library / Terence McKenna / The Rites Of Spring

The Rites Of Spring

Terence McKenna / audio 4:26:14 ~292 MB opus 154 kb/s

A teaching retreat lecture by Terence McKenna exploring plants and consciousness. The session opens with postmodern consciousness and science's limitations before focusing on plants as conscious teachers and repositories of encoded wisdom. McKenna discusses how shamanism and psychedelic experience reveal plants as more than biological organisms, but as intelligence and knowledge systems. The talk bridges botany, consciousness, evolution, and human-plant relationships, offering perspectives on what plants might be and what they could teach humanity.

transcriptmachine-transcribed, unedited

Well, the parachute never looked more like a mushroom than it does right now.

I couldn't really see you all in the firelight last night,

so this is like seeing you for the first time.

Welcome, and I hope you feel free to interrupt what's going on at any time

and ask questions, or if something needs clarification,

please don't hesitate.

My hope for these kinds of retreats is that it will quickly become so interesting to everyone

that the presentational form will transform itself into a dialogue among many people.

It seems to me that's when it happens best,

and I don't think people would be here if they didn't have strong opinions and ideas

about probably everything which is said.

So that's the way the group mind is generated,

by everyone opening up and expressing how they relate to these things that we're going to discuss.

I guess the place to start is sort of with looking at the notion that

the dawning paradigm of postmodern consciousness seems to be the growing awareness

that we don't know what is happening at all,

that all of the models whose implications have been worked out over the past 500 years or so

have come to a place where they are now recursive,

and they no longer can be pushed forward as models of explanation.

In other words, they are completed,

and ontological analysis of how they work now shows us the limitations of their application to reality.

They just simply cannot, there is not more blood to be squeezed from the stone of science.

There may be further discoveries,

but further growth and understanding along those lines now seems unlikely,

what with complementarity principle, Bell's theorem,

the primacy of language and the formation of ontology.

All these things show the relative power of science to account for reality,

where before it was assumed that science would ultimately give a good account of reality.

So postmodern living is living in the light of the fact that that faith has dissolved away,

and that we're now living in some kind of intellectual free space or fire-free zone,

where everything is up for grabs.

And the 20th century's fascination with the archaic,

with shamanism and breakdown of perception through modern art,

exploration of the unconscious through psychoanalysis,

mass political movements,

all of these things relate to this fascination with the archaic,

which is an effort on the part of the culture to stabilize itself,

because we really have, having seen the limitations of science,

we have discovered we are in a small rowboat in a dark ocean,

and we're being swept we know not where.

So all past tradition is searched,

magical traditions, alchemical traditions,

lost philosophical traditions,

pre-literate tribal traditions,

everything is frantically searched for a key.

And while there are consoling perceptions that arise out of this search

through all this other extended human knowledge,

there haven't yet emerged certain answers about what is going on.

This is why several people last night referred to how weird the time is,

how hopeful we are with so little reason on the surface to be hopeful.

And it's because the gelling out of this historical problem is happening right now,

and it's not clear what it will become.

Meetings like this are efforts to build an understanding of it.

It doesn't appear that it's going to filter down

through the transformation of institutions of control.

It appears more like it's going to be some kind of proletarian upwelling of a shift of point of view.

Now the shorthand way of saying what I just said

is that we now know that we don't know anything.

And things like the psychedelic experience and the use of psychedelic plants throws open doorways

that science was able to successfully keep closed during its heyday

because they were areas where the number of variables exceeded science's power of description,

and therefore they said, well, we'll just keep driving straight ahead

and we'll go up those rivers later.

But now that is all changed,

and the exploration of the existential dimension of not-knowingness,

which psychedelics makes possible,

is what is forming modern people, I think.

I mean, people who will be seen to have led lives that were relevant 50 years from now

or 100 years from now,

people who had actually figured out the context of the world they were living in

and tried to come to terms with it.

And this morning I think we want to talk about plants and how they relate to the planet.

But before we do that,

I want to paint a picture for you of a mandala,

which then I will discuss later in other meetings.

