Greetings from cyberdelic space.
 This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon.
 And once again I have some fellow salonners to thank for their generosity in sending in
 donations to help with the expenses here in the salon.
 And these fine people are Naomi M, Kloss H, Mark C, JP of Vabome, Jason W, Dominic G,
 and Adam K.
 And Mark, I notice that you've been sending in a modest donation every month now and I
 really appreciate your support.
 Also let me read a short note I received from Kloss H when he sent in his donation.
 Here's what he said.
 Thanks Lorenzo.
 I love what you do on the salon.
 I've never taken psychedelics and maybe never will.
 My mindset however perhaps does not need much of a push in that direction.
 I belong to the tribe nonetheless.
 Born crazy or alienated I guess.
 Well first of all Kloss, that was a very generous donation and you should consider
 yourself all donated up for life.
 And as for your comment about having never used psychedelics, I want you to know that
 you have a lot of company among our fellow salonners.
 You'd actually be surprised at how many people say similar things.
 And in fact our long time supporter Vapal P just sent me a very thoughtful email suggesting
 that I include more non-psychedelic using but still psychedelic thinking people who
 are also working on this clarity issue from other directions.
 And as time progresses I most definitely will be including speakers from other disciplines
 as well.
 But for today we're going to have one more experience listening to Rupert, Ralph and
 Terrence in what I assume was their final trialogue.
 So today we're going to hear the last part of that 1998 trialogue between Rupert Sheldrake,
 Terrence McKenna and Ralph Abraham in which they discuss their views on various aspects
 of what they call the evolutionary mind.
 In each session one of the participants made a proposal that the others then expanded upon,
 discussed and in some cases attacked one another's ideas but in a very friendly way.
 Now today Ralph Abraham begins the discussion by changing the focus to what he terms the
 edge of the millennium.
 And rather than have me tell you how that fit into the overall direction of this perhaps
 last trialogue, I'll just play it for us now and we can both try to figure out this interesting
 little change of course.
 The call for our gathering, the announcement part of the con which brought you here mentioned
 the edge of the millennium, the edge of the millennium.
 And so far the millennium has been present by subtle implication alone.
 So I think to honour our commitment we'll now trialogue on the edge of the millennium.
 Is this okay?
 It's okay.
 Now in our just appeared new book, The Evolutionary Mind, there is a chapter near the end called,
 I forget what it's called, it's about utopianism and millenarianism, two pretty long isms which
 all together add up to an overdose of different approaches to the future which are more or
 less classical.
 And there we spoke extensively of the extant literature and literary tradition and industry
 of utopian and millenarian genre.
 So that kind of utopian and millenarian stuff is not what we're going to talk about in this
 trialogue.
 I want to introduce a completely different notion of the millennium and I'm interested
 more particularly in the edge of the millennium and here's how it goes.
 This is partly, according to me, a mathematical view of history that brings up this particular
 version of the idea of the millennium.
 And nevertheless other people have written a similar view of history without any explicit
 recourse to mathematics so I think it's pretty general.
 It has to do, this view of history, with the approach we've taken toward biological evolution
 that it goes forward in catastrophes and critical leaps and so on, sudden jumps.
 The punctuated equilibrium approach to history says that history goes along in a kind of
 a level plateau, developmentally speaking, although there may be a gradual development
 up or down overall.
 And then every once in a while there is a big leap.
 The first such view of history I think that we know about was presented by the ancient
 Egyptians.
 So this is nothing new.
 Now in my own work I have classified some major plateaus including the last one, the
 one that we're at the end of now according to my system of history began 6,000 years
 ago or 5,500 years ago with the invention of the wheel and the first city-states and
 stuff like that, talking Schumer, talking Babylonia, talking ancient Egypt here.
 And so that's a 6,000 year plateau.
 Now other people, for example Bill Thompson, somebody we know and talk to about world cultural
 history, he has a similar scheme in which the plateau now ending is only three or four
 hundred years old.
 See there were people who really wrote about this explosion idea of world cultural history
 was Jacob Burckhardt.
 Burckhardt said the Renaissance was a quantum leap in world cultural history and then other
 people said, "Well, what about Giotto?
 What about Patatria?
 What about Boccaccio?"
 And the truth is that whenever you look at two major milestones in history and consider
 the between the milestones to be a sort of a level road, then somebody will come along
 and find a smaller milestone in there.
 Nowadays we have fractal geometry so we think that this is natural.
 Between any two big catastrophes there'll be ten smaller ones.
 Between any two of the smaller ones there'll be 40 or 50 little or teenier ones and so
 on.
 The first person I know who put forward such a fractal idea of history that it's not continuous,
 it's discontinuous, but the discontinuities are more or less dense as in a fractal, the
 first such person is you, Terrence.
 I give you credit in writing in my entry in the Encyclopedia of Time.
 You maybe have never read that book.
 Never read it.
 Well, there you'll find your name mentioned in a flattering way by me of all people.
 Immortality at last.
 At last.
 Well to make a long story short, it's these controversial plateaus of history that I'm
 going to call millennia.
 And then if you want to go back to chapter 10 of the Evolutionary Mind and read there
 about the history of the millennial concept, then you'll see that the first one, wherein
 the number 1,000 was actually mentioned for the length of one of these plateaus, gave
 his name to the thing.
