Greek science did not suffer the suppression that occurred with the conversion of Constantine.
 The academies were not closed. The Hermetic knowledge was not repressed. Conversely, the
 empire was stronger and was able to repel the barbarian invasions of the second to the
 fifth century. And mathematics, which had halted in our world at Diophantus, proceeded through his
 disciple Hypatia to develop a calculus by AD 370, so that the millennium of Christian stasis that
 occurred in our world did not occur in that world. And as time passed and engineering advances
 occurred, by around 850, they had ships which were able to cross the Atlantic Ocean, and they
 encountered the Mayan civilization reaching its fullest flower in Guatemala and on the Yucatan
 Peninsula. And in fact, in this vision, I saw the Roman emperor Cosmodorus V make a pilgrimage to
 Tikal in 920 to be present at the coronation of a king at the end of Bakhtun 8. Anyway, this
 Greco-Roman imperial culture immediately recognized the genius of the Mayans in mathematics and
 astronomy, and Europe was transformed into an amalgamation, a Greco-Mayan civilization with
 the... So let me see. And this civilization continued to develop. Now, one of the influences
 which the Mayans brought into Europe around the year 950 was their extremely sophisticated
 psychopharmacopeia and shamanism. And this mated with Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, so that rather
 than science developing as it developed in our world, a kind of magical psychopharmacolytic
 technology of thought and understanding was what was developed over the centuries. And then in
 later centuries, centuries before it happened in our world, they contacted the Orient, and the
 Sung, the dynastic influence of the Sung, poured itself into the creation of a global civilization,
 such that by around 1200 AD, they were able to land on the moon and create a cybernetic global
 civilization similar to the kind we have now. They continued evolving with all this psychotronic and
 shamanically derived... And now, by this time, you can imagine it was an unbelievably exotic and
 alien civilization compared to our own. The fruits of their psychedelic and psychoanalytic investigations
 into higher space was the discovery of our world. They found out what had happened. They figured it
 out by studying dreams and by making deep journeys into the psychedelic space. They were able to
 discover our sleeping unconscious with its repository of the legacy of the Christian centuries
 under the reign of this demagogic ideology. And they conceived of the notion of saving us. And
 it has to do with this whole thing about the UFOs and influence and dreams and astral traveling,
 and the other side is actually the manifestation of this bizarre Greco-Mayan postmodern star-faring
 civilization trying to reach across the dimensions to save us from the momentum of our history by
 making us aware of, first of all, their existence and also their technology, which is evolving
 toward a point where, I think, around the Mayan millennium, around 2012, the time island will be...
 we will flow past the time island and the two time streams will be rejoined and we will make
 peace with this civilization, which is now a thousand years more advanced than us, with this
 totally different cultural history and this completely different take on reality. So this
 came to me in the space of about 15 seconds. And more details have flowed in. And I use it mostly
 as a meditational device because it's so interesting to ask to be told about how this other
 civilization developed. Its amazing exoticism, its Neoplatonism, its Taoism, its Mayan influences
 melded into a completely different kind of civilization than the one that we inherited.
 I've always thought, you know, that Christianity, without making any judgment about Christ himself,
 that Christianity is hands down the single most reactionary force in all of human history. And
 where would we be had that 1,200 years not been given over to this peculiar meditation, you know?
 All the pieces were in place for the kind of civilization that I've outlined. It was just a
 coincidence. Cat does not endorse this idea, or even encourage it. He only told it to me a couple
 of days ago in Apache Junction in a truck stop or something. And he didn't tell me it is the plot
 for a science fiction novel. He said, "This is the truth." And I said, "Let's get back to it being
 a good science fiction novel." Well, the thing is that it would, on our level, explain perhaps
 the questions you were asking earlier of why the teaching plants. Sure. Another thing I was curious
 while you were talking, this is the physics of nowadays, you know, it's like if you have an
 electron on one side of the universe and split it into two and separate them by the universe,
 they're still in communication with each other. So is that why, logically, you can bring the
 time island back together again? Yeah, this would be a quantum mechanical super macro physical Bell's
 theorem event. A kind of hyper dimensional vacuum fluctuation where the two worlds spring apart,
 sail along for a period, and then parity is conserved and they're rejoined. Well, this is
 interesting. I've had dreams that are parallel, which you're describing here. And it's very
 interesting that you're bringing this up. I've not heard of it before. Another thing I was curious
 is like this takes place. This would be on a human experience level, what you're speaking of now,
 the plant kingdom. Would they remain in between the species? We're free to have it any way we like.