But my notion of what the postmodern person's mandalic projection onto the world should be

in terms of a map of understanding

is a quadrated circle

in which psychedelics and feminism and cybernetics and space travel

are the four parts of the circle.

And in the center of the circle looking backwards in time,

there is a category that I would call conservation,

which means conservation of the planet,

conservation of traditional and historical knowledge,

conservation of values,

conservation in the sense of intelligence husbanding the planet.

and when the mandala is flipped over

and you look through it into the future,

conservation has been replaced by art.

Art is the ultimate expression of this transformation

of unorganized matter into ideas

which human beings carry on.

And we carry it on in a technical mode out of necessity,

but in the artistic mode

out of a kind of upwelling of ecstatic self-expression about the universe.

So conservation is the way we relate to the past,

and human history is seen as an object of collective artifice-making in the future,

culminating in the notion of the flying saucer.

To do this, we have to completely redesign our understanding of reality,

which in terms of practical experience will mean that reality itself will appear to be redesigned.

And I touched on this just for a moment last night when I mentioned plants

and said how admiring I was of them

because they exist on sunlight, air, and earth

and that this is what we have to learn to do

in order to release spirit out of the ape matrix that we're bound in.

And strangely enough, the way this is to be done, apparently,

is by a redefining of the nature of the biological world

in relationship to this other kingdom of being, which we call plants.

Plants represent some kind of entire other dimension of existence

of which we view the topological manifestation of the form,

but are completely occluded as to the network of energy and information that this represents.

And like the zoological kingdom, which has thousands of forms of expression

and progressively more complex forms which culminate in self-reflecting primates,

the vegetable kingdom seems to have intelligent species

and gradations of awareness in the world

so that we are opening a dialogue at the end of history

with this other form in the biosphere

which we are just beginning to cognize

as our own understanding about what the world is really about falls into focus.

And certainly a hundred years ago, no one would have thought

that this was in the direct line of historical development of the high-tech civilizations,

that they would have to explore the mind of the vegetable plant goddess

who was the only force contending with them for control of the planet.

That's what it's come down to.

So, with that kind of idea in mind, the notion of plant and planet,

which is a phrase of Anthony Huxley's, which is wonderful,

Kat, maybe you would want to talk about this.

Is this a good...

Um, yeah.

I was thinking last night and this morning about plants particularly,

because of our talks that I anticipated,

and back at the tent a little while ago,

I had a gnawing feeling that I was ignoring the animals too much,

and then I arrived here and they all began to gnaw on me.

I just got about 14 ant bites just sitting here.

You see me scratching all over.

So I feel grounded again.

I don't know about having a dialogue with the end of history through plants, actually.

I don't know about that.

But I do think that they are this obviously great and ever-present mystery,

which we ingest all day long without thinking of those as plants,

without thinking of them as sacred plants in the way that we do the sacred ones.

Their chemistry, their input, is influencing us all the time.

Whether we eat meat or not, we eat plenty of plants,

and we breathe from them, and we soothe our nerves by seeing them and being near them,

and we go out into places like this and see kinds we've never seen before,

and marvel at how they can survive.

They're real models of graceful survival, aren't they?

In the jungle, where we've spent a fair bit of time,

and the competition, it seems, is for light and for protein, I guess,

for organic matter, the animals competing.

And here it's obviously for water.

They have a kind of a deal.

If you look around under the bushes, you know,

you see wonderful wildflowers right now.

The rains have just held on.

The moisture's held on long enough that many things are going,

the short life cycle plants are going through their short, intense life cycle,

and they often need shade to do it.

So you can see, we found something that we were sure was an African violet under a bush yesterday, you know.

You can see wonderful things if you look carefully and don't bother anybody else who might be under there.

The question I've been asking of myself recently, and of a few other people,

now I have many of you to ask it, I hope I get some answers,

is how can a plant be a teacher?

I asked this of someone the other day who was deeply involved in neuro-linguistic programming,

and he got way off on a tangent about what does this kind of question mean, you know,

and just broke down every part and phrase of it.

It was wonderful, you know.

We never got to anything like what he thought about the answer,

but it does assume all sorts of things.

