian.
 But what became clear yesterday afternoon is that utopianism is not enough.
 We're in the field of millenarianism, whether we like it or not.
 We're approaching a millennium now.
 All these apocalyptic-type disasters are in place, the AIDS plague, the various toxic
 wastes, the changing climate.
 These kinds of scenarios, signs of the end, are upon us, overpopulation.
 And this puts us very much in the field of this millenarian process, and that is of course
 part of the Christian view of history, which has become now spread throughout the whole
 world.
 Although many people are no longer Christian, this has created a kind of morphic field,
 a model of history, which has come to imbue our whole society.
 And of course, Terence is one of its leading exponents.
 What I'd like to do now is ask Terence how he sees these two strands in his own thinking.
 On the one hand, the archaic revival you see is psychedelic utopianism.
 On the other hand, the time wave, the end in 2012, and a great deal of his thinking
 is millenarian.
 And since he represents both so eloquently, I'd like to know how you see them connecting
 or linking together.
 Yes, well, you're quite right about analyzing both strains of thought in my thinking.
 Utopianism is, as you rightly say, somewhat in discredit.
 On the other hand, if you restrict yourself to the realm of the rational, then you only
 have two choices, utopia or more history.
 And more history is beginning to look less and less likely.
 A hundred years ago, that would have been, well, no, probably these two things have been
 balanced in people's minds for a long time.
 At the beginning of Ulysses, Stephan Daedalus says, "History is the nightmare from which
 I am trying to awaken."
 And I really feel that.
 I can't imagine a thousand more years of human history, more wars, more discoveries, more
 topless photos of Fergie, more and more and more, endless to no meaning.
 On the other hand, utopia, which the efforts to build it have become more and more fierce
 and the efforts more and more horrifying.
 I mean, we've had in this century two serious efforts to build utopia.
 Let's make it three, the American, the Nazi and the Soviet attempts to build utopias.
 All ended very, very badly, I think.
 The National Socialist Utopia ended in the Second World War and in an utter discrediting
 of fantasy fascism.
 And the Soviet Union, we know that story.
 Our own story is in the act of unraveling at the moment, I think.
 And so where does that leave us then?
 It leaves us facing this most unlikely of all scenarios, which is the millenarian.
 And it's irrational.
 The other is rational, you know, out of human plans, dreams and institutions, some more
 humane order might be fashioned.
 That's the hope of utopianism.
 And the conflict in my thinking is I believe in the millennium, but I think it's politically
 a disempowering idea.
 I see all these Christian fundamentalists running around.
 They also believe in the millennium and they are the major anti-progressive force in most
 advanced societies.
 So how can we, what, how should we react to this dilemma?
 Well, in order to understand it, I think it's worth looking slightly afield for a moment.
 What we're really talking about here are origins and endpoints.
 And we've really been talking this morning about endpoints.
 But what about origins?
 The dominant and virtually unchallenged myth of our origin is either that God created us
 in seven days along with all the rest of creation, or that the universe was born out of nothingness
 in a single moment for no reason.
 These are the two choices on the menu.
 They're terribly compelling to rationalists, I dare say.
 Interesting to note that this scientific explanation, the universe sprang from nothing in a single
 instant.
 However, we may think of it in terms of its veracity, notice that it's the limit case
 for credulity.
 Do you understand what I mean?
 I mean that if you can believe that, hell, you can believe anything.
 Sit down and try and think of something more improbable than that contention.
 So it's like they open up with the one-two punch and say, you know, put that in front
 of them.
 If you can swallow that, then, you know, the hydrogen bond, gene segregation, and whatever
 will follow hard a pace, because the hard swallow comes first.
 Well, now I maintain that it's a very odd place to look for what that's called is a
 singularity, and many theories require a singularity.
 That means in order to kickstart the intellectual engine, you have to go outside the system
 and you get one free hypothesis.
 And then once you've used that up, your system has to run very, very smoothly, clear down
 to the end.
 So science uses up its one free hypothesis with the big bang, and it says, you know,
 give me the first ten to the minus high twelve nanoseconds, and if I can do smoke and mirrors
 in that, then the rest will proceed quite in an orderly fashion.
 Now, that's orthodoxy, you've got to understand.
 You know, that's what the straight people believe.
