Well, the parachute never looked more like a mushroom than it does right now.
I couldn't really see you all in the firelight last night,
so this is like seeing you for the first time.
Welcome, and I hope you feel free to interrupt what's going on at any time
and ask questions, or if something needs clarification,
please don't hesitate.
My hope for these kinds of retreats is that it will quickly become so interesting to everyone
that the presentational form will transform itself into a dialogue among many people.
It seems to me that's when it happens best,
and I don't think people would be here if they didn't have strong opinions and ideas
about probably everything which is said.
So that's the way the group mind is generated,
by everyone opening up and expressing how they relate to these things that we're going to discuss.
I guess the place to start is sort of with looking at the notion that
the dawning paradigm of postmodern consciousness seems to be the growing awareness
that we don't know what is happening at all,
that all of the models whose implications have been worked out over the past 500 years or so
have come to a place where they are now recursive,
and they no longer can be pushed forward as models of explanation.
In other words, they are completed,
and ontological analysis of how they work now shows us the limitations of their application to reality.
They just simply cannot, there is not more blood to be squeezed from the stone of science.
There may be further discoveries,
but further growth and understanding along those lines now seems unlikely,
what with complementarity principle, Bell's theorem,
the primacy of language and the formation of ontology.
All these things show the relative power of science to account for reality,
where before it was assumed that science would ultimately give a good account of reality.
So postmodern living is living in the light of the fact that that faith has dissolved away,
and that we're now living in some kind of intellectual free space or fire-free zone,
where everything is up for grabs.
And the 20th century's fascination with the archaic,
with shamanism and breakdown of perception through modern art,
exploration of the unconscious through psychoanalysis,
mass political movements,
all of these things relate to this fascination with the archaic,
which is an effort on the part of the culture to stabilize itself,
because we really have, having seen the limitations of science,
we have discovered we are in a small rowboat in a dark ocean,
and we're being swept we know not where.
So all past tradition is searched,
magical traditions, alchemical traditions,
lost philosophical traditions,
pre-literate tribal traditions,
everything is frantically searched for a key.
And while there are consoling perceptions that arise out of this search
through all this other extended human knowledge,
there haven't yet emerged certain answers about what is going on.
This is why several people last night referred to how weird the time is,
how hopeful we are with so little reason on the surface to be hopeful.
And it's because the gelling out of this historical problem is happening right now,
and it's not clear what it will become.
Meetings like this are efforts to build an understanding of it.
It doesn't appear that it's going to filter down
through the transformation of institutions of control.
It appears more like it's going to be some kind of proletarian upwelling of a shift of point of view.
Now the shorthand way of saying what I just said
is that we now know that we don't know anything.
And things like the psychedelic experience and the use of psychedelic plants throws open doorways
that science was able to successfully keep closed during its heyday
because they were areas where the number of variables exceeded science's power of description,
and therefore they said, well, we'll just keep driving straight ahead
and we'll go up those rivers later.
But now that is all changed,
and the exploration of the existential dimension of not-knowingness,
which psychedelics makes possible,
is what is forming modern people, I think.
I mean, people who will be seen to have led lives that were relevant 50 years from now
or 100 years from now,
people who had actually figured out the context of the world they were living in
and tried to come to terms with it.
And this morning I think we want to talk about plants and how they relate to the planet.
But before we do that,
I want to paint a picture for you of a mandala,
which then I will discuss later in other meetings.
But my notion of what the postmodern person's mandalic projection onto the world should be
in terms of a map of understanding
is a quadrated circle
in which psychedelics and feminism and cybernetics and space travel
are the four parts of the circle.
And in the center of the circle looking backwards in time,
there is a category that I would call conservation,
which means conservation of the planet,
conservation of traditional and historical knowledge,
conservation of values,
conservation in the sense of intelligence husbanding the planet.
and when the mandala is flipped over
and you look through it into the future,
conservation has been replaced by art.
Art is the ultimate expression of this transformation
of unorganized matter into ideas
which human beings carry on.
And we carry it on in a technical mode out of necessity,
but in the artistic mode
out of a kind of upwelling of ecstatic self-expression about the universe.
So conservation is the way we relate to the past,
and human history is seen as an object of collective artifice-making in the future,
culminating in the notion of the flying saucer.
To do this, we have to completely redesign our understanding of reality,
which in terms of practical experience will mean that reality itself will appear to be redesigned.
And I touched on this just for a moment last night when I mentioned plants
and said how admiring I was of them
because they exist on sunlight, air, and earth
and that this is what we have to learn to do
in order to release spirit out of the ape matrix that we're bound in.
And strangely enough, the way this is to be done, apparently,
is by a redefining of the nature of the biological world
in relationship to this other kingdom of being, which we call plants.
Plants represent some kind of entire other dimension of existence
of which we view the topological manifestation of the form,
but are completely occluded as to the network of energy and information that this represents.
And like the zoological kingdom, which has thousands of forms of expression
and progressively more complex forms which culminate in self-reflecting primates,
the vegetable kingdom seems to have intelligent species
and gradations of awareness in the world
so that we are opening a dialogue at the end of history
with this other form in the biosphere
which we are just beginning to cognize
as our own understanding about what the world is really about falls into focus.
And certainly a hundred years ago, no one would have thought
that this was in the direct line of historical development of the high-tech civilizations,
that they would have to explore the mind of the vegetable plant goddess
who was the only force contending with them for control of the planet.
That's what it's come down to.
So, with that kind of idea in mind, the notion of plant and planet,
which is a phrase of Anthony Huxley's, which is wonderful,
Kat, maybe you would want to talk about this.
Is this a good...
Um, yeah.
I was thinking last night and this morning about plants particularly,
because of our talks that I anticipated,
and back at the tent a little while ago,
I had a gnawing feeling that I was ignoring the animals too much,
and then I arrived here and they all began to gnaw on me.
I just got about 14 ant bites just sitting here.
You see me scratching all over.
So I feel grounded again.
I don't know about having a dialogue with the end of history through plants, actually.
I don't know about that.
But I do think that they are this obviously great and ever-present mystery,
which we ingest all day long without thinking of those as plants,
without thinking of them as sacred plants in the way that we do the sacred ones.
Their chemistry, their input, is influencing us all the time.
Whether we eat meat or not, we eat plenty of plants,
and we breathe from them, and we soothe our nerves by seeing them and being near them,
and we go out into places like this and see kinds we've never seen before,
and marvel at how they can survive.
They're real models of graceful survival, aren't they?
In the jungle, where we've spent a fair bit of time,
and the competition, it seems, is for light and for protein, I guess,
for organic matter, the animals competing.
And here it's obviously for water.
They have a kind of a deal.
If you look around under the bushes, you know,
you see wonderful wildflowers right now.
The rains have just held on.
The moisture's held on long enough that many things are going,
the short life cycle plants are going through their short, intense life cycle,
and they often need shade to do it.
So you can see, we found something that we were sure was an African violet under a bush yesterday, you know.
You can see wonderful things if you look carefully and don't bother anybody else who might be under there.
The question I've been asking of myself recently, and of a few other people,
now I have many of you to ask it, I hope I get some answers,
is how can a plant be a teacher?
I asked this of someone the other day who was deeply involved in neuro-linguistic programming,
and he got way off on a tangent about what does this kind of question mean, you know,
and just broke down every part and phrase of it.
It was wonderful, you know.
We never got to anything like what he thought about the answer,
but it does assume all sorts of things.
You have to have an image of what you think of as a plant,
which, although we have a sort of language-verified, easy answer,
doesn't really touch on the reality.
And then you, of course, have to think what you mean by teacher.
Well, I know there's at least one biologist, serious biologist, in the group here,
so I'm hesitant to define a plant.
I guess from my point of view as an observer,
I've done botanical illustration, and I really valued the opportunity I had to learn to really look at them.
And then when you think you've really looked, look closer, you know.
You could just keep on learning from them just visually that way.
But they are organisms like us that draw in all the elements,
fire in the form of sunlight and water and air and earth,
and go through this transformation of energy into something else in the same way that we do.
This moment right now is when they're doing that most energetically for the year.
They're taking that moisture in there.
You can look at each one, you know, and the leaf tips are new,
and the tissue is soft, and the colors are bright as well as the blossoming and all that.
They're also laying out the structure, as I understand it,
for that growth to become more permanent, more woody, the perennials anyway,
so that next year they'll, well, during the year they'll fill that out,
next year they'll come from that place.
They're doing this envisioning the future, what they'll have to deal with,
how to move to make their interface with it, and then how to reproduce.
And their little messages are going into the seeds coming from pollination of other plants.
So it's always, like with us, when you choose a mate,
it's your choice for how you'd like the future to be, right?
My genes, your genes, here it goes, down the line.
Really all I have about this is questions.
I hope you don't mind if I just throw questions up,
and then if anyone wants to say anything, please do, including you, you know.
One thing I wonder is, we regard ourselves as such individuals.
We don't think of ourselves as a species much.
Terence talks about that a fair bit.
But in our daily life we really identify ourselves as individuals,
as some of us having more power, more clarity, more energy, more talent, whatever.
We divide that way.
With plants we tend to think of each plant on a species basis, you know.
I wonder if, how much that's true.
Plants we're familiar with, like ayahuasca,
Banisteriopsis copy in the South American jungle.
If you want to make this visionary drink, you go and find a member of that species.
But different members have different potencies and different takes on the same kind of message.
This gets to the teacher part.
A friend of ours, Eduardo Luna, interviewed a number of shamans in the jungle.
They use this term, plant teacher, in Spanish, as we've come to use it too.
And he asked them, do you think that all plants have a plant teacher in them?
Or do you think that some do?
And they were divided on this question.
Some people think that only the sacred plants do, right?
Other shamans said, no, all plants do, just some of the spirits.
They call them the mothers, the mother of the plant or the spirit or the teacher.
Some are stronger.
So that implies that every time we eat any plant, we're taking in that teacher.
They mix these plants with ayahuasca, which already provides the vision.
Then they take a new plant that they don't know so well or that they want some particular aspect of.
And they mix it in with that and take it and feel that they're radiating what is that plant, what is the personality, whatever you want to call it, of that plant.
And that they can take on the qualities of that plant.
So I think the Indians in this area, as I understand, did that too with their plants.
They wanted to take on the quality of the peyote is a good one, you know.
I mean, it lasts a very long time in a very subtle way doing who knows what all that time when it's not being eaten by something which is metabolizing the teacher in it.
Is the teacher in it when it's just sitting there all that time?
Is it experiencing the visions that come into the animal organism that ingests it?
I mean, I don't know.
And I guess on the species and individual thing, I wonder as an adjunct to that, you know, when you grow your own plants, anyone who gardens,
if you grow your own vegetables, how they taste different than vegetables that obviously at the store are the ones,
they've probably not been grown with even the same kind of physical care, but certainly not the same kind of attention.
It's the question for me, or what always astonishes me about it, is where does the information come from?
I mean, the peyote plant or the ayahuasca vine or the mushroom growing there in the jungle or on the desert, how did it manage to tap in and become filled with a universe of alien platonic beauty?
Why is that there?
All the rules of orthodox evolutionary theory conserve only what is necessary is conserved.
So it's very hard to understand how, why a plant needs a library card, the intergalactic library, because it's just sitting there in the desert of some planet alive and living.
But each plant is different too, I mean, their library cards don't take them to the same libraries even, you know.
Each one of these visionary plants provides something distinct, and sometimes you can see how it's a cousin of that one,
and sometimes you can't see that they're related at all.
Well, isn't it that mind is somehow, at the reflexive level, chemical?
And that when you change the chemistry of the engine which is giving the pictures, the pictures change.
Sometimes it seems almost like a biological radio that you tune into very strongly broadcasting stations,
some of which are, you know, alien, high-tech, insectoid, science fiction places.
Others are jungle worlds or things that you can't even English.
Giant human teachers, I met one.
I was 40 feet tall, you know, and took me by the finger like a little child and led me through.
What was that doing in the plant?
Yeah, what is it doing?
Sure.
Yes.
When you take a longer slice, you realize that the individual, the existence of the individual is like an illusion,
and that really the planet is involved in some kind of chemical process which is like a gene swarming,
and it's been going on for a billion years with more and more animals and plants as species and as individuals
are just aggregates of genes of varying degrees of permanence.
The individual is a very impermanent aggregate of genes.
The species has a slightly longer duration.
But what's really happening is these information transferring molecules are just swarming on the surface of the planet
and controlling, as you mentioned, the weather, the chemistry of the soils, the rate of heat transfer.
They've discovered now that plankton control weather in the oceans by controlling the surface reflectivity.
The question, I think, is the peculiar dualism in the world of information.
Why does it seem that reality is not reality?
Why are there co-present?
Actually, two worlds are co-present in our experience.
This is the taboo subject that we're here to talk about.
The weird fact that there are two worlds, one of which our culture doesn't acknowledge, but we all experience.
That's a very schizophrenic situation to be in.
We all exist in both of these worlds, but our language, our culture, our institutions tell us, no, there's only one world.
We have gotten into this lethal cul-de-sac where, by not acknowledging the second world, we have veered off on a tangent which threatens our extinction now.
This obsession with control of world one, matter, energy, and the complete ignoring of the world of consciousness which stood in front of it and manipulated it,
but just taking that as a given has created this fantastically imbalanced culture.
I think that gets back to the plants as teachers, because since we do, as in your words, play with fire as human beings,
perhaps the question you were asking as to the plants as being teachers, my feeling was at the time was,
they're in communication with us as we are in communication with them.
We're all transparent beings, you're talking genes swarming on the planet.
There's no safe in which we lock our own human knowledge.
It's, we're transparent to all around us.
If you get into intelligent plants, which is what we were talking about earlier, perhaps,
I mean, if you follow that logically out, why not have teachers as chemicals?
That's how they can manifest within this particular body and do these library cards, as you were referring to.
They realize that we're doers and shapers.
Well, I think there's only one life on the planet, though,
and to say that we're separate from the plants or from this or from the air is a fallacy.
So that's a great image, the growing transparency.
That's a good idea for what the end of history is.
It's that everything becomes clearer and clearer and clearer,
and as it becomes clearer, boundaries disintegrate and everything is seen to be of the same stuff.
Well, I think for much of the world, and still, for instance, in the Amazon and other cultures,
were tuned into nature, it was very transparent for very, very long.
Progress was the losing of that transparency and the, you know, forging ahead of certain parts of it,
and almost to the point of just either eliminating to extinction or to the extinction of memory the lessons.
One day, I was just, I think I was doing bookkeeping or something very mundane,
and the little voice that interrupts every once in a while said,
a plant teacher is a teacher who has taken the form of a plant.
And then that raised all these questions for me, you know,
because does that mean there are teachers floating around looking for places to land, right,
and ways to interface with the other species?
And, you know, I mean, I've always thought of rocks, big rocks in many places in the world.
You can sit on them and you can just hear them, you know, and feel them, really.
I'm sure you know Rupert Sheldrake's theory.
Well, it's basically the idea that things of like kind resonate together.
And when I've thought about this problem before about LSD and where does it fit into all of this,
LSD is in the morning glories of central Mexico and the far Pacific.
And I think that what makes a plant teacher complex is how many people it's taken.
And that a plant that has been used a hundred thousand years is filled with all of the contents of the minds of the people who took it over that time.
But I want to introduce the notion that life, the plants and the animals are intrusions into three dimensional space of some kind of topological manifold of a higher order.
You see, the way in which a chair differs from a giraffe is that if you slice through the chair and then come back and examine it twelve hours later, it will be the same.
But the giraffe will have changed radically.
This is because by cutting into the giraffe you have intruded into the temporal dimension of its existence.
It is more like a musical note than an object.
It must be born, grow, mature and die.
And that process, growth, maturity and death, is how three dimensional beings like ourselves describe the intrusion of these hyper dimensional vortices into our world.
That's the mystery of life cannot be encompassed in three dimensions.
Life is a hyper dimensional object.
All hyper dimensional objects are organisms, whether they be societies or animals.
So the question of what is the plant?
You know, when you ask yourself, what am I?
What you immediately concentrate on is your what philosophers call your internal horizon of transcendence.
