[Music]
 Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the
 psychedelic salon. And I want to begin today's podcast by thanking Toby E for
 his generous donation to the salon that helps offset some of the expenses
 incurred in producing these podcasts. Really appreciate your help Toby. Thank
 you very much. Well today I'm dipping back into that old box of tapes that
 Ralph Abraham loaned me and I'm gonna play another trial log that he recorded
 between Terrence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake and himself. And while it may
 not be as compelling as some of their discussions about psychedelics, there
 there are a couple of things that make this recording really stand out for me.
 The first is the fact that you know I've always kind of wondered what all of
 those non-public trial logs were like. You know what did they really talk about
 when they got together? Well what we're about to hear is a recording from one of
 those sessions. This trial log or focused conversation took place on the Big
 Island of Hawaii sometime in 1994. As I recall Ralph told me that after the
 publication of their trial logs at the edge of the West book in 1992, they
 decided to record some of their private conversations in the hopes that maybe
 another book or two would emerge. Now as far as I know there wasn't a book that
 emerged from the trial log we are about to hear, but their topic remains one of
 great interest for us yet today and that is the course of evolution. At least
 it is of great interest of us, those of us who like to think of ourselves as
 evolutionaries. So now let's join Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and
 Rupert Sheldrake as they sit around the kitchen table and kick around a few
 ideas about evolution. This particular trial log which is Hawaii what it tells
 us about evolution, how it relates to island ecosystems and their evolutionary
 progress generally, falls to me because in the course of my life as chance would
 have it I have visited most of the major theaters of evolution that involve
 island groups that are considered to be exemplars of the various types of island
 groups on the planet. Hawaii where we are recording these trial logs is of course
 a group of mid-ocean volcanic islands. The only other mid-ocean volcanic island
 groups in the world are the Azores and the Seychelles. They offer great
 contrast to Hawaii, particularly the Seychelles which as a portion of the
 Madagascan landmass have been above water some 300 million years longer than
 any other place on the planet and so the evolutionary process there offer a
 dramatic contrast to how evolution has proceeded in the Hawaiian Islands. The Hawaiian
 Islands represent a unique case because of the size of the volcanic calderas and
 vents beneath the Pacific floor that have created them. In fact these vents and
 volcanic systems the largest on the planet. So what we have in Hawaii is a
 tectonic plate sliding slowly toward southern Russia and Japan that is
 crossing over a weak place in the Earth's crust and a place where the core
 magma of the planet lies a considerable percentage closer to the surface than anywhere on Earth.
 And the result of this situation is a series of islands formed in the same
 spot that each after its volcanic birth is rafted on the continental plate off
 toward the northwest. The life in the Hawaiian Islands shows 30 to 35 years of
 indemnices by the ordinary rates of gene change that biologists recognize.
 Nevertheless geologically speaking no Hawaiian Island is older than 12 million years.
 The obvious interpretation of these events is that life arose out here on
 islands which no longer exist and as islands rose and fell the life
 hopscotched from one island to another and indeed the dispersal rates of birds,
 tree snails and this sort of thing moving eastward from Kauai across Oahu,
 Molokai, Maui to the Big Island show that this gradient is still operable.
 The forests of Kauai are the most species rich forests of the major islands.
 Hawaii's climate forests are the most species poor because animals are still arriving here from the other islands.
 Because these volcanoes are so huge Hawaii has a complete range of
 ecological systems from sea level to 14,000 feet which is virtually the
 entire range on the planet in which life is able to locate itself.
 The volcano itself is in fact by volume the world's largest mountain because what it
 represents is a 14,000 foot mountain before it breaks through to sea level because it's
 rising from the Pacific floor and in this part of the world the Pacific floor is 13,000 feet deep.
 So this island was in this mountain was enormous before it ever broke water.
 It now rises 13,000 feet above sea level and its sister mountain, Mauna Kea, is only shorter by 120 feet.
 So what has been created out here is a very closed ecosystem far from any continental land mass.
 The forms of life which arrive here arrive on rafted debris or tucked into the feathers of migratory birds or in some other highly improbable fashion.
 What we see here is a winnowing of continental species based on extreme improbability.
 As an example a very common Sierra Nevada wildflower of no great distinction.
 Apparently some millions of years ago a single seed arrived on Maui and has created,
 through back-crossing, has created a mutated race of plants that we know as the Hawaiian silversword,
 which is one of the most bizarre plants that the islands have produced.
 In terms of islands within islands, the fractal adumbration of nature, it's very evident here.
 For example, because the island is created by a series of flows of varying ages,
 there is a constant process in which ecosystems become islanded by lava flows cutting them off.
 And so you have a series of micro-islands of species that develop independently of each other,
 even though they may only be some few miles apart,
 but separated by a landscape so toxic and desolate that there is very little intermixing of genes.
 This is why this is thought to have been a formative factor in the evolution of the Hawaiian drosophila,
 which of course were very, very useful in early studies of genetics
 because the chromosomes of the Hawaiian drosophila are 10,000 times larger than the ordinary drosophila chromosomes
 and can actually, in the era before electron microscopes, you could actually color band with certain dyes
 the chromosomes of these drosophila.
 Early chromosome unraveling went forward through these studies.
 So, in terms of extrapolating all of this particular natural history data to some sort of general model,
 I think what life on islands brings home to us is that the earth itself is an island.
 I've been saying for many, many years that one of the most revolutionary,
 yet totally trivial and predictable revolutions sure to come in biology
 is the recognition that all these models of island isolation and species dispersion across oceans
 can easily be expanded to the three-dimensional ocean of outer space.
 Very, very clearly, viruses, pions, gene fragments, this sort of thing percolates between the stars
 as simply, statistically, a very low component of the percolation of inner game matter between the stars.
 Indeed, there have been many attempts to establish this idea.
 Fred Hoyle and the theory of the cometary origin of life, some of these ideas have gone forward.
 It seems to me perfectly obvious that in time this will be embraced.
 After all, viruses can freeze down to crystalline states that are almost minimalist.
 And as for dispersion between celestial bodies, it's now generally agreed that a number of Antarctic meteorites
 that have been recovered are in fact fragments of Mars.
 So the work on island dispersal patterns and the statistics and the mechanics of this
 will eventually play a role in modeling how life evolves in the galaxy.
 Some of the other islands that I've been fortunate enough to relate to were, for example, the Indonesian islands,
 which are the absolute other spectrum of the class of tropical islands,
 because what we have here in Hawaii, as I said, is mid-ocean islands far from continental floras and faunas.
 What we have in Indonesia is in fact a submerged continent.
 As recently as 120,000 years ago, Indonesia, from Sumatra to New Guinea, was a single landmass.
 And in the process of its subsidence, the sea filled in the low spots,
 so that there is a direct correlation between species differentiation on any two Indonesian islands
 and the depth of the sea between them.
 And these correlations have been shown over and over.
 One of the great conundrums of 19th century biology is the so-called problem of Wallace's line.
 Wallace believed that between the island of Bali and Lompoc, and then going west of Celebes,
 he could draw a line, which was the line of convergence between the Australopithecine biogeographical zones
 and the Asian Malayan zones.
 And statistical studies, Ernst Mayr principally, have disproven this notion.
 However, I have collected butterflies and stood in these forests on both sides of Wallace's line in several places,
 and I completely understand, and in fact wonder about Mayr's conclusion.
 I completely understand Wallace's impression, that these forests are staggeringly different.
 The bird calls, the butterflies.
 But what Mayr seemed to show was that there was no distinct line.
 There was a gradient from Australia to Malaya in one direction, and Malaya to Australia in the other direction.
 Island groups like this, and I haven't mentioned the Galapagos, but they are another one,
 are such obvious laboratories of speciation, that when Darwin and Wallace and Walter Henry Bates
 and other people who were grappling in the 19th century with the so-called species problem
 set out to do their fieldwork, they just could not fail to be impressed by this peculiar theme and variation.
 Theme and variation.
