The first minute or two, the sound is a little raw, but it gets cleared up real fast.
So don't worry about the initial sound quality.
John Steele, on memory, KPFK Los Angeles.
Okay, we have ignition.
We're going to explore a vast array of stuff which has come to me over the years
through various channels with no names.
And I'm really going to speak my mind.
I'm going to think it out so it's not in any set form.
But there is an order I want to go through.
And it will be kind of a look at different elements of contracted mind and extended mind
so we can begin to see the juxtaposition of the two, how each one defines the other.
So the element of contracted mind I'd like to look at first, before the extended mind aspect.
And for those of you who heard me last year, I'll briefly capitulate this idea of the Kali Yuga
as a set piece before I launch into the specifics.
The Kali Yuga is the age that we live in, in terms of East Indian chronology.
There are four great yugas of time.
There is, roughly speaking, a golden age, a fat yuga, and then a silver age, and then a bronze age,
and then an iron age, each one of varying durations.
We won't get into the cosmological mathematics because they're up for grabs.
Allegedly, the age that we live in now is the end of the cycle.
Each of these four ages is part of a cycle called a Maha Yuga.
The Kali Yuga is the dark age.
It's the iron age.
It's the age of Kali.
Kali is a goddess, goddess of dissolution of time and structures.
She clears the way for those impediments of evolution that have arisen.
Now, in the Kali Yuga, what occurs is, in terms of time, very interesting,
because the Tibetan translation for Kali Yuga literally means the dregs of time.
The dregs of time, what does that mean?
It means the bottom of the barrel of time.
It means that time has reached a density, a certain temporal density,
and this temporal density can actually be felt somatically in the body.
Now, what is the definition of temporal density?
Temporal density means we have too many events per unit of time
to fully assimilate in our everyday life.
That means that you've got to pay the bills and take the kids out
and go to the doctor and wash the clothes and put out the cat and, you know, do everything.
It's an unending array of tasks that have to be accomplished.
And just when you think you've finished them all, new ones magically arise.
You are never finished.
Now, so the Kali Yuga has this idea of a temporal density,
and I want to explore that in several different ways here.
One of the things that occurs in the Kali Yuga, one other aspect,
which is an interesting concomitant to the temporal density,
is that there is a seasonal disequilibrium.
In other words, the climate and the seasons go out of whack.
Rain doesn't fall at the right time.
Snow doesn't fall at the right time.
There's a seasonal imbalance.
This is one of the aspects in terms of the Kali Yuga,
this climatic disequilibrium.
And what I'm pointing to is when you get a high temporal density,
there is at least a correspondence to a climatic fluctuation.
And as people like Padmasambhava and other great teachers have said,
this climatic disequilibrium is part of the Kali Yuga.
Now, one of the aspects in terms of, again, of Eastern thought
that occurs in the Kali Yuga is a, how shall we say,
is a time window narrows in this kind of density scenario.
And so what happens, last night the Miller Lite beer ad was mentioned.
I will mention another beer ad, which may bring back some memories.
Quite a few years ago in America, there was a Schlitz ad,
Schlitz beer of Milwaukee.
And it showed these macho guys on the sailboat and the spray coming out.
And it said, you only go around once in life,
so grab all the gusto you can.
And so the idea was, since, you know, this was it,
you had to have as good a time as possible right now.
So the idea encapsulated in this ad is many different values.
First of all is the idea that there are no past lives
and there are no future lives.
This is it.
And therefore, you've got to hedonistically explode in the moment
and just really grab everything possible.
Now, this, the value inherent here is that you'll go for short-term games
and to hell with anything possible long-term.
So this means rip off anyone, have war,
as long as you profit in the immediate moment.
Grab all the gusto you can.
Now, back to Buddhism for a moment.
In the, one of the sutras, the La Kavantara Sutra,
one of the Buddhist sutras,
there is a wonderful teaching.
And this is not Tantric Buddhism, it's Mahayana Buddhism,
but it's still the same basic set.
And one of the teachings in there goes as such,
for those of you who, my work is on memory,
so I have this great interest in the subject.
It says, when the triple world is surveyed,
that's past, present, future, by the Bodhisattva,
he perceives that its existence is due to memory
that has been accumulated since the beginningless past,
but wrongly interpreted.
Now, it is this concept of memory that is wrongly interpreted
that I want to take a good hard luck at here.
And before we get into that, a few more notes.
The word memory in Sanskrit comes from the word vasana,
V-A-S-A-N-A,
and it's a beautiful word because it has several different nuances.
It means a memory which is transmitted from one life to another,
either consciously or unconsciously, usually unconsciously.
Memories, habit patterns that are generated within one life
are called samskaras.
It's different from the vasana.
Vasanas have a cross-life connection.
Now, one of the secondary meanings of this word vasana
is very appropriate to one of my other interests,
and that is fragrance,
because the secondary meaning of the word vasana means
if you have an empty perfume bottle,
even if it's completely empty,
the smell always remains of that scent in that bottle.
In other words,
the scent pervades even when the vessel is empty.
And this is what the, in the Sanskrit language,
very mixture of great technical precision
and great poetic insight,
you have this idea that a past life memory
is like the smell which goes through time,
the smell memory goes from one life to another,
even though the bottle is empty.
Now, this word also means habit energy.
Vasana means habit energy.
And this word habit energy in Tibetan,
bakchag, is the term for it.
It's like a trace,
like the smell, like the trace.
And the teaching in the sutra
is that these traces,
they build up after a while
to the extent where we begin to nucleate
an ego around them,
like I get up every morning
and I do this and I eat that.
And you get this whole kind of,
an axis of a moment,
what the Buddhists call,
an axis of the moment begins to generate.
This I, this subject,
begins to generate from habitual action.
Repetitive, automatic, hypnotic,
you know, action.
Now, the,
therefore, one of the ways,
one of the strategies
to deal with this nucleation
around this moment of subjectivity
is to learn how to,
shall we say,
die to oneself.
And this is in the perennial philosophy
and the mystical philosophies
known as the tradition of unknowing,
of unknowing,
like the 14th century English mystic work,
The Cloud of Unknowing.
And this whole process
I want to look at in a moment.
I just wanted to set that out.
Now, with the idea of memory
wrongly interpreted,
we can begin to look at
a bit of present time
through this filter.
You see,
we live in an age
at which
we are virtually hoarding memory.
Computers are based
on the idea,
like,
you look at women
in terms of their vital measurements,
where you look at computers
in terms of their vital measurements,
in terms of their memory capacities.
This one has so many bits,
and this one has more bits,
and this one can process
those bits faster and faster.
The memorial capacity
is really the key
to the strength
of a computer.
Now,
the trouble is with this
is that
there is,
and I'm generalizing,
much of what computers do
is wonderful.
I'm not putting down
computers per se.
But there is an emphasis
on the acquisition
of memories
that can be stuck
into the computer.
And what
too many memories do
after a while,
whether they are in a,
because if they're in a computer,
even if they're in a computer,
they have to be
in a programmer's mind
even in a real chunked style.
There has to be
some level of recursiveness
even in the programmer's mind.
Now,
how much he offloads
into the computer itself,
there has to be
some level of memory
of what's inside.
So the more
that's inside the computer,
the more there has to be
in the mind
of the programmer.
It's a great reduction.
But still,
you begin to set up
a great array of memories
that is auxiliary
to what would be needed
for ordinary life.
Now,
what begins to happen
is that
with this tremendous array
of memory storage,
and we have,
you begin to clog a system.
A system becomes constipated
by actual,
too much hoarding of memory.
Now,
this hoarding of memory
sets up a kind of
psychological density.
and as the system
becomes clogged,
it becomes brittle.
That is to say,
it cannot react quickly
to crisis situations
because it is overloaded
with choices
and information.
There's too much information.
Every time that something
happens now
in the modern world,
the reaction time
is stunted
to such a point
by the vast array
of information processing
technology
technology,
that people cannot react
like that anymore
in real critical decisions.
Everything is so rationally
displayed in terms
of its memorial capacity.
And yet,
with all this memorial capacity
and all this incredible
telecommunications,
the world is coming apart
at the seams.
I mean,
it's,
we're balanced,
and as the Tibetans say,
we're licking honey
from the razor's edge
in terms of our
information acquisition.
It's actually,
and this is memory
wrongly interpreted,
this vast collection
of memory
as though more
is better.
That's the assumption
that we're working under.
Now,
the more memory
that you accrete,
you see,
paradoxically,
you set yourself up
more for what
in systems terms
we call
the likelihood
of a runaway system.
A runaway system
is like a snowball
going down a hill
getting bigger and bigger
and more progressively
out of control.
And the more
you develop memory
wrongly interpreted
in terms of
vast acquisition,
the more likely
you are
to go into
a runaway system
because your reaction
time is cut.
Your direct perception,
your direct,
unmediated
by vast information
technology
is cut
and
this likelihood
of a runaway system
occurs.
And this is what
happens,
you see,
in things like
all this
contragate stuff.
You have this
incredible
information technology
of the NFC
computers
and the CIA
computers
and the DIA
computers
and all these
things.
And what happens
is that you
lose control
of who's,
you know,
who's in charge.
Ollie North
is running the
ball this way
and Colby's
running the ball
this way
and everyone's
kind of what
we call
in systems
theories again.
You begin
to generate
institutions
within institutions.
years of the
overview.
Now,
what further
begins to
happen
is that
this memory
wrongly
interpreted
begins to
generate,
this is a
footnote,
there are two
types of
unconscious mind
I want to
point out here.
One is what
I would call
unconscious
and that's
when you're
asleep at the
wheel,
it's like
you're dead
drunk,
it's like
you're numbed,
there's no
sensation.
Okay,
that's
unconscious
unconscious.
Then,
contrasted to
that,
there's
conscious
unconscious.
Now,
the link
of conscious
unconscious
is really
shamanic
consciousness.
It's where
there is a
bridge between
the conscious
mind and
the unconscious
mind.
It's what
Jung would
call the
transcendent
function.
There's a
bridge
between
these two
realms.
Now,
most people
are walking
around,
as all
the
perennial
philosophies
say,
we're in
a state
of sleep.
We're walking
around in
a state
of unconscious
unconscious.
It's what
Gurdjieff
calls we're
all asleep.
We're
sleepwalkers.
This
unconscious,
what happens
then is
there's an
unconscious
mental
mass is
generated
by memory
wrongly
interpreted.
In other
words,
what begins
to happen
is,
conversely to
what Terence
was talking
about last
night,
the idea
of a
living
conscious
memory.
What gets
generated
is what
William Burroughs
would call
language as
virus is
generated.
You see,
this is where
language goes
out of
control.
It's just
the opposite
to a
living
language.
And it's
what I call
an unconscious
mental mass
proliferates
in the
environment.
And it
means that
there's
all these
kind of
invisible
habit
patterns
and
invisible
kind of
runaway
systems
linguistically
on a
sub-vocal
voice in
the
environment.
And
as
one of my
teachers
has said
that at a
certain point
habit patterns
become
solidified in
the
body.
Now,
this is
something that
and this is
from the
Tibetan
point of
view.
This is
something
actually that
Norbu said
that habit
patterns get
solidified and
the great
illustration of
this in terms
of, for
example,
tantric
thought is
there's a
great Indian
Mahasiddha,
Saraha,
who was
the arrow
maker.
and he
taught the
idea that
memory, it
can exist in
many states.
It's like
water.
Water can be
very fluid
and that at a
certain point
it can become
ice and
become solidified.
Now, that's
the shift from
natural mind
and natural
memory to
memory wrongly
interpreted when
it solidifies.
when it
solidifies,
the mind
stops, it
gels like
that.
And that's
where this
sensation of
ego comes
from, this
nucleation.
So, this
idea of an
unconscious
mental math,
the idea of
language as
virus, is
something that
we kind of
have to be
aware of.
it's the
idea that
words have
a life of
their own.
It's like
people's minds,
the sub-vocal
voice, oftentimes
you think, well,
I'm in charge, and
the sub-vocal
voice is going, I
want this, I
want this, what
the Buddhists
call monkey
mind.
It's like it's
going here and
here and here
and you are
saying, I
don't really
think that, but
something else,
and that's this
automatic mind
is going off,
and that's this
language as
virus, memory
wrongly
interpreted, gone
inorganic.
