Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
This is Lorenzo, and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
And I want to begin today's podcast by thanking Toby E.
for his generous donation to the salon that helps offset some of the expenses incurred in producing these podcasts.
Really appreciate your help, Toby. Thank you very much.
Well, today I'm dipping back into that old box of tapes that Ralph Abraham loaned me.
And I'm going to play another trialogue that he recorded between Terrence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, and himself.
And while it may not be as compelling as some of their discussions about psychedelics,
there are a couple of things that make this recording really stand out for me.
The first is the fact that, you know, I've always kind of wondered what all of those non-public trilogues were like.
You know, what did they really talk about when they got together?
Well, what we're about to hear is a recording from one of those sessions.
This trilogues, or focused conversation, took place on the Big Island of Hawaii sometime in 1994.
As I recall, Ralph told me that after the publication of their
Trilogues at the Edge of the West book in 1992,
they decided to record some of their private conversations
in the hopes that maybe another book or two would emerge.
Now, as far as I know, there wasn't a book that emerged from the trilogues we are about to hear.
But their topic remains one of great interest for us yet today.
And that is the course of evolution.
At least it is of great interest of us, those of us who like to think of ourselves as evolutionaries.
So, now let's join Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
as they sit around the kitchen table and kick around a few ideas about evolution.
A particular trilogues, which is Hawaii, what it tells us about evolution,
how it relates to island ecosystems and their evolutionary progress generally,
falls to me because in the course of my life, as chance would have it,
I visited most of the major theatres of evolution that involve island groups
that are considered to be exemplars of the various types of island groups on the planet.
Hawaii, where we are recording these trilogues,
is of course a group of mid-ocean volcanic islands.
The only other mid-ocean volcanic island groups in the world are the Azores and the Seychelles.
They offer great contrast to Hawaii, particularly the Seychelles,
which as a portion of the Madagascan landmass have been above water some 300 million years,
longer than any other place on the planet.
And so the evolutionary processes there offer a dramatic contrast to how evolution
has proceeded in the Hawaiian Islands.
The Hawaiian Islands represent a unique case because of the size of the volcanic calderas
and vents beneath the Pacific floor that have created them.
In fact, these vents and volcanic systems are the largest on the planet.
So what we have in Hawaii is a tectonic plate sliding slowly toward southern Russia and Japan
that is crossing over a weak place in the Earth's crust and a place where the core magma of the planet
lies a considerable percentage closer to the surface than anywhere on Earth.
And the result of this situation is a series of islands formed in the same spot
that each, after its volcanic birth, is rafted on the continental plate off toward the northwest.
The life in the Hawaiian Islands shows 30 to 35 years of indemnicism
by the ordinary rates of gene change that biologists recognize.
Nevertheless, geologically speaking, no Hawaiian island is older than 12 million years.
The obvious interpretation of these vents is that life arose out here on islands which no longer exist.
And as islands rose and fell, the life hopscotched from one island to another.
And indeed, the dispersal rates of birds, tree snails, and this sort of thing,
moving eastward from Kauai across Oahu, Molokai, and Maui to the big island show that this gradient is still operable.
Kauai is the most species, the forests of Kauai are the most species-rich forests of the major islands.
Hawaii's climate forests are the most species-poor because animals are still arriving here from the other islands.
Because these volcanoes are so huge, Hawaii has a complete range of ecological systems,
from sea level to 14,000 feet, which is virtually the entire range on the planet in which life is able to locate itself.
The volcano itself is, in fact, by volume, the world's largest mountain because what it represents is a 14,000-foot mountain
before it breaks through to sea level because it's rising from the Pacific floor and in this part of the sea level.
So this island was, this mountain was enormous before it ever broke water.
It now rises 13,000 feet above sea level, and its sister mountain, Mauna Kea, is only shorter by 120 feet.
So, what has been created out here is a very closed ecosystem, far from any continental landmass.
The forms of life which arrive here arrive on rafted debris or tucked into the feathers of migratory birds
or in some other highly improbable fashion.
What we see here is a winnowing of continental species based on extreme improbability.
As an example, a very common Sierra Nevada wildflower of no great distinction,
apparently some millions of years ago, a single seed arrived on Maui
and has created, through backcrossing, has created a mutated race of plants
that we know as the Hawaiian silver sword, bizarre plants that the islands have produced.
In terms of islands within the islands, the fractal adumbration of nature,
it's very evident here.
For example, because the island is created by a series of flows of varying ages,
there is a constant process in which ecosystems become islanded by lava flows, cutting them off.
And so, you have a series of micro-islands, of species,
that develop independently of each other, even though they may only be some few miles apart,
but separated by a landscape so toxic and desolate that there is very little intermix in the penis.
This is why this is thought to have been a formative factor in the evolution of the Hawaiian drosophia,
which, of course, were very, very useful in early studies of genetics
because the chromosomes of the Hawaiian drosophia are 10,000 times larger than the ordinary.
Actually, in the era before electron microscopes, you could actually color band with certain dyes
the chromosomes of these drosophia, an early chromosome unraveling.
So, in terms of extrapolating all of this particular natural history data to some sort of general model,
I think what life on islands brings home to us is that the earth itself is an island.
I've been saying for many, many years that one of the most revolutionary,
yet totally trivial and predictable revolutions sure to come in biology is the recognition
that all these models of island isolation and species dispersion across oceans
can easily be expanded to the three-dimensional ocean of outer space.
So, very, very clearly, viruses, pions, gene fragments,
this sort of thing percolates between the stars
as simply, statistically, a very low component of the percolation of energy.
Indeed, there have been many attempts to establish this idea of Fred Hoyle
and the theory of the cometary origin of life. Some of these ideas have gone forward.
