Trialogue Hazelwood

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

This is Lorenzo, and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

Well, even though it's been less than a week since the last time we got together here in the Salon,

I just couldn't stay away.

There are at least a dozen pressing matters at hand right now,

like all the things I put off doing before my holiday.

But to tell the truth, all I actually feel like doing is listening to some trilogues I've not heard before.

So I guess this is sort of my way of goofing off by listening to Terrence McKenna,

Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake hold their first public trilogue outside of California.

The conversation we're about to hear was actually held sometime in 1993,

at Hazelhurst in England.

And their weekend-long trilogue was captured on four cassette tapes that Ralph Abraham loaned to me

for the use in these podcasts.

And each of these tapes is 90 minutes long,

but rather than break them into two programs, as I've done in the past,

I've decided that since we don't have the commercial constraints of radio,

well, why am I conforming to a one-hour format anyway?

You obviously can just pause your player whenever you want.

You know, it's not like turning off a radio program and missing something.

So from now on, I just plan on keeping these tapes, side A and side B, all in one podcast.

And since I did this once before in the past and solicited comments about it,

I'm sure that this will be agreeable with most of you,

because the email I received was essentially all in support of the longer format.

And by the way, I want to express my thanks to all of you who wrote to me about that.

I really do appreciate your comments, and I apologize for not getting back to all of you personally.

But rest assured, I'm thinking about you,

and now that I've got some of your faces in mind after meeting you at Burning Man,

well, you're all becoming much more clear in my mind.

It's really nice to be here in this cyberdelic space with you,

and I hope that you can feel the energy of this mind storm that we're all setting in motion here.

I just don't have any better idea than you do right now about what seems to be bubbling up from inside of us,

but whatever it is, I'm sure that in the end, everything is going to be all right.

As Terrence said in a dream to a dear friend of mine one time.

Okay, that's enough romanticizing for now.

Let's get on with the program and begin with Ralph telling Terrence how much he thinks of him,

but doing so with a lot of humor and back and forth teasing among the three of them.

I really like the way this trilogue begins.

It sounds as if they were actually having a good time together, way back in 1993.

So let's join them now.

A long time ago, for more than 10 years, we are doing this, but primarily in private.

And out of this ongoing process for more than a decade,

we have to become, I think, a kind of a unit or a triad.

And that's why we've been going to introduce ourselves individually, but by this other trick.

So later on, during the weekend, we'll speak more about the process of triloguing,

and of course you'll see it in action.

But to introduce ourselves, this is not a trilogue, but just a trick.

But we will describe each other as we appear to ourselves in the context of this process, triloguing.

So I'll start by describing Terence to himself from ourself.

So Terence seems to be known, better and better known,

and whenever we walk anywhere, someone will come up and recognize him.

And as it says in our program, ethno-pharmacologist.

Well, as a pharmacologist, he's sort of an herbal doctor or something.

But this kind of pharmacology is important to us also in our process.

But for me, Terence is a special person because of the breadth of his knowledge

and the evidence of a phenomenal integrity within it.

First of all, when we first met, Terence was a person asking me about mathematics,

kind of mathematics that I was interested in at that time that nobody else had even heard about.

And as our relationship developed, I saw that he had this philosophy of time, let's say,

or maybe even a mathematical model for the structure of time.

That is an odd thing for a person to be obsessed with.

And from this obsession, he had to learn a great deal about history.

So in our process of triloguing, we find it very much enriched by Terence's phenomenal knowledge of history.

And not only that, but his special way of saying it is sort of a, you're familiar with this here,

a bardic skill so that whatever he says will have more effect than it actually deserves.

Because of his phenomenal apparent conviction in it.

Is he Irish?

Yes.

That's a cooperative process.

What seems to inform or maintain the integrity of his total presentation is some kind of spiritual belief.

I don't know exactly the right word for this, but I can tell that in any way.

And this spiritual belief is outside of any organized system, so we can most easily understand it

in the connection of the archaic revival or pagan spirituality or shamanism.

Anyway, this aspect of Terence, every person is a spectrum of all kinds of things.

And here are just a few of Terence's things that I think are the most obvious in our process of interaction.

The primitive spirituality, which always speaks against any church guru or leader.

I'm almost done.

I'm squirming there.

Finally, besides this information-based personal style and integrity,

there is something else which I think is very important to us,

and that's the adventurer.

That's the willingness to risk going to some kind of edge.

And also the propulsion to talk about it upon me coming back,

fulfilling some kind of responsibility to the community,

which is beyond, which risks more than simply individual development.

It's too long.

Yes.

That's it.

Good.

Well, so it falls to me to share with you my view of Rupert,

who I'm not sure, when I first became aware,

probably it was the nature review,

which I think Rupert should certainly be very grateful to nature,

because in their perverse way,

they saved him perhaps from obscurantism

by calling for the burning of his book.

And my intellectual method has always been to seek out the heretical.

And so when I heard that nature had called for the burning of a book,

I burned up my tires on the way to the store

to see if I couldn't obtain a copy.

And it was very interesting.

And I added it to the slow-rising intellectual edifice

that I had been building for years

in the area of theoretical biology.

I was very interested in Dries and Kemmerer

and the school of vitalism

that refused to genuflect to the idea

that life could be reduced simply to physics and chemistry.

That seemed to me inadequate.

But nevertheless, after reading Sheldrake's book,

it just seemed like an intellectual war

being well fought in a distant land

by someone I was probably not likely to have cross my path.

And I discussed it with other people.

And I was amazed at the animosity

that rained down upon what seemed to me

a fundamentally interesting and not easily dismissed concept.

I can remember one person telling me,

you have only to heft the book in your hand

to tell that it's bogus.

Well, I thought they must have an intuition

into the nature of scientific theory far beyond my own

because I couldn't make the judgment at that stage.

And then Rupert, I believe it was through Ralph,

contacted me and came by bus to see me.

I live in the wine country north of San Francisco.

And I didn't know what I expected.

I was mentored by Eric Janj,

who some of you may know.

And so my vision of the European academic

was of a corpulent, elderly, animated person.

And I projected that and expected that.

And when Rupert arrived,

and Ralph vectored in for that first meeting as well,

isn't that interesting?

That's right.

And there he was.

And I thought I immediately fell under the spell

of his personality, his spirit.

Scientists, I don't know if you spend a lot of time with them,

but they tend to be pretentious boors, most of them.

And the higher they rise,

the more this quality seems exacerbated in their personality.

And I have found Rupert to be

an incredibly generous, intelligent, forgiving person.

I feel very privileged to be in the presence of these people.

I'm sure you all know the cliché

when Newton was asked how he did it.

He said, I stood on the shoulders of giants.

That's how it was done.

And to whatever degree the mathematics of Ralph

and the theoretical constructs of Rupert

have supported my own work.

And not only my work,

but the building and maintaining of a personal vision,

I felt that I've stood on the shoulders of giants.

It's hard to say what the fate of morphogenetic fields

will be in the history of ideas.

But I am convinced that given even a halfway level playing field,

the best ideas always win.

And so I'm very keen to stand close to this man

because I'm absolutely convinced

that the light of glory will fall upon him.

Mechanistic biology has failed

and for 20 years has been involved in the cover-up

of the catastrophic failure of its program

of reducing life to physics and chemistry.

It will not happen soon.

It will not happen ever.

And when the history of biology is written,

I'm convinced that Rupert's work will stand at the turning point

because the key problem in biology is form.

And the ideas that have been put forth in the past

have been inadequate.

And I think the last thing I would like to say

is I'm tremendously admiring of Rupert's simplicity.

And what I mean by that are two things.

Number one, his unwillingness to submit himself

to the hegemony of scientific,

well, the mafia of scientific correctness, essentially.

He is not an academic.

He feeds at the trough of no corporation or university

that I'm aware of.

He is a true independent thinker.

And finally, he brought back and revivified for me

something my mother was very keen to inculcate

into me as a child,

which is the primacy of observation,

the importance of going to the field,

the importance of facing the phenomenon

unaided by apparatus or even mathematics,

the importance of the existential confrontation

with the thing one wishes to understand.

And if you know Rupert,

to stroll with him through an art gallery or a forest

is to feel the mystery of life

and the immediacy of that mystery

and to have a very strong sense of its accessibility.

And that's very important.

I don't want a Gnostic god

that resides outside the imperium.

I want a kind of pantheistic richness

that is right there on the surface.

So I enjoy playing Byron to Rupert's Shelley

and hope to do so this weekend.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Now I'm going to introduce Ralph.

I met Ralph and Terence,

as Terence has described,

when I got off the bus at Sonoma.

Was it Sonoma?

Santa Rosa.

Having been sent by a friend in San Francisco

to meet him.

This was in 1982.

And Ralph was there too.

So I met Terence and Ralph together.

And that's when we found

we had this way of relating together,

which for us has been very helpful.

Well, Ralph is a mathematician,

a chaos mathematician.

But he's much more than that.

Most mathematicians are peculiar,

and he's no exception.

He's peculiar in a very interesting,

accessible way.

One of the things that he's done,

which some of you may be aware of,

is made mathematics accessible

to ordinary people like ourselves

who haven't studied it.

The secret of maths is that

for those who are skilled practitioners,

it's in fact a kind of inner landscape

that they see,

some of them at least,

have an amazing visual intuition.

They're seeing internal pictures.

It's a visual and aesthetic experience.

Things can go into this landscape,

balls roll along,

answers come out,

and they don't quite know how it happened.

Something that's hard to imagine.

But this is what it's all about.

And then they write the thing down

in symbols, in a notation.

And when you look at these symbols,

which is what we see when we look at maths,

it's like music,

as if you've never heard a symphony,

all you've seen is the score.

And if you've only seen the score of the symphony,

the notes on paper,

it doesn't mean much.

It's alienating.

It seems somehow a dry abstract.

But what Ralph has done,

among other things,

has made this mathematical,

the visual intuitions

that lie behind maths

accessible to everybody.

And this is partly because

computers have made it possible to do this.

And he's at the leading edge

of computer graphics.

He's at the University of California

at Santa Cruz,

which is right next to Silicon Valley.

And partly through simple diagrams,

his books on visual dynamics,

visual mathematics,

have no equations in them, whatever.

And introduce you through pictures,

through diagrams,

seen in or imagined in three dimensions,

to the fundamental principles,

not only of classical dynamics,

but of chaotic dynamics.

And for me,

this was the first time

anyone had unveiled

the inner mysteries

of what's going on in maths

and made it

something that

we could grasp intuitively.

It's rather like

having spent all one's life

just seeing musical scores.

You suddenly hear the music.

And this is one of Ralph's gifts

to be able to do this.

His ability to visualize mathematics,

I'm sure, is innate.

But I think it was enhanced

in the late 60s and early 70s

by certain inner experiences

which would fall into the category

of what Terence calls

hands-on pharmacology.

And these he took.

Ralph is,

he doesn't look like it,

but he's an extremist.

And when he does something,

he takes it to extremes.

For the last 20 years,

he's been taking moderation

to extremes.

But when he felt

that the secret

to understanding

the deeper parts

of the mathematical landscape

were substances like DMT,

he took that to extremes too.

And he's also traveled in India.

One of the things

the three of us have in common

is that we've all spent

quite a long time in India.

So Ralph has been in India.

He took that to extremes as well.

He's also studied here in England.

He was at Warwick for a while,

Warwick University.

He lives in Santa Cruz

in the Midson Woods

in a very beautiful place

with wonderful woodland

and a little valley

down beside his house.

Deer and wild animals

groves around.

He observes the stars.

He's got the most agreeable system

for observing the stars

of him that I know,

namely a hot tub

located outside his house.

And you can sit

in wonderful hot water

gazing at this clear star

and brilliant stars.

So he knows the stars

from many hours

spent observing him

in the most comfortable

of circumstances.

He eats,

in the most spartan way,

simple vegan food

with chopsticks.

This is what I mean

by taking moderation

to extremes.

He's a total abstainer

from all known

noxious substances

and leads this

almost monastic life

which I think

is part of the

spirit of mathematics.

But he's also

a very sociable creature

and although he's always saying

I never go anywhere

and I never meet anyone

it's amazing

how often you meet him

in all sorts of places.

He also has a great gift

for dialogue

and a great ability

to summarize things briefly

and a great ability

to empathize

with people

of all different kinds.

He's one of the few people

I know

who's totally unshockable.

What happens next?

Oh yes.

It all seems so simple

back in the era.

We're not done.

We're only half done.

Now I'm going to

introduce Rupert.

He's into nature

and into the spirit.

And in nature

he's into it

as a scientist.

A lot of people

hate the science

and I must confess

I feel very ambivalent

about it myself.

But Rupert is a scientist

as a scientist

should be

as opposed to

how most scientists

actually are.

And in science

he's really a biologist

so that he's fascinated

by life

although he likes

the stars.

The mysteries of life

seem to really absorb him.

And as a biologist

he's really a botanist.

In fact

he is so into plants

that I think

when Rupert speaks

you're hearing

the leafy green

speaking through

his mouth.

And like Terence

he has a phenomenal

ability to stand up

after seeing

a subject

printed on a flashcard

and carry on

for an hour or two

as if

he'd written books

on the subject

of his life.

And this

gift

seems to be

pointed at

communicating

on behalf

of

mute

biosphere

the planets

of the garden

and the world.

And

in Rupert

like Terence

is a special

kind

of spirituality

which also

probably comes

from plants

but in Rupert's

case

this

spirituality

is expressed

in a Christian

form.

So

unlike Terence

who's a

pagan

for me

certainly

not a

Christian

there's

in Rupert's

integrity

a kind

of living

proof

for us

a constant

reminder

of the fact

that

the ordinary

and familiar

spiritual paths

actually

work.

So

with

the voice

of the

leafy green

and this

integrity

of a true

spiritual

connection

from

the other

realms

has come

this

heretical

posture

of the

scientist

who

cannot

say

other

than

what

is

obvious

from

plants

about

nature

and

to say

that

I mean

you would

have a

choice

if you

perceive

this

either

to say

it or

not

so

here's

another

aspect

of

Rupert

that I

think

is

singular

and

maybe

for him

unfortunate

and that

is

the

courage

the

adventure

the

dedication

the

responsibility

to

report

on the

weaknesses

of

science

and

you know

it's very

expensive

to be a

heretic

if you

had a

choice

you

wouldn't

be one

and

the

reason

for

being

one

is

a

kind

of

unyielding

integrity

which

it would

be

easier

not to

have

as part

of our

group

this is

a

kind

of a

skeletal

structure

we

can never

waver

too far

into a

speculation

which is

not based

on

the integrity

of our

direct observation

of a certain

something

it has to

come back

to

reason for

risking it

all

which is

the obligation

to tell

the truth

now

rupert

will

introduce

terence

no

now

i will

introduce

you

or

would

you

rather

do

me

ross

worked

out

a

mathematical

system

very

well

i was

on my

way

to

which i

listened

to

on

the

bus

i

think

it's

the only

time

i've

ever

listened

to

one

of

those

tape

things

and

earphones

on

your

ears

and

i heard

this

extraordinary

lecture

about

the

effects

of

dmt

a

powerful

hallucinogen

and

an

entire

family

of

hallucinogen

derivatives

and

i was

amazed

that

subjects

such

as

this

was

being

discussed

in

such

a

fascinating

interesting

and

coherent

way

since

previously

i'd

associated

this

subject

with

total

incoherence

when i

met

him

i

found

that

really

he's

a kind

of

naturalist

um

fraser

hello

welcome

we must

find

you a

seat

um

so

this

is

fraser

clark

we'll

ask

you

to

introduce

yourself

to

my

we're

just

completing

the

process

of

introduction

where

everyone's

introduced

themselves

and we're

introducing

each other

so i was

just talking

about

terence

once told

me that

as a

child

he

lived

in

colorado

near a

jam

factory

or a

fruit

bottling

plant

i forget

which

and

at night

he'd go

there

and

out of

the night

sky

there was

all this

fruit

being

made

into

in

sheds

and

out

of

the

night

sky

out

of

the

darkness

would

appear

moths

of every

different

description

attracted

by the

bright lights

of the

bottling

plants

and the

delicious

fruit

jam

or whatever

they were

making

and how

he used

to go

and watch

those

out of

the

darkness

colored

moths

just

flew in

from the

sky

and it

seemed

to me

a wonderful

image

of what

he does

I mean

partly

he's

known for

his

visionary

qualities

looking

for visions

which come

out of

the

darkness

of the

mind

that

so

that

what

the

facebook

started

coming

to

the

wind

your

mine

amen

if you like. But also he's quite literally a naturalist. He's spent years traveling through

Indonesia with his butterfly net, collecting butterflies of various species. And he's spent

a long time exploring the jungles of the Amazon. And so he's a kind of naturalist of the mind

and of nature. He has an extraordinary knowledge of biological subjects, including surprising

ones like octopuses. And at the same time, he's got a curious reductionistic streak in

his thinking, which can come out under certain conditions. He turns into another person and

can become a savage critic of speculative thought of anything that doesn't reduce everything

to the biochemical or molecular level, of hallucinatory belief systems, of false beliefs of every kind.

And I haven't quite worked out what conditions bring about this phase change in Terence's

example. But you'll probably see examples of it over the weekend. So he takes on many

different personae. But all of them, as Ralph has already indicated, come out with this gift

of the gap, which comes from his Irish ancestry and also from his Welsh ancestry. He's a mixture

of Irish and Welsh. Anyway, it's always a great stimulation to talk to Terence. And you never

quite know where it's going to take you, except that sooner or later, it takes you to the 21st

of December 2012, when it's his fixed belief that the world as we know it will come to an end. So part of

him is a millenarian prophet. Part of him is a Dominican. He professes to be a pagan, but his

Catholic upbringing, his Dominican reasoning, and his experience as an altar boy have never left him.

And in his vision of the end of the world in 2012, and of the entire historical process throughout the

whole evolutionary history, being drawn towards some culminating point, namely 2012, he has

a vision of the end, which exceeds in zeal and further that of a great many professional preachers

of this sort of belief. And although he appears at times to be reasonable, at other times to be open

to new ideas and so on, there's one point which is fixed in all this, which is it's all going to come

to an end in 2012. Sometimes this apocalyptic view is tempered by a utopian view, that it wouldn't all

come to an end in 2012, or at least it needn't if people all started taking DMT.

But then it turns out that if you actually try to envisage what would happen in the total change

of consciousness and human beings in the entire cosmos in 2012, it would be just like everyone

taking DMT. So these themes weave together, but they always come to the same conclusion. But it's

put forward in such an extraordinarily varied set of ways, in kaleidoscopic forms, that one's always

amazed at how many different ways there can be of putting over a simple, single idea.

I will forswear the desire to rebut.

Yes, I'll yield to the momentum of the program.

I think I first heard of Ralph years before I met him, and it had nothing to do with his professional,

mathematical accomplishments, which are many. But a person who had made a great contribution to the

sixties youth rebellion in the United States had come upon such bad times that he was essentially living

on the street, a brilliant Princeton biochemist. And in inquiring after his fate, and knowing that

he had become an indigent person, I learned that a mathematician in Santa Cruz had invited him into

his home and taken care of him like a child or a son for several years. And that fact, and an infamous photograph

taken at the height of the sixties youth revolt, which was published far and wide in the United States,

inflamed and outraged the population because this photograph showed a full professor of mathematics

leading the charge at the barricades of the revolution, attired in a flag made of the

flag of the United States of America. And as, if you follow American politics, you know,

we hang for flag desecration. So, uh, it was an extraordinary thing, a member of the establishment

to, to be caught out in this kind of behavior. And then a few years later in 1972, a person I went to

high school with came to me and said, um, there's someone you absolutely must meet.

Well, usually when I hear these words, I make an automatic inner decision to, at all costs,

to avoid meeting whatever is being offered because experience is a hard teacher. But, uh,

but this friend of mine persisted and eventually Ralph came to see me. I was living in Berkeley

in Berkeley at the time. And, uh, it's impossible not to fall in love with the man. He's the teddy bear

of advanced mathematics. And, um, a person of extraordinary history and accomplishment. He grew up in Vermont,

which is one of the poorest and least populated of the American states. It is truly a remote area.

And, uh, there he gained a love of skiing. He, uh, I don't really recall the early details of his career,

but I remember I was extraordinarily impressed by the news that he had been a fellow of the Princeton

Institute of Advanced Studies, uh, where the only other person I was aware of who ever held that title

was Albert Einstein. Uh, no, Ralph didn't get Einstein's office, but I think he got his, uh, bicycle

stand as a consolation prize. And Ralph was such a maverick, such a chance taker that the tremendously

comfortable world of East Coast, uh, collegiate mathematics held no, uh, sway over him when an

opportunity arose to go to California, where the University of California was establishing an

experimental campus with where all kinds of educational, uh, advanced experimental educational

ideas would be tried out. Uh, Ralph was there either in the first year of its operation or very shortly

after he, uh, I hope it's all right to tell this Ralph because it impressed me before he eventually he had

tenure, but he was so loathed by the administration for his political activism that I think for 35 years,

they gave him no raise. They couldn't fire him, but they could make life hell. And he stuck with it

until now. I think even the most hardcore of the administration recognized that in Ralph,

they have a real gem, one of the major thinkers and contributors to what may seem like an arcane field,

research mathematics. But in fact, mathematics rules the world from far, far behind the throne.

Ralph estimated to me at one time that there are only about 2,500 people in the world making a living

as research mathematicians. And, uh, Ralph's work has always been forward-thinking, extraordinarily, uh,

creative in the abstract realm, but never without a human dimension. And mathematicians are extraordinary

asthese. This is not a quality in your work that is respected in mathematics. The more abstruse,

the more incomprehensible, the more removed from the human world, the more kudos your colleagues will

shower upon you. Ralph has made major contributions in the area of model building for natural phenomena,

everything from, uh, population theory, to models that prove the impossibility of monogamy,

to models of the functioning of anorexia nervosa, and, and so forth. An extraordinary,

rich and varied career, uh, Indian musician, student of the magical systems of the Renaissance,

and of Dr. D. Founding member of the John D. Society, uh, founder of the Institute for Global Analysis,

the author of several books on, uh, uh, dynamics that have brought dynamics from the closet of obscurity

into, uh, a field that many, many people are conversant with, largely through Ralph's books and the

illustrations of them by Chris Shaw. He is not simply a worker on the fringes of advanced mathematics.

He is author of Foundations of Mechanics, and I dare say anybody who's written a book titled The Foundations

of Anything, uh, gets a lot of respect from me. Ralph has, uh, been an extraordinary friend over the years.

We see each other as often as our busy lives permit, and, uh, I go to him not for insight into advanced

mathematics, which, other than my own narrow interests in the field, remains arcane, but for his insight into

the human condition. He is, uh, better than five psychotherapists rolled into one. He always has

very insightful advice, and, uh, he is, uh, above all, an extraordinary human being.

So there you have it. Three white guys on a roll.

It's crazy into the dusk. Do you want me to do something about the lights, which will be good for a time?

Yes, yes. I think maybe we'd better have the lights. I wanted to ask for a consensus on this question,

but it's impossible in the dark. It's just ten.

Someone's getting to sleep. It's just ten.

Whoa!

No, that's fine.

That's good.

No, the other is better.

All right. There are people in the room.

It was beginning to sound like an induction.

We've never done that before, and we'll never do it again.

Hear, hear.

But I'm glad we did it once. It's very interesting, to us at least.

You might be curious to know what we're going to do next, et cetera, et cetera.

And we have a scheduled plan for tomorrow. I think it's best if I share it with you.

We want to meet three times tomorrow for sessions.

We've had, as we said, private trialogues over a decade.

We've had public trialogues twice before. This will be the third.

And so, basically, we are following the plan of the other two, because they were more or less successful.

But, on the other hand, they were in California. So, it's not an entirely inappropriate plan.

However, we can start with this.

Yes, science.

And the focus of this book is on areas of research which have been either completely

or largely neglected, because they simply don't fit in to the present view of the world.

And because they've been so neglected by orthodox institutional science,

there are quite simple experiments to open up these fields that could be done,

in many cases for budgets of less than ten pounds.

And, as soon as one realizes that important research can be cheap, then the terrible Stalinist

restrictions that institutional science has, you can't do it unless you've got approval,

peer reviews, grants, committees, and so on. Terrible stranglehold of orthodoxy.

But if you can do things cheaply, you're completely free, because the only control they have is through

money, giving out funds. And if you don't need the funds, you can do what you like.

And science in the past grew out of a fertile field of amateur research, even as eminent a

scientist as Charles Darwin. Never had a government grant or an academic post. He lived as a private

man, a gentleman, in his own house, and did most of his research in the garden with his son Francis.

Well, he also kept pigeons. Now, homing pigeons are kept by 200,000 people in Britain. It's largely

a working class sport. It doesn't cost much. It does cost more than ten pounds. This experiment would

cost about 350 pounds, the one I'm going to talk about. But this is one of the experiments in the book.

It's the one with which the book opens, or almost opens. And the reason I wanted to talk about it today

is because I haven't yet discussed this with Ralph and Terence. And the present state of play,

which I'm going to summarize now, shows that there have been investigations of homing pigeons.

It's one of the few areas where research has been done. And it's led to the conclusion that we really

do not know. We haven't a clue how they do it. And in this state of the utterly unknown,

I don't know how they do it either. So I was hoping that by talking about it with Ralph and Terence,

it might become clearer, or possibly even more obscure. At any rate, it's something that

I really want to discuss with them. And this is the opportunity to do it. And I hope you'll all find

this of interest, too, because the situation we're in is one of an acknowledged fact. Pigeons can home

from huge distances. You can take a pigeon, a homing pigeon, 700 miles from its loft and release it,

and it'll be home that evening if it's a fast-flying bird. Pigeon racing enthusiasts do this regularly.