 So I think that if you get one free singularity in your model building, a more likely place
 to put it would be not in a featureless, dimensionless, processless vacuum, super vacuum, it isn't
 even a vacuum, at the beginning, but why not look toward a domain of many temperature regimes,
 many forms of energy, many languages, many chemical systems, many different levels of
 energy exchange.
 In other words, why not look for the singularity late in the life of the universe, instead
 of in the immediate moments of its birth?
 Then what you have is a picture not of a process being pushed by causality toward some heat
 death, billions of years in the future, but what you get is a picture of a universe that
 is flowing naturally toward a dwell point, or a low point in the energy landscape that's
 at the end, that organization transcends itself, produces more complex organization, which
 transcends itself, which produces more complex organization, and conceivably, out of a process
 of avalanching complexity like that, you might actually get a singularity of some sort.
 And this singularity would have the character of an attractor.
 Now I grant you that it's irrational, but our little discussion of the birth of the
 universe should convince you that it's all irrational.
 That doesn't get you tossed out of the game, that's the name of the game.
 So being hopefully a sane person, my own inner dialogue goes back and forth between the desire
 to preserve rationality, and hence channel energy toward utopian hope, which is reasonable.
 After all, we have the money, the scientific knowledge, the communication systems and so
 forth to solve any of our problems.
 Feeding the hungry, curing disease, halting the destruction of the environment.
 The problem is our minds, that we cannot change our minds as quickly as we can redesign harbors,
 flatten mountains, cut rain forests, dam rivers, these things pose no problem.
 Changing our minds is very difficult.
 And because I see that, and because I see it from a psychedelic point of view, and because
 I don't want to abandon myself to despair, instead I see then this transcendental object
 at the end of time.
 This is not part of the utopian schema.
 This is part of the millenarian revelation, but it's a very persistent idea in all times
 and all places.
 This highly unlikely concept has been kept alive.
 And I think that we are blinding ourselves to the intentionality present in our world.
 I think you have to be carrying a lot of unusual intellectual baggage to not see the last thousand
 years as a moving toward a maximizing of some kind of set of goals.
 I mean, it's not the triumphal march into God's kingdom envisioned by Christianity,
 but neither is it the trendless fluctuation that is taught in the academies.
 If you go to a university and ask them, "What is history?"
 They will tell you it is a trendlessly fluctuating process.
 What they mean is it isn't going anywhere.
 Well now that's interesting.
 If it is a trendlessly fluctuating process, then it is the only such process ever observed
 anywhere.
 Processes are not trendless.
 They always are under the aegis of some set of parameters which are being maximized.
 If a desert is drying out, then water vapor levels are dropping.
 That's what's being maximized, is dryness.
 To think of history, the very process in which mind is embedded and through which it expresses
 itself as trendless, it's an existential hallucination.
 Sorry to interrupt.
 It's Lorenzo here just to let you know that I guess I didn't do too good of a job in digitizing
 this tape.
 Apparently it came to an end and cut off, but after I turned the tape over and resumed
 the process, well, I guess I screwed up somehow.
 Somehow, of course, being the fact that we'd been up for several days and nights doing
 all of this digitizing and my brain must have become a little digitized in the process.
 Anyway, I apologize for cutting Terrence off in mid-sentence just now, and I apologize
 in advance for it just now more or less jumping into the middle of a thought and at a different
 recording level at that.
 I know there really isn't any good reason for this, but had you been there, I'm sure
 you would understand completely.
 And now back to Terrence.
 Going back to Plato to say that if God did not exist, human beings would create God.
 We are creating God.
 Our cultural machinery, our dreams of integration, balance, care for each other, care for the
 world, these are God-like aspirations.
 I mean, we really aspire to be God.
 We talk about becoming the caretakers of the world.
 We don't want to be Adam and Eve chewing on the fruit in the garden.
 We want to be the gardener, as in the original scenario.
 I think that the power that we have in our possession means we will realize these dreams.
 If not a real millennium, if not a real eschaton, then a virtual eschaton, created with such
 care and finesse and attention to detail that it becomes an alternative reality of some
 sort.
 So I think people who say you set the scale too tight, if you were saying this would happen
 in a thousand years or five hundred years, it would just be interesting table talk.
 But by saying it's going to happen in twenty years, you present us with an impossible choice.
 But the rates of closure, the speed of acceleration toward the omega point is exponentially accelerating.