 So how has Christianity possibly affected the evolution of plant species in this time stream?
 As opposed to the other, have they gone on? How is our lack of say 100,000 or a million
 species in the last 200 years that the other planet has, how does that affect the parity
 between the two? You mean how does our destruction and contort? Well, the part of the myth that I
 didn't tell you, which I will now tell you, was that naturally, well, they were developing and
 exploring technical options many hundreds of years ago. And they discovered the theoretics
 for nuclear fusion and fission, but they never used it until a few hundred years later, one of
 their great theoreticians, this was after they had discovered our time stream, made the prediction
 that the physics of atomic explosions were such that they would cross the time stream. And so they
 performed an experiment by detonating an atomic device in what is our year 1907. And this was
 the Tunguska event. And then by monitoring the dreams of Siberian shaman, which they had in clear
 focus, they saw, aha, this explosion which we set off actually did occur in both time streams.
 And at that point, they became very interested in monitoring our time stream because they were
 picking up the dreams of a Swiss telegraph worker who seemed to be pushing toward an unimaginable
 conclusion. So now there is a certain amount of urgency because if we explode our atomic stockpiles,
 it will wreck the place that they call home world. Yes, yes, not self-preservation because they now
 have star flight and encompass many systems, but preservation of home world, which on the other
 side is a vast botanical and ecological preserve from pole to pole. I mean, it's a sacred site of
 pilgrimage. It's the home of the species. It's the earth. And the notion that suddenly great parts of
 it will be blown apart by leakage from hyperspace of one of our atomic wars is impelling them now
 to attempt to open the doorway and rejoin the time streams and will be allowed a few years inside the
 botanical park to acclimate and then most people will ship off for the stars, I imagine.
 The British science fiction writer Ian Watson has a wonderful book called Chekhov's Journey
 in which he talks about the Tunguska event and his theory is that it was a catastrophic failure
 of a Soviet time travel experiment conducted shortly after the turn of the next century.
 Tough one to prove, right?
 Obviously, why didn't we think of that?
 Well, I mean, I'm not sure I've thought of that before. You know, it's the claim of Christian
 theologians that Christ comes in the center of history. They speak this same language. Before
 Christ, no souls were entering heaven. He freed the valve and now it's possible to enter into
 heaven. Before his intercession, that was impossible.
 It was pre-Vatican Jews.
 You're right, but that's where I left them was pre-Vatican Jews.
 Before I had this idea, I had another idea, which I'll tell you, which is a completely
 different kind of idea. And it's the idea that there is an overmind. This doesn't involve
 other dimensions. There is an overmind co-present on this planet. And when technology,
 when the development of technology exceeds the development of ethics, then this overmind
 can work miracles. And because the overmind is plugged into each of the individual minds
 that compose it, this miracle always has this unbelievably creepy quality of being exactly
 the thing which would convince you to change your mind. I mean, in other words, it's like
 it reads you so perfectly that it's able to present the one situation which you cannot
 refuse. So in the case of Rome, it was that Rome was a pigsty. Pasternak called it a bargain
 basement on two floors. It ran on slavery and it ran on brutality and captive populations
 and an outrageous garrisoning of military power in foreign lands. And people like Diophantus,
 this mathematician I mentioned, and hero of Alexandria, these people were on the brink
 of the calculus and the steam engine. So the overmind, seeing that and seeing their appalling
 ethical state, sent the miraculous personage of Christ, who in a world where information
 could not move faster than a horse's gallop, this religion within 60 years was beating
 at the gates of Rome itself. It was like fire just burned through the empire and changed
 everything and halted technical advance and everything stopped.
 Now I created this idea in an effort to explain the UFOs because the new theory of UFOs or
 the new school of UFOs says we've been wrong to ask what are they. That has not been fruitful.
 What we should be doing is asking what are they doing? And we can analyze what they're
 doing in the same way that we can analyze what anybody is doing through sociological
 polling of human populations. We can find out what the flying saucers are doing. So
 they polled human populations and what they discovered is that what the flying saucers
 are doing is they are sowing disbelief in science. They cause people to not believe
 in scientists because scientists come up so lame when asked to explain flying saucers.