Now, one of
the aspects
of why there's
this great
accumulation of
memory is
the idea, the
illusion is, that
the more memory
we have, the
more control and
manipulation and
prediction of
reality we will
have, if we
can manage
memory and
keep it, you
know, on
tap, so we
can push a
button, therefore
we'll be able to
manipulate reality
better with all
this memory that
we've got there
and the external
forms of computer
banks and books
and everything
else.
And we begin to
hoard memory
because we feel
it will give us
prediction and
control and
manipulation of
reality.
The central
intelligence agency,
stop and think
of that for a
moment, central
intelligence agency,
what does it do?
It gathers
information about
everything in the
world except the
natural intelligence
of the people who
are in the
organization.
There's nothing to
do with self
knowledge.
Intelligence of
the other, not of
self-knowledge.
Now, the idea of
this memory wrongly
interpreted brings us
to an interesting
model here.
Again, in the
Buddhist framework,
we talk about
that thought or
memory, as the
teaching goes, as
Saraha teaches in
his, what he calls
the royal song, the
Dohas.
And these are kind
of like poetic
teachings.
He teaches that
memory arises from
emptiness, abides in
emptiness, and then
dissolves back into
emptiness.
Or, as he teaches,
memory arises from
non-memory, what he
calls non-memory, abides
in non-memory, and
then sinks back,
dissolves into
non-memory.
Now, this cycle of
arising, abiding, and
dissolving is the
cycle of all thought.
And this cycle is
also two other
analogs that we can
give to it.
It is the basic
nature of today, what
Prigajin calls
dissipative systems.
Things arise, they
abide, and they
dissolve.
And they arise in a
slightly different
form, and then they
abide in a slightly
different form, and
they dissolve.
Now, dissipative
systems, a footnote
on this, is much
more ancient than
Prigajin, when all
he's done is brought
it into a
contemporary mode.
In the early forms
of my interest of
archaeology, we find
it embodied in the
idea of the triple
goddess.
That is to say, the
triple goddess is
exemplified by the
three phases of the
moon, and that is to
say, there's a new
moon, there's a full
moon, and then
there's the waning
moon.
And then they go
back to a fourth
phase, which people
rarely, really
recognize, and that is
the state where the
moon is not visible
at all.
That is really the
true emptiness.
And this dissipative
cycle is mirrored in
the arising of
thought, abiding of
thought, and dissolving
back into.
Now, the reason I
bring this up is the
following, is that in
the paradigm of
memory, as it's
looked at in the
twentieth century,
memory is looked at
primarily, from the
point of view of
Western psychology,
only in one of these
three phases.
That is to say, it's
looked at principally in
the middle phase, the
abiding phase.
We do not look at
where memory comes
from, or where it
goes to.
Only in a
psychoanalytical sense
we look at your
childhood memories and
stuff like that.
But we do not really
consider the idea of
emptiness, or of
non-memory, as an
origin point.
We look at this kind
of psychoanalytic
history as our way,
but not as real
emptiness.
So we have a focus
only on one phase, the
abiding phase, that is
the phase of how do
memories operate in the
ordinary, everyday,
visible world.
How do we operate in
that form?
This is where memory
wrongly interpreted
generates itself and
proliferates, right in
this gap of only
looking at the middle
phase of the
dissipative cycle.
Because you neglect
the arising and
dissolving, you begin to
get an overbalance,
and that's why it gets
brittle, that's why it
gets constipated, because
the cycle is looked at
in only one part of
it.
Okay, now the next
thing that I would
like to look at is the
idea that one of the
characteristics of the
Kali Yuga, another one
besides this temporal
density, is the whole
concept, and this is
something I've been
developing from my
doctoral thesis for
years, but it
progressively comes into
more focus, is the idea
of object proliferation.
Object proliferation.
Now, let me give you a
brief history of
objects to put you in the
picture.
The first man-made
objects that we have are
three million years old.
These first objects are
found in Africa, and they
are very small, they are
like hand axes and pounding
tools and things like
that, with a minimal of
modification to them, very
minimally modified.
And as an archaeologist, I
happen to study this in great
detail, the kind of
generation of tool making.
And what progressively
begins to happen after
another million and a
half years of no new and
improved models, can you
imagine, you know, any
car industry with the same
models for a million and a
half years?
What begins them, the first
innovation is symmetry.
That's the first innovation
in tool making, is the
idea of some degree of
symmetry.
And then you begin to get
into chipping and flaking
as sharpening, and
gradually you finally
begin to get into what
we call microgeometry tools.
You get into very, very
small tools that are very
precise and the kind of
needlepoint stuff and very,
very finely made things
about 30,000, 40,000
years ago.
And it's about 30,000 or
40,000 years ago, again,
where you begin to
generate the first symbolic
objects.
That's where you go from
functional to symbolic
objects.
And when you make this leap,
language is, you know, a
foot, as soon as you begin
to get symbolic objects.
And with symbolic objects
and language, everything
begins to escalate.
Because in the scenario of
objects, as it were, what
begins to happen is roughly, we
have the Neolithic
Revolution, which is about
9,000, 10,000 B.C.
Some people put it a few
thousand years earlier or
later, but it's irrelevant.
In the Neolithic
Revolution, essentially, before
we were hunter-gatherers, we
were nomads.
We followed herds of different
animals, the caribou and the
deer and the bison and the
mammoth.
We followed the seasonal
growth of plants to wherever
they occurred.
We followed nature.
And we did not own nature.
Now, what gradually began to
happen in the Neolithic
Revolution, someone had a
bright idea.
And that is that we could
domesticate crops and animals.
We did not have to follow.
We could take something and
plant it.
And with this planting, we
could stay in one place.
We would not be at the kind
of whims of this grand
seasonal variation.
And our animals, we could
domesticate animals.
That is to say, we did not
have to go hunting all the
time.
We would begin to domesticate
cows and keep them in pens
and sheep and goats and
things like that would begin
to occur.
And, you know, it's a
wonderful invention for many
people, the idea of stopping
this nomadic life.
Others were not so sure that
this was a great idea because
there was a great virtue in the
nomadic life in many ways as
well.
But history rolled on and
what began to happen is, as
you begin to settle and to
nucleate, you began to generate
objects for the first time in a
different scale than just hand
axes and cutting tools, just the
bare essential tools.
You began to make tools, more
permanent holding tools now.
Instead of transporting water and
ostrich eggs that were biodegradable
in a very neat sense, you would
begin to make longer lasting
objects of clays and potteries.
And in other words, the half life
of your objects would begin to
increase.
The idea of permanent objects
instead of kind of a throwaway
culture began to accrete.
And as these objects began to
accrete, you began to gradually
through the years to make
decorations on them and art on
the objects.
And this made the objects more
valuable, quote unquote,
whatever that meant at the time.
And these objects had the very
strange effect on people's minds
as they acted like an attractor
matrix for the human mind on
which to see even further
possibilities for the proliferation
of even more objects.
That is to say, once you made a
bowl, well, we can make a better
bowl and a bowl with a spout and
then a bowl with a this on it and
one with greater capacity and
then so on and so forth.
Object proliferation began to
form.
It began to be a mirror to which
the mind could say, well, we've
done this, but we can do this
better.
Before you extracted from nature,
now you were on this kind of
reflection process.
So that was one dynamic that
began to occur.
Object proliferation and the
generation of even more objects.
Now, I should say at a footnote
right now.
Object proliferation and the
way to determine the
before I go on
with the scenario
the average home
has in it today
300,000 objects in it.
Put that in your pipe
and smoke it.
And that means
that you have to deal
with the location
and function
and care
of all these objects.
So therefore
a lot of your mental activity
is tied into this
object array environment.
Okay?
Now, what happens
let's go back to the Neolithic
for a moment.
You see, then we have
very few objects.
It's gone from
a few pots and bowls
and a few digging sticks
and spears
and what have you
and furs and beads
and things like that
to 300,000.
I mean, the proliferation
that has to go with that
you see, the concomitant
proliferation is
the secret of this process
is when you begin
to generate objects
you have to have
a concomitant
and corresponding memory
for every object
that you own
whether it's online
or not.
It is.
The point is
that we don't keep
the 300,000 memory
online all the time.
It's, um,
we chunk things.
We say it's in the garage,
it's in the bedroom,
it's in the den,
it's in the kitchen.
We have a chunking
by, by spatial
kind of labeling.
But on the whole,
uh, what happens is
as soon as you have
an object,
you have to have
a memory of that object.
Otherwise, the object
is useless to you.
You don't, you don't know
where you put it
and therefore you can't use it.
So you have to have
some corresponding memory.
Now, in terms of ownership,
what begins to happen
is very interesting.
As soon as you begin
to have this object
proliferation,
you begin to have
to have the generation
of a noun,
a linguistic noun
has to come into being
for the generation
of that object.
This is a spear thrower.
This is, you know,
my, uh, uh,
water bowl.
This is, uh,
this is my fur
to keep me warm.
This is, uh,
my, uh, talisman.
Whatever it is.
You have to have
a corresponding noun
for every object
that is generated.
Uh, now,
with this kind of
generation of noun,
the converse of this,
the most curious thing
begins to happen is,
is, is the generation
of pronouns.
N begins to occur.
This is my object.
This is your object.
This is his object.
This is their object.
When you were in nature,
there was no pronouns.
There was just this vast,
undifferentiated
participation mystique.
No differentiation
of subject and object.
Therefore, no pronoun.
So, pronouns are generated
from nouns.
And nouns are generated
from objects.
So, you get this
linguistic matrix
beginning to occur.
And it occurs in this
kind of unconscious
proliferation.
Again, language is virus.
Now, uh, what begins
to happen is, again,
the, the possibility
of, um, runaway systems.
And as, uh,
Morris Berman,
a cultural historian,
pointed out recently,
you begin to get
what we, he calls
commodity fetish, fetishism.
The idea now,
in the old days,
when objects, for example,
certain totemic things
in the Indian Northwest
were made,
they were meant to
degenerate with weather
after they were, uh,
made.
The masks and the,
and the things like that
were left to weather
and disintegrate,
to dissolve in the
dissipative cycle
back into nature.
They arise,
they abided,
and they dissolve.
They were not kept
as objects of art.
You see,
what we have done
is taken these objects
and got into
the abiding phase,
memory wrongly interpreted,
and we fixate there.
And we, we keep that going.
So, you get this very
kind of, um,
interesting, uh,
scenario, uh, arising.
Now, let's take a look
at this in terms
of the, the media,
how this can be put
to us in a very
entertaining
and, uh,
insightful way.
Um, there was a film
that was made, um,
I don't know,
maybe seven,
eight years ago.
Uh, something,
I don't know,
maybe it was more than that
ten years ago,
uh, called
The Gods Must Be Crazy.
How many of you
saw this film?
I figured a lot of you
weren't.
Uh, I'll, I'll give you
a brief recapitulation
of this film
because it's a wonderful
teaching film.
The, basically,
the scenario happens,
there's an airplane
flying over Africa
and two of the guys,
and one of them
is drinking Coca-Cola
and he takes,
finishes the bottle
and he throws it
out of the plane.
They're over the middle
of nowhere.
He throws it out
and it lands
near a Bushman
hunting party,
as chance would have it.
And the Bushmen
then, um,
see this bottle
and it is
the introduction
of a new
and novel object
into the culture.
When this object
comes in,
first it is met
with wonder
and awe
and the multifarious
uses of it
are then discovered.
first of all,
you could put things
in it
as a container
that was very durable.
It was a wonderful
container for water.
Second of all,
you could roll things
out like a roller.
Then you could blow in it
and make wonderful
sounds with it.
Then you could,
you know,
all these objects
were generated,
all these uses
for the object
were seen.
But what began to happen
is that everyone
wanted to use it.
All the pronoun
thing began to arise
as soon as this object
was introduced.
And what began to happen
in this little world
where there was peace
and harmony
was discord.
Tremendous sense
of discord.
I want it.
No, it.
Fights began to break out
over who was going
to use this Coca-Cola bottle.
Exactly.
Dis-Coca-Cola.
Dis-Co-Cola
had occurred.
So, the thought was,
and this is brilliant,
the Bushman wisdom
still prevailed.
They thought,
the gods must be crazy
to have given us
this object.
It causes havoc
in this society.
So, one of them
was given the task
to take this Coca-Cola bottle
to the edge of the world
and get rid of it.