 We cannot imagine 2012 by looking backward twenty years and then saying we have that
 much more time to go through before we reach this moment.
 We have much more time because time is moving faster.
 We are compressing more events into it.
 And I think that, you know, this guy Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book, and he's what I would
 consider a secular humanist, a rationalist of some sort.
 And yet the theme of the book is that time is speeding up.
 And we all say this every time Russia shudders and a few more provinces are spun off into
 independence, then cocktail party habitués bore each other for weeks by telling each
 other, have you noticed the time is speeding up?
 Well, I would like to take that seriously and say it is speeding up.
 Not human time, but the time of physics is accelerating.
 You know, we can imagine ourselves colliding with an asteroid or being battered by earthquakes
 or something like that.
 But what we can't conceive of is that we are on a collision course with a kind of hyper-dimensional
 object of some sort.
 What people always object to the millenarian intuition with is they say, well, you say
 a transcendental object is coming parallel or orthogonal to history.
 Don't you find it a little odd that it's going to occur in your lifetime?
 How convenient.
 Out of billions of years, it's going to occur in your lifetime.
 Out of billions of years, this event is going to precisely come tangential to 20th century
 history.
 That objection is not an objection at all.
 It's an argument in favor of my position.
 Because you see, history is the trumpet of judgment.
 A million years ago, there were only animals and plants and rivers and glaciers on this
 planet.
 Human history announces the coming of the eschaton.
 Human history, when you open a door, first there's a crack of light that streams into
 the darkness.
 That's human history.
 We have cracked the door.
 It only lasts about 25,000 years.
 It creates an order in nature never before seen, the order in nature represented by a
 technology using, language using, loving, dreaming species.
 And then you push the door open and you see that, aha, history was the shockwave that
 preceded the eschaton.
 This is pretty straight Christian dogma.
 This is what all these people have been saying, is that there is a covenant between human
 beings and God Almighty, and that the contract will be kept.
 The promise will be kept.
 I think it will be kept.
 And I think the challenge of science is to overcome the struggle with religion that characterized
 science's emergence, and that now science must guide us into the presence of the eschaton
 using the tools and the descriptive approaches that science has perfected.
 In other words, the proper attitude toward the eschaton is not prayer and sacrifice
 alone.
 The proper attitude is inquisitive understanding, curiosity, and delighted anticipation.
 It is an object in nature like the electron, the spiral galaxy, and the human body.
 The end of history is a complex, a nexus, to use Whitehead's word, of temporal complexity
 that accounts for our existence.
 Without the eschaton, there would have been no human beings, no you, no me, no pyramids,
 no Stonehenge, no Catholic Church, no Hasidism.
 None of these things would exist.
 They are the precursive anticipations of the perfection that lies at the end of the morphogenetic
 process of self-expression that history is, and that we are a part of in the sense that
 we represent the individual atoms that are flowing together to make the transcendental
 object at the end of time.
 I will put myself out of business long before 2012 if other people don't start seeing things
 my way, because part of the prophecy, if you will, is that awareness that this is happening
 will spread, not simply through those who take their inspiration from Gideon, but among
 those who study particle physics, temporal matrices, and general modeling of nature.
 Nature cannot be made sense of without this kind of a singularity.
 Science recognized that.
 They just put the singularity out of reach and safely in the past, but they can't explain
 organism, intelligence, or history.
 To do that, you have to take this mysterious moment of concrescent, involutional totality
 and put it in the end state.
 It's a matter of simple logical necessity.
 The fact that it was achieved by psychedelically driven visionary shamanizing only shows how
 similar these two methods are in their conclusion.
 That's all.
 Well, I'm really a little disappointed to hear this.
 Oh my God, I can't take any more disappointment.
 I fully expect to be meeting for another trilogue in 2012.
 I think it will be quite an important one.
 I'll be 76.
 I think that's not too old to get it on.
 Get what on?
 Get this on.
 I never wanted to be on 85 anyway.
 I think that I challenge you, or I try to challenge you both, to leap to another level
 of discussion in the hermeneutical circle by considering ourselves in these traditions.
 Rupert responded by doing that, and I think maybe when he at the end challenged you with
 a question, perhaps you felt defensive, but I feel that rather than rewarding us with
 a consideration of yourself in the tradition, you instead just played another millenarian
 tape, agreed an excellent one.