You have to have an image of what you think of as a plant,

which, although we have a sort of language-verified, easy answer,

doesn't really touch on the reality.

And then you, of course, have to think what you mean by teacher.

Well, I know there's at least one biologist, serious biologist, in the group here,

so I'm hesitant to define a plant.

I guess from my point of view as an observer,

I've done botanical illustration, and I really valued the opportunity I had to learn to really look at them.

And then when you think you've really looked, look closer, you know.

You could just keep on learning from them just visually that way.

But they are organisms like us that draw in all the elements,

fire in the form of sunlight and water and air and earth,

and go through this transformation of energy into something else in the same way that we do.

This moment right now is when they're doing that most energetically for the year.

They're taking that moisture in there.

You can look at each one, you know, and the leaf tips are new,

and the tissue is soft, and the colors are bright as well as the blossoming and all that.

They're also laying out the structure, as I understand it,

for that growth to become more permanent, more woody, the perennials anyway,

so that next year they'll, well, during the year they'll fill that out,

next year they'll come from that place.

They're doing this envisioning the future, what they'll have to deal with,

how to move to make their interface with it, and then how to reproduce.

And their little messages are going into the seeds coming from pollination of other plants.

So it's always, like with us, when you choose a mate,

it's your choice for how you'd like the future to be, right?

My genes, your genes, here it goes, down the line.

Really all I have about this is questions.

I hope you don't mind if I just throw questions up,

and then if anyone wants to say anything, please do, including you, you know.

One thing I wonder is, we regard ourselves as such individuals.

We don't think of ourselves as a species much.

Terence talks about that a fair bit.

But in our daily life we really identify ourselves as individuals,

as some of us having more power, more clarity, more energy, more talent, whatever.

We divide that way.

With plants we tend to think of each plant on a species basis, you know.

I wonder if, how much that's true.

Plants we're familiar with, like ayahuasca,

Banisteriopsis copy in the South American jungle.

If you want to make this visionary drink, you go and find a member of that species.

But different members have different potencies and different takes on the same kind of message.

This gets to the teacher part.

A friend of ours, Eduardo Luna, interviewed a number of shamans in the jungle.

They use this term, plant teacher, in Spanish, as we've come to use it too.

And he asked them, do you think that all plants have a plant teacher in them?

Or do you think that some do?

And they were divided on this question.

Some people think that only the sacred plants do, right?

Other shamans said, no, all plants do, just some of the spirits.

They call them the mothers, the mother of the plant or the spirit or the teacher.

Some are stronger.

So that implies that every time we eat any plant, we're taking in that teacher.

They mix these plants with ayahuasca, which already provides the vision.

Then they take a new plant that they don't know so well or that they want some particular aspect of.

And they mix it in with that and take it and feel that they're radiating what is that plant, what is the personality, whatever you want to call it, of that plant.

And that they can take on the qualities of that plant.

So I think the Indians in this area, as I understand, did that too with their plants.

They wanted to take on the quality of the peyote is a good one, you know.

I mean, it lasts a very long time in a very subtle way doing who knows what all that time when it's not being eaten by something which is metabolizing the teacher in it.

Is the teacher in it when it's just sitting there all that time?

Is it experiencing the visions that come into the animal organism that ingests it?

I mean, I don't know.

And I guess on the species and individual thing, I wonder as an adjunct to that, you know, when you grow your own plants, anyone who gardens,

if you grow your own vegetables, how they taste different than vegetables that obviously at the store are the ones,

they've probably not been grown with even the same kind of physical care, but certainly not the same kind of attention.

It's the question for me, or what always astonishes me about it, is where does the information come from?

I mean, the peyote plant or the ayahuasca vine or the mushroom growing there in the jungle or on the desert, how did it manage to tap in and become filled with a universe of alien platonic beauty?

Why is that there?

All the rules of orthodox evolutionary theory conserve only what is necessary is conserved.

So it's very hard to understand how, why a plant needs a library card, the intergalactic library, because it's just sitting there in the desert of some planet alive and living.

But each plant is different too, I mean, their library cards don't take them to the same libraries even, you know.