 It was a special case of my more abstract idea of millennium.
 It's the plateau of history.
 And what I mean by the edge of millennium is those times when there's the snappo from
 one equilibrium to another.
 Cro-Magnon comes out of Neanderthalus or whatever it is.
 And oxygen comes out of the archeo-biological background and whatever.
 And the interest of this, according to me, is why are we here?
 Who would talk about the evolutionary mind?
 Who cares about the good and evil and the evolution of species and so on?
 This must be interesting only to the degree to which it informs us in this very present
 moment regarding our choices that we will make in the creation of the future.
 So according to chaos theory and its partner theory of bifurcation, this is one of the
 main things that teaches something like the butterfly effect that you've heard about in
 a dynamical system or a massively complex dynamical system such as we live in.
 When there is a moment of bifurcation, which is the technical math jargon for these snaps,
 that is the only time you get to do anything about the evolution of the system.
 So according to this self-inflating view, we live at a specially important special moment
 in history where when we think something or do something, it has actually an enormous
 effect on the future.
 Maybe not a direct, determinative effect, but we can't really say what the outcome will
 be, but what we do has some influence on the creation of the future more than other times
 in history.
 And the bigger the jump, the bigger the leverage, where Archimedes said, "Give me a lever and
 I'll move the world," we have a lever now.
 And we care about what's coming next.
 So that's why the edge of the millennium, any edge of any of the millennia, is particularly
 important to those revolutionary souls who want to make a change in things.
 It's a special time.
 A century or two centuries ago, you could struggle for the creation of a chaos revolution,
 and it would be impossible because there were no computers around or there were no movie
 makers in Hollywood or something, I don't know.
 It takes more than we know about to create these special opportunities.
 And anyway, that's what I mean by millennium, and that's what I mean by at the edge of the
 millennium.
 And now this is only a hypothesis for the sake of discussion, but I kind of think that
 this is very credible that we are now at the edge of a millennium.
 Therefore, we have to discuss this.
 And the question that I'm going to pose to you, Rupin Ter, if this isn't too radical,
 is to what degree do you think, actually, that what we are doing now matters in the
 creation of the future?
 And if there is any possibility that what we do matters in the creation of the future,
 what kind of future or what kind of change are we trying to create?
 And to what degree what we are actually doing, for example, what we are talking about today,
 what we are doing today, to what degree could that possibly be a real effect, a real benefit
 in creating the future that we want to create, in contrast to other things that we might
 do, like go to the beach and pray or whatever?
 And particularly.
 Should I stop here?
 Well, that's what I'm not sure.
 Yes.
 Well, I'm trying to make this easier for you because I think this might be too difficult.
 Because I think I said this morning, or maybe I didn't, but I believe it and have said it
 many times, salvation is an act of cognitive apprehension.
 So we do matter.
 Because to the degree that we are ignorant, avidya, in the Buddhist lexicon, we retard
 universal progress towards some kind of enlightenment.
 With the doctrine of avidya, this is standing for all time since 1800 BC.
 Do you agree that this is a special moment?
 Yes, I think so.
 Not only a special moment, but the other thing I would call people's attention to is the
 fact that no matter whether you scammed your way in here today and no matter whether you're
 going to go back to an appliance box that you live in under a bridge, the odds are that
 you are very close to the top of the pyramid of global empowerment.
 You are mostly white, mostly well-educated, mostly have enough disposable income to come
 to an event like this.
 It's worth pointing out that all that rides on the backs of those who do not have such
 privilege.
 And so, yeah, this is a moment of enormous opportunity and those who find themselves
 in this moment with power, define however you care to define it, have a moral obligation
 to act.
 And I don't advocate a certain political agenda, not that we must become Marxists or that we
 must become anything.
 What we must become is clear.
 We have the technologies and the informational structures and all the necessary abilities
 to create paradise on earth, to lift up the least among us to at least an acceptable level
 of comfort and freedom.
 Why do we not do that?
 Because what stands in our way is our own minds, our own habits.
 We must change our minds.
 That's the most powerful political work people in this room could do.
 And there is nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves
 and do this.
 To the degree that we can change our minds, we will escape extinction, marginality, and
 so forth.
 To the degree that we cannot change our minds, we will prolong the agony, perhaps unto death
 and extinction, perhaps only making the struggle more difficult.
 But yes, this is a moment of enormous opportunity.
 We have a yes.
 A yes.
 You agree that it's a moment of special opportunity over the long and short scales
 of time according to either mathematics or novelty theory.
 Yes.
 And you agree that we have a responsibility to do our best.
 Yes.
 And what you have to tell us is that if the 200 of us here change our minds, that that
 would somehow have an immediate effect on the rest of the world and our creation of
 the future.
 Yes.
 How?
 How would it have this effect?
 Yes.
 By telepathic means?
 By the romance of photons?
 No, I think by the spread of clarity.
 The spread of clarity, the elimination of redundancy in the system, and the spreading
 of a sense of shared purpose and the possibility of achieving that purpose.
 It doesn't matter what you do beyond changing your mind for a better clarity?