 It's like it is to, it is the, the flying saucer is the confounding of science in the
 same way that the resurrection was the complete confounding of Greek stoicism and democracy
 and materialism in the Roman world. And it's conceivable, you know, that the flying saucer,
 I mean the statistics are now something like 12, 11% of the American population have seen
 a flying saucer. 52% believe flying saucers are real, whatever that may mean, and so forth.
 So it is a faith which is percolating up from the lower levels. It's people who live in
 trailer courts and read Fate magazine who are the staunchest believers in this thing.
 But what it may be is an intercession on the part of the overmind, which it can do anything.
 It can do anything from our point of view. And in the most extreme version of this idea,
 I said, what if enormous spacecraft were to fall into orbit around this planet? And what
 if television images of this craft were to be beamed into every home on the planet? And
 then a teaching revealed some completely mind-boggling thing which you could have thought of it yourself,
 but you never did, which is always how these things are. And, and then, and then after
 30 days of melting the nuclear arsenals and causing all cancer to appear and curing all
 infectious diseases and delivering this message, the enormous spacecraft disappeared. 30 days.
 So then everybody says, my God, we have been abandoned. We have been abandoned again into
 time. And, you know, history would halt. Everybody would do nothing but study the teachings of
 the saucer and try and figure out how we could get right with them to get them to come back.
 Dogmatism, theories of communication, priestcraft, the whole thing. So you see, though I'm fascinated
 by the flying saucer and what it says about the malleability of mind and matter, I think
 mature civilizations should not be haunted by messiahs or flying saucers, that these
 things are like metaphysical spankings imposed from on high that are designed saying, you
 know, here it's a boot in the tail. Wake up, you know, stop repressing.
 Well, let's take you to ideas. It's neither one of them is that old. And what does the
 overmind have to do with or think of the double time stream?
 Well, now that's a question I never would have asked. You mean if that's true? I sort
 of think of these as mutually exclusive. Well, there's two theories. The earlier one
 was that the overmind was injecting forces of change or conservatism into the world.
 The other, that events that came from, now that was from the demiurge. Is the demiurge
 related to the overmind? No, I think the demiurge is like a negative
 expression of the overmind. But created the universe? How did the overmind
 get in there to be running the earth, at least? Well, I think of the overmind as the logos,
 you know. It's the understanding and self-existence which permeates everything. And the demiurge
 is the force of matter and time and cosmic destiny that is always trying to lock in the
 logos and condition it and make it subject to the rules of the physical universe of space
 and time. And the logos is like something from, this is all Gnostic theology, by the
 way. This is just straight from the book. The logos is trying to struggle through the
 labyrinth of the material universe to escape, to rejoin the real source of itself, which
 is outside of matter. Matter is viewed as an entrapment.
 If any of you have read the late works of Philip K. Dick, he was probing in these areas.
 He was a genius. His book, VELUS, is pure exegesis of his internal unravelment of what
 was going on. And he believed, his take on it was, he believed that from AD 69 until
 1948, no time had actually passed, and that we were living in apostolic time, and that
 the crucifixion lay only 75 years in the past, and that the demiurge had inserted a false
 history, and the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, he believed, were actually the logos as printed
 letters, and that when the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were deciphered, it was like this informational
 creature would come alive and again be present on the earth, that the logos, beginning in
 1948, was beginning to infuse everything, and that shortly it would dissolve the illusion
 of the intervening 1860 years, or whatever it was, and then we would realize that the
 prophecy would be fulfilled, and that the last days were upon us.
 That's right. That's right. He didn't get around to the Antichrist, to his credit, probably.
 You have to distinguish between Christ, the person, the teacher, and this thing called
 the Christos, which is this archetype of such power and force that immediately people of
 ill intent could get lined up behind it and impose their will.
 Sell love. Yeah, sell love and sell forgiveness, and what
 a scam. And the Christos is the thing. History is ruled by the archetypes which people can
 generate. I mean, most people are very ordinary. I mean, you're Mick Jaggers and you're Henry
 Kissinger. They're very ordinary people, but they are able to project an archetype, and
 that is the thing which sets them apart. And when that reaches the kind of super intense
 focus that you get in a Mohammed or a Christ, well then history is just putty in the hands
 of the force, not the person. The person is usually martyred in some horrible way, but
 the archetype draws energy to itself, and we don't understand how this process works.