 And it is an interesting idea, but it is not a consideration of this millennial obsession
 of yours in the context of a deep habit, a runnel in the morphic field of our civilization.
 If one did, then I think it looks more like this.
 We have habits.
 We have habits of thinking about time.
 We have philosophy of time, consideration of time according to certain models.
 The idea of time having a singularity at the beginning and a singularity at the end is
 one model of time.
 And as Rupert has observed in the past, when you believe in the Big Bang, which you correctly
 pointed out is extremely improbable, if you can believe this, you can believe anything,
 you then contradict yourself by suggesting that if you can believe that, well, you gullible
 ones believe this, that there's a singularity at the end.
 There's more evidence for the singularity at the beginning.
 That the situation is quite symmetrical, and either the singularity at the end, the eschaton
 pole that explains the origin of life, for example, such miracles that science is, confounds
 science, or the singularity at the beginning creates.
 What's the difference?
 Then there's another model of time, the cyclical one, where we have this cycle of the four
 ages which is repeated indefinitely, and not only the golden ages in the past, but the
 golden ages in the future, too.
 And the utopian Trinitarian model is a version of that laid down by Joachim when he changed
 the classical four epoch model into a three epoch model to agree with the Christian trinity.
 Now, these two habits which account for, basically for the utopian and the millennial obsessions
 of the human species over this historical period of 6,000 years, these were enabled
 by certain mathematical models of time coming into existence, into consciousness.
 We have a line, we understand a line, then we think of a linear model of time, and a
 circle.
 So, the mathematical consciousness is growing.
 Well, recently we have new models for time.
 Even the greatest exponent of the fractal model of time, yourself, has, I think, contributed
 enormously to the history of the philosophy of time by giving a new model.
 And chaos theory, likewise, has given many new models for transformation which transcend
 the singularity concept.
 There are transformations that we observe in nature, now that our mental apparatus,
 our mathematical cognitive capabilities, has evolved to a certain point where we can recognize
 many other forms of transformation as being canonical things that nature does.
 Rianne Eisler has very cleverly, I think, adapted this new development in mathematical
 consciousness in her own utopian vision by proposing that social transformations such
 as the Renaissance, which is the ultimate new age dream, the Aquarian age, that when
 the pole star moves into a new constellation that will be enough because of the power of
 the heavenly realms to awaken a new level of consciousness in us, there would be, in
 other words, the new age expectation is for a social transformation, a future history
 which is not boring.
 You said you're bored with life, the repetition, just another photograph of Fergie Fitz.
 I think, actually, the dream of a social transformation has historical support.
 You said, what, history is the trumpet of the human experience.
 We have to compare our fantasy of what is going on with the historical record.
 The historical record does not support the eschaton.
 It just doesn't.
 That is a particular interpretation based on a very archaic, a very old, the oldest
 model of time in the history of consciousness is the one that you've implied to justify
 your millennial obsession.
 Can you explain why it doesn't support the eschaton?
 I don't understand.
 It doesn't support the eschaton in distinction to the other models.
 History is actually written according to a conceptual model.
 At the beginning of what you were saying, you said that the two possibilities, the singularity
 at the beginning and at the end of the process of universal becoming, seemed co-equal.
 But to me, why?
 Equally improbable.
 Point it out.
 No, I didn't say that.
 I said I think it's much more probable to find it at the end of a process when you have
 great complexity than to believe it would spring from a state of utter nothingness.
 Why isn't the historical record compatible with the idea of, in our immediate future,
 there is an upcoming, amazing, difficult, and creative social transformation, such as
 the Renaissance?
 That means we have a future which is not boring.
 It may be boring until we get in the vicinity of a transformation.
 The transformation will be a chaotic transient from one attractor to another, a period of
 destabilization when all constraint of history is lifted.
 He is empowered to actually do something instead of being constantly frustrated.
 And then we wake up one morning and read in the paper that the sun is rising in a different
 way.
 This has happened in the past.
 It's in the historical record of the people who wrote the history by whatever their model,
 whether it's the cyclic model for history or the linear and progressive model for history
 or whatever.
 Here's a new model.
 It goes along boringly the same for a while.
 Eventually there's a destabilization.
 You have a rapid change to a new equilibrium.
 And among these different equilibria, there is perhaps a kind of progression in the long
 run.