 Well, I don't want to say absolutely it doesn't matter, but I think that's the first obligation.
 If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity, you're going
 to end up with business as usual.
 The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it is not paved with clarity.
 So for example, what you do in life, you barnstorm giving lectures, you write books,
 and you create a website.
 And the effect of this, hopefully, will be to promote clarity.
 Correct.
 Well, first of all, I certainly agree that for me personally, psychedelic experience
 has enhanced clarity, whereas some people think the opposite.
 Well, let us have vigorous debate by informed parties.
 Don't forget, I've given over 300 calculus lectures in this room.
 It boggles my mind to look out and think, well, yeah, this is Santa Cruz.
 This must be Santa Cruz.
 This is real Santa Cruz.
 What do you think, Rupert?
 The question really is, I mean, changing minds, you were talking about the butterfly wing
 effect.
 The question is, if we change our minds, can it have a larger effect on other people's
 minds?
 Yes.
 Because if we decide to recycle yet more newspaper and so on, it's not going to have that much
 effect.
 So the changing mind thing, the butterfly wing analogy, suggests some major change of
 mind spreading through our culture.
 Now, I suspect that you think the medium for this transformation is the World Wide Web.
 I suspect that Terence thinks the medium is...
 Well, I think telepathy is equally powerful.
 Yes, but...
 Wait, I want to hear his suspicion of me.
 World Wide Web?
 Yes.
 No, no.
 I think the medium is World Wide Web.
 Psychedelic drugs.
 I still haven't understood the psychedelic drug agenda.
 Britain has the highest percentage of psychedelic drug consumption in the Western world at the
 moment.
 And it's not entirely clear that this has resulted in clarity spreading through...
 Britain is the source and the fountainhead of the worldwide youth culture that is creating
 the new music, the new dance, the new forms of community, and the new resistance to consumerist
 values.
 So don't sell the old UK...
 Come to the rave tonight and see clarity created.
 Yes, yes.
 A crucible of clarity is home at last, Terence.
 Terence takes the microphone.
 Well, it's not always perfectly clear what's going on when you have your nose in it, you
 know.
 Well, I mean, my own agenda relies partly on the World Wide Web, not as strongly as
 yours.
 And here in this room is Matthew Clapp, who kindly runs my World Wide Web site.
 Spellbreak.org.
 Yes.
 So, but my own view is that this clarity involves breaking the spell of rationalism, Cartesianism,
 a spell woven more powerfully than ever before this morning by Terence.
 And I mean, it took on a new level of spellbinding in the way you described it.
 It's to recognise that we're far more interconnected, we're far more participatory in our relation
 with the world than this cognitive kind of science and cognitive model of the mind would
 tell us.
 And so I think the secret to waking us up, one of the secrets, is psychic peps.
 As you know, this is one of my particular themes.
 And the purpose of, I wrote a book which some of you may have seen called Seven Experiments
 That Could Change the World.
 The purpose of this was to find simple experiments that could give us clarity on issues that
 we know about already, which could actually have a transformative effect on our view of
 the world.
 They're to do with changing our scientific view of the world.
 And the scientific view of the world is a particularly important part of the spell that
 binds us all and that affects our whole civilisation, our whole industrial culture.
 And it's an exceptionally narrow and dissociated view of the world at the moment.
 The reason I think psychic peps could play this part is, first of all, there's more of
 them than psychedelics.
 I mean, they're everywhere.
 There are lots and lots of dogs and cats that have telepathic bonds with their owners.
 About 50% of Americans feel that they've had a telepathic bond with an animal.
 Now, to recognise what so many people already know, through experiments to test these to
 see if they're real, and so far the experiments suggest they are real, this can give permission
 for people to recognise what they already know.
 Then all these closet holists, or most of us are closet holists, can come out and recognise
 that there's this kind of interconnection with other species and with each other that's
 been going on all the time, but which has been suppressed from the level of supposedly
 rational discourse by the idea that this is all superstition, it's not scientific, it's
 irrational and so forth.
 I think that one of the big difficulties in our culture is the split between the rational
 educated part of our minds, which we put on in public, and the participatory sense of
 connection which we have at home with gardens, plants, children, animals, lovers, and our
 nearest and dearest.
 And these are so dissociated that it's very hard for people to recognise that they're
 related in any way.
 Lots of dogs know when their owners are coming home in a kind of telepathic manner and wait
 at the door for them while they're on the way home.
 I calculate that tens of thousands of American scientists have dogs waiting at the door for
 them when they get home from the laboratory, even if they come at unusual times and in
 an unusual way.
 Yet this phenomenon has been so subject to taboo that it's never been investigated scientifically
 at all.
 It could have been investigated at any time in the last 500 or 5000 years, but the fact
 is the first investigations are happening at present.
 Here in the room is David Brown, who works with me, is based in Santa Cruz and is doing
 experiments with psychic dogs, cats, and cockatiels in Santa Cruz County.
 And if any of you have such animals, please let him or me know at the end because we'd
 love to investigate your animals.
 And you can take part in this research.
 So I think that grassroots research based on phenomena that are actually common sense
 that are part of everyday life for many people could help to wake us up, to give a greater
 clarity about what's really going on.
