[no audio]
 Rare people will arrive late, but we have a little bit of trivia to go through anyway.
 Is there... how many people were here yesterday?
 Good heavens.
 Well, it doesn't matter because we're not going to repeat ourselves.
 If anybody who was here yesterday is burning to acquire the software for the time wave,
 I still have three order blanks left.
 So, I don't know how you can struggle over them or something.
 Do you need one?
 Here it is.
 Anybody else?
 There's one, and here's the last one.
 I'm sort of short on all my propaganda here.
 There are probably enough of these so that most people, or most people and some couples can have them.
 This is just my schedule for the rest of the year and next.
 If any of you are interested in the botanical project,
 there's just a few of these descriptors left of botanical dimensions.
 So, we'll pass these as far as they'll go.
 Why don't we start them at the back of the room so there's an element of fairness in all this.
 Does somebody want to come up and start these up from the back?
 And then, more appropriately to today's subject,
 I finally put aside my better judgment and accepted an offer to lead a tour of Upper and Lower Egypt next December.
 So, if you're interested in Ancient Egypt or Hermeticism,
 or the grotesque humor that arises from watching people from Southern California cavort in the shadow of the Great Pyramid,
 then you won't want to miss this one.
 No, it'll be more... if we get our friends, it'll be much more fun than if we have to, you know,
 listen to that lady from Glendale who channels Attila the Hun.
 I hope she's not listening.
 I've never known her to listen, so...
 Alrighty, right.
 I'm surprised that there's so much overlap.
 How many people weren't here yesterday?
 So these are people with a specific focus of interest on Hermeticism, is that true?
 [Audience member] Well, I was here last year.
 [Dr. Ehrman] Uh-huh.
 [Audience member] Yeah, I was here last year for a video talk, but...
 [Dr. Ehrman] Oh, so you didn't need that again, right?
 [Laughter]
 Well, all of these things...
 Oh, here are my gloves, how did they get loose?
 All of these things are... it all relates to each other,
 at least in the seamless mush that my mind has become.
 Okay, is there anything left over then from yesterday that anybody...
 over the course of 16 hours is burning to... yeah.
 [Audience member] How did you line up your...
 [Dr. Ehrman] Right, right.
 [Audience member] But that's your formulation.
 [Dr. Ehrman] Right.
 So how did I get that end date?
 Well, it was interesting, I realized lying in bed last night going over the day
 that I hadn't really discussed the correlations,
 the exterior support for the 2012 date.
 And the way I aligned the time wave was simply by having a list
 of what I thought were the high novelty points in the last couple of thousand years
 and then fitting the thing against it.
 And then when I would get what looked like a good fit,
 where all the things on my list were in high novelty positions,
 I would expand the list and see if it still fit.
 And then in the early phases I was interested--
 I had this sort of intuition or the logos told me that every cycle
 should begin with a bang, literally,
 that this bang was the trickle-down resonance of the Big Bang.
 And I gained support for this idea from--
 although to call this a source of support--from Finnegan's Wake,
 where there are instances of what is called "Viconian Thunder,"
 these huge thunderous words that begin every new section of the Wake.
 So I thought that I should look at Big Bangs.
 And when I looked at the 20th century and was trying to figure out
 where to start the cycle of the last--of the presumably last,
 but in any case, 67-year, 104.25-day cycle,
 where to start it in the 20th century,
 the Big Bang that I settled on was Hiroshima, August 5, 1945.
 And if you add 67 years, 104.25 days to that,
 you come very, very close to this December 22, 2012 date,
 plus everything else seemed to fit.
 And then what, for me, made it more persuasive was that
 after this was all completed and pretty much set in concrete in my mind,
 someone pointed out to me that the Mayan calendar ends on that precise date, that day.
 And this is a--you can call it a peculiar coincidence,
 but this whole realm is fraught with coincidence.
 [Audience member] What about the list? How did you come up with the first one?
 The list was simply sort of what you know if you have a good liberal education.
 In other words, you know the Golden Age of Greece, the Italian Renaissance,
 the European Enlightenment, and the 20th century.
 And then you begin looking at the fine detail based on that.
 When I first began, I thought that the discovery of relativity was it,
 but that would have made the grand finale occur in 1973.