Get this object
out of here.
We've got enough objects.
That's essentially
what they were saying.
Okay, so in a microcosm
in this film
is this wonderful teaching
about how an object,
a single object
in this case,
can take a very
harmonically based culture
and throw it out
the window.
Jung said,
speaking of our current era,
knowledge of the internal
world of the psyche
was eclipsed
by the external world
of objects.
The very same insight.
The more we got hooked
on objects,
the more that we began
to lose the
kind of internal world.
Now,
it's interesting
that in terms of
the very first writing
ever discovered
is a favorite
kind of point
that have come up
archaeologically,
is not some mystical
writing about
Mu or Lemuria
or channeling
or anything like that.
The first writing
ever discovered
is a Sumerian
tax receipt.
Okay?
It's 4500 B.C.
and it's a tax receipt
because what it is saying
is you have dealt
with these objects
and we want to keep
a record of them
so that
we can
find out
what the
as it were
the karmic trajectory
of this object.
Now,
this is what begins
to happen with objects.
Record keeping
grows as an industry.
You have to keep
a memory for every object.
Record keeping grows
in proportion
to object proliferation.
Today,
the biggest industry
on the face of the earth
is record keeping.
That's what computers
do more than anything else
besides their creative uses.
They do more than anything else
is inventory.
It's record keeping.
And they're doing it.
They're keeping track
of objects
and events
connected with objects.
The transactions
and interactions
and transformations
of objects.
That's what is being
kept records of.
So record keeping
grows out
of this proliferation
of this object array.
So,
in a sense,
you see,
you get an extended mind,
an unconscious
extended mind
is generated
through this
generation of objects.
objects.
And what it begins
to generate then
is the idea
of,
shall we say,
a left-brain memory.
Now,
a left-brain memory,
you see,
corresponds
to the middle phase
of the dissipative cycle.
That is to say,
the abiding phase
of memory.
Memory in the world
that we can see.
And this,
again,
is the realm
where,
if you overload it,
memory wrongly interpreted
begins to proliferate.
Now,
let's take a little bit,
a closer look
at this idea
of the,
um,
uh,
kind of the metaphysical
arising of the way
that we see the world.
The density of objects,
the density of objects
in the environment
creates a corresponding
density of memory
that you,
through record keeping.
And in turn,
this density of memory
generates the density
of time.
Temporal density
is a function
of memorial density.
And memorial density
is a function
of object density.
You will notice
that those cultures
that have the fewest objects
live in the dream time.
You look at
the Australian aborigines
with their minimal
object array.
And you see that
they live in a completely
different time frame.
They live in a dream time.
The Bushmen,
the same.
As your,
uh,
object density,
uh,
memorial density,
temporal density occurs,
it sets out
this extended,
unconscious
array of time.
Time is generated.
And,
um,
uh,
this generation
of,
of time,
the density of time,
um,
has a further,
aspect to it
which is very interesting.
Because of the,
uh,
transactions
and accounting
for all these objects,
the emphasis
is,
is placed on,
ever,
on short-term memory
because there are
more objects
and more transactions
and interactions.
Therefore,
the short-term memory,
where did I put this
and what did I do
with this
and what happened here,
because there are
more things,
your short-term memory
has to be more active.
and your short-term memory
has to be more active,
uh,
also in terms of
crisis situations,
uh,
whenever you have
a potential crisis
going on,
which is now
pretty much non-stop
in the world
at large.
So,
uh,
the short-term memory
has to keep track
of everything.
And,
again,
the short-term memory
takes place
in this middle phase.
Your short-term memory
has to be more active,
uh,
also in terms of
crisis situations,
whenever you have
a potential crisis
going on,
which is now
pretty much non-stop
in the world
at large.
So,
uh,
the short-term memory
has to keep track
of everything.
And,
again,
the short-term memory
takes place
in this middle phase
of memory abiding
in this middle phase.
And this means
that memory arising
and then redissolving,
this is right-brain memory.
This gets left out.
And this means
that far memory,
memory of past lives,
that's where the
Schlitz ads comes in.
You only go around
once in life.
Well,
that's smack
in the abiding phase
of the dissipative cycle
again.
You see?
Uh,
if you,
if,
object proliferation,
um,
short-term memory
in terms of,
oh,
I,
I've looked at memory,
I've read so much
material on memory
for the past ten years
on the experimental
psychology aspects
of memory,
just to see
what's in these
people's minds.
They're looking
at ever,
at smaller and smaller
increments
of memory.
Short-term memory
is like really
where it's at
for many people.
Uh,
short-term memory
is like a paradigm
in itself.
There's a,
it's like corresponding
to the search
for,
uh,
the atom
as the lowest
common denominator
in the physical world.
Short-term memory
is the lowest common
denominator
in the memorial world.
You,
you look for
the,
the accuracy
and the way
that short-term memory,
um,
uh,
works
as a,
as a kind of,
a hypothesis
that contributes
to reality.
Now,
I should say
as a footnote
to that,
the idea
of what is known
in the memory trade
as STML,
short-term memory loss,
which is,
uh,
the,
one of the signal,
uh,
attributes
of altered state.
Uh,
this is one of the first
thing that happens
to memory
is short-term memory loss.
Now,
many people
in the,
uh,
investigation of memory
look at,
uh,
the,
the real traditionalists
in memory research
look at short-term memory loss
as pathological.
You lose your short,
your mind,
you're losing your mind
if you lose
your short-term memory.
Watch out.
Keep control.
Stay in the abiding phase
where it's safe.
Let's accumulate,
let's stay in control.
It's all that kind of thing.
Don't let go.
Whatever you do,
don't let go
of your memory
or you will just
melt,
you'll evaporate.
But the real secret is,
is that,
that's the ploy.
Stay with memory
because memory is control.
The point,
that's how the CIA
looks at it
and all intelligence agencies
that look at memory
as control.
But the fact,
the secret is
of the perennial philosophies
that if you die
to yourself,
that if you unknow,
learn the art
of unknowing,
that if you learn
the art in Tibetan
which is called
trom meh,
which is non-memory,
what happens then
is that you do not
lose your mind.
Actually,
you come into
what Jill was talking
about yesterday,
primordial mind
or nature of mind.
This has no pronouns,
you see.
This has no hooks
of personality to it.
So,
memory is used
as a control device.
That's why
when you take
classes at school
you're asked
to regurgitate
in early school.
Rote mnemonic
because see,
this is a way
of hooking you
into control
and predictability
is kind of
give me back
what I gave you
now,
give that right back.
No, nothing new,
just give that right back
to me.
This is,
you will get
the highest marks
on your test
for regurgitation.
So,
the idea
of short-term memory
loss
as a gateway,
it is actually
a gateway
into a different dimension.
the dimension
of God,
the dimension
of the over mind,
of the over self,
whatever you want
to call it,
Atman,
Brahman,
it doesn't matter,
it's different spelling
for the same phenomena.
The same phenomena
is primordial mind.
It really doesn't matter
what you call it.
But if you
control short-term memory
as a kind of
a sphincter
and you don't let
anyone through that
or yourself through it,
you're lost
in this abiding phase.
When you go
into the rabbit hole
as it were
of short-term memory
through short-term memory
loss,
but you've got to
go through it
with awareness
if you go through
it unconscious,
unconscious,
you're finished.
I mean,
you're drunk,
you're stoned,
you can kill yourself
in that form.
You have no awareness,
you have no clarity.
But if you go through
with awareness
or clarity,
that is the entrance
to,
as I say,
the two phases
of the dissipative cycle
that are neglected,
the arising
and the dissolving aspects.
you begin to see
the entire dissipative
nature of the mind.
Now,
one other thing
about the objects here
is that
if you stay
on the object level,
you see objects
fixate attention.
They fixate attention
and they generate
kind of reactive
automatic mind
that is memory
wrongly interpreted.
So you fixate
or you crystallize
attention
through your objects.
This is my Mercedes
and I'm going to put
an alarm system
on it.
No one's going
to get this
and people begin
to build up
a paranoia
about their
valuable objects,
you see.
They become
object hooked
in that sense.
Another aspect
of this
in terms
of our
particular time
is that
people tend
to get into
hoarding
this time
in this age
that we live.
These 300,000 objects
we have become
temporal pack rats
in a sense.
We are hoarding
all these objects
in a sense.
We don't need
all these objects
you know
because all these
300,000 objects
we hoard them
and one of the reasons
that we hoard them
from a psychoanalytic
point of view
is that we think
that these will be
a buffer
between us
and death
between us
and extinction
that if we hoard
things
that they
are a substitute
for living time
these objects
and
compulsive hoarding
and also
a lot of people
hoard when they
get older
actually
is a representative
of trying to
stave off death
that the
people who are
very rich
often accumulate
tremendous arrays
of things
not just for pleasure
but to actually
keep the idea
of extinction
at bay.