Every Saturday, today for example, in the spring and the summer, people are racing pigeons. Sometimes

pigeon racing clubs have been released in northern Spain. Sometimes they take them to the north of

Scotland. Sometimes they're released in other parts of the continent. And they're taken away,

they're taken in baskets on trains or on lorries. They're released. The baskets are opened. The

pigeons circle around, and they fly straight home. And then the people whose pigeons come back

fastest, they have a little time clock, and there's a thing on the leg of the pigeon they stamp.

Then they calculate the exact distance to that owner's loft and work out the speed. The ones

that come first win the prize. It's a very competitive sport. They win cups, there are cash prizes,

good racing birds can sell for as much as five thousand pounds for breeding. Ordinary ones cost about five

pounds. Anyway, here's a phenomenon. Everyone agrees they can do it. And moreover, it's part of

a much wider phenomenon. Dogs and cats can home if you live a long way away from home. Even cows can

home. Thousands of other species of birds and animals can home. It's very widespread. It's just the

pigeons that pigeons are the best known example. Now, how do they do it? Well, Charles Darwin was one of

the first to put forward a theory. He said, well, maybe they do it by remembering all the twists and

turns of the outward journey. This theory was tested. And to test it, people anesthetized pigeons,

put them in rotating drums, and drove them in vans, sealed, closed vans, by very devious routes,

to the point of release. And when the pigeons came round from the anesthetic and overcame the ill

effects of this treatment on the way out, when they were released, they circled around and flew

straight home. So nobody any longer believes that's possible. They can't remember the twists and turns

of the upward journey. This experiment has been done many times, sometimes with slow rotating drums,

sometimes with drums rotating so fast that the poor birds are centrifuged against the edges of the

drum. And despite these appalling maltreatments, the pigeons go straight home. So that's theory

number one. That's not how they do it. Second theory, that they do it by smell,

that they sniff the air and sniff their home. This, of course, smell is usually what people propose

when animals show uncanny powers that can't be explained. They usually say, well, it must be an

extraordinarily good sense of smell. Well, this has been tested too. First of all, it's not very

plausible. If you release a bird in Spain and it flies to England and the home is downwind from the

point where you release it rather than upwind. In other words, it's flying with the wind. There's no way

smells could blow from its loft in England to Spain against the wind. So this theory is inherently

implausible. Nevertheless, because everything else has failed, it's believed impassionately by some

researchers in the field, particularly the Italians. So anyway, this has been tested too. People have

blocked up their nostrils with sealing wax. They still get home. They've severed their olfactory nerves,

poor birds. They still get home. And they've anesthetized their nasal mucosa with xylocaine or

other local anesthetics. And they still set off straight away in the home direction and get home.

So it's not smell. Next theory, they do it by the sun, somehow calculating the latitude and longitude

from the sun's position. Well, pigeons can home on cloudy days. And they can also be trained to home at night.

So they don't need to see the sun or even the stars. But if they can see the sun, then they use the sun as

a kind of rough compass, more or less as we would, if you want to keep your bearings, keep the sun on your

right, that kind of thing. And if you shift their time sense by raising them so they're shifted by six

hours, they think it's six hours early. You switch on lights early in the morning. You cover their cage

or loft later at six hours early in the sunset. You can make them think the time's been shifted by six

hours. When you release them on a sunny day, they set off 90 degrees in the wrong direction. So they use

the sun as a compass. But after a mile or two, they realize they're going the wrong way. They change

course and go home. Landmarks are inherently unfeasible because if you release the birds

hundreds of miles from anywhere they've been before, landmarks couldn't possibly explain it. Although

they undoubtedly use landmarks on their way when they're close to their home, just the final bit.

Anyway, this theory also has been tested to destruction. And this was tested by equipping

the pigeons with frosted glass contact lenses, which meant they couldn't see anything at all,

and or any of the vaguest blur of shapes when they were very close. And pigeons with frosted glass

contact lenses can't fly very normally. They take off and the whole bird points upwards. They're not

under ideal conditions for flying. But nevertheless, such birds can be released up to a hundred miles

away or more. And some of them get picked off by sparrowhawks who immediately see that they're

flying in a peculiar way. But others can get within two or three hundred yards of the loft. They crash into

trees or telegraph posts or flop down on the ground within a hundred yards of the loft in some cases.

They need to see for the last hundred yards. But it's incredible that they can actually get

so close. Sometimes they overfly the loft and then within a mile or two realize they've gone too far,

turned around and come back. So it's not landmarks. And that leaves only magnetism.

And this again is something, until the seventies, most scientists were very reluctant to consider,

because previously magnetism as an animal sense has been associated with animal magnetism, mesmerism,

and a whole range of fringe subjects they didn't want to mess with. Plus the fact it seems so unlikely

that pigeons could detect a field as weak as the earth's magnetic field. Well, it's been shown that

some migratory birds can detect the earth's magnetic field. They can tell where north and south are

from the magnetic field. They do seem to have a kind of inherent compass. But magnetism can't explain how

they get home. Because even if they could measure the dip of the compass, i.e. the angle towards dips down,

at the north pole it points straight down at the equator, it's parallel. If they could measure the dip,

they could tell how far north or south they've been taken. But if you took pigeons due east or west,

the dip would be exactly the same as at home. It wouldn't give them any information on whether they

were east, west or west. And pigeons can home equally well from all compass points. So even in principle,

the magnet won't explain it. They do seem to have a kind of vague magnetic compass sense. But this

wouldn't explain homing. If you had a magnetic compass in your pocket and you were parachuted into

a strange place and said, all right, get home, here's a compass, you wouldn't be able to do it

because you'd know where north and south were, but you wouldn't know where home was. A compass alone

can't get you home. Anyway, to disrupt the magnetic sense, pigeons have been treated experimentally

in two ways. Firstly, they've had magnets strapped to them which would, as they flap their wings,

these moving magnets would totally overwhelm the magnetic sense. And secondly, they've been

degaussed by being put in extremely strong magnetic fields that would demagnetize any magnetically

sensitive parts within them. Well, these demagnetized pigeons and pigeons with magnets strapped to them

to confuse their magnetic sense or with magnetic coils over their heads still get home particularly

all right. Well, that's the current state of play. Every hypothesis has been tested to destruction.

They've all failed. And the remaining ones, the only one that you occasionally hear is, well,

maybe they hear their home from hundreds of miles away because of extremely sensitive hearing.

Even that one won't work because pigeons that can't hear can still get home. So everything has been tried.

Everything within the last 10 years has finally, the most rigorous tests have been done in the last 10 years.

All these theories have failed. Nobody has a clue how they do it. And pigeon homing is the tip of the

iceberg of a vast range of unexplained biological phenomena which include the migration of swallows,

how they come back to Hazelwood every year having flown to southern Africa in the winter,

the migration of cuckoos, the migration of salmon, eels, and so on. These are usually explained in terms of smell as the fish runs,

but which only works really within a few miles of the home river. It doesn't explain how they can get

thousands of miles through the oceans to the right place. So there's a huge number of phenomena to do with

migratory and homing senses in animals which are unexplained. And human beings probably have similar powers too.

Not very well developed in modern urban people. Although even some urban people have quite a good sense of

direction. But extremely well developed in nomadic people like Australian Aborigines, South African

Bushmen, and also the Polynesian Navigators. Now they probably use ordinary senses as well, but this is a

whole range of unsolved problems which is hardly touched by science, which leads to the idea that animals and probably we too

may have senses or powers undreamt of within existing science. So that's the present state of play and the experiment

that I'm proposing is very simple. I can outline it briefly. I think that the evidence suggests there must

be some unknown sense force or power connecting the pigeons to their home. Now what it is I don't know.

My image of it is of a kind of invisible elastic band, taken away, stretched and may tend to be pulled back.

It gives them a kind of directional sense. I'm not bothering at the moment about the possible physical

basis of this, whether it's part of existing physics, whether it's an extension of non-locality

and quantum physics, whether it requires a new field. That question is open. But with this simple

model of an invisible connection, the experiment I'm proposing is the converse of those done so far.

If the pigeon's connected to its home, then the usual experiments involve taking the pigeon from the

home and it comes back. My experiment involves taking the home from the pigeons. This involves the use of

a mobile pigeon loft, which is essentially a simple pigeon shed mounted on a farm trailer on wheels

that can be moved around. And I've actually done this experiment, first in Ireland and secondly in

Suffolk. So far I haven't been able to carry it past the first phase, the training phase. I found,

however, it's possible to train pigeons to home to a mobile loft. They don't expect their home to move

any more than we do. And the first time you take them out of it, you move their home just a hundred

yards the first time. And when you release them, they can see perfectly well that it's not where it

was before. But they go on flying around the place where it was before. It takes them hours before

they go into the loft in its new position. That's how we'd behave if we went home after being here at

Hazelwood and found our home a hundred yards down the street. Most of us wouldn't just go straight in

and settle down to it in our letters and so on. We'd probably go round and round in circles around

the place where it was before and look awfully puzzled. Well, that's what pigeons do. But if you

keep doing this after three or four times, they just get . . . .

used to it. They realize they're sort of nomads or gypsies now. And they go straight in. They'll

find the home up to two or three miles away within ten minutes and go straight in. You

can do this. And in the First World War, the Belgian, German and British military pigeon

corps had mobile lofts. The British had 200 mobile lofts and converted London buses by

the end of the First World War. And there is still a mobile pigeon loft research project

going on in Europe. The Swiss Army is the last army in Europe to have a home in pigeons.

And the head of the officer commanding pigeons, Dr. Hans-Peter Lipp, I'm now in correspondence

with. He's at the University of Zurich. And he's carrying out a fascinating research program

on military uses of mobile lofts in Switzerland at the moment. He and I are exchanging notes

on the subject. That's the only other research project going on of this kind. His objectives

are quite different, though. They're to find ways of carrying messages more effectively.

Anyway, the key experiment is you move the mobile loft 50 miles, let's say, after you've

trained the boat and see if they can find it. If you move it downwind from the point of release

so they couldn't smell it. And if the pigeons can find it quite quickly, fly straight there,

then this would suggest there's an invisible connection between them and their home.

The next question is, is it between the loft itself for them and the loft itself or the

other pigeons? You leave some of their nearest and dearest in the loft. And you can do further

experiments then by taking the nearest and dearest somewhere else and seeing whether they find

the physical structure of the loft. Anyway, this research is relatively cheap. I mean,

£500 would cover the entire project. It's well within the capacity of the five million

pigeon panseers worldwide who keep pigeons and are well experienced in dealing with them.

How the experiment will turn out, I don't know. But here is a profound mystery, the tip of the iceberg

of a whole series of biological mysteries, which have been more or less neglected. And if there is

a new power, force or sense involved, what might it imply? What might it tell us? And where would we

go from there? And that's the question I wanted to raise with Ralph and Terence.

Well, thanks for the question. Maybe I could ask you for just a couple of little details first.

When they race the pigeons and then the winner is the pigeon returning to the home loft first.

Yes. But these home lofts are all in different cities, different streets and so on. So how does it work?

The wife of the pigeon racer is at home and when the mate comes then pulls out the cellular telephone

and calls headquarters. No, the pigeon, the racing pigeon has a little thing on its leg, a rear for the race,

with its number and the race number. They all have those when they're released. When it gets into

the loft, it actually enters the loft. The pigeon fancier is waiting there. He captures the bird,

takes this ring off its leg. He has a sealed time clock issued by the local racing pigeon federation.

He stamps this thing with the time it's come home. And then they all send in these tags with the

time and stamped by these sealed clocks. And they then calculate from the point of release.

Say it's wick in Scotland. They then calculate the distance, straight line distance to each of these

houses, divide the distance by the time, and they get the average speed.

So there's no account for difficulties and anomalous obstacles encountered along the way?

No. Like sparrowhawks. No, no. Well, if they're killed by a sparrowhawk, they don't win the race.

One more question about the nearest and dearest. Now, the home loft that they're racing to,

which is still at home, that has family members in it or not? Yes.

There's a whole bunch of pigeons in the loft and only one of them or two of them are racing.

There's two ways that several racing systems used. They have to have a motive to get home. If you race

them in the winter, they don't home very well. But if you race them, they usually race them in the

spring and summer, either when they've got eggs and young, so they have an incentive to get back to

their family. Or there's another system called the jealousy system, widely practiced, where pigeons

are monogamous. They form pairs, at least for the year. And it's a kind of limited monogamy,

but at least for that year. So they wait until they've paired up. Then they show, if, say,

they're racing the cockbird, they then hold the cockbird and put another cockbird with its mate,

so that the two start billing. Disgusting.

And then they take it in its basket to the north of Scotland and release it. And it gets home real fun.

This competitive spirit will stop at nothing. And does the pigeon home to an empty lot? I mean,

it requires it to be populated with nearest and dearness. I'm thinking of Bell's theorem.

I don't know. No pigeon racer would normally home to an empty lot. I've home it.

What about Dr. Hans-Peter Lipp of the Swiss Army?

Yes, he's done it to an empty lot. And I've done it to an empty lot. But not over long distances.

Well, I...

Yes.

Have you ever seen it yet been down over all the distances?

To empty lofts? I don't know. I've only done it over short distances.

But probably they could... But the thing is, they're not very...

But the... Certainly the practical experience... Pigeon racers have been doing this for a hundred years.

It's been a competitive sport. They've found a long experience. The way to run races is to have this

easy to understand personal motivation, as it were.

The stronger the motivation, the...

Stronger the motivation.

...the tighter the elastic band.

Yes.

Now I'm getting the elastic band theory down. Well...

All right. I'm... I'm ready to...

risk an answer to the question...

Terence is getting ready to bite.

So first of all, I think we could wish for a...

a homing pigeon or a monarch butterfly or something that... that spoke.

Then we could ask them the question you're posing, and... and they'd answer.

But actually, I wouldn't trust the answer. Because this homing pigeon might also have

a theory that, like mine, is much too elaborate and unnecessary, when actually there's some

simpler explanation, but they don't know it. For example, the Polynesian navigators.

If you ask them how they do it. In fact, there was... there was an English navigator who...

who went to the South Pacific and apprenticed himself to a native navigator.

You know, they go over a hundred miles to the nearest island and... and... and get it dead on...

without compass and... on cloudy days and so on. So they have... they have a theory,

but I don't believe it. So we'll just have to make up our own.

So this is... this is my fantasy that... well, first of all,

I'm accepting the premise that ordinary fields don't do. So it's a kind of an ESP.

And then we want to learn from doing experiments like you proposed on the phenomenon to get an

idea of what it is or how it works. And so this is just a... a fantasy about that.

Yes. Well, I don't know. I'll try talking a little louder and see if that helps.

So I'm thinking of bats now, which have been studied in a room just like this one with wires,

just like that. And in the daytime, of course, the bat will fly around missing the wires and not flying

into the wall using vision primarily, we suppose. And then at night, they do the same thing without

vision because of sonar. So in this case, there is another field explanation and it's well established

that it's sonar. So I suppose, uh, based on bats that the, uh, the brain and the mind are able to

image the results of sonar experiments in a kind of image, which is the same kind of image that the

eyes form. In other words, that instead of hearing, oh, there's a sound over there and trying to

compute that's an echo and so on, that bat sees the room with its ears in exactly the same

representation, the three-dimensional visual representation that's dynamic, that it can fly

through its own sonar receptions and that the representations are the same. Then if somebody

suddenly turned the lights on, the bat would not hesitate and fall to the ground because it has to

switch from system A to system B, that the visual representation of the room would exactly overlay

precisely the same image as the sonar image of the room. Similarly, dolphins, they have this

melon. It's called a huge sensory organ and receives, uh, sonar waves and they form a visual type. This is

just a speculation. And, uh, in both in the case of bats and dolphins, the visual representation is

three-dimensional more than ours, which gives them in a way a kind of a higher IQ. Then, um, that's

a way of seeing. In other words, for bats and dolphins, in the case of dolphins and whales, they can see

almost the entire planet as a three-dimensional object with its curvature and, and so on.

So if there were a sixth sense that homing pigeons and monarch butterflies have, and maybe we do

two to a degree, then I would suppose that, uh, that it works like that. So after the

pigeon is rotated, doped, transported 4,000 miles and released, then with its sixth sense,

it's seeing a very detailed three-dimensional roadmap of the entire planet essentially,

which is there in this field somehow, just as we consult the roadmap. First of all, it has to orient

the roadmap, the holographic, three-dimensional images of its world, where the visual world, when it

looks after it's like sort of rotate things around and get them aligned. And after that first step,

it can then fly in the map. And then things like smells, which are smells, the sun, the magnetic field,

these things are factors, and they would be kind of labeled on the map by the road association. And

so this still doesn't explain how to get home, though, because you have to know where home is

marked. Like how many times have you parked your car in the three-level structure and then you come

out of the department store after too much shopping, you can't remember where the car is, but you know

the map of the three-dimensional garage. It has three floors, they're square, they're labeled,

there's north, south, east, and west, and you can navigate anywhere to a known position in the garage.

However, the position of your own home is unknown. Therefore, you don't know how to find the car.

So given the sixth sense with a complete roadmap of the world as a three-dimensional object containing

smells, containing trees, containing magnetic fields, containing the sun in the motion of the zodiac and the

celestial, the polar constellations, and so on, there still, there must be some kind of

beacon where the home is supposed to be. So even in the sixth field, the sixth sense theory,

that's still a mystery. Now we've got to the point where you could speak to the pigeon and ask,

how is home represented on this map? And the pull of a rubber band is one idea, but I have a feeling that

if there is an obstacle, a serious obstacle between the pigeon and the loft, then it will find a way

around. It does. It does. See, so it's better to have a map than a rubber band. I think the rubber band

theory is too simple. Also, the rubber band, well, considering jealousy and so on, I don't know, but

the rubber band, the longer it's pulled, the tighter it is. And that's the opposite of most fields that we

know, where the farther you get away from home, the weaker is the pull. So I would think that it more or less

appears as a beacon, that part of this field. And the question would be, how is the physical information of a location,

especially a recently moved location, inserted into the field? That would be sort of a final mystery in this picture?

What do I think? Well, not that.

It seems to me, if I can download this into language, that the problem is not with the pigeon,

the problem is with the experiment that we know from studying quantum mechanics, that things are not

simply located in space and time. This is what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

And it seems I've always felt that what biology is, is a strategy, a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum

mechanical indeterminacy into macro physical systems called living organisms. And that living organisms

somehow work their magic by opening a doorway to the quantum realm through which indeterminacy can come.

And I imagine that all nature

works like this, with the single exception of human beings who have been poisoned by language.

And that language has inculcated in us the very strong illusion of an unknown future. But that, in fact,

the future is not unknowable, if you can decondition yourself from the assumption of spatial concreteness.

Yes. So the answer to how the pigeon finds its way home is that a portion of the pigeon's mind is already home,

and never left home. And that we, gazing at this, assume that pigeons, monarch butterflies,

so forth, are simpler systems than ourselves. But in fact, our assumption of the unknowability of the future

creates a problem here where there is no problem. And that it's only in the domain of language,

and perhaps only in the domain of certain languages, that this can become a problem.

To put it simply, I assume that if you are a pigeon,

we speak here of asking the pigeon, if you had the consciousness of a pigeon, you would not have

a diminutive form of human consciousness. You would have a consciousness that we can obviously,

based on this discussion, barely conceive of. Because the consciousness of the pigeon

is a continual awareness extending from egg to death. And the particular moment in space and time

in which an English-speaking person confronts a pigeon is, for the pigeon, not noticeably distinct

from all the other serial moments of its life. So the problem is in our, in the way the question is asked,

and in the way human beings interpret the data that is deployed in front of them. After all,

in the animal world, the future is always rather like the past, because novelty is rather suppressed in the animal world. Most things that happen have happened before and will happen again.

So my expectation would simply be that what we're, what we're seeing when we confront these kinds of edge phenomenon in biology is the beginning of a set of phenomena, which when correctly interpreted, will bring the idea of quantum mechanical biology out of the realm of charge transfer and intercellular and subcellular activity.

And into the domain of the whole organism. I'm not sure this is the solution, but it does cause the problem to disappear.

Exactly. It's not the solution, but it causes the question to go away. I wish I could say that Rupert and I had got together last night and try to predict what you would say, then I would have bet on that. But still, you exceeded my worst expectations.

Are you saying, are you saying, have I got this right, that the entire life history of the pigeon is more or less determined at the outset, including the trip away from the loft and the trip back? So, as a matter of fact...

It never went anywhere.

Yes.

It's only when you have a three-dimensional grid imposed by language laid over this, that there appears to be a problem. In other words, there is some kind of a totality about it, but we section it and deny it and then we come up with a dilemma.

What about the pigeons that get picked off by sparrowhawks on the way home?

Really?

That was predetermined as well.

They doubtless saw that as well.

They were born under Scorpio. What can you say?

Well, I mean, I offer, it's not entirely facetious. The real question I'm raising is, to what degree does language create the assumption of an unknown future?

To what degree does it somehow dampen a sense of the future that I imagine is very highly evolved in the absence of language?

I still can't grasp it. Do you mean that when the pigeon's released, part of its mind is still at home, its return home is in the future, and in some sense that helps it to get home?

Yes, you and I have talked about this before. You've always said the morphogenetic fields drive push from behind.

No, I've always said they pull from in front.

Ah, well, so then, yes, so they're attractors. Well, so this is partly that, and partly that the consciousness of the organism is distributed in time,

in a way that makes it capable of doing miracles from our point of view, but from its own point of view, there's nothing unusual going on here at all.

Well, you wouldn't be at all surprised, then, if, as a matter of fact, the race was won by the clever pigeon that actually vanished at the point of release,

and simultaneously appeared back in the law.

Well, if you're suggesting some kind of virtual tunneling as an amplified quantum mechanical effect,

perhaps we have the solution to spontaneous combustion here, well in hand, or something like that.

But I still think it's different whether the future is totally determined or if the consciousness of the future includes several alternatives.

And in case it contains several alternatives, then sooner or later the pigeon will be presented by a fork in the road and have to decide which way to go.

Furthermore, the pigeon, if it had control of all physical levels, would not have to fly.

But here we see poor guy is lumbering along, gets tired and stops for food, and so on.

We imagine this is at least the fundamental assumption for our discussion that pigeon flight is subject to our own concept of the world,

including the laws of physics and so on, much as we feel they should be extended and want to extend them by studying pigeons and doing these experiments.

The idea is to somehow modify our view of the world by engulfing the pigeon view of the world for our greater benefit.

So I think there is still missing here some kind of mechanism for the pigeon to follow this line,

this stretched rubber band of its own consciousness that occupies an extended region of space and time to follow it

so that its ordinary physical body ends up back where its consciousness is.

How does it do it?

Well, an analogy would be when you run a cartoon or a film backwards, there is a spectacle of wild confusion,

but miraculously everything manages to end up in the right place.

So what we have, it isn't that there really aren't choices.

For a pigeon, when it comes into awareness, it comes into all the awareness it will ever have.

It's like getting your memories at the moment of birth, your deathbed memories handed to you at the moment of birth.

So then essentially, for the pigeon, it's a kind of play.

It knows what's going to happen.

It doesn't even know that it knows what's going to happen because that's the nature of its perception,

a complete spectrum of understanding of its entire life.

And then it goes through it and it unfolds as anticipated, although the pigeon doesn't have the concept anticipated.

We, looking at it, have that concept.

And we alone, I think, are tormented by the anxiety of the unknowable future.

And it's an artifact I maintain of culture and language.

And so it has given us, and we impute it to the rest of nature.

But in fact, things like monarch butterflies, pigeon homing, and some of these other phenomena,

are clues to us that imputing our consciousness into nature creates problems like the one we're discussing here.

And I don't know exactly why you resist this because I think it's simply a more elegant statement of the rubber band theory.

Well, that means that except for our ignorance caused by the power of language,

that we would have the consciousness of a pigeon and therefore see our entire lifetime.

So, according to this view, the baby pigeon check upon pecking out of the shell is like waking from a dream,

looking around and realizing that, oh damn, I'm the one that's going to have to race three years from now

and they're going to put this other jerk in there with my mate.

Well, but you see, you use language to portray the state of mind of the pigeon.

That immediately collapses its four-dimensional vector into three dimensions,

and then it becomes no longer a pigeon, but a person talking like a pigeon.

Is the pigeon then aware or unaware of its entire history from birth to death?

It's aware, but it's not aware that it's a history.

It's just one timeless moment.

One timeless moment.

We could go further with this and say this explains our own curious relationship to the prophetic and the anticipated.

Instead of like the pigeon having a 95% clear view of the full spectrum of its existence,

by opting into language, we have perhaps a 5% view of the future.

So we're tormented by Messiah's prophecies.

We lean toward astrology and computer modeling.

And all of these advanced tools then give us a very weak and wavering math of the future,

which we nevertheless pay great credence to and worry a great deal about.

I'm suggesting that theoretically, if we could step away from language,

and perhaps this is what Zen anchorites and people like that do,

that isn't this what they teach?

That you fall into a timeless realm where there is no threat,

threat and all things are seen with a kind of great leveling and anxiety leaves the circuit.

So I'm suggesting, you know, one more version of the fall,

that from the fourth dimensional world of nature complete in time,

we fell into the limited world of language and an unclear future and hence great anxiety about that

and hence conundrums like, how do the pigeons find their way home?

Well, this suggests that we should stop talking and writing books and just hum.

I've always felt that.

Rather like a pigeon, I think.

Does this imply, I mean, is this, as I suspect, a polite way of saying that Rupert's current book

and the homing pigeon experiment is a total waste of time

and even if it only costs ten pounds, it's a shame?

