[00:00:00 - 00:00:06] Perhaps others will make this shift if the idea is given a hearing. [00:00:06 - 00:00:12] Many ideas may be very good and simply perish for lack of a context, [00:00:12 - 00:00:19] but this idea causes a fundamental reconstruction of reality, and it can be taught. [00:00:19 - 00:00:27] It fulfills my spiritual aspirations because it is understanding, simply understanding, [00:00:27 - 00:00:32] not a hallucination or an ability to cure or levitate. [00:00:32 - 00:00:37] It is a way of understanding, and when one understands this way, [00:00:37 - 00:00:43] it appears as though one has ended the program of understanding. [00:00:43 - 00:00:49] It does not deny any body of knowledge; it simply augments. [00:00:49 - 00:00:52] There is an argument for it on the physical level. [00:00:52 - 00:00:58] The idea is very complicated, touching as it does on areas involving quantum physics, [00:00:58 - 00:01:02] submolecular biology, and DNA structure. [00:01:02 - 00:01:08] Though the idea that I developed may not have been caused by what Dennis did in the Amazon, [00:01:08 - 00:01:16] I assume that it was, that he did something and I got a kind of informational feedback off my DNA [00:01:16 - 00:01:20] or some other molecular storage site of information. [00:01:20 - 00:01:27] The feedback consisted of this stored information, which seemed without limits. [00:01:27 - 00:01:33] The task became to create a symbol structure that would make the information coherent. [00:01:33 - 00:01:39] One must create structural categories for a new world of infinite variety. [00:01:39 - 00:01:43] One must organize it into a mandala. [00:01:43 - 00:01:45] The DNA is playing. [00:01:45 - 00:01:55] It is one's life, but one must have a concept so that as it plays, one may understand the melody. [00:01:55 - 00:02:02] This theory is a concept which when it plays in my head, I understand the melody. [00:02:02 - 00:02:06] I am interested in disproving the theory. [00:02:06 - 00:02:10] A good idea can withstand a lot of pressure. [00:02:10 - 00:02:13] But what then is the so-called flying saucer? [00:02:13 - 00:02:16] What does it really represent? [00:02:16 - 00:02:22] It is the ingression of a higher dimensional epoch which reverberates through history. [00:02:22 - 00:02:29] It is a shockwave being generated by an eschatological event at the end of time. [00:02:29 - 00:02:34] In other words, natural laws are not universal constants. [00:02:34 - 00:02:38] They are slowly evolving flux phenomena. [00:02:38 - 00:02:46] For instance, the speed of light, which is taken as a universal constant, has only been measured in the last hundred years. [00:02:46 - 00:02:54] It is entirely induction to extrapolate the principle of the stability of the speed of light to all time. [00:02:54 - 00:02:59] Any good scientist knows that induction is a leap to faith. [00:02:59 - 00:03:03] Science is founded on the principle of induction. [00:03:03 - 00:03:06] That is what this theory challenges. [00:03:06 - 00:03:17] It says that the fact that one did A and B resulted does not mean that whenever one does A, that B will be the result. [00:03:17 - 00:03:20] This cannot be proven. [00:03:20 - 00:03:25] Before Einstein, space was thought to be a dimension where one put things. [00:03:25 - 00:03:29] Space was visualized as somehow analogous to emptiness. [00:03:29 - 00:03:36] But then Einstein pointed out that space is a thing which has torque and is affected by objects. [00:03:36 - 00:03:43] In other words, from an idea, a place where you can put things, to a thing. [00:03:43 - 00:03:45] Space is a thing. [00:03:45 - 00:03:48] It is affected by gravitational fields. [00:03:48 - 00:03:56] Light passing through a gravitational field in space will be bent because the space through which it travels is bent. [00:03:56 - 00:04:07] What we are proposing in a nutshell is that time, which was also previously thought of as a place where one put things, is also a thing. [00:04:07 - 00:04:09] And time changes. [00:04:09 - 00:04:12] There are different kinds of time. [00:04:12 - 00:04:20] And as these kinds of time come and go in their cyclical progression on their many levels, [00:04:20 - 00:04:29] situations evolve which are the responses of matter to the conditioning imparted to it by time and space. [00:04:29 - 00:04:34] These two things condition matter. [00:04:34 - 00:04:41] It was always matter that was thought to be real. [00:04:41 - 00:04:45] But actually matter has a quality more nearly like thought. [00:04:45 - 00:04:55] And matter thinks what it thinks according to two flux phenomena which are in interrelationship, the space-time continuum. [00:04:55 - 00:04:58] This idea does have axioms. [00:04:58 - 00:05:01] A major one is taken from Leibniz. [00:05:01 - 00:05:05] Leibniz talked about monads, monadic space. [00:05:05 - 00:05:15] He envisioned the monads as being like tiny particles which were infinitely reduplicated everywhere in the universe. [00:05:15 - 00:05:20] These tiny particles contained all places within themselves. [00:05:20 - 00:05:23] They were not here and now. [00:05:23 - 00:05:28] They were everywhere, all the time, in each place. [00:05:28 - 00:05:36] They