now
if we look
at
objects
from another
point of view
that is to say
from the
one point
is
shall we say
the
participation
mystical
participation
that is to say
when there is
no difference
between subject
and object
in primitive
societies
participation
mystique
versus
the idea
of the
Buddhist
or tantric
teachings
of detachment
from objects
and I want to
go into that
for a moment
we have a very
interesting
kind of what
Ken Wilber
calls the
pre-trans fallacy
you begin to
separate two
things which
look the same
but they are
really not
in the
participation
mystique
there is a
kind of
fusion of
subject
and object
in the
Zen tradition
in the
Eastern
kind of
sense
you are
taught to
detach yourself
from objects
not buying
their whole
seeing them
as they are
but not
becoming
totally
involved
with them
and there is
a subtle
difference
in this
as
Hui Nang
the six
patriarchs
Zen
patriarchs
said
not to
be
defiled
by external
objects
this is
to be
one
with the
unconscious
and that's
capital U
it's
conscious
unconscious
he means
that
that is
to be
detached
from objects
so they are
present
in consciousness
when all
thoughts
are discarded
consciousness
is cleared
off
from all
its
defilements
so
on one
hand
you have
this
fusion
of subject
and object
and the
other
one
you have
detachment
like this
not getting
attached
to objects
okay
now there are
some similarities
between these
two states
in the
participation
mystique
you may not
become attached
but you don't
consciously become
detached
there's a subtle
difference
now if we go on
with this a little
bit it becomes
interesting
because what
Jung refers to
as this
or in the
Zen tradition
this epistemological
detachment
the translation
for it
of Hui Meng
of this
unconscious
is the
word
Wu Nian
and Wu
means
no
and Nian
means
literally
it has
several
nuances
to it
it means
no memory
or no
habit patterns
it's most
traditionally
translated
as no memory
so Wu Nian
means
no memory
now
in other words
unconscious
with a capital
U
or conscious
unconscious
means
a state
of no memory
but
what this
no memory
is
and it's
very important
is that
it is
a temporary
suspension
it is not
an obliteration
of memory
non-memory
is
what Lang Changpa
one of the
great
masters
of Tibetan
Vajrayana
thought
said
the spontaneous
wizardry
of the mind
takes place
out of
emptiness
or out
of non-memory
the spontaneous
wizardry
and again
the obvious
by the very
terms that he
uses
akin to
shamanism
right there
with the term
wizardry
non-memory
is something
that
you see
a computer
is very
interesting
a computer
cannot
unknow
this is a
very important
thing
it cannot
go into
the unknowing
mode
if you
clear a
computer's
memory
it's no
temporary
suspension
that's it
the little
I know
about computers
if you
wipe the
disk
clean
that's it
you don't
just say
okay
forget this
and then
see what
happens
this is a
uniquely
human
function
the ability
to suspend
and then
see what
happens
now
non-memory
you see
is
it teaches
us
the
it shouldn't
be cultivated
for itself
it should be
cultivated
in conjunction
with
memory
that is to
say
just because
you've given
up the
abiding
cycle
and looked
at the
arising
and dissolving
that's to
substitute
one thing
for another
you need
the whole
cycle
the middle
phase
is
conservation
of memory
the others
are the
arising
and
dissolution
of memory
so
for memory
to be
its highest
form
you have
to have
conservation
and
dissolution
you need
the dance
between
non-memory
and memory
it's like
saying the
left brain
is bad
that's
ridiculous
the left
brain
has a
vital
function
it's
what
enables
us
to
communicate
and
to
exist
in
this
world
in
that
amnesia
sets
in
and
then
a
runaway
system
begins
and we
go out
of
control
that's
the
dynamic
of it
so
this
non-memory
we have to
learn how
to look at
it
to
oscillate
it
and
in
sitting
practice
one of
the most
valuable
things
that
I have
learned
from my
altered
states
is
the
oscillation
of
memory
and
non-memory
the
oscillation
of
attention
and
the
release
of
attention
and
realizing
and I
always see
them
in an
infinity
cycle
I
always
see
them
in
this
form
like
this
I
don't
know
why
my
mind
always
takes
it
to
this
just
this
dance
like
this
because
it
moves
to
like
memory
and
then
it
shifts
the
dissipative
cycle
and
in
mathematics
and
eight
actually
is very
interesting
this is a
footnote
eight
is a
number
of
Isis
the
goddess
and
eight
the
goddess
is
the
great
as it
were
the
primordial
mind
the
last
thing
about
objects
that
I
would
like
to
introduce
now
is
that
again
objects
in
themselves
are
not
negative
at
all
it
is
our
reference
to
them
that
it
is
this
unconscious
mental
mass
this
linguistic
flux
invisible
flux
that
makes
them
what
they
are
or
aren't
you
see
because
there's
a
tremendous
tradition
in my
research
and memory
I was
astonished
to find
I looked
under
the folk
tales
concerned
with
memory
there
is
a
tremendous
array
of
folk
tales
concerned
with
magical
objects
that
restore
memory
there
is
the
magical
stone
the
magical
drink
the
magical
feather
the
magical
flower
the
magical
kiss
the
footstool
there
are
things
which
actually
are
encoded
as
awakeners
in the
environment
and this
idea of
awakening
in the
environment
is a
very
interesting
one
what it
pertains
to
is the
idea of
the
conscious
impregnation
of the
environment
of
mind
specifically
to
awaken
people
in future
states
when they
go by
or
interact
with
this
object
and
to
use
Rupert's
framework
this
is the
setting
up
of
a
morphic
framework
around
an
object
if
you
take
an
object
and
you
sit
with
it
and
you
meditate
it
and
you
sleep
with
it
and
you
dream
with
it
and
you
use
it
in
ritual
it
begins
to
absorb
in
psychometry
we
see
that
these
vibrations
are
absorbed
every
object
we
have
absorbs
some
of
our
field
that's
why
psychometrists
can
take
a
ring
or
a
belt
in a
very
unusual
way
one
of
the
ways
this
is
done
in
the
for
example
in
the
Gurdjeev
tradition
is
you
take
a
place
or
an
object
and
a
good
thing
that
I
use
in
many
of
the
classes
that
I
taught
is
you
take
a
doorway
and
you
say
to
your
class
or
those
people
that
you're
dealing
with
every
time
you
pass
this
doorway
you
should
wake
up
be
mindful
it's
like
the
bell
going
off
in
the
meditation
retreat
every
time
then
the
art
becomes
to
impregnate
an
environment
with
conscious
objects
and
then
as
you
begin
to
impregnate
your
environment
you
begin
to
set
up
an
extended
mind
field
in
the
environment
which
you
react
with
when
you
go
out
into
it
and
this
is
why
for
the
American
Indian
and
the
Taoist
and
all
the
other
aboriginal
people
that
their
environment
was
a
conscious
environment
that
Gaia
was
alive
and
all
these
ancestors
the
rainbow
serpents
and
the
great
whales
and
all
the
totemic
beings
you
were
reminded
that
you
were
part
of
this
dream
time
of
Gaia
of
this
living
entity
anyhow
let's
stop
here
I've
got
another
subject
let's
break
for
about
you
another
subject
a
very
valuable
one
that
we
should
look
at
and
that
is
one
of
the
counters
to
the
state
of
waking
sleep
or
this
runaway
system
this
memory
wrongly
interpreted
one
of the
principal
counters
to
it
is
to
develop
something
called
cross
state
retention
cross
state
retention
I've
talked
about
this
before
but
I've
done
a
cross
state
retention
or
CSR
is
based
on
the
idea
that
most
of
the
time
when
we
are
in
an
altered
state
whether
it's
psychomimetically
induced
or
dream
or
emotional
when
we
go
back
to
an
ordinary
state
we
don't
remember
there's
a veil
of
forgetting
between
going
from
state
to
state
this
is
Rowan
Fisher
calls
it
state
bound
experience
in
classical
memory
parlance
it's
called
state
specific
memory
that is
to
say
if
you're
one
of
the
classic
things
for
example
in
Sufi
story
is
Nasruddin
he loses
his
key
while he's
drunk
wakes up
the next
morning
can't
find it
and he
says
what am
I
going
to
do
and
he
says
well
I'll
get
drunk
again
and
he
stumbles
off
into
the
bushes
again
and
finds
the
key
because
he's
in
the
same
state
this
is
just
an
example
by
parable
of
the
way
that
it
works
now
again
in
the
dissipated
cycle
the
abiding
section
the
center
one
there's
the
arising
abiding
and dissolving
in the
abiding
cycle
that's
where
state
specific
memory
in
current
research
is
focused
in
this
area
right
here
and
between
dissolving
and
arising
you
don't
look
at
the
transitions
you
see
in
contemporary
memory
research
you
only
look
at
this
abiding
phase
and
some
psychoanalytical
history
of early
childhood
now
cross-state
retention
is
most of
us
know
when we
have
dreams
unless
it
is
an
exceptionally
vivid
dream
when we
wake
up
we
know
that
we
have
dreamed
but
the
dream
disappears
like
the
bubbles
of
a
wave
going
out
after
they
affect
different dimensions. There are yogas of dream recall taught in the Tibetan tradition. There
are yogas taught in African systems of shamanism that I know of for dream recall. There are many
aspects of cross-state retention taught in many different esoteric traditions. In fact,
I would say that cross-state retention is the essence of all shamanic and esoteric ways of
thinking at heart. For example, Eliade teaches that the shaman is the man who goes into the
other realms or the woman who goes into other realms but he is able to bring it back. You see,
this is what differentiates him from other beings. He's able to bring it back. Many people have
altered state experiences and they're, wow, the next morning, I really can't elaborate on
quite what happened, but I know it was fantastic. It's what we call the limbic system flash. You know
that it happened and you have a rush, but you can't elaborate it. Now, the idea of cross-state
retention, first of all, is never taught to us in school. I want to bring this to a basic everyday
life. We're never taught any idea of cross-state retention. You're taught state-specific regurgitated
memory. You are not taught the idea of remembering from one. You're not even taught that you've got
other states, let alone remembering between them. Now, the idea of this kind of shamanic sense
can be taught in many different ways. It can be taught in, for example, the idea of what is called
holy reversals is one way in which cross-state retention is taught. For example, in the peyote
ceremonies, when the Huichols go to the highlands, is it pronounced Wirakuta? When they go,
there's a certain point in distance where everything must be reversed in terms of language and act and
symbol. If you are right-handed, you do everything with the left hand. If this is your friend, you refer to
him as your enemy. If you're walking along and it's a beautiful sunny day, you'll say,
gee, isn't the moon lovely tonight? The reversals are a way of jarring the attention from fixated
patterns, and this inculcates an unusual quality to the attention so that it is remembered differently
because of the reversal. So this quality of reversal is done in many different traditions
throughout the world. That's just one in particular. In fact, I recall one that Rupert told me about
once, and that is the tradition of holy in India. Isn't there a reversal between master and servant?
Yes. That's rather interesting. And I think this probably arose not from just kind of sense,
some sense of equality, but from some sense of awakening. The name itself might have something
to do with that. Now, if we look at another aspect of this cross-state retention,
to operate it fully, it requires a notion of the entire dissipative cycle, how things arise,
how they abide, and how they disappear. And a knowledge also that there is always, no matter what
phase you're in, apparently that primordial mind is there, no matter what phase is showing its face,
whether it's the abiding phase, or the dissolving, or the arising, the primordial sense is always there.
And if you have that sense, the idea of cross-state retention is vastly made much more easy. But in
practical terms, really, let's get, you know, non-theoretical for more practical terms, the best
way for cross-state retention to work is the following. You see, attention in the modern world,
because of all the objects that we've got in it, attention slides across the surface of the mind,
of objects. It just slides. We never go in deep. It slides across the surface of the world.
Now, how do we counter that? Well, for one of the ways in the traditional schools, like in the
Gurdjieff tradition that is done, there's a tradition called self-remembering. And self-remembering
literally means that you, just like in mindfulness, you take a moment, any moment, you take this moment,
for example, and you make it special by investing it with an inordinate amount of intention.
And you see, just in a footnote to this explanation, the sequence goes, intention, attention, retention.
If your intention, if your will is clear that you want to remember, you will pay attention,
and therefore your retention will be clear. Intention, attention, retention. That's how it works.
Now, if you want to raise consciousness by this cross-state retention manner, you take a moment,
and it can be any moment. And you encode your, all of your five senses' response to that moment.
In other words, you take one minute, like right now, you take a minute, and first of all, you look
around you, and you don't try to encode everything. This is something I've learned. You look at a number
of key objects, three, four, five. The mind can only chunk five plus or seven plus or minus two
objects at a time. So don't try to chunk, say, more than five to nine objects. You look around,
say, at people. You see what they're wearing, just generally. Then you look at your, what you're
sitting on, and you feel it, and you see what is this texture feeling, like so. And then you do your
smell, like I can smell tiger lily over here. And then you can look into the sense of taste, what kind
of taste in your mouth, perhaps from breakfast, or the coffee that you're just drinking, or whatever
it is. And what here, what you stop for a moment, and you hear, hear the flies, you hear the birds,
you hear the sound, you encode that. And you begin to multi-sensory encode over a one-minute period.
And the way that it works in the phone, you begin to encode all of those things. And the way that it
works is, the more things that you can encode a memory in sensorially, the easier it will be to
recall the entire memory. That's really it in a nutshell. So if you're able to have in these
five sensory modes, it's very different than if you only, if you just saw someone, you only have a
visual sensory mode to recall from. But you see, the senses reinforce each other. And if you can
reinforce them by your attention, you're set. Now, after the 10 years I've been working on my memory
thesis, I can put it down to a nutshell what it's all about. Memory is a function of attention.
That's it. It's the whole thing. It's the name of the game. If you don't pay attention, you don't
remember. It's that simple. It's that simple. And of course, if you don't have an intention,
you don't have an attention. So it's that intention, attention, retention is the memorial cycle.
So what we do is we take that minute, and you have to know how to trigger yourself in that
moment. I usually, when I give classes or something, do it in a way which is,
do you want to say something? Okay. The sense of encoding is done by like a theme. For example,
the theme of water is given. I'll say to a class, we're going to meet next Thursday, but next Tuesday,
I would like you, or any time before that, any time that you see water in any form, be it rain or washing
up liquid or flushing the toilet or taking a bath, any time you see water, I wanted to remind you to
take a moment, one moment and stretch it out and do that multi-sensory sensing. And then I'm going to
ask you all to tell your story of that moment. I have them all tell stories. And of all these moments,
and you get these, and see, what I'm about is slices of life. Every moment is special,
but it's only special because of the attention invested in it. And I've had them, I mean,
these housewives that I taught adult education in England for a while, these housewives who said,
well, I was washing the dishes and I remembered the water and I looked around and there was the full
moon and she just got excited. And, you know, and then my husband came home and the dog barked and,
you know, and this little old moment became special. And many people did this. We did this
with all kinds of themes. All I'm saying is that this cross-state retention is developed by multi-sensorial
attention within, say, a minute's framework. And you have to be able to trigger yourself.
The point is we're too lazy. We walk through the world and we go like this, but we never just go
like that. That is to say, you're walking by a beautiful flower. I mean, I do this all the time.
And all of a sudden it catches my attention and I'll sit with it. I'll smell it and I'll see the
ground that is coming out. I'll hear it. I'll let that be a cue. Anything can be a cue for you.
And you go into that mode. Now, one of the other things about cross-state retention that I'd like
to say, and this really relates to the theme of the extended mind, is the idea, first of all,
just the idea of cross-state involves extension, right in itself, right to begin with. The idea,
there are two types of cross-state retention that I'd like to look at. And one of them is,
it's purely associative, like this idea reminds me of this idea reminds me of this idea,
and it's this kind of glass bead game type of thinking, okay? And that is one type of cross-state
retention goes auto-catalytic after all. It begins to breed more and more insights. And it's like the
opposite of memory wrongly interpreted, it's like memory rightly interpreted when it goes cross-state.