Each one of these visionary plants provides something distinct, and sometimes you can see how it's a cousin of that one,

and sometimes you can't see that they're related at all.

Well, isn't it that mind is somehow, at the reflexive level, chemical?

And that when you change the chemistry of the engine which is giving the pictures, the pictures change.

Sometimes it seems almost like a biological radio that you tune into very strongly broadcasting stations,

some of which are, you know, alien, high-tech, insectoid, science fiction places.

Others are jungle worlds or things that you can't even English.

Giant human teachers, I met one.

I was 40 feet tall, you know, and took me by the finger like a little child and led me through.

What was that doing in the plant?

Yeah, what is it doing?

Sure.

Yes.

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 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 was 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 genes swarming on the planet.

There's no safe in which we lock our own human knowledge.

It's, 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 these library cards, as you were referring to.

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,

were tuned into nature, it was very transparent for 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.

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 in 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 your what philosophers call your internal horizon of transcendence.

You look into yourself today.

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 its whitehead called it a petition it's its 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 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 the

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

therefore 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

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

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

it just isn't done but you're right and but the plants seem to be the things which shake us out of these cultural conventions we have this very bad habit of of when we encounter a new experience we describe it and as we describe it we erase its reality

and replace it 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 hi I know what this is and 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

uh 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 know you are that is the great first gateway on the path to realize the relativity of language and the and the malleability of

of the world of the world i mean since 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 the strain 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 and 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 later

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

roost but well no i i'm very optimistic i just metaphors

is it my metaphors or my pessimism oh the horrible metaphor

the rhetorical hyperbole

unbridled

i'd like to ask a question about this uh this two world thing

because um it interests me really do you think that there's two worlds or that there's um many many worlds

yes well i i think you're right i mean but there are different orders of different worlds

i mean i 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 uh you know staggering

right i don't i find that cumbersome

and uh but there certainly seem to be a number of of universes and there seem to be different kinds of universes

for instance uh 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 uh ideological mandalas or something

you can't say much about it afterwards but it certainly was compelling

and uh well i don't know robin you've 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

one of the weird things about about growth or trying to make your ideas always become new

is that you always assume you're going to uh to uh know what the next step is

that even though you're going to become more and more enlightened there won't be any surprises

in and uh so a few weeks ago i was meditating in my usual fashion and uh

i began to get this new idea which was so weird that i immediately shifted into

this is 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 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 uh 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 unicate event it only happens once in the lifetime of a universe you can think of it as a wavelength with one wave

that's why it's called a soliton

and if one of the and these things move not in ordinary three-dimensional space but 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 there that the universe it's gnostic that the universe is the creation of a demo urge

not the highest expression of divinity but a kind of demon a fallen creature

and that this demo urge 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 demo urge and the demo urge 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 demo urge who can hurry

okay go ahead

okay so 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

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 2nd to the 5th 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 on 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

and Europe was

transformed into an amalgamation

a Greco-Mayan civilization with

so let me see

and

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 psychopharmacolitic technology of thought and understanding was what was developed over the centuries

and then in later centuries centuries centuries before it happened in our world they contacted the Orient and the Sun the dynastic influence of the Sun 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 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 and

by studying dreams 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 demoergic ideology

and they conceived of the notion of saving us and it it has to do with this whole thing about the UFOs and influence in 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 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 fifteen seconds and more details have flowed in and I use it mostly as a meditational device because it's so interesting

about how this civilization about how this civilization developed

it's amazing exoticism you know it's neoplatonism it's Taoism it's Mayan influences melded into a completely different kind of civilization than the one that we inherited I've always thought you know that the 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 twelve hundred 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

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 you know and he didn't tell me it's the plot for a science fiction novel he said this is the truth and then I said let's get back to it being a good science fiction novel

yeah

well the thing is that it would on our level explain perhaps the questions you were asking earlier of why the teaching plans

sure

another thing I was curious while you were talking about 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 separated 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 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 what you're describing here and it's very interesting that you bring 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

connection between the species

we're free to have it any way we like

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 a hundred thousand or a million species in the last

two hundred 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

theoretic 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

water

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

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 over mind this doesn't involve other dimensions there is an over mind co-present on this planet

and when technology when the development of technology exceeds the development of ethics

ethics then this over mind can work miracles and because the over mind 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 you know 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 over mind 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 sixty years was beating at the gates of Rome itself

it was like fire you know 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 you know 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