 And make us recognize that there's far more interconnection between us and other species
 and us and other people than is admitted in the scientific view of things, which is the
 worldview which most people feel they have permission to talk about in public.
 So I think that this transition, a butterfly wing effect, would be a few dogs and cats
 that do this being proved scientifically to be able to do it, shown on TV, would probably
 overnight give millions of people permission to recognize and talk about these events in
 their own lives.
 And never again would the subject be able to be stuffed back into the closet.
 I think these could lead to a great change in the way we think about the world.
 Now it's not, of course, it's several steps from that to solving the ecological problems
 of the world, to dealing with the problem of multinational corporations and so on.
 But it's a step towards clarity and it's one that could spread very quickly.
 Well it seems to me the overarching theme here that unites all three of our positions
 is boundary dissolution.
 Psychedelic drugs dissolve boundaries.
 The world wide web dissolves boundaries.
 And certainly the discovery that our pets are communicating, anticipating and understanding
 us is a boundary dissolving perception.
 So really what we're saying is we must dissolve the artificial boundaries that confine our
 perceptions.
 Someone once said if we could feel what we are doing to the earth, we would stop immediately.
 Because a man hitting himself on the head with a ball peen hammer stops immediately.
 The feedback loop is very short.
 So we have compartmentalized our lives and this allows us to do the fateful and lethal
 work that is destroying the planet, destroying community, so forth and so on.
 So maybe three answers as diverse as you've just heard here, you might search your own
 soul and ask what obsession or interest of mine would contribute to the grand project
 of boundary dissolution.
 Certainly it is not the affirmation of cultural values.
 Culture is a scheme for maintaining and creating boundaries.
 It replaces reality with a linguistically supported delusion.
 And behind that delusion then pogroms, programs of genocide, arms races, sexism, racism, all
 can operate very, very comfortably.
 Ralph earlier mentioned love.
 Generally speaking, love is a boundary dissolving enterprise.
 So I think each of us, the three of us, all of you, in our way should find ways to express
 love and it's not, it's not trickily, it's not woo woo, it's a very practical matter
 that has thousands of expressions.
 As long as we believe in mind and matter, rich and poor, living and dead, aboriginal
 and advanced, black and white, man and woman, then we're inevitably going to carry on a
 dualistic analysis of our dilemma and we're going to produce incomplete agendas and answers.
 Well, this is, this is good.
 I agree with everything.
 I admire you both for your revolutionary efforts.
 I, nevertheless, I can't help having a sinking feeling here we are in the University of California,
 and naturally my thoughts turn to the educational system.
 Now we have here a group, I know there are actually a few undergraduates of the University
 of California at Santa Cruz are here by accident as it were, and that's cool, but we have not
 yet taken over one regularly offered course of the university to enable students to learn
 science by doing research projects with psychic pets.
 Well, Ralph, the university is the last place where you would look for this.
 The university is the manufacturer of these cultural values that encourage them.
 Well, that's why I'm bringing up this subject of education at this time.
 I think we've discussed the problem of education before, but my experience is that no amount
 of clarity in this group of 200 and other like groups is going to matter one whit when
 we are all adults, you see.
 The next generation will have to face the same butterfly problem with the same lever
 because the majority of people will have their paradigm set in K through 12 in some archaic
 school system that sees its primary business to work against a worldwide cultural revolution.
 So the inertia, we have to overcome inertia, and we can talk about religion and psychedelics
 and getting clarity and so on.
 We know that the scientific establishment is a big obstacle as far as environmental
 problems are concerned, and so Rupert's work, the ultimate effect will be to deconstruct
 or revolutionize science, is very important in making a transformation among adult scientists
 worldwide.
 How can this matter at all if there is no change in the educational system K through
 12, pre-K, pre-pre-K and back to the womb, the parents and so on?
 This chicken and egg loop has got to be somewhere in a more sensitive spot than the adult community.
 What do you propose?
 You work with youth, I guess, you're interested in talking with younger people.
 Rupert, I know that you're particularly active in education through the existence of your
 children who are now subject to the educational system that does this criminal brainwashing
 that I'm talking about.
 So I'm just posing this now, do you have any idea as to the transformation of our school
 system by a change of curriculum or the entrance of any weird idea into the actual program
 which trains most children worldwide?
 Well, I ought to have.
 There's a story that perhaps not everyone here is familiar with, which is when I was
 in New York a couple of years ago I was asked to visit a school in Long Island.
 I was particularly urged to go there.
 A private helicopter was sent to take me and I was asked to address the board and the teachers
 of the school.
 When I asked them what they'd like me to speak about, they said they wanted me to speak about
 the rectified Sheldrake principle on which their entire curriculum was based.
 So when I said, "What is the rectified Sheldrake principle?"
 They said that that was the very question they were asking and hoping that I would explain.
 I then asked who had invented the rectified Sheldrake principle on which the curriculum
 was based and they soon revealed that the author of this principle, or at least the
 author of the documents on which their entire curriculum was based, was Ralph Abraham.
 By careful questioning I was able to find out that the rectified Sheldrake principle
 meant that because of morphic resonance and habits of learning, the sequence of events
 in which people should learn things in school should follow the historical process.