Now, the other aspect of it is a Greek term called anamnesis, A-N-A-M-N-E-S-I-S, anamnesis,
or any way you want to pronounce it. But anyhow, anamnesis has, again, two meanings to it.
In the classical Greek sense, it means to be able to remember your karmic trajectory, as it were,
your past lives back, like Pythagoras could remember when he was a butcher and a candlestick
maker and a this and a that. Pythagoras was known for his ability to trace his karmic trajectory back,
and this is the idea of anamnesis. It is used today in psychoanalysis when talking about the patient's
past history. They talk about a patient's kind of psychoanalytic anamnesis, tell me about your early
childhood, that type of thing. But you see, at a certain point, anamnesis, just going back with,
I was a dishwasher, and I was a princess, and I was a channeler, or whatever, an ice skater.
This goes back and back and back. And after a while, see, Buddha's first realization, as it were,
his pari nirvana beneath a bow tree, when he became enlightened, it began when he started going back in
this karmic trajectory. He went back 500 lives. And he was a this, and a king, and a queen, and a this,
and a this. And he was cool, and he was happy, and he was delightful, and he was sad.
But what he saw in his great genius was not the fact that he could go back life to life to life to
life, as it were. What he saw is that every one of these lives was, in a sense, an illusory pearl
on the necklace of primordial mind. That is, every one of these lives, although appearing separate,
was arising from primordial mind. It was apparently separate life. But in this dream kind vista, it
wasn't separate. There was only one life. There was only one mind. There was only this one primordial
being. And it put on different clothes from time to time in the apparent world. So this is the way
that the idea of a deeper anamnesis is not just to go life to life to life, but to go to source.
When people play the past life game, I was a this, I was a that, you were a this, very rarely do they
go back to source. And that's the root. The final anamnesis is back to source, to emptiness itself,
to source, to God, to over self, whatever you want to call it. And this is anamnesis depth,
as opposed to, and it's a type of cross-state retention to source, as opposed to associative
cross-state retention extended-wise. So you go to depth, and you go to breadth. Now these two things
will trigger each other off. You see, what constantly goes through my head, and I'll look at
things in breadth. The mind will go, this relates to this, and this relates to this, and this relates
to this. It always happens, funnily enough, or many times when I'm walking by a big apartment building
in the city or something. You look at a room, a window, an arbitrary window, and you know that
somewhere in that apartment, a drama is going on, a life drama is going on in that apartment.
And you realize, in that apartment, there's another drama in this apartment,
this apartment. Every one of it, there's millions of dramas going on. And you speed up the mind a
billion-fold, and to all the dramas that are going on the face of the earth, until you go like that,
and you put them, then you collapse the wave front, as it were, into just an instant. And you realize
that, yes, they're all going on, but it's all now as well. It's not just the extension, but it's the
collapse of the extension into the primordial moment. And it's that oscillation between the
extension of this glass bead game type of thinking, and you go on, you think it could go on forever,
infinity. But you have to go back to its source, as well, which stops everything in a moment.
And then there's this vast sense of interrelatedness. And these two things have to properly
interact with each other in a kind of a mystical framework. If you get stuck just on the proliferation,
you'll go crazy. If you get stuck just on the primordial mal, you'll kind of, this is what they
call dead void heretics in the Zen tradition. You just become, I'm deeply in the void, don't bother
me, you know, just leave me alone and let me sit. So you have to be able to go from these two kind of
states. And that's that dance, that oscillation, which is really key. Now, other ways in which we
tend to miss out on cross-state retention and on 20th century life is the idea of the elimination of
rites of passage. Any types of rites of passage from childhood to adolescence, adolescence to manhood.
I mean, the vestiges that we have left don't really do the job in our culture. Rites of passage
are more seen on what kind of salary you're getting. You know, this is a big rite of passage. Marriage,
on the whole, so many marriages aren't conscious marriages. So many children, I mentioned this to
Jill. Yes, there are so many children that are born maybe are not consciously, you know, looked at as a
process of birth. But rite of passage is a way of going from one state to another state. And if you
don't have that awareness built into your culture, you lose. You lose the dissipative cycle. You lose the
big mind picture at that point. So that is an important thing. Another aspect about cross-state retention
is the idea that transitions, that's why I said reversals, they encourage cross-state retention.
The solstices and the equinoxes, for example, are points of temporal transition from balances of
night and darkness. And these points of transition are ideal times to plant a seed in the mind to say,
remember now, at this axis of time, this nexus of time, really remember what you're all about in the
cycle. Because every solstice and equinox is a point on the dissipative cycle of the year. And you
should use these axis points, these kind of focal points, as points to plant suggestions for integration
into the environment, to make the environment conscious, as it were.
What we have to become then, in a sense, is what I would call psychic amphibians. You have to be,
you see, an amphibian is an animal or a being that can go from water to land. It's a cross-state animal,
you see. So we have to become kind of psychic amphibians, in a sense. And this will really begin to
get us into the mode of cross-state retention. Cross-state retention would, if taught in this kind
of way, would have a tremendous kind of revolution in education, which I want to mention at the very
end here. Now, one last thing on cross-state retention. Actually, two. There is, first of all,
the idea of, in Jung's theory of synchronicity. That's very interesting. He says, in synchronicity,
we have two types of temporal events. One occurs on a causal chain, causal sequential chain.
This happens. And as a consequence, this happens. And as a consequence, this happens. Primary,
secondary, tertiary effects. Then, he says, on the other hand, there may be a kind of meaningful
cross-connection. Now, it's from this idea of cross-connection that, incidentally, that he borrowed
from Schopenhauer, from an essay called, On the Apparent Design and the Fate of the Individual. An
interesting analogy there, Schopenhauer took a world globe model, and he took the meridian of the model
to be the causal chains of events. But the parallels, he said, these were the cross-connections
that happened in life. And this is how Jung built his theory of synchronicity from this geographical
analogy of Schopenhauer. Now, it's interesting that synchronicity means the simultaneous occurrence
of the psychic state, an internal psychic state, and a corresponding external event occurs, which kind
of mirrors or cross-connects to this state. Can you see? So any idea of synchronicity, we get not a,
we don't get a temporal density, we get a temporal fluidity, begins to occur at this time. And this
is where magical thinking is born. This is where all the magical memory systems, like Bruno's magical
memory system, take their heart out, this kind of correspondence between all these symbolic objects
and the corresponding psychic states that go with them. Now, the last method of, in this framework,
all aspects of divination. Divination is like throwing the I Ching, reading coffee leaves, throwing coca leaves,
reading the oracle bones, looking at clouds, reading the flight of birds. These are all processes of divination.
Divination means to become godly or have a godly insight, a godly knowledge into something. Now,
the essence of all divination is to connect the unconscious to the conscious. It is a cross-state
bridge. That's what it's about. When you divine something, so that you throw a mo in the Tibetan
tradition, you throw the cards, you read the tarot, whatever it is, it's a cross-state. You're using these
symbols. You're using this as a medium, as it were, to go from the unconscious to the conscious and to
facilitate this kind of cross-state communication. And again, when I say cross-state, it has the
implication of extended communication or of an extended mind concept goes with the idea of cross-connection.
Now, finally, in this, to bring it down to a literal sense in this whole kind of cross paradigm,
incidentally, one of the great general systems theorists, James Miller, a biologist,
talks about, he said, there are many people who do systems analysis.
That is to say, you take a business and you analyze how it works every little bit of it. He said,
but the much deeper way to operate is what he calls the cross-level hypothesis,
when you begin to mix things from different levels, symbolic levels.
On a mundane term, what's going on with athletics and aerobics and fitness is rather interesting,
because there is a new type of training going on now. And this new type of training is called
cross-training. It's called cross-training. There's a lot of people going to triathletes,
the Iron Man stuff, where you swim and then you run and then you bicycle. And what people are doing,
reading from an article, it says, first associated with triathletes and needed to be prepared for
running, swimming, and biking. Cross-training has been adopted by other athletes and now the general
public. Skiers are alternately roller skating, lifting weights, and running before the first snow
falls. Runners are swimming and doing low-impact aerobic dancing.
And in the same way, beginning exercises are swimming, riding stationary bikes, or taking
stretching classes, etc. But what it does is interesting. Cross-training appears to cut down
injuries because various muscle groups are strengthened by the different forms of exercise. So you see,
I'm making an analogy between physical cross-training and psychic cross-training. You exercise
different as it were psychic muscles by this kind of cross-state interest. Finally, an obvious way of
inducing cross-state memory and perception is to be taught in a way in school or in education,
which the very last thing I'll say is going to focus on that. Now, one last subject before the final last
subject. This one won't be that long. There is a reader, a great thinker that I would like to honor
for a moment in the general systems theory framework. It's someone that I knew personally and I know that
Karen's knew, and that's Eric Yonch. And Yonch was a real, he was a mathematician and a musician and a
systems man in every dimension. His works are like, they're kind of like the glass bead game in a certain
sense. They roam in so many different arenas. And I talked to him about, you know, my work and thesis
and stuff like that on several occasions. And there's a term of his which caught my eye, which I would like to
bring to front now, which I have found to be, along with the non-memory concept in my thesis, one of the
central things that I'm going to be using. And that is what he calls holistic system memory, HSM,
holistic system memory. And essentially, he remarks here, he says, in evolving systems,
systems, or systems with history, with history, that is to say, all dissipative systems. Each system
state depends on the past development of all subsystems. There exists, therefore, a system
memory in terms of the entire system. In other words, there is some system memory, no matter what
phase you're in of the dissipative cycle, whether it's arising, abiding, or dissolving, there is some
holistic system memory, which has got all the pieces, no matter which phase you're in. There's
something which has got it all. That's the way I can put it. Call it an overmind, if you will, for
easy visualization. So this holistic system memory, he goes on to say, each system with history,
that is, a dissipative system, remembers the total development itself of its whole. In other words,
it's an amnesis, its karmic trajectory, and is therefore capable of what he calls religio,
with its own origin. Now the word religio is from religion. Religion means to reconnect with,
really to reconnect with the source, as its original intent. So a holistic system memory operates by
reconnecting to the source of the system. So with that in mind, I'd like to just look at a very
interesting dynamic here. What it means is you start from this, say, this is point A. You start here.
Now by reconnecting to your source, it means you go backwards to your source. That means backwards to
your, like Buddhist, the emptiness at the end of all those lives, the source, the primordial mind.
You're back to that point. Now at this point, a curious thing happened, and it happened to Buddha as
well. After you go back to source, you get a feed forwards into the future of an unexpected,
unanticipated range of insight. But you have to go back to ground zero in order to go forward.
It's the old French, you draw back to leap forward. Now, this model I have found operative in
so many different forms in shamanic ecstasies, in psychoanalysis, in personal insight and creativity.
It is this idea of going back to source, this temporary suspension of non-memory, you see,
and then there can be a leap forward. But there has to be a prepared mind before you go back to source.
Many people just think, oh, I'll be quiet and I'll get creative. First, you have to fill the mind with
intense creativity in terms of a search. There has to be this intent. Then you have to release totally,
and you go back. Now, this idea of holistic system memory incorporates then both the idea of, shall we say,
cross-state retention at the beginning, going back to non-memory, and then you get this leap into the
unknown, which takes you to some other cross-state insight. But I'm doing it very succinctly here,
because it's a subject which I could take a lot more time with. But I just wanted to give you a flavor
of this. It's like in shamanic tradition. It's the idea of a shaman takes a psychedelic, for example,
and then goes through a state of dismemberment, the idea of the body is seen to be dismembered
by some spirit animal, for example, eaten by a great bear or an eagle or a jaguar or what have you.
And then it goes back, it goes back as it where you see this dismemberment takes you to ground zero.
You go back to source, to where the allies, the spirits can take you and remake you, remake you. And
then they throw you into the future like that, and you fly on the wings of the unknown. And you come
back with this gift from the unknown at that point. But you have to go through the dismemberment before
the rememberment of the psyche. There is that kind of cycle. And it's interesting that in many of the
Greek myths, for example, in one of the Greek myths of the sixth century BC, there is a cave in Greece
called Cophonius, the cave of Cophonius. Cophonius was the god of dreams and sleep. But you would go into
this cave, and you would first sit on what they call the chair of forgetting, the chair of lethe.
