I mean, who among us cannot think back on our own behavior to moments that hardly exemplify the Gaian ethic? So then how can we expect more or anything better than that from other people? The real task, I think, is one of linking together through communication, which people don't realize when they're not communicating. But what we're doing right now, this is a very unusual activity. Even the most intelligent of us go through our ordinary day basically with grunts and groans. That's how we signal to each other. But creating a shared mind space, a consensus of understanding, requires people talking to each other and clearly speaking from the heart about what they know and understand. Ralph introduced me to the notion of clairparlance. This is a psychic ability that we're trying to cultivate. Clairparlance is clear speech. You know, William Blake said, "The truth cannot be told so as to be understood without being believed." That's the greatest weapon the truth has. But if it is articulated and you hear it, you will serve it. And so will George Bush, and so will anybody else who hears it. The power of the truth is its immediate, limpid rightness. So cognitive activity, and this really goes back to the theme of the weekend, which is shamanism. To my mind, what shamans really are, are people who indulge in cognitive activity. They communicate, they dance, they sing, they chant, they tell stories, they speak out, they orate, they pray, they communicate. And in so doing, they empower everyone around them to open their hearts and their minds. Reagan was a shaman, or is a shaman. Oh yes, it's stage magic. And there is this, and you can't understand why it works. And it is morally neutral. This is the other thing. I mean, Goebbels, you can forget Ronald Reagan, this is a piker and a buffoon. Joseph Goebbels was the man who understood the power of information and communication. And if he believed the best idea wins, then he can only shake his head. The fate that overtook his ideas, because here was a millennial dream that 12 years after it was launched, people were living in basements on rats. So it's a matter of allowing the ideas to fully express themselves through us. We can only advance into the future at the rate at which we can transform our language. And we can only transform our language by working with it. This is why design and art and music and all of these things are so important. The artist, who appears to be the weakest among us, actually creates the context for everything to happen in. So that it's so bizarre to hear right-wing politicians, for instance, talk about terms like spin and hype. And I mean, they use the language by grafting certain concepts onto the language, you make it impossible for people not to agree with you. You actually foreclose the option of disagreement. They know this, and we know this. So this is the theater where the battle goes back and forth to say what the world is in such a way that you convince everyone. And then we can get down to the business of living in that world. And history really is this process of trying to generate a guiding image that serves. And so someone, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, will project the guiding image, and it gels in the unconscious and becomes a creode and a vast set of historical forces follow it the way water follows a dry arroyo. But then the way is lost. It's not clear which direction the flow should go. Then there must be a new guiding image. And I think that the guiding image that we have been operating under, which is the property-owning male citizen, is giving way to a new guiding image, which is the planetary steward androgyne shaman. And this image reconnects us to nature, reconnects us to the lost part of ourselves, and will serve then until circumstances change, and then it too will have to yield to some new definition. Because we are ultimately malleable. We are like water. We take upon ourselves the shape of the container into which we are poured. And this is what history is, is the flowing from one container to another. I think that I wanted to just connect. Sure. I just wanted to ask you to comment on a remark you made this morning about anticipating the future and how information drifts back through time. I thought you would never ask. You repeat the question. This refers to my comment this morning that a portion of shamanism is the anticipation of the future by accessing information which drifts backward through time. Well, I think my interpretation of what religion is, other than the scheming of eunuchs, is there is something there. There is something there, transcendent and compelling. And what it is, is I think an anticipation of a future event, an anticipation of a future state of human completeness, that actually ahead of us in time, our destiny, whatever it is, is casting an enormous shadow backward into what we call history. And that in fact one way of thinking about history is as the shockwave which precedes an eschatological event. 