 So in history you learn first about the Sumerians, Egyptians, etc.
 Then you move on to the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Dark Ages, etc.
 That it follows the principle and they start in grade one with ancient Egypt.
 I calculated on this basis that the invention of the domestication of fire, which occurred
 between 400,000 to 700,000 years ago, should mean that in the toddler playgroups they should
 be playing with fire.
 I pointed this out, but that wasn't part of the curriculum I was suggesting.
 I discovered that there was in fact an entire process of educational reform afoot in this
 country behind which is the guiding genius of Ralph Abraham.
 So I think we should ask you this question, Ralph, since you've more experience than most
 of us.
 Well, I'd rather that people with less experience speak about it, because my experience has
 been very disappointing.
 Oh, no.
 Here is the problem as I perceive it.
 Maybe you can help me get through this one.
 The children are innocent and trusting and will try any curricular reform experiment.
 They'll try anything, which they have done in different schools around the world with
 great effect.
 It was only a couple of days ago I was at the Intel Farm, they call it, in Oregon, where
 10,000 people work on realizing Terence's dream.
 Making psychedelic drugs available to them?
 It's called a different dream.
 They know what I mean.
 Chips, not hits.
 Casually over lunch, I revealed my revolutionary program for the schools to the software engineer
 who was sitting there.
 And he said, "Oh, well, this historical curriculum."
 He said, "I'm an Armenian."
 And Armenian went, "No, Algerian."
 He said, "I'm from Algeria, and my school was exactly what you...
 It was wonderful."
 And so there are places in the world where even my experiment has been tried.
 The problem is this.
 The children, the owners of the school, the people, everything is fine.
 The problem is with the teachers and parents.
 The teachers have been trained.
 That's one problem.
 And the parents have been frightened, I guess.
 So the parents absolutely refuse any experiments that would affect their children because of
 the danger of a failure.
 You see that they consider the current system, which is guaranteed to fail, is somehow safer
 than an experimental system that might fail.
 The insecurity itself is a source of anxiety.
 Well, I'm just analyzing.
 I don't really know what goes through their mind.
 But what I have discovered is that groups of parents come in and physically attack the
 teachers, the administrators, and so on, to guarantee that the time-worn, failure-proof
 system is performed as it always has been.
 You see the problem?
 Older people seem to see the problem.
 That's why Terence has recommended mushrooms.
 That's why Rupert has suggested psychic pets.
 You see how revolutionary is psychic pets?
 We're talking about the parents here.
 After it's proved to them that what they already know is true by somebody in the authority
 of the scientific establishment, then the truth will become true for them for the first
 time due to the fact that they trust authority more than they trust their own experience.
 So I haven't given up yet with the educational system, but I'm still seeking some little
 way around this very deeply ingrained habit.
 And part of the problem is, as the stakes rise, the clenching on the part of the geriatric
 establishment becomes even more intensified.
 So for example, right now, the worldwide epidemic of youth bashing is the most counterproductive
 thing we could possibly generate.
 I mean, we're leaning on the very people who are going to have to save the situation.
 Why not admit the obsolescence and bankruptcy of the old models and take our foot off the
 neck of youth and honor an interest in psychedelic experimentalism, sexual redefining of roles,
 a new look at how we relate to work, a new look at how we relate to community, instead
 of marginalizing youth culture and defining it as a phase, misguided, naive, foolish,
 we should say these are the uncorrupted people in society who have not yet felt the hammer
 of the programming and the guilt and the creodes of economic necessity and try to build upward
 and outward from youth culture rather than suppressing it.
 For this reason, I will be appearing at a rave tonight that starts after my bedtime.
 I wish I could be persuaded by your persuasive rhetoric.
 My experience of youth culture is here are people who from the age of two have been watching
 hours a day of television shaped by commercials cunningly designed to introduce toddlers to
 the consumer society, whose music is dominated by a music industry run by cynical interests,
 manipulative people, public relations operations and large corporations.
 So to see this as uncontaminated, pure, the spirit of tomorrow, untarnished by the vices
 of today, seems to me to beg a number of questions.
 I'll be there at the rave tonight too, Terence, and there I'll be able to see this paradise
 that's unfolding before us.
 Your point about television is well taken.
 I totally agree.
 I think this is the most pernicious programming and propaganda device around.
 It's about to be strangled by the World Wide Web.
 Well, and you know, you can just turn off your TV.
 And I don't, I say that as someone who did.
 I raised my children without television because rather than just giving lip service to the
 idea that it's stupid, we actually acted on the perception.
 Yes, we do too.
 But your other point about the youth culture's music being in the hands of capitalists and
 record companies is slightly out of touch with what's actually happening.
 For $500 you can buy a CDR burner.
 Bands do this.
 And most youth culture music is now put out in editions of under a thousand pressings.
 And really the corporate middlemen have all been gone around and the big record corporations
 are not at all in touch with real tastes and real creativity in the music business.
 They recycle garbage that they support with massive public relations programs at the same
 time that real creativity is alive and well and thriving on a fractalized micro scale
 that goes right around the desires of mass consumerism.
 Sorry to interrupt.