You look into yourself today.
understand yourself when we try to describe a plant we inevitably give a
topological mapping of it how it appears to us its uptake of minerals its
surface reflectivity its weight but the plant obviously experiences itself very
differently all life has an internal horizon of transcendence toward which it
aims its whitehead called it a petition it's its inclusion of sensory data out
of which it maps being but what the nature of this higher dimension is that these
vortices are intruding into our dimension from is absolutely anybody's guess I mean
you can call it a mathematical conundrum or a religious mystery but it's what's
making the world happen it's what how the mystery of our being will eventually be
shed one more level of veil to let us understand it you see an organism is a
chemical system which does not run down the the second law of thermodynamics says
that the whole universe tends toward the dissipation of structure and the release
of energy and heat and then everything all structure all energy is dissipated but the
life has achieved the miracle of by being an open system and taking material into it and extracting
energy from it and getting rid of waste life has been able to leave the main stream of thermodynamic
degradation and establish itself at an equilibrium point off that graph and maintain itself
therefore at least on this planet alone four billion years now the average life of a star in this galaxy is on
the order of two and a half billion years some last longer but that means that biology is no
epiphenomenon no iridescence off the surface of matter as the 19th century physicalists wanted to describe it it means that life is indicative of a physics of higher dimensions which intrudes into this otherwise thermodynamically degrading system which we call the physical universe
physical universe and information there seems to be an informational ghost of this universe which is somehow co-present at all points within the matrix perhaps a la bell's theorem or something like that and that's what the psychedelic
psychedelic experience shows you it shows you a hologrammatic space of information where by sitting still in your room and sending the mind you can cross the universe in an instant you know and return and the question of is this real is in bad taste it violates the two ontological categories you see
it just isn't done but you're right and but the plants seem to be the things which shake us out of these cultural conventions we have this very bad habit of of when we encounter a new experience we describe it and as we describe it we erase its reality
and replace it and replace it with a map and forever after when we encounter that input we access the map and overlay it over the thing and say hi I know what this is and and so by the time a child is five years old they have completely entered into a symbolic construct which hides the real world from them and fortunately
uh these plant teachers seem to have the unique ability of showing you the relativity of language which for us is the relativity of being and then you are freed because you have seen something incontrovertible there's no going back then you know you are that is the great first gateway on the path to realize the relativity of language and the and the malleability of
of the world of the world i mean since coming out into the desert is typical of people seeking visions the first thing you have to do is leave the polis culture is this effort to hold back the mystery and replace it with a mythology
which is then in the control of those who recite that mythology whether they be shamans or priests this holding back of reality is
the strange is the strain is what christian theologians call the fall our strange alienation from nature that causes us to crowd into cities and mint money and put a price on everything and this is why it's so important to go back to the amazon and eastern indonesia
and these places and try and understand what spark it was that those people kept you know over the millennia while we became the prodigal son and wandered into matter and to you know hoard in the cities on the plain and have now come full circle and returned at the end of history with the dilemma that we have made such a mess of things that there's nothing we can do now but later
each stage is a greater distancing from the wellspring of being and it's brought us you know to the valley of dry bones to the valley of the apocalypse
and now the fat is in the fire now we'll find out what stuff man is made of as the chickens come home to roost
roost but well no i i'm very optimistic i just metaphors
is it my metaphors or my pessimism oh the horrible metaphor
the rhetorical hyperbole
unbridled
i'd like to ask a question about this uh this two world thing
because um it interests me really do you think that there's two worlds or that there's um many many worlds
yes well i i think you're right i mean but there are different orders of different worlds
i mean i i guess it was the physicist wheeler who thought that every time there was a choice
the universe took both paths and had always done this so that the number and kinds of universes was uh you know staggering
right i don't i find that cumbersome
and uh but there certainly seem to be a number of of universes and there seem to be different kinds of universes
for instance uh you can tune from channel to channel but some of them you can't make heads and tails out of you know
it's just too far away from your conceptual schema for you to be so it's sort of like watching uh ideological mandalas or something
you can't say much about it afterwards but it certainly was compelling
and uh well i don't know robin you've you're such a skillful questioner you've brought yourself to the doorway of my most recent mania
maybe i should unburden myself briefly about it
one of the weird things about about growth or trying to make your ideas always become new
is that you always assume you're going to uh to uh know what the next step is
that even though you're going to become more and more enlightened there won't be any surprises
in and uh so a few weeks ago i was meditating in my usual fashion and uh
i began to get this new idea which was so weird that i immediately shifted into
this is this is not the truth this is not a transmission about the nature of reality this is a plot
for a science fiction novel that i that i should write and tried to hold that as the defense that was my shield against the onslaught of this thing
and i've never been one for atlantis or lemuria or all these invisible prehistoric lands and places that people enjoy so much
but i was told a very funny thing which i will share with you it's uh a funny idea
now let's see how does it go
it has two versions one of which speaks a scientific language the other speaks a mythological language
okay so the scientific language goes like this
there's something in the universe called a fractal soliton of improbability
this means it's a unicate event it only happens once in the lifetime of a universe you can think of it as a wavelength with one wave
that's why it's called a soliton
and if one of the and these things move not in ordinary three-dimensional space but but in some kind of much higher spatial manifold
and when they collide with a planet or when one collides with a planet in a universe
the time stream of that planet is divided and two copies of the entire planet spring into existence
without either having any knowledge of it it just is something which happens
so this voice was telling me that this had happened to the earth and that this was the secret that we were all striving to understand
was that an event in the past had actually divided our time stream and that a twin of this planet had come into being in another dimension
okay so that's the scientific explanation of it so the mythological explanation was
that there that the universe it's gnostic that the universe is the creation of a demo urge
not the highest expression of divinity but a kind of demon a fallen creature
and that this demo urge was able to coax itself into being and actually incarnate into history as a human being
and that when this happened this was then the mythological expression of the fractal soliton of improbability
and when it happened the time stream split
the universe is the creation of the demo urge and the demo urge impelled itself in in the form of an individual
right and this is sort of you know waited a long time
when you're a demo urge who can hurry
okay go ahead
okay so so the time splitting event had to do with the career of Christ
who was an extraordinary manifestation of energy in the historical time stream not to be
confused with a Buddha or a Mohammed or a Zoroaster who were great saints and it was something else
it was in some sense what it claimed to be but in some sense okay so now at the moment of and you can choose
either the immaculate conception or the resurrection depending on which side of the bed you got up on today
but at that moment the time stream split
and this other place came into being without having any awareness that
and they were identical at that moment these two worlds
now Christ had no children
so
oh what I forgot to say was
that the event the fractal soliton of improbability has this quantum mechanical half charge
so that in one of the universes it happens
in the other universe it doesn't happen
and so everything about these two worlds was the same except that in one of them
the immaculate conception had not taken place or the resurrection had not taken place
now because Christ had no children
in the world in which he was absent
it was not a genetic line which was missing
it was an ideological line
which never received expression
and consequently as time passed
first decades and then centuries
the absence of this particular intellectual influence in the world
changed the world
radically
in the following way
Greek science did not suffer the suppression that occurred with the conversion of Constantine
the academies were not closed
the hermetic knowledge was not repressed
conversely the empire was stronger and was able to repel the barbarian invasions of the 2nd to the 5th century
and mathematics which had halted in our world at Diophantus proceeded through his disciple Hypatia to develop a calculus by AD 370
so that the millennium of Christian stasis that occurred in our world did not occur in that world
and as time passed and engineering advances occurred by around 850
they had ships which were able to cross the Atlantic Ocean
and they encountered the Mayan civilization reaching its fullest flower on in Guatemala and on the Yucatan Peninsula
and in fact in this vision I saw the Roman Emperor Cosmodorus V make a pilgrimage to Tikal in 920
to be present at the coronation of a king at the end of Bakhtun 8
anyway
this Greco-Roman imperial culture immediately recognized the genius of the Mayans in mathematics and astronomy
and
and Europe was
transformed into an amalgamation
a Greco-Mayan civilization with
so let me see
and
and this civilization continued to develop now one of the influences which the Mayans brought into Europe around the year 950 was their
extremely sophisticated psychopharmacopeia and shamanism
and this
mated with Neoplatonism and Hermeticism so that rather than science developing as it developed in our world
a kind of magical psychopharmacolitic technology of thought and understanding was what was developed over the centuries
and then in later centuries centuries centuries before it happened in our world they contacted the Orient and the Sun the dynastic influence of the Sun poured itself into the creation of a global civilization such that by around 1200 AD they were able to land on the moon and create a cybernetic global civilization similar to the kind we have now they continued to land on the moon and create a cybernetic global civilization similar to the kind we have now
they continued evolving with all this psychotronic and shamanically derived and now by this time you can imagine it was an unbelievably exotic and alien civilization compared to our own the fruits of their psychedelic and psychoanalytic investigations into higher space was the discovery of our world they found out what had happened they figured it out and
by studying dreams by studying dreams and by making deep journeys into the psychedelic space they were able to discover our sleeping unconscious with its repository of the legacy of the Christian centuries under the reign of this demoergic ideology
and they conceived of the notion of saving us and it it has to do with this whole thing about the UFOs and influence in dreams and astral traveling and the other side is actually the manifestation of this bizarre greco-mayan postmodern star-faring civilization trying to reach across
the dimensions to save us from the dimensions to save us from the momentum of our history by making us aware of first of all their existence and also their technology which is evolving toward a point where I think around the Mayan millennium around 2012 the time island will be we will flow past the time island and the two time streams will be rejoined
and we will make peace with this civilization which is now a thousand years more advanced than us with this totally different cultural history and this completely different take on reality so this came to me in the space of about fifteen seconds and more details have flowed in and I use it mostly as a meditational device because it's so interesting
about how this civilization about how this civilization developed
it's amazing exoticism you know it's neoplatonism it's Taoism it's Mayan influences melded into a completely different kind of civilization than the one that we inherited I've always thought you know that the that Christianity without making any judgment about Christ himself
that Christianity is hands down the single most reactionary force in all of human history and where would we be had that twelve hundred years not been given over to this peculiar meditation you know all the pieces were in place for the kind of civilization that I've outlined it was just a coincidence
a coincidence
cat does not endorse this idea or even encourage it
he only told it to me a couple of days ago in Apache Junction in a truck stop or something you know and he didn't tell me it's the plot for a science fiction novel he said this is the truth and then I said let's get back to it being a good science fiction novel
yeah
well the thing is that it would on our level explain perhaps the questions you were asking earlier of why the teaching plans
sure
another thing I was curious while you were talking about this is the physics of nowadays you know it's like if you have an electron on one side of the universe and split it into two and separated by the universe they're still in communication with each other so is that why logically you can bring the time island back together again
yeah this would be a quantum mechanical super macro physical bell's theorem event
a kind of a kind of hyper dimensional vacuum fluctuation where the two worlds spring apart sail along for a period and then parity is conserved and they're rejoined
well this is interesting I've had dreams that are parallel what you're describing here and it's very interesting that you bring this up I've not heard of it before
another thing I was curious is like this takes place
this would be on a human experience level
what you're speaking of now
the plant kingdom
would they remain in
connection between the species
we're free to have it any way we like
how has Christianity possibly affected the evolution of plant species in this time stream
as opposed to the other have they gone on
how is our lack of say a hundred thousand or a million species in the last
two hundred years
that the other planet has
how does that affect the parity between the two
you mean how does our destruction and contort
well the part of the myth that I didn't tell you which I will now tell you
was that naturally
well they were developing and exploring technical options many hundreds of years ago
and they
theoretic they discovered the theoretics for nuclear fusion and fission
but they never used it
until
a few hundred years later
one of their great theoreticians
this was after they had discovered our time stream
made the prediction that the physics of atomic explosions were such that they would cross the time stream
and so they performed an experiment by detonating an atomic device in what is our year 1907
and this was
the Tunguska
event
and then by monitoring the dreams of Siberian Shaman
which they had in clear focus
they saw
aha
this explosion which we set off actually did occur in both time streams
and at that point
they became very interested in monitoring our time stream
because they were picking up the dreams of a Swiss telegraph worker who seemed to be pushing toward an unimaginable conclusion
so now there is a certain amount of urgency because if we explode our atomic stockpiles
it will wreck the place that they call home world
water
yes
not self-preservation because they now have star flight and encompass many systems but preservation of home world
which on the other side is a vast botanical and ecological preserve from pole to pole
I mean it's a sacred site of pilgrimage
it's the home of the species it's the earth and the notion that suddenly great parts of it will be blown apart
by leakage from hyperspace of one of our atomic wars is impelling them now to attempt to open the doorway
and rejoin the time streams and will be allowed a few years inside the botanical park to acclimate and then most people will ship off for the stars I imagine
the British science fiction writer Ian Watson has a wonderful book called Chekhov's Journey
in which he talks about the Tunguska event and his theory is that it was a catastrophic failure of a Soviet time travel experiment
conducted shortly after the turn of the next century
tough one to prove right
obviously why didn't we think of that
well I mean I'm not sure I've thought of that before you know it's the claim of Christian theologians that Christ
comes in the center of history they speak this same language before Christ
no souls were entering heaven he freed the valve and now it's possible to enter into heaven before his intercession that was impossible
you're right but that's where I left them was pre-Vatican Jews
before I had this idea I had another idea which I'll tell you which is a completely different kind of idea
and it's the idea that there is an over mind this doesn't involve other dimensions there is an over mind co-present on this planet
and when technology when the development of technology exceeds the development of ethics
ethics then this over mind can work miracles and because the over mind is plugged into each of the individual minds that compose it
this miracle always has this unbelievably creepy quality of being exactly the thing which would convince you to change your mind
I mean in other words it's like it reads you so perfectly that it's able to present the one situation which you cannot refuse
so in the case of Rome it was that you know Rome was a pigsty
Pasternak called it a bargain basement on two floors
it ran on slavery and it ran on brutality and captive populations and an outrageous garrisoning of military power in foreign lands
and people like Diophantus this mathematician I mentioned and hero of Alexandria these people were on the brink of the calculus
and the steam engine so the over mind seeing that and seeing their appalling ethical state
sent the miraculous personage of Christ who in a world where information could not move faster than a horse's gallop
this religion within sixty years was beating at the gates of Rome itself
it was like fire you know just burned through the empire and changed everything and halted technical advance
and everything stopped
now I created this idea in an effort to explain the UFOs
because you know the new theory of UFOs or the new school of UFOs says
we've been wrong to ask what are they that has not been fruitful
what we should be doing is asking what are they doing
and we can analyze what they're doing in the same way that we can analyze what anybody is doing through sociological polling of human populations
we can find out what the flying saucers are doing
so they polled human populations and what they discovered is that what the flying saucers are doing is they are sowing disbelief in science
they cause people to not believe in scientists
because scientists come up so lame
when asked to explain flying saucers
it's like it is to
the flying saucer is the confounding of science
in the same way that the resurrection
was the complete confounding of Greek stoicism
and democracy and materialism in the Roman world
and it's conceivable you know that the flying saucer
I mean the statistics are now something like twelve eleven percent of the American population have seen a flying saucer
fifty two percent believe flying saucers are
推 LOL
five eight
all one
alright
everything is going to be done
let it free
please
if you leave theと思います
you have a pain
the
real whatever and so forth so it is a faith which is percolating up from the
lower levels it's people who live in trailer courts and read fate magazine who
are the staunchest believers in this thing but what it may be is an
intercession on the part of the overmind which it can do anything it can
do anything from our point of view and in in the most extreme version of this
idea I said what if enormous spacecraft were to fall into orbit around this
planet and what if television images of this craft were to be beamed into every
home on the planet and then a teaching revealed some completely mind-boggling
thing which you could have thought of it yourself but you never did which is
always how these things are and and then set and then after 30 days of melting the
nuclear arsenals and causing all cancer to appear and curing all infectious
diseases and delivering this message the enormous spacecraft disappears 30 days
so then everybody says my god we have been abandoned we have been abandoned again
into time and you know history would halt everybody would do nothing but study the
teachings of the saucer and trying to figure out how we could get right with
them to get them to come back dogmatism theories of communication priestcraft the
whole thing so you see though I'm fascinated by the flying saucer and the and what it
says about the malleability of mind and matter I think mature civilizations should not
be haunted by messiahs or flying saucers that these things are like metaphysical spankings imposed from
on high that I designed saying you know here it's a boot in the tail wake up you know stop repressing
well let's take you to ideas and it's neither one of them is that old and what does the other mind
have to do with or think of the double time stream now that's a question I never would have asked you
mean if that's true I sort of think of these as well actually exclaims the earlier one was that the
other mind was injecting forces of change or conservative conservatism into the world the other that
events that came from now that was from the demiurge is demiurge related to the other mind no I think
the demiurge is like a negative expression they created the universe how did the other mind get
in there to be running the earth at least well I think if the overmind as the logos you know it's the
it's the understanding and self existence which permeates everything and the demiurge is the force
of matter and time and cosmic destiny that is always trying to lock in the logos and condition it and make