 Let me tell you a story, just so you can see how peculiar this is.
 Yes, so I fastened in on the theory of relativity,
 and I calculated forward that--to try and find the end date,
 and it ended on the winter solstice of 1973.
 And I thought that was moderately interesting.
 It was when you propagated it forward two of these 384-day things.
 So then I went to the astronomical library at Cal
 and looked up in the ephemeris of eclipses,
 and I discovered that on this winter solstice of 1973,
 there would be a total eclipse of the sun.
 And I thought that that was interesting, these accumulated--
 that's what you look for is accumulations of density of coincidence.
 And they publish in these astronomical atlases
 all the eclipses of the next thousand years and the past thousand years,
 and they publish maps of the tracks of all of these eclipses.
 So I looked up the track of the eclipse of December 22, 1973,
 and it started, I think, out in the Pacific Ocean somewhere,
 at totality it swept across La Charrera,
 and it completed itself in the delta of the Amazon over the city of Beiling,
 which is a big river city in the Amazon.
 Well, I thought--I looked at this, and I--as an amateur scholar of Joyce,
 I was aware that the delta symbol for Joyce was always the vagina.
 There's that whole geometry lesson in Finnegan's Wake
 that has to do with the inverting of the triangles,
 which is actually this obscene thing that he's going through.
 So I knew that the delta was the symbol of the vagina,
 and then I saw that this eclipse ended in the delta of the Amazon.
 And then I thought, of course, the delta of the Amazon, the world mother,
 the Amazon is the largest female geographical feature on the planet,
 and here we had a total eclipse of the sun on a winter solstice
 completing itself at Beiling, and "Beiling" is the Portuguese word for "Bethlehem."
 You see, I was seriously--it's called "delusion of reference," this condition.
 So--and I thought, "Wow, far out."
 Now we have the answer to Yeats' question.
 Do you know what Yeats' question was?
 "What rough beast is it that slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"
 And so I was all quite keen on all of this.
 Now, as if that weren't strange enough,
 whatever is--whenever somebody comes up with something like that,
 the desperate argument of the pseudo-rationalists,
 when really slammed to the wall, is that this information was known,
 it was published in books, these eclipse tracks, these ephemerides, and so forth.
 It was all published in books, and consequently you didn't predict the future.
 You merely tapped into the sum total of the human database already existent,
 and your unconscious has taken all these clues and all this data
 and woven it together into a delusion which is designed to suck you in and trap you.
 Well, this is a hard argument to overcome.
 The only way that you could overcome that argument
 is that if you predicted an event that was non-repeating
 and that nobody on Earth knew it was going to happen
 or could possibly know that it's going to happen at the time you make the prediction.
 So I was in the early months of '73 and the late months of '72
 running around telling everybody that this winter solstice
 with an eclipse over the delta of the Amazon was going to be of cosmic importance.
 Well, then about March of 1973 I was reading my morning paper,
 and on page four there was this large headline, and it said,
 "Brightest Comet Yet Headed Toward Earth."
 And I was reading this thing, and it said, "This object will reach Perhelion,"
 meaning closest approach to the sun, "on December 22nd of this year."
 This was the comet Kohotek.
 Well, now the interesting thing about Kohotek was it didn't amount to much,
 but I had predicted its window of appearance
 before it was detected by human beings or instruments anywhere on the planet.
 So it was just from the mushroom to me like a perfect proof
 that it was giving information that couldn't come from the human unconscious,
 couldn't come from any calculation of past events,
 that a unique long-period comet never before seen
 and probably never to be seen again was going to fall right smack
 in the center of my window of predictive intensity.
 So, you know, it's just an instance of the cosmic giggle.
 I mean, in terms of what does it mean, it's like, you know,
 when that question was posed to Mr. Natural, he said, "It don't mean shit,
 but isn't it strange?"
 Well, that's enough of that.
 Yeah?
 [Unintelligible]
 Well, morphogenetic fields, the theory that lies behind the I Ching,
 all of these things are attempts to make a statement
 about the frontier of understanding, and to the degree that,
 in other words, it's like there's a perception which wants to be born,
 but since it's at the edge of cognitive revelation,
 it's very hard to get it right.