 In that model, these catastrophic transformations are announced by plagues, by the crash of
 Russia, the dissolution of the established structures, out of which, phoenix from the
 ashes, comes a new organization which might be glorious.
 Now, in this transformational model of history, we have the longest view written in a book
 is Jim Lovelock's history of the earth called the Ages of Gaia.
 And in the Ages of Gaia, he describes the whole history of life on the planet as a series
 of equilibria punctuated by these catastrophic transformations.
 And he says in the history of the planet, there are eight of them that are really major
 transformations.
 The last one is 65 million BP drastic boundary.
 Well, which shows the kind of attention he gives to human history.
 So in that view, even the human species could disappear.
 And life may be boring for microbes, but they must go on.
 The biosphere is not over.
 Life is not.
 Maybe the eschaton is there for the human species.
 Well, I don't know.
 I'm feeling like a slightly mauled in all this, because as you know, I'm the purveyor
 of a mathematically precise theory, which as you know, cannot be laid out in the time
 remaining before this group.
 So I'm being thrashed because it's known that I will not bring up the big guns.
 And so I have to sit and listen to this.
 The reason I don't buy the idea that this is simply one more renaissance or one more
 Gothic revival is because these processes have occurred faster and faster, these breakthroughs
 to novelty.
 So it's just not that they happen.
 It's that they happen faster and faster.
 And whatever James Lovelock's affinity for something happening 65 million years ago,
 a few things of high interest have happened since, like everything having to do with the
 human world.
 And when you look at human history and technology and the spread of peoples and genes and so
 forth and so on, it's clear that we have reached some kind of limit.
 Maybe you get one more renaissance before you slam into the wall, but not a dozen, not
 a hundred.
 This is not the renaissance.
 This is not the rise of Rome.
 This is the final global crisis, and the objective data supports that.
 I know, but it's so provincial, Terence.
 I mean, there's a sense in which this millenarian vision is a product of a historical model,
 that grew up within one branch of human consciousness, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic branch.
 There's a sense in which you could argue that all this is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
 Having unleashed these millenarian visions, our history's been driven by millenarian visions,
 which has actually empowered and directed the discovery of America, the opening up of
 the new world, the development of the atom bomb, the rise of science and technology.
 Most of the things that are actually creating the crisis are man-made, and therefore there's
 a sense in which this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
 And even if we collide into this wall of history here on earth, I find it quite incredible
 that the rest of the solar system is just going to shut up shop and go out of business,
 let alone the galaxy, let alone the clusters of galaxies.
 And here's a man who thinks the sun is alive.
 Oh, all right.
 The sun could undergo a tremendous transformation.
 I'll concede the entire solar system to you.
 But that leaves an awful lot else.
 The rest of the galaxy.
 I'll take it.
 I'll never take the solar system.
 The galaxy can take care of itself.
 Well, no, it can't, you see, because we now move... this is what I mean about provincial
 thinking.
 First of all, it's limited to a tiny fraction of the cosmos.
 And I see the same problem with Tyre de Chardin.
 Is the Omega Point just about human destiny on earth, or just the destiny of the earth,
 or even the solar system?
 Or is it about the entire cosmos, countless trillions of galaxies, stars everywhere, incredible?
 I can't believe that the extinction of human life on earth, the kind of transformation
 you're talking about, even the implosion of the entire solar system, is going to set up
 more than the most minute ripples throughout even our galaxy.
 Well, but implicit in that objection is that you really think those galaxies are there.
 You really believe that there are millions of light years of space and time filled with
 spiral galaxies.
 That could all be scrim.
 The true size of the cosmic stage is a hotly debated subject, even among the experts.
 And when you say it's too local, then you attack it if one takes the other position
 and say, but then how can you possibly believe that it's universal?
 Well, you only have two choices, either what you disdainfully call provincialism, or what
 you disdainfully call universalism.
 It's got to be one or the other.
 I am uncomfortable with the universal thing myself.
 However, I also am uncomfortable with the idea that the universe, as described by Newtonian
 astronomers, should just be absolutely unchallenged.
 This anthropocentric principle that they've begun to allow into their deliberations suggests
 that maybe the stars aren't as fixed in their courses as we imagine, and that somehow events
 on the earth could have a kind of cosmic significance.
 I mean, I'm just speculating.
 Well, I'll tell you how.