it subject to the rules of the of the physical universe of space and time and the logos is like
something from this is all gnostic theology by the way this is just straight from the book the logos is
trying to struggle through the labyrinth of the material universe to escape to rejoin the real source of
itself which is outside of matter matter is viewed as an entrapment if any of you have read the late works
of Philip K Dick he was probing in these areas he was a genius his book velus is pure exegesis of his internal
he unravelment of what was going on and he believed his take on it was he believed that from AD 69 until 1948
no time had actually passed and that we were living in apostolic time and that the crucifixion lay only 75
years in the past and that the demo urge had inserted the false history and the Nag Hammadi manuscripts he
believed were actually the logos as printed letters and that when the when the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were
deciphered it was like this informational creature would come alive and again be present on the earth that
the logos beginning in 1948 was beginning to infuse everything and that shortly it would dissolve the
illusion of the intervening 1860 years or whatever it was and then we would realize that the prophecy would
be fulfilled and that the last days were upon us that's right that's right he didn't get around to the
Antichrist to to his credit probably have to distinguish between Christ the person the teacher and this thing
called the Christos which is this archetype of such power and force that immediately people of ill intent could get lined up behind it and impose their will
yeah sell love and sell forgiveness and you know what what a scam and and the the Christos is the thing history is ruled by the archetypes which people can generate I mean
most people are very ordinary I mean you're Mick Jaggers and you're Henry Kissingers they're very ordinary people but they are able to project an archetype you know and that is the thing which sets them sets them apart and and when that reaches the kind of super intense focus that you get in a Mohammed or a Christ well then you know history is just putty in the hands of the
force not the person the person the person is usually martyr in some horrible way but the the the archetype take draws energy to itself and to and we don't understand how this process works if there ever is developed by benevolent or malevolent forces a science of social control it will be a science of knowing how to project archetypes and and and
different archetypes different archetypes apparently are suitable to different times I mean you could almost posit an astrological theory of archetypes but it's something about how you know what's appropriate for the first century AD is not appropriate for the 15th
and but when the archetype is appropriate nothing can stop it we what the modern term for archetypes is paradigm and we expect it not to be a person not a messiah but an idea which will save us all in which then gives us certain affinities with mystical Judaism where the messiah was seen was expected in the form of an idea and this is sort of our faith we're messianic
messianic ideologues or something like that
oh I agree with you I think ultimately all dualisms have to be dissolved in the in the notion that you know there is one thing I mean that's the platonic faith the problem is all these secondary and tertiary operational levels where you know we're trying to actually operate in a universe of scarcity in a body which requires energy and all these things
this isn't this isn't this is really the central problem in Western thinking I think is the tension between dualism and unity and matter and spirit and how do you handle it I think you know that we are spiritualizing the
spiritualizing matter this is what technology is and that the spiritualizing of matter is the highest expression of our technological output and that this will become more and more what we are about so that in the next century the difference between mind and brain and cell and machine will all have been subsumed under a new vocabulary because we are hardwiring our mind
and we are making the artifacts of our culture intelligent and we are breaking down the barriers between ourselves between ourselves and larger data bases and this kind of thing so that the old I'm an ego inside the skin definition gives way to some kind of much more malleable and plastic thing
it's it's the definition of relationship quality by opposition it's polarity it's right wrong good bad male female
russians Americans the aquarium one which is the two lines of waves over each other is one of resonance and it's one of dolphins jumping in the water together it's one of people coming together and realizing
like how I resonate with you and what I have to give you and you have to give me but you'll have something to give me that other people can't and so on and we need to swim together
and that breaks down all of the the dualist bonds that and I think we're right at that that crux right at the moment and that place between Pisces and Aquarius where we're kind of two worlds again flipping from one side to the other of opposition being torn from life and death and
and seeing as the Christ I feel was that that that prototype that template of light and spirit with matter coming together and saying I can dance in this and I can leave it and I can come back into it I have this power it's my conscious
compassionate love that is just so unbounded that it gives me the opportunity to to play in clay if I choose
much of what I say is Alfred North Whitehead his philosophy and believe me if you're looking around for a serious ontological foundation you don't have to read Sanskrit
Alfred North Whitehead will serve very admirably science in the modern world process and reality he was he was and remains the greatest
psychedelic philosopher of the 20th century in the era of Bergson you had another question
you had another question yeah I'm going to be 84 in the year 2012 and I'm wondering how best to manage my life so that I'll be ready for that
time crescent well I don't know I think that the wall the canyons of the creode down which we are as individuals are moving those walls are
getting higher and higher too a lot of times when I had these intense contacts with the teaching entity I would have an anxiety about what is what should I do what is it for me to do and it always said nothing relax your function is to just you'll be present where you are necessary and I
and I really this isn't a fatalism this is a kind of recognition of the dynamics of time that the thing is trying to teach you see it's trying to say that if you understand how process works you will always understand where you are in any given process and then you won't have anxiety about not occupying some other point in that process you know
but when I began having these ideas the only way I could previously relate to the notion of the end of the world was that I had a head full of cartoons of bearded men in sandals carrying signs on street corners saying repent repent and here was I you know former Marxist former this former that espousing these unimaginable things
and there was a wonderful book there was a wonderful book called the pursuit of the millennium by Norman Cone in which he details the history of millenarianism that's what this phenomenon is the belief by a person or a group of people that the end of the world is about to occur and it existed among the jews of the post exilic period
that gave Christ the early patristic Christians lived in the eminent expectation of the end of the world and then during the medieval period the most utopian prophetistic millenarian movement before Marxism was
Floraism or the people who followed the teachings of Flora who was a wandering monk who predicted the end of the world
let's see I think for 1244 and he died in 1222 and but his followers carried on and the pope had to send out armies to quell
uprisings as people wanted to distribute the wealth because they felt the end of the world was upon and why should anybody go to work and you know this sort of thing similarly in the year 1000 there was great expectation but of Christ's eminent return so this is a thing which the human mind at least in its western expression seems to seek to do Islam too has its apocalypses
but 1967 wasn't that I mean I thought it was happening I thought we were months away from a new secular order for the ages
but my theory of history views these things not as evidence against such a thing occurring but as evidence that it will occur that these uprisings and outbreaks of irrational expectation of the millennium are in fact the
temporal reflections they are catching the light on the temporal prism from the object at the end of history which contains the apocalyptic scenario
it's very important to manage the apocalypse and the millennium it's very important that people not confuse the cleansing flames of transcendence with the ability to use thermonuclear weapons against your ideological enemies
it's a very delicate matter because it's a very delicate matter because our mythologies and our fears run so deeply but I think that it's an awareness of this
of this potential of the existence of this law of temporal compression and of course institutions don't promote millenarianism because institutions want people to invest their money at low interest and long term and to
not have the expectation that everything will carry on pretty much as it has
but an existence of this law of temporal compression and of course institutions don't promote millenarianism because institutions want people to invest their money at low interest and long term and have the expectation that everything will carry on pretty much as it has
but an examination of the last 500 or 1,000 years of human history would lead anyone I think to the conclusion that everything is going to be swept away and everything that replaces it is going to be swept away and that everything that replaces it is going to be swept away and that everything that replaces it is going to be swept away and that we
and everything that replaces it is going to be swept away and that we are just
moving in to an era of change which might as well be called apocalyptic and
must be made millenarian otherwise it will just end in some kind of gotter
dammerung and and the worst boogeyman of Western culture will emerge and
and destroy us I know how the wave all comes together and accelerates toward
this transition point I never call it the end because then the beginning of a
new series of many leveled waves that's right I guess I believe in flux and so
the whole process is one wave at that moment we begin another process sometimes
you discover you discuss that point as being the end of the universe she did a
little while ago and sometimes I feel like when you're as close when everything
is accelerated like it seems to have recently and you're as close to a moment
of transformation of some sort as we see seem to be you see great strides
forward being made and great slips backwards being made all at the same time
right it seems possible that the transformation will be not so
fantastically physical as the end of the universe or turning inside out of the
whatever this is but but actually just a sweep through you know worldwide peace of
mind what if that occurred you know and that's large enough to qualify it seems to
me for the changeover in the wave yeah I think it's very the hardest thing to
know is the nature of what this ultimate compression is what it means I mean it
could like one way I imagine it and that's why I love to quote Joyce about man
becomes dirigible I imagine it as the day when your mind becomes your home you know
and all over the world people just realize that now their mind is their home and you
feel free to describe that as as the end of history or the end of the universe not the
end of the universe the end of history because I think history is some kind of
involvement with matter it's a wrestling with the angel of matter and the end of
history is when you pin the angel of matter to the mat and then you stand up and you say I am the
endemic human being made of light and you leave the realm of matter and return to some previously hidden
dimension Whitehead called these things epochs these long periods of time and he called transitions from one to the other a shift of epochs
well we've only been doing things like measuring the speed of light since 1910 or something like that all the
so-called constants of our physics are based on miniscule periods of actually monitoring these things to see if they are constants and so I can
imagine it as a shift in the laws of the universe that somehow cause consciousness to perceive itself more as it must truly be and I'm always trying to to find physical models for these transcendental hallucinations and the one which fits this is a few years ago
this Scandinavian astronomer Hans Ulfven wrote a book called worlds and anti-worlds
and in it he talked about what's called a vacuum fluctuation a vacuum fluctuation is where suddenly out of nothingness there emerge a stream of particles and they are equally particles and anti-particles and they sail along for a period of time and then they collide again in the
and each particle is destroyed by its anti-particle
and so what is called parity is conserved meaning that when you add up all the charges positive and negative you get zero
so it's okay that this matter came from nothing and returned to nothing this violates no laws as long as parity is conserved
but the interesting thing about this phenomenon which is called a vacuum fluctuation is that there seems in quantum mechanics no rule which would limit the size of such a phenomenon as this
so it's conceivable that our entire universe is an enormous vacuum fluctuation and it's just you know 10 high 72 particles have emerged from nothingness and are hurtling through space
and in another dimension a parallel dimension the anti-universe which is the twin of this universe is also hurtling through space and at some point in future time completely unpredictable
from the state given within each universe the two will collide and all uh and parity will be conserved and all particles and anti-particles will disappear
however the interesting thing is that photons which is what light is composed of do not have anti-particles they're this one weird exception
so that when the universe collided with it and its anti-matter twin what would be left would be a universe made only of photons
and those photons would be in the configuration they were in in the moment when the cosmic collapse of the state vector occurred
well we have no idea what the physics of a photonic universe would be about
a limiting case or a good first try would be that it would just be nothing and no life and no self-reflection and no more
but why pause at that there's such a persistence in in the perennial philosophy of the notion that spiritual development is somehow related to light
and to the cultivation of inner light and to the creation of light bodies and the stabilizing of light
so uh you know it's possible to suggest that the you that the world of the imagination is simply the world of internal light
that it's a world where light is manipulated by thought in the way that in this world
physical organism manipulates matter and so that you know you live in the radiant castles of the imagination
after a shift of epochs in which the the photonic mode predominated that's just one way of imagining it
it's one of the richest meditations there is to try to imagine the millennium again it's this thing what would you have if you could have anything
i mean sometimes i imagine it you know hieronymus bosch's great triptych the garden of earthly delights where men and women of all races mingle among giant wrens and strawberries and feed each other pomegranates under an autumnal sun in an endless rolling park-like world of exotic vegetables and sexual excess and
hard stuff to be
and uh
you can really take a readout on yourself by
by seeing how would you like things to be you know i mean i have
sometimes i my fantasy is
i would like to be
alone on a starship
ten thousand light years from home with all the books in the universe and i would dress like captain ahab and i would
stride around the catwalks inside this echoing starship and faithful robot slaves would bring me
crumbling volumes of ancient lore which i would say no this is a little too vincent price how about
i love uh if any of you are into science fiction the science fiction of cordwayner smith is really wonderful and one of his stories uh the starship is uh george washington's estate mount vernon in new york and it's all exactly like mount vernon in washington's time except in the library of the big plantation house there's one room from which the thing is controlled and it's actually a starship in new york
and it's all exactly like mount vernon in washington's time except in the library of the big plantation house there's one room from which the thing is controlled and it's actually a starship in mid-flight
more questions about this time theory or
yes i have a question yes
you mentioned here how the now
is flooded with future perception
yes
and
i have a question
yes
i have a question
yes
you mentioned here
how the now
is flooded with future perception
yes
and
i have just
it's really part of the tibetan
practices but it's always something which
captures my imagination
it's just
how come
it's now
now
and
the
the fact that
these future perceptions are so
tremendously tangible to us especially while sitting in meditation or while
eating a meal even or something and there's this
how come it's not yesterday
and how come it's not tomorrow
and how come that
i'm here now
when
i just have to flick my mind and i'm in yesterday
and
equally
easy and tomorrow
i wonder if you have anything to say on that one
well i think that
life proceeds through time
it's an effort by
organism
to map something one dimension larger than itself
so it takes a whole life to do it
a life
is an effort to map
a something
you know
and the now
is the moving edge
of the mapping process
you cannot map it instantly
or you would be it
and so what
to
what being in time is
is
is experiencing the
incremental
mapping of this higher order object
and that's why hopefully a long life would give wisdom
because a person would begin to get the whole picture
you know
yeah
that's very much idea
yes well what did plato say
that the present is the moving image of eternity
that
that's
pure good platonism
it's like a projection
much as our shadows are through the mountain
well you can think of it as a
you can think of the now as a kind of
laser
which is moving over a larger surface
and illuminating it
you know
scanning it
it's scanning something
and it takes it a while to scan it
and then at the end all the data is in place
and then you say
oh yes
I see now
what the object
of cognition was
and
we
our faith is
and there's no reason to doubt it
that this is a great
transcendent experience
this is the resolution
the peace that passeth understanding
as you sink into death
it's just that we like to think
that the psychedelic experience
gives us a preview
no one escapes
you know
the final realization
it's just
no one escapes
you know
the final realization
it's just that some people do postpone it to their last act
but there's no reason for that
because
it is the mystery
the culmination
it is
the date palm
and the wellspring
I'd like to
I'm always interested in pursuing things from the Mayan
so I'd like to
ask about
how this theory of time relates to the individual
somewhat related to BJ's question
there's some sense I have that
in their techniques
and certainly you've experienced
and other people have experienced this with the mushroom
at high doses
of
traveling through time
and actually
seeing the future
or
seeing the past
and I
I was
I wonder if you could say more about that
and some framework for understanding how that is possible.
Yes, well, I think psilocybin seems to be the great teacher of history
and part of its teaching is history.
It views a person without a history as a person with amnesia,
a person with a diminished capacity
because your history gives you the power of your convictions.
The way I use the wave, or the way I've been using it recently,
is to try and study the time immediately ahead of us
so that we don't misjudge what's going on.
And, you know, it's a mathematical process.
There's no indeterminacy about it
if we anchor the whole wave system on 2012.
And what I see from that anchorage point
is in the 67-year cycle from 1945 to 2012,
we have reached that point
which resonates with the larger 4,306-year cycle
at that point which corresponds to the collapse of the Roman Empire
around 475 AD.
In other words, we have been through a period of imperialist expansionism
which has lasted for a number of years,
certainly since the beginning of the 80s.
But I see a retrenchment of that
and a recidivist tendency,
a tendency toward religious fundamentalism,
rigid social structures,
and in short, the sorts of things
which could be seen as valid resonance patterns
to the early medieval phase of European civilization.
The period from AD 474,
let's for shorthand call it 500 AD,
the period from 500 AD to 1500 AD,
in other words,
to the discovery of the new world by Columbus.
That thousand-year period
is the resonance that we are going to experience
from now to the late 90s.
Around 1998,
we will reach the beginning of the Renaissance
and the discovery of the new world.
But we are going to have to endure
a period not entirely to our liking.
We represent the pagan Hellenistic spirit
which has held full sway within the empire
for the past 25 years.
And we may feel constricted now,
but I think that our ideas
and our position in society
has further constriction to undergo
before it re-flowers downstream a bit.
So when I first realized that,
I felt very pessimistic.
But then I asked myself,
well, what aspects of medieval life
could I groove?
What aspects of that medieval eschatology
were solitary to my needs and wishes?
And I discovered that, you know,
it was an age of great mystical faith and illumination.
It was an age of communities
of like-minded people seeking transformation
far from the turbulence of the collapse of the empire.
So I am not of that scoop.
My theory leads me away from those people in the new age
who think we're about to be catapulted
into the corridors of power.
I think that's preposterous
and the evidence for it is zero.
Well, and I think better we should tend our gardens
and form brotherhoods and sisterhoods of affinity
and realize that the task of transformation
is one of a lifetime,
our lifetimes, you know?
And every time someone like Dick Price
or Tony Lilly moves from the wheel,
I always wonder, you know,
how did it feel to know it wasn't finished,
you know, to go with it undone?
And, oh yes, I have no doubt
that when the saucer comes
that Tony or Dick will be in control,
one of them.
What is it Bob Dylan says in his song,
Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
fighting in the Captain's Tower.
But yes, so I don't know
if that answered your question, Robin,
but I wanted to get it in
because the real meat for most people
for this idea about time
is not the mathematics of it
and the symmetry of it.
That's only pleasing to a certain mentality.
But really, what does it tell us
about the years immediately ahead?
And what it says is, you know,
consolidation, illumination,
community, and self-discipline.