 The I Ching, morphogenetic fields, the tarot,
 the time wave that we looked at yesterday,
 these are all attempts to encompass within a metaphor
 something which is at present almost unsayable.
 It's very interesting, if you care about this kind of thing,
 to go back into the history of the evolution of ideas
 and see what it is like, what the ideological climate is like,
 right before an idea crystallizes and is finally gotten straight,
 or pretty straight.
 An area where that happened that I spent some time poking around in
 is immediate, you know, the 15 years preceding Darwin's publication
 of The Origin of Species and Alfred Russell Wallace's paper
 to the Royal Society in London.
 All of biology in England and Germany and on the continent,
 all of biology was intensely involved with what the literature of the time
 called the problem of the species.
 And, you know, all these people were exploring various parts of the world,
 especially the tropics.
 They could see that if you go from one Indonesian island to another,
 there is shift of species, there are slightly modified forms.
 In other words, they had all the ingredients in front of them on the table,
 and people were trying to figure it out, but they didn't quite have it.
 And then it crystallized in the minds of certain people.
 For Alfred Russell Wallace, who is the real discoverer of natural selection,
 it sort of relates to our theory of creativity,
 he had malaria on the island of Ternate, north of the Moluccas,
 or in the north Moluccas.
 And in the fifth day of this intense malarial fever,
 he saw the solution to the problem of the species,
 and he wrote it down in this fevered state,
 and then he worked his way through this illness.
 And when he came down and looked at what he'd written,
 he couldn't find fault with it.
 It seemed right. It's just a page and a half.
 It's preserved. It's all there.
 So he didn't know what exactly to do.
 So he decided he would write a letter to the greatest naturalist,
 natural scientist of the age,
 who was the aristocratic and well-connected Charles Darwin back in England.
 By this time, Wallace had been six years knocking around in the forests of Indonesia.
 So he sends this letter to Darwin.
 Darwin had been working on the origin of species for nearly 18 years.
 This letter arrives in the post.
 He opens it up, and he just says, "Oh, shit.
 You know, who is this guy?
 Some surveyor from Wales has beaten me to the punch."
 And so he--I don't suppose he got on the phone,
 but he sent a message with a servant to Charles Lyell,
 who was his great friend and the president of the Royal Society at that time,
 and said, "Charlie, this is a real problem.
 I'm bringing this book out.
 This guy's some clown.
 This guy looks like he scooped me."
 And Lyell said, "Don't worry. Here's what we'll do.
 We'll get him to deliver a paper at the Royal Society,
 and we'll have you deliver a paper the same evening.
 And you know how everybody adjourns to get drunk at the intermission,
 so we'll just schedule him after the intermission."
 And this was done.
 And this is why Charles Darwin is the discoverer of evolution.
 For a few decades, it was called the Darwin-Wallace theory,
 but eventually--it's an interesting story,
 although not relevant to what we're doing,
 but what overturned--well, somewhat relevant.
 The reason Wallace became persona non grata in English science
 was because he would not genuflect before pure reductionism.
 He said there is more to evolution than mutation and natural selection.
 There is a spiritual element, and that was all it took for him to get the boot,
 because 19th century scientific theory and biology
 was absolutely phobic of deism, belief in God.
 They were really far more committed atheists than I would wager most of us are.
 It was a point of pride with them to squeeze spiritual assumptions
 out of all of their theories.
 There is no purpose recognized in Darwinian evolutionary theory.
 To speak of purpose in their minds was to completely misunderstand
 what was being suggested, and what they wanted was a theory
 of how life could evolve and come to be that would be specifically without purpose,
 because the only kind of purpose they could imagine was God's plan,
 and they wanted to dump that whole idea.
 It was a very fierce intellectual struggle.
 As the inheritors of the victory,
 we don't really realize what a desperate struggle that was.
 As recently as 120 years ago, you could call yourself a member of the British intelligentsia,
 and you could believe that the earth was created at 10 a.m. on September 6, 2344 B.C.
 That was educated Christian opinion in England as recently as 120 years ago.
 So we have made considerable intellectual progress.