5500,000 years ago there was no intimation of an eschatological event. There were simply hunters and tribalism and animal existence embedded in the life of the planet. Then slowly there has grown like an ever-increasing downward rolling boulder a momentum of intuition that there is something, a great change is in store for us, that we are all going to become enlightened, or that the Messiah is going to come, or that the extraterrestrials are going to rescue us from ourselves. The intimation of a sudden shift of epoch and an ingression into ordinary history of the transcendental. Now some psychologists might say this is nothing more than the culture's reaction to the inevitable fact of death, that every one of us will recapitulate this process, that death itself is like an enormous shadow at the end of life sending a flickering signal back through our existence. And when you're young, death seems far away and has no power. But as you live your life, you suddenly realize that the walls are growing steeper, the water is moving swifter. There is a kind of inevitability and that you don't want to stare this inevitability in the face. Well, I think the historical process is like that and that we are in the grip of what I call a singularity, that it is cultural, that the evolution of technique to become an ever more limpid mirror of the self is turning into a kind of process where we are becoming the objects of our imagination. We are, through cultural evolution, actually creating our own eschatology. You know, Plato said if God didn't exist, man would invent him. Well, there are many different kinds of gods for humanity to invent. And one of the most satisfying, I think, is this eschatological hypostatization that lies outside of history and informs it. This is what the seers are reacting to. This is what inspires the careers of the prophets. And it is, I maintain, what shamanism is about. We've offered many definitions of shamanism here. Here is another one. A shaman is someone who has seen the end. That's all. Once you've seen the end, it's like going with a friend to a movie that you've seen and they haven't. You have a completely different relationship to it. You are anticipating their enjoyment of it, their moments of fear, anticipation, and pleasure, but you are above them looking down. You have already seen the end. You know the punchline. And every shaman in every culture gains his or her humor, balance, healing ability, wisdom, if you will, by having participated in the transhistorical eschatological object. And modernity just denies this. The modern, the theory of history taught in the universities is what's called the trendlessly fluctuating theory. That just means war, revolution, reform, revolution, war, war, reform, revolution. It's like a random walk across the landscape with a steady increase of techni, rising Malthusian pressures, but that's all. It's because there is no place for the transcendent in the scheme of rationalism as we inherited from the late, you know, from the enlightenment. But in fact, if what the psychedelic experience argues, what our dreams argue, what our good sense argues is that it is not business as usual on this planet. And history is not a random walk that has tens of millennia yet to run ahead of it. But actually we have set off processes that finalize our time upon the earth, finalize the duration of our present cultural mode. We are going to have to fish or cut bait. We have built this into our myths about our world, but it has an ending and so it shall. And I think shamanism anticipates this superhuman condition out of which we arose in Ilio Tempore before history and into which we shall be subsumed at the end of the historical peregrination. The myth of our culture is the myth of the prodigal son. We made the descent into Physis, into the world of matter, into the well of the world, if you wish. Our job to recover a piece of lost information about the nature of the soul and then return to the tribal family, to the shamanic, prehistoric and post-historic mode where then the fruits of history will be not thanatoptic in their consequences, but transformative. Anticipation of the future. I'm thinking of the second book of the I Ching and asking that question about the reversibility of time going both ways. And also in that second book there is an interesting comment on the actual contrast or complementarity of creativity and transformation. It was to suggest that there are processes that go counter to one another. Well I think the I Ching is a special obsessive interest of mine, specifically the kinds of things you're talking about. There is this body of commentary that is pre-Confucian, late Zhou, early Han, that is puzzling in the present context of the I Ching. And I think this is what you're referring to. There's a place where it says the backward running numbers refer to the future, the forward running numbers refer to the past. And you say, well what does this mean? There are no backward running or forward running numbers. There are just 64. It's because the I Ching as we possess it today is a piece of broken machinery. It is actually an extremely sophisticated understanding of time couched in an intellectual and epistemic domain that we can barely cognize because it arises out of a different kind of language stratum. But really I think being is a kind of interference pattern where the forward flowing casuistry of what are called pre-potent situations, like