 If there ever is developed by benevolent or malevolent forces a science of social control,
 it will be a science of knowing how to project archetypes, and different archetypes apparently
 are suitable to different times. I mean, you could almost posit an astrological theory
 of archetypes, but it's something about how what's appropriate for the first century AD
 is not appropriate for the 15th. But when the archetype is appropriate, nothing can
 stop it. The modern term for archetypes is paradigm, and we expect it not to be a person,
 not a messiah, but an idea which will save us all, and which then gives us certain affinities
 with mystical Judaism, where the messiah was seen, was expected in the form of an idea.
 And this is sort of our faith. We're messianic ideologues, or something like that.
 I agree with you. I think ultimately all dualisms have to be dissolved in the notion that there
 is one thing. I mean, that's the platonic faith. The problem is all these secondary
 and tertiary operational levels, where we're trying to actually operate in a universe of
 scarcity and a body which requires energy and all these things. This is really the central
 problem in Western thinking, I think, is the tension between dualism and unity and matter
 and spirit, and how do you handle it. I think that we are spiritualizing matter. This is
 what technology is. And that the spiritualizing of matter is the highest expression of our
 technological output, and that this will become more and more what we are about, so that in
 the next century, the difference between mind and brain and cell and machine will all have
 been subsumed under a new vocabulary, because we are hardwiring our minds, and we are making
 the artifacts of our culture intelligent, and we are breaking down the barriers between
 ourselves, between ourselves and larger databases, and this kind of thing, so that the old "I'm
 an ego inside a skin" definition gives way to some kind of much more malleable and plastic
 thing. As an astrologer, one of the images that I like is the symbol for Pisces, which
 is two lines with a line going through it, and it's the definition of relationship quality
 by opposition. It's polarity, it's right-wrong, good-bad, male-female, Russians-Americans.
 The Aquarian one, which is the two lines of waves over each other, is one of resonance,
 and it's one of dolphins jumping in the water together. It's one of people coming together
 and realizing how I resonate with you and what I have to give you and you have to give
 me, but you'll have something to give me that other people can't, and so on, and we need
 to swim together. That breaks down all of the dualist bonds, and I think we're right
 at that crux right at the moment, and that place between Pisces and Aquarius, where we're
 kind of two worlds, again, flipping from one side to the other of opposition, being torn
 from life and death, and seeing, as the Christ, I feel, was that prototype, that template
 of light and spirit with matter coming together and saying, "I can dance in this, and I can
 leave it, and I can come back into it, and I have this power. It's my conscious, compassionate
 love that is just so unbounded that it gives me the opportunity to play in clay, if I choose."
 Much of what I say is Alfred North Whitehead, his philosophy, and believe me, if you're
 looking around for a serious ontological foundation, you don't have to read Sanskrit. Alfred North
 Whitehead will serve very admirably. Science in the modern world, process and reality.
 He was, he was and remains the great psychedelic philosopher of the 20th century in the era
 of Bergson. You had another question?
 Yeah, I'm going to be 84 in the year 2012, and I'm wondering how best to manage my life
 so that I'll be ready for that. I'm Crescent.
 Well, I don't know. I think that the canyons of the creode down which we as individuals
 are moving, those walls are getting higher and higher too. A lot of times when I had
 these intense contacts with the teaching entity, I would have an anxiety about what should
 I do? What is it for me to do? And it always said, "Nothing. Relax. Your function is to
 just, you'll be present where you're necessary." And I really, this isn't a fatalism. This
 is a kind of recognition of the dynamics of time that the thing is trying to teach, you
 see. It's trying to say that if you understand how process works, you will always understand
 where you are in any given process. And then you won't have anxiety about not occupying
 some other point in that process, you know. But when I began having these ideas, the only
 way I could previously relate to the notion of the end of the world was that I had a head
 full of cartoons of bearded men in sandals carrying signs on street corners saying, "Repent,
 repent." And here was I, former Marxist, former this, former that, espousing these unimaginable
 things. But it's always good to do your homework. And I discovered there's a wonderful book
 called The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cone, in which he details the history of
 millenarianism. That's what this phenomenon is, the belief by a person or a group of people
 that the end of the world is about to occur. And it existed among the Jews of the post-exilic
 period. It's part of the phenomenon, or it's part of the social expectation that gave Christ
 his entree. The early patristic Christians lived in the eminent expectation of the end
 of the world. And then during the medieval period, the most utopian, prophetistic millenarian