I can only say thanks a thousand times
that we don't have to go through it
for a thousand years
and only for like 15 years.
This acceleration seems to me
to be very, very convenient.
Imagine if we were born in 500 A.D.
and we had to look forward to that.
Yes, well, that's why I say, you know,
imagine the people who lived in times
when the temporal river was stagnant
or even when countercurrents swept it backwards.
In other words, this is the anguish of the ancestors.
This is the sacred trust that must not be betrayed.
The pogroms and the invasions
and the atrocities conducted across history
can only be somehow redeemed
if we, who are the living wavefront
of this genetic experience,
do not fumble the ball, you know.
All our ancestors are watching
to see how we will do.
Okay.
I would like to address Robin's question as well
because it seemed like you were asking
sort of on a more mechanical,
how does this happen?
Well, yeah, how can it be that the Mayans
or we on psychedelics
can travel through time and see these things?
My image for it,
it explains that phenomenon to me
and I've had the same experience, past and future,
is, well, Terence was just referring
to the temporal river,
is that it's a river which flows two ways
from the past to the future
and from the future to the past.
And if you put yourself out in the middle of it,
let go of control,
let go of fear,
and maybe you want to choose your orientation
or maybe you don't.
You can just find out where you flow
or you can sort of face the past
or face the future and flow there.
I mean, this is not a physicist's explanation
of how this happens,
but it seems to work that way, you know,
and that we think perhaps far too much
of the past creating the future
and that we should think more
and perhaps other people have
of how it's flowing the other way.
And this is how some so-called primitive people
have managed to conserve
the very simple, effective beauty
of their lifestyle
and that real strong feeling
that every moment is now
because they're thinking of it simultaneously.
I think of that
and that also sets my mind off.
That's kind of like the river's flowing both ways
and if you kind of take a step to the side somehow
that you'll catch the current from the future.
That's appealing,
but also, I mean,
I always play with these metaphors
and maybe I'm literalizing them too much.
Is it possible to step out of that stream
in some way
and then looking above
and sort of choose
where you're going to descend into it
or another image that came to mind is
are there somehow
holes in the fabric of time
that you can shoot through
sort of like in 2001,
the Stargate opening up
and there's this hole in between
and where you emerge
is not the other side of it
but someplace completely different.
If you take the wave seriously
and apply it on these short scales of time,
you know,
you can find your way
into, yes,
unique configurations of the moment.
It's like astrology in that way,
you know,
and often the content
of a psychedelic experience
can be later seen to be
because of the situation
of historical resonance
that you weren't perhaps
even aware of at the time.
Or if there are parallel worlds,
one or many,
which ones happen to be adjacent
at that moment
in the cosmic weather kind of,
you know.
Sometimes I've taken the mushroom
just to say,
like a weather person,
to say,
okay,
I just want to see
what's happening out there right now,
not with a will in it,
you know.
And then,
you know,
you can find that it's about
knitting in your rocking chair
or you can find that you're just
on some landscape
that you couldn't
at the same time before.
The essence of Tao
is the correct
apperception of process.
That's what Taoism is,
is to understand process
is to be a Taoist.
And I think that this is
almost a formal rendering
of the notion of Tao,
almost an effort
to create a mathematics,
an algebra of the Tao.
and as long as it's true
to the notions
which Taoism conserves,
which is of flow
and determinacy
within indeterminacy,
it serves.
This is what
understanding time is,
is to understand process.
But to understand it so well
that it's like a sense for you,
it's like seeing.
This is the kind of seeing
that is very important
to see into time.
It's what history
and culture
have experimented with,
but it's what we now,
by identifying that
as what is going on,
can accelerate much faster.
Anything else?
I was, you know,
just picking up on
a conversation
with Michael this morning.
Maybe you could talk more
about the other.
Oh, the other.
Well, I'm not sure exactly
what he meant
by talking about the other.
I mean, the other
is just a way
of thinking
about all of these things
that we name
spirit,
God,
demon,
void.
It's that
there just necessarily
is a place
off our map.
Whenever you have a map,
it implies
the part that is not
on the map.
And the other,
the truly other,
is,
it lies outside
the domain of language.
It's like the unspeakable.
All you can do
is point at it,
you know.
And the Gnostic idea
of God
was that it was
totally other,
that there was nothing
in this universe
that gave any clue
whatsoever
as to the nature
of God,
that that was its essence,
was to be
completely other.
But, you know,
the other trickles
through and reverberates
in our lives
in all kinds of dimensions.
I mean,
the first other
that you meet
is the world.
And at a later point
in your development,
your attachment
to another human being
can become
a confrontation
with the other.
So it's just a way
of shorthand
signifying,
right?
The dimension
that carries you
beyond yourself
into the things
that you previously
couldn't expect
or imagine.
Yeah,
that's one notion of it.
Or Wittgenstein's
unspeakable.
Or,
you know,
I always,
I'm fond of quoting
this poem
by Trumbull Stickney
where he says,
I lean over
your meaning's edge
and feel the dizziness
of the things
you have not said.
That's the other.
It's the dizziness
of the things unsaid,
the things that lie
beyond the edge
of meaning.
Part of the question
has to do with,
specifically in
the mushroom experience
of my dose
is this sense
of alien intelligence
or other.
Because I think
in, you know,
it's like you said,
in some of our systems
of conceptions of God,
many psychedelic experiences,
at least with LSD
and other,
or light dosages,
is that I am connected
to that
or that I'm part of,
I'm part of that thing.
But somehow
on the tryptamines
that it's
this alien intelligence.
I mean,
what do you make of that
that you feel
is important?
Well,
I don't know
quite what to make
of that.
LSD is self-reflective
and integrative,
I think.
these tryptamines
seem to be
informational
and largely
unconcerned
with the impact
that the information
they carry
has on the perceiver.
I don't know.
I think it just
must have to do
with the fact
that the universe
is not
all smoothed out
and filled in
and that this is
really an area
of personal exploration
where you can
penetrate
into an area
of terra incognito,
a place
where nobody knows
exactly what is
going on.
We're not used
to that experience.
We expect
to have maps
of everything
we look at
and everywhere
we go.
And it is strange
that in this one area
we don't,
that apparently
our taboo
against looking
at the unconscious
or delving
into the mind
has made us
content
to just
fence off
this area.
Well then
if you climb
over the fence
and start wandering
around out there
you don't know
what you're going
to find
because the culture
has carefully
engineered itself
to go around
all of this stuff.
Even,
even I think
shamanism
is largely
concerned
with gaining
power
to protect
yourself
from the onslaught
of the other.
You know,
they're very
concerned
to hold
stuff back.
They don't really
have this
let's hurl
ourselves
into it
attitude
that we have.
We found
in the Amazon
we were looking
for this one plant
which had
DMT in it
and the
ayahuasquero
that we were
working with
I kept
leading the
questioning
back
to the matter
of this one
plant
and finally
he said
first he said
that it was
comida del
pero
food for
dogs
and
which seemed
like maybe
a put down
of some sort
and so then
went back
over it again
and he said
whoa
it's mal and bizarro
it's too strange
so this was a man
whose whole life
was about taking
ayahuasca
and triggering
hallucination
but he felt
that to go
into that plant
it was too
weird
and you often
have the feeling
with those people
that they
involve themselves
in the psychedelic
effect
like a dancer
almost as little
as possible
to get the job
done
you know
they don't
I don't
think that
of Don Fidel
I think that
in that one case
he certainly
was
he did also
seem to hold
the mushroom
in the sort
of middle
category
but he would
use it
on his own
he would only
administer
to others
ayahuasca
or certain
things that he
felt very
familiar with
but then
that was
Saturday nights
Wednesday nights
he would do
things on his own
you know
his work
and he would
try out some
of these other
plants or combinations
but I think he
was pretty intrepid
actually
he did have
boundaries
in 83
or whenever it
was that I
was down there
last
we were dealing
with a different
group of shamans
on the upper
Ampeyaku
and it was
to get this
orally active
DMT
thing
that was made
from tree
resin
and we
had
pure
chemical
DMT
as a
trade item
or we
weren't sure
why
but just
in case
we needed
it
exactly
and
and so
talking to
the shaman
who could
make the
varrola paste
stuff
we said
this
and he
said
oh
you
have
the
essentia
you
have
the
essence
he said
yes
and he
said
so
what
is
that
like
he said
well
you don't
take it
orally
you don't
take it
by mouth
you smoke
it
he said
oh
and what
happens
and so
he described
a typical
DMT
trip to him
and then
said
would you
like
to
real crazy
by any
means
well
I'm reminded
of
in the
latest
Castaneda
books
he goes
into
what he
calls
the
old
seers
and the
new
seers
and the
old
seers
were
maybe
you're
more
aligned
with them
I don't
know
but
they
would
be
willing
to
explore
any
territory
and they
made
a division
between
the known
and the
unknown
no
it was
the new
seers
who came
up
with
the
third
category
of
the
unknowable
in other
words
there's
this
reality
which is
the
known
and then
there's
the
other
realities
you
go to
which
are
the
unknown
it's
like
they're
not
necessary
it's
like
maybe
the
ayahuasquero
takes
you to
the
unknown
but
this
other
realm
where
place
of
the
unknown
they
could
glimpse
very
briefly
the
unknowable
and it
was
usually
a pretty
shattering
experience
I put
great
emphasis
on being
able to
distinguish
the
difference
between
the
unknown
and
the
unknowable
he said
that
whenever
one
made
an
error
in
judgment
it
wasn't
that
dangerous
to
be up
against
the
unknowable
but you
have to
recognize
it
as
unknowable
because
whenever
one
did
it
invariably
led to
disaster
of course
that's
cause
you
that's
his
text
well
that's
interesting
I mean
it makes
me think
of
you
know
I
mentioned
Wittgenstein's
unspeakable
there
is
I
think
the
unspeakable
and
the
unspoken
and
all
these
esoteric
and
initiatory
religious
numbers
are
trading
in
the
unspoken
you
know
you
come
to
them
and
they
will
whisper
in
your
ear
the
previously
unspoken
teaching
they
will
give
you
an
oral
empowerment
but
beyond
that
lies
the
unspeakable
which
transmissibility
by its
nature
and
I
would
to
some
degree
I
would
think
so
and
that's
the
thing
which
then
you
validate
you
can
only
validate
it
for
itself
in
itself
for
itself
it
is
the
private
object
of
being
it
is
not
something
which
I
can
tell
you
about
or
you
can
tell
me
about
it's
the
private
mystery
that
is
ontologically
private
because
it's
unspeakable
I
don't
think
that
what
is
the
unspeakable
is
the
same
as
the
unknowable
I
think
that
all
of
us
who
have
pursued
these
dimensions
have
many
experiences
that
it's
very
hard
to
talk
about
or
when
you
talk
about
them
you
know
it
sounds
so
silly
compared
to
what
you
experienced
right
it's
one
of
the
challenges
of
having
this
kind
of
group
discussion
or
these
kinds
of
workshops
is
to
try
to
talk
about
that
but
there
is
I
think
a big
area
that
just
doesn't
language
don't
you
think
the
ineffable
is
how
I
think
of it
another
word
for it
well
you can
sort
of
chip
away
at
it
I
mean
the
whole
progress
of
human
development
is
into
the
spoken
I'd like
to speak
about that
that's what's been
going on in my
thought
and I'm glad
to use that
because
in a way
that is
the process
of everything
from the
very beginning
to the very end
we as human beings
on the planet
are just
somewhere in the
middle of this
whole process
of the unknowable
becoming
the known
and
it ties back
a little bit
to your whole
thing of time
yesterday
where you said
like the
physicists
are interested
in the
first
second
or
parts
thereof
whereas
you're
interested
in this
final
or
coming
up
moments
or years
as things
speed up
but
what we're
looking at
is
the
physicists
are looking
at
basically
the
physics
of it
the
form
whatever
the matter
the physics
and
what you're
looking at
are the
ideas
which
are
coming
into
being
more
and
more
this
end
of time
is
more
and more
recognition
so it's
really
so it's
like
the
opposite
end
one
is
the
matter
coming
into
form
at the
beginning
and then
at the
end
is
the
knowing
of all
of this
which is
coming to
a point
and
like
an ant
or whatever
lower level
of consciousness
is
on different
levels
or I'll tell you
a cell
an amoeba
they have
their
thing
and then
there's
their knowable
which is
what we are
acting
in
how can
even
inside of
our body
the blood
cells
can they
know
of our
world
knowledge
such as
we are
on this
unknowable
is really
just a greater
universe
a higher
level
which is
known
by a higher
way of being
and it's
so it's like
from each
end
whatever
the matter
here
and then
the mind
coming into
it
and like
this point
coming up
shortly
this 2012
is significant
in that
it's
possibly
some sort
of
like I say
this opposite
end of
knowing
becoming
complete
like life
becoming
completely aware
of all
life
of itself
but that's
like
is that
the end
of everything
it seems
like that's
just a point
like a mid
swing of a
pendulum
yes well
then some
other process
having to do
with the
career of
spirit
instead of
matter
is initiated
you know
and whether
it's the end
of everything
is rather
a human way
of approaching
it
of us
as a species
as a
life
development
it's not
just human
it's all
life
of the
earth
life
entity
but if
that life
entity
goes to
a great
metamorphosis
it's rather
meaningless
to say
what happens
to the rest
of the universe
since the rest
of the universe
right now
is a concept
in our mind
but to say
what's never
been said
to do
what's never
been done
to paint
what's never
been painted
to dance
what's never
been danced
this is
you know
somehow you're
acting for
everybody
when you do
that
it's an
amazing thing
to do
something
that's never
been done
it means
once you've
done it
it's been
done
that's right
putting the fence
it's like a fence
going out
bigger and bigger
and like all
these great
minds that
go out there
and fence
off a big
area for all
of humanity
to run around
in this area
of being
and knowing
and it's
this whole
process of
it's what
aeronautical
engineers call
stretching the
envelope
when you fly
a fighter plane
you have
the predicted
engineering
performance
characteristics
but once you
validate that
it can do
that then
it's up to
the pilot
to find
out
to stretch
the envelope
to find out
what it can
really do
how fast
it can turn
how fast
it can climb
and that's
what we as
creative artists
do for the
human enterprise
and the lacking
ingredient is
courage
I think
I mean
I
for you
often
I have the
feeling that
it's no longer
at least in
my own life
about seeking
the answer
it's about
facing it
you know
it isn't
about you know
is it yoga
is it Taoism
is it this
is it that
I think that
now I know
at least for me
what it is
but the answer
is so appalling
and requires
such courage
to execute it
and carry it
through
that I don't
know what to do
I have no
doubt
that
we could all
become
the Taoist
hermit
on cold
mountain
you know
and be that
person
of whom
people in the
valley say
oh him
we see him
sometimes
when it snows
very deeply
because he comes
further down
for wood
he comes and
goes in the
mist and never
talks to anybody
we could all
become that
person
there are no
barriers to
ultimate spiritual
attainment
but what about
you know
your mortgage
and your lover
and your devotion
to french chocolate
and
all of these
things
that's tricky
that's very
very tricky
learn how to
make
all washes out
maybe just
for an hour
of peaking
but it's really
puts all of that
in perspective
but for instance
like the matter
of the flying saucer
I have no doubt
that if you took
ten people
selected
from this group
and trekked
days east
of death valley
and
you know
stayed up
all night
and then
everybody took
eight dried
grams of
mushrooms
and hooped
and hollered
and waited
that something
would happen
that would be
so appalling
and so destructive
to our preconceptions
of what's possible
in this universe
that you just
come out of it
you know
pointing into
the desert
and saying
mmm
but
I'm careful
I don't
doubt
that appalling
appalling
things
can happen
and that reality
can be completely
pulled to pieces
and I don't know
what that means
but I want
to really
try and deal
with that
on my terms
and that's
a kind
of fear
you know
it's a kind
of holding back
that's why
you know
I know
people
who seem
to me
superhumanly
reckless
I mean
they tell me
the things
they do
and I just
shake my head
you know
because
of the
power
of the
vistas
of the the the energies that they must have laid their hands on I don't it's too
much for me I want I'm a simple scholar and bookish collector type I'm like
brother John here we like our home and hearth but that's the challenge you see
that's the weird thing about the psychedelics it is a path but in a sense
it's the end of the path and then what do you do you know now it's up to you
it's no more about you know the guru says in five years you'll make progress or
if you just keep eating the spirulina or fiddling with your crystals or something
it's that no you've arrived now what do you do with it are you really want to be
a wandering figure at the edge of civilization glimpsed occasionally in
your tattered cloak with your wild ravings and we were talking about envisioning
something and how these plants help you to to generate a vision of something real
that you want to create or organize in the world and then they help you to have
the discipline and the dedication to carry them out in the real day-to-day you know
telephone calls and how do I get the money for it kind of way and that I think
is is a real strength that all of us have and that it's one of the
responsibilities of being granted the visions is to make the visions then as
real as you can I mean we do have our bodies here on earth for some time to
come we do have pleasure of course which we should all indulge in but we also have
responsibility to make it as as much like even if it's a small step as much like
that fantastic thing we can see in our visions and and I think that you know it
gives you the object and then it helps you move toward it and then we need to do
that work and keep refreshing our vision if it gets weak or we start to give up on
it or or if we need to shift direction slightly I go back to astrology in Saturn
being drawing a ring around the vision and then Saturn stairway envisioning the
steps that it takes to get there and that how that you can't jump you know 40 steps up
without losing part of the foundation and then as an artist myself I'm finally
getting to a place of patience and realizing that the slower it goes the
better it gets and the statement that I like is if I only had more time I use
less words to write it's like choosing things carefully and allowing the process
and it's very for years I was just like I've got to get this out I've got it you
know not anymore it's now I'm really seeing that slow patient steps create a
foundation strong enough to someday even if it's not in this lifetime to manifest
that dream if you if you use the quality of your daily life as your currency for
how you're proceeding towards something then you you know if the quality of your
daily life is good deep satisfying and you have a goal you're probably on the
right path right if you're saying god it's just gonna be hell for three years
so I can get this project together you maybe should think about it again I've
actually done process reflected on a greater scale in just the evolution of
life itself and that if life were to very quickly achieve the knowing pure
spirituality then what good is it and that's like through humans and through
all of our history and time and so even this coming moment 2012 that might just be
like this reflection of another even more ultimate it most likely is and it's just a
certain it's just that reflection it is really this endlessly drawn out patient
process which is taking its time as long as possible so that every aspect will
work into place well this quality of daily life thing is an interesting point