 But they could not understand whose fingers strung the harp
 until they realized that similar populations, separated by catastrophes,
 such as the arrival of ocean water or a lava flow or something like that,
 then come under very slightly different selected pressures,
 which cause a very slightly different physical aspect to be taken on.
 And so in the Amazon basin, for example, you can move 2,000 miles
 and have only about a 15% replacement in certain butterfly species.
 In Indonesia, you can cross a strait of water 20 miles wide and have a 70% replacement in butterfly species.
 And Darwin and Wallace, familiar with these places, both the continental flora and fauna,
 and the island situation, finally figured out what the mechanism was.
 And it's a wonderful thing, you know, butterfly diversity, for example,
 is a situation where diversity itself becomes and it confers adaptive advantage
 because butterflies are largely predated upon by birds.
 And it's been shown in numerous studies that birds hunt a target image.
 They have an image of the prey.
 Well, if through the chance recombination of genes, your wing color or wing shape
 pushes you outside the target spectrum, you will be ignored.
 And so, like, so variety itself becomes a premium in the evolution.
 Again, novelty itself then is preserved because novelty confers adaptive advantage in this situation, birds and butterflies.
 Well, I think the implications of these things lie close to the surface.
 We, Earth, is a small island. We are making great changes in its ecological parameters.
 We are affecting its plant and animal populations. By studying how evolution has shaped island groups,
 we can appreciate, I think, our own small cosmic island and perhaps eventually draw politically empowering conclusions from that.
 What a wonderful view of things, Tom. It's marvellous and a real delight.
 The main evolutionary puzzle that comes to my mind, in the view of what you said,
 is that if islands have this tremendous role in speciation, as all evolutionists believe,
 and which, in fact, as you say, both Darwin and Wallace provide the classic cases,
 then if we have places where there are contact, island chains and archipelagos have incredible rates of speciation in Southeast Asia,
 the Malaysian archipelago, including Malaysia and Indonesia, is unbelievably species-rich,
 one of the great creation centres of the world of species.
 That's the tropical forest I know best, having lived there.
 And the quality of that forest, its creativity, from what you've said, would come from a combination of island factors
 plus mingling of two totally radically different floras giving rise to all sorts of new possibilities and combinations.
 And that it was pumped by the repetitive comings and goings of the sea,
 which repeatedly islanded populations and then reunited them in periods when water was concentrated with the tall.
 And presumably also pumped by the ice ages, which must have compressed all forms of life towards the tropics,
 and then there'd been a retreat again away from them at the end of each ice age.
 Well, that would explain a lot about the pumping, and it makes incredible sense about the Malaysian archipelago.
 What I don't understand is, on the view of this day, how the Amazon, which is a large non-island area,
 comes to be the other major centre of species creation and diversity.
 The answer is very simple. It has simply been above ground for a very long time.
 In other words, the Malaysian-Australopipuan situation is probably no more than 70 or 80 million years,
 that that map has looked like that.
 The Amazon, on the other hand, has been above water 280 to 300 million years.
 So simply being in the tropics with three, four, five breeding seasons a year for many organisms,
 and never being inundated by sea water or catastrophe, allowed that incredible climax of speciation on a continental landmass.
 You're right, it didn't happen as far as we know in Africa,
 although Africa is so heavily impacted by human beings that any notion of its original natural history is impossible.
 But that's the short answer, that it was just above water a long, long time.
 But then, you see, we have two methods of speciation.
 One is spontaneous production of species just by being around a long time, without island separation, the case of the Amazon.
 The other, we have all the well-understood neo-Darwinian mechanisms, speciation, pumping of things, mixing of gene pools, and so on.
 What pumped the Amazon situation on a micro level is the meandering of rivers.
 You see, it's very hard in a climaxed forest situation for any new mutation to have a salutary effect.
 But because rivers meander and destroy forests and create sandbars and the intermediate shifting zone of what is called uninhabited land,
 so-called predatory species can move in there.
 And that's where the speciation is taking place.
 Carl Sauer estimated that before the advent of culture, of human culture,
 it was the meandering of rivers was the main force promoting plant evolution on the planet.
 And a vast amount of this shifting of boundaries goes on.
 And it's in that shifting boundary that mutants, new forms, can get hold.
 That's why a predatory species will have the following characteristics.
 It will be an animal, and it will be a prolific seeder.
 It will be herbaceous, not woody.
 In short, it will be a weed.
 That's what a weed is.
 A pioneer species.
 A pioneer species.
 A tremendously predatory species designed for open land, utterly unable to compete in the forest,
 but in open land able to take hold very rapidly.
 Yes, I think that there may be a certain proliferation just for its own sake.
 You see, I think isolation, new environments, and so on, explain one side of evolution.
 I think there's another side which neo-Darwinism can't explain,
 because it puts too much emphasis on natural selection.
 This is Willis, the great British botanist who lived on Ceylon, and knew the Asian flora well.
 In the '30s and '40s, he had all these things about evolution by divergent mutation rather than natural selection.
 And in Ceylon, he showed that in the Podis Demaceae, a group of water plants that live in streams,
 that leaves the plate on the water, there's an amazing variety of species in streams and rivers in Ceylon,
 sometimes many different species growing in the same river.
 And any attempt to account for this in terms of marginal differences in leaf shape,
 giving selective advantage, just fails.
 And he shows the same is true of many flower patterns, many tropical leaf forms, and so forth.
 Well, I think you'd have to look at this more closely, Wayne,
 and how variety itself somehow confers advantage.
 I would go through the plants and look for chemical, very slight chemical variances in the gene expression,
 because probably this variety is to confuse some feeder,
 and that it's literally bewildering variety is an excellent defense against predation.
 I've always wondered why, like the hapu here, an excellent example.
 Here we have these two tree ferns. They're two distinct species.
 As far as I can tell, they're distributed in a ratio of 50/50 here.
 One has little black, stickery stems, and the other has a fuzzy, brown, soft stem.
 What selective pressure caused stickers to work for one and down to work for the other,
 and they're standing right next to each other?
 It seems to me there must be a drift of genes, or a simple--for variety itself.
 Well, that's Willis's point, that life itself is constantly throwing out new forms, novelties,
 that novelty is the essence of it, and unsuccessful novelties will be weeded out.
 Very successful ones will be a sort of wild success,
 but a lot of these novelties, which may just be different--
 you know, these two tree ferns work equally well in this environment--
 there may just be lots of entirely equivalent things where you've got novelty for novelty's sake,
 and that this is the nature of the evolutionary process,
 and natural selection plays a much smaller role than if you try and explain all forms
 in terms of the close sculpting of natural selection.
 Yes, in the Indonesian butterflies there is this concept of what's called the conspecific species,
 which means that when you're on Bali there is a certain butterfly,
 and then you go to Lompoc and there is a butterfly which is different from that butterfly,
 and cannot naturally cross with it, and yet is so obviously the same butterfly,
 that it's the conspecific species, and they have been isolated in this way,
 and so by that means there's a variation, and then sometimes these populations can be reunited,
 and some very small percentage can transfer genes, and then you get even more variety.
 Cool.
 Well, getting back to Hawaii here, it seems that I understood you right,
 that what's unique about Hawaii is the Hawaiian islands are young,
 and they're maximally oceanic islanded, they're far from the continent,
 and the process of the population of a new island from a neighboring island is visible,
 even in the present, and then we see a certain pattern which is repeated over and over again,
 even in the course of a century.
 So it seems to me that these different examples you're talking about
 conflate two different processes more or less, but projected upon the same screen.
 One is purely a biogeographical process,
 which could at least be imagined to be operating the same way without any evolutions.
 We have only the same species that ever were to be found on Maui
 are suddenly appearing on Hawaii by a process of dispersal,
 pioneering the successful species, the creation of an ecology suitable for the second species,
 and there are space-time patterns developed one upon another
 in a very interesting fractal movie that to begin with would have nothing to do with evolution.