the rolling downhill of a ball bearing, the momentum of happenstance, where the momentum of happenstance meets this more mysterious carrier wave from the future. And together they form an interference pattern. I remember I was very impressed where the Amazon River flows into the Rio Negro. These are both huge rivers. They're each about 12 miles across where they meet each other. And so consequently they are like two waves coming together. And where they meet they form a standing wave. And you can actually sail up to this bump in the river. And it's quite large. I mean, it's five or six feet high. And you can sail along it. It's like a ridge in the middle of the river. And you can see that all the material is in motion, but the wave itself is stable. It is what is called a standing wave. And I think that this is what being is. Science has attempted to give a very full account of the forward moving momentum of happenstance. But we deny that there is appetition for the future or that the future is somehow shaping events. And in our denial we are then left with a blind spot in our account of reality. I'm going to teach a five-day workshop at Esalen the week after Thanksgiving in which psychedelics will barely be mentioned. And the I Ching and its mathematical dynamics will be the entire focus of this. Because I take this notion very seriously and have worked it out in excruciating detail. Because I think that the wave form of the Tao can be known and was known. And that there are technologies of interior observation, which is what yoga is. But Taoism in its early and incipient phase was a similar kind of technology that allow real insight into the future. The future is not determined. If it were, thought would be meaningless. But it has... it's like water flowing over a dry arroyo. The water takes the shape of its container. And the water of historical happenstance flows into the vessel of the future, which already exists and takes its shape. Can you comment on the opposition of creativity and transformation in that same chapter? Yeah, I'm not so sure about... You see those as opposed? I thought that one led to the other. But in reading that, it seems that there's some question and I'm puzzled by it. Well I think you have to read the I Ching with a grain of salt. I mean, why does before completion come after after completion? There are a number of puns. I mean, it can be read as very deep, but not without humor, I think. And it is Taoistic thinking is inherently contradictory. The coincidencia positorum used to create cognitive dissonance. So you never have the satisfaction of logical closure that you get in Hegel or somebody like that. You're always left not sure, not knowing. Ralph, do you want to sum this up? I got carried away here. I thought my watch said 4.30 and it said 5 o'clock. Well we said we were going to stop at 5, so I don't think there's any way to try to sum it up. Well, you could just add. Well one thing I just thought we have had some thoughts about tomorrow and also maybe some of you have some particular wishes that you'd like to express about that. But the one thought we did have about what we might do tomorrow is tell stories rather than present ideas or information to tell stories. And Tans has some stories, I have some stories, and many of you will have some stories that are related to your theme. And stories, I mean, one way of looking at our lives is that we're creating and living out each story and we're trying to make it stories that are interesting and productive and life-sustaining, life-enhancing. What are stories that are your own personal stories that happened to you or fairy tales, myths, or ones that you're working with in your process that you might want to share? So and we might want to use a staff for that, a talking staff, so that the storyteller has the staff and pay a little attention to the flow. So you might dream about that, you might have some dreams. So that's what we have in mind about tomorrow. I did want to mention one little thing that may be happening around here, and I want to mention it in the sense of sharing an observation in the spirit of perhaps some of you are also picking it up. I had a dream last night, and I've since talked to two other people who had similar dreams last night here, in which there was some kind of attack by not-so-friendly spirits. In my case, they were just indistinct humanoid, could have been aliens, could have been humans. I had no way of knowing. I didn't know anything except their intent. They caused me actually to scream in my dream. And somebody else experienced a gang of street punk gangsters kind of challenging, invading, intruding. So there may be something happening right during this. I don't want to scare or paralyze anybody, but just to tune in. And perhaps some of you will have something to report tomorrow, or perhaps some of you know about it already. If you do, I'd appreciate knowing about it. There might be some opportunities to discuss it. Pay attention. You could be the next Whitley Strieber. Yes. Abductee. So maybe we should end with a few minutes of drumming. When is dinner? [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] [Drumming] Three other main kinds of paths