It seems to me perfectly obvious that, in time, this would be embraced.
After all, viruses can freeze down to crystalline states that are...
As for dispersion between celestial bodies,
it's now generally agreed that a number of Antarctic meteorites that have been recovered are in fact fragments.
So, the work on island dispersal patterns and the statistics and the mechanics of this
will eventually play a role in modeling how life evolves in the galaxy.
Some of the other islands that have been... were, for example, the Indonesian islands,
which are the absolute other spectrum of the class of tropical islands,
because what we have here in Hawaii, as I said, is mid-ocean islands, far from continental florals
and faunas, what we have in Indonesia is, in fact, a submerged continent.
As recently as 120,000 years ago, Indonesia, from Sumatra to New Guinea, was a single landmass.
And in the process of its subsidence, the sea filled in the low spots so that there is a direct correlation
between species differentiation on any two Indonesian islands and the depth of the sea between them.
And these correlations have been shown over and over.
One of the great conundrums of 19th century biology is the so-called problem of Wallace's line.
Wallace believed that between the island of Bali and Lompoc and then going west of Saladees,
you could draw a line which was the line of convergence between the Australopocian
biogeographical zones and the Asian-Malayan zones.
And statistical studies, Ernst Meyer principally, have disproven this notion.
However, I have collected butterflies and stood in these forests on both sides of Wallace's line
in several places, and I completely understand and, in fact, wonder about Meyer's conclusion.
I completely understand Wallace's impression because these forests are staggeringly different.
The bird claws, the butterfly, but what Meyer seemed to show was that there was no distinct line.
There was a gradient from Australia to Malaya in one direction and Malaya to Australia in the other direction.
Island groups like this, and I haven't mentioned the Galapagos, but they are another one,
one, are such obvious laboratories of speciation that when Darwin and Wallace and Walter Henry Bates
and other people who were grappling in the 19th century with the so-called species problem
set out to do their fieldwork, they just could not fail to be impressed by
this peculiar theme and variation, theme and variation, but they could not understand whose fingers
strummed the heart until they realized that similar populations separated by catastrophes such as the
arrival of ocean water or a lava flame or something like that, then come under very slightly different selective pressures,
which cause a very slightly different physical aspect to be taken on.
And so in the Amazon basin, for example, you can move 2,000 miles and have only about a 15 percent replacement in certain butterfly species.
In Indonesia, you can cross a strait of water 20 miles wide and have a 70 percent.
And Darwin and Wallace, familiar with these places, both continental flores and faunas and the island situation,
finally figured out what they want to do. It's a wonderful thing, you know, butterfly diversity, for example,
isn't it, is a situation where diversity itself becomes and it confers adaptive advantage because butterflies are largely predated upon by birds.
And it's been shown in numerous studies that birds hunt a target image, they have an image of the prey.
Well, if through the chance recombination genes, your wing color or wing shape pushes you outside the target spectrum,
you will be ignored. And so variety itself becomes a premium in the evolutionary game.
Novelty itself then is preserved because novelty confers adaptive advantage in this situation of birds and butterflies.
Well, I think the implications of these things lie close to the surface.
We, Earth is a small island. We are making great changes in its ecological parameters.
We are affecting its plant and animal populations. By studying how evolution has shaped island groups,
perhaps we can appreciate, I think, our own small cosmic island and perhaps eventually draw politically.
What a wonderful view of things, Terence. It's marvelous and a real delight.
The main evolutionary puzzle that crossed my mind on the view of what you've said is that
if islands have this tremendous role in speciation, as all evolutionists believe,
and which in fact, as you say, with both Darwin and Wallace provide the classic cases,
islands, then if we have places where there are contact, island chains and archipelagos have incredible rates of speciation in Southeast Asia,
the Malaysian archipelago, including Malaysia and Indonesia, is unbelievably species-rich,
one of the great creation centers of the world of species. And, you know, that's the tropical forest I know best,
having lived there. And that the quality of that forest of creativity, from what you've said,
would come from a combination of island factors, plus mingling of two totally radically different floras,
giving rise to all sorts of new possibilities and combinations. And that it was pumped by the
repetitive comings and goings of the sea, which repeatedly islanded populations, and then reunited them in
periods when water was concentrated. And presumably also pumped by the ice ages, which must have
compressed all forms of life towards the tropics, and then there'd been a retreat again away from them
at the end of each ice age. Well, that would explain a lot about the pumping, and it makes
incredible sense about the Malaysian archipelago. What I don't understand is, on the view of this day,
how the Amazon, which is the large non-island area, comes to be the other major center of species creation
and diversity. The answer is very simple. It has simply been above ground a very long time. In other words,
the Malaysian austral cocoon situation is probably no more than 70 or 80 million years that that map has
looked like that. The Amazon, on the other hand, has been above water 280 to 300 million years. So
simply being in the tropics with three, four, five breathing seasons a year for many organisms,
and never being inundated by sea water or catastrophe allowed that incredible climax of speciation on
the continental landmass. You're right, it didn't happen as far as we know in Africa, although Africa
is so heavily impacted by human beings that any notion of its original natural history
is impossible. But that's the short answer, that it was just above water a long, long time.