 They calculated, they read the Bible, all those begats, you know,
 and the ages of each person, so-and-so lived to be 120 years,
 and he begat so-and-so, and they added it all up,
 and that was the date.
 [Unintelligible]
 Well, yeah.
 They had an incredibly limited view of the possibility of cosmic time.
 This is an intellectual revolution that has taken place almost within our lifetimes.
 People had no idea how old the world was and how old human beings were.
 I mean, that was as far as the imagination of Western Europe could be stretched
 to the idea that the earth was 4,500 years old.
 You know, at the turn of the century,
 when these French peasants were out digging truffles or feeding their goats or something,
 and they fell into the hole that led to the Lascaux paintings,
 and they saw all these, you know, the bison and the deer and these amazing paintings,
 said, you know, "This is really important.
 Let's tell the experts in Paris."
 So the great experts on the art of Europe came down
 and lowered themselves into this cave and viewed all this stuff
 and then announced to the Paris newspapers that this stuff was not old,
 that in their expert opinion, these things had probably been done as a kind of amusement
 by French soldiers in the Grand Army of Napoleon who overwintered there in 1812.
 So they were saying it's basically less than 100 years old from their vantage point.
 These things were 20,000 to 25,000 years old.
 And as this dawned, this realization, this is the discovery of deep time,
 the idea that the earth could be 4 billion years old, you know.
 These were astonishing intellectual revolutions of which we are the inheritors,
 and we've sort of grown up with these assumptions,
 but they are very, very recent leaps in the evolution of the European imagination.
 [Unintelligible]
 That's right. Oh, yeah. We're a country of rattlesnake-handling screwballs.
 I mean, every time I go to Europe, it amazes me the great difference
 between Europe and the United States is that it's a secular society over there.
 They have transcended fundamentalism pretty thoroughly.
 And so discussions about social mores or drugs or stuff like that
 can go on without invoking concepts like God's wrath and Jesus' plan
 and stuff where you just, "Zoey, ovey," you know.
 Anyway, enough of Sunday morning raving. Yes?
 On the time wave, how much can you say that the time wave actually relates to the individual?
 Particularly if you're getting down into our own time on the time wave,
 can the individual--we didn't get that far down into the time wave yesterday.
 I take it that the time wave is actually fixed for everyone, right?
 Well, the big wave, the wave we were looking at.
 The big wave is how much can it then relate to the individual in terms of--
 if you look at it and you take--if you zoom on down--
 Right. That's an interesting question.
 I sort of feel--I see and I've worked out the theory of how it could be applied to the individual,
 but I'm a little less comfortable with it.
 I don't hear the logos booming in my ears when I did that part of the work.
 Astrology underwent a kind of similar crisis, if you want to put it that way.
 Originally, astrology was to chart basically the course of reigns, of kings,
 and kings were assumed to be macrocosms of society.
 So really, astrology was created to chart the destiny of nations and peoples.
 In the Renaissance, with the birth of the idea of the individual, really,
 people for the first time began to think of, "Well, what about my horoscope?"
 And really, I think the evolution of the personal horoscope--
 although I'm sure astrologers will rise in a single body to shout this down--
 but the rise of the individual horoscope is essentially a capitalist phenomenon
 where you then create a product that can be dealt--
 because if you're only casting horoscopes for the court,
 pretty soon there aren't too many horoscopes needing to be cast.
 The way you do it with the time wave, if you want to get your individual wave,
 is the way I think of the big wave that we looked at yesterday,
 is that it is, in a sense, the average of all the little waves,
 that we each are a little wave, and when you average them all together,
 you get the big wave, sort of the way if you have enough atoms of gold
 and you put them together, pretty soon you have an ingot of gold,
 and the ingot of gold has a different architecture than gold atoms,
 but it's made of gold atoms.
 Anyway, the way you do that for an individual is you take your birth date
 and you add 67 years, 104.25 days--that's one cycle.
 You add that to your birth date and you enter that as the end date,
 rather than December 22, 2012.
 You add that, you use that as the end date, and then you look back at your life.
 Now what this implies is that at age 67 years, 104.25 days,
 you have an excellent opportunity to die.
 If you miss this opportunity, there won't be such a good opportunity as that
 for 67 more years.
 So you sort of have to--I don't know, I don't take this stuff seriously,
 and neither should you.