 I don't, I just, it would be good if there could be an experiment carried out, perhaps
 with you as the cheerleader, for this youth culture of tomorrow actually to be able to
 be permitted rather than suppressed and so on, to see what happens.
 In my, I mean there are quite a number of experiments in this I would have thought going
 on spontaneously.
 It's not as if all these people involved in this culture are totally controlled by parents,
 teachers, etc. and many of them are not under direct control in this way at all.
 So, but you're still going to have to have educational systems, school systems of one
 kind or another.
 And it's not clear to me that, you know, more raids and psychedelics are going to automatically
 to generate that.
 Well I would offer as an example, I think the place on the planet where youth culture
 is most in control of the social agenda, in other words where youth's preference for psychedelic
 drugs is honored, where youth's music is honored, where microeconomic systems built by youth
 are honored, is the Netherlands, Holland, lowest AIDS infection rate in Europe, lowest
 heroin addiction rate in Europe.
 Heroin is legal.
 Prostitution is legal.
 There are actually very large scale social experiments going on that embody the values
 of youth culture and they're producing saner, less stressful, more life affirming in human
 societies than anything going on inside the high tech industrial democracies that set
 the global agenda.
 Well, I often visit Holland and I must say I haven't quite noticed such a striking distance
 difference between them and the rest of Western Europe.
 Well, but that's really because you come from London where also these things are happening.
 But if you lived in Berlin or Rio de Janeiro or Houston, I think the contrast with the
 Netherlands is quite astonishing.
 Didn't mean to stop the show.
 Ralph, you're not saying enough.
 Oh, am I guilty then of too much self-indulgence?
 No, you posed important problems.
 You've shown how on the edge of the millennium, great steps or small steps are needed that
 magnify through butterfly effects.
 You've asked me and Terence what you think they should be.
 You've told us you're disappointed by your own experiments with the reform of the educational
 system.
 Yes.
 So what next?
 Well, as I say, I think that we're at the edge of a millennium.
 We're at a turning point.
 What may be coming down the pike could be two or three miracles that will decidedly
 change the definition of the problem.
 And in the meanwhile, I think that we're more or less stuck in the situation where we keep
 trying what we're doing and believing that it has at least some chance of having an effect.
 I think that the educational system might change itself by a miracle, for example.
 And it could do that in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with any of our efforts,
 or in fact, it may be that some little thing that we did mattered.
 I think that your work in the revolution of science is very important and very promising,
 and it's proceeded essentially without funding because the genius of the program that you've
 evolved is that it has this enormous leverage, and at every crossing of the road, you've
 made the right choice to get more leverage.
 And Terrence, I think that your program also is a good one, in that over the years it's
 changed in the direction of younger people and that you've changed your approach to maximize
 and I don't see in either case that there's an enormous backlash working against you,
 that other revolutionary movements have been stopped by a backlash.
 And although you don't have funding, you don't have groups calling you up and threatening
 your life and so on.
 In my own case, I have felt, I've written about this endlessly, besides writing mathematics,
 I write that mathematics is important, and through the microscopic analysis of the hinges
 of history, the edges of millennia past, I have pointed out exactly where in each case
 mathematics had a key role in the miracle and the bifurcation that happened.
 I think that a society that rejects mathematics cannot actually successfully deal with these
 problems and therefore I have activated myself against the problem especially prevalent in
 the United States and concomitant with other problems that are especially prevalent in
 the United States, the problem of math, anxiety, avoidance and misunderstanding.
 And here I would say that there is a huge institution, more or less equivalent to the
 scientific community, that is arrayed against this information, that somehow the educational
 system has been particularly persistent in the destruction of mathematics, in the destruction
 of mathematical capability of youth and therefore in disempowerment of the society with its
 critical faculty to change.
 I do not believe you can have any clarity of view in the progress of history with no
 mathematical training on the part of any of the participants.
 I have seen in this society that even Nobel Prize winners in physics have math anxiety
 to a very severe degree.
 I am able to detect this because it's something that is amplified, it's behavior that emerges
 as soon as I walk into a room.
 So I guess I feel in some that my own efforts have been rather less successful or maybe
 I haven't been as clever in turning to the left or right at the crossings of the road.
 The problem is already much less severe in other countries so it seems like we needn't
 worry too much.
 In Europe, throughout Europe for example, the problem of the destruction of mathematical
 capability is far less severe.
 The only thing really disturbing there is that it's growing at an alarming rate, that
 it's becoming, they're inheriting the disease from the United States, a spreading disease
 based on standardized examinations like the SAT and equivalent movements.
 So there you have it, a problem that's so bad that the very mention of the word mathematics
 produces a perversion reaction that is paralyzing so that much as I hate to, and you've seen
 this today, that I can go through an entire day without mentioning mathematics, with mentioning
 mathematics but not the word mathematics, in the hopes of tricking people into recognizing
 that some ideas like this that have to do with perception of space-time patterns in
 the abstract, that these skills are useful.
 Can I add to that, I mean I don't think what Ralph means is that it's a tragedy that most
 people can't factor a quadratic equation.
 I think he speaks as he does because he is so professionally immersed in these issues.
 As someone somewhat more distant from all of this but in agreement from Ralph, the failure
 to teach mathematics in practical, social and political terms boils down to a failure
 to teach logic and discriminating understanding.
