When you take a longer slice, you realize that the individual, the existence of the individual is like an illusion. And that really, the planet is involved in some kind of chemical process which is like a gene swarming. And it's been going on for a billion years with more and more, and animals and plants as species and as individuals are just aggregates of genes of varying degrees of permanence. The individual is a very impermanent aggregate of genes. The species has a slightly longer duration. But what's really happening is these information transferring molecules are just swarming on the surface of the planet and controlling, as you mentioned, the weather, the chemistry of the soils, the rate of heat transfer. They've discovered now that plankton control weather in the oceans by controlling the surface reflectivity. The question, I think, is the peculiar dualism in the world of information. Why does it seem that reality is not reality? Why are there co-present, actually, two worlds are co-present in our experience? This is the taboo subject that we're here to talk about. The weird fact that there are two worlds, one of which our culture doesn't acknowledge but we all experience. That's a very schizophrenic situation to be in. We all exist in both of these worlds, but our language, our culture, our institutions tell us, no, there's only one world. We have gotten into this lethal cul-de-sac where, by not acknowledging the second world, we have veered off on a tangent which threatens our extinction now. This obsession with control of world one, matter, energy, and the complete ignoring of the world of consciousness, which stood in front of it and manipulated it, but just taking that as a given, has created this fantastically imbalanced culture. I think that gets back to the plants as teachers, because since we do, as in your words, play with fire as human beings, perhaps the question you were asking as to the plants as being teachers, my feeling at the time was, they're in communication with us as we are in communication with them. We're all transparent beings. You're talking of genes swarming on the planet. There's no safe in which we lock our own human knowledge. We're transparent to all around us. If you get into intelligent plants, which is what we were talking about earlier, perhaps, I mean, if you follow that logically out, why not have teachers as chemicals? That's how they can manifest within this particular body and do, use library card, as you were saying. They realize that we're doers and shapers. Well, I think there's only one life on the planet, though, and to say that we're separate from the plants or from this or from the air is a fallacy. So that's a great image, the growing transparency. That's a good idea for what the end of history is. It's that everything becomes clearer and clearer and clearer, and as it becomes clearer, boundaries disintegrate, and everything is seen to be of the same stuff. Well, I think for much of the world, and still, for instance, in the Amazon and other cultures where it tuned into nature, it was very transparent for a very, very long. Progress was the losing of that transparency and the, you know, forging ahead of certain parts of it, and almost to the point of just either eliminating to extinction or to the extinction of memory the lessons. That's kind of the response to the question. One day, I was just, I think I was doing bookkeeping or something very mundane, and the little voice that interrupts every once in a while said, "A plant teacher is a teacher who has taken the form of a plant." And then that raised all these questions for me, you know, because does that mean there are teachers floating around looking for places to land, right, and ways to interface with the other species, and, you know, I mean, I've always thought of rocks, big rocks, and many places in the world. You can sit on them, and you can just hear them, you know, and feel them. Really. I'm sure you know Rupert Sheldrake's theory. Well, it's basically the idea that things of like kind resonate together. And when I've thought about this problem before, about LSD and where does it fit into all of this, LSD is in the morning glories of central Mexico and the far Pacific, and I think that what makes a plant teacher complex is how many people it's taken, and that a plant that has been used a hundred thousand years is filled with all of the contents of the minds of the people who took it over that time. But I want to introduce the notion that life, the plants and the animals, are intrusions into three-dimensional space of some kind of topological manifold of a higher order. You see, the way in which a chair differs from a giraffe is that if you slice through the chair and then come back and examine it twelve hours later, it will be the same, but the giraffe will have changed radically. This is because by cutting into the giraffe, you have intruded into the temporal dimension of its existence. It is more like a musical note than an object. It must be born, grow, mature, and die. And that process, growth, maturity, and death, is how three-dimensional beings like ourselves describe the intrusion of these hyper-dimensional vortices into our world. That's the mystery of life, cannot be encompassed in three dimensions. Life is a hyper-dimensional object. All hyper-dimensional objects are organisms, whether they be societies or animals. So the question of