 Yes?
 [unclear audio]
 Well, in a way, what this is just showing you, the architecture of the hologram,
 you know how one of the interesting features of a hologram is
 when you cut a little piece out of it, you have the whole thing.
 You can cut a square out of the middle of a hologram,
 and when you illuminate that little square, the whole thing is still there.
 This is the magic of the hologram, that all of the information is distributed
 through each point on the hologram.
 And you can take that little square and cut a little square out of it
 and illuminate it, and the whole hologram will be there.
 Now what you're losing in this is resolution.
 The detail gets dimmer and dimmer, but the major outlines remain.
 This is a quality of fractals.
 You see, information in a hologram is distributed
 according to what mathematicians call a Fourier transform.
 And when you analyze Fourier transforms, they turn out to be a kind of fractal.
 So these resonances that I was showing you yesterday,
 where we see how the Third Reich relates to ancient Egypt and stuff like that,
 well, that's a one-day course in the time wave version of how these resonances work.
 Really, there are dozens of major resonances and thousands of minor resonances
 that go in to making up a given moment.
 So if we were to analyze this moment in high detail,
 we would build trees of resonances of less and less input but still present
 that would show us the situation in great complexity
 because many, many times are present, all time, ultimately,
 if you draw the resonance trees out far enough,
 you discover all time is present in every moment,
 eternity in a grain of sand, wasn't that William Blake's rap?
 That's the bottom line of all of these theories,
 is that the whole history of the universe is contained, recapitulated,
 and somehow present in every moment or every year or every millennium
 or every million years.
 It's a series of hologramized, refractive, fractalized self-referentiality is what it is.
 Yeah?
 [inaudible]
 Each thing in its time.
 [inaudible]
 Well, in a way, I was very interested in synchronicity in my youth.
 That's sort of what got me started reading Jung.
 But the more time I spent reading philosophy,
 and especially philosophy of science relative to time,
 I came to realize that synchronicity, as presented by Jung,
 is not an explanation of anything.
 It's the name of a phenomenon, but it is no explanation.
 In fact, it tells you there is no explanation.
 The explanation is there is no explanation.
 It's simply synchronicity.
 P.W. Bridgman, in a book called "The Theory of Natural Law,"
 made a statement which has always guided me in this kind of model building.
 He said, "A coincidence is what you have left over when you apply a bad theory."
 You see how that works?
 The only thing in the material that you change,
 except the consulting oracle,
 you truly are asking questions of the universe,
 of which it shall respond in echo.
 It's very much like AP.
 And more and more, my train of thinking is starting to see the response of the universe.
 And this is very Eastern, in the Middle East.
 They pretty much were in alignment at the moment,
 but there were signs and symbols that people so finely tuned
 to perceive and to accept the revelations.
 Yeah, you have to be able to perceive almost schizophrenically.
 You have to see.
 We were talking, or his name has been bandied about this weekend,
 Philip K. Dick.
 What happened to Phil was that the resonance became stronger than the reality,
 or it became equal in strength,
 so that by squinting, he could see second-century Rome.
 Everybody changed into people wearing togas and speaking Demotic Greek and everything.
 Well, that was the resonance of where he was at,
 but when the resonance comes forward with such strength that the foreground is displaced,
 they have a name for that, "Buggo."
 [Laughter]
 You know, you got to watch that.
 On the other hand, if you can control it,
 it's a source of great richness and inner amusement.
 Just to see somebody come scrambling up who needs their book signed,
 and you notice that who you've got in front of you is Charlie Chaplin or Adolf Hitler.
 Everyone has these people inside them, and they come and go on the surface.
 I mean, you aren't who you think you are.
 You aren't even who you think you aren't.
 I mean, it's very, very tricky, yeah.
 [Unintelligible]
 That's the idea, yeah, to map novelty.
 [Unintelligible]
 Yeah, because see, here's the thing.
 If there were only one wave, then it would be my difficult task to explain to you
 why we aren't all always doing the same things at the same time.
 How can, for instance, imagine a situation where on the day people land on the moon,
 you lose your job.
 Well, how--you haven't really shared in this wonderful forward step
 into new dimensions of freedom.