because I think it was yesterday or two days ago we meditated or thought about
what would you do if you could do anything and how oh there it is
yes and how you imagine or if the genie were to suddenly tell you you had not
three wishes but thousands and you would begin to dabble in fulfillment and then of
course in the the all the trivial and superficial things I mentioned palaces
and Ferraris and all this but then things like that you could move anywhere
instantly how would you choose to travel if you could move anywhere instantly and
things like that well at La Cerrera these possibilities were so real to us that we
actually grappled with it sufficiently to see how it would develop and how it
develops is you discover that if you can do anything the only values which have any
meaning if you can do anything and have anything are aesthetic values so that if
you could travel anywhere instantly how would you travel you would walk obviously you know
because it's so tasteful because it's so completing it's such a complete reverence for
space and time and your own body and the correctness of the situation and time and
time at La Cerrera someone would be doing something some way and someone else would
say well if you're omniscient why don't you just make it be done and the answer is
because that's it's crass to do that you know the way to do things if you can do
anything is to do them right then cooking is like that I guess but that that that
realization of the total richness and correctness of the moment is that's the
correct interpretation of the attainment of these cities at things would go on at
La Cerrera as an example of how the Tao works where I would walk out into the
jungle and there would be butterflies circling and I would hold out my hand and speak to the
butterflies with my mind and invite them to come down and land on my hand and display themselves
and the butterflies would do this they would come and land in my open hand and turn and strut and show
me all facets of themselves and this would go on for like two or three minutes where I would
experience gratitude reverence delight and then this other emotion the need to show somebody else what I
could do and so then I would I would walk back to the camp and smiling with a bizarre inward smile I would
select one of my camp mates and ask them to walk out into the jungle with me and then to their horror I
would stand underneath this tree and gesture and ask for the butterflies to come down and land in my hand and
people would just turn away in a mixture of horror and embarrassment that anyone could be such a jackass
first of all and that anyone could be so mentally deranged as to operate like that and of course the
butterflies would have nothing to do with me and and and I would just be left just just sputtering you know and and it
happened many times many times oh no oh many times because there was this you took people and were left sputtering or
like that it was not only the butterflies it was that as long as I didn't have as long as I had no ego
I could work magic but it was not it was magic that was the necessary magic it absolutely had no use other
rather than to make my life a more perfect work of art as an example we had a pot in which we cooked a vena oatmeal every
morning it was our magic pot and the scrubbing out of this pot was a major pain in the neck and was consequently a
rotating camp duty so in the height of this it became my turn to scrub this pot and I went down to the little spring
where the sand was and squatted down by the water and I picked up the sand and I rubbed it onto the pot
to get ready to scrub it and then I looked and the the black stuff was just flaking off it was like easy off or
something and it was just and I just took the pot holding it by its two little protrusions and immersed it in the spring
like this and looked and all the black stuff was just flaking off and crudding off and going and I
was just amazed you know the magical scouring agent so then I went back to the camp and got my most severe
critic and again smiling with inward benigness I led them down to the river and said I'm going to teach you how to wash a pot
the zen master you see so we squat across from each other by the spring and I and I pick up the sand and I put it on and
and she said so I'm supposed to know that sand can wash a pot I think no look and again it failed me you know and I just was
and I just was then by then I was getting the message and I I stopped and there was one other instance which was very puzzling
because I actually saw another person go into it too and it had to do with this prophecy which my brother had made he one of the motifs which circled in his mind space during the
space during this period was what he called the good shit and this was he am claimed imagined that at some time in the past he had gotten a sample of
afghani hash that had had cow manure very very carefully worked into it and then the hash had been infected with the psilocybin mycelium and all of the cow manure had been
converted into psilocybin so that he had the psilocybinated hash and he had this notion that he would invent a musical instrument like an electric guitar
which when you played it it would cause this stuff to condense out of the air and rain down on great crowds of people
so anyway there was this thing about the good shit and one night he announced that the good shit would appear at a certain time
and so then I went back to my hammock in this hut in the jungle and the woman who was with me came as well and we had no watches
but he had said that 11 that at 11 p.m. the good shit would appear so I was settling down to roll my evening joint and it was this
Columbian weed that we had brought in with us and as I lit the joint this little thing fell out of the end of it on the floor burning and I picked it up and I smelled it and it was
unbelievable hashish I mean hashish to die for and I was just you know and I put it in the pipe and I smoked it and I said to this woman I said smoke this and she agreed that it was astonishing
your major critic no not my major critic my major critic was back at the river so then I looked and I and I opened this baggie with this stuff and I started smoking it and it did not
it didn't change its physical appearance it still looked like this Santa Marta gold but the odor and everything was just the most the finest hash I've ever smoked
so I thought that the millennium had come so I thought that the millennium had come but forever after we would all trash yes the end of the world is when all trash is
Mazar-i-Sharif when trash becomes hash but but at the crack of dawn the next morning I went tearing down to my harshest critic and knelt beside her
hammock and woke her up and said you know you've got to smoke this and of course you know garbage was back
so so I don't know why I got off into this I guess it was the life is art thing and this thing about what would you do if you could do anything
you should just enhance that little story with the myth isn't it from New Guinea about the good shit do you remember that one where they generated
you mean the thing about the resin where the resin bar grew longer I'm not sure how this relates to it but I'll tell it
in the study of messianic movements in fact you can read about this in Sylvia Thrupp's book Millennial Dreams in Action where she talks about a number of millennial religious groups
there was a movement around 1910 in Java called the Kalupan movement and it was some guy was sitting on his porch one day in a hut off in the jungle and he was playing his flute and they collect kopal
in the forest there and sell to traders and as he was playing his flute he noticed that this bar of rolled out kopal multiplied to twice its size right in front of him
and not only did this happen but at the same moment it happened his mind was flooded with the sudden realization that the meaning of this event was that all human lives
were now going to be twice as long as they had previously been before and he started he told people in his village and he had the proof because they had this bar of kopal that was twice as long than anybody ever rolled them in that village so it spread from village to village and before long people from all over Java were vectoring in on this place and
eventually the army had to be sent to put up roadblocks and turn people back and it all had to do with this piece of resin which had doubled in length while this guy was playing his flute
and that is what's called a cognitive hallucination
a cognitive hallucination
where an idea becomes so real to you that you see it but then there's this funny border where maybe it becomes so real that other people see it and maybe that's actually how we keep enlarging and complicating reality is by having consensual cognitive hallucinations of what's possible
that's right that's right that's right yeah the the ayahuasquero that cat mentioned that we like so much and worked with in peru don fidel he lived behind he lived off this road when we knew him a few miles down this trail and we would go over there often and walk with him back and forth between there his house and where we could catch these little jitney buses into town and he said one afternoon as we were walking along through the amazon jungle
apropos of nothing he said this is the path that christ walked when he lived on earth and it became so you saw that somehow this was not a logical statement this was a statement about the transposition of time and dimensionality and that he was living in the light of christ that he was living in the presence of the master
the master through being enveloped in a cognitive hallucination and i think our entire culture is headed for being enveloped in a cognitive hallucination where our real wishes will be fulfilled and that's why it's so important to to find out what our real wishes are
one of the most powerful forms of yoga one of the most powerful forms of yoga one of the highest yogas is what's called the Anuttatara Yoga Tantra
and it involves a series of visualizations and they say
imagine your home as a splendid palace
and imagine the common utensils of your everyday life as golden vessels vessels of beaten gold encrusted with jewels imagine your raiment as being made of the finest silk and imagine yourself as a god centered in the midst of all of this splendor
well this is like trying to induce what in western psychotherapy is called a delusion of grandeur
a delusion of grandeur is when you're a hell of a lot happier than other people think you should be
you know
and
you say what do you have to be so happy about
and it's all about infusing the quality of life with greater purity
we were saying around the fire last night that the way to relate to the millennium
is to make it happen as soon as possible in your life so that you become a spectator to it as a historical phenomenon
well the main way to make it happen in your life is to not transcend desire but transmute it so that what you really want is what you actually have you know
i find um on these plants on the mushroom particularly i found it effective to um will choose to become an archetype that i both of course have to be able to identify as an archetype but then also one that i can relate to and wish to be and and become you know as large
a hundred a thousand times larger than we are and as smooth and as everything is right you know you can you can practice being in the dao so deeply in those states and knowing that everything you do no matter how minuscule it is you're doing most gracefully and everything you say you're saying most eloquently and
you know even um you know even um i've used the mending sock thing because i sometimes i feel like that's what i'm doing is that level of work but then i'm doing it perfectly you know and that's that's a great feeling if you indulge in that feeling of being the goddess or a god or goddess or a one of whatever you identify with you know one of the kachinas whatever then you can um carry it back
it's a really good way to carry it back it's a really good way to carry it back into your daily life and and uh i and learn to practice it either in moments when you're wobbly and you suddenly need to grow into the situation or in moments of ecstasy you know i mean to be archetypes making love is pretty good
well that's the technique of tantric practice of imagining these gods in union with their consorts in sexual union
can we have a break yeah let's have a break
and i think we're all dancing around it very well and i think you're dancing around it really well and so i think we do know something not a lot perhaps but we do know something
words are that important and do have that meaning meaning whether it's what we're saying that is true or just the sound of our voice that is true something is true we're here getting to say the unsayable
and what a feeling it is yes well we feel the dizziness of the things not said we feel it we're dizzy from it it's here
it keeps forming it's like a creation of words thought ideas they attack themselves with larger structure and keep getting larger and larger pieces fall off people add
um
But it's just trust, it's that leap of faith to the other side of what you can't see, what you can't understand.
To trust it, as you trust your lover, as you trust a friend.
And it doesn't always work out, but trust is the only way.
Because otherwise, there's only fear.
Fear of ourselves, fear of others, fear of ideas.
I think this community is part of that, of building trust among people who have different ideas.
I'm teaching with regard to the psychedelic experience.
You can use a lot of verbiage in trying to explain to people what that search is about, and what that adventure will yield.
But in the end, probably the best communication is to just dispense the sacrament.
I think it's very holy work, and I just want to express my appreciation to those who are involved in that work.
There's great respect for the sacrament, and for those to whom they dispense it.
And I'm just very happy to be associated with your works.
I think that's something I've missed for a long time, since the days of the 60s.
It was the last time I was around people who knew about that work, and approached it with the kind of reverence that I see here.
The great thing about the psychedelics is that they speak for themselves.
So they need no priest, no interpreter, they can deliver their message all by themselves.
What happened after that song, it seemed to be so wonderful, which words may be unspeakable with being together in silence.
It's like nothing else to say.
For me, who's always babbling, it's quite an event.
Well, it's wonderful to feel so comfortable with people that you don't have to rattle on.
Why don't you lead us now, Kat, in a meditation?
Hold hands.
We've seen many eggs in the last two days, and had the pleasure of holding them and swallowing them.
Spoken of luminous eggs, and it seems just to be very eggy today, right?
Resurrection and all that stuff.
So I was thinking that our luminous eggs should meet each other in maybe a less verbal way.
If we close our eyes and find your center, the light, and let it swell out into your egg, your shape,
and then you feel that light of yourself moving into your head and letting everything else out of it.
You can breathe through the top of your head and through your forehead and your eyes
and let it become, let your head become like a cloud of light.
And when that's strong, that floats up above your head until you have a sphere of light
that you can feel and see just above the top of your head.
It seems to get more and more charged as you perceive it.
And then it grows.
The light is growing.
The sphere is growing rounder and fuller and softer until it meets the lights of your neighbors.
And we have a huge halo over us together.
If you travel through it in your light, you'll encounter everyone very softly.
And we can charge that halo of light to be stronger and bigger than us.
I feel like it becomes a sphere, a dome above and beneath us, which meets the light of the spirit of this place,
the spirit that lives here.
It's partly in the earth and partly in the air and very old, wise, with a sense of humor.
And so we're all inside our collective luminous egg, which we could take anywhere, actually.
But perhaps for now we should just greet the spirit of this place
and gradually breathe and draw the white light energy back into ourselves, into our circle
and into our individual spaces above and through and beneath us.
And when we go out and sit on the rocks alone, we can keep doing this, even though we're not in a circle.
It's good to connect with all of you.
Thank you.
You were suggesting that this kind of visual language, somehow, our future lies there somehow.
And I know that Jose Aguayas talks about the future of technology being light and sound
in probably the same way that you're talking about it.
I guess my interest in formulating this question has to do with things like the Mayan hieroglyphic
language system or also Egyptian hieroglyphs or basically that kind of visual language system.
I also think of Northwest Coast Indian designs where there's very particular kind of design patterns.
And another piece of this question is the interface between the past use of that and the future use of that somehow.
That it seems that, I mean, my sense of these hieroglyphic languages is that in the past they would literally see these things that are being drawn
or these things would speak to them or provide information as you're talking about.
And that somehow, as we've evolved, we've lost that ability somehow or buried it or shunted it off to one side.
And so my question has to do with, is there some sense of the re-emergence or the, in the Joyce sense,
here comes everybody, the democratization of that ability in future culture?
Yes, well, I think so.
I think that the way these hieroglyphic languages, especially Mayan and Egyptian, differ from alphabetic languages
is that etymology remains on the surface in a hieroglyphic language so that thousands of meanings
are immediately, visibly present, and so it's more like an ideogram rather than a word with a dictionary meaning.
You couldn't really, I doubt that a Mayan could conceive of a dictionary of Mayan glyphs
because they're, they're, they infinitely shade off one into another so that, and, and that kind of sensitivity
to the depth of language and to the presence of the past in the present in a word
is what Joyce is trying to do in Finnegan's Wake, you know.
And that's why, if you read it carefully, you feel many historical layers of meaning in the same passage
because he wrote it with almost a pictographic consciousness of the meaning of the words
rather than a lineal and literary sense of it.
So, yes, it's in, in that sense, uh, it's like that.
How this will be achieved in the future in our culture, I'm not sure.
The control of the Macintosh through an internationally set of, an internationally understood set of control glyphs
is very weird, and if any of you have worked with a Macintosh, you immediately see, ah,
this idea which seems very odd could, in fact, I could learn this very quickly and, and anyone can do it
kind of thing, maybe presages a, you know, a world of illiterate computer users
who, who communicate with computers through symbols because literacy has been lost.
But, uh, it's, it's very interesting. Yeah.
So you see computers might play a role in that kind of, um, visual component.
I've heard you talk about, actually, Bruce, when you asked your question about will, will computers become intelligent in life,
I've heard you talk about it more that, um, we, the technology of computers will become available to us
as almost a biological extent of who we are. Yes, that's what I think will happen, that,
I mean, my vision of a perfect world is where, you know, the Earth is restored to its prehistoric,
Edenic perfection, but technology has not been eliminated, it's merely been micro-miniaturized to the point where
the computers which maintain the history of the race and the governance of the planet
have all been secreted in a certain pebble which lies on a certain beach somewhere on the planet,
and we walk around in perfect harmony with nature and in perfect and complete touch
with an imaginary holographic world that is our self-expression, as a city is our self-expression,
to then be simultaneously, you know, in the world of techni and in the world of nature,
but with neither violating the other. And I think that's reasonable. In fact, I think, perhaps,
in a sense, this is what, uh, so-called pre-literate cultures in the Amazon and places have achieved,
that's how it looks to them from the inside. They have an extremely rich inner life. It isn't maintained,
by vast computer networks, and projected into holographic space, and taped onto magnetic tape, and all of that.