 movement before Marxism was Floraism, or the people who followed the teachings of Joaquin
 of Flora, who was a wandering monk who predicted the end of the world, let's see, I think for
 1244, and he died in 1222. But his followers carried on and the Pope had to send out armies
 to quell uprisings as people wanted to distribute the wealth because they felt the end of the
 world was upon and why should anybody go to work and this sort of thing. Similarly, in
 the year 1000, there was great expectation of Christ's eminent return. So this is a thing
 which the human mind, at least in its western expression, seems to seek to do. Islam too
 has its apocalypses. 1967 wasn't bad. I mean, I thought it was happening. I thought we were
 months away from a new secular order for the ages. But my theory of history views these
 things not as evidence against such a thing occurring, but as evidence that it will occur,
 that these uprisings and outbreaks of irrational expectation of the millennium are in fact
 temporal reflections. They are catching the light on the temporal prism from the object
 at the end of history, which contains the apocalyptic scenario. It's very important
 to manage the apocalypse and the millennium. It's very important that people not confuse
 the cleansing flames of transcendence with the ability to use thermonuclear weapons against
 your ideological enemies. It's a very delicate matter because our mythologies and our fears
 run so deeply. But I think that it's an awareness of this potential, of the existence
 of this law of temporal compression. And of course, institutions don't promote millenarianism
 because institutions want people to invest their money at low interest and long term
 and have the expectation that everything will carry on pretty much as it has. But an examination
 of the last 500 or 1,000 years of human history would lead anyone, I think, to the conclusion
 that everything is going to be swept away, and everything that replaces it is going to
 be swept away. And that we are just moving into an era of change which might as well
 be called apocalyptic and must be made millenarian. Otherwise, it will just end in some kind of
 gutter dommerung and the worst boogeyman of Western culture will emerge and destroy us.
 I know how the wave all comes together and accelerates toward this transition point I
 never call it the end because then the beginning of a new series of many leveled waves is there,
 right? I mean, this is, I guess I believe in flux. And so the whole process is one wave.
 At that moment, we begin another process. Sometimes you discuss that point as being
 the end of the universe, which you did a little while ago. And sometimes I feel like when
 you're as close, when everything is accelerated like it seems to have recently, and you're
 as close to a moment of transformation of some sort as we seem to be, you see great
 strides forward being made and great slips backwards being made all at the same time,
 right? It seems possible that the transformation will be not so fantastically physical as the
 end of the universe or turning inside out of the whatever this is, but actually just
 a sweep through, you know, worldwide peace of mind. What if that occurred, you know?
 And that's large enough to qualify, it seems to me, for the changeover in the wave.
 Yeah, I think it's very, the hardest thing to know is the nature of what this ultimate
 compression is. The scale.
 What it means. I mean, like one way I imagine it, and that's why I love to quote Joyce about
 man becomes dirigible. I imagine it as the day when your mind becomes your home, you
 know, and all over the world people just realize that now their mind is their home.
 But this, you feel free to describe that as the end of history or the end of the universe?
 Not the end of the universe, the end of history, because I think history is some kind of involvement
 with matter. It's a wrestling with the angel of matter, and the end of history is when
 you pin the angel of matter to the mat, and then you stand up and you say, "I am the
 edemic human being made of light," and you leave the realm of matter and return to some
 previously hidden dimension.
 Whitehead called these things epochs, these long periods of time, and he called transitions
 from one to the other a shift of epochs. Well, we've only been doing things like measuring
 the speed of light since 1910 or something like that. All the so-called constants of
 our physics are based on minuscule periods of actually monitoring these things to see
 if they are constants. And so I can imagine it as a shift in the laws of the universe
 that somehow cause consciousness to perceive itself more as it must truly be. And I'm always
 trying to find physical models for these transcendental hallucinations. And the one which fits this
 is a few years ago, this Scandinavian astronomer, Hans Alfven, wrote a book called Worlds and
 Anti-Worlds, and in it he talked about what's called a vacuum fluctuation. A vacuum fluctuation
 is where suddenly out of nothingness there emerges a stream of particles, and they are
 equally particles and antiparticles, and they sail along for a period of time, and then
 they collide again, and each particle is destroyed by its antiparticle. And so what is called
 parity is conserved, meaning that when you add up all the charges, positive and negative,
 you get zero. So it's okay that this matter came from nothing and returned to nothing.