 On top of that, you have, I'm not sure where the relative timescales are,
 then you have an evolutionary process involving speciation
 either during or after the dispersal, pioneering, and what you call a civilizational process
 of a brand new island.
 Is the evolutionary process essential to the population of the new island, or isn't it?
 Well, I think in the short term it isn't, in the long term it is,
 because any form of life arriving in these islands is not home free.
 It's then got to contend with this kind of islanding by volcanic flow that I talked about,
 and other large-scale catastrophic events that are hypothesized to have gone on in the Hawaiian Islands.
 So basically what we see here is just genes being mixed and stirred, probably,
 at a faster rate than in most places, and that's without even mentioning
 the vast number of plant and animal introductions brought by human beings.
 One of the other unique things about Hawaii that we've been enumerating was
 that the human beings arrived late, and this in some sense gives us a clearer picture of what happened.
 But it's almost as though Hawaii is a speeded-up microcosm of the Earth itself,
 because probably eight-tenths of the Big Island is in the pre-archaeozoic phase.
 In other words, almost abiopic.
 And then large areas are covered by lichens, a fern or two here in the crevice,
 and then a small percentage of a post-cometary impact forest of flowering trees inhabited by man.
 The biogeographical process, really without a kind of modulation by speciation,
 is a kind of recapitulation of evolution.
 That is, there's a resonance between evolution in the past and biogeographical development in the present.
 So the conflation of these two things is not an accident of thought,
 but because there's a resonance between these two processes.
 Yes, they're fractal in relationship to each other.
 If you supposed that an animal's genetic heritage never changed,
 but that it moved across the surface of the Earth from one environment to another by being blown and swept there,
 then nevertheless you would get different forms of this animal,
 because selective pressures are different in different places.
 So without any change in the general model,
 you would get a series of divergent forms through natural selection in the absence of gene.
 That's why we're different from the little green men in the UFOs.
 Well, back to this resonance idea, you used the word "pumping," and I like that,
 but I think it's a form of resonance.
 There's sort of a forcing or a coupling or a codependence between these two different processes.
 There's a totally physical one, as for example new lava flows, the meandering of rivers, the rising of the island.
 And then it kind of pumps the space-time evolutionary pattern formation process.
 Well, it couples back into the Earth itself.
 Really, the ice ages are the pump.
 They raise and lower sea levels. They create deserts and drop humidity.
 They force change, and they are probably driven by fluctuations in the dynamics of the sun.
 And this is now pretty well in hand.
 And therefore, to correlate with the novelty wave, have you tried mapping it against the ice ages?
 Thank you for that opportunity to...
 Well, I think we should have a figure of correlation in our text.
 Oh, I have one.
 You guess. Well, let's put it in the ice ages and the novelty wave.
 Good.
 I should just point out that the process looks a bit different if you take morphic resonance into account,
 which standard neo-Darwinian biogeography doesn't.
 Well, habit then becomes a much more important process.
 Habit formation.
 And we know that organisms adapt to new environments.
 Any given plant, you could take seeds from any of these plants and grow them at different altitudes and in different climates.
 And in many, they'd survive.
 But they'd look different from the way they do now.
 Grow them there for several generations, and they can adapt, and they take on, as Barton would say, a new habit.
 And I think you see that kind of habit formation gives you very rapid evolution.
 All of us can adapt to change circumstances in a matter of days, or in the case of coming here, more years.
 In fact, everything adapts without any gene change, organism change, as it adapts, it forms new habits.
 Well, behavior is that small mulch of adaptability that is supposedly not genetically driven.
 Well, behavior is one form of adaptive habit, and we know those best.
 But the way that plants grow, for example, in different environments is another.
 They can vary enormously over a range of environments, in form and stature and leaf shape and so forth.
 So I think that this gives a much more rapid way of understanding evolution,
 that instead of just random mutation and sculpting by natural selection,
 you have a positive adaptation of the animal or plant itself to a new environment.
 It reacts and responds appropriately in a creative way, creating new habits, new subspecies, new forms of life.
 So the creative adaptation of life to new circumstances, in my view, is what's going on,
 in the way that when you see a plant adapt or an animal learn a new and adaptive pattern of behavior,
 what you're seeing is the innate creativity of life in action, not blind random mutations,
 not just physical forces, not just natural selection, but a kind of creativity inherent in all life.
 Well, I think it was L.L. Hwang who pointed out that a great deal of selection goes on
 where an organism emerges from the womb, and that to pretend that natural selection operates on a tabula rasa is completely naive.
 The first environment is the environment of the womb, and many don't make it.
 So those who do have already been subject to a process of natural selection and winnowing that was quite infamous, quite to all species.
 But there's still a large range that can pass through that.
 In the case of plants, where you don't have wounds, you've got a seedling stage, a fairly brief one.
 Well, no plant can survive that, can't go through that, unless it propagates vegetatively.
 So they're vulnerable there.
 But the fact is, lots of seedlings don't look that different from each other, a lot of them.
 In the earlier stages, they're hard to tell apart.
 So you seem to have a fairly generic pattern there.
 The differences come out later in both animals and plants, the later-formed structures.
 Anyway, I think that this creativity and adaptation enables us to understand that whenever you have all these physically new environments
 and meandering rivers, lava flows, recolonization, moving from island to island, and so forth,
 these, as you say, create new environments, micro-environments, and lead to a great deal of creativity.
 There's one other thing that this theory suggests.
 Not only would you have this creativity through adaptation in individual organisms,
 you'd also, by morphic resonance, have transfer of forms from place to place.
 So conspecific species could be an appearance just by morphic resonance, copying of forms, like in the placental mammals and the marsupials,
 where you've got all these parallel forms.
 Well, it would augment the natural selection of separated gene genomes.
 Yes. These things all work together.
 I mean, there's still natural selection of gene pools, but it's a rather foreshortened view of the whole process,
 which involves creativity, adaptation, spread of habits as well, in my opinion.
 And so I suppose the thing that puzzles me most, really, is why there haven't been more species and more forms in Hawaii.
 You know, we look around this rain forest here and there's just one or two tree species,
 whereas in a tropical rain forest in the Amazon or Malaysia, there'd be hundreds.
 Again, the answer is time.
 You know, 300 million years versus 20 million years.
 That's what it is.
 Well, there's so many reasons to fail here.
 I personally find the environment harsh, or lush as it may look to you or other people.
 And I suppose that one way a new species could fail is through having bad habits.
 There may be habits that manifest visually to us only in terms of spatial pattern.
 The colonization of the black lava by these trees, what are they called?
 Oh, the ohia.
 The ohia tree.
 The ohia tree disappears in a certain fractal pattern in which there are characteristic frequencies of distance
 that have to do, I suppose, with the distance the seeds fly in the wind or something like that.
 There is a certain spatial pattern which is the necessary one for survival that has a kind of a morphic resonance.
 I mean, a resonance of space-time pattern with the physical substrate itself.
 And other species, although they would look equally strong or stronger in the environment of a planetarium,
 if they dispersed in the lava, they can't make it because their spatial characteristic is wrong.
 So in the change of a species that may not involve DNA,
 it could be a change of habit in terms of the spatial distribution.
 It could just be a response to a nutrient that causes a change of size
 and therefore characteristic distance in the space-time patterns.
 We seem to see that, well, first we see the lichen.
 The lichen creates just the minimum of degradation of the surface that makes it possible for the ohia tree to grab a hold.
 And the lichen as a pattern is obviously fractal.
 It's sort of characteristically fractal.
 And the lava surface is fractal as well.
 And fractal means that there's a resonance across scales.
 Then the lichen scale, which is much smaller, is not--
 There may be many kinds of lichen, but only this one grows because its fractal pattern is,
 in spite of the apparent difference in scale, because of resonance across scales,
 has the right basic form, something like the time wave,
 so that as a matter of fact it's compatible with the bare rock.
 And then the ohia tree is compatible with its fractal pattern,
 apparently on a much larger scale is nonetheless resonant, harmonious,
 as opposed to other species that might be disharmonious.