Well, that's a wider issue, but you know very well that I think experiment,

as currently understood, is futile because all experiments,

including I assume all the experiments in Rupert's book,

make the assumption that time is invariant and I don't believe that time is invariant.

So we're now going to, I mean, I didn't intend to open this up as a general frontal attack

on the epistemic methods of modern science, but in fact,

the idea that time is invariant is entirely contradicted by our own experience

and it's merely an assumption science makes in order to do its business.

I believe that we have a case here of multiple personality in action

and now I'm going to undertake to prove it.

So it's supposed that Rupert had in his book an eighth chapter,

an experiment with homeopathic medicine, and this experiment was done

and the outcome of it was that flower power was discovered,

which absolutely and instantly cures hay fever.

then you would be interested in the result of the experiment or not?

Sure.

I rest my case.

Well, as a practical matter,

I don't think we should confuse our ideologies with our sinuses.

No, you see, I would like to redefine science.

Science has the study of those phenomena so crude that the time in which they are embedded is without consequence.

You've really got to love Terence McKenna, don't you?

He can think those great lofty thoughts and then when it suits him, he can say something like,

As a practical matter, I don't think we should confuse our ideologies with our sinuses.

Sometimes when I listen to Terence, I think he's actually reciting from Alice in Wonderland, the way he can whiplash my mind with those sudden idea shifts.

And I guess I probably should have warned you that Rupert was going to go on what I thought was an insufferably long riff about all of the ways scientists have tried to uncover how homing pigeons find their way home.

But after thinking about it, I now understand why he took so much time on that topic.

And he just said, hey, we've done every kind of experiment we can think of and we still don't know how they do it.

Well, if that was all he had to say about it, I doubt if it would have finally struck me that, hey, what he's talking about here is a scientific principle, an important one that we still don't have a clue about.

And that, my friends, is really big news when you think about it that way.

In a way, it's like we're still living in a world that doesn't understand something as fundamental as gravity or electromagnetism.

My guess is that we still haven't even come close to the most basic understanding about this universe.

Maybe we'll learn more about it by listening to the rest of the Hazelhurst Trilogues.

And that's my plan.

In fact, if all goes well, I'll have the next installment of these Trilogues out by the end of this coming weekend.

And after I get all three of these out, three remaining tapes, then we'll get back to the Plilogues that were recorded at Burning Man this year.

And before I go, I want to thank our fellow Saloners who have searched out and then forwarded information that may be of help to Sasha Shulgin in his battle with dry macular degeneration.

All of your suggestions and comments have been passed along to the Shulgins now.

And Ann asked me to thank all of you for your good wishes and your help.

Like me, they're still unpacking from their trip to Burning Man.

But they sound like they weathered all the storms on the Playa quite well and they're in really good spirits.

So that's about it for today.

But I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 2.5 License.

And if you have any questions about that, just click on the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which may be found at psychedelicsalon.org.

And if you have any questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions about these podcasts, well, just send them to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.

And Jacques Cordell and Wells, sometimes known as Chateau Hayouk, thanks again for letting me use your music here in the Salon.

Also, a big thank you goes out to Ralph Abraham for letting us play his trilogue tapes here in the Salon.

And to Bruce Dahmer, who not only made the arrangements with Ralph, but who also stayed up for several days and nights digitizing the box of old cassette tapes Ralph had loaned us.

And thank you for joining us here in the Salon again today.

I hope to see you back here again real soon.

For now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

Be well, my friends.

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

This is Lorenzo, and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

As I mentioned in my previous podcast, I'm going to try and keep my own chatter to a minimum for a few podcasts now while I get back in the groove again.

And so I'm going to continue playing the recordings of the Hazelwood trilogues that I began a couple of days ago.

Basically, I've left this conversation unedited.

However, there were several sections where people in the audience made long statements,

but the microphones were so far away from them that I couldn't make out what they were saying,

even by enhancing those sections of the audio.

So I did cut out a few parts of this section of the trilogue.

So now we'll pick up where the last podcast left off,

with Terrence McKenna on a riff about redefining what he means by science.

And then they will finish their discussion of the unknown force field,

or whatever it is that homing pigeons use to find their way home.

And at about the halfway point, which will be the beginning of Side B of this tape,

Terrence McKenna introduces a new topic, time.

So now let's join Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake at Hazelwood House in England,

sometime in 1993, as they conduct their first trilogue held outside of California.

Redefined science as the study of those phenomena so crude that the time in which they are embedded

is without consequence.

And I suppose all bearings rolling down slopes and things like this fall into that category.

But the things which interest us, love affairs, the fall of empires,

the formation of political movements,

these things always happen in different ways.

There is no theory for much of what happens in the human world.

And I maintain it's because in the human world,

the invariance of time forces itself upon us.

And so we create categories of human knowledge outside science,

like psychology, or that's sort of a fence-sitter,

but advertising and political theory and this sort of thing.

So that addresses the invariant time or the, yes,

the variable time that we experience.

And then we hypothesize a theoretical kind of time that is invariant.

And that's where we do all this science that has led us

into these incredibly alienating abstractions.

This goes back to Newton.

Newton said time is pure duration.

He visualized time as an absolutely featureless surface.

Well, now notice, Ralph,

Aristotle's effort to describe nature with perfect mathematical solids

has been abandoned long ago

because nowhere do we meet perfect mathematical forms in nature.

The only perfect mathematical form that has been retained in modern scientific theory

is the utterly unsupported belief that time,

no matter at what scale you magnify,

will be found to be utterly featureless.

There is absolutely no reason to think this

and considerable evidence to the contrary.

The problem is if we were to ever admit that time is a variable medium,

a thousand years of scientific experiment would be swept away

and we would be back to Zed.

So it's just simply a house of cards

and better left where it stands, I think.

But the fact of the matter is there is no reason to believe

that time is invariant.

And experience argues the contrary.

No, but...

The thing is, the invariability...

I mean, this seems to go a little bit beyond the problem of pigeon-hanging.

Well, it addresses the problem of experiment as a notion.

But I don't think it actually touches it, you see,

because I think what you've been saying,

if we take it down to the level of the pigeons again,

it does, as you yourself say,

it would turn out to be an elaborate version of the rubber band theory,

the rubber filigree, or something like that.

Anyway, the rubber band theory would say

that they'd be drawn back to the loft.

And the experiment of moving the loft

and seeing if they can find the moved loft,

let's say they can do that, there's an experiment.

It would show something that goes beyond anything

contemporary science would expect.

It might or might not fit with your all-time theory.

It does fit.

But nevertheless, here we have an experiment,

crude though it is,

which would show that the existing scientific models are inadequate.

We need something that goes beyond them.

We need something that shows how the pigeon can be linked to the home.

The rubber band theory does involve

a kind of attraction to the home,

and in that sense involves a pull in time.

So it does raise all these questions, perhaps.

Well, do you have a theory about how this works?

I mean, I don't see how morphogenetic fields

are particularly helpful here,

unless we, or if they are helpful,

then in the boil down, it's the same thing I'm saying.

Yes, I think the morphogen,

if there's a field that includes both the pigeon and its loft,

so here's the pigeon, here's its loft,

normally they're together, it's normally the home,

you separate them,

you can either do it by moving the loft,

or you can do it by moving the pigeon,

but either way they're separated,

they're part of a single system,

because the pigeon's world includes its loft,

its home, its mates, and all the rest of it.

You move them,

they're now separated parts of a single system,

they're linked by a field,

and the pigeon is attracted within this field,

back towards the home,

which functions as the attractor.

This is another,

this is where we and Ralph have this different view of attractors.

In dynamics,

things are drawn towards attractors,

and if the loft is an attractor,

within the field,

then the pigeon is, as it were, pulled,

that will feel,

it doesn't need an AA road map of the whole of Britain,

that's irrelevant,

it just feels a pull in a particular direction.

And so the trouble with the map theory,

you see, is it has all this information,

the whole of Britain,

you know, star rising,

all these kind of features of this road map,

it doesn't need that,

you don't need that,

you only need to,

you're trying to work out

where you're going to go

by some method of rationing.

Oh, well, this is the angel theory,

that when I come to the fork in the road,

a guardian angel appears from behind a tree

and tells me which way to go.

Roughly speaking, yes.

Well, you just feel a pull

in a particular direction,

you just feel,

you don't even think about it,

you just feel that's the way to go,

and you're drawn that way.

I think that's how the pigeon does it,

subjectively.

I don't think it necessarily needs

to see the whole of its future

from ape to grave.

I think it feels a pull

towards where its home is

by this kind of invisible rubber band,

which is actually,

if you like,

a gradient within the field

towards an attractor,

which is its home.

I mean, that's how you could model it mathematically.

Yes.

But you wouldn't need to bring in

the whole of the rest of Britain

and a road map.

Now, if you did need a road map

for the whole of the rest of Britain

and all the rest of the world,

then we'd have the question,

how would it get it?

Well, I've got a theory

how it could get it,

but I think it might tune in

to the collective memory

of all the other pigeons

that have ever gone

and homing races.

All of them see the ground

they're flying over.

If a pigeon could access

the collective pigeon psyche

or take it further,

even the collective memory

of other species,

not just pigeons,

if all birds could link up

to what all other birds have seen,

then they would indeed

have a global map of the world.

They could gain access to it.

But I think that's possibly

going further than we need

for this rather limited case.

It may be more relevant

in the case of migrations,

where you have birds migrating

over thousands of miles

in the case of cuckoos,

young cuckoos,

migrating to South Africa

independent of their parents

that leave in July from England.

The young cuckoos leave in August.

They've never met their parents

because they're cuckoos.

And their parents, in any case,

push off before the young

ones are ready to fly.

They go all that way.

And I think that in that case,

they must be tuning in

at least to a kind of

collective cuckoo memory

that includes features

of the landscape

over which they fly.

But the rubber band theory

wouldn't necessitate even that.

You see, it would necessitate

maybe some degree

of collective memory,

but it would essentially

have this kind of pull,

directional pull.

Well, there still seems to me

some kind of problem,

either a mathematical

or cognitive problem.

When the loft is moved,

then the dynamical system,

which extends essentially

over the whole of the planet,

wherever this pigeon may be released,

and all the way back,

has to receive the feeling

which direction to go

from the guardian angel

or whatever.

And that directional field

all over the planet

has changed

when the loft was moved.

So the question arises,

how does the attractor,

the loft,

extend its field

and directional instruction

all over the planet?

And I don't think

that the idea

of morphic resonance

helps here

because no other pigeon

has flown

to that particular loft.

No, I'm not talking

about morphic resonance,

I'm talking about

the field itself.

Morphic resonance

is a memory

of how to do it.

If you have a magnet,

say you have a magnet,

a pile of iron findings here,

and you have a magnet

over here,

and you put the iron magnet there,

these iron findings

will be drawn towards it

and you'll see lines

of force moving towards it.

If you then move

the magnet over here,

you don't have to,

there's an immediate

adjustment to the loft.

The loft itself,

yes,

simply functions

as a magnet,

as it were,

in another field

which is not

an electromagnetic field,

but it's sort of

an emotional field.

Yes.

And the loft's

like a magnet,

and so you move the loft

and it's just like

moving a magnet

automatically.

Now the iron fans

or whatever

will go there.

That's basically

the model I suggest.

And the reason

that I can't find my car

in the parking garage

is because

I'm not emotionally

attached to it

and I've never been

in love with it.

I could get

an Italian car.

Well,

it's a thing about

I mean,

in the human realm

it could apply

to finding people.

And Jill does

an experiment,

well,

she doesn't call

this an experiment

in her workshops

where people

form pairs

and they can

first find each other

by humming

with their eyes closed

and fly across

and then after

they've got good

at that

you can then

find your partner

with your eyes closed

so you can't see

just by feeling

where they are

and heading

in that direction.

And now

that's an example

of this possible

magnetic pulling

in the human realm.

I've tried

doing this experiment

with my children

on grounds

that it ought

to be particularly

strong

with children

and it turned out

Merlin was extremely

good at finding me

and then I discovered

he was peeping.

so I'm afraid

this experiment

he couldn't quite

see the value

of totally objective

utterly controlled

scientific study.

So I mean

it may be

you see

that the bonds

between pigeons

and their home

are comparable

to the bonds

between people

and other people

and indeed

they may be

related to the

kind of social

that which

holds societies

together.

When we say

there's a bond

between people

we may mean

something more

than a mere

metaphor.

It may be

that there is

an actual

connection

between them

and so

we have many

examples

from the human realm

someone falls

a child falls

ill

hundreds of miles

away

and their mother

immediately starts

worrying

and rings up

on the telephone.

This may be

another manifestation

of the same

kind of thing.

It may be

part of the

social bonding

I mean

the motive

of the pigeon

to go home

is social

it's not

merely geographical

if it hasn't

got mates

and so on

it doesn't bother

if you try

racing in the

winter

when they've

got no social

motivation

they hang out

wherever they

can

they join into

other people's

lofts and so on

and it may well

be that the pigeon

who spent such

a pleasant

ten days here

at Hazelwood

like most of us

discovered this

is a really nice

place to be

and it didn't

have a sufficiently

strong motivation

to get home

so we may be

looking here

at something

that's essentially

a social bond

but which because

our social

we're never in

exactly the same

place as

somebody else

we can't

two bodies

can't exist

we're always

separated to

some degree

however small

from those

we're bonded

to and often

in the case

of birds that

fly foraging

for food

in the case

of migratory

birds

in the case

of all animals

that have to

go out

bees

that have to

forage out

from their

hives

and then come

back

find the

home group

in the case

of wolves

there are these

cases reported

by naturalists

of packs of

wolves that

go out hunting

a wolf may

be injured

sometimes they're

injured

and then they

stay behind

in a kind of

lair

while the

whole pack

goes hunting

and there's

this book

by W.J.

Long

called

How I Must Talk

about his

tracking of

wolves

through the

in Canada

in the snow

the pack

would go

out hunting

about 20

miles

and went

around

and then killed

an animal

quite silently

no baying

they do it

quietly

and then

from the

tracks

he found

that the

wounded wolf

had taken

the shortest

line from

where it was

to the place

where they

had this

and joined

the rest

of the pack

and got

them in

and the

track

showed

it was

on a straight

line

not followed

the centre

of where they

were

and he

showed

it couldn't

just be

sound

and it

couldn't

be smelling

because

the wind

was blowing

a long way

so

this kind

of social

bond

this kind

of linkage

may be

utterly

fundamental

to the

social

field

in some

sense

and its

extension

over the

geographical

realm

well I'm

sensing a

kind of

convergence

here

where

even

Terence

could find

something

to agree

with

that

there is

a sixth

sense

it is

a field

phenomenon

like

the quantum

field

it's a

social

field

it's

involved

with

the

flocking

of

birds

the

schooling

of

fish

and

with

herds

of

animals

and packs

of

wolves

you had a

question

you started

us off

what would

this

teach us

or what

would that

mean to us

in terms

of our

future

and

it could

be that

humans

are somehow

divorced

from

the

significance

of this

field

so whenever

the guardian

angel speaks

they always

do the

opposite

or something

and

if we

wanted

to

understand

the

population

explosion

the demise

of the

planet

and all

these

wars

and the

manifestation

of hatred

and sources

of evil

and so on

a candidate

for the

disharmony

in the human

species

would be

its

disconnection

with this

field

and

here's

where

Terence

comes in

that

somehow

it's

the

implication

of

language

is

to

submit

to it

is to

lose

your

connection

with

the

field

so

we

all

have

done

experiments

in

not

speaking

for

example

meditation

for

example

dreaming

where

the

antithesis

of

language

has

an

opportunity

to

come

forward

and

to

attempt

to

reconnect

us

to

this

field

a

harmonizing

influence

that

entrains

us

but not

for

long

especially

for

people

like

Americans

who

watch

television

for

seven

hours

a

day

there

is

somehow

not

enough

time

away

from

language

but

notice

that

I

think

that

supports

my

point

that

we

have

lost

connection

with

a

kind

of

fourth

dimensional

perception

that

for

the

rest

of

nature

is

absolutely

a

given

I

think

it's a

given

on the rest

of nature

I mean

I don't

still see

why you

need to

have

a pigeon

knowing

whole

of its

future

well

because

you

have

many

cases

of

this

kind

of

thing

animals

that

are

put

in

the

pound

by

owners

who

are

moving

and

then

the

owners

move

miles

and

the

animal

escapes

from

the

pound

and

it

doesn't

return

to

the

ancestral

home

it

returns

to

the

future

doesn't

have

this

occluded

character

that

it

has

for

us

as

a

result

of

our

acquiescence

in

the

language

behavior

it

seems

to

me

it's

the

most

time

it's

the

space

you

could say

they

know

they're

going to

wind up

at the

new

home

but

still

you've

got

the

problem

how

they

know

which

way

to

go

and

I

don't

see

them

they

see

themselves

at

every

point

in

their

life

not

just

the

high

or

low

points

in

the

minute

in

the

future

so

they

just

go

that

way

in

other

words

they

can

always

see

it

from

where

they

are

it's

always

ahead

of

them

in

the

same

way

that

we

navigate

through

space

I

speculation

and

hypotheses

and

so

forth

and

so

on

but

I

mean

why

should

nature

imprison

itself

within

a

temporal

domain

clearly

for us

it's

an

artifact

of

language

I

mean

we

talk

about

future

tenses

past

tenses

those

aren't

descriptive

of the

future

and the

past

they

create

it

that's

why

I

put

in

the

possible

exception

of

perhaps

there

are

human

languages

where

this

is

not

happening

and

therefore

they

are

much

closer

to

animal

perception

the

mysterious

quote

unquote

mysterious

behavior

of the

Australian

Aborigines

the

Hopi

these

peoples

they

seem

capable

of

things

that

to

us

are

like

magic

but

the

magic

is

all

done

by

knowing

what's

going

to

happen

so

if

they

simply

imbibe

that

animal

understanding

then to

them

it's

trivial

that

seems

to me

the

most

elegant

explanation

and

it

doesn't

require

new

undetected

fields

or

any

of

these

other

somewhat

cobbled

together

mechanisms

just

another

dimension

well

we

know

it's

there

there's

no

debate

about

that

so

here

an

example

again

to carry

that

forward

I've

always

felt

that

the

role

of

shamans

in

Aboriginal

society

especially

the ones

that were

using

psychoactive

plants

that all

the magic

that they

do

suddenly

becomes

not so

mysterious

if you

simply

assume

that

by

perturbing

the

ordinary

brain

states

and

ordinary

language

states

they

then

let in

this

hyper

dimensional

understanding

because look

at what

shamans

do

really

they

predict

weather

that's

classical

that

demands

the

knowledge

of the

future

they

tell

the

tribe

where

the

game

has

gone

also

requiring

a

knowledge

of

the

future

and

they

rarely

lose

a

patient

that

means

they

know

who's

going

to

make

it

and

who

isn't

and

they

refuse

all

cases

perceived

to be

fatal

so

here

are

three

examples

of

shamanic

magic

all

easily

explained

by the

simple

assumption

that

they

can

perceive

to

some

degree

the

future

which

is

occluded

to

ordinary

people

locked

in

brain

states

q

e

d

do

the

pigeons

do

a

ritual

then

to

get

in

touch

with

it

no

animals

are

in

this

place

to

begin

with

you

see

look at

the

shaman

to

push

this

point

in

state

with

ordeals

or

drugs

or

something

like

this

but

the

very

close

association

of

the

shaman

to

the

animal

mind

suggests

that

that's

the

clue

to

entering

this

atemporal

or

4D

perceptual

sphere

and

as

Joe

mentioned

at the

beginning

in the

christian

tradition

the

principle

symbol

of the

holy

spirit

which

is

that

which

gives

inspired

prophecy

shamanic

type

gifts

of

healing

all

the

gifts

of

the

spirit

including

speaking

tongues

prophecy

healing

and

so

forth

discernments

and intuitions

of various

kinds

are symbolized

by the

pigeon

so

there's

some

curious

way

which

the

dove

well

known

at the

biblical

times

for its

homing

powers

the

Egyptians

had a

homing

pigeon

service

in ancient

Egypt

so

the

choice

of the

pigeon

was

not just

plucked out

of nowhere

Noah's Ark

was the first

biblical story

of the pigeon

where the pigeon

is sent off

and comes

back

with the

homes

with an

olive

twig

so

right from

the beginning

the pigeon

is seen

as a

messenger

that can

find out

things

in

distant

places

and come

home

and bring

back

the

information

so

you could

to the

whole

western

tradition

this

shamanic

thing

of becoming

like an

animal

in this

case

somehow

entering

the mind

of a

pigeon

or

somehow

in some

way

assimilating

to the

state

of a

pigeon

is the

basis

of the

gift

of

knowledge

prophecy

and

spiritual

power

it

to

i'd like

to ask

a question

do we

suggest

that if

we

spend

our

language

alive

in our

minds

that we

have

it

i'm

told you

that

going to

a room

and

you

feel

of

no way

and

you

feel

constantly

like

they

essentially yes I mean I think it might take some time but I think as a strategy for expanded

awareness that's how it would present itself experientially trappist monasteries do this

all Aboriginal peoples sequester the young men and women often by themselves for a period of

silence somehow language is a strategy for holding at bay a much more complex world that if we can by any means

remove the language-forming capacity, even...

What is the trouble of it?

The trouble is to complete contradiction with everything you're saying.

You need the language to...

Well, who was it said?

I contradict myself?

I contradict myself.

The obsession with intellectual closure

is inappropriate to talking monkeys

because nowhere is it writ large that talking monkeys

should be able to achieve a complete understanding of reality.

I think part of what we have to do is live with unsolved mysteries

that are, in principle, insoluble.

They're not simply unsolved problems.

They are, in principle, mysterious.

All would agree that the highest understanding resides in silence,

but it's the death of conversation.

Hardly to speak, but weekend workshops!

Sir, if language is a deterrent of pages,

and the principle of the survival of the fittest,

why do you think it developed?

Well, maybe it's a maladaptive trait.

Many maladaptive traits develop.

I'm not willing to say that.

I think it has...

For us, it's a substitute for other forms of cohesion,

like pheromones, which are a kind of language

that knit together insect societies.

Originally, we were possibly fairly unsocial creatures.

In other words, human beings may have paired

and reared their children in secret.

We've created societies of billions of people,

and the linkage is language,

and it's an unsteady linkage, as we can see.

I mean, I don't have an answer for why language evolved.

What can we do with little pack animals, like wolves or horses?

Pack animals are the animals that produce complex signalling systems

to coordinate themselves in space,

with barks and yips and yells.

They coordinate hunting activity and this sort of thing.

It may be that that relatively benign adaptation,

carried further, becomes something else.

What we do, I think, that no other animal does,

is we carry out symbolic activity.

And it's this symbolic activity that has closed us off

from the reality of what lies outside the symbol system.

Can you give an example of that?

Symbolic activity?

Everything we do, I mean, for instance,

to think of a child lying in a crib with an open window,

and a hummingbird comes through the room.

Well, this is like a miracle.

It's all light and iridescence and whirring sound,

and the child is sucked into the presence of a miracle.

And then its nurse or its mother comes into the room and says,

it's a bird, baby, bird.

Suddenly, the miracle is collapsed into a lexeme.

And by the time you are five years old,

the entirety of reality has been very carefully mosaiced over with words.

And to burst through that to whatever reality lies beyond

is the task of a mystic or a shaman.

And it's extraordinarily difficult.

That's what I mean by trading in the world for symbolic signification.

But we think in words.

And I've got children who speak of language,

where they thought of words, of communication, of easement,

because we think in words.

And the words that we are thinking in are,

as you said, communicated to us by our parents,

because of communication, to maintain the mood,

and what would happen,

how would we develop our thinking processes

in alternatives to words?

Well, I question whether we actually think in words

or to what degree we do.

What you notice when you experiment with these shamanic tools,

such as psychoactive plants,

is that as the intoxications deepen,

thought becomes vision.

And one thinks in images.

And I imagine that this is the aboriginal thought style.

And we must have thought in images for a long time

before we downloaded into words.

To the degree that people think in images,

I think they are a different sort of person

than the word-oriented person.

I think thinking in words may be an artifact of writing and print

and may have been most intensified in the last thousand years.

I mean, sensory ratios are incredibly subject to cultural modification.

As an example of what I mean by that,

Saint Augustine, to prove his piety,

they would open a book of scripture in front of him,

and without making a sound,

he would examine it for a few minutes,

and then they would close the book and question him,

and he was able to discuss what was written there on the page.

He was the only man in Europe, in other words,

who could read silently.

And it was thought a miracle.

Well, we all read silently and think nothing of it.

So I think the mind is very malleable

and the imprint of culture very deep.

You know, McLuhan suggested that the concept of the citizen,

the concept of the industrial assembly line,

were both artifacts of print

and would have been incomprehensible in a manuscript culture.

This is an area where we are very naive

of how our languages affect our view of the world.

We are part of a continuum in nature

that animals know us from different types of consciousness.

They don't have to make moral choices.

They are not running around killing each other in Bosnia.

They are preying on each other for food.

They are limited, you know.

All the people in this room are probably concerned about the world.

And I think one of the things I would like you gentlemen

to address in some way

to feel that things might be moving in some place,

which is better.

And I think to try and bring things into some notion

that we, the animals, have some better place,

is not helpful.

Well, I didn't mean to suggest they are in a better place.

As I hear what you are saying,

you are saying the glory of our humanness is our free will.

No, I am not saying not about the words of our glory.

I am not putting emotional context on this.

I am trying to keep it going.

But, in fact, you are right.

The decisions that we make form us as individuals,

not as a species.

