OmniBus 2012 - 612
Episode 612 of Terence McKenna's OmniBus 2012 series. McKenna examines the origin of consciousness as a major unsolved problem, asking why the natural order produced a creature as bizarre as humanity after millions of years of simpler biology. He presents time as something generated by metabolism and DNA, describing organisms as lower-dimensional slices of time analogous to sand dunes as slices of wind, then argues for taking a direct "what can you show me" approach to spiritual questions rather than relying on authoritarian gurus. Available in multiple formats.
transcriptmachine-transcribed, unedited
together, together, together, together, together, together, together, together, together, together.
A retreat from the brink of a historical apocalypse created by overpopulation and resource abuse
and untrammeled militarism and dominator politics.
I mean, everybody knows there's something wrong with the world.
And if you read left-wing politicians or deconstructionists or thoughtful historians,
they will offer thoughtful critiques of our situation.
But the question is, you know, the Tolstoyian question, what needs to be done?
We need to get our act together and solve a number of major problems that face this planet and our species.
It seems as though...
what we call biology, culture, humanness...
is something which is climbing rung by rung, step by step toward higher dimensions.
And it will use protoplasm as its vehicle when that will serve.
It will use silicon-based organization for its vehicle when that serves.
And it will... if it can exist out of nature, out of silicon, out of water...
...we can do this.
outer body it will probably do that too it's like the ascent of spirit it's almost like the
the western myth it's as though spirit fell deep into matter limitation and chaos
and somehow is slowly making a return to its higher and to the source of itself which it has
been so long severed from and longs to return to with such incredible urgency that it you know
evolves life on planets and technologies inside cultures as mere stepping stones to its return
to the contemplation of its self-image is this religion is this science fiction
what is this well who knows you know and where was it written adamantine that we should know
it's a mystery we are caught and caught you know inside a mystery veiled in an enigma
locked inside a riddle so what you do is you look for unsolved problems that this new approach
might shed light on and the number of unsolved problems is not great at this point maybe a dozen
or so and i could think of five of them but one of them is uh
the
origin of consciousness you know what happened here i mean this planet had been producing
chipmunks and birds of paradise and ant colonies cheerfully for hundreds of millions of years
without this left-wing swerve into tool building cognitive systems
energy release and so forth and so on what happened why did the natural order
admit of a creature as bizarre and as at apparent cross-purposes as our dear selves i mean this
is really the question of philosophy what is our place in the natural order of things you know
fallen angel risen demon prodigal scion of the elect or existential monster roving a land uh
landscape of conferred meaning who are we this is the question and so it becomes a question of
why did consciousness emerge and where and when and how so uh here's my version of this and i'll
sort of tell it as a story we could say if we were mathematicians that a sand dune is a lower
dimensional slice of wind that seems intuitive
true right okay so now with all this talk of wind and sand dunes well in hand
imagine the following not sand dunes but all biology what is biology made of
it's made out of genes so imagine the genes like grains of sand they are biological grains of sand a
range in an environment of some sort a jungle a desert a coral reef and now imagine time
as though it were wind and the time moves the genes around the genes are moved like grains
of sand by the wind the genes are moved by the pressure of time well then take away the
uh the winds of time and let's look at an organism a person a rhinoceros and anything
we can say then that this organism is a lower dimensional slice of time in the same way that
the dune is a lower dimensional description of wind an organism is a lower dimensional description
of the phenomenon we call time
and in fact the mushroom said this to me once it said it said what you call man we call
time speaks english too but you don't see dmt
too you see i am nobody and so uh it is therefore not so surprising that time which is something we generate
it's not there in some physical sense it's something made by bodies by metabolism
and so it has the structure that it has because the dna has over billions of years arranged itself
to reflect the modalities of the medium in which it finds itself is that not seemingly obvious
so so time as we experience it is really the time of our own genetic material and our genetic
materials time model is faithful to the facts of nature because our genetic material was shaped
by the architectonic the dynamic of nature so it isn't that we are decoding an occult chinese oracle
and we're not going to go into that detail it is not that we're going to go into that detail
but we are making a physical oracle to suggest a revision of physical laws it's that uh pictorially
or how do i want to say it's symbolically embedded in this chinese oracle is the same
structure that is symbolically embedded in our in our own genetic structure it's just that from the
yi qing it is more easy for us to extract it it's as though it's a rosetta stone into allowing us to
decipher not the dynamics of the I Ching but the dynamics of human organism and
experience as it is modulated by the structure of our own DNA and so in a
sense DNA is almost you could say a kind of hyper intelligent being or community
in which we are embedded with the illusion of our individual consciousness
but that what history is is a kind of morphogenetic unfolding not of the
individual through embryo Genesis and maturity and
shooting through time that is under the control of something beyond the reach of
rational inspection and the ego as a species in net过程
how did you create a law?
things come into existence and how do they maintain themselves and how do they disappear
and what is the unfolding of the world as we experience it.
My approach to all this had just simply been to take a what can you show me approach.
Whether I'm dealing with a yogin or a roshi or a rishi or a geishi or a bhikshu or a bhikshuni
or any one of these folks, I just say save the crap for the troops, what's the whammy.
And if they tell me well you have to sweep up around the ashram here for 15 years and
attend to Babaji, I just say hey I'm out of here, I don't have that kind of time, I don't
have that kind of faith in other people.
I think I mentioned the mushroom told me once, it said for one human being,
to seek enlightenment from another is as ludicrous as a grain of sand on the beach seeking
enlightenment from one of its neighboring grains of sand.
We're all alike, don't you get it?
Sai Baba has nothing inside him that you don't have inside of him.
Neither does George Bush or Nelson Mandela or de Klerk.
It's so similar.
It's the human being.
It's…
They're together.




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