 Harmony, this capability of a certain space-time pattern, is a habit which may change
 and adapt in a way that requires no change in DNA at all.
 It's a non-genetic variation just in resonance to some kind of morphic field.
 So you're talking about the evolution and development of whole ecosystems.
 And I think what's interesting about that is that these ecosystems get established,
 then there's repeated lava flows, and they're wiped out again and again and again.
 Divided and re-divided.
 And then lava flows are re-colonized.
 The entire ecosystem has to move, not just single species.
 So you've got a portable ecosystem.
 Maybe that's why it has to travel light.
 And evolve again, and learn a new way, too.
 Because the Amazon forest, to have the whole thing, to transport the whole of that,
 where some seeds drop to the ground, others are blown by wind, others are carried by birds,
 to get the whole thing to move, if the whole thing just had to move from place to place,
 what it had to do in the past, I suppose, is adapt to changing rivers
 and adapt to shifting cultivation much more recently.
 But here, the whole thing--
 But strangely enough, the Amazon, too, is an incredibly inhospitable place.
 It's all what's called podzolic sand.
 In terms of the way foresters measure these things, this is a much more hospitable place,
 in that in the Amazon, at any given moment,
 I'm talking about, say, for instance, the Rio Guajardo Valley,
 98% of all organic matter is bound within a living system.
 In other words, there's no detritus on the forest floor, there's no falling leaves.
 Well, here, it's probably 80%, something like that.
 There is detritus, there are fungi, there are pockets of soil.
 The Amazon is in a frenzied state of recycling.
 A palm frond falls, and you pass the same place 20 minutes later, and it's gone.
 It was 16 feet long and 5 feet wide. It's gone.
 The ants have just taken it.
 And this is the rate at which--
 It was estimated that minerals in rainwater falling in the Amazon
 flow an average distance of 1/2 centimeter
 before being completely bound and absorbed in the organic systems.
 Well, there's so many trees per square kilometer,
 and there's this climax forest 200 feet high,
 and here, everything is very sparse and thin.
 Does it just need 250 million years or something to thicken up?
 No, it's 19 degrees north, which is a long way north.
 It's a pseudotropical forest, in my estimation.
 It would not be nearly this lush if it weren't that its climate is created
 not by its latitude, but by the ocean.
 It is bathed by warm currents, in the same way that England's climate is,
 in a sense, a godsend.
 Nobody that far north should expect temperatures like that,
 and nobody this far north should expect a situation like this.
 But it's just very mild, very stable,
 and that accounts for it.
 I believe it's on the latitude of the Maasai.
 Going back now to this question of the morphogenetic field of an entire ecosystem,
 I'm bothered by the creation myth, and I just want to ask you guys about this.
 In this creation myth of the Hawaiian Islands ecosystem that you described,
 there are these islands which have already disappeared,
 and the ecosystem has jumped from them onto Kauai and so on.
 But as I understand, these islands are rafting along over this more or less stationary hot spot.
 Those earlier islands were also right here where we are sitting today,
 also very distant from any continental landmass.
 So is day one of biology on the Hawaiian Island chain,
 was, we are to understand, a result of long-distance dispersion because of rafting and birds came.
 But then they had to recreate an entire ecosystem,
 it seems so coincidentally similar to island ecosystems elsewhere.
 Because they had to follow the same creodes and were constrained by the same process.
 Nothing happened until the right lichen arrived after the failure of millions of years of bird and raft carried.
 Well, the lichen, I suspect, could probably be found in air samples above any point on the planet.
 So you've got spores as the first colonizers.
 Yes, and then the ferns come next.
 And of course, the reason the non-flowering plants conquered the planet, if you think about it,
 is because the planet was like Hawaii.
 It was new lava, it was endless life flows and the ferns could do get cold.
 We think of ferns as soft and somehow spoiled plants.
 Actually, they're the toughest plants there are.
 When we study biology, they teach you xyloton.
 You have to dissect xyloton, it's held up as the most primitive land plant.
 This forest is full of xyloton, I can point it out to you.
 These guys are tough.
 They're tough, they're tough.
 But how did they get here? These seeds are carried by birds.
 Well, spores, no. Well, yeah, sure, spores, mud on the feet of migratory birds could carry millions of spores.
 Well, this is one of my favorite explanations.
 John Michel particularly likes this, the Fortians, it's one of their beloved explanations.
 You see, the Fortians have studied the phenomena where you have new pools appear, lakes are created and so forth.
 And within, you know, 20 years or something, they've got all the things a regular lake should have.
 You know, the right flora, tadpoles, the right kind of fish swimming in the water, you know, daphnia, water beetles and so forth.
 And the nearest lake may be many, many miles away.
 So the explanation for this that's accepted without question is that they all got there on ducks' feet.
 And so ducks' foot hypothesis is...
 Well, but spores, I think, are a little more reasonable.
 Spores are a little more reasonable.
 The Fortians have a great time with the ducks' foot hypothesis.
 Obviously, do spores mutate into mallard ducks, cattails, minnows?
 Well, no, they have their own explanation.
 The teleportation theory.
 You see, they believe that nature air-pours a vacuum and that when the right thing is needed by the ecosystem,
 if it's not there, it simply teleports it from where it is.
 So you need to assemble a tropical forest.
 You've got to have trees, tree ferns, lian-type vines.
 You know, the whole thing's certain regulation things a tropical tree forest morphic...
 tropical forest morphic field ought to have.
 Hawaii satisfies those criteria with the minimum number of species.
 But the fact is it has to have all those.
 And so they think that all these cryptozoological reports of pumas in Scotland and jackasses on Dartmoor and so on,
 that these things...
 I'm sure that happens.
 [laughter]
 These reports of... you know, they love these... and falls of fishes.
 You know, the falls of fishes and of frogs.
 When animals just fall from the sky...
 Well, can we agree that they represent sort of the trailing edge of a bell curve of probability?
 No, I don't think we can.
 Because I think that they... I think that there's no... the reports are indisputable.
 When animals fall from the sky, people cracking open stones that have been there for thousands and thousands of years
 find living toads embedded within them.
 But, you see, they accept... they take the teleportation hypothesis seriously.
 There's evidence of it in the human realm.
 You know, Sai Baba seems to manifest things that could be teleported and so on.
 If that's their best exhibit, they'd better run for cover.
 My God.
 I'd rather eat my chickens, you ungracious Sai Baba.
 [laughter]
 Would you? Would you leave your chickens alone?
 No, I think they'd be in danger of teleportation.
 At a minimum.
 [laughter]
 At a minimum.
 Anyway, if species can move, there's a way in which they might be able to move
 or be reconstituted or by... in ways over and above spores, seeds, rafts, etc.
 And that, I think, makes... may seem of minimal interest in the context of the Earth,
 a merely eccentric theory.
 It becomes much more interesting when we take up your theme of the Earth itself being an island
 and the biology on Earth being an island biology.
 When we then consider how things could have moved through from other planets
 and maybe other star systems, then ducks' feet are out, for starters.
 I mean, you can get in the sort of film that...
 Well, I mean, that's the idea that there's an underlying set of resonances
 that matter will flow along similar creodes in similar regimes of chemistry and pressure,
 whether they're here or in orbit around Arcturus.
 And so, I mean, this is what fuels the expectation that on an Earth-like planet
 there would be Earth-like beings.
 But I would say by morphic resonance, you see,
 because I think the two planets would be in resonance if it was sufficiently Earth-like.
 So you then have the idea of a kind of resonance phenomenon driving evolution
 or leading to forms of life which have never before appeared there
 but which have appeared somewhere else in the universe.
 But without the need for spores, seeds, or rats.
 Well, there are evolutionary puzzles that I think completely defeat
 any kind of Darwinism or neo-Darwinism,
 the prime example being the metamorphosis of beetles and butterflies.
 I mean, here is a process which involves the perfect coordination of hundreds,
 if not thousands, of genes simultaneously,
 and imagining any gradual process that would proceed gene by gene over eons
 to end up with something like that happening to an organism defies credibility.