And so, in an animal situation,

the individual animal, I think, is not,

that is not what is of interest there.

We differentiate ourselves from each other

by the choices that we make,

and that requires this unknowable future dimension.

Well, you just poo-pooed it.

We don't need it.

It's an illusion.

Well, I didn't poo-poo it.

I said animals don't have it.

Clearly, we are of a different order.

I am not a pro-animal, anti-human sort.

I mean, I think the human world is definitely

the most interesting world.

But, I think, maybe you've put your finger on it.

That, without this illusion of an unknowable future,

we would not differentiate as individuals.

So, it's a happy flaw.

O Felix culpa.

Right?

And some people have always been afraid of prophecy.

But, that you have the moral of it never.

Well, it raises real questions about free will.

That's for sure.

I mean, one can suppose,

it raises real questions.

I mean, if one can,

if a prophecy comes true,

does that mean then that, in principle,

all of the future is determined?

You see, we have to avoid determinism here.

Because, a true determinism means thinking is pointless.

Because, in a rigid determinism,

you think what you think,

because you couldn't think anything else.

So, the concept of truth is utterly without meaning,

in a rigid determinism.

So, perhaps, in the pursuit of truth,

the unknown future is a necessity.

And, it allows our individuation from each other.

And, that is the particular hallmark of our species,

is that we are a population of individuals,

not a population that is defined genetically.

So, this is a challenge, isn't it?

These language structures are very provisional.

Every culture assumes that it is building an edifice of eternal truth.

But, every culture has all other cultures as examples before it,

of parochiality, provincialism, and limited understanding.

Why we then should assume that our culture is any more provisional than any other,

is simply a matter of hubris and historical momentum.

I don't think the meaning of human existence lies in culture.

It lies in the individual.

And, to become, to access that meaning,

a certain amount of deconditioning, i.e. alienation,

has to take place from a culture.

If you're just a cheerful representative of your culture,

you're the kind of mindless boar,

whether you represent Japanese culture, Indonesian culture, or whatever.

We require distance between ourselves and the object of our contemplation,

in order to define ourselves.

And, I think, to go on with this,

Terence earlier pointed out that the animal state is true language,

but the state advocated by mystics and all great religions

is to go beyond language.

None of them, none of the great religious or spiritual traditions,

say human culture is the end.

It's where it's at.

All of them point beyond it.

And, all of them point to states of contemplation,

mystical insight, prayer, intuition,

which go beyond the limitations of language.

So, I don't think, I didn't take down what Terence was saying

to be a denigration of all human culture and all language,

but pointing out its limitations,

which were agreed on by the greatest traditions we have.

I think these, in a sense, all these animals can be our teachers, you see.

I think that the, part of my interest in the home of pigeons,

and indeed the other experiments that I've been thinking about lately,

is to help to see if there's much more to the natural world,

and certainly much more to the animal world,

than current models allow.

The current models of biology, of institutional biology,

say all animals and plants are pure machines,

totally explainable in terms of A-level physics.

I mean, they don't even take quantum physics into it.

If you do, then you get weird phenomena like non-locality,

which would mean pigeon-hemming might not be such a mystery.

So, the attempt to reduce all animals and the whole of nature

has been going on for a long time,

and it's part of the triumphalist culture we have.

Our culture is based on the agenda of conquering nature.

You can conquer the whole of nature.

And now we've told every other culture in the world,

that's where it's at.

Development programs, logging operations, and so on.

So, the ecological crisis is a result of working out

this particular way of thinking about nature and other species.

I think that recovering a sense of,

I don't think that anybody here is saying,

we've got to say animals are better than us,

and denigrate the whole human race.

But to recognize that there are astonishing powers,

in the animal and the other realms of nature,

which we've just simply been blind to.

We're blind to them if we think in terms of institutional science.

People who actually know animals well,

people who train horses, who keep dogs and cats,

and who actually observe their behavior,

know for all well that they have very often uncanny

or seemingly uncanny powers of learning,

which go beyond what we would expect

on the basis of textbook biology.

So, I think these are ways of learning more

about the world in which we live,

and more about the biological context of our lives.

And when we come to dolphins,

then indeed, if we take big brains

to be the criterion of our superiority

to the rest of the animal kingdom,

then we have to face the fact that whales

and several other animals have bigger brains than us.

What are they doing with all that cerebral capacity?

They're certainly not building media empires

and constructing television programs and so on.

And so I think that this interest in dolphins and whales

as having a different kind of consciousness,

and possibly a more harmonious and telepathic consciousness,

is another way in which people are trying to learn

from the animal kingdom.

But, I mean, it creates a kind of humility in ourselves,

doesn't it?

To realize that here are these astonishing social forms

based on kinds of consciousness

quite different from our own,

possibly more advanced in certain ways.

And all we regard them in it,

at least all the Japanese fishermen,

regard the dolphins as nuisances

for getting in the way of their drift nets,

and the whales are simply a resource to be exploited,

and the Norwegians want to resume it

because it's good for the...

to save job losses in northern Norway,

that kind of thing.

There's a clash of value systems here,

and I think the whole of our modern civilization

is in a crisis because of this clash of value systems.

of what's really going on in the rest of nature.

Rediscovering what's happening is very important,

because it does have wider consequences

for our future as a species and a civilization.

These are not mere questions of idle curiosity.

I find this a little dissatisfying,

somehow, to start on this point,

to resolve what I think is the basic question

about the homing pigeon,

especially in connection with its significance for ourselves.

Because here we have a couple of divergent views.

Even if we concede that the loft radiates a field,

that the homing pigeon follows this field

by a process of clairvoyance,

in which it has a precognition of its position to moment hence,

and just goes in that direction.

There's still, I think, the fundamental question

has to do with the utter determinism of this,

and whether the homing pigeon sees a variety of future positions

and has to test them out by some process

to determine which one is the most connected

to the loved one or to whom,

or whether there is only one vision and it just follows it.

That's the fundamental question,

because thinking of our species as the homing pigeon,

and we're hoping to get home.

If the future is totally determined,

then probably the likeliest outcome

is the demise of the entire species,

if not the biosphere itself.

And, of course, there's no trouble for chance,

having expected that.

But most people, I think,

are seeing a variety of possible outcomes

and seeking a way to ennoble their own life

by philosophical position of empowerment,

in which what you do, which choice you make,

by what criteria you prioritize the possible futures,

would actually lead in one direction instead of the other one.

Thus, in the context of free will

for the homing trajectory of the entire species,

life obtains a moral meaning.

If it matters what we do, that's one thing.

If it doesn't matter what we do, that's another.

Therefore, it sort of matters,

whether it matters or not, if you do what I mean.

I think Bell's theorem in quantum theory

says there's this principle

that if things have been part of the same system

and they're separated,

they retain an instantaneous correlation,

even if they're miles apart,

even if they're going apart at the speed of light.

Now, this is part of quantum theory,

and it's totally unlike anything in conventional physics.

And so the pigeon is separated from its home

or from its loved ones,

and if Bell's theorem applies at the larger scale,

then you could say they're part of the same system.

They retain a non-local or non-separable connection.

This could be the basis of the rubber band

or the homing system or whatever.

You could say that.

The trouble is that physicists don't...

They don't know whether Bell's theorem

applies in the larger scale or not.

Most of them want an easy life,

and so they say,

well, Bell's theorem's fine

if you're dealing with these microscopic systems.

It doesn't seem to have any effects anywhere else.

We're just regarded as a peculiar feature

of microscopic physics.

It could be that there are other physicists,

including Ralph's friend, Nick Herbert,

who's spent years puzzling and wrestling

with the consequences of Bell's theorem,

thinking it must or may have implications

of the larger scale realm.

And you see, homing pigeons may indeed, I think,

come to be seen as a large scale manifestation

of the same principle.

I mean, I myself think that's quite a likely possibility.

But Ralph knows Nick Batten has talked about these things more.

So what do you think about that, Ralph?

Well, what I think is that quantum mechanics

applies to a different realm,

and it provides us with metaphors,

and Bell's theorem is a stimulating metaphor

to understand this phenomenon of bonding.

But to take this model too seriously

seems to me ridiculous.

Why?

Taking into consideration

how complex life is,

you know,

that one gravitates towards certain people

who are terribly important.

It's like one is part of a certain group of people.

You know, the fact that I'm a big friend,

and it just came from where I checked on

and it ends up knowing the people that I do know.

It's quite frightening.

What is that for?

I mean, it's quite a conscious way

towards certain people.

It's a little bit maybe

we're a part of it,

because maybe we share a vision.

I mean, there are other levels of this.

It's just sort of human talent.

And also the thing about the pigeons

that seem to me,

they always be undervalued.

Animals,

they're not seen as having consciousness.

So therefore people say,

oh, they're just animals

who've got a plan going on

how to move on.

You know,

it seems very peculiar.

But in fact,

there is this vision consciousness.

They don't want to accept that

the vision has this talent.

You know,

there are many talents

that happen to explain

a great piano,

happen to explain

many great talents.

This is an animal talent.

It's the talent that they have

it's God's given.

It's innate.

It's what they do.

It's what they're very good at.

And it's kind of beyond,

it's beyond our comprehension.

I don't think many things

beyond our comprehension.

I don't think many things

beyond our comprehension.

I mean,

how...

What?

Yeah,

there's probably many of them.

The only thing

is a monkey pigeon

is doing trouble.

Yeah.

I just want to ask

do they do anything else?

I mean,

this is a thing we always hear

about family pigeons

about the pigeons thing.

Well,

this is the thing

that they've been trained to do.

And if you think about it,

you see,

under normal conditions,

no bird or animal

would ever do this.

In a homeless family,

the pigeon is captured

by the owner getting,

grabbing it,

putting it inside a basket,

and it's transported

on the train or a lorry

for hundreds of miles.

Well,

in nature,

that doesn't happen

to animals very much.

If they go away from home,

they usually go under

their own steam.

In the normal circumstances,

the pigeons range

out from Trafalgar Square

or wherever they live,

and they forage.

In Trafalgar Square,

they don't have to go far usually

because all these tories

feed them there.

But normally,

pigeons live on buildings

or on rocks.

The original habitat

of the homing pigeon

is,

it's a rock pigeon,

lives on rocks,

on cliffs.

That's why they like buildings,

like buildings in London,

because they like cliffs.

And they,

they go out and forage,

and they find their way home.

That's the biological basis,

and they've somehow

got this to a very high degree,

and they've been selected

over many generations.

But they have all the normal

bird life as well.

It's a talism a bit like that,

as well,

isn't it?

It turns off to a home

within slightly of

strange circumstances.

Yes.

And these,

these pigeons have also

been selected very strongly

over many generations.

Pigeons that aren't very

good at homing,

don't make it back from races,

and they don't get bred from

in the next generation.

So,

there's been tremendously

strong selection.

Anyway,

yes,

I think that these,

how this relates to

human affinities,

and so on,

comes back to this question

of the social bonding

being the underlying

basis for all these

forms of behaviour,

and what forms of

affinity or bonding

are involved.

We don't know much.

I thought we love,

you could say,

you know,

mother,

yes,

but that's another subject.

I think maybe,

well maybe it's,

well maybe it isn't,

but it's a bond

which draws through

unrighteous people together.

Yes.

I remember,

and it's a bond

which takes it back

to its children,

eggs and men.

Well,

some people would find

that an unflattering

comparison,

because we like to think

human love different.

But I think that would

But we're harming

from now on.

It's an alcohol!

We've,

could pass to our point

at which we should be

breaking up and joking.

The subject

for tonight's

trialogue

is a subject

near and dear

to my heart.

You might even say

it has my initials

on it.

I had decided

to talk about time

and then

there was a request

to do so,

so that must be

the general drift

of our interest

and intent

as far as

what I can contribute.

I'm very interested

in time.

I'm very interested

in the largest

frames

into which

phenomena

can be

fitted

and

sort of

the

various ways

in which

we view

our humanness

if we change

the way

we look at

time.

and I think

that it's

sufficiently

unsecured

by science

that we

need

feel

no

trepidation

about

doing this.

what I mean

what I mean by

that is

examine

or recall

to yourself

for a moment

what it is

that orthodoxy

teaches

about

time.

It teaches

that

for

reasons

impossible

to conceive

the universe

sprang

from

utter

nothingness

in a single

moment.

Now

whatever you might

think about that

idea

notice that it is

the limit test

for credulity.

In other words

if you believe that

you could believe

anything.

It's impossible

to conceive

of something

more unlikely.

Yet

this is where

science

begins

its supposed

rational

tale

of the unfolding

of the

phenomenal

universe.

almost as if

science is saying

give us

one free

miracle

and from there

the entire

thing will

proceed

with a seamless

causal

explanation.

But

there is

an aspect

to the

phenomenal

universe

that I think

impinges

on anyone

who undertakes

to examine it

that is

not

given

any weight

whatsoever

by science.

and that

is

that when we

look at the

span of time

which stretches

from the big bang

to the present

moment

it's very clear

I think

that complexity

has aggregated

towards the

nether end

of this process

in the

dimensions

in which we

find ourselves.

ourselves

and

for example

the

early universe

was very

hot

and only

a kind of

electron plasma

could exist

hence there were

no

there was no

atomic physics

no

molecular

chemistry

only

only the

physics of

plasma.

by cooling

complexity

appears

this is

not

argued

but what

interests

me is

that each

successive

advance

into complexity

occurred

much faster

than the

stage

which preceded it

so

the first

billion years

of the life

of the universe

was an extraordinarily

boring

and empty

period

basically

atomic systems

were forming

the simplest

elements

were aggregating

into stars

this

permitted

fusion

the cooking out

of heavier elements

and after

some long period

of time

carbon appeared

and of course

four valent

carbon

then permits

a whole

new

set

of

properties

to emerge

including

ultimately

life

and i'm moving

through this

very quickly

because what i want

to concentrate on

is

what i call

the short

epoch

and my

terminology

here

is largely

drawn

from Alfred North

Whitehead

i think is the great

unsung

hero

of british

20th century

philosophy

and he had

a notion

of

a progression

of epochs

and

leading

toward

what he called

concrescence

and

i've taken

this notion

of

concrescence

and attempted

to construct

the temporal

cosmology

that

literally

stands on its

head

the explanation

of

science

because i don't believe

the universe

is pushed

outward

into

universe

is being

pulled

and

shaped

into an

ever

more complexified and compressent entity that is in fact a transcendental attractor transcendental

in in the sense of residing in a higher dimension than ordinary space and transcendental in the

feeling tone sense in which we ordinarily use that now this idea is basically just uh catholicism

with the chrome stripped off unless uh or you know chelvard de chardonism of a certain sort the idea

of the omega point the idea of a telos attracting and drawing history into itself but what i'm

interested to consider is uh that most delicate of all questions in prophetic systems of this sort

and that is when when science evades this issue by setting us down somewhere between the big bang

and the heat death of the universe imagined millions of years in the future science notice also completely

marginalizes human experience we are told that we live on a typical planet around the typical

star at the edge of a typical galaxy and that we are animals of a of a complex type but easily

identified to more typical forms my notion is to take seriously the apparent

vectoring in of universal intent on the human world

and try and keeping away from the pitfalls of religion to try and talk about why that might be happening

and i think it might be happening for the following reason that history is actually the shock wave of

eschatology and that this is a concept that we have not sufficiently entertained but which we are going to be

forced to entertain as the planetary crisis created by modernity of builds toward some kind of come

some kind of climax what i mean by that history is the shock wave of eschatology is something like this

animal uh if this planet were a planet of hummingbirds woodchucks giraffes and grasslands then darwinian

mechanics as modified by molecular biology would be sufficient to explain what's going on

the fly in the ointment of that simple schema is ourselves we represent some other order of existence we this

afternoon talked about language my notion is that out of the broad moving stream of animal evolution

a species was selected fell victim to the terminology can vary but a higher animal fell under the influence of an attractor

pulling us in the direction of symbolic activity and this is what we have been involved in through theater

dance poetry chant magic religion science politics cognitive and symbolic activity and it's only occupied

for all practical purposes outside the dreary world of chipping flint and picking fleas

less than 25 000 years it's a blink of an eye on the cosmic scale it is the shock wave which precedes

eschatology an analogy would be think of the undisturbed surface of a pond if the pond begins to boil

it indicates that some enormous protein and form is moving beneath the surface and is about to in fact

make its presence visible this is what history is on the surface of nature it's a boiling anticipation

of the emergence of the emergence of the compressence or the transcendental object at the end of time

and it has been anathema to discuss this in secular society even new age secularism because this has

always been the province of beastly priests and their hideously hierarchical and constipated religions

so that decent people have tended to turn away from it but in fact this is some kind of primary intuition

about our circumstance and the reason it's important is because we now are in a situation of planetary crisis

where you don't have to be an enthusiast for whiteheadian metaphysics or psilocybin or the more arcane

metaphors of terence mckenna to realize that we are approaching our limits it's inconceivable to speak of 500

years in the human future history is a self-consuming process and all we need do at this point is extrapolate

any of a number of curves here are some of my favorites uh the spread of epidemic sexually transmitted

diseases the proliferation of thermonuclear weapons the dissolution of the atmospheric ozone

the rise in world population when these curves are extrapolated it's very clear that we have

taken business as usual off the menu and i would prefer rather than imagine that this is a situation driven by

the momentum of bad historical decisions and therefore our responsibility the wrecking of the planet and so

forth i would rather prefer to believe that what we're witnessing is something like a birth and that it is

built into the laws of physics what we're witnessing that we are literally on a collision course with an

object that we cannot exactly discern it lies below the event horizon of rational apprehendability at this

point but the east is streaked with the blush of rosy dawn for sure and what it what it portends

is i think is uh an end to our fall an end to our sojourn in matter and an end to our separateness

and it lies now so close to us in historical time by virtue of our having collapsed our options in three-dimensional

space but you need only close your eyes have a dream take a shamanic hallucinogen practice yoga and there you will see it

it's an attractor which has been working on the species at least a million years and i maintain that this is

actually somehow a universal attractor and we represent a compressence of complexity that is truly transcendental

you know james joyce said uh uh if you want to be phoenixed you've got to be parked up in the end

prospector you sprout all your worth and woof your wings uh he said the end is nearer than you might wish

to be congealed and i'm essentially carrying this same uh notion because i think that otherwise we're going

to be victimized by an enormous pessimism arising out of the bankruptcy of science positivism ordinary

politics so forth and so on the ride to the end of history is going to be a white knuckle experience

and i offer this metaphor in the hope that it may make the trip to the transcendental object glittering

at the end of time uh an easier rhyme uh an easier rhyme gentlemen

well let me fill in the footnotes s it refers to the last things the final things the eschaton the

eschaton is a kind of a neutral way of saying what some people call the buddha matreya what some people

call the flying saucer at the end of history the second coming um it's the last thing the eschaton and

i see it as a kind of what i think is happening is that all boundaries are dissolving and the boundaries

between men and women between society and nature and ultimately the boundaries between life and death

and we are going truly beyond ambiguity beyond syntax we have been trapped in a kind of demonic simulacrum

for 25 000 years created out of language and now uh somehow this accelerating process of involuted

connectedness that characterizes this white hedian progression of epochs toward the compressence

is in fact uh being fulfilled and it's uh i think quite uh quite extraordinary well this i think uh

terence is it it sounds a little more optimistic than i've heard you before i'm not mistaken that

that although in this model you accepted the one miracle of science the big bang fantasy for your

creation myth and then you reflected it into a similar event coming in the near future about which you're

concerned with the wind that i think you spared us and didn't mention the date this time yes i thought

it should be a sort of a generalized discussion of the assumptions that come out of this kind of thinking

but when the forthcoming event that the optimistic part is that i think for the first time i've heard you

describe it as a birth um the optimistic event is interpreted by you as an eschaton this is i think

um a myth made real like a christmas tree where the events of history are kind of pasted on it and as

this tree sort of shapes to a point at the top you've uh drawn history around it in an ascending spiral that

just ends at that point where they put the star now i think this is is a myth and that history can be wound

on the form in in a lot of different ways and only by starting with an assumption which to me is

very symmetric and identical to the big birth of the universe that uh for which you make fun of science i

agree with you there that far we're together but this um it puts me in mind of the history of history

where the concept of time in different cultures suits different models of which there are but few

there's the bang to bang model which you share with tellier de chardin there's the infinite linear

progress model which is pretty much discredited now by everyone there's the reflection model where

a cyclic is is completed and then uh repeats at the beginning and uh four more epochs or five or ten

in um a cycle of epochs which might be never ending there's um the kurt goodle model in which time

goes uh forward and closes on itself without reflection by going around a torus and and coming

back many ancient societies share this one where it was understood that this is something like your theory

of the homing pigeon that uh every action we are doing today will be repeated again another day i i think

also that these different models for history which are essentially mythical structures that is no pseudo

scientific evidence could be given to distinguish one from another they start on the basis of belief and

then it is thought that what follows from this particular belief of a certain model of history

is the actual evolution of that culture into some shape which is to a degree determined by the model

and which has been analyzed in the different cultures comparing the different evolutions of the culture

with the creation myth and model for historical time in each one eric vogelin for example then it's also

thought that well now that we have archaeology cultural history and so on we know this much we know

there's different models of time historically that they fit into a certain pattern and by and large

it's thought that they guide give guidance to the evolution of that culture itself in other words

if it's not true that tomorrow is already determined and we just have to good do a good job to follow our

dream if it's possible that what we do uh think or say affects the future then it's important which

historical model we choose because the myth itself guides action determines evolution

at least influences to a degree the outcome i'm not saying that belief in an eschaton guarantees an eschaton

because i don't think the influence of our belief is that seriously important

i don't see though even accepting the christmas tree in the point with the star i don't see why it

would be a birth or a death or anything other than a simple cultural transformation which is more or

less timed by presaged by announced by the shock wave at the end of well this epoch why not just a

simple social transformation like the renaissance well because they're the planet can't bring forth

further societies uh we've come to the end of our road in newtonian space and that's what i wanted to

say i mean wouldn't you agree ralph that when we look back over the whole history of uh life as known to us

what it appears to be is some kind of strategy for the conquest of dimensionality in other words the

earliest forms of life were fixed slimes of some sort and then you get uh very early motility

but no sense organs the being literally feels its way from one point of perception to another

then you get sequestering of of light sensitive pigment on the cell and the notion of a gradient

of here and there appears and then for a long long time it's the coordination of you know

backbones skeletons binocular vision so forth and so on then with us some fundamental

uh boundary is crossed because we are beginning not the apparently the conquest of terrestrial space

ended with the cheetah or something but in us what begins is the conquest of time first through memory and

strategic triangulation of data out of memory and then with the invention of epigenetic coding writing

electronic databases and ever more deep and thorough um spreading out into time and so this eschatonic

transition that i'm talking about essentially all that's happening is that the deployed um world of

three-dimensional space shrinks to the point where all points are cotangent

and it literally goes into hyperspace it's no longer a metaphorical hyperspace and so what we're saying here

is you're right it's no big deal and yet what it actually will come to be seen to be is a transition from one

dimension of existence to another and but a continuation of this universal program of self expansion and

transcendence that can be traced back to the earliest and most primitive kind of protoplasm isn't this a fancy

way of saying we're running out of time yes time is speeding up there isn't much left you know someone

said time is god's way of keeping everything from happening all at once well my notion is that we are

caught that think of the transcendental attractor as a kind of black hole into which we have fallen into

its basin of attraction and now we're circling ever faster ever deeper as we approximate an approach to

this singularity the eschaton is simply a singularity it exceeds rational apprehendability somehow intrinsically in

principle it lies outside the framework of possible description we have we're on a collision course with

you know the unspeakable and that explains why we are not groveling around like groundhogs and

other animals we have been selected out for this very very peculiar

metamorphosis via information and the conquest of dimensions to become something completely other a new

ontological order of being as we represent now a new ontological order of being when contrasted to animal

life now we're apparently about to take one more stand but it's too early to tell let me just respond

for one minute then we'll we'll see what rupert thinks of this i'm afraid i'm basically um so pessimistic

i can't really dispute this or or go on nevertheless for the sake of theory let me say that this pessimism is

just a matter of faith because using these historical arguments and timings you've just described we have

sort of uh mixed here together the good and the bad everything is accelerating on the one hand we have

the population explosion itself the destruction of the biosphere and so on the complexity the rate the

seriousness of all this the irreversibility the finality the eschatology of this is as a matter of fact climaxing meanwhile

we have language as you say if it's 25 000 euro or or 60 000 or even at most 100 000 as some people think

that is really recent on the timescale we're talking about

and then we have such things as uh agriculture and the urban revolution and now we have automobiles

and airplanes and computer and you spoke about memory computer memory has somehow increased our

intelligence by an enormous amount so on the good side we have all this increase in the complexity in

the fractal dimension of life is more or less to our benefit so we have as it were a race between two

processes both of which growing faster exponentially but we don't know for sure which one is growing more

and furthermore the possibility of a miracle can be ruled out due to the fact that we wouldn't even have

got this far without a whole series of without a series of miracles for example the miraculous of

appearance of oxygen in the atmosphere so if there is a race

it's a it's a subtle matter i think the way in which the myth of the eschaton could intervene in

this race between the two accelerating processes that's all i wanted to say what do you think group

well i think um i mean i agree with you this is a cultural pattern the the judeo-christian tradition

takes further tendencies already there in early civilizations a sense of movement towards some end

apocalyptic prophecy the last book of the bible the book of the apocalypse speaks of things not unlike

those that terence does it's very similar and the i mean as he's well aware this this um apocalyptic

nature of his thinking is a transform of a vision which appears in christianity and in jewish messianic

and apocalyptic literature so the question is to what extent is the pattern of acceleration you see in