were all identical, but in the way they interconnected they built up a larger continuum. [00:05:36 - 00:05:40] Memory is similar to this in its principle of operation. [00:05:40 - 00:05:46] Destruction of up to 90% of the brain does not impair memory function. [00:05:46 - 00:05:50] It is as though memory is not stored anywhere. [00:05:50 - 00:05:56] It is as though it is like a gas and permeates the brain throughout. [00:05:56 - 00:06:01] Like a hologram, all of the memory is in each part. [00:06:01 - 00:06:06] One can take a holographic plate of Mount Fuji and cut it in half. [00:06:06 - 00:06:10] When half is illuminated, the entire image is present. [00:06:10 - 00:06:13] One can do this again and again. [00:06:13 - 00:06:19] The holograph is made up of a nearly infinite number of tiny images, [00:06:19 - 00:06:25] each of which in combination with its fellows presents one image. [00:06:25 - 00:06:33] Quantum physics makes similar statements, saying that the electron is not somewhere, sometime. [00:06:33 - 00:06:39] The electron is a cloud of probabilities and that is all one can say about it. [00:06:39 - 00:06:46] A similar quality adheres to my idea of time and the comparison of time to a thing. [00:06:46 - 00:06:54] The obvious question to be asked of this is what is the smallest time that a thing can be made of. [00:06:54 - 00:07:01] The scientific approach would be to divide toward the small to find out if it is discrete. [00:07:01 - 00:07:06] So what one is looking for is a chronon, a particle of time. [00:07:06 - 00:07:12] My hunch is that the chronon exists but is not distinct from the atom. [00:07:12 - 00:07:15] The atoms are chronons. [00:07:15 - 00:07:19] Atoms are simply far more complicated than had been suspected. [00:07:19 - 00:07:23] There may be atoms and chronons. [00:07:23 - 00:07:27] Chronons may not be reducible to atoms, [00:07:27 - 00:07:36] but I suspect that what we are looking for is one particle that makes matter, space, time and energy, [00:07:36 - 00:07:43] but not the electron in the Heisenberg-Bohr description that describes the properties of the electron [00:07:43 - 00:07:46] which account for physical matter. [00:07:46 - 00:07:52] But the electron must be more complicated than that because it exists in a universe [00:07:52 - 00:07:56] where minds and organisms arise. [00:07:56 - 00:08:02] So we have to describe the atomic properties that would allow a particle in certain stages [00:08:02 - 00:08:07] to coalesce into a living organism or a thinking organism. [00:08:07 - 00:08:14] Even a bacterium like E. coli is a staggering accomplishment for the Heisenberg-Bohr atom. [00:08:14 - 00:08:19] The Heisenberg-Bohr model explains the physical universe. [00:08:19 - 00:08:22] It doesn't explain organism or mind. [00:08:22 - 00:08:27] We have to overlay that atomic model with qualities. [00:08:27 - 00:08:34] We must imbue the atom with qualities that will let us understand how we could exist, [00:08:34 - 00:08:39] how we could arise out of its substratum. [00:08:47 - 00:08:53] I do not claim that we have done this, but we have stumbled upon the intellectual avenue [00:08:53 - 00:08:58] that will have to be followed to achieve this understanding. [00:08:58 - 00:09:03] The key lies in cyclical units, in hierarchical structures, [00:09:03 - 00:09:10] generating various kinds of continui that move toward different kinds of closure. [00:09:10 - 00:09:17] The person who has actually laid the firmest foundation for understanding this sort of thing philosophically [00:09:17 - 00:09:19] is Alfred North Whitehead. [00:09:19 - 00:09:26] Nothing we have suggested is beyond the power of his method to anticipate. [00:09:26 - 00:09:32] Whitehead's formalism accounts for minds and organisms and a number of things [00:09:32 - 00:09:36] poorly resolved by the Cartesian approach. [00:09:36 - 00:09:40] Other visionary thinkers are probing these areas. [00:09:40 - 00:09:46] General systems theory is the idea that any process can be related through a mathematical equation [00:09:46 - 00:09:55] to all other processes simply by virtue of all processes being part of a common class. [00:09:55 - 00:10:01] The overthrow of a dictator, the explosion of a star, the fertilization of an ova, [00:10:01 - 00:10:05] all should be describable through one set of terms. [00:10:05 - 00:10:11] The most promising recent developments in this area have been the emergence of the new evolutionary paradigm [00:10:11 - 00:10:13] of Prigozhin and Jancz. [00:10:13 - 00:10:20] With their work, nothing less has been achieved than a new ordering principle in nature. [00:10:20 - 00:10:27] This is the discovery and mathematical description of dissipative self-organization [00:10:27 - 00:10:34] as a creative principle underlying the dynamics of an open and multileveled reality. [00:10:34 - 00:10:42] Dissipative structures work their miracle of generating and preserving order through fluctuations, [00:10:42 - 00:10:48] fluctuations whose ground is in quantum mechanical indeterminacy. [00:10:48 - 00:10:54] If we had a perfect philosophical mirror of the universe, I would be able, [00:10:54 - 00:11:00] by applying our philosophical method, to tell a person how