what is the plant, you know, when you ask yourself, "What am I?" what you immediately concentrate on is what philosophers call your internal horizon of transcendence. You look into yourself to understand yourself. When we try to describe a plant, we inevitably give a topological mapping of it, how it appears to us. Its uptake of minerals, its surface reflectivity, its weight. But the plant obviously experiences itself very differently. All life has an internal horizon of transcendence toward which it aims. Whitehead called it apetition. It's inclusion of sensory data out of which it maps being. But what the nature of this higher dimension is that these vortices are intruding into our dimension from is absolutely anybody's guess. I mean, you can call it a mathematical conundrum or a religious mystery, but it's what's making the world happen. It's what, how the mystery of our being will eventually be shed one more level of veil to let us understand it. You see, an organism is a chemical system which does not run down. The second law of thermodynamics says that the whole universe tends toward the dissipation of structure and the release of energy and heat, and then everything, all structure, all energy is dissipated. But life has achieved the miracle of by being an open system and taking material into it and extracting energy from it and getting rid of waste, life has been able to leave the main stream of thermodynamic degradation and establish itself at an equilibrium point off that graph and maintain itself there for at least on this planet alone four billion years. Now, the average life of a star in this galaxy is on the order of two and a half billion years. Some last longer, but that means that biology is no epiphenomenon, no iridescence off the surface of matter as the 19th century physicalists wanted to describe it. It means that life is indicative of a physics of higher dimensions which intrudes into this otherwise thermodynamically degrading system, which we call the physical universe, and information. There seems to be an informational ghost of this universe which is somehow co-present at all points within the matrix, perhaps a la Bell's theorem or something like that, and that's what the psychedelic experience shows you. It shows you a hologrammatic space of information where by sitting still in your room and sending the mind, you can cross the universe in an instant, you know, and return. And the question of is this real is in bad taste. It violates the two ontological categories, you see. I mean, it just isn't done. But you're right. But the plants seem to be the things which shake us out of these cultural conventions. We have this very bad habit of when we encounter a new experience, we describe it, and as we describe it, we erase its reality. And replace it with a map. And forever after, when we encounter that input, we access the map and overlay it over the thing and say, "Ah-ha, I know what this is." And so by the time a child is five years old, they have completely entered into a symbolic construct which hides the real world from them. And fortunately, these plant teachers seem to have the unique ability of showing you the relativity of language, which for us is the relativity of being. And then you are freed because you have seen something incontrovertible. There's no going back then. You are--that is the great first gateway on the path to realize the relativity of language and the malleability of the world. For instance, coming out into the desert is typical of people seeking visions. The first thing you have to do is leave the polis. Culture is this effort to hold back the mystery and replace it with a mythology, which is then in the control of those who recite that mythology, whether they be shamans or priests. This holding back of reality is the strange--is what Christian theologians call "the fall." Our strange alienation from nature that causes us to crowd into cities and mint money and put a price on everything. This is why it's so important to go back to the Amazon and Eastern Indonesia and these places and try and understand what spark it was that those people kept, you know, over the millennia while we became the prodigal son and wandered into matter and to, you know, hoard in the cities on the plain and have now come full circle and returned at the end of history with the dilemma that we have made such a mess of things that there's nothing we can do now but lay. Each stage is a greater distancing from the wellspring of being and it's brought us, you know, to the valley of dry bones, to the valley of the apocalypse, and now the fat is in the fire. Now we'll find out what stuff man is made of as the chickens come home to roost. But--well, no, I'm very optimistic. I just-- [laughter] Is it my metaphors or my pessimism? Oh, the horrible metaphors. The metaphors. I'm using a hyphen. Yes, well, the rhetorical hyperbole unbridled. I think that--I'll ask a question about this two-world thing, because it interests me greatly. Do you think that there's two worlds or that there's many, many worlds? Yes, well, I think you're right. I mean, but there are different orders of different worlds. I mean, I guess it was the physicist Wheeler who thought that every time there was a choice, the universe took both paths and had always done this so that the number and kinds of universes was, you know, staggering. [inaudible] Right. That's where reality is