our culture a product of the fact our culture is based on this myth of history or to what extent do

these visions reflect some true perception of a cosmic process something far beyond history that's not easy to

decide because although there's a self-fulfilling prophecy built into these cultural patterns we're

now seeing these dreams coming true in many ways these things that have led to emphasizing novelty

innovation change moving faster and faster these are both prophesied and believed in and and coming

true and makes it easier to believe in them so it's all self-fulfilling but we've now spread it to the

rest of the world so it seems pretty global does it go beyond this for me this is the big question

is there a real in this prophetic vision a real influence of something beyond humanity beyond

history which terence thinks there is namely the transcendental object the attractor or as tile

the shadow would put it the omega point or is there not and if there is how limited is it in its range of

application are we talking as terence sometimes seems to be about something just happening on earth

i mean i have the same problem with um christian apocalyptic speculation tire de chardin for example he

talks of the narrow sphere around the earth and this growing emergence of consciousness here is he talking

about the transformation of this planet and of humanity or is he talking transformation of the entire

universe and you have the same ambiguity in the new testament when saint paul writes the whole creation

groaneth in travel and the idea of the whole universe groaning in travel for the coming of a new

birth of a new age so this is the real question i have to turn to tonight is how provincial is this vision

um are we talking about the future of human culture on this planet or are we talking about the future of the solar

system the galaxy or even the entire cosmos because if we're talking about this planet a lot of these

accelerating changes graphs extrapolations look pretty plausible if we're talking about the solar system

or the galaxy i don't think astronomers in the last few years or decades have suddenly noticed

curves rushing off to some extreme point where we can expect stars all over the galaxy to turn into

supernovae planets all over the solar system to collapse crumble or otherwise undergo dramatic alteration

the the history that we're so preoccupied with here on earth human history and the effects of human

activities doesn't as far as we know seem to be mirrored in changes going on anywhere else in the solar

solar system the galaxy or the cosmos so just the question really is how limited is this vision and are we just

talking about the destiny of a small planet which has come on to the uh some for some reason under some

planetary attractor whether it's human made or human making we can leave aside for the moment um and what's your view on that

well i'm not intentionally cutting this trial log off right here it's just where this tape ran out

and i'll i'll get the next one in this series out to you uh early next week as soon as i can and i i

want to thank those of you who wrote to say that they don't mind the longer format particularly uh

those of you who are funny about it like this one i got from uh tom barbillet tom by the way is the host of

the noble eight podcast and the uh biota podcast and i'll uh put links to those in the program notes

here and also on our psychedelic salon web page uh you can hear interviews with people like bruce damer

and a whole lot of other really fascinating people over there anyway here's what tom said a quick note to

say i like the new entire format the only problem i have found is in hitting pause when the trial logs were

divided by sides you had taken on the responsibility to create a division and there was little that could

be done bar to wait for the next installment giving the listener the power to pause means i am sure

more exercise will be had more people will stay in their cars to listen to the end and people will

travel to the end of their train lines rather than stopping the flow

i found this problem myself this morning although i was able to hit pause eventually

i did feel some guilt however

well uh for sure i don't want to make anybody feel guilty so uh sorry about that

and so that i don't feel guilty about forgetting to say this i sure want to send my thanks to

steven b and michael m both of whom made donations this week and michael you'll probably remember

better as a dime short who's also been a regular contributor here to the salon so uh thank you

both for your kind donations and uh rest assured i plan on seeing that yours and all of the donations

to the psychedelic salon are put to good use directly in the service of these podcasts before i go i should

mention that this and all of the podcasts from the psychedelic salon are protected under the creative

commons attribution non-commercial share alike 2.5 license and if you have any questions about that

just click on the creative commons link at the bottom of the psychedelic salon webpage which may

be found at psychedelicsalon.org and if you have any questions comments complaints or suggestions about

these podcasts well just uh send them to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com chateau hayuk thanks again for

letting me use your music here in the salon and thanks again to ralph rupert and terence for

uh holding these fascinating conversations and to bruce damer

for obtaining the recordings for us to listen to here in the salon.

Well, that's about it for today,

but I'll be back soon with installment three of the Hazelwood Trilogues.

I'll see you then.

For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

Be well, my friends.

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

This is Lorenzo, and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

And before I get into today's program,

I need to apologize to those who downloaded the previous podcast

in the first 12 hours after it was posted.

It seems that I mislabeled the MP3 tag,

and it'll show up in your menu as a second number 107 program.

So if you have two podcast 107s,

take a close look,

and you'll see that one should say Part 1 and the other Part 2.

I've fixed that problem now,

but of course that won't help you if you're on automatic download,

because there are a lot of those that take place

in the first few hours after I post a new program.

So even though it's a small inconvenience for you,

well, maybe you can just think of it as having a collector's item.

Of course, I don't think there's much of a hot trading market

for collectible files right now.

I don't know if there is such a thing.

Well, since this is a somewhat long podcast,

I want to begin by thanking a few people now

so that my thank yous don't get missed if I put them at the end.

First of all, I think we'd all like to thank Ralph Abraham and Bruce Dahmer

for making these tapes of these trilogues available

for me to play here in the Psychedelic Salon.

And I also want to acknowledge those who have made donations of all kinds

to help get these messages out to a wider audience.

I know that many of our fellow salonners are students,

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Well, I'm in the same boat,

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And finding myself now older than I planned on getting

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well, I have to tell you that when donations do come in

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Here I am having fun listening to all these great talks

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In short, I'm having the best time of my life.

And then to top it all off,

this week the salon received donations from Viple P.

Hey, Viple, how are you?

And thanks for yet another donation.

That's really nice of you.

And I also want to thank Mona F.,

who also made a very generous donation.

Thank you both.

And I want to make a special mention for Elena,

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that kept her from making a payment.

But by telling me about the problem,

she provided a very valuable service for the salon.

And so thank you, Elena,

who after all her problems persisted

until her donation made it through.

I probably would have given up myself.

So thank you so very much for hanging in there.

Well, there's some other things I want to mention today,

but first we better get into the trilogue.

As I was thinking about how to introduce today's program,

I was trying to figure out how best to recapitulate

the end of the last tape in this series.

But when I began playing tape three,

which you're about to hear right now,

I discovered that there was a disconnect between the two.

I'm not sure how much of the trilogue, if any, was lost,

or what led up to the part we're about to hear.

But what you're hearing with me is exactly as it came off

the four cassette tapes that Ralph Abraham loaned to me

to play here in the Psychedelic Salon.

But hey, being psychedelic doesn't mean that you're strung out on drugs.

It means having the ability to think outside the box

and to change mental directions without getting psychic whiplash.

So it shouldn't be too hard for you to get right up to speed

as Rupert Sheldrake asks a question that leads to a discussion

of stellar pathology, among other cosmic topics,

in a trilogue with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham

that was held at Hazelwood House in England sometime in 1993.

So just the question really is how limited is this vision?

I mean, are we just talking about the destiny of this new planet

that we've come under some, for some reason,

under some planetary attractor?

Whether it's human-made or human-making,

we can leave aside for a moment.

And what's your view on that?

Well, I've thought a lot about it.

It's a difficult question.

If we extend the search for a universal crisis beyond the Earth,

the only evidence that has been offered by anybody

is there is some kind of problem between nuclear theory,

which has been very well established for 40 years,

and the neutrino output of the sun.

And in trying to account for this,

your choice is either that nuclear theory requires serious modification,

which doesn't seem likely,

since it's worked in all of the cases up till now.

Or there is, in fact, something wrong with our star.

Searching for pathology beyond the solar system

in the cosmic environment

is outside the present reach of our technical ability.

I tend to think,

though the time waves that I've elaborated

can be extended back into the pre-biological domain,

I tend to think that this is a phenomenon of biology

that I'm talking about,

and that it is just one small planet,

and that biology is a process of conquering dimensions,

which once it starts,

as a primal slime,

it accelerates,

and it bootstraps itself to higher and higher levels

at tighter and tighter turns of the spiral,

and that we are now in the process of seeing it

essentially exhaust and abandoning the planet,

and carry itself into this other dimension.

So it's a phenomenon of biology.

That's why all these metaphors of Gaia

and Gaian interaction seem cogent to me.

But the whole point about biology

is that the earliest forms of light and the plants

are related to the light of the sun.

And the whole of biology,

the whole of the sun kingdom,

the whole of the transformation

of the atmosphere of the planet

is dependent not on merely terrestrial events,

but on our relation to the sun

and the wider cosmic environment,

since the elements of carbon

and so on produce dead,

the dust of supernovae of exploding stars.

So biology on earth is rooted in a much larger ecology.

And so first of all,

I don't think the evolution of life on earth

can be regarded as merely terrestrial

or merely biological in that sense.

And secondly,

every human culture that's talked about

some light pulling it from ahead,

some vision that's gone,

has tended to talk in terms of images

of celestial influences of one kind or another.

Sky, planets, stars,

heavenly influences of one sort or another,

which suggests to me

that if we're to take them literally,

and you take most of these things

quite literally, really,

that we have to look for influences

from outside the earth working on us.

The transimensional object

may be located or channeled through

the sun, other stars, planets, constellations,

something to do with the astronomical environment.

Well, if it is truly a higher dimensional object,

then it is in some sense everywhere

in this universe.

And so all routes of evolutionary progress

may lead into this.

It's a kind of universal hologram

of time and space

into which we enter into

some kind of, I suppose,

galactic community of intelligence

or something.

In other words, biology,

I understand what you were implying

in the early part of your statement.

I agree, yes, that spores or viruses

or bacterium probably percolate

and permeate through the physical universe.

And wherever they come upon

a planetary environment

in which they can work their magic,

then life takes hold.

And from then on, life,

it's a battle in which life attempts

to modify the abiotic environment

and control it

and keep it at equilibrium

sufficiently for the program of bios

to be put into place.

And that program is to go from

this essentially,

this initial seed

to a return

to the higher hidden source

of all outside

the pleroma

of three-dimensional space.

It's a kind of Gnostic return idea.

It's an idea of

alchemical sublimation

and rarefaction

that I see the cosmos

as a distillery for novelty.

And the transcendental object

is the novelty of novelties.

And when we formally define that,

we discover

we are getting something

like a Leibnizian plenum,

a monad of some sort,

a tiny thing

which has everything

enfolded within it.

And that means

that you are in another dimension

where all points in this universe

have been collapsed

into cotangency.

And it is an apotheosis.

It is an apocatastasis.

There is something else in Greek.

I'm not sure what.

Pure poetry.

While trying to listen to this,

did I not observe a consensus

that as a matter of fact

it's provincial?

Is that right?

That I'm suggesting...

We have a biological catastrophe

on planet Earth

while the Earth...

Yes, the Earth is giving birth

to a hyperdimensional being.

In spite of the fact

that the eschaton

permeates

as a higher dimensional object

the entire universe,

as a matter of fact,

it's got a special

sub-eschaton

with a more accelerated program

of just for us.

salvation proceeds

on many schedules,

my son.

The fact that the galaxy

is spiraled

suggests to me

that in the interest

of modesty

we should probably

confine this supposition

to the notion

that it is

it's happening

within the galaxy.

It's perhaps

what spiral galaxies

are about.

Well, the sun

is burning out.

People believe that.

A mere

half billion years

to go.

Well...

It's a little bit longer

than the 18 and a half years

that...

Well, but excuse me.

If there is a problem

with the neutrino output

of the sun,

the orthodox interpretation

of that is

that that means

the sun has stopped

and gone off

the fusion boil

and is in fact

just sitting there

and the amount of time

it would take

for evidence

of this

having gone off

the boil

to percolate

to the surface

is about

25,000 years

and the moment

that it happens

eight minutes later

the radiant energy

reaching the earth

will drop

60%.

I'll accept

your lower bound

of 25,000 years

without further discussion

letting me know.

Just to shock you

and let me take

a position

much more pessimistic

than yours

there have been

several close calls

lately

with comments

and some people

William Whiston

for example

or Emmanuel

Velikovsky

felt that

the beginning

of our planet

the Big Bang

as a matter of fact

was a collision

with a comet

and in the last

couple of years

there have been

several close calls

in fact

the closest call

in history

is only three

or four years back

it seems to me

especially

after a good look

at the sun

with it without glasses

that is quite likely

we would get hit

by a comet

and even pretty soon

sooner than

25,000 years

maybe sooner than

18 and a half years

now suppose

that this happened

and then we had

an extinction

such as

we saw

65 million years back

when Jurassic Park

vanished into the ocean

then

all of this

biological miracle

accelerating

to its own

omega point

anyway

according to

a schedule

with exponential

condensation

to the

compressence

of the eschaton

and the shockwave

from the

transcendental object

at the end of time

would

be rendered

totally insignificant

because

the cause

came by

a car crash

on the highway

of the solar system

totally independent

of the progress

of biology

on planet earth

no I don't

you don't get it

it's entirely

it's entirely possible

I didn't want

to bring it up

because it's a little

Halloween-ish

but

it's entirely possible

that the

transcendental object

at the end of time

is

nothing more

than

a five kilometer

wide

carbonaceous

chondritic asteroid

that in a

single moment

will stand

us all

at the gates

of paradise

and that

that is

what it means

to

destroy my argument

by appropriating it

didn't I say

didn't

didn't I say

that

the dissolving

of boundaries

would eventually

mean the dissolving

of the boundaries

between life

and death

itself

well why then

if the eschaton

is a comet

rapidly approaching

New York City

why is it necessary

to have this

increase of

complexity

the population

explosion

the destruction

of the ozone layer

well you know

it's very interesting

did you know

that

immediately

preceding

by immediately

preceding

I mean

in the million

years

preceding

the

impact

that killed

the dinosaurs

some enormous

extinction

was underway

that they

can't

figure it out

it's like

the earth

knew

or

something like

that

there was

an extinction

underway

when that cometary

impact hit

and so

what I'm suggesting

Ralph

is that

biology knows

this is back

to this morning's

discussion

about the

homing pigeons

biology has

a complete

four dimensional

five dimensional

map

of the planet's

history

what the hell

the comet's

on the way

let's get it on

the comet

the planet

said

the comet's

on the way

let's get

these monkeys

moving

toward

the production

of

sufficient

complexity

that when

this impact

event occurs

it will have

a transcendental

rather than

simply

an opportunity

to escape

into another

dimension

yes

so all

of

all of

history

is this

curious

relationship

with this

intuition

that nobody

wants to face

but nobody

can quite

get rid of

and so here

we're sacrificing

goats

and we're

doing this

and we're

doing that

because we

have this

very restless

feeling

that all

is not

well

in three

dimensional

space

and time

and you

know

history

keeps

bearing

it out

and now

it's

upon us

it's

who don't

quite

make

the

extinct

of the

moment

well

the

instruction

well

you know

here's

the idea

Jorge Luis Borges

the Argentine

surrealist

he had an

interesting idea

he felt

that

a species

could not

enter

hyperspace

whatever

that means

until the

last member

of that

species

perished

and so

what is

happening

here is

that

vast numbers

of souls

are accumulating

in some

dimension

waiting for us

to decently

depart

this mortal

coil

so that

the human

family

in a

body

can

find itself

at play

in the

fields

of the

Lord

what I

want

to do

to think

this

through

a bit

further

given

that

there'll

be

this

we used

to think

that this

great

transformation

of humanity

a kind

of collective

near-death

experience

except it

would be

an actual

death

experience

would be

brought about

by a

nuclear

cataclysm

well

although the

bonds

are still

there

that

model

has gone

out of

fashion

for some

reason

and it

could easily

come back

I mean

but currently

currently

we're now

more into

ecological

I mean

your list

apart from

nuclear

proliferation

have the

ecological

apocalypses

anyway

we've got

all these

models

let's assume

that it

happens

that this

happens

there's this

sudden new

transformation

of humanity

and dogs

and cats

and everything

else

into this

new

they're taken

up into

the transcendental

attractor

now what

effect does

this have

on the rest

of the

universe

that's my

question

and leave

aside the

details

on that

well I

think it's

not an

answerable

question

but it

is in

fact

what we

will then

set out

to understand

that we

are literally

packing up

and preparing

to decamp

from Newtonian

space and

time for the

high road

of hyper

dimensional

existence

and we may

find ourselves

you know

the least

in the

grand councils

of the

who knows

what

or we

may find

something

I imagine

entirely

unsuspected

I mean

in fairness

to the

audience

I should

say

these things

don't

spring

de novo

for me

I mean

I talked

this morning

about

shamanism

anticipating

the future

and that

that was

how that

magic

was worked

well

the

if you

pursue

these

psychedelic

shamanic

plants

there is

inevitably

this

conclusion

scenario

or this

apocalyptic

intuition

and I

think

that

shamans

have always

seen

the end

that the

human

enterprise

in

three

dimensional

space

has always

been

finite

and

in the

same way

that ontogeny

recapitulates

phylogeny

as we

look back

into the

past

it seems

reasonable

then to

assume

that death

which we

have spent

a thousand

years

turning into

a materialist

vacuum

is in fact

not that

at all

and that

there is

an enormous

mystery

that hovers

over our

existence

and that it

is only

unraveled

beyond the

grave

and I

would never

in my

life

have thought

that I

would have

been pushed

to this

kind of a

position

I mean I

spent the

first half

of my life

getting away

from this

but the

evidence

of these

shamanic

hallucinogens

is in fact

that shamans

have always

done what

they do

via ancestor

magic and

higher dimensional

perception

and that

death is

not what

naive

positivism in

the last

500 years

has attempted

to say

that it is

and I

realize that

it's incredible

to suppose

that here

at the apex

of materialist

positivist

scientific

civilization

we're going

to make

an orthogonal

turn

into

an understanding

of what lies

beyond the

grave

but in

fact

I think

this is

probably

the paradigm

shattering

world

condensing

event

that is

bearing

down on

that

conversion

in progress

well

given all

that

I want

to

I want

to know

whether this

has happened

somewhere else

because

if it could

happen

on our

planet

change

the entire

conditions

of dimensionality

throughout the

galaxy

or let us

perhaps

cosmos

there's no

what makes you

think that our

planet's the

curse

no I don't

think that

ah well if

it's happened

elsewhere

what effects

will it

elsewhere in

the galaxy

on planets

elsewhere in

the galaxy

what effect

do you expect

it to have

had on us

already

well it

seems to be

the content

of it

when you

explore it

when you explore

the adimbrations

of the

transcendental

object

and you see

all this

transhuman

alien

data

that is

the

that is

essentially

what it has

become

in its past

history

it wears upon

itself

the imprint

because see

all life

is finding

its way

back

to some

kind of

source

that is

in a

higher

plane

and that's

why it

has this

alien

presentation

civilization

because it

has maybe

a thousand

civilizations

poured into

it

or ten

thousand

or fifty

million

who can

know

the universe

is old

already

but it

is

you know

it pervades

the universe

like a gas

in a higher

dimensional

space

what I can't

work out

though

is whether

we're talking

here about

some

planetary

virus

that gets

hold of

civilization

after civilization

or planet

after planet

and causes

them to

auto-destruct

in this particular

way

or whether

we're talking

about some

cosmic process

because whatever

it is

it seems to be

pretty local

to planets

it seems to me

it's just a

continuation of

life's program

of conquering

whatever dimension

it's up against

that it has not

yet conquered

and probably that

process is endless

that's what life

is

it's a chemical

strategy

for the conquest

of dimensionality

and it carries

out this program

come hell or high

water

it's just like

striking a match

you mean

biology comes to

a planet

and then

the flame

leaps up

and then pretty

soon

it burns out

through the

exhaustion of

resources

and the

arrival of the

shockwave of

the eschaton

for that

particular planet

biology there

is extinguished

once again

and what is

left in the

ashes

is the

alchemical

lapis

the sothic

hydrolith

the one

thing

right

yes

yes well

i wouldn't expect

you to buy

into it

whole hog

but it's

interesting

because it

provides a way

of imaging

what is happening

that doesn't

fall

to some

of the

dualisms

that haunt

either a

reductionist

view

or an

out

and out

gung

ho

no questions

asked

religious

conversion

view

and let me

say one

more thing

while we're

on this

subject

because it

shouldn't be

left unsaid

there are

orthodox

cosmologies

that support

my contention

of the

possibility

of a

universal

collapse

Hans

Altven

of the

Swedish

Academy

of Sciences

has suggested

that the

universe is

what's called

a vacuum

fluctuation

now a

vacuum

fluctuation

is a

situation

where

it happens

in quantum

mechanics

where

a

group

of

particles

and

antiparticles

spring

into

existence

and then

annihilate

each other

and because

parity

is conserved

this

creation

ex nihilo

of matter

is allowed

by quantum

physics

but an

interesting

aspect

of these

vacuum

fluctuations

is that

quantum

theory

sets

no upper

limit

on their

theoretical

size

it merely

says that

the larger

they are

the more

improbable

they are

well

the universe

itself

could be

a vacuum

fluctuation

of some

ten high

sixty-eight

particles

which sprang

into being

completely

according

and allowed

by quantum

physics

separated

into

higher

dimensional

space

and are

in fact

eventually

at some

point

in the

future

going

to

reconnect

and

conserve

parity

and

Alphen

says

that

in this

kind

of a

higher

dimensional

collision

all points

in both

systems

would

appear

to an

observer

to become

cotangent

instantly

and what

that would

mean

is

he's

saying

that

the

material

universe

potentially

could

disappear

in a

single

moment

across

mega

parsecs

of space

and time

and all

that would

be left

Alphen

says

then

is light

because

light does

not have

an

antiparticle

it is

different

it is

the exception

and no

one knows

what the

physics

of light

a universe

made only

of light

would be

light

and I

suggest

to you

that

the many

myths

and intuitions

that link

light

to the

process

of spiritual

advancement

and talk

about the

generation

of the

light

body

and so

forth

may anticipate

something

like this

so even

within the

toolbox

of ordinary

quantum

astrophysics

there are

incredibly

optimistic

transcendental

and

psychedelic

scenarios

there is

no way

to personally

leap into

the dimensions

of hyperspace

in the

birth event

of the

eschaton

not in

quantum

physics

I suppose

we are

talking about

a different

kind of

thing

what about

the

timetable

I don't

know

but

I'm

a

little

about

doing

a

thing

I don't

know

I don't

even

I don't

know

you

I don't

know

what about

the

I don't

know

what I

yeah

I don't

know

Terence, so far it seems like your idea is pretty similar to Tellyard de Chardin, except

you said he didn't give us a timetable.

So assuming we have sunshine for 25,000 years ...

When do I think it will occur?

Yeah.

Well, it's sort of weird to talk about that because it rests on a formal argument

where you have to look at a lot of historical data.

What I did was I produced curves that I felt were reflective of the ebb and flow of novelty

in time.

Then by fitting these curves to historical data, and granted, history is not a quantified entity,

but nevertheless, there's general agreement, for example, that the Greek Renaissance was

a novel time, the 20th century was a novel time.

So by doing this, I slowly refined down a prediction based on a spiral closure, which makes it happen

much faster than you would expect, of the winter solstice of 2012 A.D. After I had made that

calculation, I discovered, to my amazement, that the Mayan civilization had a very complex

cyclical and recursive calendar, and it too indicated that same date.

And then I think if you take these World Bank, United Nations, strict objective data curves,

and put in the fudge factor of the unexpected, it seems pretty reasonable to suppose that at

least there is there a nexus of prophetistic intensity of some sort that has caused a number

of traditions, for some reason, to get focused on the late months of 2012 A.D. When I attempted

to understand objectively what could be going on there using computer simulations of the star

fields, a program called Voyager that lets you see any place in the solar system 10,000 years

in the past or 10,000 years in the future, it turns out that there is something unique about

this December 21st, 2012 solstice. It's a solstice which will occur at the helical rising of the galaxy.

What that means is once every 26,000 years in the precession of the great year, there will

be a winter solstice sunrise that catches 28 degrees Sagittarius on the plane of the galactic ecliptic.

What does that mean? Who knows? Certainly not me. In Hamlet's Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Helge von Dechend, who were both very well respected historians of science,

they suggested that for ancient peoples, these were somehow galactic gates or way stations of some sort through which souls

had to transit to make their way back to their higher and hidden home. This is not compelling stuff to me. I find it a little too mediumistic or something.

But nevertheless, it is an objective fact that the heliacal rising of the galaxy, which occurs once in 26,000 years, will occur on this date I chose, and that I did not know that at the time, nor did I know the light.

Well, that's interesting. I agree. But let's look at this. We have here the coincidence of three different things. One is what you did looking at historical data, which I think we could fairly describe as novel and very interesting.

Very interesting and fancy kind of mathematical extrapolation of historical data that does sort of culminate in a point. We grant you that.

The other two things, the Mayan calendar and the greatest astronomical conjunction in 26,000 years, these are both periodic phenomena. The Mayan calendar repeats a cycle in 26,000 years,

and the greatest conjunction in the galaxy from our perspective in the galaxy recurs every 26,000 years. So they could be expected to recur once more before the sun gives its last gasp and biology must extinct.

So if we would weigh these things equally, it would kind of suggest that your mathematical extrapolation, which is good, I like it, but it's not the same as the reportage of a shamanic clairvoyance that you were talking about of a hyper-dimensional investigation.

This is more like academic scholarship with huge database of history and this imaginative curve used to extrapolate data. So this suggests that your extrapolation curve could actually be reversed.

Like you take it like this, it ends here, you take it out and rotate it around and put it back there. Then you have a completely different model which must necessarily without a doubt equally well or poorly fit the historical data up to now and yet it has a future but only for 26,000 more years.

So in spite of this, it's not an ironclad extrapolation and it's not a coincidence with two other disparate eschatological predictions, then I think the case for this actually being the omega point is weak.