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 twelve eleven percent of the American population have seen a flying saucer

fifty two percent believe flying saucers are

推 LOL

five eight

all one

alright

everything is going to be done

let it free

please

if you leave theと思います

you have a pain

the

real whatever 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 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 set 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 disappears 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 trying to 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 the 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 I 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 and it's neither one of them is that old and what does the other mind

have to do with or think of the double time stream now that's a question I never would have asked you

mean if that's true I sort of think of these as well actually exclaims the earlier one was that the

other mind was injecting forces of change or conservative conservatism into the world the other that

events that came from now that was from the demiurge is demiurge related to the other mind no I think

the demiurge is like a negative expression they created the universe how did the other mind get

in there to be running the earth at least well I think if the overmind as the logos you know it's the

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 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

he 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 demo urge had inserted the false history and the Nag Hammadi manuscripts he

believed were actually the logos as printed letters and that when the 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 to his credit probably 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

yeah sell love and sell forgiveness and you know what what a scam and and the 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 Kissingers they're very ordinary people but they are able to project an archetype you know and that is the thing which sets them sets them apart and and when that reaches the kind of super intense focus that you get in a Mohammed or a Christ well then you know history is just putty in the hands of the

force not the person the person the person is usually martyr in some horrible way but the the the archetype take draws energy to itself and to 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 and and

different archetypes 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 you know what's appropriate for the first century AD is not appropriate for the 15th

and but when the archetype is appropriate nothing can stop it we what 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 in 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

messianic ideologues or something like that

oh I agree with you I think ultimately all dualisms have to be dissolved in the in the notion that you know there is one thing I mean that's the platonic faith the problem is all these secondary and tertiary operational levels where you know we're trying to actually operate in a universe of scarcity in a body which requires energy and all these things

this isn't this isn't 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 you know that we are spiritualizing the

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 mind

and we are making the artifacts of our culture intelligent and we are breaking down the barriers between ourselves between ourselves and larger data bases and this kind of thing so that the old I'm an ego inside the skin definition gives way to some kind of much more malleable and plastic thing

it's it's the definition of relationship quality by opposition it's polarity it's right wrong good bad male female

russians Americans the aquarium 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

like 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

and that breaks down all of the the dualist bonds that and I think we're right at that 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

and seeing as the Christ I feel was that that 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 I have this power it's my conscious

compassionate love that is just so unbounded that it gives me the opportunity to 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 greatest

psychedelic philosopher of the 20th century in the era of Bergson you had another question

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

time crescent well I don't know I think that the wall the canyons of the creode down which we are 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 is 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 are necessary and I

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 you know former Marxist former this former that espousing these unimaginable things

and there was a wonderful book there was 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

that gave Christ 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 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 and 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 you know this sort of thing similarly in the year 1000 there was great expectation but 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

but 1967 wasn't that 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 the

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 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

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 to

not have the expectation that everything will carry on pretty much as it has

but an 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 everything that replaces it is going to be swept away and that everything that replaces it is going to be swept away and that we

and everything that replaces it is going to be swept away and that we are just

moving in to 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 gotter

dammerung and and the worst boogeyman of Western culture will emerge and

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 that's right I guess I believe in flux and so

the whole process is one wave at that moment we begin another process sometimes

you discover you discuss that point as being the end of the universe she 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 see 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 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 what it means I mean it

could 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 and you

feel free to describe that as 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

endemic 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 miniscule 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 to find physical models for these transcendental hallucinations and the one which fits this is a few years ago

this Scandinavian astronomer Hans Ulfven 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 emerge a stream of particles and they are equally particles and anti-particles and they sail along for a period of time and then they collide again in the