 The great evil in my humble opinion which haunts our enterprise, and I say this realizing
 I'm setting the fox among the chickens, the great evil that has been allowed to flourish
 in the absence of mathematical understanding is relativism.
 And what is relativism?
 It's the idea that there is no distinction between shit and shinola.
 All ideas are somehow operating on equal footing, so one person is a chaos theorist, another
 is a follower of the revelations of this or that new age guru, someone else is channeling
 information from the Pleiades, and we have been taught that political correctness demands
 that we treat all these things with equal weight.
 Because we have no mathematical ability, no logical ability, we don't know how to ask
 the questions that expose some positions as preposterous, trivial, insulting to the intelligence,
 and unworthy of repetition.
 So we all are very comfortable bashing science and flailing away at that, but that isn't
 our enemy.
 Science is capable of undertaking its own reformation and critique and has been engaged
 in that fairly vigorously for some time.
 The enemy that will really subvert the enterprise of building a world based on clarity is the
 belief that we cannot point out the pernicious forms of idiocy that flourish in our own community.
 And this problem is growing worse all the time.
 Just pick up a copy of Magical Blend or Shaman's Drum and you will discover an appeal to the
 level of intellect that makes what's going on with television advertising look like a
 meeting of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study.
 We have tolerated too many loose heads in our community.
 We are not willing to take on the karma involved in argument and discourse that actually gores
 somebody's ox so that at the end of the day, iridology or Mormonism or some other form
 of institutionally supported foolishness lies in shreds on the floor.
 We consider this politically incorrect.
 I can feel the tension in this room because people sense I might gore their particular
 ox.
 If we had learned mathematical logic or reason or rules of evidence, when someone approaches
 us excited to inform us that the ruins of Lemuria have been spotted in the deep sea
 off Big Sur or something like that, we would be able to respond to that with the contempt
 it deserves.
 I had a conversation about this recently with someone who if I had to describe their
 job category, I would describe them as mafioso.
 And I said, "What do you think of the abduction phenomenon?"
 And without hesitation, this person said, "There are just so many foolish people in
 the world."
 And to me, all of these things are intelligence tests.
 And the people who pass the intelligence test are not worrying about pro bono proctologists
 from other star systems.
 So, you know, we have perfected politeness.
 We have perfected the ability to listen to damn foolishness without betraying by so much
 as the flick of an eyebrow that we realize what we're in the presence in of.
 Now I think it's time to refine our mathematical skills, learn to think straight, and not be
 afraid to denounce the pernicious forms of foolishness which are vitiating the energies
 of our community and making us appear marginal and absurd in the discourse about truly transforming
 society.
 Well, I can't wait to see this laboratory of clarity unfold before me tonight.
 And as all nonsense is dispelled, a scalpel of reason is brought out by time to set it
 right.
 Yes, well, it is an ambiguous enterprise and fraught with contradiction, but forward, ever
 forward.
 You're listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one
 thought at a time.
 And so ended what I think was the last trilogue that they held.
 Maybe not, but it's the last one that I know of.
 And as we are listening to the end of this conversation just now, one of the last things
 that Terrence said really struck me, so much so that I'd like to play it again right now.
 It's time to refine our mathematical skills, learn to think straight, and not be afraid
 to denounce the pernicious forms of foolishness which are vitiating the energies of our community
 and making us appear marginal and absurd in the discourse about truly transforming society.
 Now I'm one of the worst in the world about this, because I go out of my way to accommodate
 people who I find too far out in left field for even me to be comfortable with.
 And as a result, I probably seem to give my approval for behavior and points of view that
 I find, well, ridiculous is the first word that comes to my mind.
 I'll give you an example.
 Several years ago, at one of the Mindstates conferences, just after Sheldon Norberg gave
 a presentation of his one-man play, "Confessions of a Dope Dealer" (and Sheldon, by the way,
 can be heard in my podcast #64 in case you missed it).
 Anyway, after his talk, I joined a crowd of people gathering around him to give him congratulations.
 And one of the people in the crowd was a young woman with spiked purple hair, strange clothing,
 and weird makeup, and she was literally just bouncing around and into people because, well,
 her sense of balance was essentially gone, and quite obviously the result of some unknown
 substance she had probably ingested.
 And then she asked Sheldon a question, something about UFOs and Stonehenge, or something all
 mixed up like that, and he very politely tried to answer her, but then she became slightly
 belligerent and continued on in a different vein and started saying, "And hey, how come
 my parents and all the old people hate these drugs?
 I think they're great!"
 Now there wasn't a person in the group who didn't feel somewhat uncomfortable and slightly
 embarrassed for her, even though she was oblivious to her own obnoxious behavior, but Sheldon
 did exactly what Terence suggested just now, and that is tough love for screwballs.
 Rather than just trying to ignore her, Sheldon looked her straight in the eye and very calmly
 said, "Because they're afraid that they'll turn out like you."
 Well, there was a hush in the little crowd for a moment, and then this young woman sort
 of gathered herself together and said, "Thank you," and left.
 Hopefully she's now given some thought to his answer, but in any event, I think Sheldon
 did a lot more to help this person than I would have by simply humoring her.