It's weak. You should think about this. It's an important day. It's some kind of transformation. As far as the transition from all of us into the fifth dimension, I don't see a case for it.

Well, you'd have to go into, we'd have to look at it because what it comes down to then is a very fine-tuned argument looking at a particular curve, looking at a story.

Look at the curve, reflect it around and put it on the other side. What's to contradict this? History sort of starts running backwards from the point of view.

I'm not sure if I can explain, but there is an answer and I'll try. It's something like this. It's a damped oscillation. It actually does run down.

It isn't elegant to try to make it one cycle within a larger or extrapolated set of larger cycles because it has a built-in spin-down factor in it that makes it pretty clear that it is a single, it's many cycles embedded within many other cycles, but on its highest level it actually has a beginning and it actually has an end.

It just seems to you looking at this radically implausible that there would be any future after this point.

Well, I've thought of many, many ways of thinking about this that would make it not so catastrophically radical.

And here's a very simple way that makes everybody feel a little better.

I suppose that what happens on December 21st, 2012 is physicists who have been laboring for some time toward the technology of time travel actually succeed.

Well, then suddenly the wave is fulfilled and yet the heavens do not fall and angels don't appear to lift us into paradise.

It simply shows that the reason history ended at that date was because after the invention of time travel, the notion of a seriality of events ceases to have any meaning.

And so everybody agrees, well, history ended yesterday and it did end and we now live in the post-historical atemporal bubble where you not only tell where you live but when you live.

And everything would be very nicely fulfilled and then people would say, well, the people who saw it coming got highly agitated because they didn't realize what it was that was coming.

Now we know what was coming. It turns out to be just like the invention of the steam engine or power flight or anything like that.

There are, you see, we needn't assume these cosmic dimensions to the transformation.

You've given this up or this is?

But we must assume the transformation.

There are still some alternatives?

Oh, there are other alternatives. Here's a good one.

How about this one? December 21st, 2012 AD, I dropped dead.

Then everyone says, well, how peculiar. It was only about him.

That's really controversial.

It was just we were all swept along for 45 years in some bizarre mathematical hallucination that this very glib Irishman was able to foist off and it's totally fulfilled.

And yet, again, the heavens don't fall nor the oceans boil.

So, but I'm telling you, Ralph, there's something out there.

There's something out there.

And I'll know it when I see it.

And I expect you at my elbow.

Well, I'm sort of a bad person to try this all out.

And I'm kind of an unfortunate bearer of this message because if you knew me, you would know that I'm actually not a very pleasant or nice person.

And I'm very hard on, there's nothing, believe it or not, I hate unanchored speculation.

And yet I find myself in the position of leading the charge and the greatest unanchored speculation in the history of crackpot thinking.

So it bothers me.

See, my method, which I can't really go into tonight, but it's very formal.

What I say is it's very easy to predict the future because who the hell can say you're wrong?

You know, it's just fire-free zone.

Predicting the past, on the other hand, is very, very difficult because it's happened.

So if you're wrong, everyone will know.

So what I have done is made a career out of predicting the past with a wave which proceeds right past the present moment into the future.

And my argument to my skeptics is my wave has correctly predicted any past moment that you can conceive of.

Therefore, there is a certain intellectual obligation to at least take seriously the contention that it predicts the part of history that has not yet undergone the formality of actually occurring, as Whitehead would say.

And, you know, under different circumstances, I would demonstrate this wave because it gets down to a very, very finely-grained argument about the vicissitudes of history and where the great changes lie.

And without that, it's a sort of arm-waving at this point.

Terence, I've just got one final question I want to ask you about this, which is that other people who tell us the end is at hand, as in placards, the end is at hand, prepare to meet thy doom, suggest that this requires some kind of special moral preparation on our part.

Now, does yours come willy-nilly, no need to get ready for it in any particular way.

Would you recommend some special kind of preparation?

Well, this is a very difficult question for me because much of what I was involved in many years ago was political activism, political struggle.

And yet, when I go to my sources on this matter, they assure me that it's a done deal and that possibly one might spend one's time reassuring other people.

But only if you felt like it.

The walls are now so high, the creote so deep, the momentum so tremendous, that I really don't think anything could swerve or divert us from what we are being drawn into.

I wasn't thinking in terms of more recycling and so on.

I was thinking in terms of moral preparation or conscious preparation.

Well, conscious preparation.

I think people should drive out and take a look at the eschaton at the end of the road of history.

What that means is psychedelic self-experimentation.

I don't know of any other way to do it.

But if you drive out to the end of the road and take a look at the eschaton and kick the tires and so forth,

then you will be able to come back here and take your place in this society and be a source of moral support and exemplary behavior for other people.

Because I think that as we approach the eschaton, remember I call history its shockwave, literally the Q forces, as engineers call them, the vibrational forces that will rip the wings off an airplane as it approaches hypersonic speed.

History is good.

That s what I meant when I said it will be a white knuckle ride.

There is an outlandish amount of vibration in the next 19 years.

It s going to look good, then bad, then worse, then good, then bad.

And if you haven't driven out to the end of the road and taken a look at what's waiting, it will just drive you nuts what the next 20 years are going to be like.

Because all the resonances of all past time are now in the close packing phase as the thing is squeezed down and the contradictions are rubbing up against each other.

Boundaries are dissolving all around us.

The Soviet Union?

Gone.

Yugoslavia?

Gone.

America is a great power?

Gone.

Good taste?

Gone.

Boundaries dissolving all around us.

This is going to happen faster and faster and faster.

And governments now, all they are doing is managing a spreading wildfire of uncontrolled catastrophes

and trying to keep us in the dark about how bad things really are.

And so it s good to go out and take a look and reassure yourself that it s there.

Can we just stop it in trouble tomorrow?

It s a possibility.

It is a possibility.

I think we could discuss it now.

Or do you have another point now?

No, we ve reached the time to open it up.

Terence, you sound to me like a psychedelic version of Karl Marx.

Well, Marx was the last great millenarian theoretician in Western civilization.

That s right.

He was convinced that history was the result of interplay of conflicting classes.

And once that conflict has been removed, history itself would cease.

And I hear a similar story, except the players are not the classes in society, but these various

forms of global problems that we have.

And it could be that it s a kind of test arranged by this attractor down the end of the road there

that s leering at us and saying, let s see if you guys can get yourselves together enough

to get around this one and show us that you can reach a higher stage of evolution.

If you don t make it, you don t survive.

If you do make it, then you go to the next step.

It s an initiation ritual.

A sort of, yes.

I shouldn t put in this kind of crazyology.

A series of hurdles to be leaped as we approach the end.

It s all kind of language.

It s not something I don t exactly express it, but it s a fun way of talking about it.

So it might not be the end.

It might just be like, you know, entering the Masons or something like that, you know.

Yes, well, it s impossible to say.

But you re right, certainly, that all of these factors are coming together.

I don t see it as class war.

I see it as a kind of universal Manichaean struggle between habit and novelty.

And, you know, habit is forever dragging novelty back down to its level.

And novelty is forever conniving new ways to escape the control of habit.

But the good news is, over vast spans of time, novelty always wins.

And what we re simply seeing is novelty crossing a particularly significant milestone in its infinite

journey outward towards self-expression.

What about all these people that say we re merely crossing from the Piscean Age to the

Aquarian Age?

And the emergence of high-speed electronic communications, et cetera, et cetera, is the typical symptom of

the Aquarian Age.

And it s high-speed communication.

I m an astrologer.

You know, and all this turbulence is because we re right at the point where we re crossing.

Well, see, I think that as we approach this eschatological object, the number of interpretations

of what it is will just proliferate exponentially.

I mean, false prophets of all sorts and thousands of variants will arise because everyone can feel

it and yet everyone has a unique perspective on it that then distorts their description of

it.

I mean, I think that all the messiahs and mystics of human history can be seen in this light.

They were, you could almost have the geometric theory of messiahhood and just say, if you

were in the big league, the Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, Manai, Mahavira league, then you just

caught a very bright reflection from the distant spinning eschaton.

And then you embodied it and became a microcosm of that distant macrocosm.

And religions are set marching by this means.

Well, then the guy parading down at Hyde Park with the sign, the only difference between him and the big

leaguers is he got a smaller scintilla of the noetic energy.

And so then with each of us, we each have a perspective on the eschaton.

And to the degree that we cultivate and fan that flame, we get an insight through the filter of our

personal circumstance, the infinite interprets itself to us.

Something like that.

So we're all little bits of noetic thought.

Fall in.

We're all carrying a tiny piece of the whole.

And at the end of time, each person will make their contribution.

Yes.

We're like moats being drawn in to this.

Leaf mulching ants.

In other words, we're all aspects impossible.

Yes, although I think God is a contaminated term.

But we're all aspects of the transcendental other.

And our deployment in three-dimensional space in time is just one aspect of its being.

And we are in the process of finding our way to a nodal point of transition into a different dimension of its self-expression.

Creativity, complexity, density of connectedness.

And one reason I love this notion, you see, is because even the positivists agree that the most densely ramified physical material known in the universe is the human neo-cortex.

So suddenly, no longer are we observers of the cosmic drama.

It turns out it was our opera all along.

And the universal drama of the production and preservation of complexity is met in us.

We represent the most precious distillation of this four, five, six billion year process of the production and the conservation of novelty.

It returns us to the center of the cosmic drama and ennobles the human condition thereby.

Well, so now there are new technical salvations being offered.

The possibilities, no one knows, well not, some people think they know, but it is assumed possible to perhaps migrate into some kind of dimension of electronic microstorage or something.

We are all going to live in a gold Iterbium supercooled cube buried a thousand feet beneath Copernicus and abandon the earth to animal life.

That is not very attractive to me.

On the other hand, I have never been downloaded into a chip, so I suppose one should not knock it until they have tried it.

But the virtual realities that I have seen have been hideously sterile and cartoon-like.

On the other hand, you know, predicting the pace of technological innovation, especially with these new technologies, is very, very tricky.

Human, as the study of neural networks, parallel arrays, they are pushing out in directions where there could be unexpected breakthroughs in the imaging of human intelligence.

Or take the cold fusion thing a couple of years ago.

It turned out not to be so, but for a moment the whole thing hung in the balance there, you see.

There could be more of this kind of thing.

No one is directing or controlling the creative energies of this species.

It is being driven by thousands of micro-units called companies, all pursuing agendas they won't discuss with anybody who hasn't signed a non-disclosure agreement.

So, God knows what they are doing out there, and they are fiddling with life and mind and intelligence and micro-dimensions and, you know, you name it.

So, given the past history of technological development, I certainly wouldn't rule out breakthroughs that could make the timetable of my scenario even seem conservative.

Even less than a miracle could, as a matter of fact, sort of turning round, push it to a new phase, like cold fusion.

Yes, or, you know, superconducting thinking machines, or any of a number of things.

So, what's going to be the future?

It's the future we're living in.

Hollywood creates it, and we have to swallow it, until something better comes along, or until we get sick enough of that system to do something about it.

Like what?

Well, the design process of human civilization has been left to Bauhaus brass with their eye on their checkbook.

That has created this international airport style of human coral reef that is absolutely abiotic and toxic.

So, art, I think here in the final moments of human history, we should push the art pedal to the floor and attempt to pour as much beauty into the human design process as we possibly can.

Too long have we wandered from the notion that the good, the true, and the beautiful are somehow inextricably linked, and modernity teaches otherwise, but modernity has failed.

Well, a revivified shamanism, which would be the culmination of this program of art that I'm suggesting.

Essentially, on one level, shamanism is the art of gaining a familiarity with death.

And this is what we must do, I think, because we've become so alienated from it.

So, part of what I talk about is a neo-archaeism, that what we are, by leaving history, we're returning to the values that preceded history.

Where there was a great de-emphasis on material culture and a great emphasis on human bonding, feelings, cognition, that sort of thing.

We have to re-empower our senses self.

We have accepted our place in a very rigid hierarchy as consumers of images, products, and ideas.

And as everything dissolves, responsibility will flow inward to the individual,

and we will be more and more held responsible for ourselves, our actions, our presentation.

And no more can we say, well, I'm white, or I'm American, or I'm, it won't work.

We're entering into a domain of such freedom that the responsibility will be contemplative.

And this is a beautiful thing.

This is what all the struggle was about, human unfoldment.

This is why all those kings were hung and all those enemies of the demon spirit turned back and defeated.

So each individual must die to be collected, reborn to the collectivity.

Yes.

That sounds right.

Yes.

Well, somehow the modalities of both must be preserved in a higher union.

This is the union of opposites, the coincidencia positorum, that Jung and alchemy is all about.

Well, I really see, I mean, now that we're onto this metaphor, what I've really been saying

here this evening is that history is an alchemical process.

This novelty that I'm talking about being conserved.

We might as well have been talking about the Sothic waters or something.

It's history is the act of calling in.

existence the perfect tool which is discovered to be the self itself but in

a sense what history is is a process of turning ourselves inside out so that the

soul becomes visibly manifest in three-dimensional space and the body

becomes an object freely commanded in the imagination you know the patristic

father Justinian taught that the resurrection body would be spiritual just

to the joy of even controversialists I might add because it made him so open to

attack but it's an incredibly modern anticipation of ourselves going into a

kind of quasi union with our technology what is it

Yates says in sailing to Byzantium the part about how I would be a thing of gold and

golden once out of nature I would be a thing of gold and gold enameling set upon

a branch to sing of what has been and what will be that is the idea that we

change ourselves into an eternal golden superconducting perfected object that

transcends death transcends space and time and has no apparent connection to our

physical images as animals it's the alchemical sublimation all alchemical

processes are like fractal anticipations of this final rendering of the stone itself

no no it is the alchemical idea is not that one goes against nature but that one a

it's it's

but it's one aids nature and catalyzes it and it's very explicit in alchemical contingent that what one does

is the alchemical idea is not that one goes against nature but that one aids nature and

catalyzes it and it's very explicit in alchemical thinking that what one does is one makes it happen

faster one uh accelerates catalyzes natural processes and so this is what we would be doing

it would essentially be uh by make it by transforming ourselves in this way we bring ever closer the the

final the final apocatastrophe um

speaks about that in life it's given out of time it's in beyond causes which seems to be a personal

not a collective thing yeah but that time the world is time it's uh has kind of but it's a different

one has stepped from the mortal coil yes plato said time is the moving image of eternity

and so eternity is is outside the wheel and that is what i mean by this higher dimension of

completeness it is eternity and all time rests within it

but if it happens in the individual then it's a property of the species ontogeny recapitulates

phylogeny and vice versa we are there are only these fractal adumbrations of the transformative

process on every level yes that's what i mean well we're past time i see thank you for your indulgence

and thank you again for your indulgence

i have to admit that after listening with you to the first tape in this four tape series from hazel

woodhouse i was a little disappointed in it i guess they kind of lost me with the long discussion

about homing pigeons but by the time they got going with the tape we just heard i thought they were

back in the best of form in particular i was taken by some things terence said about the

transcendental object at the end of time that i hadn't heard before if i understood him right

it could be anything from a comet impact to a revelation about what happens after bodily death

and that that thought has opened a whole new door for me it isn't all that difficult for me to

envision what our planetary state of mind would be if we knew that a comet impact was imminent

but what if just what if every human on the planet suddenly knew with absolute certainty exactly

what is going to happen to them after their body dies now if you already have a preconceived idea of

what that means try to put it aside for a moment and think about having absolutely no doubt at all

about the revelation that you and everyone else on the planet just had about life and death

as terence said that would definitely qualify as a world condensing event now i know that i'm not

talking to everybody here in the salon right now but i'm sure that there are a few others besides myself

who've experienced one of those world condensing events for me two of them came during ayahuasca

ceremonies and there have been others but if you've been there you know what i'm talking about

unfortunately such experiences are truly ineffable you know they they can't be put into human words

but what you can take away from these experiences rare though they are is an absolute certainty that

in the end everything is just going to turn out just fine i can't even tell you why i feel this way but

we are really getting close to something completely new and unexpected in the realm of consciousness

at least that's my hunch now if you think back to where terence was just now talking about a

revivified shamanism or archaic revival and the form of human consciousness back before what we now

think of as human history well just stop for a moment and consider the possibility even if it's

only a very remote possibility but what if as the yuga cycle says there once truly was a great golden age

and that we are finally on our way back up to do it again well if that actually is the case

then what terence is talking about isn't just some form of primitive live in the jungle existence

if he's talking about some form of consciousness that either can exist or maybe even once did exist

in some past age well then finally i think i'm beginning to understand what he means by an archaic

revival i guess i'm maybe a a little slow on this but uh reading terence for me is sometimes like

uh when i read emerson they they both seem to make sense to me but i find it difficult to explain

to somebody else what they're saying i guess i'm rambling now so i better wrap this up

but one last thing about the trialogue we just heard if you remember at one point terence mckenna put

down on cold fusion technology as being uh not real or a hoax or something and i think it's important

to note that while that was a case presented by the mainstream media back in 1993 the facts since then

have borne out the fact that this is a very real technology and one that is now being widely

investigated in many places around the world so i guess that's the uh at least one thing terence would

have been happy to learn had he stuck around a while longer okay now how about a little podcasting news

the other day i was listening to kmo's sea realm podcast and heard him read an email from two of

the salonters who i met at burning man and in it they told him a shared vision they had for a moment

on the playa i remember them telling me about that just before one of the playa logs and it sounded like

one of those extremely rare experiences that lets you know that we haven't even seen the tip of the

consciousness iceberg yet and i noticed that the burning man stories camo was relaying came in

basically two flavors the first time burner experience and the somewhat jaded long time burner experience

right now i've been there just enough times to begin developing a somewhat jaded edge about that event

but i'm still new enough to the experience that i'll probably go back a few more times

in a few weeks i'll be playing dale pendle's plialogue in which he discusses the changes that

have taken place at burning man in the last few years in fact dale has even written a follow-up essay

on the topic and i think you'll find the entire discussion quite interesting even if you've never even

been to an event like that another news item is that thanks to sandor and a helper or two there is now a

psychedelic salon forum on the grow report dot org and if you go to that site and click on the link

for the forums you'll find quite a wide range of discussions taking place all of the podcasters on

the cannabis podcast network have their own forums there and i try to stop by there a couple times each

week maybe i'll catch you in their chat room one day actually uh i tried the chat feature which i think

is coming from dopefiend.co.uk which is the network's home and i found queer ninja and wink in there to

chat with for a bit and they tell me that around two o'clock saturday pacific time is when a bunch

of people from the eu are in the chat room there so i might try to stop by and catch some of you there

too and while i'm talking about dopefiend.co.uk i should mention that in just two more days

they're going to be adding yet another program to their already stellar lineup of podcasts

i think that the program is going to be called bb's lounge or something like that but it

it'll definitely feature black beauty the lovely voiced lady from down under who you can already

hear in various places on the network but now she'll have her very own program and we're all

looking forward to that so welcome black beauty it's good to have you here with us if you've been to

the psychedelicsalon.org blog recently you'll probably notice that on the home page i'm only

showing the complete contents of the most recent post the main reason for this is to keep google

from thinking we're trying to cheat on them by having two copies of all the posts online so

now after that first post you'll have to click on the continue reading link or just click on the

title of the post and you'll be taken to the full article on its own page now realize this may confuse you

at first because it looks like the download links don't work so i'll try to figure out a hack that'll

make it a little bit more clear and in case you haven't visited that blog to view the program notes

for these podcasts you might want to stop by and check out some of the sidebar links that'll take you to

all kinds of current news topics that i suspect you'll be interested in and the comments section under

each of these podcast listings now is starting to grow too and some very interesting discussions going on

there when i get back to podcasting some of the ply logs we recorded at burning man this year i'll

also be talking more about this year's event but right now i want to bring you up to date on three

intrepid slaughters who you last heard of as they left the uk and made their way to black rock city

well martin and his two traveling companions spent some time hanging out with us and talking about

their travel plans which were quite ambitious i might add and so now it's uh exciting for me to

yesterday have received an email from martin part of which i'll read for you right now lorenzo it was good

seeing you at the burn being there really blew me away it was bigger better and much more profound

than i expected but most of all the presence of real magic after the burn we flew down to lima and we've

now spent three weeks traveling around the andes the highlight so far is clearly cusco once the center

of the inca empire this beautiful city is surrounded by old ruins and is also an obligatory stop on the

way to machu picchu at the moment there's a real buzz happening here shamanism is everywhere with both

ayahuasca and san pedro fully legal and a huge western interest you see it and hear it all over the place

there's loads of companies organizing treks up to and around machu picchu they've been doing this for

decades but now there's something else on the menu psychedelics and it's not cheap kicks it seems to be

done with responsibility and integrity we had the opportunity to do a san pedro session up in the hills

overlooking cusco a truly amazing day with this gentle and bright plant ally the rocks came alive and

at points in the ruins the energy became so strong and intense that it was almost overwhelming well

you know martin you're bringing back memory of a time i had down at the ruins in palenque under similar

circumstances and what you say about the energy is is really amazing you can actually see it

continuing with this email now tonight we're off to bolivia where we've got just over two weeks of

traveling before we've got to make our way back up to peru and out into the amazon for our six week

ayahuasca retreat i'm very excited but also a bit nervous i've been speaking to lots of people here

with lots of experience and i know that this is sure no walk in the park real hard work with real issues

but also i hope euphoric ecstasy i hope everything is well with you and mary c send my love to her and

everyone else i had the pleasure to meet on the playa i'll keep you posted lots of love and light martin

well martin we'll be waiting for your next report and if you get a chance to post some pictures of

your travels please let me know and i'll pass the link on to your friends here in the psychedelic salon

as you'll hear a few podcasts from now i've got some mixed emotions about the burning man festival

but there is one thing that became very clear to me this year no matter what i think about the

festival or how it's changing the real point of the event at least for me is to reunite with old

friends and to make some connections with new ones i have to admit that i was really blown away at how

many people came up to mary c and me at the burn this year and said that they were regulars here in

the salon it's so good to be able to put some faces to the names that i've read in emails i can't

say that i've got all of your names and faces correctly sorted out but i can tell you that your faces are

permanently etched in my mind so even though i might be a little grumpy about burning man right now

i'll most likely return again next year just to be able to spend some more time with brooke and la

john darren mark all the rest of the wonderful people in the pod cluster it really felt like family and

uh i want to feel that way again so there's a good chance i'll be back again next year but to be honest

i'm uh also hoping that john hannah will produce another mind states conference before then so

i can get back together with all of you uh without so much dust in the air

gosh here i go on about burning man again it just won't let me alone today

well before i go i want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the psychedelic salon

are protected under the creative commons attribution non-commercial share like 2.5 license

and if you have any questions about that just click the creative commons link at the bottom of

the psychedelic salon webpage which is at psychedelicsalon.org and if you have any questions comments

complaints or suggestions about these podcasts well just send them to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com

and i guess i should mention that matrixmasters.com is also my personal website i know that some of you

might have become a little confused and clicking around on the psychedelicsalon.org blog because you

often wind up on matrixmasters.com now that's because before i started podcasting the matrix

masters site was where i spent most of my online time but since i started doing these podcasts i

really haven't added a lot of new material to that site however many of my essays are there along with

a brief resume or cv for those who are interested in those kind of things and also i want to thank

jacques cordell and wells my friends who make music under the name chateau hayuk thanks again for the

use of your music here in the salon you guys really appreciate it and for now this is lorenzo

signing off from cyberdelic space be well my friends greetings from cyberdelic space this is lorenzo and

i'm your host here in the psychedelic salon so how's it going for you today personally i've had a hard

time getting going this week if you've been following these podcasts for the last couple

of months you'll probably remember that sometime in june i started whining about how much work it

was taking to get ready for burning man and then after i got back i complained that i was out of

energy and had to recover from burning man well now it's october and i seem to have run out of excuses

so it looks like my lack of get up and go is primarily due to the aging process coupled with my

own inherent lethargy which can make things difficult to get up the energy once in a while

but then i check my email and find it full of comments suggestions and thank yous from so many

of our fellow salonners that my energy level shoots back up to the max and well here we go again getting

ready to listen to the end of the hazelwood house trialog and again today's program will be a bit longer

than the one hour i like to keep them to and so i want to be sure to get my thank yous in before you

get lost in the thicket of thoughts that our merry trialoggers create and in addition to ralph rupert

terence bruce and chateau hayuk whose music you hear in the background right now i also want to thank

three people whose financial donations to the salon have been significant so thank you very much elliot k

jim and my fellow grandfather robert oh and how's your little granddaughter doing robert i'm sure she's

bringing you as much joy as my grandchildren are bringing me they really make my life worthwhile and

i'll bet it's the same with you anyway uh thank you all for your support of these podcasts i couldn't

do it without all of your help love and support and it's deeply appreciated well for today's program

we'll be picking up where we last left the hazelwood house trialog that was held between rupert sheldrake

terence mckenna and ralph abraham back in 1993 and we'll begin with ralph's tale that he calls fractals

on my mind now as i've been listening to these trialogues with you over the past couple of years

i've come to expect to hear new insights about our physical world coming from rupert and over-the-edge

metaphysical ideas coming from terence but uh throughout them all it's been ralph who quite

often provides the steadiness or ballast or rudder or whatever you want to call it that gets their

cargo of new ideas safely ashore you know i've got a good friend like that myself and believe me he's

saved me from a lot of embarrassment on more than one occasion by forcing me to think through some

outlandish statement that i'm about to make and his advice is often the first i seek because i know

he won't cut me any intellectual slack in the realms we all seem to enjoy talking about it it really

pays big dividends to have a well-grounded friend covering your back and that's one of the roles i see

ralph playing here and that is sort of the wise elder guiding a couple of precocious young friends

so it was uh kind of interesting for me that uh in the talk we're about to hear i guess maybe about

10 minutes into it is when rupert points out the fact that we're actually uh listening to a lecture

on mathematics in his tale of fractals well i couldn't believe it at first so i went back and

listened to ralph's talk again from the beginning and was blown away when i began to think of myself

sitting in a college classroom and listening to a teacher who could actually inspire me to

dig deeper into the beauty of mathematics in order to better understand how math directly impacts my

everyday thinking even my metaphysical thinking and by the way my undergraduate degree is in electrical

engineering so i had a lot of math along the way but never was i taught by a poet who also happened to

be a mathematician just listen with me right now and i think you'll hear what i mean

trap tools on my mind an epic in four parts part one the sandy beach the three boys put on their

wellies they ran down the field they swung on the swain they rolled down the corn circle

they came to the river they sat on the edge dangling their feet over the stream

look said roof a sandy beach sure enough they saw there was no tiny beach of sand

terence said the land reaches down into the water and rupert said no the water reaches up into the land

well then it's both water and sand it's the sandy beach it's a fractal object

they stood then they walked in the stream

look said turns it circles to the left

no said rupert it circles to the right it's turbulent flow said ralph it's a mathematical object

it's chaos on the other side of the stream there was no beach there was a concrete wall

it was not a practical object rupert said

it's a straight line terence said it's a bow house excrescent of post-linguistic humanoids

thinking of peanut butter sandwiches then they walked back up the slope rupert said nature has given

us a lesson nature is our teacher and we have learned about the sandy beach the sun had set

ralph pointed to the sky look he said they looked and saw there was a silver stripe in the sky shining

there they hadn't noticed it before it girdled the entire celestial vault it sprung from two legs to the

south that way they saw that uh it's two legs pierced the zodiacal belt it sprung across the mid heaven going

somewhere near the polar constellations rupert said i think those constellations over there those are all

watery that's the pisces the fish this is biology projected on the sky parents said the the chaldean

astrologers call that the celestial sea and and ralph said it's it's a sandy beach in the sky

the group said father sky is our teacher too

ralph said well there's a sphere above the sky with the sandy beach in it and a kind of astral projection

imprints its shadow on the celestial sphere and on the terrestrial disc as well

they went back to the kitchen and tugged off their wellies

and looked for peanut butter in the fridge part one the sandy beach

uh part two is is called uh

two roads diverged in a yellow wood

uh bird flight

so we have to recall that pigeons live in a loft and the loft radiates the field throughout the

atmosphere of the planet earth all the way around and this is a field of intuitive flying instruction

wherever a pigeon might be released you can consult its intuition in its heart and see

a snapshot of itself a moment later in a certain direction and by following itself it gets the

instruction to fly in a certain direction which even though it's not a straight line will eventually

lead back to the loft which is the attractor of the dynamical system or intuitive field of directions

and uh we'll assume this for the sake of discussion this is the morphogenetic field of the loft and uh

now we have to put ourselves in the position of someone reading rupert's book soon when it's published and trying to do the experiment with the movable loft

so this first we dispose of uh monotheism leave that behind now we have two lofts the two lofts each

radiates morphogenetic field instructions wherever the pigeon might be that's the fixed loft at home and

the movable one just taken off the truck or out of the boat or whatever it is the pigeon has spent time

in each loft and then trained and feels the impulse of morphogenetic field of each in a congo combination

averaged by mathematical functions built into the heart of the bird the result is that after flying

the bird will arrive either at the fixed loft or at the movable loft depending on where it starts

this is sort of a mathematical fact but i hope that experimentalists will try this out that would mean

training a whole bunch of pigeons in the same fixed loft in the same movable loft and then releasing

not all of them a certain proportion of them from different locations sort of neighboring in a region

and later on marking the starting points in that region with the color red for all the starting points of

birds that flew to the fixed loft and green for all the birds that ended up in the movable loft then we

end up with this region is painted park red and part

So these colored regions in dynamical systems theory are called basins.