much change he had in his pocket. [00:11:00 - 00:11:07] Since he actually has whatever amount of change he has in his pocket at that moment, [00:11:07 - 00:11:12] it is an accomplished fact, and so should be possible to calculate. [00:11:12 - 00:11:18] What is important is to understand the necessities of occurred existence, [00:11:18 - 00:11:22] not the necessities of existence about to occur. [00:11:22 - 00:11:26] Although there, too, boundary conditions operate, [00:11:26 - 00:11:31] but they are boundary conditions, not absolutely determined fact. [00:11:31 - 00:11:36] We assume that ten minutes hence the room we are in will exist. [00:11:36 - 00:11:42] It is a boundary condition which will define the next ten minutes in our space-time coordinate. [00:11:42 - 00:11:47] But we cannot know who will be in the room ten minutes hence. [00:11:47 - 00:11:49] That is free to be determined. [00:11:49 - 00:11:54] One may ask if we can really know that the room will exist. [00:11:54 - 00:12:01] This is where induction enters the picture, since in truth we cannot know with certainty. [00:12:01 - 00:12:05] There is no absolutely rigorous way of establishing that. [00:12:05 - 00:12:12] But we can make the inductive leap to faith that has to do with accumulated experience. [00:12:12 - 00:12:16] We project that it will be a boundary condition. [00:12:16 - 00:12:20] But in principle, in the next ten minutes there could be an earthquake, [00:12:20 - 00:12:24] and this building might not be left standing. [00:12:24 - 00:12:30] However, for that to happen, the boundary condition will have to be radically disrupted, [00:12:30 - 00:12:33] and in some unexpected manner. [00:12:33 - 00:12:38] The thing that is so curious is that such a thing could occur. [00:12:38 - 00:12:43] That is where our map of the chronon would allow one to predict. [00:12:43 - 00:12:46] There is, however, a problem with it. [00:12:46 - 00:12:51] Because we suggest a model of time with a spiral structure, [00:12:51 - 00:12:56] events keep gathering themselves into tighter and tighter spirals, [00:12:56 - 00:13:00] which lead inevitably to a final time. [00:13:00 - 00:13:06] Like the center of a black hole, the final time is a necessary singularity, [00:13:06 - 00:13:13] a place where something happens which breaks down the physical laws established in the previous epoch, [00:13:13 - 00:13:20] imagining what would happen in that condition has caused science to shy away from such an idea, [00:13:20 - 00:13:27] although Western religions have no trouble whatever embracing the concept of a final time. [00:13:27 - 00:13:33] We would say within the context of our theory that millenarians argued for apocalypse [00:13:33 - 00:13:39] because they were getting a reflection back through time, a ricochet as it were, [00:13:39 - 00:13:43] a distorted image of an apocalyptic event. [00:13:43 - 00:13:49] The view of science is that final time means simply a time of no change. [00:13:49 - 00:13:54] All processes run down. Entropy is maximized. [00:13:54 - 00:13:59] The idea of entropy makes an assumption that the laws of the space-time continuum [00:13:59 - 00:14:03] are infinitely linearly extendable into the future. [00:14:03 - 00:14:07] In a spiral time scheme, this assumption is not made. [00:14:07 - 00:14:14] Rather, final time means passing out of one set of laws which are conditioning existence [00:14:14 - 00:14:19] and into another set of laws conditioning existence. [00:14:19 - 00:14:26] To see time through the eyes of our theory is to see one's place in the spiral scheme [00:14:26 - 00:14:31] and to know and anticipate when the transition to new epochs will occur. [00:14:31 - 00:14:34] One sees this in the physical world. [00:14:34 - 00:14:39] The planet is five or six billion years old, the first turn of the spiral. [00:14:39 - 00:14:41] Then life appears. [00:14:41 - 00:14:48] What is happening if one examines this planet, which is the only planet we can really examine in depth, [00:14:48 - 00:14:55] is one finds that processes are steadily accelerating in their reaction speed and complexity. [00:14:55 - 00:15:00] A planet swings through space two billion years before life appears, [00:15:00 - 00:15:05] and the instant life gets started, a mad scramble is on. [00:15:05 - 00:15:10] Species appear and disappear. This goes on for a billion and a half years, [00:15:10 - 00:15:14] and then suddenly thinking species appear. [00:15:14 - 00:15:20] From the dumb confrontation with the chipped flint to the starship is 20,000 years. [00:15:20 - 00:15:27] Tops. What could that be but the ingression of a new set of laws, [00:15:27 - 00:15:33] laws that are allowing our species to manifest very peculiar properties. [00:15:33 - 00:15:39] Humanity is made by DNA like rattlesnakes and poplar trees, [00:15:39 - 00:15:44] but we trigger the same energies that light the stars. [00:15:44 - 00:15:51] We do this on the surface of our planet, or we can create a temperature of absolute zero. [00:15:51 - 00:15:57] We do these things because though we are made of mush and mud, we have minds, [00:15:57 - 00:16:01] and we know about the detour through tools. [00:16:01 - 00:16:11] So we can build tools which can unleash energies that in any other situation in the universe occur under very different conditions. [00:16:11 - 00:16:16] The center of stars is the usual site of such processes, [00:16:16 - 00:16:21] but we do such things using mind, and what is mind? [00:16:21 - 00:16:29] Who knows? 