 I just can't feature it.
 Clearly, thousands of genes were changed in one or two moves to achieve that,
 and no ordinary process of gene reshuffling that I'm familiar with could account for that.
 You do not hear this discussed?
 No, it comes in that category of macromutation which biologists don't like to discuss,
 when you have a large change of a lot of coordinated things.
 But after all, the insects are probably the dominant order on the planet
 in terms of biomass, in terms of species number,
 in terms of the number of environments they can inhabit.
 So, in other words, the conquest of this planet by life,
 preceded by a mechanism, metamorphosis,
 currently completely a black box to modern biology.
 Well, I think there's a start-up problem, whether on the scale of the whole planet
 or an island in the Hawaiian chain.
 I just can't imagine that the frequency of ducks flying is enough
 to allow the duck's feet hypothesis to explain the arrival of the correct species
 and correct temporal sequence in so short of time.
 You have to just be dumping, literally dump truck loads,
 of different genetic material on a daily basis on the planet of Wai'ane,
 in order to have a chance to get started in a human being.
 The breeding of banded birds and this seems to show that there's a lot of material moving around
 and that a million years is a long, long time,
 and that a number of improbable things can go on in a million years.
 Well, I've been here for a week.
 I have not seen a new species of bird arrive from the mainland.
 Well, stick around.
 Has anyone ever worked out--I know they've banded the birds all right,
 but have they counted the number of spores they can possibly carry in a full load?
 Of course, this is what graduate students are for, Ralph.
 This is the work of the study of the Hawaiian islands.
 Well, on the matter of--
 I hear models of these birds coming and going from Vancouver and Baja, California,
 over here, carrying one hundredth of a gram of biological material on each trip,
 and of those, one out of a thousand survives, and out of those, you discover.
 Well, okay, let's accept in part the Duxford hypothesis in its broader form.
 Migratory birds, pretty plausible.
 Birds do migrate from place to place over large distances, indeed many call in Hawaii.
 I looked up in your bird book and saw there were quite a number of migrants from different directions.
 So here's--we accept this for the purpose of argument.
 Now, which is cause and which is effect?
 No one knows why birds migrate in the patterns they do.
 And no one--the evolutionary basis for migration--
 sometimes we hear land masses gradually move apart,
 and they have to move further and further over oceans,
 but in fact, migratory routes are kinds of habits.
 They can--new ones have evolved in recent decades in Britain.
 No, I don't think it is migratory birds.
 I think that the process is primarily one of a novelty, unusual events, catastrophes,
 the greatest storm of the century, every century.
 Birds blown off course.
 Birds blown off course.
 It's not about habits.
 The pure numbers are reduced to such a small level
 that it's hard to imagine all of these coincidences necessary for the reconstruction of an ecology.
 A single crack storm veering off course might equal a century of ordinary dispersal.
 But these migratory habits of birds are presumably quite old in many cases,
 and every time there's an ice age pumps the evolutionary process.
 Presumably birds that do migrate have to change the places they migrate to.
 In the last 10,000 years, the great bulk of northern Europe and North America has opened up as a habitat.
 Much more recent than anything we're looking at here.
 We have to remember we live in pioneer, recolonized communities ourselves
 as we come from most of the northern hemisphere.
 London, the ice cap went down to Hampstead in the north of London 10,000 years ago.
 Most of England is a recolonized and recently recolonized ecology.
 Quite common.
 The birds that migrate have to adapt over thousands or even hundreds of years.
 Short-term adaptations.
 It seems to me that if birds have a kind of collective map which they share with other birds that have migrated
 and can tune into a kind of bird collective unconscious,
 that some species migrating over certain routes and knowing about Hawaii
 may enable others starting off in that direction to follow a kind of pre-existing creode
 rather like existing jet flight paths.
 I was amused when we came here to Hawaii.
 We were flying in this jet plane and outside the window about 100 feet away was a vapor trail
 which we followed exactly for two hours, presumably of the previous jet flying to Hawaii.
 And they were 100 feet apart.
 So there may be kind of creode memory channel bird migration paths.
 And many species often follow the same paths like around the Mediterranean coast
 and over the Straits of Gibraltar into North Africa and so on.
 So we could have a whole kind of bird mind.
 And when the Hawaiian Islands appear, long-distance migrants like albatrosses
 or whatever the largest seabirds are here, but in any case spend a lot of time at sea,
 recognize this fact and start coming here,
 somehow this gets into the bird map.
 And other species, rather than whole flocks of them starting out lemming-like
 from the coast of California in the hope of finding an island by chance 2,500 miles away,
 are actually doing it with a great deal more confidence.
 Then we'd have the idea of the appearance of new land
 if it actually channeled bird migration routes towards it,
 because the word got around pretty fast and they were able to adapt.
 Then the ducks' foot hypothesis would still be plausible, plausible for a different reason.
 With this direction by a committee in the sky, the Nature, the Vacuum and Quarance Committee,
 whoops, in New Ireland, Pacific, tell the albatrosses to do their job
 as sort of a pack train to bring as much genetic material as rapidly as possible
 and dump it on the New Islands.
 Sounds like one of the adventures of Dr. Doolittle, you can see.
 [laughter]
 Well, I think there are one or two more points if you've time and patience.
 Sure.
 Let's do it all.
 If you can wait just a moment.
 When a new island comes up, then the entire database of migratory birds
 and all the other species is somehow informed of this,
 that geography is the basis of biogeography after all.
 Well, this came up just the other day.
 How did the original people who came here find it?
 And one obvious hypothesis that struck us was that if they were keen observers of migrant birds,
 they'd notice that birds set off from their islands in a particular direction and came back again,
 and it would therefore be a fairly simple deduction
 that if you follow the migrant birds, you'll reach land sooner or later.
 That's right. That's what "East is a big bird" means.
 So following the birds then is no less of a mystery than the birds themselves being able to migrate.
 So either the people could follow the birds who navigate by some unknown mysterious means,
 or the people could have had access to similar mysterious means themselves.
 And when a new island came up, then the information is somehow injected into their own migration patterns,
 which is whatever guides them, which they may consider to be celestial navigation or whatever,
 in their canoe rides from one island to another.
 Well, all we have to do is to add in the cetacean factor, and we'll have a complete story.
 Though the animals that presumably noticed first of all that volcanoes are erupting beneath the sea
 two or three, four, ten thousand feet down, causing a great deal of hitting, steam, commotion,
 presumably marine animals, fish, things, dwellers on the marine floor,
 and presumably there's a whole microenvironment of warm, water-loving creatures
 that moves along the base of the islands.
 Well, it's sound, it carries thousands and thousands of miles.
 And the whales have this telegraph system. They send telegrams to each other,
 and then finally the dolphins go and they communicate to birds who are friends of theirs.
 The very fact that it's all tied together, as it were, is the only reason that it can all work.
 And that without the tying together of all living things in one giant, worldwide web,
 there would, as a matter of fact, be no life, certainly no new life on a new island like Hawaii.
 That sounds reasonable.
 Yes, I think so.
 I mean, if one isn't too tightly constrained in the definition of communication, it obviously...
 And without the communicative web, the informational sharing system, then it's all impossible.
 And even though we don't know how these communications take place,
 nevertheless we can sort of deduce that without communication it doesn't work.
 Interspecies communication makes it all go.
 Yes. And if we...
 This is an idea again that came up from Ralph and I talking a couple of days ago.
 We postulate that plants have a kind of dolphin or whale-like telepathic relationship between them.
 Then plants of similar species on different continents would be able to read out...
 An oak tree, for example, now planted on every continent and native.
 If you take in the whole genus, you'd have a wide band of the old world and the new covered.
 If any of these, if they were linked or resonating together in a complete kind of that oak mind,
 any one of them would know what was happening with the weather as a storm passed over Wales
 and the oaks all registered it and their stems had closed or opened or whatever.
 Or as some great catastrophic lava flow occurred somewhere else
 and the mounts of Helens erupted or something.