The basins might be particularly important if you were of the gambling sort and were

betting on a certain pigeon whether it would go to the one loft or the other.

You could certainly win your bet if you knew this colored map from successive experiments

with the same two lofts as lots of birds.

Yes, I am talking about you and so it's important to know where the green and red regions are

and it could be all red over there sort of toward the home loft which is in the south and all

green over there for the movable loft which is in the north but it could be much more complicated

because during flight there are all these hills you have to go around and there are certain

nests of sparrowhawks that have to be avoided by a wide detour and one possibility is that

between the red and the green regions there is a sharp line like that Bauhaus concrete wall

on the other side of the river.

And another possibility is that the red and green have been stirred and mixed like colors on this

carpet into a pattern with the boundary as a practical object as a sandy beach.

A sandy beach in the multi-genetic field so that the separation between the red and green which

might mean life and death might be the red eschaton and the green eschaton is a fractal and that means

that whatever you would be in the supposed boundary like wherever you are on the sandy beach if you

are a pinhead you might be either in water or on land and even the tiniest puff of wind could blow you from

land to water or vice versa so unless it was an entirely windless day you couldn't even predict whether you're

going to end up in the home roost or the movable roost in life or death in the good or the bad eschaton it's

the fractal boundary the sandy beach which destroys determinism the Milky Way is as a mythological object

is Chama is the early Assyrian goddess of chaos and her mate Apsu are those two branches of rivers which is

the projection of the Tigris and the Euphrates the identification of chaos and Milky Way and Chama and

indeterminacy and the creative source of all form is traditional at least for six thousand years I

didn't make up this fable that's the end of part two two roads diverge in the yellow wood these two roads are

the red and green you might as well toss a coin because you can't get where you're going on purpose

that's down at the river and uh that's the homing pigeons we're pigeons and the Eschaton is our home

Terence would say and uh now let's take a deep breath we've survived two lessons of mathematics without the

despicable frightening word being mentioned and uh now on to apply the concepts in the context of a single

individual mind so we have in mind different parts which are somehow dynamical objects where there's a

cycling about or roving over that repeats a pattern or follows a track for a long time until we get out of that track into

another one this could be an entire paradigm whatever that is let's say a paradigm is a bunch of basins like

instead of the red and the green we could have a hundred different colors all of them kind of mixed up

practically like this rug and each of these colored regions might be

a group of basins but between the basins are thicker boundaries

that make it more difficult to go through reflect you from the boundary so that it takes a bigger

perturbation in the world of thought in order to change that we could call them paradigms or

personalities or cubby holes in the mind for example when language came over us i don't mean 25 000 years

ago well this process started 25 000 years ago but in the in the history of a single individual

then at the age of one or two or three or something when speech is beginning what was going on before that

presumably that was what everyone was doing before speech came all together if there ever was such a

time and that childhood paradigm is not vaporized and replaced when the linguistic phase arrives instead

it's like covered over and it just makes another one of these bases so that's an example of we could call it

multiple personality and these regions in the mind um normally should be uh the boundaries should be

fractal that is to say more like the sandy beach than like the bauhaus concrete wall in the case

that some training influence creates instead of the natural sandy beach a concrete wall then

it becomes very difficult to get from one to another when there would be fractal beaches everywhere

then the slightest perturbation a strange idea coming on the radio would bop you just that millimeter

sorry fraction of an inch to get from the water to the sand from the one paradigm to another in

in a normal day in the life with a lot of perturbations one would rapidly be visiting them all of the

different regions or multiple personalities making up the south so noise in the environment is sufficient to

integrate the personality but if there are iron curtains here and there then it's it takes a very

big perturbation to get out of one paradigm into another and then you would see an individual manifesting

the multiple uh personality syndrome so since this difficulty at this in this model which is inspired

by kurt levin the founder of social psychology he had the kind of mathematical model for a mind uh

individual or social that uh the basis of his invention of social psychology in this model the

healthier state has these sandy beaches and the bases the colors are all um mixed up

the pathological state has too much order like after toilet training or something with these concrete walls

iron curtains so these iron curtains i call them this chaos so replacing the order disorder binary with

this chaos and chaos binary because we need more sandy beaches so i wouldn't call this as they do

the multiple personality disorder i call it the multiple personality disorder i call it the multiple personality dis chaos

so that's a sandy beach model of a mind which if we were into clinical psychology we could try developing

inventing inventing a therapeutic strategy to increase chaos uh for example visiting the river listening to the

sound or walking in nature as opposed to listening to the radio and watching the tv

watching tv would be good if they somehow put word song on there chanting um so well there are many applications of

this um that i will go into now um i'll just mention a possible application we could come back to

some day just you know to point uh to some possibilities for individual psychology before i go on to

the fourth and final lap of this course and this has to do with the question

why do people believe in ufos or why do people want to believe in uh corn circles or this is in in quite

independent of whether ufos are real or imaginary it hardly matters and not not to put down ufos and uh why

they would want to believe in god or monotheism or there is one god and and so on i think that the uh

multiple personality this chaos phenomenon is pretty universal in our culture and there are heavily walled

off regions walls were built at different stages in in life and and uh

um the the the the child part was sealed when there was uh an authoritarian trustworthy emotional

environment that had the illusion of absolute truth or something so that part is sitting there

yearning for some validation from from the outside world something like that would uh if you

wanted to wanted to try experiments or you could write a book recommending experiments in social

psychology in which uh the tendency of people to believe in god you could try to affect it by playing

music music therapy for dis chaotic religious belief

and in case of success then restore pantheism which is maybe badly needed at this time

instead of going on with applications uh

to fractals in the individual mind

i'd like to just uh go on to the collective mind to our social sphere

and uh in this fourth and final part and then i'll end with a couple of questions for you guys

based on this idea well i wouldn't have thought of this exactly but uh i think parents suggested that i

was guilty of making a mathematical model for monogamy and since that's true i might as well share it with you

the business and and this is it in fact we we are there so this is uh

about uh the sandy beach in the collective mind and well we could get to this collective mind stepwise

as in the uh Zhuangzi one from nothing comes one and then two and then three he says

after three any mathematician can make infinity so we've got one now we can just step to two and

what what would be then the application of the sandy beach model to a social system consisting of two

people now you have the two people and there's some kind of mathematical model for the psyche not to be

taken too seriously but this is just what psychology does makes uh kurt levine type models for the psyche

and now you've got like two of them and then they start talking to each other uh touching cooking and

eating together or something like that and then these two systems are coupled in to one and of course

the behavior of the coupled system is much more complicated than the behavior of the parts and the

behavior of the coupled up complex system can be predicted or even guessed at from the full knowledge of

behavior of the two parts and besides you would only know one of the parts if you were involved in this

to a degree um this system then also has this dynamical system i mean the model is not the people

and in the model this complex system has uh attractors that is say roost lofts the movable loft the fixed

loft and so on and the bases colored red green and all the other things and the boundaries in between

either iron curtains or sandy beaches and i suppose that

um monogamy means a contract uh or behavioral ethic phenomenon in which some of the boundaries between

the parts are heavily walled off so that it is as a matter of fact a situation unstable situation of

this chaos i'm not saying that order is always bad but uh cosmos and chaos just have to be balanced

i wouldn't elevate uh payoff above the cosmos or vice versa but systems probably could be healthy they

need a certain balance and understanding uh monogamy as an iron curtain then to make it stable would

require a balancing chaos elsewhere something that's the idea otherwise this multiple personality that's

the system of the two people would have the multiple personality this chaos and out of balance uh situation

in the direction of order which like the concrete wall doing its best to hold up the bank for life is uh

highly unstable that's one application then i won't go into details but considering two nations instead of two

individuals one also gets a model of this sort in which the stability of the complex system would require

adequate balance of chaos and order so those are the four parts and uh

uh let me just end with these uh questions for group and care so rupert this model suggests that you have

to consider experiments with multiple loss and even with a single law have to consider experiments with multiple

pigeons and uh anyway that's a consequence of your idea your model of what is going on and so i wonder what

what you think the results maybe you already know of results of this uh that have been tried it could uh for the uh ancient

egyptian government of course mean the success or failure in the war with the pixels and uh

for terence i think um i just wonder what would this do to your idea to consider

uh multiple attractors at the end of time two three or more eschatons nothing in what you said seem to me

prohibited this other than a misplaced iron curtain of the monotheistic type that perhaps filtered the uh

uh the speech of the mushroom that came through your lips i see there you have it

can i just try and summarize ralph what i think you said because i'm not sure i've got it okay

one element seems to be that personalities and of course social relationships and international relations

and the behavior of different groups of pigeons fall into different basins and we can visualize that

like being a landscape with different values in it and um so sometimes in a particular region

of the ball will roll down in particular values another region of rolling from another one and

each of these basins represents a different kind of sub personality um within a marriage or a relationship

then each of the basins represents what we normally call the personality each of which has sub-personalities

within it um these are the different basins and you seem to be pointing out that personalities are

made up of different sub-personalities a very fashionable view everybody's talking about sub-personalities

James Hillman says the polytheistic psychology where you have all the different dogs and goddesses

not only representing the archetypes that we all go through all these different ones

we're possessed by different gods or goddesses at different times and we move from one to another

and we're not a single personality with different functions but we're a kind of emotion of all these

different personalities then there's the multiple personality craze in America where people are

fascinated not just by serial killers but by people with multiple personalities and people do

both you know multiple personalities with serial killers um anyway there's a fascination with multiple

personality there's the hillman thing with the computer model Minsky and the MIT um multiple module

Daniel Dennett the materialist's master has the multiple graph theory of consciousness so everywhere

we find these multiple models of which yours is one and all of them seem to be saying that to get

away from monotheism which is reflected in psychology that by the idea of a central ego a dominating

ego you've got to get away from that too to these more uh democratic models where you have

grinded grassroots democracy all these different personalities that seems to be one drift in what

you're saying and that's another one discussion is whether or not a polytheistic model is possible

or whether indeed there have been many because in India which is frequently called polytheistic and you

have many gods but you have all through all Indian traditions the idea of some state beyond all this

Brahman or Atman and and in every system where you actually have polytheism you have some sense of a

undifferentiated unity as well so that's one point to discuss the second point you'll seem to be making

is that the boundary between these different basins is not a straight line or a rigid wall but rather a

fractal boundary namely one that has many spins and outs and curves and filigrees and patterns and therefore

moving with that kind of boundary moving from one to the other is very easy because you never quite know

where you are and you could cross the boundary without realizing it whereas if it's a rigid wall

it's difficult to get from one to the other is this so correct right um well i'm not sure which points to take up first i think i'll lead pigeons aside

um but i think that the idea of the plurality of models i mean i'm sure you're right terence's model is

monotheistic in that he has a single eschaton um and this takes us immediately to the plurality

into the polytheism versus monotheism argument my view of polytheism is that polytheism in all its

actual functional forms even in its catholic form catholicism is in a sense a kind of polytheism

you have all the angels you have all the saints you go into the cathedral there's all those side

chapels and shrines it's just like a henry temple you go into a henry temple there's the goddess of this

then there's the god of the planets the god planet gods and then the biggest goddess and this local god

and then there's ganesh and then there's various other gods and that there'll be a central shrine

so shiva or bishmi which would represent the central unifying principle so most forms of polytheism are

not radical polytheism they're a thoroughness with some however vaguely defined overarching unity behind

so the first point is are you denying an overarching unity no no a radical polytheism my uh i see i think

my main message is what you described as the second point it has to do with the rigidity of boundaries

in between i think that everybody uh would agree that there's plurality in uh in religion in life in the

mind in the stream in the sky and and so on and uh it i think it's more important the rigidity of the

boundaries in between do you worship in the shiva temple and then you go to ram is that okay or

uh you do you have to be faithful to one and never admit the existence of others and so on it's more the

denial of what obviously children seems to exist that brings about a disintegration of the personality

through excessively rigid boundaries rather than in fact our boundaries between so it's easy to go

from one to the other yes they're porous to the point of i mean when you're in the stream it's much

more watery than when you're on land but the job of getting into the stream doesn't really have a

shock of cold water in it because it's like a permeable membrane i guess between basins and uh i think

in this religious or mythological context it's appropriate to think of shiva and uh concepts of

that sort of attractors and then there's multiple attractors everybody knows considering the population

of the planet to all times at large and there's zillions of attractors and some people have visited one

and other people have visited two or three and and so on and this uh openness i guess i would say

to all attractors is some kind of prerequisite for stability for the longevity of the culture or the

health of an individual and this idea is based on the cosmology in which the stream has the same

morphology as the heavens which has the same morphology as some abstract mathematical object

therefore under the ambience of of this idea our experience of nature is that these rigid walls are

very uh unstable but they're not that unstable if you look at nature if you look at a plant for example

there's little membranes around its leaves and although they have invagination stenature and the

air can go in the surface of our skin has pores in it and is not absolutely smooth but nevertheless

these are clear functional boundaries and everywhere you look in biology you find clear functional

boundaries there's a cell membrane around each cell which may have within the lipid structure the fatty

structure some kind of fractal nature but it's not an infinite or poundable boundary it has a it's

pandable to a point well it'll have little holes and it was pumps which are designed for particular

things in the environment so the uh permeability is as it were structured in in the way that's rigidly

connected with that species but uh if these holes were plugged up with uh chewed down or or or or something

then of course the cell would instantly die but boundaries you're you're you're not denying the importance

of boundaries of course your whole model is based on boundaries isn't it that's right it has to do with

their crookedness and their crookedness is your mathematical model for their family abilities

yes okay we've got it straight now but i want to hear how to prove how it is

yes well uh it seems i think the hay fever medication must be cutting in it seems extraordinarily arcane

uh nature is fractal and this is the new discovery and it's a very powerful insight but it doesn't wipe out

some of the previous accomplishments uh i'm thinking of all the work that was done to show that it's also

hierarchical so without tossing the baby out with the bath water it might be better to say

it's fractal and hierarchical so that uh in the case of your suggestion to me that the eschaton could be many

i think the eschaton is defined as one and so the the many that you're suggesting are sort of subsets of

the approach and then what i'm hearing is that because of the interdimensionality of the fractal the boundary

transition is uh it's as philo judaeus said of the more perfect logos you can never tell the moment when it

crosses over from being heard to be seen that's another one of these fractal boundaries that you're talking about

well if if that were all there were to say about it then no boundary would be defined or noticed as such

so we're sort of back to whitehead's notion of certain stubborn facts that are i suppose like raisins of

resistance embedded in this fractal ocean of infinite permeability um i don't have any problem with this

um but nevertheless i think above all these cycles boundaries membrane there is ultimately a frame

that is all inclusive and defined as far as my you know whether this is simply because i can find some

form of monotheism on the side possibly the form that i've probably fallen under the sway of is some

kind of neoplatonic pyramid of ever-ascending abstract hypostatizations that lead into the one

i mean if what we mean by the eschaton is the absence of boundaries then what we're saying is that the

fractalization of reality occurs ultimately on such fine scale that from the point of view of the perceiver

the boundary has dissolved completely or the boundary and the thing bound have become so homogenized

that it no longer makes sense to speak of boundary and medium you can only speak of this um

I picture it as a kind of extremely marbleized liquid or surface where every domain can be found to be lying next to a mutually exclusive other domain and they're sort of like the kinds of diagrams that you get when you carry out four color mapping problems to fourth and fifth stages of resolution.

Then you have these extraordinarily complicated structures where every point lies next to the boundary that separates it from points that have been somehow defined as others.

I'm not sure that we have no disagreement here.

Well, we do.

What is it?

Well, I think what we've got here in your description is a speculation built upon a speculation built upon a speculation and coming eventually from some kind of absolute and pure faith.

My usual man faith.

The one to Plotinus was something that you could explore toward to not actually arrive at.

So we have to understand then on the testimony of those early experts that one is an article of faith in our experience.

Even the best traveling shaman has only been so far.

And the assumption of one beyond that is, as a matter of fact, pure, faithful monotheism at its best.

It's even called the one.

God is called the one to make sure that you don't think perhaps is two.

Now, I agree with your idea that the cosmos is hierarchical.

That's fine with me.

And even I don't care if it has a finite number of layers or an infinite number.

But however far you would go that the wildest shaman has traveled has seen only another image, maybe more complex, of what we see in ordinary reality and nature.

And that is, there are multiple basins.

There are fractal boundaries.

There are many possibilities.

There are different regions.

The complexity where harmony is hierarchically organized, we have never got to the top.

Therefore, to say it's one or it's two or it's three could only be an article of faith.

It cannot be any kind of extrapolation from observation, normal or arcane observation.

We're talking about pure faith here.

When you get to the top frame, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't have two basins, and they're separated by a fractal.

And that means that the shaman who comes back and says he knows which one it is, is lying.

Well, my understanding of fractals is that they are a kind of homogenization of levels, not present, domains, distance.

And that, in fact, the idea is if you have a sufficient sample of the fractal, not very large, you can, in fact, extrapolate the contours of the entire system.

So that it isn't necessary to send a shaman or a mathematician for a total overview, that the sample can be, isn't this what the cosmological principle is, that based on local measurement and local physics, it is allowed to extrapolate?

There's another monotheistic religion, which is yours in reverse, which says instead of an eschaton, it's got a birth at the beginning.

Without an article of faith, you can't get a cosmological principle.

We don't have any evidence from the boundaries of space.

Well, isn't the idea that fractals are a kind of holographic plan, that the pattern recurs on many, many levels,

but it's always the same pattern.

So if you have ten levels and you know the pattern on two through seven, you know the pattern on one, eight, nine, and ten.

No, few fractals in nature have that property, which is a special property of special fractals, which are self-similar fractals,

which are, as it were, like integers within the field of all real numbers.

They are exceptional, self-similar fractals, mostly.

It just means you have the two basins, red and green, and their boundary is kind of stirred up so that it has the following property.

Wherever you are in it, you're within one millimeter of each side, or even a tenth of a millimeter of each side.

Like in a map.

Like in a cantor set.

Uh-huh.

Well, I guess I somehow have limited my marble building to the use of self-similar...

Just like Pythagoras.

Is this so terrible?

I'm not sure if we allowed you self-similarity in the eschaton, if that would still establish everyone's satisfaction.

There's only one.

Well, in my model of the eschaton, it is, at the mathematical level, it is self-similar.

Well, there's this...

Let me tell you about the Wada principle.

If you had three basins, fractally entwined, then not only, wherever you are in the sandy beach, you're within one millimeter of the red and green, but the yellow one is there also.

That means, if you travel as a shaman, and then you see this pattern at the end of time, if there would be any jitter in your travel, any blur in your vision, anything slightly human remaining in your travel,

then you would see it as one, even though it isn't.

You just mistakenly see it as a blur of the three colors into a kind of a gray eschaton.

Well, in some circles, this is known as the mystery of the Holy Trinity.

The theological attempts to deal with this problem have led to a variety of models where you have the idea that the ultimate is not an undifferentiated unity,

but rather a pattern of relationships, which, in the Chinese model, you have the yin and the yang,

you have the kind of fractal model between them, and the circle containing the two is the whole that unifies them.

And in the model of the Holy Trinity, there's a lot of different ways of dealing with it,

but one way is the Father is the source of the Word and the Spirit.

And the Word is the primary model, is the spoken Word.

The Spirit is the breath on which you speak the Word.

You breathe out, and as you speak, the Word can happen.

Of course, the spoken Word, not the written Word.

And this, as Jill would tell us, is a pattern of vibrations with harmonics and so on.

It's probably some kind of fractal pattern in time.

And it would be hard to say which is the breath and which is the sound,

and how you can separate the vibration from the sound and so on.

There would seem to be the kind of model in another very different form that you have in mind.

But the principle of unity is not there so much.

It's partly, I suppose, a kind of experience people report,

but it's also the sense that all these things are related or hold together.

The unity comes from the sense of interrelationship,

rather than perceiving some kind of undifferentiated sphere.

Because all these models of an ultimate unity are models of a relationship with it,

which, you know, something holds them together.

Now, your model seems to be similar,

because the hidden agenda behind your model

is that, although these fractals set these boundaries,

and although you can have any number of boundaries,

and although you can't see unity within these boundaries,

the hidden unity behind all this is the equation governing the fractals.

And for mathematicians, the equation governing the fractals,

because, you see, as a mathematical object,

mathematicians have this representation.

You can look on a computer screen for fractal patterns,

but behind that fractal pattern is a program,

and behind that program is an equation.

And when it comes to equations,

mathematicians would certainly admit there can be many different equations,

many mathematical functions.

But for this given fractal pattern,

there's presumably one equation governing it,

and that contains different elements,

but they're related together by the equals sign of the equation,

and by the whole structure of the equation

as a kind of unity containing diversity,

as a mathematical object,

which, for most mathematicians,

exists in some kind of platonic realm

beyond space and time.

Even if this platonic realm is only in the imagination of mathematicians,

there's some kind of hidden unity

containing the diversity

that generates this entire thing you've been talking about.

So I would say unity is implicit

in any mathematical model,

in the hidden mathematical object

behind the manifested pattern.

Well, that's true,

but it still makes a difference

if you fly to the home boost

where your mate is,

or you fly to the mobile loft

where there's just this army captain

waiting to give you your food.

I think that my point is not so much

about the multiplicity or unity.

I agree that everything is unified in one thing,

at least the better if it is.

The point is more about the boundaries,

that if you have the dynamical system

with the different basins,

and they have factual boundaries

with the water property,

then, as a matter of fact,

no matter how you perceive it,

no matter what experiment you do,

you will perceive unity.

When you don't perceive unity

is in the pathological case

when you have the iron curtains.

If you have iron curtains,

then unity essentially has been defeated

by a disease of this chaos.

And, therefore, when we see this

in nature, in history,

in social systems,

and in ourselves,

we have to beware

about these iron curtains

because they create, as it were,

an unnecessarily multiple situation,

which is the multiple personality syndrome,

which is a real problem

for some people

and is a problem to some extent

for all people.