20,000 years from the stone flint to the starship and still accelerating. [00:16:29 - 00:16:33] There are yet more spirals to congress. [00:16:33 - 00:16:37] From the model T-4 to the starship, 60 years. [00:16:37 - 00:16:41] From the fastest human on earth being able to move 30 miles an hour [00:16:41 - 00:16:47] to the fastest moving 9 miles per second, 60 years. [00:16:47 - 00:16:51] Human culture is a curve of expanding potentiality. [00:16:51 - 00:16:55] It has reached asymptotic vertical gain. [00:16:55 - 00:16:58] Man threatens every species on the planet. [00:16:58 - 00:17:04] Because we have stockpiled radioactive materials, they are everywhere. [00:17:04 - 00:17:07] Every species on earth can feel that. [00:17:07 - 00:17:12] The planet as an ecological entity can react to that kind of pressure. [00:17:12 - 00:17:15] It is 3 billion years old. [00:17:15 - 00:17:18] It can deal with this. [00:17:18 - 00:17:23] Dualistic talk about man not being part of the natural order is foolish. [00:17:23 - 00:17:31] We could not have arisen unless there was purpose of ours which fit into the planetary ecology. [00:17:31 - 00:17:40] It is not clear what it is, but it seems to have to do with our enormous research instruments and crises. [00:17:40 - 00:17:45] By stockpiling atomic weapons, we have claimed the capacity to destroy the earth [00:17:45 - 00:17:48] like a stick of dynamite in a rotten apple. [00:17:48 - 00:17:52] And why? We do not know why. [00:17:52 - 00:17:57] Surely not for the political and social reasons that are given. [00:17:57 - 00:18:05] We are simply a tool-building species that is itself the tool of a planetary ecology [00:18:05 - 00:18:09] that has this perception of a higher dimensional mode. [00:18:09 - 00:18:16] It knows what the boundary constraints are and is organizing life to transform itself. [00:18:16 - 00:18:21] [video plays] [00:18:21 - 00:18:26] [video plays] [00:18:26 - 00:18:31] [video plays] [00:18:31 - 00:18:36] [video plays] [00:18:36 - 00:18:41] [video plays] [00:18:41 - 00:18:46] [video plays] [00:18:46 - 00:18:51] [video plays] [00:18:51 - 00:18:56] [video plays] [00:18:56 - 00:19:01] [video plays] [00:19:01 - 00:19:07] Our story is fairly peculiar, very peculiar as a matter of fact. [00:19:07 - 00:19:13] It is hard to know what to think because a phenomenon of all kinds of mental illness [00:19:13 - 00:19:20] is visions of some kind of a fantastically complicated thing which happens [00:19:20 - 00:19:23] to put you in the very center of everything. [00:19:23 - 00:19:28] If the theory does that, so does immediate experience. [00:19:28 - 00:19:32] It is important to have recourse to the scientific method. [00:19:32 - 00:19:38] If the theory is real, it can be proven in the calm confines of the laboratory. [00:19:38 - 00:19:45] And if it is not real, that should be made explicitly clear through careful experiment. [00:19:45 - 00:19:52] To empathize with the visions at Lacherera, one must imagine what one can imagine. [00:19:52 - 00:19:58] Imagine if wishes were horses, how beggars would ride. [00:19:58 - 00:20:05] The ideas were so compelling because with fourth dimensional matter one can do anything. [00:20:05 - 00:20:11] One can spread it out and climb on it and take her up to any altitude, [00:20:11 - 00:20:15] adding oxygen by the act of noting the need for sane. [00:20:15 - 00:20:18] It's the flying saucer again. [00:20:18 - 00:20:22] One can climb inside it since it is oneself. [00:20:22 - 00:20:26] It is like putting on your mind like a wetsuit. [00:20:26 - 00:20:29] The flying saucer is the perfected human mind. [00:20:29 - 00:20:34] It waits warmly humming at the end of human history on this planet. [00:20:34 - 00:20:40] When it is perfect, there will be an ontological mutation of the human form, [00:20:40 - 00:20:44] the resurrection body that Christianity is all about. [00:20:44 - 00:20:56] It is the genius of human technology to master and to serve the energies of life and death and time and space. [00:20:56 - 00:21:02] The UFO holds out the possibility of a mobile mind, [00:21:02 - 00:21:07] a ship that can cross the universe in the time that it takes to conceive it, [00:21:07 - 00:21:11] because that is what the universe is, a thought. [00:21:11 - 00:21:16] Then humanity, the masters of thought, would set out. [00:21:16 - 00:21:21] [music] [00:21:21 - 00:21:26] [music] [00:21:26 - 00:21:31] [music] [00:21:31 - 00:21:55] Or we may discover that it is not done that way. [00:21:55 - 00:22:00] The future may reveal that there is something out there that is calling us home. [00:22:00 - 00:22:07] Then it will be our technology and the call of the other that will move toward meeting. [00:22:07 - 00:22:11] The saucer is a good metaphor for this. [00:22:11 - 00:22:16] When Jung suggested that the saucer was the human soul, he was right. [00:22:16 - 00:22:18] He simply didn't know what he meant. [00:22:18 - 