But then, you see, we have two methods of speciation. One is spontaneous production of
species just by being around a long time, without island separation. The case of the Amazon. The other,
we have all the well-understood neo-Darwinian mechanisms, speciation, pumping of things,
mixing of gene pools. Well, what trumped the Amazon situation on the micro level is the meandering of
rivers. You see, it's very hard in a climaxed forest situation for any new mutation to have
a salutary effect. But because rivers meander and destroy forests and create sand bars and an
intermediate shifting zone of what is called uninhabited land, so-called predatory species
can move in there. And that's where the speciation is taking place. Carl Sauer estimated that before the
advent of culture, of human culture, it was, the meandering of rivers was deemed that shifting
boundary that mutants, new forms can get hold. That's why a predatory species will have the following
characteristics. It will be an animal, and it will be a prolific seeder. It will be herbaceous,
not woody. In short, it will be a weed. And that's what a weed is. A pioneer species. A
pioneer species. A tremendously predatory species designed for open land. Utterly unable to compete
in the forest, but in open land, able to take hold very rapidly. Yes, I think that there may be a
certain proliferation just for its own sake. You see, I think isolation, new environments, and so on,
explain one side of evolution. I think there's another side which neo-dominalism can't explain,
because it puts too much emphasis on natural selection. But this is Willis, you know, the
great British botanist who lived on Ceylon, and knew the Asian flora well. In the 30s and 40s had
all these things about evolution by divergent mutation rather than natural selection. And in Ceylon, he
showed that there are, in the Pontus de Macy, a group of water plants that live in streams that
leaves that place on water. There's an amazing variety of species in streams and rivers and Ceylon,
sometimes many different species growing in the same river. And any attempt to account for this in
terms of, you know, marginal differences in leaf shape giving, you know, selective advantage,
just fails. And he shows the same is true of many flower patterns, many tropical leaf forms and so forth.
Well, I think you'd have to look at this more closely, and how variety itself confers advantage. I would
very slight chemical variances in gene expression, because probably this variety was to confuse some
some feeder, and that it's literally bewildering variety is an excellent defense against predation.
I've always wondered why, like the Haku here, an excellent example. Here we have these two tree
ferns. They're two distinct species. As far as I can tell, they're distributed in a ratio of 50-50 here,
and one has little black stickery stems, and the other has a fuzzy brown soft stem. Well,
what selective pressure caused stickers to work for one and down to work for the other, and they're
standing right next to each other? It seems to me there must be drift of genes, or simple for variety
itself. Well, that's Willis's point, that that you have, that the life itself is constantly throwing
out new forms, novelties, that novelty is the essence of it. And unsuccessful novels would be
weeded out, and very successful ones would be a sort of wild success. But a lot of these novelties,
which may just be different, you know, two of these two tree ferns work equally well in this environment.
Yeah. There may just be lots of entirely equivalent things, where you've got novelty for novelty's
sake. And that this is the nature of the evolutionary process, and natural selection plays a much
smaller role than if you try and explain all forms in terms of the close sculpting of natural selection.
Yes, in the Indonesian butterflies, there is this concept of what's called the conspecific species,
which means that when you're on Bali, there is a certain butterfly, and then you go to Lompoc,
and there is a butterfly which is different from that butterfly, and cannot naturally cross with it,
and yet is so obviously the same butterfly, that it's the conspecific species, and they have been
isolated in this way, and so by that means there's derogation. And then sometimes these parts, some very
small descent each can, and then you get even... Here it seems that, if I understood you right, that
what's unique about Hawaii is young, and they're maximally oceanic islanded. They're far from the
process of the population of a new island, from a neighboring island, is even in the present,
and then we see a certain pattern is repeated. It seems to me that these different examples you're
talking about conflate two different processes, more or less, the projections upon the same screen.
One is a purely biogeographical process, which would be,
could at least be imagined to be operating the same way, without any evolutions. We have only the same
species that ever were to be found on Maui, are suddenly appearing on Hawaii by a process of
dispersal, pioneering the successful species, the creation of the ecology for the second species,
and there's space-time patterns. I developed one upon another in a very interesting, practical movie,
that to begin with, would have nothing to do with evolution. On top of that, you have, I'm not sure
where the relative time scales exist, then you have an evolutionary process involving speciation,
either during or after the dispersal, pioneering, and what do you call it,
civilizational process of a brand new island. Is the evolutionary process essential
to the population of the new island, or isn't it?
Well, I think in the short term it isn't, in the long term it is, because any form of life arriving in
these islands is not, it's not home-free. It's then got to contend with this kind of islanding by
volcanic flow that I talked about, and other large-scale catastrophic events that are hypothesized
that have gone on in the Hawaiian islands. So, basically, what we see here is just genes being
mixed and stirred, probably, at a faster rate than in most places, and that's without even mentioning
the vast number of plant and animal introductions brought by human beings. One of the other unique
things about Hawaii that we didn't enumerate was human beings arrived late, and this, in some sense,
gives us a clearer picture.
It's almost as though Hawaiian is a speeded up microcosm of the Earth itself, because probably eight-tenths of the Big Island is in the pre-archaeozoic phase, in other words, almost abiotic.
And then large areas are covered by lichens of furniture here in the crevice, and then a small percentage of a post-commitary impact forest of flowering trees and habitat.
So the biogeographical process, with and without a kind of modulation by speciation, is a biogeographical process is a kind of recapitulation of evolution.
That is, there's a resonance between evolution in the present and biogeographical development in the present.
So the conflation of these two things is not an accident of thought, but because there's a resonance between these processes.
Yes, they're fractal in relationship to each other.
If you supposed that an animal's genetic heritage never changed, but that it moved across the surface of the Earth from one environment to another by being blown and swept there,
then nevertheless, you would get different forms of this animal, because selective pressures are different in different places.
So without any change in the genome at all, you would get a series of divergent forms through natural selection in the absence of genes.
That's why we're different from the little green men in the UFOs.
Well, back to this resonance idea, you used the word pumping, and I like that, but I think it's a form of resonance.
There's sort of a forcing or a coupling or a codependence between the two different processes.
There's a totally physical one, as for example, new lava flows, the meandering of rivers, the rising of the island.