 I'm not well-witted to be.
 Well, let me get...
 First I'll deal with my other objection to millenarianism, as proposed by you.
 We have ten minutes remaining.
 Yeah, we have to get going.
 Okay, very quickly.
 The true millenarian vision and the apocalyptic tradition is more like what Ralph says.
 It's a period... it's not a total... everything suddenly disappears in a blinding light.
 It's a period of transformation followed by a millennium, a period of the kingdom of heaven
 on earth.
 Right.
 And that, I think, is something that's lacking from your vision.
 At least you don't think beyond this 2012.
 No, I would...
 I'm interested in...
 ...the term "mascotonic" or something like that.
 Yours is much more absolute.
 Yes, right.
 Now, I'm more inclined to traditional millenarianism, like Ralph is, a transitional period followed
 by some kind of kingdom of heaven on earth.
 And what I think the kingdom of heaven on earth could involve is, first of all, psychedelics;
 secondly, the revival of animism; thirdly, mathematical objects visible to all through
 computers; and fourthly, communication with the stars, so that through conscious communication,
 a network of consciousness begins to link up far beyond the earth to other stars, other
 galaxies, along the lines we were discussing last night.
 A thousand years to effect this linking up of consciousness throughout the entire cosmos,
 at the end of which the true and absolute eschaton might be possible.
 Right now, it would be confined to earth, or at least the solar system.
 Well, the only difference you and I have on this is, I think that this thousand years
 will probably... should be scaled back by two orders of magnitude.
 It's ten years.
 It's from 2002 to 2012, and you will have your psychedelic legality, your cured aids,
 your orgies, your food for everyone.
 The millennium will dawn, I think, sometime around 2002 or 2003, or something like that.
 But it doesn't last a thousand years.
 That was a naivete by virtue of the prophecy being made in a different era, the compression
 of time.
 It will then build quite naturally toward the revelation of the eschaton sometime around
 2012.
 What do you think?
 About that or anything else?
 I mean, this is your...
 Our aborted plan included a space for a response to the weekend from everyone.
 And now we need a new plan, so let's consider this together.
 We can quit now making extra space for final hugs, which I think are very appropriate in
 case Terence is right.
 You're listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one
 thought at a time.
 Save some time for final hugs.
 Now I like that thought.
 There should always be a place for final hugs, even if Terence is wrong, which I believe
 he was.
 I know, I know, you Daniel Pinchbeck fans and die-hard 2012-ers are still expecting
 a singularity four years from now, and maybe we'll experience it yet.
 But for sure, Terence's idea of a ten-year reign of peace from 2002 to 2012 seems pretty
 far off the mark to me, even with the rather remarkable election in the States just now.
 But I do believe that there has been a slight cosmic shift in this corner of the planet,
 and so I thought it might be worthwhile for us all to get our feet back on the ground
 before we let a much-needed transformation turn into dreams of a utopia that simply isn't
 going to arrive.
 In other words, it's time for a reality check.
 Now don't get me wrong.
 I do get it.
 I really understand the magnitude of what happened in the US elections two days ago.
 I remember segregation.
 I saw it in practice.
 And so I really do know what an absolutely impossible thing just happened.
 That it happened during my lifetime I find almost beyond belief, because I know how much
 racism still exists in this land.
 It remains very broad and very deep, yet today.
 But I now see a possibility for us to change, even if ever so slightly.
 Because we didn't just elect a president yesterday.
 We elected a first family.
 And from what I've seen so far, this is going to be the finest first family this nation
 has ever had.
 Now I know that I've promised to keep politics out of the salon, and after today I'll get
 back to that policy.
 But I've got a couple more things I want to say while I circle back to today's topic,
 which is reality check time.
 This spring was the only other recent time in which I mentioned politics.
 At the time I was very passionate about seeing Obama defeat Clinton, and so I said something
 to the effect that even if I had to write in Obama's name that I would still be voting
 for him in November.
 Those words came back to haunt me this past July when he reversed himself on the FISA
 bill.
 I won't go into all that right now, but for me it was treason.
 He had betrayed me.
 And by the way, I still feel that way.
 And so when he did that, I began telling my friends, relatives, and neighbors that I was
 going to vote for either the Green or Libertarian candidate instead of Obama, knowing full well
 that here in California my vote for Obama wasn't needed.