00:22:22] It is not so far away. That is the other thing. [00:22:22 - 00:22:27] The last shift of epochs gave us relativity theory and quantum mechanics. [00:22:27 - 00:22:33] Another epoch looms, but whether or not it is the final epoch is hard to tell, [00:22:33 - 00:22:40] because when one is part of the process, the uncertainty principle interferes with prediction. [00:22:40 - 00:22:44] All these themes are woven around DMT, [00:22:44 - 00:22:49] perhaps because DMT seems to illuminate the regions beyond death. [00:22:49 - 00:22:51] And what is death? [00:22:51 - 00:22:56] We find ourselves in such a peculiar situation. [00:22:56 - 00:23:02] Having been born, being autonomous open chemical systems, [00:23:02 - 00:23:07] which maintain themselves at a point far from equilibrium through eating, [00:23:07 - 00:23:10] and we think, and what is that? [00:23:10 - 00:23:15] What are the three dimensions? What is energy? [00:23:15 - 00:23:19] We find ourselves in the strange position of being alive, [00:23:19 - 00:23:23] having been born, going to die. [00:23:23 - 00:23:27] A lot of thinking says that this is not so strange, [00:23:27 - 00:23:32] that this happens in the universe, living things appear. [00:23:32 - 00:23:37] And yet our physics, which can light the fires of the stars in our deserts, [00:23:37 - 00:23:42] cannot explain the strangeness of the phenomenon of our being alive. [00:23:42 - 00:23:48] Organisms are completely outside the realm of physical explanation at this point for science. [00:23:48 - 00:23:52] So what is it for? [00:23:52 - 00:23:57] Spencer and Shakespeare, quantum theory and the paintings at Altamira, [00:23:57 - 00:24:03] who are we? What is history? And what does it push toward? [00:24:03 - 00:24:09] Now we have atomic weapons, and so should soon address these questions, [00:24:09 - 00:24:14] because we have unleashed processes potentially fatal to the planet. [00:24:14 - 00:24:18] We have triggered the final crisis for the planet. [00:24:18 - 00:24:22] We have done this, but we do not control it. [00:24:22 - 00:24:30] No single one of us, no leader or state, can call a halt to the fact of our being trapped in history. [00:24:30 - 00:24:40] We are moving toward the unimaginable, as information piles up about the real nature of the situation we find ourselves in. [00:24:40 - 00:24:47] To paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, our situation may not only be stranger than we suppose, [00:24:47 - 00:24:53] it may be stranger than we can suppose. [00:24:53 - 00:24:58] [music] [00:24:58 - 00:25:03] [music] [00:25:03 - 00:25:08] [music] [00:25:08 - 00:25:13] [music] [00:25:13 - 00:25:18] [music] [00:25:18 - 00:25:23] [music] [00:25:23 - 00:25:28] [music] [00:25:28 - 00:25:32] Chapter 18, The Coming of the Strophariat. [00:25:32 - 00:25:38] Such were the concerns through which I navigated the intervening years to the present. [00:25:38 - 00:25:43] No definitive condensation of the thing we sought has yet occurred. [00:25:43 - 00:25:52] What did occur was the continued elaboration of the theories both of hypercarbolation and of the nature of time. [00:25:52 - 00:25:58] In 1975, The Invisible Landscape was published and our ideas made publicly available. [00:25:58 - 00:26:05] But since the manuscript of that work had been nearly two years finished, we had not been idle. [00:26:05 - 00:26:10] The conclusion of myself and my brother was that when all was said and done, [00:26:10 - 00:26:19] the truly novel element and the candidate for being the causal element in the situation at La Churrera was the mushroom. [00:26:19 - 00:26:26] It was Stropharia cubensis which stood behind all of the effects that we had experienced. [00:26:26 - 00:26:32] And as this realization grew, so did the understanding that if this was the case, [00:26:32 - 00:26:41] then new expeditions into the unimaginable could be launched only if a supply of the mushrooms could be secured. [00:26:41 - 00:26:46] Now it happened that on that second trip to La Churrera, [00:26:46 - 00:26:50] the mushroom had been much less abundant than the first time, [00:26:50 - 00:26:58] and this scarcity had impelled me to take a number of spore prints from the few specimens that we did run across. [00:26:58 - 00:27:08] Those spore prints had been kept refrigerated over the years while my brother and I pursued academic careers and wrote our book. [00:27:08 - 00:27:15] During those intervening years, we dabbled with the thought of cultivating Stropharia cubensis, [00:27:15 - 00:27:19] but the only work on the subject was Wasson and M.'s work in French, [00:27:19 - 00:27:25] and it seemed somehow a remote and technically difficult thing to attempt. [00:27:25 - 00:27:34] In the spring of 1972, we had already isolated the mycelium of the mushroom and had it growing on agar in Petri dishes, [00:27:34 - 00:27:39] but it was not until the early spring of '75 that we encountered an article [00:27:39 - 00:27:49] detailing a method for growing commercial mushrooms on rye in canning jars under very carefully controlled conditions. [00:27:49 - 00:27:58] Perhaps this method would also work for Stropharia cubensis and get our stalled exploration of the invisible