And then it kind of pumps the space-time evolutionary pattern formation process.
Well, it couples back into the Earth itself.
Really, the ice ages are the pump.
They raise and lower sea levels.
They create deserts and drop humidity.
They force change.
And they are probably driven by fluctuations in the dynamics of the sun.
And this is now pretty well in hand.
When, therefore, to correlate with novelty wave, have you tried mapping it against the ice ages?
Yes, thank you for that opportunity to...
Well, I think we should have a figure of the correlation in our text.
Oh, I have all that.
You guess.
Well, let's put it in the ice ages and the novelty wave.
Good.
I should just point out that the lead process looks a bit different if you take morphic resonance into account,
which standard neo-Dalwinian bio-age...
How does that mean?
Well, habit then becomes a much more important process.
Habit formation.
And we know that organisms adapt to new environments.
Any given plant, you could take seeds from any of these plants and grow them at different altitudes and in different climates.
And in many, they'd survive.
But they'd look different from the way they do now.
Grow them there for several generations, and they can adapt, and they take on, as bottomists say, a new habit.
And I think you see that kind of habit formation gives you very rapid evolution.
All of us can adapt to changed circumstances in a matter of days, or in the case of coming here, or years.
And everything adapts, without any gene change or organism change.
And as it adapts, it forms new habits.
Well, behavior is that small margin of adaptability that is supposedly not genetically driven.
Well, behavior is one form of an adaptive habit, and we know those best.
But the way that plants grow, for example, in different environments is another.
They can vary enormously over a range of environments, in form, and stature, and leaf shape, and so forth.
So, I think that this gives a much more rapid way of understanding evolution, because instead of just random mutation and sculpting by natural selection, you have a positive adaptation of the animal or plant itself to a new environment.
It reacts and responds appropriately in a creative way, creating new habits, new sub-species, new forms of life.
So, the creative adaptation of life to new circumstances, in my view, is what's going on in a way that when you see a plant adapt or an animal learn a new and adaptive pattern of behavior, what you're seeing is the innate creativity of life in action.
Not blind random mutations, not just physical forces, not just physical forces, not just natural selection, but a kind of creativity inherent in all life.
Well, I think it was L.L. White who pointed out that a great deal of selection goes on before an organism emerges from the womb, and that to pretend that natural selection operates on a tabula rasa is completely naive.
The first environment is the environment of the womb, and many don't make it, so those who do have already been subject to a process of natural selection and winnowing that was quite intense, and it's quite awesome.
But there's still a large range that can pass through that.
In the case of plants, where you don't have wounds, you've got a seedling stage, a fairly brief one.
Well, no plant can survive that can't go through that, unless it propagates vegetatively.
So they're vulnerable there.
But the fact is, lots of fairly seedlings don't look that different from each other, a lot of them.
In the earliest stages, they're hard to tell apart.
So you seem to have a fairly generic pattern there.
The differences come out later in both animals and plants, the later formed structures.
Anyway, I think that this creativity and adaptation enables us to understand that whenever you have all these physically new environments, and meandering rivers, lava flows, recolonization, moving from island to island, and so forth, these, as you say, create new environments, micro-environments, and lead to a great deal of creativity.
There's one other thing that this theory suggests.
Not only would you have this creativity through adaptation in individual organisms, you'd also, bimorphic resonance, have transfer of forms from place to place.
So, conspecific species could be an appearance just by morphic resonance, copying of forms, like in the placental mammals and the marsupials, where you've got all these parallel forms.
Well, it would augment the natural selection of separated genes generally.
Yes.
These things all work together.
I mean, there's still natural selection of gene pools, but it's a rather foreshortened view of the whole process, which involves creativity, adaptation, spread of habits as well, in my opinion.
And so, I suppose the thing that puzzles me most, really, is why there haven't been more species and more forms in Hawaii.
And, you know, we look around this rainforest here, and was it, you know, just one or two tree species, whereas in a tropical rainforest, in the Amazon or Malaysia, it would be hundreds.
Again, the answer is time, you know, 300 million years versus 20 million years, that's what it is.
Well, there's so many reasons to fail here.
I personally find the environment harsh, or lush as it may look to you or other people.
And I suppose that one way a new species could fail is through having bad habits.
There may be habits that manifest visually to us only in terms of spatial pattern, the colonization of the black lava by these trees, weren't they called?
Oh, the Ohia.
The Ohia tree.
This appears in a certain fractal pattern in which there are characteristic frequencies of distancing that have to do, I suppose, with the distance the seeds fly in the wind,
or something like that.
There is a certain spatial pattern which is the necessary one for survival that has a kind of a morphic resonance.
I mean, the rest of the space-time pattern with the physical substrate itself.
And other species, although they would look equally strong or stronger in the environment of a planetarium, if they disperse in the lava, they can't make it because their spatial characteristic is wrong.
So in the change of a species that may not involve DNA could be a change of habit in terms of spatial distribution.
It could just be a response to a nutrient that causes a change of size and therefore characteristic distance in the space-time patterns.
We seem to see that, well, first we see the lichen.
The lichen creates just the minimum of degradation of the surface that makes it possible for the Ohia tree to grab a hold.
And the lichen as a pattern is obviously fractal.
It's sort of characteristically fractal.
And the lava surface is fractal as well.
And fractal, if it means that there's a resonance across scales, then the lichen scale, which is much smaller, is nothing.
There may be many kinds of lichen, but only this one grows because this fractal pattern is, in spite of the apparent difference in scale,
because resonance across scales has the right basic form, something like the time wave, so that, as a matter of fact, is compatible with the bare rock.