 Well, I think John Donne covered this territory.
 No man is an island entirely, except each is a part of a continent, a part of a main.
 Each man's death diminishes meaning.
 Therefore, I have never sinned to know for whom the bell tolls for thee.
 But the conversation of the oaks, that transcends that homocentric view.
 This is closer to children's books, children's stories
 and the lost mythology of the communication of humans, animals and plants.
 What we're proposing is, I think, for many people, stranger than a living toad inside a dead rock.
 That is the basis of shamanism worldwide.
 It's what shamanism is all about.
 Communication on this interface between the human world and the world of plants and animals.
 And presumably, it's shaman who discover the powers of plants,
 the humanly relevant powers of plants, including the psychoactive powers of plants, and explore them.
 And it's shaman who enter the mind of animals and have animal totems and animal spirits
 and can find out the ways of animals for practical purposes.
 So, if we see this communication, we see that pets, as we were talking about,
 can find out what people are up to in surprising and astonishing ways and systems.
 We've already got ingredients that point towards the possibility of a worldwide web
 of communication between plants and animals and animals and people and so forth.
 Well, I think the technological principle on which the next century will operate is the mimicking of nature.
 Solid state, micro-miniaturized, solar-based, no moving parts, so forth.
 But a lot of that is the mimicry of nature as perceived through a filter so narrow
 that maybe the most essential functions of nature are not even recognized.
 And therefore, what is mimicked is a non-working skeleton of a dead nature, as it were.
 Well, but for instance, solar cells obviously depend on an understanding of photosynthesis.
 And it would be a brighter world if all electrical power were produced that way.
 Similarly, processes of fermentation are better than processes that require more high-molecular-weight solvents.
 That sounds right. But actually, I think that photoelectric devices as known today
 are not only much simpler than photosynthesis, but they were understood at a time when photosynthesis was not understood.
 And even now, the whole chain is perhaps not completely clear.
 And they take the bare essentials but leave out the whole of plant morphology.
 Well, but they share the same solid state quality. That's all I'm saying.
 Well, they started to make them as single crystals, and this is very expensive,
 so when they make them more fractals like plants, they're more...
 It's the morphism process.
 So I think that the imitation of nature would be disastrous if we can't learn to see it better.
 Somehow we need more means of opening the scientific stranglehold on the observational powers of the human.
 Well, but there are at the moment only two aesthetic schools on the imitation of nature.
 But we're leaving out the alternative that arises from the possibilities we're talking about.
 I mean, if nature involves this worldwide web of communication,
 if there are flows of information from people to animals, animals to people,
 migrating birds, dolphins, and so forth,
 all these things being reflected in the population of this isolated set of volcanic islands,
 it sounds like an activity is the overarching metaphor.
 Well, now we come to the true spiritual purpose of the digital worldwide web,
 which is a training ground for appreciating the mechanism and the characteristics
 of learning to observe the global phenomena of worldwide webs,
 so that with this training in childhood and early adulthood...
 It's an analog for nature.
 Quite. At present we're limited to analogs of mechanics,
 and in the case of morphic resonance, radio and TV,
 because the underlying metaphor is radio and TV.
 But here we have another metaphor, and since science can only work in terms of metaphors,
 and so far it's only worked in terms of mechanical metaphors,
 here's an expanded mechanical metaphor.
 But I think it would only really work if it converges with an expanded mental or psychic metaphor,
 and I suppose the psyches of the people connected through the web are that.
 I mean, the thing lacking from it as an evolutionary model, for me,
 is the lack of it having a field-like quality,
 with just a kind of series of interconnected bits,
 like in these artificial life models where you just have units that join up.
 I think a field-like quality would make it much more interesting.
 That could happen if the community of people doing it
 followed the suggestion of the Russian eccentric Konstantin Ivanenko,
 who's always writing to me with his scheme for a total transformation of humanity
 through people linked up by computer nets, chanting together at the same time,
 and intentionally creating what he calls a psychotronic revolution,
 which would entrain the consciousness of all those doing it,
 more than just the operation of the mechanics of this thing does,
 by synchronized chanting, which would be coordinated through the net itself.
 Very interesting.
 That's his vision. He's been going about this for years,
 and if that could cause the emergence of a shift in consciousness,
 the network won't do it by itself.
 And I think that that's what's lacking from the network by itself,
 and from the standard physical linkage theories of evolution.
 It's sort of the harmonic convergence idea.
 If we all go stand on nearby mountaintops at exactly the same instant
 throughout the entire biosphere,
 then somehow that would precipitate phase transition.
 Exactly. And many people would ridicule this,
 saying this is what peace protesters were doing all through the '70s,
 visualizing peace all over Eastern Europe and the ending of the Cold War.
 And as the smile comes to their lips, it tends to freeze,
 because, of course, that's exactly what's happened.
 Although the harmonic convergence is a less successful piece of evidence
 and seems to indicate that this area of thinking can become a reality,
 it shows that people go for it and that really respond to it,
 because otherwise why would so many of us have been gathered in obscure parts of the globe,
 chanting at dawn, in my case at Glastonbury, in a light drizzle,
 along with Sir George Trevelyan on the top of Glastonbury Tor.
 How are so many people engaged in this activity, if it isn't deeply attractive?
 We Americans can answer this question for you.
 It's called hype, and we've perfected it, and I think you were hyped.
 Hype isn't a resonance phenomenon, but not the only one.
 But hype has only certain kinds of hype work,
 while the subsequent ones he's convened haven't.
 So this one actually worked in a new kind of way.
 And you see, I think it's possible that if we look at the whole world,
 there may be a kind of global chance, triggered off by sunstorms,
 or spot cycles, life all over the world may, just as it has pulsed through the ice ages,
 it may be being pulsed...
 Any theory which has this gathering together in large crowds to chant,
 should look back at the Third Reich before it proceeds too far with its agenda.
 Well, in this case they're not in large crowds, they're spread out over the surface of the earth,
 or in front of their computers.
 Ah! Homegrown fascism! Decentralized fascism!
 Well, it shows that only if there's a ritual or a kind of conscious, intentional, resonating aspect to this,
 will this network have any kind of dimension of a field.
 Because this could create a field.
 Well, but in a way, when you think of it, the whole Nazi thing was the invocation of a field.
 Yeah, it was very successful.
 It was an appeal to the folk mind.
 Well, so were all calls to war by nations, bishops, crusaders, you know.
 This is why I think Heidegger was far wrong when he said,
 "The way you judge reality is by the depth of the call, because the call can be deep and it can still be haywire."
 I know, but you see, we're all the victims of a call. A call to move west, for example.
 I mean, we've wound up here, now at the ultimate limit of the West.
 Well, except the Western most Hawaiian island, I suppose.
 The trilogues at the edge of the West have been...
 Here we are.
 ...a further 2,500 miles.
 So there's this westward alarm which causes, well, in the case of the British, it was an eastward movement.
 Migratory peoples migrate to England, Anglo-Saxons settle, etc.
 Sort of wipe out the native people or subjugate them.
 You know, they're on the move again after a few hundred years.
 The British Empire, you know, the settlement of North America.
 And similar process from Spain.
 And now, having gone right across North America, subjugated and wiped out its natives, illuminated their culture,
 the whole process has moved here.
 We can see that happening before our very eyes.
 Something which, in terms of evolution, shows the opposite of everything we've been talking about so far.
 Now there's no separation of the islands from TV networks and satellite linkages and the Internet itself.
 Well, one of the most frightening trends, I think, in modern culture is the wish to build shopping malls everywhere.
 There is a mentality that would like to turn the planet into an international airport arrival concourse.
 That's their idea of utopia.
 Based on America, the model for all this is always America, you see.
 I suppose.
 And so now there's this kind of clonal culture moving worldwide through media.
 Through me?
 Which has the opposite effect to all the speciation, diversification and evolutionary creativity we've been talking about.
 So we see the opposite process at work in Hawaii today.