moving again. [00:27:58 - 00:28:02] Working in close consultation with my brother in Colorado, [00:28:02 - 00:28:08] we determined within a matter of weeks that the hardy Stropharia not only grew and fruited with the new method, [00:28:08 - 00:28:16] but that it was less fragile and easier to grow than the agaricus species sold in grocery stores as food. [00:28:16 - 00:28:21] The implications of all this were not lost upon us. [00:28:21 - 00:28:27] From the spring of 1975 onward, I was not without a continual supply of Stropharia. [00:28:27 - 00:28:30] Ev and I had parted earlier in the year. [00:28:30 - 00:28:36] I was living alone and finishing up an academic career that had lasted far too long, [00:28:36 - 00:28:40] what with seven years of wandering around the world scheduled in. [00:28:40 - 00:28:47] It was a time of loneliness, self-examination, and work pressure. [00:28:47 - 00:28:54] Into that world came suddenly the perfected method for growing the same organism [00:28:54 - 00:29:00] that had been the means to opening up the dimension of contact four years before. [00:29:00 - 00:29:08] The very spores gathered at La Churrera were now furiously producing mushroom psilocybin in my home. [00:29:08 - 00:29:12] During the spring, I experimented with low dosages several times. [00:29:12 - 00:29:20] The sense of peace and lightness that I associated with the halcyon days at La Churrera was definitely there. [00:29:20 - 00:29:30] So too was the sense of a teaching voice and a return to close consultation with a cosmic agency of complex intent. [00:29:30 - 00:29:55] [water gurgling] [00:29:55 - 00:30:03] Throughout the spring and summer of that year, I took the mushroom at doses of five grams dried or 50 grams fresh, [00:30:03 - 00:30:09] as often as I felt was prudent, which worked out to about once every two weeks. [00:30:09 - 00:30:17] Each of these experiences was a lesson, a chilling and exhilarating plunge into an ocean of noetic images. [00:30:17 - 00:30:30] I discovered my own mind like a topological manifold lying before me, inviting me to rove and scan the reflective knot of past and future time that I am. [00:30:30 - 00:30:36] Alien presences and trans linguistic elves bent near to me in those trances. [00:30:36 - 00:30:44] The mushroom stressed its age, its vast knowledge of the ebb and flow of historical forces in many civilizations [00:30:44 - 00:30:47] with which it had been associated through the millennia. [00:30:47 - 00:30:51] Images of the past and future abounded. [00:30:51 - 00:30:55] Once I found myself on a hill with a crowd of people. [00:30:55 - 00:30:58] The view looked out over a curved plain. [00:30:58 - 00:31:03] It was the interior of a cylindrical space colony miles in extent. [00:31:03 - 00:31:12] Vast sweeps of windows alternated with farmlands and towns scattered along the floors of the valleys between each set of windows. [00:31:12 - 00:31:20] I knew somehow that in the future I was seeing hundreds of millions of people lived in such cylindrical worlds. [00:31:20 - 00:31:34] The teeming worlds that populate the galaxy in the minds of our science fiction writers had been recreated inside a sphere only twelve light hours in diameter and with the sun at its center. [00:31:34 - 00:31:41] Within that sphere thousands of independent societies pursued their destinies and their evolution. [00:31:41 - 00:31:48] Thousands of independent cylinder worlds swarming around the infinite energy furnace of the sun. [00:31:48 - 00:31:55] What a rich and endlessly creative force humanity had become in escaping the confines of the planet. [00:31:55 - 00:32:00] Through the vast windows I could see more advanced machinery being made ready. [00:32:00 - 00:32:02] A starship. [00:32:02 - 00:32:06] It was the departure of an experimental starship. [00:32:06 - 00:32:11] Copeland's fanfare for the common man was being played. [00:32:11 - 00:32:29] Again I saw alternative futures where the knowledge of the mushroom was not fused with humanity's restless expansionism. [00:32:29 - 00:32:35] I saw a planet covered with a society of slave worker machine symbiotes. [00:32:35 - 00:32:42] I saw the life of North American society running through several hundred years of upheaval and political change. [00:32:42 - 00:32:46] An image like a great animated war planning board. [00:32:46 - 00:32:52] The dualism of fascism and democracy hung around America's neck like the albatross. [00:32:52 - 00:33:00] Again and again nightmare police state fascism would sweep like a foul tide over the aspirations of the people. [00:33:00 - 00:33:07] And again and again the subtlety of the people would organize around the stupidity of the oppressor. [00:33:07 - 00:33:18] And rise in wild and bloody revolt to again secure the space of a few generations in which to inaugurate attempts at democratic social justice. [00:33:18 - 00:33:26] The mushroom always returned to the theme that it was wiser in the ways of evolution. [00:33:26 - 00:33:34] And sympathetic therefore to a symbiotic union of the technical control of matter possessed by humanity. [00:33:34 - 00:33:42] And its own sense of the howness of things that had been developed over millions of years of