And then the Ohia tree is compatible with its fractal pattern, apparently on a much larger scale, is nonetheless resonant, harmonious,
as opposed to other species that might be disharmonious.
And this harmony, this capability of a certain space-time pattern, is a habit which may change and adapt in a way that requires no change in DNA at all.
It's a non-genetic variation.
It just resonates to some kind of morphic field.
So you're talking about the evolution and development of whole ecosystems.
And I think what's interesting about that is that these ecosystems get established, and there's repeated lava flows, and they're wiped out again and again and again.
Divided.
Divided, and then lava flows are recolonized. The entire ecosystem has to move, not just single species.
Yes.
So you've got a portable ecosystem.
Yes.
Maybe that's why it has to travel light.
And evolving one, and learning one, too.
The ponds.
I mean, because the Amazon forest, you know, to have the whole thing, to transport the whole of that, where they've some seeds dropped to the ground, others are blown by wind, others are carried by.
But, I mean, to get the whole thing to move, you know, if the whole thing just had to move from place to place, I mean, what it's had to do in the past, I suppose, is adapt to changing rivers and adapt to shifting cultivation much more recently.
But, yeah, the whole thing.
But, strangely enough, the Amazon, too, is an incredibly hospitable place.
It's all what's called padzolic sand.
In terms of the way foresters measure these things, this is a much more hospitable place, in that in the Amazon, at any given moment, I'm talking about, say, for instance, the Rio de Janeiro Valley, 98% of all organic matter is bound within a living system.
In other words, there's no detritus-length forest floor, there's no fallen meat.
Well, here, it's probably 80%, something like that.
There is detritus, there are fungi, there are pockets of soil.
The Amazon is in a frenzied state of recycling.
A palm frond falls, and you pass the same place 20 minutes later, and it's gone.
It was 16 feet long and 5 feet wide.
It's gone.
The ants have just taken it.
And this is the rate at which it was estimated that minerals in rainwater falling in the Amazon flow an average distance of one-half centimeter before being completely bound and absorbed in organic systems.
Well, there's so many trees per square kilometer, and there's this climax forest 200 feet high.
And here, everything is very sparse, and it just needs 250 million years or something to thicken up?
No, it's 19 degrees north, which is a long way north.
It's a pseudo-topical forest in my estimation.
It would not be nearly this lush if it weren't that its climate is created not by its latitude but by the ocean.
It is bathed by warm plants in the same way that England's climate is a godsend.
Nobody that far north should have, and nobody this far north should expect a situation like this.
But it's just very mild, very stable.
But I believe it's on the latitude of the massive line.
Going back now to this question of the morphogenetic field of an entire ecosystem, I'm bothered by the creation myth.
And I just want to ask you guys about this.
In this creation myth for the Hawaiian Islands ecosystem that you described, there are these islands which have already disappeared,
and the ecosystems have jumped from them onto Kauai and so on.
But as I understand, these islands are rafting along over this more or less stationary hotspot.
Those earlier islands were also right here where we are sitting today, also very distant from any continental landmass.
So is day one of biology on the Hawaiian Island chain was, we are to understand, a result of long-distance dispersion because of rafting and birds carrying.
But then they had to recreate an entire ecosystem.
It seems so coincidentally similar to island ecosystems elsewhere.
Almost impossible.
Because they've had to follow the same creodes and they're constrained by the same process.
Nothing happened until the right lichen arrived after the failure of millions of years of bird and raft carried.
Well the lichen, I suspect, could probably be found in air samples above any point on the planet.
So you've got spores as the first colonizers.
Yes, and then the ferns come next.
And of course, the reason the non-flowering plants conquered the planet, if you think about it, is because the planet was like Hawaii.
It was new lava.
It was endless life flows.
And the ferns could do, get cold.
We think of ferns as soft and somehow spoiled plants.
Actually, they're the tapest plants they're on.
When we study biology, they teach you Silotum.
You have to dissect Silotum.
It's held up as the most primitive land plant.
This forest is full of Silotum.
I can point it out to you.
These guys are tough.
They're tough.
Yes, this is lucky.
But how did they get here?
These seeds are carried by birds.
Oh, spores.
No.
Well, yeah, sure.
Spores.
Mud on the feet of migratory birds could carry millions of spores.
Well, this is one of my favourite explanations.
John Michel particularly likes this.
The Fortiums, it's one of their beloved explanations.
You see, the Fortiums have studied the phenomena where you have new pools appear.
Lakes are created and so forth.
And within, you know, 20 years or something, they've got all the things a regular lake should have.
You know, the right flora, tadpoles, the right kind of fish swimming in the water.
You know, daphnia, water beetles and so forth.
And the nearest lake may be many, many miles away.
So the explanation for this, that's accepted without question,
is that they all got there on duck's feet.
And so, duck's foot hypothesis.
Well, but spores, I think, are a little more reasonable.
Well, spores, all right, spores are a little more reasonable.
But the Fortiums have a great time with the duck's foot hypothesis.
Obviously, these spores mutate into mallard ducks, cat tails, minnows.
Well, no, they have their own explanation.
The teleportation theory.
And, you see, they believe that nature air pours a vacuum,
and that when the right thing is needed by the ecosystem,
if it's not there, it simply teleports it from where it is.
So you need to assemble a tropical forest.
You've got to have trees, tree ferns, leon-type vines.
You know, the whole thing, certain regulation things are tropical.
Tree forest morphic, tropical forest morphic field ought to have.
Hawaii satisfies those criteria with the minimum number of species.
Right.
But the fact is, it has to have all those.
And so, they think that all these cryptozoological reports of pumas in Scotland,
and, you know, jackasses on Dartmoor, and so on.
These things...
I'm sure that happens.
These reports of, you know, they love these, and falls of fishes.