and each particle is destroyed by its anti-particle

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 10 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 uh and parity will be conserved and all particles and anti-particles will disappear

however the interesting thing is that photons which is what light is composed of do not have anti-particles they're this one weird exception

so that when the universe collided with it and its anti-matter 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 more

but why pause at that there's such a persistence in 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 uh you know it's possible to suggest that the you 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

physical organism manipulates matter and so that you know you live in the radiant castles of the imagination

after a shift of epochs in which the 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

and uh

you can really take a readout on yourself by

by seeing how would you like things to be you know i mean i have

sometimes i my fantasy is

i would like to be

alone on a starship

ten thousand 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 uh if any of you are into science fiction the science fiction of cordwayner smith is really wonderful and one of his stories uh the starship is uh 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 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 or

yes i have a question yes

you mentioned here how the now

is flooded with future perception

yes

and

i have a question

yes

i have a question

yes

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

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 and 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

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

you know

yeah

that's very much idea

yes well what did plato say

that the present is the moving image of eternity

that

that's

pure good platonism

it's like a projection

much as our shadows are through the mountain

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

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

no one escapes

you know

the final realization

it's just that some people do postpone it to their last act

but there's no reason for that

because

it is the mystery

the culmination

it is

the date palm

and the wellspring

I'd like to

I'm always interested in pursuing things from the Mayan

so I'd like to

ask about

how this theory of time relates to the individual

somewhat related to BJ's question

there's some sense I have that

in their techniques

and certainly you've experienced

and other people have experienced this with the mushroom

at high doses

traveling through time

and actually

seeing the future

seeing the past

and I

I was

I wonder if you could say more about that

and some framework for understanding how that is possible.

Yes, well, I think psilocybin seems to be the great teacher of history

and part of its teaching is history.

It views a person without a history as a person with amnesia,

a person with a diminished capacity

because your history gives you the power of your convictions.

The way I use the wave, or the way I've been using it recently,

is to try and study the time immediately ahead of us

so that we don't misjudge what's going on.

And, you know, it's a mathematical process.

There's no indeterminacy about it

if we anchor the whole wave system on 2012.

And what I see from that anchorage point

is in the 67-year cycle from 1945 to 2012,

we have reached that point

which resonates with the larger 4,306-year cycle

at that point which corresponds to the collapse of the Roman Empire

around 475 AD.

In other words, we have been through a period of imperialist expansionism

which has lasted for a number of years,

certainly since the beginning of the 80s.

But I see a retrenchment of that

and a recidivist tendency,

a tendency toward religious fundamentalism,

rigid social structures,

and in short, the sorts of things

which could be seen as valid resonance patterns

to the early medieval phase of European civilization.

The period from AD 474,

let's for shorthand call it 500 AD,

the period from 500 AD to 1500 AD,

in other words,

to the discovery of the new world by Columbus.

That thousand-year period

is the resonance that we are going to experience

from now to the late 90s.

Around 1998,

we will reach the beginning of the Renaissance

and the discovery of the new world.

But we are going to have to endure

a period not entirely to our liking.

We represent the pagan Hellenistic spirit

which has held full sway within the empire

for the past 25 years.

And we may feel constricted now,

but I think that our ideas

and our position in society

has further constriction to undergo

before it re-flowers downstream a bit.

So when I first realized that,

I felt very pessimistic.

But then I asked myself,

well, what aspects of medieval life

could I groove?

What aspects of that medieval eschatology

were solitary to my needs and wishes?

And I discovered that, you know,

it was an age of great mystical faith and illumination.

It was an age of communities

of like-minded people seeking transformation

far from the turbulence of the collapse of the empire.

So I am not of that scoop.

My theory leads me away from those people in the new age

who think we're about to be catapulted

into the corridors of power.

I think that's preposterous

and the evidence for it is zero.

Well, and I think better we should tend our gardens

and form brotherhoods and sisterhoods of affinity

and realize that the task of transformation

is one of a lifetime,

our lifetimes, you know?

And every time someone like Dick Price

or Tony Lilly moves from the wheel,

I always wonder, you know,

how did it feel to know it wasn't finished,

you know, to go with it undone?