 Well needless to say, many of them actually quit talking to me.
 But in the back of my mind, I remembered what I said here in the salon, and so I knew that
 if I wasn't going to vote for him, I had to at least say something here in the salon before
 the election.
 Yet, I didn't feel that I should be telling anyone how to vote, but ultimately I knew
 that this was such a historic occasion that I'd kick myself for not being a part of it,
 and so I did give him my vote.
 Now bear with me for just a moment more.
 I guess you could say that I'm not his biggest supporter, and that is why I was so surprised
 at my own reaction on Tuesday night as my wife and I watched Barack Obama give his speech
 in Grant Park.
 I still remember Grant Park as the scene of the police riot during the 1968 Democratic
 Convention when hundreds of students were attacked by the Chicago police.
 Yet there was Barack Obama at the scene of the crime of one of the lowest points in American
 history.
 And that old park was transformed into a scene of one of the greatest triumphs in American
 history.
 As I watched and listened to Barack Obama give his speech that night, I'm not ashamed
 to admit I sat there and wept like a baby.
 I truly didn't think I would live to experience that moment.
 While I was an undergraduate at college, I watched John Kennedy give his inaugural address.
 That was a thrilling moment for me back then, a callow youth of 19.
 But I'm here to tell you that it was nothing, nothing in comparison to how I felt on election
 night.
 And remember, I'm one of Obama's critics.
 Yet the symbolism of that moment moved me to tears.
 It was one of the most precious moments in my life.
 That's how moved I was by these events.
 And if you're a person of color or other minority, well, I can't even imagine how exhilarated
 you must have felt.
 What a moment.
 A wonderful moment.
 But as we all know, moments pass us by, and very fleetingly at that.
 So we've had our celebrations.
 Now let's see where we are.
 Well, to begin with, it does actually look as if there will be once again an orderly
 exchange of power in the U.S. Capitol next January.
 And the new guy is so great an improvement over the current occupant of the White House
 that there aren't even words for it.
 That's the positive side.
 The other side of the pancake isn't quite so appetizing, I'm afraid.
 For starters, Obama now supports the new FISA law, which essentially establishes a secret
 police system in this country.
 Search warrants are no longer required.
 You know, it's a true constitutional abomination, and we're stuck with it for a long time now.
 Then there's the number two guy, the new number two guy.
 Granted, he's not an insane evil maniac like the current VP.
 But Biden's a jerk who came up with mandatory minimum sentences and is also the guy who
 came up with the concept of a drug czar.
 On top of that, the last time I heard, he was still against P2P file sharing as well.
 So the faces have changed, but from where I stand, I don't see any significant changes
 in this nutty war on drugs, which is part of the culture wars, of course.
 And on the culture front, Tuesday was not a very good day.
 For example, here in California, where gay marriage is already a constitutional right,
 a bill may have passed that removes this right from the state constitution.
 Now the vote is close and still being counted.
 Plus there are already court challenges to this proposition.
 But how could this happen, you ask?
 Isn't California the most progressive part of the country?
 Yes it is.
 But as is true elsewhere, a significant part of the population gets all of their election
 information from TV ads.
 In the case of the anti-gay proposition, our television stations were clogged from morning
 to night with advertising in support of this anti-human proposition.
 And where did those tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars in advertising fees
 come from?
 Well, it seems that this polygamous cult from Utah has its members all over the world collecting
 money from the poor, from poor uneducated people who think that their donations might
 just buy them a ticket to heaven.
 And then, these alms from the poor have been used to trick the California poor into voting
 against gay rights.
 You can't make this stuff up, you know, but doesn't it seem strange to have a polygamous
 cult lecturing the good people of California about marriage etiquette?
 And I don't want to pull any punches here.
 The anti-gay proposal was overwhelmingly supported by the black and Latino communities in the
 LA area.
 So I say to all of those bigots who voted against gay rights, shame on you.
 How can you vote for a black man in the interest of ending oppression of your race and then
 turn around and oppress another group?
 We have obviously a very long way to go if we're going to move our culture in a more
 human direction.
 And then there was Proposition 5 here in California, which had to do with providing better treatment
 instead of prison for non-violent drug offenders.
 Actually, I prefer to think of people arrested for violations of drug laws as "resisters"
 - members of the resistance, not criminal offenders.
 But that isn't the way the ignorant masses see it.