conscious experience. [00:33:42 - 00:33:47] As an intelligent organism radiating through the galaxy. [00:33:47 - 00:33:50] From its own point of view it is an elder life form. [00:33:50 - 00:34:01] And as such it offers its tempering experience to a vibrant but naive child race that stands for the first time on the brink of the stars. [00:34:01 - 00:34:10] As our imagination has striven outward to attempt to encompass the possibility of the intelligent other somewhere in the starry galaxy. [00:34:10 - 00:34:21] So the other observing this now reveals itself to be among us as an aspect of ourselves when in the psilocybin trance. [00:34:21 - 00:34:30] In the phenomenon of Strophary Cubensis we are confronted with an intelligent and seemingly alien life form. [00:34:30 - 00:34:36] Not as we commonly imagine it but an intelligent alien life form nevertheless. [00:34:36 - 00:34:46] It is only an anachronistic lack of modern self reflection that would lead any thinker on the subject of extraterrestrial life. [00:34:46 - 00:34:52] To suppose that any intelligent alien would be even remotely like ourselves. [00:34:52 - 00:34:59] Evolution is an unceasing river of forms and adaptive solutions to special conditions. [00:34:59 - 00:35:01] Culture even more so. [00:35:01 - 00:35:08] It is far more likely that an alien intelligence would be barely cognizable to us as such. [00:35:08 - 00:35:18] Rather than that it should overwhelm us with such similarities as anthropoid form and an intimate knowledge of our gross industrial capacity. [00:35:18 - 00:35:25] Star traveling species would have a sophisticated knowledge of genetics and DNA function. [00:35:25 - 00:35:32] And therefore would not necessarily bear the form which evolution on a native planet had given them. [00:35:32 - 00:35:36] They might well look as they wished to look. [00:35:36 - 00:35:47] In the late summer of 1975 Dennis and I decided that the world we were exploring required a wider audience. [00:35:47 - 00:35:52] So that some consensus concerning what was going on could be established. [00:35:52 - 00:35:59] To that end we wrote and published a guide on the method we had developed to cultivate the Stropharia. [00:35:59 - 00:36:07] At the beginning of that little book I introduced what we had personally learned about the world of the mushroom. [00:36:07 - 00:36:18] The mushroom speaks and our opinions rest upon what it tells eloquently of itself in the cool night of the mind. [00:36:18 - 00:36:28] I am old, older than thought in your species which is itself fifty times older than your history. [00:36:28 - 00:36:34] Though I have been on earth for ages I am from the stars. [00:36:34 - 00:36:47] My home is no one planet for many worlds scattered through the shining disk of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life. [00:36:47 - 00:36:54] The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sunbathing. [00:36:54 - 00:37:00] My true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. [00:37:00 - 00:37:07] These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections than the number in a human brain. [00:37:07 - 00:37:11] My mycelial network is nearly immortal. [00:37:11 - 00:37:19] Only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of a parent star can wipe me out. [00:37:19 - 00:37:26] By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality. [00:37:26 - 00:37:34] All my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyper-like communication across space and time. [00:37:34 - 00:37:39] The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider's web. [00:37:39 - 00:37:52] But the collective hyper-mind and memory is a vast historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in our spiral star swarm. [00:37:52 - 00:38:02] Space you see is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores. [00:38:02 - 00:38:07] For spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. [00:38:07 - 00:38:22] Across the eons of time and space drift many spore bearing life forms in suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a suitable environment. [00:38:22 - 00:38:26] Few such species are minded. [00:38:26 - 00:38:40] Only myself and my recently evolved near relatives have achieved the hyper-communication mode and memory capacity that makes us leading members of the community of galactic intelligence. [00:38:40 - 00:38:48] How the hyper-communication mode operates is a secret that will not be given lightly to humanity. [00:38:48 - 00:38:50] But the means should be obvious. [00:38:50 - 00:39:03] It is the occurrence of psilocybin and psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living body that opens for me and my symbiotes the vision screens to many worlds. [00:39:03 - 00:39:19] You as an individual and mankind as a species are on the brink of the formation of a symbiotic relationship with my genetic material that will eventually carry humanity and Earth into the galactic mainstream of the higher worlds. [00:39:19 - 00:39:36] Since it is not easy for you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you, your most advanced theories of politics and society have advanced only as far as the notion of collectivism. [00:39:36 - 00:39:47] But beyond the cohesion of the members of the species into a single social organism, there lie richer and even more baroque evolutionary possibilities. [00:39:47 - 00:39:58] Symbiosis is one of these. Symbiosis is a relation of mutual dependence and positive benefits for both of the species involved. [00:39:58 - 00:40:11] Symbiotic relationships between myself and civilized forms of higher animals have been established many times and in many places throughout the long ages of my development. [00:40:11 - 00:40:16] These relationships have been mutually useful. [00:40:16 - 00:40:22] Within my memory is the knowledge of hyper-light drive ships and how to build them. [00:40:22 - 00:40:31] I will trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around suns less forsaken and near galaxy center. [00:40:31 - 00:40:46] To secure an eternal existence down the long river of cosmic time, I again and again offer this agreement to higher beings and thereby have spread throughout the galaxy over the long millennia. [00:40:46 - 00:40:52] A mycelial network has no organs to move the world, no hands. [00:40:52 - 00:41:02] But higher animals with manipulative abilities can become partners with the star knowledge within me and if they act in good faith, [00:41:02 - 00:41:12] return both themselves and their humble mushroom teacher to the minion worlds all citizens of our star swarm are heir to. [00:41:12 - 00:41:37] [water bubbling] [00:41:37 - 00:41:47] What has been my own reaction to the mushroom's claims concerning the extraterrestrial origins of tryptamine hallucinogens and the visions they bear? [00:41:47 - 00:42:00] I am of many minds. I think that it is possible that certain of these compounds could be seeded genes injected into the planetary ecology eons ago [00:42:00 - 00:42:08] by an automated space probe arriving here from a civilization somewhere else in the galaxy. [00:42:08 - 00:42:19] Such genes could have been carried along in the genome of a mushroom or other plant awaiting only the advent of another intelligence and its discovery of them [00:42:19 - 00:42:26] to begin reading out a message that opens with the bizarre dimension familiar to shaman everywhere. [00:42:26 - 00:42:36] The point of such a message could only be made clear when we had advanced to a sufficient level of technical achievement to appreciate it. [00:42:36 - 00:42:44] The exponential growth of analytical tools and methods may indicate that we are now approaching such a level. [00:42:44 - 00:42:53] I speculate that the final content of the message and its raison d'etre will be instructions, it will be called a discovery, [00:42:53 - 00:43:08] of how to build a matter transmitter or subspace radio so that we can have direct contact with the civilization that sent the message bearing hallucinogen genes to the Earth so many eons ago. [00:43:08 - 00:43:18] The trances imply that such a civilization has a faster than light technology for information if not for matter itself, [00:43:18 - 00:43:29] but they require a receiver at the arrival point, else they are as bound by the constraints of general relativity as are we. [00:43:29 - 00:43:39] The mushroom alien may have seeded the stars with automatic biomechanical probes immensely sophisticated by our standards, [00:43:39 - 00:43:48] able to tailor make message bearing hallucinogens for the special ecological conditions that the probe may encounter [00:43:48 - 00:43:58] and to release virus like pseudo organisms that can carry the artificial genes into the nucleoplasm of the target species. [00:43:58 - 00:44:06] This is a far more enduring form of message than a solid state monolith on the moon or an orbiting monitor. [00:44:06 - 00:44:17] The artificial genes may be carried along in the stream of evolution for literally hundreds of millions of years without substantial degradation of the message. [00:44:17 - 00:44:29] The information carried by the probe and broadcast by the hallucinogens is modulated by the modalities of the evolving intelligence of whatever planet is contacted, [00:44:29 - 00:44:35] but slowly the emphasis of the information available from the probe shifts. [00:44:35 - 00:44:51] Predictions of good hunting, finding of lost objects and the provision of medical advice is slowly superseded by the revelation of the extraterrestrial source of this information and the telos behind it. [00:44:51 - 00:44:59] The star antenna and the entry into the hegemony of galactic civilization that it will bring with it. [00:44:59 - 00:45:10] Speculative ideas indeed, but strangely enough many of the most current calculations and ideas about the density of life and intelligence in the galaxy [00:45:10 - 00:45:16] confronts xenobiologists with the dilemma of why we have not been contacted. [00:45:16 - 00:45:25] I will not go into details, but Ponamparama and Cameron's scientific perspectives on extraterrestrial communication [00:45:25 - 00:45:29] gives an excellent overview of current thinking on the subject. [00:45:29 - 00:45:38] R.N. Bracewell's contribution printed in the same work was the basis of my own ideas about interstellar probes. [00:45:38 - 00:45:41] I will summarize the state of the art thus.