And this chair of lethe, as it were, you were given what I reckon to be a psychomimetic mushroom brew.
And then, after this took effect, then you were placed on another chair called the chair of memory.
And after you were wiped clean from the chair of forgetting of who you were, you were dismembered
psychically through the psychedelic, then you sat on this chair of remembering. And the new information
came through you. Now again, this is the same way that the cloud of unknowing works. You have to unknow
before you come to God. You have to dismantle all your names, labels, places, categories, and concepts.
And only through unknowing can you be filled with a different spirit, the Spirit of God. But you have to
release first. Now, this idea of holistic system memory is quite a key one. I really haven't done it
justice now, but in a...
you
re-education process and that's the last thing I want to spend a few minutes on
it is where I would put a lot of emphasis you see the way that our memory works
today we spend a lot of time exercising rote mnemonics in terms of you know
like all these memory systems are based on wind friends and influenced people by
this fabulous memory system and all this type of thing but that's quantitative
memory it has nothing to do with quality of memory quality of memory has
to do with being able to touch source being able to touch origin and then this
leap of the unknown out of it and I would like to see in some type of
educational situation for children I'm really talking about I see I've taught at
university level and I've taught at adult education level the area that
interests me the most now is that it's at the children level because I cannot see
that the sense of going twenty years and then telling a kid look you got it all
wrong you're neurotic we're going to have to send you to a psychoanalyst and to
de-school someone after twenty years I can't see the sense of it it's totally
counterproductive if you give someone an education which is cross-state or
extended to begin with that is to see you are taught the good cross-state
analogy is the glass bead game in a sense you see the relationship of a volcano to a
symphony to a star and you begin to extend the mind through all these
different categories you don't just teach children state specifically this is
mathematics and this is history and this is biology and you never teach how they
cross you never look at the parallels in the analogy of the globe so this is what
I would really emphasize in education and I would also educate in terms of
senses as I've said before here I really think you have to take each sense and you
have to teach each sense in detail you want a master of each sense you want a
master of sight smell touch hearing sound and set all of the senses a master to be
for the kids to be taught sequentially by each one of these and then you teach
them after the sequential thing how to integrate all these different masteries
of the senses and then you will get cross-state perception and when you get
cross-state perception you will get cross-state retention that's really in a
nutshell how it works now one of the things in the way that we're kind of
exposed to life and consciousness in terms today is we are every technology as
McLuhan says and I'll quote him the main influence of any technology is not
exercised consciously through concepts and opinions but rather unconsciously by
altering the sense ratios of patterns of perception you see it's not just the
technology with everything itself the technology alters our sense ratio and our
sense ratios have been pushed so that the visual thing is where it's at and I
have nothing against vision per se but I'm just saying the sense of all the other
senses are secondary to vision which is 70 to 80 percent of the way we sense the
world if another opportunity arises I'll share with you I have with many of you
before my interest in the sense of smell I think is another thing that could be
emphasized very strongly so we have to learn how to get our way out of this
what I call sensory amnesia which we really have for many of the senses now the
idea of as I said this kind of cross-state amphibians is a very very
very important one and I think that you have to learn in being cross-state
amphibians and from the altered state experience one of the biggest things
that I've ever learned is as I was trying to say to point out last night in my
question to Terence you know so many people can't bring them back alive it's
just they know they had the feeling that limbic flash of emotional yeah I got it
aha rush but they really don't have the content and the trick you see is the
following that I found after my own voyages into these realms is to learn to
pay attention while you are in the state of what is going on to a very precise
degree in other words to imprint at the moment of recognition a moment which says
aha this is how it works I see this goes to move to this this is important I
will put a beacon in my mind at this point I will light a bonfire so that later
tomorrow when I wake up I will see that bonfire in my mind and that bonfire will
remind me of that insight that beacon you see what you're doing as that one
teacher EJ gold one of the workers and the good chief workers said what you're
doing is you're building beachheads in the fourth dimension by this technique what
you're essentially doing is you are learning to imprint your attention your
intention to remember at the moment of recognition you have to imprint that
intention to to hold it isn't enough just to have it you know as you said
before it's not enough just to how did you say you've got to not not you're not
just looking how do you say you've got to face the thing that's already there in a
sense it's not just a question of confronting something else and this
idea of imprinting at the moment because you see these ideas that we have in
altered states I'll put it very graphically have an extremely short
half-life they go like that like that like that like that like that and they're
coming all over the place especially and when time becomes liquid they come at
you from omni-direction as Terence said you're dealing with hyperdimensional
idea complexes and the way that if you cannot imprint this will this intention
to to recall in an in the ordinary state you lose it now the way that my mind
works in these states and in this kind of extended runs my mind works in these
kind of bifurcations one thing reminds me of another thing reminds me of another
and da da da da da but unless I make a moment for recapitulation while I'm in the
state I'll lose it you have to be able to do that even for a microsecond or else
you lose it you see because what it is is attention you are investing some more
attention at that moment into the idea so attention is the way that you that you
can develop your cross-state retention is the development of attention really
develop that sense of attention anyhow for then and really in summing all this up
for the the idea of a an extended mind is this idea of going cross-state is
extending but to do that you have to learn the simple art of attention and you
have to realize that objects are attention traps if you are unconscious and they
will fixate your attention and track them you will be hooked unto what happens to
your Mercedes or what happens to your beautiful house if you let yourself go to
that extent conversely you shouldn't pay you know no attention to them at all
there has to be a balance between paying too much and too little attention there
has to be that kind of sense of right effort of attention but this idea of an
extended paradigm I think going over the idea of the object proliferation and the
attention and the cross-state retention are different ways that I can see that kind
of contribute to this this overall idea of an extended mind paradigm so I'm gonna
shut up now and I'd like to if you have any questions or discussion or
something like that you know go over some of these things the trick that I use is
when something happens that I want to remember I imprinted as John said but then
10 minutes later I tell it to myself again yeah and 40 minutes after that you
cannot simply mark it in your mind and 24 hours you have to hand it from the
deeper levels to the slightly less deep levels to the more shallow levels and
finally into consciousness and this doesn't fail if you do that you'll get it
out yeah that this is a it's a good point it's called rehearsal yeah and it's a it is
a way of of of memory transfer yeah good point I was very interested by the way in
which the themes the two of the themes that are striking me a lot in the course of
these discussions are the habit versus novelty dichotomy and morphic resonance is a
system of habit formation and have it reinforcement and Terence's novelty wave
running through history the opposite of it as novelty increases and one way of
looking at what it is that decreases is habit and those novelty decreases what
increases habit so one can see the novelty wave as a kind of interplay of
habit and novelty and I thought that you took this for me anyway you took suggested
several new aspects of this way of looking at things because through the loss of
short-term memory and which you say precedes many altered states and which is
also surely a characteristic of dreams and it means that you're apparently as it
were sathing on the advancing novelty wave and so you're and it you know what
happened you keep forgetting what's happened and any object that's there now in
the present can turn into something else because there's sort of no habitual
inertia and this also is like the kind of Terence's theory of the origin of
language that he told us last night where people sort of babble in a kind of
zoom a glossy way and sort of surfing on the breaking wave of novelty the whole time
and somehow transmitting that to others and but without the language yet having a
whole series of built up and established habitual meanings and conventions and so
and and it seemed to me that your notion of cross-state retention and it's really it's it's partly and building up fields which embrace and
I mean it seemed to me implicit in all you were saying sometimes explicit was a kind of
hierarchical field model of these things said what you call or what the end called
holistic systems memory would happen when you have a large-scale field with other
subsystems within it each with their own fields and that even if individual systems
come into being and pass away the larger field that's right and somehow retains a
memory of them and the primordial mind could perhaps be considered the ultimate
larger field within which all fields come into being and pass away and so it seems to me to play to fit quite well with the sort of habit view and the proliferation of objects
which give us the ultimate sense of habit because in a sense the solid state of matter
which is what most of our objects are made out of iron metal originally stone and but then these other things derived from the earth and from rocks like steel and aluminium and and so forth and solid objects like rocks from which they are derived endure for extremely long time and matter in the solid form is at its
most fixed in the liquid form less fixed in the liquid form less still in the gaseous and as a
fluid plasma there's a total flux the whole time and it's but in the solid form in the crystalline form in other words it takes on a particularly rigid set of habits and I think one of the ways that we think about reality depends on what we take as the basic paradigm for reality and I think there's no doubt that solid objects are the basic paradigm for mechanistic science
because solid matter the atoms are considered the ultimate small solid objects they're impenetrable I mean talking about the old style atoms of atomism as of course atoms have turned out not to be like this at all but the way they were thought of was as enduring solid objects
and I think that astronomy had a lot to do with that because the astronomical model of reality is that the sun and moon and things endure indefinitely but when they disappear below the horizon they haven't vanished they're enduring in where we can't see them that these solid objects persist indefinitely
we live in a world which is conditioned by solid objects persisting for millions of years far beyond human time spans so we have the idea of astronomical time and a kind of solid object paradigm both of long-term time and of the endurance of objects in this world which is very different from the biological paradigm of reality which I suspect is well I'm fairly sure is Terence's leading one to a larger extent my own biological model is that and the model you brought out is that things come from
they come into being they stay around they stay for a while or develop for a while and they pass away this is the biological model seeds germinate plants grow and they die babies are conceived they grow as embryos they're born people grow up and grow old and they die and this is true of all things in the biological realm they come into being and they pass away what we have now is a model of the universe where the biological model of the universe and the evolutionary universe where the universe comes into being the hatching of the cosmic egg or the
the big bang grows and grows and expands and may in due course die or come to some kind of culmination or transition but that isn't the model that either astronomy gives us or mechanistic physics which is based on eternal laws and eternal matter there isn't this perpetual flux of growing coming to being and passing away and if we have a biological model then that fits with both what you said about memory arising and persisting and falling back into non-memory
then flips into what something terence said very evocatively last night was this kind of whole biological psychedelic reality behind the world of dreams which is behind the world of the physical world in which all of which things are coming into being and enduring and passing away and things that come into being repeatedly become increasingly habitual and things that if we make an abstraction from the most habitual of things namely crystals
we arrive at the idea we arrive at the idea of permanently enduring matter as the basic reality rather than the coming into being of forms and patterns and their passing away and their recurrence
yes I thought it was very interesting what you said about the proliferation of objects causing the increasing densification of the temporal dimension it seems to me that I was saying this to Rupert at the braid that
it's almost as though there is a transcendental object at the end of time and that every object that is created is an effort to approximate the felt presence of the transcendental object so that either and I wondered as you spoke if perhaps we haven't passed
we haven't passed the apex of the apex of the object proliferation phenomenon perhaps around 1900 or so and that now there actually are fewer and fewer objects in our lives as computers and things like that become multipurpose objects that combine in themselves or objectify in themselves the ability to be many many different kinds of objects
and when we have an extrapolation of physical objects within the subject of the subject that we come into every object to be the world and that object to be met
So while we take an extrapolation of that I can see the object as part of the historical advance the objects beginning to be fewer and fewer it's a kind of aesthetic taking hold with the ultimate result being
single object in the world, and that object would be the contrescent and objectified mind
of the species, because every object is essentially a trap for mind, a frozen portion of the mental
universe, so that one can... and it fails always, because it's only an approximation of the
perfect object, but the... and this, to me, this kind of idea ties in with the notion of the flying saucer.
The flying saucer, which haunts time like a ghost, has a curious relationship to an axe head.
It is, in fact, probably a manifestation of the same thing, so that we can see that mind is trying to
manifest itself wholly and completely, and a notion like the philosopher's stone is the notion,
a curious blending of mental and physical qualities, where something behaves like an idea, but is made of
matter, and has the enduring qualities of matter, but the transforming qualities of thought.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, I think that we could almost measure our distance from the transcendental
object at the end of time by the proliferation of objects in our mutually created world, and so that
was very useful, that connection of objects to the density of time, to my own notion of a transcendental
object, which is drawing things through time toward us. It can be extrapolated further. I mean,
it's not only that all objects are attempts to realize the eminence of the felt object at the end
of time, but all messiahs are trying to be the messiah. Religions are trying to be the religion. It's that what
being in history is, it seems to me, is a series of attempts to approximate transcendental objects
that are felt to be outside of time, and of course, memory is very important in this.