You know, the falls of fishes, and the frogs, when animals just fall from the sky.
Well, can we agree that they represent sort of the trailing edge of a bell curve of probability?
No, I don't think we can.
Because I think that they...
I think that there's no...
The reports are indisputable.
Fish fall from the sky.
People cracking open stones that have been there for thousands and thousands of years,
find living toads embedded within them.
But, you see, they accept...
They take the teleportation hypothesis seriously.
There's evidence of it in the human realm.
You know, Saibaba seems to manifest things that could be teleported, and so on.
If that's their best exhibit, they'd better run.
Oh, my God.
Well, I think...
I wouldn't leave my chickens alone with Saibaba.
Would you?
Would you leave your chickens alone with Saibaba?
No, I don't think they'd be in danger of teleportation, and it would appear...
At a minimum.
Anyway, if species can move, there's a way in which they might be able to move, or be reconstituted, or by...
In ways, over and above spores, seeds, rafts, etc.
And that, I think, makes...
May seem of minimal interest in the context of the Earth, the mainly eccentric theory.
It becomes much more interesting when we take up your theme of the Earth itself being an island, and the biology on Earth being an island biology.
When we then consider how things could have moved through from other planets, in maybe other star systems, then duck's feet are out, for starters.
I mean, you can get in the sort of...
Well, I mean, there's the idea that there's an underlying set of resonances, that matter will flow along similar cryodes, in similar regimes of chemistry and pressure, whether they're here or in orbit around our tourists.
And so, I mean, this is what fuels the expectation, that on an Earth-like planet, there would be Earth-like beings.
But I would say, by morphic resonance, you see, because I think the two planets would be in resonance, if it was sufficiently Earth-like.
So you then have the idea of a kind of resonance phenomenon driving evolution, or leading to forms of life which have never before appeared there, but which have appeared somewhere else, in the universe.
Now, without the need for spores, seeds, or rats...
Well, there are evolutionary puzzles that I think completely defeat any kind of Darwinism or neo-Darwinism, the prime example being the metamorphosis of beetles and butterflies.
I mean, here is a process which involves the perfect coordination of hundreds, if not thousands, of genes simultaneously.
Imagining any gradual process that would proceed gene by gene over eons to end up with something like that happening to an organism defies credibility.
I just can't feature it. Clearly, thousands of genes were changed in one or two moves to achieve that.
And no ordinary process of gene reshuffling that I'm familiar with could account for many.
I mean, you do not hear this discussed?
No, it comes in that category of macro-mutation, which biologists don't like to discuss.
Why?
When you have a large change of a lot of coordinated things.
But after all, the insects are probably the dominant order on the planet, in terms of biomass, in terms of species number, in terms of the number of environments they can inhabit.
So, in other words, the conquest of this planet by life preceded by a mechanism, metamorphosis, currently completely a black box to modern biology.
Well, I think there's a start-up problem, whether on the scale of the whole planet or an island in the Hawaiian chain.
I just can't imagine that the frequency of ducks flying is enough to allow the duck's feet hypothesis to explain the arrival of correct species and correct temporal sequence in so short of time.
I mean, they would have to just be dumping literally dump truck loads of different genetic material on a daily basis on a brand new wildlife in order to have a chance to get started in a billion years.
The studying of banded birds and this seems to show that there's a lot of material moving around and that a million years is a long, long time.
And that a number of improbable things can go on in a million years.
Well, I've been here for a week. I have not seen a new species of bird arrive from the mainland.
Well, stick around!
Well, has anyone ever worked out? I know they've banded the birds already, but have they counted the number of spores they can possibly carry in a full world?
Of course, this is what graduate students are for, Ralph. This is the work of the study of the Hawaiian Islands.
Well, here are models of these birds coming and going from Vancouver and Baja California over here.
Dumping a load and returning.
Carrying one hundredth of a gram of biological material on each trip, and of those, one out of a thousand survives, and out of those, and you discover.
Well, okay, let's accept, in part, the duck's foot hypothesis in its broader form.
Migratory birds. Pretty plausible. Birds do migrate from place to place over large distances. Indeed, many call in Hawaii.
I looked up in your bird book and saw there were quite a number of migrants from different directions.
So, here's, we accept this for the purpose of argument. Now, which is cause and which is effect?
No one knows why birds migrate in the patterns they do. And no one, the evolutionary basis for migration.
Sometimes we hear land masses gradually moved apart, and they have to move further and further over oceans.
But in fact, migratory routes are kinds of habits. New ones have evolved in recent decades in Britain.
No, I don't think it is migratory birds. I think that the process is primarily one of a novelty, unusual events, catastrophes.
The greatest storm of the century. Every century.
Birds blown off course.
Birds blown off course. It's not about habits.
But then the pure numbers are reduced. It's about disruption.
Such a small level that it's hard to imagine all of these coincidences necessary for the reconstruction of the ecology.
A single freak storm veering off course might equal a century of ordinary dispersing.
But these migratory habits of birds are presumably quite old in many cases.
And every time there's an ice age pumps the evolutionary process,
presumably birds that do migrate have to change the places they migrate to.
And in the last 10,000 years, the great bulk of Northern Europe and North America has opened up as a habitat.
Much more recent than anything we're looking at here.
We have to remember, we live in pioneer, recolonized communities ourselves,
if we come from most of the northern hemisphere.
London, the ice cap went down to Hampstead in the north of London 10,000 years ago.
Though most of England is a recolonized, and recently recolonized ecology.
Quite common.
The birds that migrate have to adapt over thousands or even hundreds of years,
short term adaptations.