 It's like a bulldozer.
 America's a cultural bulldozer.
 Yes.
 It just tramples and destroys everything.
 But that, you see, is simply an expression of this westward migratory urge,
 which underlies all the people who migrated to America, of whatever race or background.
 They all migrated. That's what brought them there.
 And this migratory urge, which has been, I suppose, very strong in all sorts of human populations,
 and indeed maybe just yet another manifestation of the migratory urge we see in birds and in plants
 and indeed in the movement of life from planet to planet.
 And there appears to be a double gradient here with the eastward migration of Asian people,
 a kind of balancing westward migration of European people.
 This is actually the interface where the double gradient can produce an increase of novelty and new mutations.
 A forward leap, perhaps, of human evolution could be here because of this double wave phenomenon.
 A standing wave is forming here as forces move both east and west.
 So can we point to any human creativity of Hawaii that exemplifies this?
 Like in the Malaysian archipelago, coming together with two great flora and fauna ecosystems.
 Can we see that creativity in evidence?
 I haven't noticed it myself.
 Well, I suppose Pearl Harbor was the moment of the greatest impact of east and west.
 And the result of that, of course, was the deployment of nuclear weapons.
 And whereas we don't like this, it is definitely a novel evolutionary or counter-evolutionary step.
 It's creative, hate it as we might.
 And Pearl Harbor itself being a volcanic derivative has this kind of volcanic effect on world politics.
 It's interesting that that radiated out the whole biogeography, I mean political geography of today,
 which was shaped by Pearl Harbor, as we know from all elementary accounts, with a lot of background and so on.
 But there we have another role of Hawaii.
 I wonder if you've reflected on that.
 Well, certainly the defeat of fascism and the solidification of American opinion to go with Churchill
 relied on that to the point where some historians have felt that Roosevelt knew what the Japanese were planning
 and he allowed it to happen because he wanted to go with Churchill
 and he couldn't figure out a way to solidify the opinion.
 So, yes, that was its moment on a geopolitical step.
 But it was also the moment of conflict of east and west, eastern and western power.
 The Japanese sought to expand their influence in the world and were held back by military means in the end.
 They've now succeeded economically where they failed militarily and here in Hawaii, at least politically,
 if you tell me the Japanese control here.
 So, this was the eastern Vienna.
 If the Turks were stopped at the walls of Vienna, then the Japanese were stopped at Pearl Harbor.
 So, that's the domain from Honolulu to Vienna.
 That's western civilization's turf.
 But is it really the creative interface it could be between east and west?
 Because now it's a kind of stalemate with roughly half of the island's population coming from the east
 and half from the west with the native Hawaiians trapped in the trees.
 Well, I think this Pacific Rim culture that is hypothesized to be emerging, Hawaii is central to all of that.
 It's equal distant from Sydney, Lima, Tokyo and Vancouver.
 Have they adopted the slogan "Come to Hawaii in the Pacific Hub" yet?
 If they haven't, I'm sure they're not far behind.
 The presence of these telescopes here makes it the center of world science, at least in astronomy.
 I think the world's first, second and third largest telescopes are on this island
 with an identical twin of the largest being built a few hundred yards away from it.
 And the Maxwell 4mm, there's an amazing concentration of science on the island, on the cave.
 So, it's a channel, perhaps, at least in the human realm, for linking us with the stars.
 Another important theme.
 We're looking out at the top of Hawaii.
 That's right.
 The chosen paradoxically for being the darkest place on Earth.
 From here they'll see the next wave of duck's feet.
 On their way.
 Arriving for the biosphere too.
 Well, what do you think?
 I think that covers the waterfront.
 Around to a halt.
 We're listening to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
 Well, I have a question for you.
 Do you know why I think that you would be able to fit right in perfectly at that kitchen table with Ralph, Terrence and Rupert?
 Well, it's simple.
 Because like those three amigos, you're spending your time listening to this podcast
 rather than talking about last night's football game or something like that with your friends.
 Like it or not, some kind of strange mind virus has gotten a hold of us
 and is causing us to listen to a long-winded conversation instead of listening to music right now.
 But if I were you, I'd get back to the music right away.
 But if you're still here with me, I'll just ramble on a little bit more.
 I don't know about you, but I really enjoyed hearing Terrence talk about butterflies.
 Although it isn't something he talked about very often,
 collecting butterflies was one of the first things he did after leaving college, if I'm not mistaken.
 And just a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the new book that Terrence's daughter just published
 that contained photos of some of the butterflies he collected.
 And I'll put another link to that book with the program notes to this podcast.
 But his mention of the way butterflies mutate and change their patterns on their wings
 in order to fool the birds who preyed on them
 got me to thinking about something that either he or Tim Leary said on another podcast recently
 about how you can no longer pick out the heads
 because the rest of the culture has co-opted the way that all the heads now look.
 Maybe that's why it's so hard to find the others.
 Maybe everyone is one of the others, but we're all too afraid to speak up and say so.
 That's an interesting thought, huh?
 I know that it happened to me once.
 A guy who is now one of my closest friends,
 he and I worked together for almost a year before we discovered that we shared an interest in psychedelics.
 You know, I'm not holding my breath about seeing an end to the prohibition of our sacred medicines during my lifetime.
 All I'm really hoping to live to see is a world in which we can at least discuss them as freely as we talk about the weather or sports.
 And I also liked Terrence's comment that when there's a shifting boundary, that that's where the mutants can thrive.
 Well, it seems to me like a lot of boundaries are beginning to shift all around the planet.
 Let's hope that spells good news for us psychedelic mutants.
 And I'm not talking about the science fiction version of mutants here.
 What I'm talking about is a new and improved form of humanity, one that can be passed on to our young.
 Just take a look around and ask yourself if you want to reincarnate as yet another mindless consumer,
 or do you want to mutate into an intelligent, focused, purposeful human being?
 So let's hear it for the mutants.
 Another thing that struck me when Terrence was talking about evolution, perhaps just trying things for the sake of variety,
 reminded me of a book that you might be interested in.
 It's Stephen Wolfram's book, A New Kind of Science.
 And now I'll warn you ahead of time that if you're like me, it'll take you probably more than a year to finish reading it.
 It did for me.
 But some people, and I count myself among them,
 happen to think that Wolfram's ideas are as profound as Newton's were when they were first introduced.
 And they are as little understood as well, I might add.
 But in any event, one of the points he argues for in that book is close to what Terrence was saying about evolution trying all kinds of things,
 like a mad tinkerer or something like that.
 It's an interesting take on the processes of evolution,
 and not one that's completely accepted or hardly accepted at all by the mainstream,
 which of course makes me want to look at it all the more closely.
 And speaking of the mainstream and ways in which our sacred medicines are entering that flow,
 wasn't it nice to see that piece floating around the net recently about the brilliant Latin American writer Isabel Allende?
 Here's part of the email I'm talking about, and I quote,
 "When Allende herself encounters the rare for her but dreaded writer's block, she finds an unusual way around it.
 She drinks a potent shamanic rainforest hallucinogen and disappears into her mind for several days.
 During this unorthodox excursion, Isabel,"
 and the following text is actually from Isabel Allende's new memoir, "The Sum of Our Days," where she says,
 "I crossed through the opening and effortlessly plunged into an absolute void.
 There was no sensation, no spirit, not a trace of individual consciousness.
 Instead, I felt divine, absolute presence.
 I was inside the goddess, something I can only define as love, an impression of oneness.
 I dissolved into the divine.
 I felt there was no separation between me and the rest of all that exists, all that was light and silence.
 I was left with a certainty that we are spirits and all that is material is illusory."
 That's the end of her quote.
 She also writes that on that voyage, she lost her fear of death and her writer's block as well.
 And then she resumed her writing, usual writing schedule and began working for 10 to 12 hours a day until she completed a book.
 And speaking of someone else who is putting in a lot of work each week for our community,
 I want to thank Allison Terry for her exceptional work of transcribing six of our podcasts so far.