 This violates no laws as long as parity is conserved. But the interesting thing about
 this phenomenon, which is called a vacuum fluctuation, is that there seems in quantum
 mechanics no rule which would limit the size of such a phenomenon as this. So it's conceivable
 that our entire universe is an enormous vacuum fluctuation, and it's just, you know, ten
 high 72 particles have emerged from nothingness and are hurtling through space, and in another
 dimension, a parallel dimension, the anti-universe, which is the twin of this universe, is also
 hurtling through space, and at some point in future time, completely unpredictable from
 the state given within each universe, the two will collide, and all, and parity will
 be conserved, and all particles and antiparticles will disappear. However, the interesting thing
 is that photons, which is what light is composed of, do not have antiparticles. They're this
 one weird exception. So that when the universe collided with its antimatter twin, what would
 be left would be a universe made only of photons, and those photons would be in the configuration
 they were in in the moment when the cosmic collapse of the state vector occurred. Well,
 we have no idea what the physics of a photonic universe would be about. A limiting case or
 a good first try would be that it would just be nothing and no life and no self-reflection
 and no mind, but why posit that? There's such a persistence in the perennial philosophy
 of the notion that spiritual development is somehow related to light and to the cultivation
 of inner light and to the creation of light bodies and the stabilizing of light. So it's
 possible to suggest that the world of the imagination is simply the world of internal
 light, that it's a world where light is manipulated by thought in the way that in this world,
 the organism manipulates matter. And so that you live in the radiant castles of the imagination
 after a shift of epochs in which the photonic mode predominated. That's just one way of
 imagining it. It's one of the richest meditations there is to try to imagine the millennium.
 Again, it's this thing, what would you have if you could have anything? I mean, sometimes
 I imagine it, you know, Hieronymus Bosch's great triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights,
 where men and women of all races mingle among giant wrens and strawberries and feed each
 other pomegranates under an autumnal sun in an endless rolling park-like world of exotic
 vegetables and sexual excess and hard stuff to be.
 You can really take a readout on yourself by seeing how would you like things to be.
 You know, I mean, sometimes my fantasy is I would like to be alone on a starship 10,000
 light-years from home with all the books in the universe, and I would dress like Captain
 Ahab, and I would stride around the catwalks inside this echoing starship, and faithful
 robot slaves would bring me crumbling volumes of ancient lore, which I would say, "No, this
 is a little too Vincent Price." How about...
 I love, if any of you are into science fiction, the science fiction of Cordwainer Smith is
 really wonderful, and one of his stories, the starship is George Washington's estate,
 Mount Vernon, in New York, and it's all exactly like Mount Vernon in Washington's time, except
 in the library of the big plantation house, there's one room from which the thing is controlled,
 and it's actually a starship in mid-flight.
 More questions about this time theory?
 Yes, I have a question.
 You mentioned here how the now is flooded with future perception.
 Yes.
 And I have just... it's really part of the Tibetan practices, but it's always something
 which captures my imagination, it's just, how come it's now, now? And the fact that
 these future perceptions are so tremendously tangible to us, especially while sitting in
 meditation or while eating a meal even or something, and there's this, how come it's
 not yesterday, and how come it's not tomorrow? And how come that I'm here now, when I just
 have to flick my mind and I'm in yesterday, and equally easy in tomorrow? I wonder if
 you have anything to say on that one.
 Well I think that life proceeds through time. It's an effort by organism to map something
 one dimension larger than itself. So it takes a whole life to do it. A life is an effort
 to map a something, you know? And the now is the moving edge of the mapping process.
 You cannot map it instantly or you would be it. And so what being in time is, is experiencing
 the incremental mapping of this higher order object. And that's why hopefully a long life
 would give wisdom, because a person would begin to get the whole picture.
 So the now is kind of like the edge of the pencil as it moves over the ground.
 Yes, well what did Plato say? That the present is the moving image of eternity. That's pure
 good Platonism.
 It's like a projection, much as our shadows are two dimensional.
 Well you can think of it as a, you can think of the now as a kind of laser, which is moving
 over a larger surface and illuminating it, you know, scanning it. It's scanning something,
 and it takes it a while to scan it. And then at the end all the data is in place. And then
 you say, "Oh yes, I see now what the object of cognition was." And we, our faith is, and
 there's no reason to doubt it, that this is a great transcendent experience. This is the
 resolution, the peace that passeth understanding as you sink into death. It's just that we
 like to think that the psychedelic experience gives us a preview. No one escapes, you know,
 the final realization. It's just...
 [silence]
 [BLANK_AUDIO]


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.64 sec
Decoding  : 2.14 sec
Transcribe: 4254.75 sec
Total Time: 4257.53 sec