 You know, it's a fine line between being rude and giving somebody your honest opinion.
 And that's something I probably need to focus on more often myself.
 Anyway, getting back to the trial log, the first question I'd ask you, as I'm also
 asking myself, is whether or not you think we are now still at the edge of a millennium.
 Personally, I think we are.
 And I don't think it is just the year 2000, or just the 2012 craziness, or just a change
 of astrological age from Pisces to Aquarius, or just the advent of the information age
 and the internet.
 I don't think it's just any of those things.
 I think it's all of it.
 And we are definitely in some kind of an evolutionary snap, as Ralph just now called it.
 Or as is equally possible, I may be just trying to make our present age have more meaning
 than it deserves.
 But, hey, it's the age that you and I are living in.
 And so why shouldn't we consider it a pivotal age?
 It will at least be pivotal for you and me.
 But keep in mind, even though we may be at what Ralph calls a "hinge in history," we
 still have to do something to swing that hinge in the direction we think it should go.
 Whatever that is.
 So press on, my friend, press on.
 Now before I get out of here, I've got a few announcements that you may be interested in.
 One is a podcast that I mentioned a week or so ago called In a Perfect World with Rak
 Razam, in which he had an excellent interview with Dennis McKenna.
 Well, I went back a bit and listened to his podcast number 23, which is an interview with
 the legendary Mark McCloud, who, among many other titles, is the world's leading expert
 on blotter art.
 You know, the kind of art that you find on blotter paper dipped in LSD?
 Well, Mark is one of the elder elders in our community, and this interview I think will
 fill you in on a significant amount of tribal history that would take a dozen or so books
 to fill you in on any other way.
 And so it may be well worth your time to get to know a little something about Mark McCloud.
 At least that's my opinion, for what it's worth.
 And another item that you may be interested in is a new project that East Forest has begun
 called Sound Healing Bites.
 And I'm sure you'll recall the work of East Forest from some of my previous podcasts, and
 in quite a few other podcasts as well.
 And not only is the music delightful, it's also free.
 And I was lucky enough at the Symbiosis gathering last September to get to meet the man behind
 East Forest, and he appears to me as graceful and gentle as his music is.
 Now this new project is actually a podcast in which he posts short meditative pieces
 that are free to download.
 His programs run from 10 minutes to 15 minutes or so, and are just perfect for certain times
 in the day when you need to take a short break and reboot.
 Well here's what East Forest has to say himself about the podcast.
 I've been wanting to release more music into the world outside of the traditional album
 structure.
 Each episode of the podcast features a bite-sized live improvisational soundscape, robot-free,
 that goes very well with meditation, yoga, commuting, or just plain relaxing.
 It's super easy to subscribe so that each episode is automatically placed on your computer,
 iTunes, and/or iPod for convenient listening.
 You can always download individual episodes as MP3s, but subscribing simplifies everything
 into one click, and you can always unsubscribe in one click as well.
 Best of all, it's free.
 Thank you for that East Forest.
 I know that most of our fellow slawners already know that stuff about subscribing, but there
 are quite a few fellow slawners who still wait to manually download a program each week
 or just stream it from our RSS feed directly through their cell phones.
 But the auto-subscription method is the one that I recommend if you want to be sure to
 not miss any episodes, particularly in the case of somebody like me who doesn't get
 a program out on the same day of every week.
 Now there's also a fellow slawner who has put together quite a nifty little website
 that you can find at mindofmckenna.com.
 And that's all one word, mindofmckenna.com.
 And what he is doing is taking some of the best McKenna sound bites and pulling them
 out in short clips that are searchable through the tags he's associated with them.
 And it's a real dream site for you audio engineers who are looking for short McKenna
 clips that you want to add to your work.
 Now for an announcement of an event that might be difficult to get to, but I'm sure it'll
 be worth it if you can make it to the big island of Hawaii June 10th through the 13th
 for the All Chemies Visionary Art Congress.
 And if you just do a Google search on that, and that's A-L-C-H-E-M-E-Y-E-Z, All Chemies,
 I guess is how you'd say it, All Chemies Visionary Art Congress, you'll find a link
 to the public Facebook page about it where there's a list of confirmed attendees as
 well and from what I see the audience is certainly as stellar as the presenters.
 So if you do attend this event, it sure would be great if you could send us a report or
 a sound bite or two.
 I really wish I could be there myself.
 In fact it was there on the big island that I last saw Terrence McKenna and it was at
 a similar event, the All Chemical Arts Conference, which is also where I met Bruce Dahmer.
 And I have a feeling that this upcoming All Chemies Visionary Art Congress is also going
 to be one of those events that can change many lives.
 So aloha to you all.
 And now I'd better get out of here and get to work on the next two programs, neither
 of which has been online before I might add.
 So that'll do it for now and so I'll close by reminding you again that this and most
 of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your
 own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 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 if you're interested in the philosophy behind the Psychedelic Salon, you can hear
 all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is available as an audiobook that you
 can download at genesisgeneration.us.
 And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.
 Be well, my friends.
 Yes, well, it is an ambiguous enterprise and fraught with contradiction, but forward, ever
 forward.
 [Music]
 (upbeat music)


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