It seems to me that if birds have a kind of collective map,
which they share with other birds that have migrated,
and can tune into a kind of bird collective unconscious,
that some species migrating over certain routes and knowing about Hawaii,
may enable others starting off in that direction to follow a kind of pre-existing creode,
rather like existing jet flight paths.
I was amused when we came here to Hawaii.
We were flying in this jet plane, and outside the window, about 100 feet away,
was a vapor trail which we followed exactly for two hours,
presumably of the previous jet flight to Hawaii,
and they were 100 feet apart.
So there may be kind of creode memory channel bird migration paths,
and many species often follow the same paths,
like around the Mediterranean coast,
and over the Straits of Gibraltar into North Africa, and so on.
So we could have a whole kind of bird mind,
and when the Hawaiian islands appear, long-distance migrants like albatrosses,
or whatever the largest seabirds are here,
that in any case spend a lot of time at sea,
recognise this fact and start coming here.
Somehow this gets into the bird map,
and other species, rather than whole flocks of them starting out lemming-like
from the coast of California in the hope of finding an island by chance 2,500 miles away,
are actually doing it with a great deal more confidence.
Then we'd have the idea of the appearance of new land,
if it actually channeled bird migration routes towards it,
because the word got around pretty fast and they were able to adapt,
then the duck's foot hypothesis would still be plausible,
plausible for different reasons.
For this direction by a committee in the sky,
the nature, the vacuum adhorrence committee,
whoops,
in New Ireland Pacific,
tell the albatrosses,
do their job as sort of a pack train to build,
bring as much genetic material as rapidly as possible,
and dump it on the new islands.
Sounds like one of the adventures of Dr. Doolittle,
you can see.
Well, I think there are one or two more points,
if you've time and patience.
Sure.
Let's do it all.
If you can wait just a moment.
When a new island comes up,
then the entire database of migratory birds,
all the other species,
is somehow informed of this,
that the geography is the basis of biogeography.
Well, this came out just the other day. How did the original people who came here find it?
And one obvious hypothesis that struck us was that if they were keen observers of migrant birds, they'd notice that birds set off from their islands in a particular direction and came back again.
And it would therefore be a fairly simple deduction that if you follow the migrant birds, you'll reach land sooner or later.
That's right.
That's what East is a big bird means. So following the birds then is no less of a mystery than the birds themselves being able to migrate.
So either the people could follow the birds who navigate by some unknown mysterious means or the people could have had access to similar mysterious means themselves.
And when a new island came up, then the information is somehow injected into their own migration patterns, which is whatever guides them, which they may consider to be celestial navigation or whatever, in their canoe rides from the island to the island.
Well, all we have to do is to add in the cetacean factor, and we'll have a complete series.
Though the animals that presumably noticed, first of all, that volcanoes are erupting beneath the sea, two or three, four, ten thousand feet down, causing a great deal of hissing, steam and commotion of presumably marine animals.
I'm sure.
Fish, things, dwellers on the marine floor, and presumably there's a whole micro-informed warm, water-loving creatures that moves along the base of the island.
Well, the sound carries thousands and thousands of miles.
And the whales have this telegraph system, and they send telegrams to each other, and then finally the dolphins know, and they communicate to birds with friends of theirs.
The very fact that it's all tied together, as it were, is the only reason that it can all work, and that without the tying together of all living things in one giant worldwide web, there would, as a matter of fact, be no life.
Certainly no new life on a new island like Hawaii.
Yes, I think so.
I mean, if one isn't too tightly constrained in the definition of communication, it obviously can affect it.
And without the communicative web, the informational sharing system, then it's all impossible.
And even though we don't know how these communications take place, we, nevertheless, we can sort of deduce that without communication it doesn't work.
Interspecies communication makes it all good.
Yes.
And if we, this is an idea again that came up from Ralph and I talking a couple of days ago, we postulate that plants have a kind of dolphin or whale-like telepathic relationship between them.
Then plants of similar species on different continents would be able to read out an oak tree, for example, now planted on every continent and native, if you take in the whole genus, you'd have a wide band of the old world and the new cover.
If these, any of these, if they were linked or resonating together in a complete kind of oak mind, any one of them would know what was happening with the weather as a storm passed over whales and the oaks all registered it and the stone had closed or opened or whatever.
Or as some great catastrophic lava flow occurred somewhere else, Mount St. Helens erupted or something.
Well, I think John Dunn covered this territory, Ralph.
No man is an island entirely himself. Each is a part of the continent, a part of the main. Each man's death diminishes me, therefore I have never sinned to know for whom the bell tolls and tolls for it be.
But the conversation of the oaks, that transcends that homocentric view. This is closer to children's books, children's stories and the lost mythology of the communication of humans, animals and plants.
I think for many people stranger than a living toad inside a dead rock.
That is the basis of shamanism worldwide. It's what shamanism is all about. Communication on this interface between the human world and the world of plants and animals.
And presumably it's shamanism.
And presumably it's shaman who discover the powers of plants, the humanly relevant powers of plants including the psychoactive powers of plants and explore them.