or types that are known, ways of knowledge within the kind of shamanic context that some of you may relate to. Probably the most common one, actually, the one that most people relate to, is the shaman as healer. And this is the one where the shaman functions as the physical and spiritual healer of his or her family and immediate village or tribe, and does shamanic work for the purposes of healing. Part of that includes an aspect of the warrior. The warrior is a necessary part of the healer function, because in the process of health maintenance, the warrior function is the function that defends your body against infections and toxins. The immune system. The immune system is the warrior function of the body, of our system, seen as an aspect of healing, maintaining the integrity of the system. And then another very prominent path is the one that Terence referred to a great deal yesterday, was the path of the artist or the maker. The artist, the maker of tools, the craftsman, which would include scientific inventors and people that build tools and perceptual instruments, for example, that facilitate our perceptual and cognitive understanding of the world, communicate our vision. And then another path is the path of the seer or prophet or visionary. In some cultures, such as the ancient Paleolithic Basque culture of Europe, the sole surviving pre-Indo-European culture in Europe, they have a class of people called vision makers, who are the ones that you go to if you have a problem or you need to get an insight into your life path, your life destiny, a professional oracle, as it were. So I wanted to share that with you, because it might trigger off some thoughts about seeing different people who are engaged in shamanic work having different combinations of those different qualities. Terence is obviously very strong on the explorer, adventurer and the artist communicator. I have some of the healer, also the adventurer, explorer is my main one, with some of the healer, some of the artist communicator also, some of the warrior, but not as much as several of my friends that I know. The interesting additional difference between the path of the warrior and the path of the explorer that I also learned recently is that the adventurer, the warrior, in terms of to seek a vision, is more likely to go for an ordeal, where pain and stress is used as a way of expanding your perception, pushing your boundaries. So the kind of thing that Wallace Black Elk is wont to do of inserting himself into a hole in the ground, suspended from hooks in the chest, two days and two nights without food or water in total darkness, that's an ordeal. See, it's not natural. I mean, you're going out of your way. Nature isn't doing that to you. You're going out of your way to create a stressful, limiting situation in order to be able to transcend or push that limit further. The adventure explorer tends to, again, because the attitude isn't quite as hard as that of the warrior, to go to nature herself, the wilderness, pure wilderness. Now, wilderness may be an ordeal, but it may not be. It may be a sheer ecstasy. And it's in the wilderness, with its shifting, mysterious patterns, that you have to be alert. You can't just indulge and say, "Well, mother will take care of me," because mother nature will not take care of you. Mother nature doesn't give a shit about you as an individual. Basically, you know that, and that's a very important realization. If you think mother nature is going to take care of you like your mother did, I mean, you can be dead in two seconds flat out in the wilderness. If you attend, though, and pay attention, then you can survive, and not only survive in the wilderness, you can learn a great deal from it. You can enter into a communication relationship. So, wilderness is the preferred mode of vision path, I think, for the adventure explorer. And that could be the wilderness internal as well as external. Can we cheer occasionally when you're... Oh, absolutely. Okay, so having said that, I want to read you a brief passage from Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," in which he summarizes basically what both Terrence and I said yesterday in a few memorable lines. Let's know who's on top in terms of literature. Well, he was one of our great visionaries. He saw it at an early age. "The ancient poets animated all sensible objects with gods or geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive." Oh! "And particularly, they studied the genius of each city and country." You know, they had this concept of the genius loci, spirit of the place. "Placing it under its mental deity, until a system was formed, which some took advantage of to enslave the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects. Thus began priesthood." Very important sentence. "Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of and enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects. Thus began priesthood." That's you two. "No way, Jose. Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales, and at length they pronounced that the gods had ordered such things. Thus, man forgot that all deities reside in the human breast." Oh! Oh! Oh, hey! [laughter] One last passage from the same Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Fantastic text. "The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of 6,000 years is true, as I have heard from hell." There's your apocalyptic vision right there. [laughter] "For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life." See, the cherub is standing guard at the tree of life to prevent humanity from attaining immortality. That's what Yahovah said. You know, we must--you've got to go, because otherwise you might eat from the tree of life and you become immortal like us. Exclusionary system. "So the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas now it appears finite and corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment." [laughter] Oh, for aphrodisiacs and hallucinogenics. Yes, and each other. "But first, the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged. This I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives," you know, it was Blake's doing engravings in copper and etching and stuff, "which inhale a salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern." [sipping] So I'd like to tell you a story, part of a story, part of an ancient story, an ancient myth, actually the oldest written myth of Western culture. The story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and the goddess Ishtar, which might also be called the story of the hero, the wild man, and the goddess, or better, the goddess, the wild man, and the hero, just for the sake of balance. And in this oldest myth of Western civilization, I think more basic to the Western psyche than the Greek or the Egyptian myths, we find already all the themes in a prophetic way that we deal with now. The overbearing male patriarchal heroic warrior ego trip, the distrust of the goddess and the projection upon the goddess of qualities of human deceitfulness and treachery, the regret of what was lost in giving up the old goddess cultures and going to a male-dominated culture, and what was lost by leaving the wilderness and going into cities, and the price that was paid for that, the price that was paid for hubris, and the price that was paid for separation from our instinctual nature. And Gilgamesh was king of Uruk. Uruk was a city from which Abraham went out. Abraham was a pastoralist, a herder, a wandering nomadic herder. He took his herds of sheep and his tribe of people and founded another religion. Uruk was a city of farmers. Gilgamesh was a mighty king, a great warrior. He had built the city of Uruk with massive walls of stone. He had slain many enemies. He was said to be two-thirds god and one-third man. He was a mighty and powerful man and king. And he became overbearing and arrogant in his behavior towards his own people. He lorded it over the people. He bullied the young men and he demanded that the young brides were given to him for the first night of their marriage. And he oppressed the people to the point where the people went and complained to the high gods and said, "You have to do something about this Gilgamesh, king of ours. He lords it over us, he oppresses us and he pushes it around until our lives are miserable. He is a tyrant." And the gods sitting in council agreed that something had to be done, that a counterpart player had to be created. So they went to the old ancient goddess Aruru, the creator goddess, who created both them and man, and said to her, "Please create somebody to balance out this raving Gilgamesh tyrant. Somebody who will be his equal in strength and courage, who will be like him, like his very self, like a second self," it says. Thereby pointing, this is an aside, to the fact that right here in this earlier story, we're dealing with a coded story that talks about the internal psyche. The second self is the second self within every one of us. Gilgamesh is the human self who becomes arrogant through power. Gilgamesh had a dream in which he saw a star fall from heaven, and the people came to pick up the star. And it was heavy, and Gilgamesh tried to pick it up, and it was so heavy he could not lift it. And he went to his mother Ninsun, who was herself a seeress, semi-divine seeress, priestess, who said, "This dream symbolizes the one who is going to be born, who will be your counterpart, your brother, your equal, like unto you, like your very self." Gilgamesh said in the dream he bent down to pick up the star, and he felt attracted to it like to a woman. And he had another dream in which a sword of unusual design was found in the town square, and nobody could figure out what it meant, and Gilgamesh picked it up and put it on his belt. And he went to his mother and asked her, "What does this mean?" And she said, "This, too, is the one who is going to be born, who is like yourself, your counterpart, and he will be like your right arm. He will help you fight your battles and be your equal, strong like you." In the woods, a hunter saw a creature, a man, with the animals, running with the animals, drinking at the stream with the animals. This man was covered with hair all over his body and had long hair like a woman. He ran with the animals and he drank. End {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.64 sec Decoding : 2.06 sec Transcribe: 2745.35 sec Total Time: 2748.05 sec