set. I don't--I find that cumbersome. [laughter] And--but there certainly seem to be a number of universes, and there seem to be different kinds of universes. For instance, you can tune from channel to channel, but some of them you can't make heads and tails out of, you know? It's just too far away from your conceptual schema for you to be--so it's sort of like watching ideological mandalas or something. You can't say much about it afterwards, but it certainly was compelling. [laughter] And--well, I don't know, Robin. You're such a skillful questioner. You've brought yourself to the doorway of my most recent mania. Maybe I should unburden myself briefly about it. [laughter] One of the weird things about growth or trying to make your ideas always become new is that you always assume you're going to know what the next step is. That even though you're going to become more and more enlightened, there won't be any surprises. And-- [laughter] So a few weeks ago, I was meditating in my usual fashion, and-- [laughter] I began to get this new idea, which was so weird that I immediately shifted into, "Ah-ha, this is not the truth. This is not a transmission about the nature of reality. This is a plot for a science fiction novel that I should write," and tried to hold that as the defense. That was my shield against the onslaught of this thing. And I've never been one for Atlantis or Lemuria or all these invisible prehistoric lands and places that people enjoy so much. But I was told a very funny thing, which I will share with you. It's a funny idea. Now, let's see. How does it go? It has two versions, one of which speaks a scientific language. The other speaks a mythological language. Okay, so the scientific language goes like this. There's something in the universe called a fractal soliton of improbability. This means it's a unicative event. It only happens once in the lifetime of the universe. You can think of it as a wavelength with one wave. That's why it's called a soliton. And if one of these things move not in ordinary three-dimensional space, but in some kind of much higher spatial manifold, and when they collide with a planet, or when one collides with a planet in a universe, the time stream of that planet is divided, and two copies of the entire planet spring into existence without either having any knowledge of it. It just is something which happens. So this voice was telling me that this had happened to the Earth, and that this was the secret that we were all striving to understand, was that an event in the past had actually divided our time stream, and that a twin of this planet had come into being in another dimension. Okay, so that's the scientific explanation of it. So the mythological explanation was that the universe, it's gnostic, that the universe is the creation of a demiurge, not the highest expression of divinity, but a kind of demon, a fallen creature, and that this demiurge was able to coax itself into being, and actually incarnate into history as a human being, and that when this happened, this was then the mythological expression of the fractal soliton of improbability. And when it happened, the time stream split. The universe is the creation of the demiurge, and the demiurge impelled itself in in the form of an individual. Right. And this is sort of, you know... Waited a long time. When you're a demiurge, who can hurry? Okay, go ahead. Okay, so the time-splitting event had to do with the career of Christ, who was an extraordinary manifestation of energy in the historical time stream, not to be confused with a Buddha or a Mohammed or a Zoroaster, who were great saints. And it was something else. It was, in some sense, what it claimed to be, but in some sense. Okay? So now, at the moment of, and you can choose either the Immaculate Conception or the Resurrection, depending on which side of the bed you got up on today. But at that moment, the time stream split, and this other place came into being without having any awareness that... And they were identical at that moment, these two worlds. Now, Christ had no children, so... Oh, what I forgot to say was that the event, the fractal soliton of improbability, has this quantum mechanical half-charge, so that in one of the universes it happens, in the other universe it doesn't happen. And so everything about these two worlds was the same, except that in one of them the Immaculate Conception had not taken place, or the Resurrection had not taken place. Now, because Christ had no children, in the world in which he was absent, it was not a genetic line which was missing, it was an ideological line which never received expression. And consequently, as time passed, first decades and then centuries, the absence of this particular intellectual influence in the world changed the world radically in the following way. 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 A.D. 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 A.D., 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... 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 influencing dreams and astral traveling and the other side is actually the manifestation of this bizarre Greco-Mayan post-modern 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, you know, 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. {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.70 sec Decoding : 1.99 sec Transcribe: 1698.39 sec Total Time: 1701.08 sec