And, oh yes, I have no doubt

that when the saucer comes

that Tony or Dick will be in control,

one of them.

What is it Bob Dylan says in his song,

Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot

fighting in the Captain's Tower.

But yes, so I don't know

if that answered your question, Robin,

but I wanted to get it in

because the real meat for most people

for this idea about time

is not the mathematics of it

and the symmetry of it.

That's only pleasing to a certain mentality.

But really, what does it tell us

about the years immediately ahead?

And what it says is, you know,

consolidation, illumination,

community, and self-discipline.

I can only say thanks a thousand times

that we don't have to go through it

for a thousand years

and only for like 15 years.

This acceleration seems to me

to be very, very convenient.

Imagine if we were born in 500 A.D.

and we had to look forward to that.

Yes, well, that's why I say, you know,

imagine the people who lived in times

when the temporal river was stagnant

or even when countercurrents swept it backwards.

In other words, this is the anguish of the ancestors.

This is the sacred trust that must not be betrayed.

The pogroms and the invasions

and the atrocities conducted across history

can only be somehow redeemed

if we, who are the living wavefront

of this genetic experience,

do not fumble the ball, you know.

All our ancestors are watching

to see how we will do.

Okay.

I would like to address Robin's question as well

because it seemed like you were asking

sort of on a more mechanical,

how does this happen?

Well, yeah, how can it be that the Mayans

or we on psychedelics

can travel through time and see these things?

My image for it,

it explains that phenomenon to me

and I've had the same experience, past and future,

is, well, Terence was just referring

to the temporal river,

is that it's a river which flows two ways

from the past to the future

and from the future to the past.

And if you put yourself out in the middle of it,

let go of control,

let go of fear,

and maybe you want to choose your orientation

or maybe you don't.

You can just find out where you flow

or you can sort of face the past

or face the future and flow there.

I mean, this is not a physicist's explanation

of how this happens,

but it seems to work that way, you know,

and that we think perhaps far too much

of the past creating the future

and that we should think more

and perhaps other people have

of how it's flowing the other way.

And this is how some so-called primitive people

have managed to conserve

the very simple, effective beauty

of their lifestyle

and that real strong feeling

that every moment is now

because they're thinking of it simultaneously.

I think of that

and that also sets my mind off.

That's kind of like the river's flowing both ways

and if you kind of take a step to the side somehow

that you'll catch the current from the future.

That's appealing,

but also, I mean,

I always play with these metaphors

and maybe I'm literalizing them too much.

Is it possible to step out of that stream

in some way

and then looking above

and sort of choose

where you're going to descend into it

or another image that came to mind is

are there somehow

holes in the fabric of time

that you can shoot through

sort of like in 2001,

the Stargate opening up

and there's this hole in between

and where you emerge

is not the other side of it

but someplace completely different.

If you take the wave seriously

and apply it on these short scales of time,

you know,

you can find your way

into, yes,

unique configurations of the moment.

It's like astrology in that way,

you know,

and often the content

of a psychedelic experience

can be later seen to be

because of the situation

of historical resonance

that you weren't perhaps

even aware of at the time.

Or if there are parallel worlds,

one or many,

which ones happen to be adjacent

at that moment

in the cosmic weather kind of,

you know.

Sometimes I've taken the mushroom

just to say,

like a weather person,

to say,

okay,

I just want to see

what's happening out there right now,

not with a will in it,

you know.

And then,

you know,

you can find that it's about

knitting in your rocking chair

or you can find that you're just

on some landscape

that you couldn't

at the same time before.

The essence of Tao

is the correct

apperception of process.

That's what Taoism is,

is to understand process

is to be a Taoist.

And I think that this is

almost a formal rendering

of the notion of Tao,

almost an effort

to create a mathematics,

an algebra of the Tao.

and as long as it's true

to the notions

which Taoism conserves,

which is of flow

and determinacy

within indeterminacy,

it serves.

This is what

understanding time is,

is to understand process.

But to understand it so well

that it's like a sense for you,

it's like seeing.

This is the kind of seeing

that is very important

to see into time.