But it's still, in feeling, it's the notion that the richest world is within, and that you, uh, promote a balance with the exterior world,
but then the purpose of the leisure created when you have achieved balance is not then to accumulate things,
but to explore the interior horizon of transcendence through the recitation of myth and ecstasis and, uh, and this sort of thing.
Terence, in connection with Robert's question, conjunction with it, could you further elaborate this idea of the material externalization of the soul and the internalization of the body as a definitive thing in evolution?
as a definitive thing in evolution?
Well, I think imagination is, uh, where we want to go,
that this has become the arrow of our epigenetic development, because everybody says,
in the future, you'll have everything you want!
Well, if we believe this, then we have to think seriously about what everything you want is.
I mean, obviously, you want plenty of food, plenty of clothes, plenty of money, plenty of friends,
but then, if you get all that, and then they say,
well, you still, you haven't even dented your credit account.
Well, then it says, well, I want to live at Versailles,
surrounded by brilliant robots who,
and I want great writers and artists to have lunch with me every day,
and then, and the Hope Diamond, and Rembrandts,
and eventually this becomes very silly,
and instead there is an ascent toward truly grandiose aspirations, you know,
truly bodhisattvic calling.
And I think that, uh, that this, the rich, the imagination is the real frontier.
This is why the poets and the artists are, uh, are so important.
And, and this is why I think one of the aspects of the space thing
that is never mentioned by the L5 Society,
or any of these engineering types who are so into it,
is the interesting thing about outer space.
We are not going to go through space to other worlds.
That will be very incidental to going into space.
Going into space means going into space.
That space itself is a medium with unique properties for a species such as ourselves.
And one of those unique properties is that engineering,
which on the surface of the planet has to always be cognizant of, uh,
stress and bearing loads and the limitation of materials,
engineering is just going to become like ballet.
And objects miles in extent can be created that are obedient only to the laws of the human imagination.
And of course the, the, the funding available to create these things.
But in other words, the constraints of nature are pretty much lifted.
Outer space is very much like what you see when you close your eyes in a dark room.
It's a vast, unfilled void into which anything whatsoever can be projected.
The hallucinations of the individual are, are the cultural artifacts of the species 500 years from now.
I mean, all these visions and dreams that we have will be realized.
I mean, in ways that we cannot imagine, but realized nevertheless.
This has been consistently what has been going on.
The alchemical dreams of the 16th century are fully realized in the 20th century, you know.
And of course it has facets that they never imagined.
But, uh, going into space and going into the imagination is the same thing.
And in the same way that, um, the New World presented a tremendously tight genetic filter to immigrants,
so that only the soldiers of fortune, the religious fanatics, and exiles came to this place.
And that created a unique gene mix.
Space is going to be a much tighter genetic filter.
I mean, most people who go are going to be very smart and very healthy.
And, uh, and, uh, very quickly, I think, a space type will arise.
But I don't think you can create a space-based civilization without recourse to psychedelic plants and the psychedelic experience.
Because it's too much the same thing.
You know, without, if you don't integrate psychedelics into the leap to space,
and realize that what is happening is that more and more we perfect the, uh, aspiration to vertical ascent.
In the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, you get this.
Then in the Brothers Monc Gauphier and their gas-filled balloon.
And then the Wright Brothers, and then the Apollo Project.
All of these things are, you know, this aspiration to ascension.
And it is, uh, apparently a biological drive.
I mean, some people have suggested it's a nostalgia for the canopies of the rainforest that no longer exist.
But whatever it is, it's going to take us eventually out to the stars and inward to the stars.
Because, uh, you know, the real question mark which hangs over all this is the nature of mind.
And we do not know what mind is.
And yet everything goes on upon the stage that is conditioned by and assumes mind as a given.
And, uh, every society has assumed that it had the answers.
That just fifteen years more of fine-tuning of the current ideology would do it.
And no society has ever been right about that.
So why should we be right?
We are hurtling toward an unimaginable future in the same way that our present would have been unimaginable to people two hundred or five hundred years ago.
But it is, uh, it is the imagination because it is consciousness that is growing and expanding and strengthening itself.
And if we take the notion that these, uh, psychedelic plants are consciousness-expanding agents.
This is what they were originally called consciousness-expanding drugs.
If you take that seriously for a moment, how can you not center it in your life?
I mean, obviously consciousness is what must be expanded as fast as possible at all costs in all times and places.
Because it is a lack of consciousness that will, uh, be toxic to our species and the planet.
Consciousness is the saving grace.
And so it has to be cultivated by any means, uh, available.
Yeah.
You're saying that this urge to go into space is something like a biological urge.
And also maybe something relating to, like, the rainforest.
Well, I think we're like the trigger species.
Yeah, well, the point I want to make is that, you know, when we think of going to space, we're so human-centered.
And it's like, yes, us as humans can exist in space and exist there.
But I think what's really important about going away from this planet's surface is that it's not just a human-centered thing.
It's a totally biological thing in that we are just the implements of it.
We are the thinking, conscious, creative tool-makers that will be able to implement this, getting off of this gravity trap, this gravity well.
But it's not just for humans. It's for all life.
And we have to, it'll be a complete synthesis of all biological life that will exist away from the planet.
If we go to space, we will take everybody with us.
Just like in a rainforest, it's not just, it's everything.
That's right. We are the species that is deputized to use energy to do the thing for all life on the planet.
That's why I am not pessimistic about history.
And I don't see history as unnatural or somehow opposed to nature.
What history is, is a 10,000 year process by which the monkeys attain enough understanding of physical processes to build the habitats into which all life on the planet can then migrate.
That's what I was talking about this morning when I said, I think the planet senses the finiteness of its existence and that biology is a wild scheme for getting out to the stars for dispersal of life.
And you're right. No, we, though we have great hubris and believe we are doing this and man will go to the stars.
It's more that man is the pecking beak of the cosmic, of the cosmic chick in the egg of life on earth.
And the entire bird will emerge and fly.
But it was man with his atomic weapons and his radar and all this, who, who can break the shell.
And then the whole of the biosphere will flow outward into space and escape the cycle of energy degradation that will eventually turn this solar system into a group of cold cinders rotating around a red, uh,
giant or something.
What?
Yes. Well, we're trying to compare our maps.
Everybody has seen different pieces of a geography whose total size we don't know.
So we don't know maybe none of our maps overlap or maybe some do and some don't.
And maps which don't overlap are not invalidated.
It just means nobody has been there but you.
I mean, I often have the feeling that I'm seeing things that no one has ever seen before.
Often.
Leon asked me to talk about time.
Leon is off on alone time, so he'll miss this.
The thing that really interests me or draws me back to the psychedelic experience again and again is the notion that there's something that you can learn that would somehow be, uh, have an impact on society at large.
That when, that when you have the psychedelic experience, it's like you're a sailor on some kind of a vast ocean where you let down your net into the deeps.
And the hope is that you will snare an idea of some sort and of some size and it may be, you know, that you come up with the equivalent of tuna.
Which is many small ideas or, and perhaps you bring up your nets and see that they have just been shredded by something so large that you scarcely care to imagine it.
But the, the hope is to land an idea of intermediate size that, uh, you can then fully, um, explore and understand.
When you go into that ocean as a swimmer, you see these things passing in review, uh, things of such beauty and intricacy and complexity that you are literally speechless.
And even speechless in terms of an interior dialogue about what you're seeing, you can't, uh, it just blows your mind and washes past you in such profusion that there seems to be the notion of capturing it seems to be like the notion of a child emptying the ocean with a cup.
But if you have a net, and I'm not sure what a net is exactly, but it's a way of somehow capturing these psychedelic ideas and then bringing them back for examination.
And I think, um, part of it rests on a technique of, uh, cyclical recitation to yourself of what you've seen so that you carry a vision to a level of reflection in memory as you pull away from it.
And then 10 minutes later, you tell yourself again, what has just happened, and then 20 minutes later again, so that you get a series of telescoping images, which are granted a compression of the original event, but nevertheless, they bear the, uh, the, uh, stamp of what the thing was.
So, the thing of this class that has happened to me is a very peculiar idea about time, which was developed, uh, fairly suddenly, as I would imagine ideas develop, uh, in me in the early and mid seventies.
And then it was pretty much.
formulated in my head but it took the invention of small computers to make it
possible to write software so that I could actually talk to other people
about this idea well since we have no computers and not even a blackboard this
will be a kind of feeling toned excursion into talking about this theory
of time it's it has an abstract foundation and a practical foundation
its abstract foundation is the notion that time is different than we have come
to conceive of it as the legacy of Western science the legacy of Western
science is that time is duration that time is a dimension necessary for process
and it's usually thought of as a flat plane against which some other
fluctuating variable can be plotted this is called you know linear time and Newton's
physics took the same view of space the Newtonian view of space was that it was
essentially emptiness it was something which you had to have if you wanted to
put something somewhere so it was a kind of an abstract plenum but Einstein showed
that space is actually some kind of thing it has properties of thing them it is distorted in the
presence of a large magnetic field and and so it became it rose out of the realm of abstraction and
then was cognized as an objectifiable entity a topological manifold that was real this is I think the same step that has to be taken for time
time time is not simply the dimension of duration required for the successive
occurrence of occasions it is rather some kind of conditioned topological manifold we can
think of it as a fluid medium flowing across a surface a river in other words in some places the river is very broad
and shallow and meanders because the pitch of the incline over which it's moving is so
slight that it can barely discern which way to move you see this often in the
Amazon in other situations the incline increases and the speed of the flow
increases and the depth of the channel increases and the sides of the distance
between the banks decreases so time runs slowly and it runs quickly it has a kind of modulated speed
well it's been a commonplace of Western cosmology since Darwin although it's never been elevated to the
status of a law or even a principle that complex steady complexification has occurred in the universe
since its very beginning that this is something that we see in the very first moments of physics and proceeding
right up into our own day in other words in the era before physics that period of time so short that it's the period of time it's less than the
amount of time necessary for the photon to cross the radius of the nucleus of the atom there was absolute chaos and a complete absence of physics and then what sprang into being was a physics of pure electrons of pure energy and it was not for many seconds that temperatures fell to a point such that other
factors could come into play such that free electrons could fall into atomic orbitals and this sort of thing and at each successive level of cooling new forms of order became possible at first everything was just this plasma of particles and energy and then atomic systems sprang into being and then at still lower temperatures these atomic systems sprang into being and then at still lower temperatures
systems were able to form molecular systems the energy level in the general
medium dropped below the level at which it would disrupt the molecular bond so
then molecules came into being and then at that point there was the aggregation
of stars and the cooking out of the heavier elements through the height the
process of cooking hydrogen so that iron and carbon these things then arose and
by this time the universe is much cooler than it was at the beginning and
then finally you get temperature regimes and environmental situations where very
large colloidal molecular species can come into being large polymerized
molecules and and this sets the stage for DNA which once it emerges and the the
thing to notice at each of these stages of complexification is that it requires a
shorter time than the process is preceding it if the universe is let's take the long
view and say 20 billion years old then the first 10 billion years not very much
happened that was interesting in the realm of complexity there was star formation and
the percolation of heavy chemistry but not life and or it's doubtful that life
occurred in the early universe so what we see then is the emergence of more and
more complex animal forms at a greater and greater speed and then finally the
emergence of self-reflection in the primates and then epigenetic methods of encoding
information in other words writing and storytelling and language and at each point
what is happening is there's a progressive time binding of energy and a progressive
intensification and speed up of the complexification of certain parts of the universe right now the
most complex part of the universe that we know is the human brain mind situated in
its network of computers and cultural conventions and social obligations and
expectations and hopes and fears and historical aspirations etc and this is the
realm of the densely packed that the Buddhists are talking about so it seems to me
that this should be seen as the operation of a general law and we are not outside of
this we are in fact the cutting edge of it somehow of all the animal species on the
earth the human beings are carriers of this temporal speeding up process which is now
engulfing the entire planet and so that's the general law or the general perception upon which
this idea I elaborated was based the notion that complexification is being conserved through time
and being built up as some quality that the universe is very interested in maintaining and then I looked at
the ching which I hope is familiar to most of you I'm sure it probably is it's a very ancient
Chinese Oracle system of that uses what are called hexagrams which are six leveled ideograms of broken or
unbroken lines and the possible subset of these things is 64 which is an interesting number because it's the
number which DNA operates on because it uses 64 codons and in fact I came to see that as no coincidence that
actually life was organized around this number and the ching as well because both were subject to a set of
rules which was surfacing in the phenomenon of biological organization and the organization of a
Chinese oracular theory for understanding past and future time but and I looked at what is called the
sequence which is the way in which you move from one hexagram to the next and I sought order there and
found order that I think had been lost since pre Han perhaps pre Zhou time and I came to see the
teaching as we possess it today as an archaeological artifact a piece of broken machinery it's like
the turbine of a jet plane you puzzle over it and you see that it could be used for something and you do use
it for things and it's very effective but it's really a piece of broken machinery from a very ancient
technology which ceased to exist before the rise of the Han Dynasty and what it was was it was like a
Taoist technology of understanding time that by the practice of certain techniques whose historical echoes I think you get in the
in the stilling of the heart techniques of Vajrayana Buddhism these people were able to see into the quantum
mechanical foundations of thought and consciousness and they noticed there a flux which they called the Tao and it
was a thing which came and went the Tao Te Ching says the way that can be told of is not an unvarying way
and they still their body functions and they looked inward with a cataloging analytical mentality and they
noticed that while this flux was variable it seemed to be not infinite in its contributing factors but that in
fact it seemed to have a pattern and they discerned the pattern as revolving around the number 64 in other
way in other words they discerned through this process of meditation temporal elements that had a
kind of ontological validity that the material elements of the periodic table have for matter that there is not
one kind of time or two kinds of time but actually 64 facets of the possible temporal jewel and they saw that
that any moment in time was the combination and the overlay of this wave system which they called Tao and it was a harmonic wave system
it had periods of self-expression which were very short in duration on the order of seconds or hours or microseconds
it had levels of expression which were cognizable in the human world as years and decades and centuries and it had vast
resonant periods which were as large as history and then larger many times periods of historical or periods of temporal
resonance which could only be referenced to the life of the planet and this is i think
you know part of the chinese notion of the Tao of heaven earth and man these are different speeds at which
these temporal waves of conditioning of the world of phenomenal appearance are moving and if you
if you if you take an idea like this seriously even as a personal discipline of thought to to picture it to
visual it visualize it in a vajrayana spirit then you see that what's really being offered is a map of time
it's saying that the condition of knowing a fading past and facing an unanticipatable future
future is not an ontologically given necessity of existence that it is possible to imagine an existence in which one saw into time
the way we as animals see into the space in front of us so that we are able to run and leap and
dance among the rocks it's because we can see into space
a creature that or a culture that could see into time could anticipate where the river of time would flow quickly
where it would broaden out and move slowly with a rich sense of the conservation of accomplishments achieved
where it would cascade and break up its previous patterns and produce great cataracts of novelty
a civilization which knew these things or a person which knew these things about their own life
would claim a new dimension of existential freedom for being and you know i was having this whispering
entity this demon this logos show me these things and it was expressed on a very very practical level
i mapped what is called the first order of difference in the sequence of the yi ching that means how many lines
change as you go from one hexagram to another and i discovered that it looked like a random wave it looked
like a stochastic slice except that at the beginning and the end there were tongue and groove points of fit
if you rotated the thing 180 degrees and brought it down against itself so that the thing achieved closure at the beginning and the end
this satisfied me that i was dealing with an artifact of nature you know that i was dealing with an organized
structure either of nature or created by intelligence and then using the principle of hierarchical resonance and
stacking of modules into uh into hierarchies which is the really the principle by which all chinese
metaphysics has operated from the very beginning i created a cosmic calendar which had where each level was a
resonance of the level below it but either collapsed or multiplied by a factor of 64.