 And I've posted links to these transcriptions on our notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog, which you can find at www.psychedelicsalon.org.
 And five of them are Terrence McKenna lectures and the other is a talk by Ann Shulgin.
 Not only does Allison's work help various scholars who are working on books involving the work of Terrence McKenna,
 her transcriptions now mean that some of Ann Shulgin's and Terrence McKenna's brilliance will be available for Google to index and bring yet more minds to their work.
 So thank you so very much, Allison, on behalf of our entire community.
 And once I get caught up a bit, I plan on including some of Allison's comments about Terrence's work here in the salon.
 After spending so much time with him, phrase by phrase, she has some interesting comments that I think you'll be interested in hearing.
 So, Allison, I know that I owe you an email or two and I'll get back to our project soon.
 I'm just running way behind so far this year.
 And maybe I can catch up a bit by reading this email from Jeff M., because it's similar to quite a few others I've received.
 And so I'll try to catch up with a bunch of you with this one and then pointing you to a thread that I plan to begin over at thegirlreport.com.
 Here's what Jeff had to say.
 "I have heard the names of many books that sound fascinating in the talks you put out,
 so I would greatly appreciate it if you would suggest a few of them that you think I would enjoy.
 I think that I would be especially interested in any books about consciousness, science, and the universe.
 I'm sure those are broad topics and you have many books you could suggest,
 so I leave it up to you to continue to guide my psychedelic thinking.
 P.S. A side effect of my recent fascination with consciousness has been a love for dreams.
 I am teaching myself how to become a lucid dreamer and have had some success so far.
 I was so excited when I saw your recent podcast titled "Psychedelic Dreams,"
 but even though it was fascinating, it was not on the subject I thought it would be on.
 If there are any talks or books that you would like to suggest to amuse my interest in dreams, please say so."
 Well, like I said, I'll try to get a thread going.
 Maybe somebody else can get it going before I get out there.
 But I don't know of any good dream books right offhand, but I'm sure some of our fellow Slawners do,
 and that they also have some good ideas about your first question.
 So I'll be watching what others have to say over there and adding my own two cents once in a while.
 Another email comes from Matt R. who says, "I'm a new listener to your podcast and I really enjoy it.
 In one of your podcasts, either you or someone else mentioned that they like Seattle.
 They went on to mention that if it wasn't for other issues, they would probably want to live there.
 Do you remember this or happen to know what issues they were talking about?
 I live near Seattle and I'm starting to get uneasy about the fault lines below us.
 Is that what they were referring to or is it there are certain locations that are predicted to be more dangerous at the 2012 event?
 Just curious if you know what insight that person had about the Seattle area."
 Hmm. I don't remember anything about a fault line.
 The only comment I think I might have made would have been about the long, wet winters up in that part of the world.
 I've kind of become addicted to seeing the sun every day now that I live here in Southern California.
 And so I might have slipped up and said something along those lines, but I don't know anything about fault lines up that way.
 Maybe some of our fellow saloners do, but I do know I love the area and all the people up there.
 So if it didn't rain so much, I'd probably be living there.
 Another email comes from Daniel L. who said, "You might already be aware of this, but in case you're not,
 I wanted to tell you that Dr. Phil made an episode about salvia. A very negative and biased episode.
 For example, Dr. Phil tells a 16-year-old who got "addicted" to salvia that salvia is the cause he failed school.
 Not mentioning that he might have failed school anyway and that it doesn't have to be attributed to salvia as he automatically assumed.
 He also compared it to LSD and labeled all users of it as "stupid."
 Funny. Stupid is a word I would actually use to describe Dr. Phil and his entire audience, including Oprah.
 But that's just my opinion.
 Daniel goes on, "Might be of interest to comment on your podcast as it demonstrates very clearly and unsubtly
 how the media still tend to demonize every drug and regard it as a teen problem.
 My suggestion is that you watch the episode before you go to bed as it otherwise might get you into a bad mood for the rest of the day.
 The show is available on YouTube in two parts and I'll post a link along with program notes for this podcast."
 Well, thanks for sending the link and pointing that out, Daniel.
 As you say, this once again clearly points out how much disinformation about psychoactive substances is being passed on by the corporate media.
 But as for the non-corporate media, if you're interested in some talk about the upcoming 2009 Burning Man festival,
 you can get a good taste of it on Sancho and Cody's podcast, Black Light in the Attic.
 I've mentioned their podcast before because it's one of my favorites and not just because I joined them in their podcast #14
 to talk about their plans for this year's burn.
 And by the way, I did buy my own ticket just yesterday, so it looks like I'm committed to returning the Palenque Norte Plylogues to Black Rock City again this year.
 And I can almost hear the groans from some of our fellow slaughters who get tired of hearing me talk about Burning Man.
 But take heart, because this year I'll try to keep most of my Burning Man talk confined to Sancho and Cody's podcasts
 rather than repeat too many times the same things over and over again.
 Of course, I haven't told Sancho and Cody that yet, but I know that they're listening and they'll get the news right along with you.
 Hope that's alright with you guys.
 And by the way, I didn't mention it when we talked on Skype the other day, but afterwards it dawned on me that we hadn't known each other and hung out together for years like it felt like.
 You know, with all of the stories I've heard on their podcasts, I feel like we're old friends, and I hope that's the way it is with you and me too.
 You know, even though we haven't been together in the same physical space, we have been together here in the theater of the mind, here in cyberdelic space,
 and somehow that makes the world seem a little more friendly, if you know what I mean.
 And I hear there's a chance I'm actually going to get to meet Cody in person, if he can arrange to get out this way for the annual Southern California Writers Conference the weekend of February 13th.
 Our friend Mateo, by the way, has arranged for a $50 discount to listeners of the Sea Realm, Blacklight, and Psychedelic Salon podcasts.
 So, if you're interested in attending, just tell the conference ticket sellers that you're a listener of this podcast, and they supposedly will give you the discount.
 And if they don't, just look for Mateo, and I'm sure he'll run interference for you, as he's done for me on more than one occasion.
 But I digress.
 Actually, Mateo will be teaching two workshops at the conference, as well as doing one-on-one manuscript consultations.
 And I'll post the link so you can see who all of the other speakers are.
 But if you do plan to attend, why don't you go to www.matpalamary.com, and let him know via the contact link that you're going, and maybe we'll put together a little mini-salon or something like that.
 Another piece of information I want to pass along comes from Louis C., who says,
 "After listening to the #143 Trilog, 'Rethinking Societies,' I was wondering what your opinion is on the Venus Project, Resource-Based Societies, or the Zeitgeist Movement."
 Hmm, where to begin?
 First of all, I should say that I don't know a whole lot about any of them, other than they seem on first glance to be heading in the right direction.
 I've visited the website of the Venus Project several times, and I find that I can spend a significant amount of time there just poking around and learning about the many interesting things that they're doing.
 And in general, it seems obvious that we have to quickly learn how to convert our wasteful ways into a sustainable society.
 In fact, that seems to me to be our most important project.
 Yet, so many of us humans are spending the majority of our time and resources building bigger and more lethal weapons.
 So, my hat is off to anyone and everyone who is working on projects that will help lead us out of the dead end of consumerism, however fanciful and even impractical some of them may seem.
 Any movement that is peaceful, sustainable, and is repulsed by war is a step in the right direction in my book.
 And if I don't cut this off now, I'll never get back to working on my new, now long overdue book.
 But I do want to mention that there is a new interview with Rupert Sheldrake that has recently been posted on ShamanicFreedomRadio.podomatic.com.
 This is a new podcast that I haven't yet had an opportunity to listen to.
 And while I normally don't plug podcasts until they get 10 or so episodes posted, but since the podcaster is a fellow slaughter and participant over at thegirlreport.com forums,
 and since his fourth program is an interview with someone we just heard from today, well, I thought I'd tell you about it anyway.
 And I do plan on listening to that interview in the next few days myself.
 Now, 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-A-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 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 psychedelic space. Be well, my friends.
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