I think the symbol of the, all the fascinations. The fascination with crystals seems to me to be a signature of this theme, that we're,
the crystal of the diamond body, which is the ultimately enduring, ultimately transparent jewel, which lures us
onwards to supreme order and matter which, once chaotic, is in its state of supreme order, is ultimately luminous and transparent.
So that would view the current interest in crystals as a kind of symbolic fascination. This is my position.
Yes.
Glad that I didn't say it.
Yes, I think you're right. That why the crystals are fascinating is not for any imagined power that they possess,
but because they are the embodiment of an ideal, quite obviously.
This is what I meant before. I've got this thing here. About impregnating conscious objects in the environment,
and crystals would definitely be, you know, the primary aspect of a conscious object. You thought that they can heal and respond to consciousness and stuff like that.
So it is. It's a very good, specific example of a conscious environment, and I would, I think you're somewhat optimistic to think we passed the apex.
I think that we will pass it, only to the degree that we go through some kind of very large-scale bifurcation point.
Some, there's going to be some radical change. I don't think it's just going to be, okay, everybody, let's get rid of all your objects.
Obviously, it's not going to be like that. I think the computer can save a lot of, as you say, multipurpose work and tasks,
but, you see, capitalism as it stands now is based on the generation of objects, and that's what I mean.
And so, everyone wants to make that buck, because you only go around once in life, you see.
The point is, once we get rid of that, you only go around once in life scenario, then the object proliferation will begin to diminish,
because then you'll have a dream time kind of consciousness, and if you can have an electronic dream time,
this is something that Andrew's talking about, you can begin to do that by using a computer, you know, type of reality, as it were.
Don't you think maybe the hopeful sign is that, though we don't necessarily follow it in our daily lives,
that the dominant, I believe I can say this, I'm not sure, that the dominant aesthetic in the West is an anti-clutter.
We really appreciate vast, empty spaces, and clean lines, and white walls, and receding perspectives,
where our Victorian grandmothers, you know, like to hang plants in small gloomy rooms, with tables covered with tchotchkes.
I agree, but by the same token, I think that a lot of the architecture is actually impoverished today.
You look at the same street corner in Paris a hundred years ago, and today, and you see what's there,
and these clean, streamlined lines don't have the elegance, they don't have the beautiful curvilinear sense that represents the arising and dissolving aspect.
I know what you want to say, but I can't go completely, the idea that we want to be anti-clutter,
because I find more, and I find that clutter is proliferating itself.
I wish I could say that it was going the other way, where awareness, the awareness of clutter is here, yes,
but I don't find that, I mean, you take a culture like Morocco, or in American Indian culture,
where you have this beautiful, you have a teepee, or you have a mosque, or, you know,
a beautiful, simple, curvilinear lines, and not too many objects.
I don't know, I think we've got a ways to go before we reach that aesthetic.
How many people here?
I think the Japanese are interesting, because they are the masters of space,
the masters of no clutter, and objects for them have always been very few,
and each material has been understood in its very essence,
and that essence has become the object in all its manifestations,
but now they're in this extraordinary role of providing us,
of feeding the West with every kind of electronic objects.
Yeah, and there's always new desires,
and for instance, I was thinking of, like, simple things like coffee makers, you know,
that it's not, you know, a few years ago it was a big innovation to have, like, a drip coffee,
Mr. Coffee kind of thing, but now you have to have an espresso machine,
and then you have to have the thing with the steamer, you know,
and it's not enough just to have a TV, you have to have a VCR,
and then you have to have a special timing device that will catch your show when you're not home,
and play it back, and you have to have a pasta maker, and on and on, all these things.
It's like, I see that it is proliferating,
but I think what you might be talking about is that it's miniaturizing.
The technology is getting smaller in a sense, but it's not particularly less objects.
And the other thing I thought of when you were saying that was the movie 2001,
where that whole theme of the object, actually the tool, is so explicitly stated,
where the ape is with the bone hitting the first tool, and he throws it up in the air in ecstasy,
and it comes down as this spaceship.
And in a sense, Hale 9000 is that ultimate tool,
and that's one of the main subplots of that movie,
that it does do everything that you want an object to do,
that it, in some sense, does approximate this omnipotent power,
but something goes wrong and goes haywire.
Well, the curious thing about these lines of progression
as they now surface in the computer industry
is that the product which the computer industry is dealing is the self.
That's what they're selling.
And so, aren't you interested in buying in to the self?
How can you be without it?
It's the ultimate product.
I mean, they say,
you will be more powerful.
Your memory, your plans, your wishes, your intentions.
They have, out of dealing us all kinds of garbage,
they have finally centered in on the ultimate product,
the thing that everybody wants as much of
as they can possibly get their hands on,
and they're just packaging it up furiously and getting it out to us.
But perhaps we have closed some sort of cycle
with the realization that the ultimate product can be the self.
Now let's just make that conscious,
get money out of the cycle,
and suddenly we will turn into a very different kind of civilization.
The other thing I was thinking about in there is
Terence, when I visited him,
recommended this book called Neuromancer,
which basically,
to follow that proliferation of objects into a fused whole,
what this then posits is a not-too-distant future reality
where there's a collective consensual reality called cyberspace.
In other words, the computer opens out this consensual hallucinogenic reality
that you then enter into.
I'm not sure where I want to go with that,
except that that does become,
that is a sense and object,
but then that also, in a sense,
becomes a state of consciousness as well.
And it's a form of an extended mind that everybody shares in.
Yes, computers then become doorways rather than machines.
I don't know how many of you have used the Macintosh operating system,
but the genius of this operating system is,
let's say you're in a program like Full Paint,
and you need a pencil,
you must go to this thing called the toolbox
and get the pencil
and bring it back to the desktop
and then use it.
And when you're through using the pencil,
you put the pencil away.
So all these conventions of ordinary three-dimensional space
have been written into this operating system.
So you need know nothing about computers.
The computer has disappeared,
and the ordinary set of reflexes,
go get, pick up, use, put back,
are all operating.
And you can see in 20 years what this is going to lead to.
It's going to lead to,
these are walk-in worlds
that will be made as user-friendly as three-dimensional space.
That's the goal, obviously, conceivably.
But it seems to me that I'm doing a particular materialized aspect
of something that seems to obtain at every realm of reality.
Because my experience of psychedelic realms
is one of a wild proliferation of forms and shapes and patterns
and limitless proliferation.
And biological evolution shows the same kind of seemingly limitless proliferation
in over a million species of insects
and tropical rainforests
with tens of thousands of plant species in them.
And there's just this kind of wild proliferation,
which presumably happens when the novelty wave gets loose for a while,
as it does again on Monday.
And this wild proliferation seems to be part of the very nature of things.
And the thing about habit is that at least it has a kind of stabilizing effect
on some of these proliferations.
I mean, why should one want to bring anything back
from the psychedelic experience
or even from the Amazon jungle?
And in a sense, you know,
when one's got it back,
it becomes a kind of object,
a herbarium specimen,
it has a name,
it's sort of,
it becomes part of the kind of objectified,
materialized world.
But one of the things that overwhelms me a lot of the time,
it's a kind of feeling that I find hard to put to words,
is just the overwhelming...
variety of objects. The fact one could, if one wished, pay attention to almost anything.
When I was in India, I was employed to work on the physiology of pigeon-pea plants, which
are very much to my taste. They're a plant of my own size, and I like them very much.
I know them better than any other plant, I think. But, in a sense, there's infinite
levels, you know, the anatomy of the pigeon-pea. I know you can cut open any leaf or stem,
and put it on the microscope and see layers of cells, and order within cells. Then there are
thousands of varieties of pigeon-pea plants. We had them growing in our fields. There's thousands
of different things you could look at in each variety, and thousands of measurements you could
make in these experiments. And that's just one plant within a genus which has something like
twenty other species, and that's part of a family with thousands of other species within it.
They seem quite arbitrary. I could equally well, if some did, ask me to be more likely
on another plant in the species. There's this kind of arbitrary element to attention.
The same with books. You go into a library, and there are thousands and thousands of books,
or a bookshop, all on potentially fascinating topics. And you know, why should one read one
rather than another? And that seems to be the big problem. If one is going to try and make
cross-state pretensions, or if one is going to try and bring things back, why that rather
than something else? Because we live in this wildly proliferating world.
Well, that's a good question. You know, why that rather than something else? I think the whole
thing hinges on how meaningful it is at the moment to the person, meaning is in the eye of the beholder.
And, you know, something that is hyper-dimensional to Terence or myself might be different to anyone else here.
But the point is usually, as you go up the node in these kind of hyper-dimensional complexes, the ones up high,
those are the ones, when you bring them back, are going to have the most extensive communicable aspect to all people at the most basic level.
You see, if you pick from too low a level, you'll only be able to communicate to a super-specialist.
But you want to get those ideas of ultimate generalization, yet ultimate simplicity and ultimate power.
And those are the ones, those are the rare animals, the rare plants, that when you bring them back, you can say something to a few people,
and they don't have to have great training, they'll have the most impact.
I think that's what it's about, the highest communicability.
Kind of hyper-dimensional complexes, the ones up high, those are the ones, when you bring them back,
are going to have the most extensive communicable aspect to all people at the most basic level.
You see, if you pick from too low a level, you'll only be able to communicate to a super-specialist.
But you want to get those ideas of ultimate generalization, yet ultimate simplicity and ultimate power.
And those are the ones, those are the rare animals, the rare plants, that when you bring them back,
you can say something to a few people, and they don't have to have great training, they'll have the most impact.
I think that's what it's about, the highest communicability.
Yes.
Of course, Terence is on to a rather simple topic, in a sense,
because if every one of the tropical species of the Amazon took one into a totally different psychedelic realm,
they're kind of arbitrary, qualitative.
There does seem to be a manageably small number of known hallucinogenic plants.
Although not a manageable number of hallucinogenic images.
No.
But there's a manageable number of hallucinogenic creodes.
That's true.
And in a sense, anyone who has the DMT experience and the mushroom experience is traversing a path,
or at least they're getting a ticket to a realm, you know, they're checking in to a flight to a realm where others have been before.
It's nominal on the proliferation of language.
For instance, as we go back in time, the tools get simpler and simpler.
Throw it.
Do all these things.
But you notice that it could do some things better than others.
Mm-hmm.
And you said, we scrape, therefore we need a scraper.
Mm-hmm.
We slash, therefore we need a slasher.
Mm-hmm.
And these verbs were translated in their functions became objects.
Okay.
It's a good point.
What happens in this type of thing is you get the co-evolution of language and objects.
In other words, as your objects develop language, your language develops objects.
And you get this kind of oscillation between language and objects.
So by developing a hyperdimensional object or language, can we force the development of the others?
I wouldn't say you would force it.
It would come.
Yes.
So it is, in fact, the same enterprise.
The evolution of a hyperdimensional language is nothing less than the project to create
a hyperdimensional object and vice versa.
In a sense, I would say so.
If you get this incredible, you know, psychedelic vision that you have and you're able, you know,
and you call that a transcendental object, then the idea is you will begin to get a hyperdimensional
language to begin to make that communicable or else it stays.
That's what I mean by bringing it back.
By bringing it back, all I mean is by making it communicable so that it is useful to other people.
I don't mean to bring it back and stick it in a zoo and say,
this is a hyperdimensional object from the Amazon and it's one from Africa.
It's got to have functional, useful evolution.
It's what I call, it has to have a potential, what I call an evolutionary next message quality to it.
It really has to have that quality.
It's not just object for the sake of object.
But then words which are beheld are much closer to being things than words which are merely heard
because like things they are seen.
So there's a migration toward a single trans-linguistic, if you will, state where objects and words are suddenly found to be the same thing.
And this would be the entry out of history and into a magical dimension where words and things are seen to be the same.
This is it. This is dream time.
This is this total participation mystic.
This is like in many, for example, the American Indian traditions.
They talked about there was a time when men could become animals and animals could become men.
And there was one language that was common to all beings.
This is this is the time when when this you can hyper dimensional trans-linguistic, whatever you want to call it.
There was one language and you could go from species.
The idea of what we have of the Nagual of a shaman going to one animal.
I think it was much more common in ancient times.
But I think.
So this is the realm of the extended mind.
That's right.