It's what history

and culture

have experimented with,

but it's what we now,

by identifying that

as what is going on,

can accelerate much faster.

Anything else?

I was, you know,

just picking up on

a conversation

with Michael this morning.

Maybe you could talk more

about the other.

Oh, the other.

Well, I'm not sure exactly

what he meant

by talking about the other.

I mean, the other

is just a way

of thinking

about all of these things

that we name

spirit,

God,

demon,

void.

It's that

there just necessarily

is a place

off our map.

Whenever you have a map,

it implies

the part that is not

on the map.

And the other,

the truly other,

is,

it lies outside

the domain of language.

It's like the unspeakable.

All you can do

is point at it,

you know.

And the Gnostic idea

of God

was that it was

totally other,

that there was nothing

in this universe

that gave any clue

whatsoever

as to the nature

of God,

that that was its essence,

was to be

completely other.

But, you know,

the other trickles

through and reverberates

in our lives

in all kinds of dimensions.

I mean,

the first other

that you meet

is the world.

And at a later point

in your development,

your attachment

to another human being

can become

a confrontation

with the other.

So it's just a way

of shorthand

signifying,

right?

The dimension

that carries you

beyond yourself

into the things

that you previously

couldn't expect

or imagine.

Yeah,

that's one notion of it.

Or Wittgenstein's

unspeakable.

Or,

you know,

I always,

I'm fond of quoting

this poem

by Trumbull Stickney

where he says,

I lean over

your meaning's edge

and feel the dizziness

of the things

you have not said.

That's the other.

It's the dizziness

of the things unsaid,

the things that lie

beyond the edge

of meaning.

Part of the question

has to do with,

specifically in

the mushroom experience

of my dose

is this sense

of alien intelligence

or other.

Because I think

in, you know,

it's like you said,

in some of our systems

of conceptions of God,

many psychedelic experiences,

at least with LSD

and other,

or light dosages,

is that I am connected

to that

or that I'm part of,

I'm part of that thing.

But somehow

on the tryptamines

that it's

this alien intelligence.

I mean,

what do you make of that

that you feel

is important?

Well,

I don't know

quite what to make

of that.

LSD is self-reflective

and integrative,

I think.

these tryptamines

seem to be

informational

and largely

unconcerned

with the impact

that the information

they carry

has on the perceiver.

I don't know.

I think it just

must have to do

with the fact

that the universe

is not

all smoothed out

and filled in

and that this is

really an area

of personal exploration

where you can

penetrate

into an area

of terra incognito,

a place

where nobody knows

exactly what is

going on.

We're not used

to that experience.

We expect

to have maps

of everything

we look at

and everywhere

we go.

And it is strange

that in this one area

we don't,

that apparently

our taboo

against looking

at the unconscious

or delving

into the mind

has made us

content

to just

fence off

this area.

Well then

if you climb

over the fence

and start wandering

around out there

you don't know

what you're going

to find

because the culture

has carefully

engineered itself

to go around

all of this stuff.

Even,

even I think

shamanism

is largely

concerned

with gaining

power

to protect

yourself

from the onslaught

of the other.

You know,

they're very

concerned

to hold

stuff back.

They don't really

have this

let's hurl

ourselves

into it

attitude

that we have.

We found

in the Amazon

we were looking

for this one plant

which had

DMT in it

and the

ayahuasquero

that we were

working with

I kept

leading the

questioning

back

to the matter

of this one

plant

and finally

he said

first he said

that it was

comida del

pero

food for

dogs

and

which seemed

like maybe

a put down

of some sort

and so then

went back

over it again

and he said

whoa

it's mal and bizarro

it's too strange

so this was a man

whose whole life

was about taking

ayahuasca

and triggering

hallucination

but he felt

that to go

into that plant

it was too

weird

and you often

have the feeling

with those people

that they

involve themselves

in the psychedelic

effect

like a dancer

almost as little

as possible

to get the job

done

you know

they don't

I don't

think that

of Don Fidel

I think that

in that one case

he certainly

was

he did also

seem to hold

the mushroom

in the sort

of middle