i discovered a very well recall that because the yi ching is 64 hexagrams with the six lines in each hexagram
it's composed basically of 384 yao or lines and i discovered that this number 384 has a very interesting
property the uh cycle of the moon is 29.5 days so that if you take 29.5 times 13 it's something like 383.93
and it seemed to me then immediately obvious that that part of what the machinery of the yi ching was
describing in the humanly cognizable phenomenal world was the cycle of the moon using a 384 day lunar calendar
which precessed 19 days a year against the solar calendar and when you take that 384 day unit and
multiply it times 64 you uh get 67 years and some months and days this is exactly six 11 year sunspot cycles
and china is the first place where we have historical records of the observation of sunspots
so that's one sunspot cycle for each line in the six line hexagram also sunspot cycles have a greater peak
every third cycle so that's one large sunspot cycle for each hexagram in that trigram and i saw then
that there were uh these resonances when you take that number 67 years again times 64
you get 4 306 years and uh that was that works out to let's see 4 306 200 150 years for each zodiacal sign
so it's like each zodiacal sign is claim is slotted to one trigram and these are all notice that all these
things that this resonance calendar is predicting are things visible to the naked eye we're talking about
movements of constellations sunspots and um and the moon
so i saw then that this was a tremendously powerful natural calendar that that was a
a technology developed by proto-daoist central asian shamanism very very long ago but it had this curious
property of when the wave was mathematically analyzed in modern mathematical by modern mathematical methods
so that we could draw these maps of novelty we could see then that it showed us the map of the temporal river
from earliest beginnings to the collapse of the state vector at some time in the future
and so it was obvious then that if we could lay the map over the portion of reality we had already
experienced we could then propagate the map forward into the future and know and begin to take hold of
ourselves in this other temporal dimension and so it became a question of what is the best fit of this
undulating wave of novelty and i used the word novelty out of alfred north whitehead's philosophy
because he he had this notion that novelty was the compressing of a force which knits things together
and and i like that that's what i felt it was that the tao is making itself and that this compression of
novelty through the speeding up of time will eventually reach a place where everything is connected to
everything else and this is you know the universe's self birthing of itself well you must be aware of
all these very straight studies which say if we keep increasing how fast we go by the year 2020 we'll go to
10 times the speed of light if we keep increasing how much energy really we release by so and so we'll
release the energy in the sun the propagation of all these curves of development become asymptotic
and then nobody knows how to interpret what they mean they just seem to mean that the whole culture is
going to go kazoo you know and this is sort of the idea that this theory implies it implies that
far from the universe being a steady state entity uninfluenced by the existence of the human mind
which is going to go on and exist for billions of years until the stars burn out and the second law of
thermodynamics is going to reduce everything to heat death that that's all wrong a hundred percent
and that actually the universe is made by mind within and without organism and that mind is a
capable of bootstrap leaps in its organizational self-expression and that we are privileged
to be the witnesses of the final act of life going through some kind of immense
transformative unfolding from itself in a kind of vortex which has been building on this planet for
billions of years but which has been accelerating to you know such excruciating intensities over the
last 25 000 years that it has called forth self-reflective intelligence from the monkeys and the invention of
quantum physics and space flight and shamanism and it is novelty upon novelty novelty novelty so
intensified that the genetic machinery can no longer carry it and it bubbles out into the epigenetic into
art and language and poetry and religion and religious mania and romanticism and all of these
things it is a progressive knitting together an expression of the universe's will to become
that causes me to think that we may be in the shorter gyres as william butler yeats called them the
shortening spirals of this vortex of novelty and compression you see a curious quality about this kind of
cosmology that i'm describing a cosmology where each epoch is preceded by an epoch which is
a 65 64 times greater in duration the curious thing about that is that you only need about 20 multiple
instances of multiplication before you go from a period of time smaller than the duration of planck's
constant which is 10.1.55 times 10 to the minus 23 which is a very short period of time
to then by by 20 multiplications of 64 you reach a period of time in excess of the required time for
the age of the universe a period of time on the order of 72 billion years well if each time
the spiral goes into a state of collapse at the end of one of its cycles then in the last 384 days of the
existence of a universe like that it would transit through half of its epochs of transition do you see
what i mean it's like a screaming meme it really winds up and instead of the the the vision which physics
gives us is that the really rapid transitions of phase and state occurred at the beginning of the universe
they whole professional lives are given over to discussing the first 10 picoseconds of the physics
of the universe right well i'm saying it's all i don't care about that i think that the really interesting
stuff will happen in a big hurry at the end of the universe that the picture that the second law of
thermodynamics gives us of just you know tumescence maximum detumescence is what it's picturing is all wrong
and that actually this strange hyperdimensional force in the universe called life and information
transfer is in the process of working itself up into a real tizzy and wrapping all space and time around
itself and uh what was startling and what made me think that maybe i was losing my marbles was that when
you look at time that way and push these novelty graphs against the historical continuum i reached
the conclusion that we entered the last 67 year period before the collapse of the state vector
at 8 30 in the morning on august the 6th 1945 when the atomic bomb went off over hiroshima you see it was
a temporal reflection of the birth of the universe it was actually a you could call it an event which was a
reincarnation of the big bang because each cycle begins with a bang and that cycle initiate the fact
that human beings had used atomic weapons on other human beings meant that we had entered a new era a new
epoch of moral danger and the stakes had been raised you know by a power of 64 to a new level
now using the mathematics inherent in the cycle if you propagate forward from that date 67 years 104.25 days
you reach late november of 2012 a.d and i concluded based on all kinds of factors personal and historical and so
forth that that was the fit that that if hiroshima was was day one then the place where it all came together
was this date in 2012 and i worked with that for several years before some kind soul henry munn i think
pointed out to me that the mayan calendar which is a cycle of three of the long count calendar i'm now
talking about is a cycle of 13 time periods which are called baktuns and the baktun is 396 years in
duration after 13 baktuns the world ends completely and the 13th baktun of the classical mayan long count
calendar is the winter solstice of a.d 2012 within 30 days of the date that i had fastened in on using a
completely different path of analysis and so this raised all kinds of questions one of which is is it
simply that individuals and civilizations who take mushrooms become i want to say privy slash engulfed
by a certain mathematical secret about the cosmic machinery what is so important about this date
in 2012 you know the meso-american cultures have the most uncanny history of successful prophecy in the
world i mean the aztecs anticipated the coming of the spanish the day the book of chilam bellum gives the day
when the spaniards would weigh anchor off the coast of mexico and of course the fact that it happened
exactly as prophesized was a major undoing
of that civilization so I put this out I this was a very confusing experience
for me to channel or transmit this idea because I was interested in the I Ching
I had carried it with me in India I used to throw it at each full moon but I was
not mathematically inclined and when reading the philosophy of science and
people like Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos and reading the history of
science and Thomas Kuhn and all of those people trying to understand you know
well what is a true idea what is true and what is false and and when you have
an idea which makes claims as sweeping as these then you want to try to
understand just what the limits of knowability are and I discovered that
all you can require of any idea is that it be self consistent that it not generate
any contradictions within its own set of rules you see and that's why astrology is
beyond criticism because astrology is a mathematical
theory with an interpretive exegesis attached to it and who can quibble with
the mathematical theory well then the the the interpretational exegesis has to do
with the sensitivity and subtlety of the interpreter well isn't this true of
mathematical data in science exactly the same way so I discovered that what I had
created was a self consistent idea that appears to be sealed beyond refutation in
some weird and uncanny way which makes it seem very non-human because you can't
really find your way into telling whether it's can answer can be answerable to the
notion of objective truth so what I've decided about it is that it's a it's a
teaching or it's a it's a kind of it's an exemplary model about how all process
goes on and it's a way of learning how things happen to see time as a modulated flux of elements to
see it as a series of waves moving at different speeds through which you are taking a vertical slice
and then stacking that slice and that gives rise to the multiplistic ever-changing
flux that is called the now it is actually made up of reflections and
adumbrations of the past and it's made up of anticipatory shock waves and
intimations of the future the past and the future are co-present in the now they are
in fact what's making it happen you can almost think of it as a hologram where you
have two or or a standing wave where you have two wave systems one from the past one
from the future and where they cross an interference pattern forms which has a
curious stability as a system in and of itself and and yet it's almost a ghost created by these
other two realities and that is the moving present and to mathematically this notion of
time that I evolved delivers you know the map of novelty a two variable flux a wandering line
graph that's very pleasing for arguing with formalists but what lurks behind it and
what is so rich for the romantic and the shaman and the poet is these this wandering line graph is
the composite of of the overlay of certain historical time periods which are in a state of flux at various
speeds so that they give rise to an endless kaleidoscopic unfolding in what we call three-dimensional space and
of what we call reality and this is why I often mention Finnegan's wake in my lectures because Joyce
understood this he understood that every moment is caused by everything that happened in the past and
everything that happened in the future and I like to give you know the the trivial example that you
find yourself in Hadrian's hamburger joint this is because the Emperor Hadrian invaded England in a
certain year and conducted a campaign we are ghosts of past and future events and what the what the chaos at the end of history
that we are now living through is is that for thousands and thousands of years
people have felt a vague thing
calling across time to
humanness
calling us to be a certain way to practice certain rituals to observe the stars to observe the plants to observe birth and
observe death a calling and that thing which some people have called God whatever it is is throwing a gigantic shadow over human history now
because now the creode of development that leads to our merging with this thing the walls are very steep the water is moving very swiftly and it's almost as though the future event is throwing off God's
great sparks that are themselves faceted contradictory epitomizations of this mystery
this is what a Mohammed and Christ and Buddha are they are human
human
personalities that were situated in time in such a way that they became macrocosmic reflections of the superordinate
edemic humanity that is going to be generated at the end of history and we are close we are close it is
all of history can be seen as the shockwave of this eschatological event this is what the prophets were anticipating the culmination of man's God making effort in time will be the perfection and the release of the human soul and it has it's not that we are doing it you see it's that a natural law that we were
previously unaware of is inexorably unfolding unfolding and that is what all this cross connectedness of man into matter plant into animal earth into space all of this flowing and interconnectedness this reaches right down into the rocks of the planet and the
right down into the rocks of the planet this is not simply a phenomenon of biology this is the unfolding of a general law of which biology is only the cutting edge of a wedge of becomingness which includes all being and reaches right down into the neutrinos and it is you know to be a being in time is to share in the immense
of precognitive anticipation of the universe in anticipation of this event and that's what being is and that's why it's so rich and so complete within itself and yet always somehow pointing beyond itself because the richness of the matrix through which we are moving is incomparable and beautiful and
and so this is the basis of my extreme optimism is I think that everything is under control that we are in the grip of a force so powerful that the notion that we could jeopardize or overthrow it is completely preposterous because we are acting in accordance with a resonance that was set
going millions and millions of years ago and of course being is fraught with danger but the stakes are you know to be at play in the fields of the Lord to be at rest in the mansions of the goddess and it's it's soon I think at least the historical mimicking of it is clearly soon
because the thrust toward the millennium of this society will not be turned aside if it is not a law of the universe then it will become a myth of human beings and be created anyway
so since we are human beings I see us as the central actors in that mandala
I mean this is the task of the next hundred or five hundred years to realize the alchemical nature of humanity and being and have everything fused into a super numinous concrescence that is time
time Joyce said all space in a nutshell
you know all time bound into a lenticular vehicle which is both both everyone's and mine alone and yours alone and yours alone
and yours alone what I want to talk about this morning is an idea I've talked about it in a couple of places
some of you may have heard it before I think it bears repeating it's a much more serious idea than what I put out yesterday
which had a note of whimsy in its genesis this idea is important whatever that means because it would change
not only the area of its concern but our view of the world generally and Easter is an appropriate time to discuss this
because it concerns the genesis of man of consciousness and self-reflection which is what the Easter mythologium is also an expression of
so what I wanted to talk about this morning is a new notion of how human evolution occurred and what the critical factors were in it
and how to draw a picture for us that shows how our intellectual complexity and symbol manipulating facilities could have emerged naturally
from a background of animal existence and over a fairly rapid period of time
over the last 3 to 5 million years actually the African continent has been growing more dry and has experienced fluctuations of aridity
nevertheless as recently as 2,000 years ago the Roman historian Pliny called North Africa the breadbasket of Rome
because wheat was being grown over thousands and thousands of acres
now it's in this same area of northern Africa the great rift zone the Serengeti plain where physical anthropologists place the origin of human beings
and it has to do with the following sequence of events arboreal primates living in an unbroken continental rainforest ecology
achieve a close adaptation to existence in the canopy and this is stabilized for millions of years they are insectivores
they have the opposable thumb and binocular or rudimentary binocular vision
the drying up of the African continent caused the breakdown of this continental rainforest into a configuration of patches of forest with grassland in between
and in this grassland ecology
herds of mammals evolved
proto-cattle, proto-bison
exotic mammals like giraffes and gazelles of all types
at the same time the primate adaptation to this increasing aridity
was to begin to descend from the trees
and to hunt in packs
and to shift from a diet of
canopy fruits and berries
and roots dug from the ground
to an omnivorous diet that could include meat
so in this situation
these tribal monkeys
developed a complicated repertoire
of signals
to aid in pack hunting
in exactly the same way that wolves
are known to do
now
into this situation
and their habit
was nomadic
and to follow behind these great herds
either
killing the animals
that were
less well
and could be
killed
by the crude means
at their disposal
or living off
the kills of other carnivores
and this is still the habit
of baboons
now
into this situation
comes
a mushroom
which grows in the manure
of the ungulate animals
that have evolved
on this plane
and in this protein
intensive environment
where there is pressure
on the availability of protein
these foraging primates
are testing
every object in the environment
for its food value
so
uh
Roland Fisher
who was a researcher
into the effect of psychedelic drugs
and the structure of consciousness
showed that small doses of psilocybin
sub-psychedelic
uh
sub-threshold doses of psilocybin
actually increase
visual acuity
and he had a very elegant experiment
where
two parallel lines
could be deformed
by turning a dial
and you would put graduate students
in front of this
stoned and unstoned
and ask them to press a buzzer
when the lines
appeared to them
to no longer be parallel
and he showed
that consistently
uh
a small amount of psilocybin
allowed you to detect
this change
uh
sooner
than
an ordinary subject
was able to
and he said to me
he said
you see
this proves
that in some cases
drugs
give you a clearer picture
of reality
than their absence
and what it means is
that these primates
who were inculcating the mushroom
into their diet
were gaining a subtle adaptive advantage
over their fellows
who were avoiding the mushroom
because they were gaining in visual acuity
which is one of the critical parameters
that a pack hunting carnivore
would be subject to
in that kind of an environment
so
uh
without any teleology being involved
without any invocation
of an extraterrestrial intelligence
we see that a feedback loop
was established in the food chain
of these primates
very early on
those who ate the mushroom
tended to survive
and out breed
those who did not
at the same time
the relationship
between these animals
and these
herd
ungulate mammals
was shifting
from a hunting situation
to a situation
of domestication
which was
bringing the mushroom
ever more
into the fore
and if you look back
at the archeological evidence
in North Africa
especially
the paintings
the
late Neolithic paintings
on the Tassili Plateau
in southern Algeria
you see there
magnificently
portrayed
herds
of cattle
and
I mean
beautifully
painted
more
more sensitively portrayed
cattle
than you find
at Altamira
and Lascaux
and you see also
shamans
dancing
with mushrooms
sprouting out of their body
and with mushrooms
clutched in their hands
groups of them running
holding them on high
with
geometric
matrices
of connected dots
all around them
and
now of course
in that area
it's very similar
to this
it's an area
of sculpted
sandstone
and
cross-cut
arroyos
with undercut
cliffs
and it's very dry
but in some places
the Neolithic
detritus
is several meters deep
and the people
who lived
in the Tassili Plateau
when the aridity
of the Sahara
further increased
are the people
who migrated
east
to the valley
of the Nile
and established
the proto-Egyptian
civilization
of six to ten thousand
years ago
the important point
I want to make
about this later
phase
of the
human involvement
with the mushroom
was that it was
always intimately
connected
with cattle
and the goddess religions
of ancient
North Africa
and the Middle East
are
religions
of cattle goddesses
and
this connection
between the cow
and the mother goddess
and the mushroom
is some kind
of key
to understanding
the evolution
of religious sensitivity
in early man
in that part
of the Middle East
it carries forward
into historical time
with the mysteries
at Eleusis
where there is
a clear indication
that a psychedelic
substance
was being used
either ergotized
rye
or
a mushroom
of some sort
and this
this notion
that
it was
the presence
of the mushroom
on the African
veld
at a critical
bifurcation
of primate evolution
that created
the feedback loop
which eventually
developed
into self-reflecting
consciousness
because you see
at lower doses
the psilocybin
is giving
increased
visual acuity
and
it seems like
increased
symbol processing
ability
its strange effect
on the language centers
but of course
inevitably
they would have also
discovered
its higher dose effects
which would be
to
convey them
into an inner
tremendum
that became
then the cultural
guiding image
in other words
it was
perceived as
as a god
as a goddess
as the goddess
and became
then
the arrow
for cultural dynamics
and evolution
and the reason
I think
this is important
is because
the spin-off
implications
of the acceptance
of an idea
like this
would bring us
into much greater
harmony
with our environment
we sort of
have the anxiety
of an orphan
about our origins
because our best
people
in physical
anthropology
don't give
very good accounts
can't seem
to make sense
of how we could
have been forced out
and emerged
out of primate
organization
and so there's
been much talk
in the 20th century
about the search
for the missing link
which was always
conceived of
as a physical skeleton
of a certain kind
of intermediate
hominoid form
but it isn't
a missing link
I think
it's a missing factor
and the factor
which accelerated
the forward evolution
of the brain size
of this particular
primate line
was the inclusion
of psychedelic
plants
in the diet
which then
fed
the tendency
towards
symbol formation
and self-reflection
if this idea
gained
wide acceptance
some of our laws
and some of our
ways of relating
to nature
and to medicine
plants
in particular
would
have to be
altered
and brought
into line
and this is
the source
of our humanness
apparently
the psychoactive
compounds
being elaborated
by plants
throughout nature
are regulators
of various forms
of evolution
in animals
and food chains
and all this
which appear
very trivial
on the surface
are actually
the message-bearing
medium
of the
of the hand
of God
which is forming
and sculpting
nature
along these various
creodes
of development
and
the
the thing
to understand
about this
or why this
has impact
in the future
is because
it's a continuous
process
which we can
foster
and husband
and
help develop
in healthy
ways
if we recognize
that it's going
on
I mentioned
Eleusis
as
as this kind
of thing going
on in historical
time
also of course
Soma
the sacrament
of the Vedic
civilization
appears to have been
a mushroom
was certainly
a psychedelic
plant
and it isn't only
psychedelic plants
it's all
plants which affect
and shift
consciousness
I mean
a history of
the human race
could be written
analyzing it
not in terms of
class struggle
or the impact
of great personalities
but as
a shifting
set of interactions
between
sugar
tobacco
opium
caffeine
alcohol
and
psychedelics
so that
you know
we need to understand
that
chocolate
that these
food
cocaine
that these
foods
and
drugs
and spices
are
we have
subtly
overlooked them
and taken them
for granted
they are regulating
human history
and individual
self-expression
how much
you know
how you look
how
pure
your transmission
of your genetic heritage
to the next generation
all of these things
are being regulated
and controlled
by these plants
in this way
now
if we
could create
a civilization
or even
a
even a
clique
within a civilization
that understood this
and had its fingers
on a vertical monopoly
of research
from the jungle
to the clinical hospital
great things
could be understood
this is the way to do it
to systematically explore
these relationships
and see
that Gaia apparently works
through the intercession of catalytic compounds that convey revelation
revelation
and revelation
is then
the factor
which has historical impact
the people
the messiahs
and the teachers
are merely the pipelines
for ideas
and the
the metabolic release
of these ideas
in the macro environment
is being controlled
by
the plant-animal
interaction
and so it will be
on into the foreseeable future
and by understanding this
a kind of new science
looms
in
to view
a kind of
integrated
dynamical
understanding
of
the flux
of energy
mediated by
chemistry
in the environment
so that
the guiding image
of culture
can be
revitalized
and realized
in a much shorter period
of time
and this whole
shortening period
of time thing
has also been going on
for a while
you see it isn't astonishing
I think
that self-reflection
could emerge
giving basic
given basic
primate organization
but what is astonishing
about it
is the speed
with which it happened
I mean in the last
thirty to fifty thousand years
the human brain
has changed
more
than it changed
in the previous
three to five million years
so
you know
a factor
has entered
a catalyst
is in the mix
and it must be
something
in the food chain
or something
in the environment
or the hand
of almighty God
or the extraterrestrials
or you know
elf invasion
from hyperspace
but something
is causing
this accelerated development
and I
and this
it
what I've said
this morning
could be criticized
as being reductionist
I've tried to give
a very sober
account
of it
I haven't said
why
the mushroom
appeared in the manure
or discussed
whether it has
awareness
or a stake
in the catalyzing
of this primate evolution
I just introduce it
as a chemical factor
and that's how
it would be written
if it were presented
to a straight audience
the fact of the matter
is that it raises
all kinds of questions
I mean
why is this
process being
catalyzed
in the primates
is it just
by happenstance
where has the mushroom been
is it
what is its relationship
to the evolution
of other forms
of life
on this planet
did it drift
in from the stars
if so
long ago
or recently
and with intent
or by chance
and
you know
just a host
of questions
questions
but the thing
Thank you.