 Here is what Rob Campia of the Marijuana Policy Project had to say about Proposition 5.
 "We knew from early polling that a substantial majority of Californians favored this major
 reform of the state's prisons and drug sentencing policies.
 The assorted coalition of the Prison Guards Union, the Beer Distributors Association,
 gambling interests, fanatical anti-drug groups and craven politicians raised $3.5 million
 in the last few weeks of the campaign and ran deceitful TV ads across the state.
 Ultimately, we could not compete with their lies and scare tactics."
 And so the state of California will now continue to close schools and libraries in order to
 use that money to expand their prison system.
 Now if that doesn't kill your election day buzz, I don't know what will.
 And just to go back to the Mormon ad blitz against gays and lesbians for a moment, they
 reportedly spent somewhere around $70 million in their attack ads.
 So much for separation of church and state.
 And I realize that I'm stepping on some of our fellow slaughters toes here because I
 know that there are a lot of our friends in Utah who listen to these podcasts.
 But it's time for some tough love, I'm afraid.
 I've actually read the Book of Mormon, and to be honest, if you or I came up with a cock-eyed
 story like that, we'd be laughed out of town.
 Get a grip, and this goes for my friends who are Christians and Muslims, too.
 Just sit down and read those books that you think were written by a god and read them
 objectively.
 Then do some research and dig into the backgrounds of the people who actually wrote these supposed
ly sacred books.
 And if you have to, ingest one of our sacred medicines and see what you think about those
 wild tales once you've broken the chains that were wrapped around your mind when you were
 a child.
 Think for yourself.
 Question authority.
 All authority, particularly religious authorities.
 Religion is a con game, and the sooner you figure that out on your own, the better off
 you're going to be.
 But I'm getting way off track here.
 My point is that we still have miles to go before we sleep.
 A great victory was won on Tuesday.
 A victory for all the people, even the Republicans, even though it'll take them a few years to
 come to that conclusion.
 But now is not the time to sit back and rest.
 Don't think that life on the ground is going to change for any of us any time soon, other
 than to get even more difficult for a bit, that is.
 We're still in for some tough times ahead, but this cynical old Vietnam vet is more optimistic
 and hopeful about the future of life on this planet than I've ever been before at any time
 in my entire life.
 So let's press on.
 And I'd better press on with this podcast right now.
 First of all, Rupert mentioned a trilogue that they'd held 36 hours before and was about
 computers and psychedelics.
 In case you're joining us for the first time today, I should point out that you can hear
 that trilogue in our podcast number 126, which I titled "Psychedelics and the Computer Revolution."
 Next I want to mention that it was Symbiont on the Psychedelic Salon forum over at thegirlreport.com
 who was the one that posted the information about the psychedelic conference in Australia
 that I mentioned last week.
 After finishing the recording of last week's podcast, I realized that I didn't give him
 or her credit for the information.
 So thanks again, Symbiont, and thanks also for participating in our forums.
 And finally, I want to mention our friends over at Arrowid.
 I'm sure that you've been to arrowid.org, E-R-O-W-I-D dot org, but in case you haven't
 heard, it is without a doubt, hands down, the very best source of drug information on
 the internet.
 And I know that Anne and Sasha Shulgin, among many others, agree with me on that.
 I know most of the people involved in that project, and in my opinion, they are all impeccable.
 And I never say that lightly.
 Anyway, the new edition of Arrowid Extracts is now at the printer.
 And if you aren't already an Arrowid supporter, now is the perfect time to become one and
 get a copy of their latest printed journal.
 Here are some of the things that you're going to find in it.
 Results of a 2C-B fly survey, an article on a novel smoking cessation therapy that uses
 scopolamine and atropine, a report about the Boom Festival, a look at on-site pill and
 substance testing, information about chunga, which is a DMT and MAOI-containing smoking
 blend, and more.
 Now Arrowid was having a membership drive in October, but I'm sure that they would more
 than welcome you if you stopped by right now.
 They're really a wonderful group of people doing some very important work.
 My wife and I have been members for a long time now, and we hope that you're also a part
 of this important project as well.
 Well, that's about it for today.
 But as always, I'll close this podcast by saying that this and all of the podcasts from
 the Psychedelic Salon are available for your use under the Creative Commons Attribution
 Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 license.
 And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the
 bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, 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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