 Instead, you've been reduced to poverty, misery, and anxiety.
 How come it means that while the big wave was moving deeper into novelty,
 your personal wave was moving in the opposite direction?
 One of the great things, I think, is to have your own wave in sync
 or in resonance with the big wave.
 I've noticed that very strongly.
 Like, I've been thinking for months and months that I needed to get a better disk drive.
 So finally, I look at my bank account and I decide,
 "Okay, it looks like I can just squeak through and I'll get this thing."
 So I buy it, I bring it home, I flip on NPR, and they say,
 "Sales of durable goods are rising in a sure sign that the recession is about to end."
 I think, "Gee, I could have ended the recession months ago if I'd realized."
 [laughter]
 Yes, yes.
 An anecdotal evidence of the speeding up of time is--and the increase of novelty--
 is there for each one of us by just even walking into a record store.
 You can listen to music from all over the world and way back in time.
 And novelty, immense novelty, is just available to all of us.
 That's right. All cultures are embedded in this culture.
 I mean, on this island, you can find Amazonian Indians,
 you can find Sufi saints, you can find Satanists.
 It's all here, probably within walking distance of where we're sitting.
 Yeah, synchronicity, coincidence, all that stuff is very peculiar.
 I remember--this will be the last anecdote--
 I was in a restaurant a few years ago in Malibu with a bunch of Hollywood people.
 And there was this woman there, this French woman, and she wasn't terribly hip,
 but she had been introduced by somebody to my shtick.
 And so we were all there, and she said,
 "This mushroom, you say that it speaks to you, but I don't understand 'speak.' What do you mean?"
 And I said, "Well, you know, it can take on various persona."
 For instance--and thinking since she was a film producer, I should appeal to her industry--
 I said, "Remember the role that Steiger played in 'The Pawnbroker'?"
 "Well, sometimes the mushroom is like that."
 And at that moment, Steiger leaned across the table to be introduced to everybody.
 And I--[laughs]
 [laughter]
 So then we all shook hands with Rod Steiger.
 He went back to his table, and Ralph Abraham, who had been sitting across from this French woman and I,
 watching this whole thing, leaned over and said to me,
 "You see, Terrence, it's just the mushroom's way of showing you that it can reach out and touch you anywhere."
 Anyway, it does--the mushroom is very much like Rod Steiger.
 [laughter]
 I said to it once, "What are you doing on this planet?"
 It said, "Listen, you're a mushroom. You live cheap."
 [laughter]
 "This was not such a bad neighborhood till the monkeys went nuts."
 Which is true, actually.
 All right.
 We've probably staved off serious work just about as long as we can, unless someone insists.
 Okay. Well, today's thing is sort of a return to a more orthodox, educational kind of mode,
 hopefully not to such a degree that it's boring.
 But the agenda is to talk about hermeticism and alchemy,
 the way in which this tradition, which is counterintuitive and heterodox,
 if not heretical from the point of view of Christianity,
 and what it can mean for the present, what it means for the psychedelic experience,
 what it means for the notion of the end of history,
 and how the loss of this point of view has probably done us a certain amount of damage.
 The great tension in the Middle Ages was between--
 the late Middle Ages was between the magical schema,
 the magical view of human beings and the Christian view.
 And the Christian view is very strongly marked by the idea of man's fall,
 that we screwed up early on, and somehow then, by virtue of that,
 we're forced into a secondary position in the cosmic drama.
 We are doing penance as we speak.
 The world is a veil of tears.
 The lot of human beings is to till hard land,
 and we are cursed unto the 19th generation or something like that
 by the fall of our first parents.
 And we can be redeemed--this is, I'm giving you the Christian wrath--
 we can be redeemed through Christ, but we don't deserve it.
 If you are saved, it is because there is a kind of a hand extended to you
 from a merciful God who is willing to overlook your wormy nature
 and draw you up in spite of yourself.
 And this is deep in us, no matter how--
 you may not think you've bought in because you're black or because you're Chinese or something,
 but it's just in the air we breathe.
 It's what Western civilization makes you think, whether you want to think it or not.
 Even if you don't come out of these traditions,
 for us the concept that you've got to pay your dues, that's what it comes down to.


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