that puts us in such an existential situation individually and culturally is
this puzzlement over our origins we are not strictly speaking religious in the
19th century way so that we cannot really I think accept that you know God
sculpted us from clay and set us down here on a world he created and yet if you
were to look for the thumbprint of God on this planet you would certainly have to
focus in on the human beings and their activities as a special case of natural
phenomena perhaps so special a case that it had to be accorded a separate
ontological status we are different and why and for what I think that probably we
are the agent of change that Gaia has unleashed upon herself that the planet
itself is aware of the finiteness of planetary existence and it's sort of
like the story of the ant and the grasshopper you can have a planetary
consciousness which says well I look forward to three to five billion years of
sentient existence and then I'm willing to be extinguished with the death of my
star or you can have a plant with an ant a planet with an ant-like mentality that
says you know I can sense winter coming three to five billion years down the line
and I'm going to organize some wild strategy to break through the tyranny of the
energy cycle of one star and I am going to organize biological existence so that
energy can be brought greater and greater amounts of energy can be brought under
control so that eventually a kind of liberation can occur where life can burst
out of the planetary cradle and disperse itself through the universe and there
are apparently several strategies for this one is evolve intelligence and build
star ships another is you know become a mushroom and produce three to five
million spores per minute during sporulation that are particles small
enough to percolate by Brownian movement away from the atmosphere of a given
planet and by sheer numbers and the slow gradient of drift by light pressure and
that sort of thing emanate through the universe and establish yourself in any
planetary regime that is suitable the obvious next great revelation in biology
and it's strange that we can state it because once it's stated by Carl Sagan it
will be headlines everywhere but it's obvious that space is no barrier to
life it's a it's a it's a barrier in the same way that the Pacific Ocean it was a
barrier to life's colonization of the Hawaiian Islands but that's all it's just a
tight filter but spores and starships and shamans probably get through to other
closed topologies in orbit around other stars you know there must be a dimension
somewhere where all surfaces in the universe are contiguous and if you could
move into that dimension you could just walk to zeta reticuli so the means by which
life will penetrate these larger dimensions that free it from its dependency on the energy cycles of
the material universe are not by any means clear I mean it may be that it's about organizing the mind and
building an inner vehicle that moves off into the imagination the imagination may be in fact a
three-dimensional slice of a higher dimensional universe that is holding all of this in being and causing it to happen the imagination
it's hard to account for it in evolutionary terms if it is not to somehow mapping a field of data that is important for development
so that's that notion the notion of the importance of psychedelics in the formation of the this species and the continuing formation of the cultural design I think what the psychedelics do is they decondition from cultural programming and allow models to be replaced at a much greater rate of speed
that the the culture that uses psychedelics can trim itself to every historical current and this is really the challenge of the future we are moving as a culture faster and faster through the temporal medium through the historical space and this is creating a compression of events and it's almost like an airfoil approaching the speed of sound there is a
a wave of concussion concussive shock building in front of our culture and we have to almost redesign ourselves in mid-flight in order to push through that barrier and into the the different order the different set of laws that will prevail once we have gotten through that but this whole sense of everything accelerating and of all historical input being intensified
and all previous times being somehow co-present this is the phenomenon of the winding down of a universe or the building up of an eschatological shockwave in front of a vehicle that is trying to transit out of history and into some kind of millenarian space that is not subject to the anxiety that history involves
and that's what the whole crisis and around the millennium and the whole twentieth century really is about you know is this this effort to create a complete summation that can also be used as the force to propel us beyond everything that we have been or thought before because there's obviously no other escape from the culture crisis it is
that kind of that kind of situation is called a forward escape it means the only thing you can do is move forward into the crisis at ever greater speed because the only solution is to pass through it and move beyond it and as we move toward the millennium and as you know the intelligence of our machines the size of our databases
the ability of the visions of our visionaries all of the visions of our visionaries all of this will build to a crazy concatenatious climax it can't be any other way because Christian civilization has wired us up for these things at the end of every thousand year period I mean in the year one thousand everything just went haywire I mean people stood in the streets for months gaping at the sky
and there was an imminent expectation of an imminent expectation of the onslaught of the millennium
nevertheless this archetype of renewal is seeking in thousands and thousands of ways to be born and I think the rediscovery of psychedelics LSD everything that Wasson did all of these things are critical factors in this cultural mix
that is going to gel toward the recognition of the things which we hold as cliches
you know that the inside and the outside are the same thing that the universe can be crossed by thought in an instant that all information is somehow co-present and so on are there any questions about any of this?
yes I said that what we take for granted that the inside and the outside are the same thing these things when will be assimilated by the larger culture and things like you know human machine interface and the ego identification with the body I think all these things are going to be obviated that you see we don't know what man is and we have a strong
association that humanness is related to the monkey body but yet our whole historical career has been of projecting ideas into technical accretions and now that we have computers and things which mimic intelligence we are beginning to explore you know what is humanness ontologically that's what people are really talking about when they say can machines think will
they mean is what we have focused in on as the defining factor of our being that sets us apart from all other things something which we could manufacture and the answer is probably to some degree yes because much of what is intelligence or appears superficially to be intelligence is simply data and retrieval so that you know more and more of
the culture of the culture is being hardwired into an electronic coral reef that is simply the outermost of each of our own exoskeletons we all have telephones in our homes many of us have computer terminals these things introduce us to a global skin of information that as the hardware grows more and more unobtrusive
we will more and more come to identify these things with our own ego we won't even realize that we're being charged for thinking about certain questions because we're actually accessing a database somewhere which is feeding us data so that the commonality of mind is I think going to be
the commonality of mind in a capitalist context that there really will be an ocean of thought that you will swim in and that will be composed of deeper and deeper levels of integrated information perhaps this is all that hyperspace is is the entirely expressed informational ghost of this physical universe
of the physical universe that the mind will eventually come to swim like a fish you know and will come and go from various constellations of aggregation and integration I mean you see what's going to happen is that the rules of the imagination are going to replace physics so that we are going to be able to do and be
you see what's going to be able to do and be able to do again in any way we can follow in the bicent
and we call them and go to theintérieur of the intelligence that you have to live in your life so that the eiga-loosk
I'm thinking of to do and keep in mind in mind and keep in mind and keep dreaming and doing great that you have to do and solve them and try your needs to be
in mind so what would it be like if a culture evolved for a thousand years in that way I mean if you could be anything we all that I guess the first step everyone takes is they imagine themselves as the flying saucer
flying saucer the lenticular mind object made of light that can move at any
speed and become any object and answer any question and well it's an
archetype of wholeness in Jung in his flying saucer book talked about this
thing in alchemy called the rotundum which was the thing which spins you know
and it's also in alchemy called the scintilla the spark and it's simply
because it's round and spins it's a symbol of wholeness but it's like the
exteriorization of the human soul the realization that you know expressing
what is within us may culturally eventually mean actually exteriorizing
the human soul and interiorizing the human body so that this world is traded
in for the imagination I mean this is sort of what art has always been trying to do
but we're talking about a breakthrough in ways and means on such a scale that you
can just march off into this art oh yes well Kat and I did that without even a
flashlight battery just by having children I mean there's an epigenetic component and a genetic component
but what I'm saying is the difference between these things may become dim indeed in other
words why shouldn't all you know the way a person is made is that a DNA message is
read by RNA and it's a it's a group of codons nucleotide bases which are then
templated and then a ribosome reads it and and assembles little pieces correctly and then the protein is
is created well there's no reason why anything should be made any other way all
machines should be produced by the transcription of molecular templates so
then all our machines will become strangely quasi biological you will Chevrolets will not
be manufactured they will be grown in yeasty vats and when they talk to you the
question you know it becomes very moot as to whether this is a pet a friend a colleague or because
that's you see and nature works with very low energies DNA can make anything and there's no
smelting no huge release of toxic byproducts and and the amazing thing about these proteins is that the
ribosome stamps them out and they come out and like a line but they have forces electrostatic and other
kinds of forces scripted into them so that they fold in very very complicated ways and they always fold
the same way and their memory of how to fold where this comes from is one of the great mysteries of
molecular biology it's not at all understood well imagine if we could make machines which just
emerged as a strange form of spaghetti which then folded itself into jet planes refrigerators automobiles
color television sets lipstick cases and what have you this has to do with my notion that really the next
evolutionary leap is uh well i shouldn't call it an evolutionary leap because it's a leap in epigenetic
development but is what i call the genesis of visible language that there is an ability just under
the surface of human organization waiting to be coaxed out either through yoga or slight genetic engineering or
or something like that and it is uh something that was anticipated by the alexandrine philosopher philo judaeus
he talked about the logos and which is this teaching voice this informing thing which is heard and he was
interested in what he called the more perfect logos and he said what is the more perfect logos and then he
answered his own question and said it would be a logos which went from being heard to being beheld
without ever crossing over a border of transition in other words a form of synesthesia well all using
ayahuasca and dmt and compounds like this which are very closely related to our ordinary brain chemistry
and practice and dedication you can begin to explore places where a vocal synesthesia becomes a colored topological
manifold and you can communicate you can show someone your thoughts by singing in such a way as to condense
visible objects into the air in front of them and these objects are they are hyper words they are words which
you don't hear but which you see and they are and like objects they have sides and facets and can be rotated and
examined from all sides well now the biases in our language that causes to say things like
i see what you mean when we mean i understand you fully shows that we really place a greater emphasis on
seeing the truth than on hearing the truth so the truth seen is somehow more valid than truth heard
and ayahuasca is a perfect example of a plant which communicates with a visible language the mushroom you
often hear it and often the hearing evolves into a visible synesthesia field of photonic input
but the ayahuasca always communicates visually and it's like the mayan glyphs or something it's this
fantastically complicated surface which is conveying alien meaning after an ayahuasca trip you just feel
like your eyes are sticking out of your head because you've just been looking as one looks at the page of
a book for hours and hours as this strange uh alien uh three-dimensional language flows through your mind
but i believe that this is a human ability just under the surface and that in psychedelic states of mind
this happens to people this is why all the fiddling with glossolalia it's in the hope of reaching you
know that concordance of chemistry and the moment that will allow this to happen because it's for some
reason very satisfying it's like an utterly harmless city it seems to have it is true magic and the person
doing it is utterly transported by their ability to project visual beauty but it appears to have no
use other than entertainment of oneself and others but eventually when it is integrated as a cultural
mode i think it will be it is what telepathy will be telepathy will not be hearing other people's thoughts
in your head telepathy will be when you switch into the language that lets people see what you mean it'll be
the see what i mean language and i think that uh the psilocybin from the very beginning was catalyzing the
language centers and that in fact the kind of language i'm speaking to you right now is a prototypic
type of this eventual development in human organization and that this is the thing that makes humans unique
is this ability to make small mouth noises which are arbitrarily encoded with conventionally agreed
upon meanings which allows us then a vast control of a previously invisible uh linguistic space
and it's in that linguistic space that we have erected our cathedrals and conducted our pogroms
and gone about all our forms of business and uh and becoming aware of this of language as a thing to
journey into and language as a thing to avoid the pitfalls of to be you know the buddha say awareness of
awareness maybe it's easier if one thinks of it as awareness of language you know
i wanted to um perceive this thing of the visual language because they'll have their mouth open and
there will literally be these beautiful things coming out of their mouth with flowers and they
interpret it as flowery speech but perhaps uh they were in fact doing what you're talking about oh well
they don't interpret it as flowery speech they try they call it that but yes i think that's what it must
have been this is all very puzzling to me and if anybody knows if anybody is an acoustics person or i
don't know what's going on exactly but the question of how what is voice and what can you do with
self-generated sound how neutral is it to your own organism in other words any of you who read the
invisible landscape the theory in there is that you take a certain drug a certain plant and you hear an
interiorized tone which is not a psychological phenomenon but rather it is actually the electron
spin resonance of this highly biodynamic molecules by the millions entering into the synaptic cleft and
competing with the endogenous uh uh transmitter there for uptake and that this is molecularly real and
hence can be treated as a manipul a variable to be manipulated with the input of other kinds of sounds
such as sound which cancels it or sound which uh reinforces it to then manipulate these molecules in
in one's body and this is uh this is really i think the frontier of shamanism worldwide that everybody
is trying to figure out how far you can go with sound and what you can do with it and also how dangerous is
this how permanent can some of these brain changes be and what is the mechanism you know is the electron
spin resonance thing pretty close to it or is that just a myth and that an entirely different set of
coupling mechanisms are are making that happen but all of the ayahuasca shaman are great hummers
and great controllers of their voice and uh you know they do operate on your body with light and sound and
there are sounds which can slice into your body and uh and it seems to me this is where experiential and
experimental work with these things should concentrate to try and understand just how much of human
humanness can we take control of how bound in are we what do these special abilities mean and uh and uh
what traditions if any have anticipated them the thing