As we have, for example, here,

expressed a yearning

for a peaceful state beyond language,

then I'm calling that

one of these boundaries.

And if you practice chanting,

meditation, and so on,

then you are intentionally increasing

the fractality of the boundary

and, therefore,

the integration of the parts

into unity.

If unity is your goal,

then you have to examine

the fractal width

of all your boundaries

and die against things

that are too thin.

So how do you fractalize

your boundaries?

Can you give a personal example?

Well,

in the emerging science

of neural nets,

this is called annealing.

one thing you can do

is take a psychedelic.

Another thing you can do

is go to a different culture,

which is really, really different

and stay there for seven years

on a farm or something.

And,

um,

Just need to do a lot.

Well,

if you have,

Thanks for courage,

have a mate

of any gender,

then you're certainly

in a more chaotic situation

than,

but these

two-person units

do definitely have diseases.

We know that.

And a few of them survive.

And I'm making a suggestion here

as to what's the trouble,

which might not be validated

by further study,

but to the degree that it was,

it would suggest a strategy,

a kind of a therapeutic technique.

And people are tying out,

by the way,

this idea

for therapy

in relationships.

Can you give an example

of how it would work

in the therapy

in a relationship?

The fractalization

of boundaries.

not in the model,

but I mean

in a kind of therapeutic

personal way.

Well,

people,

um,

first of all,

there's a diagnostic phase

in which the therapist

is trained in chaos theory

instead of Freudian theory.

And

when a boundary

has been detected

with a pathologically

low dimension

or thickness,

then

a therapy

has to be devised

specially for it

and that would

consist of some

carefully,

some safeguarded

experiments

in the

violation of the boundary

and the mixing

of the boundaries.

One

common strategy

involves

play in a sandbox.

You've seen this.

Therapist's office

has all these toys

that returns

to a pre-verbal

mode of expression

and,

well,

people are clever

at therapies.

I'm not a therapist,

but I think that

an advance in theory

is helpful

in devising therapies.

what's happening

with this

fad of multiples

in the United States

is that people

who suffer this

are getting together

in a small group

for self-therapy

because they feel

that the therapist

not having

multiple personality

with chaos

has no idea

really what's going wrong.

So the theory

coming from the therapist

can't possibly be right.

So these groups

are studying chaos theory

and the therapy

that they've devised

is a psychodrama

which they write,

direct,

and perform in public

in sort of street theaters

in cities around

the United States.

There's a network

of these

that base their approach

on my paper

on the multiple,

what is it called,

personality dischaos,

it's called.

So we'll see,

I can give you

a report next year

how these experiments

work out.

Some therapists

believe that

they may be fatal

and I should be imprisoned.

But the patients

themselves

are very enthusiastic.

They're really

having such a wonderful time.

It applies to bipolarity.

You know,

depression is

a really serious condition.

If you're depressed,

I mean,

you are so unhappy,

life is so painful,

you can't really go on.

And if a therapy

was devised

that cured

bipolar

personality

dischaos

without drugs,

then a lot of people

would be helped.

This is,

it's not a fad,

it's a really serious disease.

So just chaos,

the psychodrama

is designed to

break down boundaries,

rigid boundaries.

Yes,

to increase

their fractal dimension.

What do you do

with people

whose boundaries

are too low already?

There are certain people,

for example,

in conversation

who run from one

attractor

or creod

or basin

to another.

So they jump

from subject

to subject

with alarming rapidity

and you can barely

keep up.

Now,

these seem to be

people who have

highly,

fractals of high dimension

in their mental

attractor structure.

What do you do

with them

to reduce

the dimensions

of their fractal?

Well,

I'd start with

beer or maybe

a shandy

and then go on

to wine.

So,

Ralph,

given what you've

said about

the goals

of this therapy,

wouldn't it just

be simpler

to give these people

psychedelics?

Well,

personally,

I've had good results

with psychedelics.

I'm not sure

everyone would.

And maybe

there,

well,

it'd be nice

if we had

several alternative

strategies,

some of which

could be done

on a Sunday

evening

where you still

feel okay

about going

to work

on Monday morning.

Well,

since you have

such good luck

with psychedelics,

why are you

so reluctant

to advocate?

Well,

I do.

I have been

advocating

psychedelics

in public

or at least

if not

advocating

confessing

that for me

there have been

very good results.

I've had a certain

amount

but quite recently

of hostile mail

and telephone calls

and even people

coming to the

university

to hasten

my demise

they seem

to think

they're drugs

that psychedelics

are drugs

and

there's also

the aspect

of legality

where many people

are in jail

with 20,

30,

and 40

year jail sentences

so I think

that the atmosphere

of paranoia

in the world

today

might even

make them

much less

effective

as medicine

for dischaos

and psychodrama

and therapy

because of the

paranoia

the legal status

but if that

barrier

were removed

and it sounds

like you're

advocating

something

fairly close

to what

Salvador Roquette

and that school

settled into

is that

I don't know

Salvador Roquette

while he was

a psychotherapist

who worked

in Mexico

for many years

and gives

people psychedelics

but he also

then assaults

them with

Auschwitz footage

and all of

the very

highly charged

emotional material

the idea

being to

just reduce

them to

some absolutely

basic

jelly

of

dissolved

boundaries

and psychics

sounds disgusting

to me

I agree

I'm trying to

find out

how

what you're

advocating

is different

oh it takes

only very subtle

medicine

to decrease

rigid walls

even the very

idea of it

may be enough

as a matter of

fact

well that's

anyway

the therapy

idea

once your

consciousness

is adjusted

so that your

sensitivity

to your own

process

actually observes

these things

and considers

them undesirable

then automatically

they

begin to

disappear

under the

self-creative

action

of one's

own psyche

after all

nature is

there

too

and

mathematical

necessity

reveals itself

in the milky way

in the sandy

beach

and in the

human psyche

as well

there is a

tendency

toward health

I think that

these

diseases

of the rigid

barriers

like other

diseases

consist primarily

of the rejection

of the cure

and the cure

can be found

within

unlike hay fever

and a lot

of things

this can actually

be treated

within

one has to

get the idea

thus

when people

suffer this

which is

essentially

universal

it is

an inheritance

from a culture

which has

the disease

itself

so

the cure

consists of

identifying

the difficulty

as essentially

a cultural

pattern

and then

disowning it

by becoming

more of an

ex-patriot

of your own

culture

that's why

visiting another

culture

and living there

even for three

months

is sometimes

enough

to liberate

people from

a rigid

pattern

so the

diagnosis

comes very

close to

the 19th

century

diagnosis

for most

difficulties

is

a few

months

at the

seashore

in Italy

preferably

in other

words

in both

cases

you want

to establish

this extra

environmental

attitude

through

distance

from cultural

values

either achieved

through

journeys

with drugs

or journeys

to

foreign

exotic

life

so it's

a search

for perspective

achieved

by distancing

it's a kind

of a

mathematical

perspective

yeah

well

is there

another

time

appropriate

because our

culture has

suffered this

particular disease

over a

mere span

of 6,000

years

that's all

we have

to recover

from

the particular

disease

being

boundary

anxiety

patriarchal

monotheistic

hierarchical

well

constipated

linear

toilet

train

etc

yes

but

is there

any culture

that has

managed

to avoid

this chaos

well

I

I think

so

but I

don't

have

exact

experience

of

aboriginal

cultures

the one

we live

in

has by now

covered

the entire

globe

and the

exceptions

are

near to

extinction

but there

are some

anthropologists

used to

go and

study wild

tribes

before

they were

contacted

by the

external

civilization

now

dominating

the entire

sphere

which

arrived

unfortunately

to them

in the

form of

this

anthropologist

which

was

the

kiss

of

death

for

that

culture

and

but what

you're

suggesting

Ralph

is that

archaic

lifestyles

were

more

boundaries

which is

a theme

near and

dear

to me

I mean

personally

in living

Amazon

cultures

one of

the hardest

things

to put

up with

when you're

there

is the

fact

that

there

are

no

boundaries

you know

that everybody

lives

in a

wall-less

grand

house

defecation

sexuality

death

domestic

hassling

disciplining

of children

everything

goes on

in the

presence of

everyone else

and no one

from age

six to

ninety

feels

any constraint

whatsoever

about making

comments

suggestions

and offering

free advice

it's a

hard thing

to embrace

even with

the knowledge

that

it's going

to be

good for

you

well there

are degrees

of boundaries

but I

think the

permeability

of the

boundaries

is

important

and our

culture

has

perhaps

excess

attention

devoted

to

the

walled

fortress

necessitated

by the

whatever the

violence of

these people

which some

would

associate

with the

patriarchy

and

so called

testosterone

poisoning

and whatever

it is

there has

been the

necessity

of

bow

house

concrete

walls

around

the

town

locks

on the

doors

of the

houses

electronic

motion

detectors

video

cameras

at the

bank

card

place

and

and so

on

our

culture

is

perhaps

there's

an increase

of complexity

as we

approach

the

eschaton

perhaps

there's

a decrease

in that

the

fractality

is

actually

vanishing

at

alarming

rate

that's

what

it

means

the

death

of

nature

but

Ralph

when I

last

visited

your

house

in

Santa

Cruz

I

noticed

a

rigid

straight

fence

dividing

your

property

from

your

very

undesirable

neighbors

who

have

motorcycle

scrambles

on their

land

and have

terrible

noise

yes

they're all

boys with

guns

that's

right

that's

right

well

what we

need

here

is

a new

product

the

fractile

fence

which

would

go

down

very

well

in

California

some

boundary

instead

of

old

style

posts

with

barbed

wire

excellent

sort

of

made

in

where

people

get

lost

well

then

just

for

the

slightest

low

gust

of

wind

or

chaotic

event

these

motorcycles

that

suddenly

zoom

past

your

we

have

these

gateways

like

cell

membrane

paths

that

nice

people

could

go

right

through

those

with

spirit

guides

have

we

reached

the

point

I

think

we

could

yes

it's

okay

yes

let's

have

some

questions

yes

well

yes

well

everyone

is

stuck

there

we

it's

Janus

we

have

our

individuality

perceived

according to

our own

paradigm

which is

a paradigm

of individuality

and then

there is

our

participation

in

a group

another group

in the

larger group

and so

on

which is

the

study

of

cultural

anthropology

or

sociology

and

we

don't

know

sometimes

if our

individuality

actually

exists

and other

times

we don't

know

if we

belong

to

any

network

at all

so

we

could

perhaps

think of

these as

two faces

as it

were

that

means

that

each

one

exists

simultaneously

within

us

the

individual

paradigm

where

my

neighbors

say

I

can

do

anything

I

want

on

my

own

property

and

including

smoking

tobacco

well

the other

one says

I exist

for the

group

or

the group

is punishing

me now

or

I better

get up

and cook

for the

group

and so

on

and a lot

of other

ones

and the

important

thing

is

that

this

view

of

the

self

or

individual

as

a

structure

which

like

all

of

these

levels

are

part

of

the

structure

and

that's

the

self

at least

from

the

point

of

view

of

a

single

point

in

it

if

you're

looking

from

a

single

point

which

is

probably

a

different

point

for

each

of

consist

on

logical

consistency

compatibility

harmony

between

all

these

different

individuals

then

you're

in

trouble

because

then

you're

trying

to

impose

a

structure

on

it

say

logical

consistency

which is

impossible

and

which

if

you're

obsessed

with

it

if

you're

insistent

upon

it

can

only

result

in

the

rejection

of the

consciousness

of those

certain

personalities

which

then

they

move

around

sort

of

controlling

the

show

without

any

supervision

so

this

is

I

think

a

really

important

aspect

of the

peculiarity

of our

culture

that

back

in those

neoplatonic

times

we had

Plato

and

Aristotle

they

argued

they had

completely

different

like one

is north

south

the other

is east

west

or something

together

they

give a

good

map

the

transmission

of

the

Greek

miracle

over

time

through

early

Christianity

and

early

Islam

gave

by means

of

some

historical

accident

a

phenomenal

imbalance

accentuation

to the

Aristotelian

that is

the

perspective

of formal

logic

that is

the

insistence

upon

absolute

truth

that is

the

perversity

of

modern

science

that's

the

Aristotelian

unfortunately

without

the

balance

of

the

platonic

when

this

Aristotelian

imbalance

at

aspect of our culture comes into our own psyche, we then may ask for, with our different parts,

some logical compatibility. And that's a very unhealthy state. So we can accept the

individual and the social without conflict, even though they're conflicting, just because

they are. And their partnership, too, is...

Yeah, it sounds great. And Terence was suggesting everybody take five grams of dried mushrooms,

maybe one of these little balls under the tongue would do. So I might take this opportunity

to just speak in defense about the image of mathematics that you projected. And I think

that this could be helpful to everyone, because I don't know how many people have come to me

and said, I hope it won't be too mathematical. Mathematics is not a science. It's sort of

the opposite of a science. Science is science. You know what that is, or we don't know. There's

a lot of different images, but somehow it has to do with an absolute truth observed about

nature by doing it a certain way with a discipline, which is miraculously good in terms of getting

rid of a lot of foggy stuff and giving all people on the planet a consensus about what's

going on. Not speaking down science, but the science is not mathematical and mathematics is

not science. Science is discovered about the world through the activity of people. Mathematics

is an inborn ability that everybody has, like breathing, pumping the blood, we don't know how it

works and so on. It is not an equation behind the picture you see in the book. The picture

that you see in the book, which you recognize and it immediately means something to you in

terms of what you're doing, that's the mathematics. Mathematics is an abstract vocabulary of space-time

patterns. That's all. If somebody figured out some cute way to stuff into an equation or a computer

diskette or something to find, but computer graphics has made visible mathematics, like a slide

projector put into Terence's head would project the shadow of the eschaton onto the wall.

So everybody can do it. The story I told about the three boys at the beach, that's mathematics.

I think once you understand what mathematics is, every single one of us, before lunch, could

invent a new branch of mathematics. Mathematics is simply the formal relationships between

defined sets. And you can define the sets. You know, they could be hexagrams, they could be

triangles, they could be groups of eleven dots. You set up the terms and then watch the system

run and derive the rules and that's a new branch of mathematics. It doesn't need language. It's

pre-linguistic. Children can do it. As soon as you've observed a similarity between the left

bank of the stream and the right bank, between the right bank and the Milky Way and so on,

you are performing mathematical functions and each... that's all there is to it, except that

somehow the subject has been misunderstood on such a massive scale within the school system that

everyone's been convinced incorrectly that they can't do mathematics. And that's everyone,

including Nobel Prize winning physicists and so on, have math anxiety because of the school system.

You know, chaos and there is no order. Chaos is a kind of order. And order is a kind of chaos.

So, I think, I know this sounds like double talk, but the whole idea is just to somehow disabuse

yourself of the habit of overemphasizing something by perceiving the value in the other. You know,

Jung psychoanalyzed God. This was bold. I think it was the last book before he died. Answer to Job.

He psychoanalyzed God. He psychoanalyzed Yahweh. And he found a fractal mixture of two basins,

good and evil, that can't exist without. That is, in other words, the ultimate model behind all the

mathematical models for all the dichotomies before construction or after deconstruction. That is, the red and green

fractally mixed. They're still red. They're still green. But they're so close together. That's, anyway,

Jung's deconstruction of Yahweh. Yes. Well, this is, I think, what Rupert was suggesting at one point.

They're the idea about the sacred trinity or the original tripartite structure of the goddess.

Each part is present in every part. And there, in other words, no distinction between the divine world

and the mundane world and the mundane world. And if there is a distinction where a culture has made a distinction,

then that distinction is, as it were, creating dis-ease in the culture by setting aside divinity from something else,

ordinary reality, family, life. And then you've got a temple with a thick concrete wall around it,

and the divinity within and outside, and so on. And then there's the progressive parturation of, like, unzipping a zipper,

where one thing after another is desacralized. And now we live in a world which is totally desacralized.

And the resacralization of the world could be as simple as zipping up this zipper again,

but we don't know exactly where the handle is. We can't recover the aboriginal state of consciousness

because it's extinct, I guess.

But we're trying.

But we're trying to find that in this, the multiple personality idea then suggests that it's there.

It's still there in each person, under the wall.

The aboriginal state of consciousness involves, as far as we know, taboos.

In other words, boundaries of what's restricted. It's not without boundaries at all.

All the early books on anthropology, like James Fraser and all those kind of people, were fascinated by taboo structures.

As soon as anthropologists arrived anywhere, they found systems of taboos.

And that's why early 20th century anthropology, Freud wrote a book on totem and taboo.

I mean, they invested in this question. And taboo means that which is forbidden.

And the idea that there are these boundaries set up by culture seems utterly fundamental to all cultures.

Well, but don't you think they were projecting a lot of that?

After all, people like James Fraser and Freud came from the most taboo-ruled societies that have ever existed on earth.

Victorian England and fin de siècle Vienna were so taboo-obsessed, so constipated, so hidden from themselves

that they very probably carried that into their work as a projection.

But not just that. I mean, like among Australian aborigines, the idea that there are certain initiation rites that boys go through,

when they're shown certain objects which can only be seen by initiated men, not by women, not by boys beneath the age of initiation.

And this kind of pattern, presumably, wasn't just made up by anthropologists.

These things are found everywhere. Things of that general kind.

And the idea of boundaries seems fundamental to human culture.

And the boundaries in so-called primitive societies are much more rigid than in our own, in many ways.

And like in India, for example, with the boundary between the left and the right hand.

You use your left hand for wiping your bottom after it goes to the artery,

and it's considered unclean and pure, and so on, with an actual daily reinforcement of that reality.

You use your right hand for eating, and if you give someone a present, you must give it with the right hand.

I was always having to tell my guests in India, for heaven's sake, don't give people things in your left hand.

They're in the shop. Pay with the money. You just don't do that.

And you have to learn all these cultural divisions when you go and live in another culture.

It's not just that we're obsessed with boundaries, we're in fact in our culture many of them have been broken down.

So I think there's something extremely important about these boundaries, that your fractal model...

Well, I never spoke against the boundaries, I think that...

No, they're not even fractal. In traditional cultures, they seem, the ones I've encountered,

haven't had a kind of fractal, permeable quality. They've had a quality of extreme authority to them.

Well, this suggestion, I think, about Aboriginal society has to do with the presence of the divine throughout the world,

the view you share had more. And that's one particular boundary that we have that those traditional societies didn't have,

even though they had other ones. So maybe there's a law of the conservation of boundaries,

or the maintenance of a certain degree of complexity of structure that you find in all societies.

And these boundaries have to be put somewhere. And we just have to see that they're more left in the appropriate places.

And I don't think they're weaker or stronger. The taboos we overthrow are the weak ones, but we're ruled by incredibly strong taboos.

I was visited once in Hawaii by a bunch of Germans, and I took them down to the beach, and this woman immediately whipped her top off.

And she knew that you can't do that in America, but she didn't believe it, because it was so inconceivable to her.

While I could not conceive of doing it any other way, and realized that wave upon wave of social disruption would flow from this absurdly trivial act,

because a taboo had been violated that was just one just doesn't do that. So we choose.

So you told us to go to Hong Kong. Absolutely. Instantly. Public beach in Hawaii.

The main thing is quite an interesting one. In traditional cultures, it's mainly used for certain.

It's very, very highly specified. And like in traditional Japan, there were whole-hearted men who, in the former ones,

you've actually got down to less and less boundaries. And in England, you know, you told your husband's home here in India to do that.

But nowadays, even that's what I mean, you've called it by the kind of Christian name,

it's happening, it's happening. And in those times, the boundaries have got more and more flingy between people.

Well, the boundaries move. That's right. But wherever they are sitting at any given moment,

they are incredibly rigidly maintained, again, for all reasons. I mean, I remember when I lived in Benares,

my houseboat was anchored near the bathing gath, and you could watch a thousand women wading into the Ganges,

in soaking wet like rats in their saris. You could watch a thousand women bathing and never see a nipple

or so much as a thigh. And it seemed perfectly reasonable to them to walk into the river fully clothed

in order to preserve a sense of modesty. It did not seem to them silly, irrational, or preposterous.

And yet, wasn't it? And isn't it absurd for American women to keep their tops on at the beach?

Yes, but it goes without saying. It's beyond question.

And then the taboos that are negotiable change over time, but they usually don't address the central concerns of the society.

I mean, for instance, this thing about topless beaches. All the beaches of France and Italy are topless. That means nothing in America.

It will never change. I cannot conceive of it changing. The situation with cannabis is similar.

Everyone knows that cannabis is trivial and harmless, but that doesn't mean that we're on the brink of changing the social taboos about it.

It feels to me as though they will never change.

Those taboos are denial of the text and the text.

Yes, I agree. Speaking of all these divisions, one of the strongest divisions is the division between the sacred and the profane.

They seem to be like oil and water. And once a profane domain is established, it will struggle with all of its resources to resist a re-sacralizing of that space.

That's what has made Western civilization so toxic, is the fact that it is a continuous and spreading profanation,

apparently to be carried on until the extinction of the planet, unless those few heretical voices that dare to oppose the imposition of this boundary are heard.

So you're suggesting there are pathological taboos and taboos which actually maintain health.

Yes.

I mean, the taboo about the hand that Rupert mentioned is probably a health-based taboo.

You don't want to be transmitting amoebas to your friends or yourself.

Well, we don't want to eat poisonous plants. We don't want to eat...

But poison, it becomes a word, this is a word so fraught with cultural...

We're talking about amanita varna or something.

Well, your first shot of the scotch. This doesn't convince you that this is a toxic substance.

But no, it turns out to be the basis of an entire culture lifestyle and philosophy.

In taking a shower in the Ganges, I would let my little bucket off the front of my houseboat,

was it's pure, there's no turd larger than a thumb in it.

So this is how India deals with the sacred river Ganges.

This is where the bodies are being dumped, this is where the garbage is going.

They don't seem to perceive any contradiction there.

So why they should be so hoity-toity about taking a shower, it doesn't make any sense.

They're not honouring the river by keeping themselves...

They do honour the river, but these particular acts that we're discussing,

I don't think they're viewed as honouring the river.

I don't know what the history of Indian prudence is.

I suspected what I was seeing was Victorian ethos run mad.

Thank you, that's exactly what I meant at the beginning,

where Jung's cycle in like God and found a fractal mixture of good and evil,

and then of course we see it everywhere in nature,

and the Ganges is not dirty water,

it's actually a fractal mixture of excrement and clean water.

And nature is a fractal and poisonous plants are growing intermixed with the food.

So that's just the way of it, this planet.

So when our societies are more like nature, maybe they have more longevity, or maybe not,

and maybe the mathematical model helps to look at it, or maybe not.

But in any case we succeeded to draw back from the eschaton and the homing pigeons,

and somehow arrive in the society that we live in.

So the boundary is a rigidification of habit.

Yes, the boundary is a kind of a materialization of habit, I guess.

And nature itself seems to have evolved, the structure came out of chaos,

in a process of creation in which order emerged and structure is made,

and matter materializes around habits and so on.

In our personal life, in our family, in our school and institutions and so on,

we have a lot of freedom, it seems, to behave this way or that.

And within some realm, we have choices.

And that's why I think it's good to have a mathematical view of all this,

because it does give you a way to extrapolate from nature,

to make analogies between nature and the structures we're living in.

And that's kind of diagnostic in itself.

Maybe we should stop here.

It feels like we've hit the moon boundary.

Since this has already been an overly long podcast,

I'll refrain from any comments on the trialogue we just heard,

other than to say that, once again, it seemed like it was Ralph Abraham

who had to gallop in and save the day from some of Terence's more ungrounded speculations.

But what great fun to listen to the three of these guys bounce such entertaining ideas off one another.

And there still are a few more of these trialogue tapes to go.

Today's conversation was the end of the Hazelwood House trialogues,

but there are still others that they held that I haven't had a chance to podcast yet.

So you can rest assured that over time you'll eventually hear the rest of them here in the salon, too.

Now, before I make a final comment, I want to mention, like I do every week,

that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon

are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Like 2.5 License,

which basically means you can use parts or all of this program if you want.

Just go to the creativecommons.org site and you can read all about it.

Or if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about these podcasts,

just send them to me, Lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.

And as a final note, I want to mention the passing of my friend Bud Wilkinson.

Bud had just turned 91 years old shortly before he died,

quite peacefully, I'm told, and with most of his children by his side.

And while I realize that the chances are slim that you knew Bud,

one of the reasons I want to mention him now is to point out how just being a nice person

can help to make the world a little bit better for all of us.

I only met Bud a couple of years ago when a mutual friend introduced us at the gym

we both use several times a week.

And the image of him shuffling into the gym each morning is still quite vivid for me

because the few moments I spent visiting with him on those mornings made going to the gym

something that I actually looked forward to rather than dreaded.

It was his smile that got you first,

and I don't think I'll ever hear the word smile without first thinking of Bud.

He simply radiated vibrant energy and great joy.

As it turned out, we figured that way back in the 50s,

Bud had actually worked at some of the Chicago baseball games I attended as a boy.

So we spent a lot of time talking about Chicago and, of course, Notre Dame football,

which was one of his favorite topics.

Like my own dad, Bud hadn't attended Notre Dame but was part of the Subway alumni

that the Chicago sportswriters often talk about.

Now, why am I spending all this time talking about an old man that I just casually spoke with at the gym?

Well, first of all, it's because I miss him, and I want to thank him for his smile

and for helping to make this world just a little easier for me to make my way through each day.

And I guess that I wanted to point out to you that the next time you smile at a stranger,

you just may be making someone's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day just a little more bearable.

And besides, I'm told that it takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown.

So, relax, be happy, and smile as often as you can.

For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

Be well, my friends.