In the extended mind, words and things are two sides of the same coin.
Yes.
At the highest level of it.
Yes.
The very highest level.
In the beginning was the word.
And then everything proceeded from that point.
And I think there is.
And in magic, magic is based on the idea that you can, by intentional visualization, you can create an object.
I mean, I just say this as an anecdote.
I was once doing a test with a biofeedback with a friend of mine, Jeff Blundell, in England.
And he had this thing all hooked up to him.
And we were sitting around about 15 of us.
And he said, I want you to put this coin under one of the books in front of you in a circular table.
And somehow I'll be able to sense when I'm at the place and the lights were gone and this machine, the mind mirror and all of that.
And he found it four out of four times where the coin was when he just went by.
And then I said to myself, hey, okay, enough of that.
And I said, I don't have the coin, but I'm going to create a virtual object underneath my book.
I'm going to visualize the bloody coin.
And so I did.
I put the coin.
And he went by me.
And his bells went off.
And he says, you've got the coin.
I said, no way.
And he said, I know you've got the coin.
I said, no way.
And he said, let's back down to the book.
And he said, what?
And I said, what did you do?
And what that was just an illustration of was just magic.
It's simple.
It's not magic.
It's just the power of the extended mind.
You can just actually place something by intention and attention in the environment that will have that effect.
But it really is magic.
Well, it is.
It is, in a sense, yeah.
Yeah, please.
To what degree is science and the scientific paradigm just creating this?
This hyper-meta-space.
And that the creation of, let's say, DNA, first as a thought system and then as a creation of something that's manipulated.
And then it's genetic structure.
And then we can, given that information, have the ability to hang out in our genetic structure,
as that is the metaphor of our extended mind, like you were talking last night,
our genetic structure going back and our genetic structure going forward.
This is historical access of a group mind phenomena at the scientific base.
So where is the nub of your question?
How does this sort of mirror what the alternative experience that you're talking about,
in terms of the border crossings around going into, let's say, plant or animal phenomena,
is entering a kind of world that we haven't experienced enough yet to know that?
The science is, let's say, up on this level of the ladder and we can start accessing each other genetically across the room,
but we just haven't figured out that that's how we're doing it.
Well, what I'd first say is what Terence said before.
We've done all that in the past, in our genetic past.
We've been able to go into plants and animals and rocks and the entire,
that's what, again, what the dream time is all about, the animated Earth.
It's not just that the Earth was alive.
It's just that we animated it by our interaction with it.
It's not just this being, the Earth hanging out.
It's what, to really get into it, it's what we call the development of the geopsyche
that's different than the Gaia field, which is the mind and the being of the planet itself.
But the geopsyche is the interaction of the collective mind of humanity, or of a tribe, with the Gaia field.
And that's when you begin to get the most interesting kind of hybrid going on.
And I think what science has done, at a certain level, science is, as Rupert has said,
and we are really an object-based science.
We don't look so much at the invisible nature of things in terms of this arising and dissolving kind of dissipative paradigm.
And I think that until we get a science which incorporates the object world, you don't want to dismiss that,
but as well as to see the kind of, the magic, this magical element.
In other words, you see, like Fridjof Capra developed the new physics, or once they developed and made it popular,
and Rupert the new biology.
And what each of these guys has done, as I see it, is add the dimension of mind to a classical scientific discipline.
I, in my own sense, I'm an archaeologist, and what I've tried to do is add the dimension of mind to archaeology.
So, essentially, what we're doing is, we're restoring a dimension that was written out of the program,
but it was always there in the earliest of times.
And, again, what Rupert says, I mean, I have to, you know, listen to, is the idea, yes, this object proliferation is part of history.
It's not a negative thing, there's tremendous diversity.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with object proliferation.
I'm just saying that when we become attached to the objects, that our minds become attached to them
and create this unconscious kind of mental virus, as it were, and we become fixated at that level.
But there are the phases.
There's the time for object proliferation, and there's the time for, you see, in music, for example.
There's a thing, something I'll never forget, the musician John Cage, who used to play what he called a prepared piano.
You take a piano and you stick shoes in it and small alligators and marbles,
and you get all these weird sounds when you're playing the piano.
Now, one of the things that he said about it, and this is a general systems principle, he said,
in talking about atonal music, you know, that's that kind of Schoenbergian kind of, you know, non-rhythmical stuff,
he says, at a certain point, spontaneity begins to neutralize itself.
And this is so important in composition and evolution.
At a certain point, what may be very good for a time actually becomes detrimental to a system.
Cancer, for example, is something which is, you know, you have a spontaneous movement, but then it's out of control.
You get positive, positive feedback, and you're gone.
You have to have these kind of governor, these oscillations of kind of, like Rupert said,
of some degree of habit, which is positive habit and positive action, and then you have free flow.
And then some habit comes back.
There's this oscillation.
To me, the biggest lesson I've learned in all of this stuff is the oscillation between,
form and emptiness.
And then to know that they are ultimately the same thing.
But you have to understand between memory and non-memory is a dance.
And between object and objectlessness is also a kind of a dance.
Let me just, before, is there anyone else who hasn't said anything that might want to add anything?
I just wanted to ask, and the novelty wave, the evolutionary thrust.
Well, I'll say a little bit and then Terrence can, I mean, go on.
I mean, in a sense, the, I mean, in one, how would you define, I'll get to it right a bit,
in one, in like a sentence, how would you define novelty wave so everyone knows what we're talking about?
Following Rupert's formulation, I think I would call it the ebb and flow of the interaction between habit and novelty.
Okay.
So, in a sense, you see, this is very much the same thing between the ebb and flow between habit and knowledge.
There's what I call the oscillation between memory and non-memory.
You see, memory is habit-based, it's conservation-based.
And non-memory is, and even Saraha says this, this is where creativity emerges from.
So, in a sense, the relationship between intention and the novelty wave, and it's a good question,
is that, you see, without, intention decides the point where you will shift from one state to another,
from memory to non-memory.
Now, the way I look at this, for example, is in meditation practice, for example, if I'm sitting,
and you take a tennis ball, and you throw it up, and the first bounce, right at the very top of the bounce,
there's the point in mathematics, it's the x by dt, the rate of change equals zero.
It's just that point right there, where it's at the height of the bounce.
That, and then it bounces again, and a little lower, and it reaches that point again, and again, and again.
Now, the point is, each one of those points, when they occur in consciousness, when the rate of change equals zero,
it's the optimum time to shift gears.
That's the time, if I'm doing a sitting practice, and I'm focused into one-pointedness.
There's a certain point where one-pointedness becomes difficult to hold.
It starts to wander around the edges.
So, what I've learned to do is, right at that point, I shift into no-pointedness.
I give it rain.
And that there's a certain point where no-pointedness begins to get too diffuse.
And at that point, when the ball's again, you go back into the one-pointedness.
And you have to learn those points of where that ultimate, optimum rate of change is, where to shift.
But to go with the shift.
Don't do it against it.
Say, no, I'm doing a one-pointed sitting, and I'm going to do that, and by God, I'm going to torture myself.
I have found, for me, that's not the way.
I'm like this, and when it begins to go, I'll go like that.
And then when that weakens, I go like this.
And that way, you see, it's the transition from one state to another actually awaken intention and awaken you.
When you go from one state to another, it awakens you.
And one last point to this, about the intention, is that the, I've said before, the cycle is intention, attention, retention.
Actually, behind that intention is another memory.
And it is a memory, it's this holistic system memory.
It's the one that knows the whole show.
In other words, there is something behind that, because to intend something, you say, okay, I want this to really be focused.
You have to have an idea, an image of what focused is, and you don't know where you get that from.
And you get that from some holistic base, which is even before the intention.
Okay, any other points that people want to raise, or just before we go have lunch, or comments, or anything?
I just briefly wanted to raise something about names and forms.
Because we talked about the fact, with Terence, that to some extent objects and their names are the same.
But the interesting thing, and of course in Hindu systems, you get this hyphenated word, Nama Rupa, where the name and the form are somehow equivalent.
But the interesting thing is that so many forms don't have names.
As you say, when venturing through these realms, one's in the realm of the unspeakable, much of the time.
Forms without names.
And to bring them back, they have to be named.
And however many you name, there's millions more that won't be named.
And it will pass away, perhaps, forever.
And I think that it just occurred to me, we have very much, this is a living reality in the world today, with the conservation thing.
The Amazon jungle is full of species of insects and plants that have never been named.
In other words, they're unknown to science, to use the conventional phrase.
When they're named, it's announced in the taxonomic journals as a new species to science.
In other words, they're not known until they're named.
And what's exercising a lot of people at the moment is that a lot of these species are going to become extinct before they're known.
And a lot of people think it's not so bad if they become extinct after they've been known.
So you send in a collecting trip, and so you can name them all and have them all in queue, herbarium, pressed on sheets, and somehow recorded and photographed.
And then at least you've done that, even if they become extinct.
But somehow the idea that they could just pass away without being named is an actual reality of the world at the moment.
This is not just in the psychedelic realms, but there are lots of unspeakable plants, in the sense unnameable plants of men.
Because nobody's been there to name them yet.
So although in a sense some things become part of our mental world through being names and forms,
the psychedelic experience and the Amazonian jungle and lots of other things show us that there are many forms without names.
Clouds are another example.
We don't even bother to look at most of them because they have forms, they sometimes remind us of things,
but usually we just assume these are unnameable forms.
As I say, in this model everything arises out of this emptiness, this primordial mind is infinitely spewing out new names and forms.
And I don't think you can ever, you say millions of them, you may never be lost forever.
I don't think they're lost forever.
Any time you tap that dream time, that primordial mind, nothing ever truly ever disappears from that realm.
It's there, it's contactable by the state that you put yourself into to access it.
Isn't that that it's so vast that you can never be sure that you'll pass precisely that place again?
But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
All you can really say is that if you were given the opportunity to, as it were, to imprint and bring it back,
and it didn't come back with you, it wasn't right for it.
I mean, it didn't have its communicability was not for that purpose.
I really wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't worry about that element.
Where that came from...
Well, but I think artists are the people who do worry about that,
who keep trying to go into it and bring out as much as they can and feel the tension.
They want to speak the unspeakable.
They want to sculpt the unsculptable, paint the unpaintable.
And every time they succeed, a step forward is taken.
It is.
But just to round things kind of finely off,
it's like what we were just saying the other day about tribal art and canonical art,
like the Tonkas and things like that.
You see, for them, everything was accessible through certain canons and frames of reference and geometry and form,
because it would awaken within you the new states.
What we're saying on this other level, the artist stuff,
it is this pursuit of a novelty wave.
Like, if I don't get it, it's gone forever.
And it's very different from the traditional ways of canonical art,
being able to arise in the mind something.
And in surrealism, when it arose in the early part of this century,
the surrealist artists and painters and poets,
what they were all into when they started getting and smoking hash
and hanging out in cafes and absents and all of that kind of stuff,
what they really got into was the idea that we can pull out images that no one has ever gotten before,
and the Dali's and all those kind of people, Magritte and et cetera.
But what, after a couple of years, I did a study of this,
what they found disappointed them profoundly.
Because the further they went out into the unknown,
to get back the unsculptable and the unpaintable,
they found that archetypes of patterns were coming up,
that as far as they went to become individualized,
they kept on hitting archetypes.
As far as they went.
And that's what, see, all these artists who want to be individual,
are the unpaintable and sculptable.
They'll come up against this.
Surely the whole point is that if you have habit, you have novelty.
And yet the extreme of novelty is habit.
In a sense. And what you want to do, though, as we said before,
is to have a balance between the best of habit and the best of novelty.
That's really, that's what the novelty wave, this ebb and flow of the two,
and between memory and non-memory.
You need that, the yin and the yang, to continually redefine each other,
to keep each other, to awaken each other.
Or the role of ego, intention, as opposed to the novelty wave.
And it seems to me it's a situation like the old saying in Protestant hermeneutics,
man proposes, God disposes.
Intentionality is the act of proposing.
The novelty wave disposes of the intention in whatever way that it can at that moment.
That's it. This is KPFK Los Angeles, and we've heard the end of John Steele speaking on memory,
a discussion with Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, and Jill Peirce,
who is Mrs. Rupert Sheldrake.
I should say Jill Peirce and Rupert Sheldrake, who is Mr. Jill Peirce.
Thank you.