them and it's shaman who entered the mind of animals and have animal totems and animal
spirits and can find out the ways of animals for practical purposes so if this we see this
communication we see that pets as we were talking about can find out what people are up to in
surprising and astonishing ways of distance we've already got ingredients that point towards
the possibility of worldwide web of communication between plants and animals and animals and people
and so forth well i think the print the technological principle on which the next
century will operate is the mimicking of nature solid state micro miniaturized solar base
uh no moving parts um so but a lot of that is the mimicry of nature as perceived through a filter so
narrow that maybe the most essential functions of nature are not even recognized and therefore what
it mimicked is is a non-working skeleton of a dead nature as it were well but for instance solar cells
obviously tend on an understanding of photosynthesis and it would be a brighter world if all electrical
problems were produced that way similarly processes of fermentation are better than processes that require
more primolecular way to solve it it sounds right but actually i think that uh photoelectric devices as
known today are not only much simpler than photosynthesis but they they were understood at the time when
photosynthesis was not understood and even now is not the whole chain is perhaps not completely clear
and they take the bare essentials but leave out the whole of plant morphology well but all these
shares are so synthetic solid state quality that's all i'm saying well they started to make them as
single crystals and then this is very expensive so when they make them more fractals like plants the
morphosy yes so i i think that the imitation of nature would be disastrous if you can't learn to see it
better that somehow we need more means of opening the scientific straggle hole by the observational powers of the
human well but there are current only two aesthetic uh schools on the memory the imitation of
but we're leaving out the alternative that arises from the possibilities they're talking about i mean if
nature is involves this worldwide web of communication if there are flows of information from people to
animals animals to people migrating birds dolphins and so forth all these things being reflected in the
population and of this isolated set of volcanic islands and it sounds like the connectivity is the
overarching and now we come to the true spiritual purpose of the digital world wide web which is
a training ground for appreciating the mechanism and the characteristics of the learning to observe
the global phenomena of worldwide webs so that with this training in childhood
so it's an analog for nature yeah quite at present we're limited to analogues of mechanics
you know and in in the case of morphic resonance radio and tv because the underlying metaphor is radio and tv
the but here we have another metaphor and since science can only work in terms of metaphors and so far
it's only worked in terms of mechanical metaphors here's an expanded mechanical metaphor but i think it
would only really work if it converges with an expanded mental or psychic metaphor and i suppose the psychics of
the people connected through the web are that i mean what the thing lacking from it as an evolutionary
model for me was the lack of it having a field-like quality but just a kind of series of interconnected bits
rather like in these artificial life models where you just have units that join up um i think field-like
quality would be uh make it much more interesting that could happen if the community of people doing
follow the suggestion of the russian eccentric um constant time even in care he's always writing
to me with his scheme for a total transformation of humanity through people linked up by computer nets
chanting together at the same time and intentionally um creating what he calls a psychotronic revolution
uh where which would entrain the consciousness of all those doing it more than just the operation of
the mechanics of this thing does by synchronized chanting which would be coordinated through the
net itself very interesting that's his vision he's been going on about this for years he thinks that
could cause the emergence of a shift in consciousness the network won't do it by itself and i think that
that's what's lacking from the network by itself and from the standard physical linkage theories of
evolution even if we sort of the harmonic convergence idea if we all go stand on nearby mountaintops at
exactly the same instant throughout the entire biosphere then somehow that would precipitate uh phase
transition exactly and many people would ridicule this as saying this is what peace protesters were
doing all through the 70s visualizing peace all over eastern europe and the ending of the cold war
and as the smile comes to their lips it tends to freeze because of course that's exactly what's happened
and although the harmonic convergence is a less successful piece of evidence and seems to indicate
that this area of thinking can become a redoubt disease to intellect but it shows that people go for it
and that really respond to it because otherwise why would so many of us have been gathered in scared parts
of the globe chanting at dawn in in my case of glastonbury and a light drizzle along with sir george
trevelyan on the top of glastonbury tour how are so many people engaged in this activity if it isn't
deeply attractive and we americans can answer this question for you it's called hype and we've perfected it
and i think you were hype hype isn't a resonance phenomenon but not the only one but hype hasn't
hype only certain kinds of hype work well the subsequent ones he's convened haven't so this one
actually worked in a new kind of way and you see i think it's possible that if we look at the whole
world there may be a kind of global chance triggered off by sun stock spot cycles life all over the world may
just as it has pulses through the ice ages it may be being caused theory which has this gathering
together in large crowds to chant should look back at the third rife before it proceeds too far with
its agenda well in this case they're not in large crowds they're spread out over the surface of the
yes yes in front of their computers home chrome fascism decentralized
well it shows that only if you in only if there's a ritual or a um a kind of conscious intentional
resonating aspect of this will this field or will this network have any kind of dimension
of a field because this could create a field well but in a way when you think of it the whole nazi
thing was the implication yeah it was very successful group of resonance it was an appeal to the the folk
mind well so were all calls to war by nations bishops crusaders you know this is why i think heidegger
was far wrong when he said the way you judge uh uh reality is by the depth of the call because the
call can be deep and it can still be haywire i know but you see we're all the victims of the call a call to
move west for example i mean we've wound up here now at the ultimate limit of the west
well except the westernmost hawaiian island i suppose you know the trial logs at the edge of
the west here we are a further 2500 miles so there's this westward alarm which causes
um well in the case of the british it was an eastward movement and migratory peoples migrate to england
anglo-saxons settle etc sort of wipe out the native people or subjugate them you know they're on the
move again after a few hundred years the british empire you know the settlement of north america
and similar process from spain and now having gone right across north america subjugated and they
wiped out its natives eliminated their culture the whole process has moved here we can see that happening
before our very eyes something which in terms of evolution shows the opposite of everything we've
been talking about so far the now there's no separation of the islands from tv networks and
satellite linkages and the internet itself well one of the most frightening trends i think in modern
culture is the wish to build shopping malls everywhere there is a mentality that would like to turn the
planet into an international airport arrival concourse that's their idea of utopia based on america the
model for all this is always america you see i suppose and so now there's this kind of clonal culture
moving worldwide through media through which has the opposite effect to all the speciation diversification
and evolutionary creativity we've been talking about so we see the opposite process of working hawaii
today it's like stifling of the native culture america is a cultural bulldozer yes it just tramples and
destroys everything but that you see is simply an expression of this westward migratory urge which
underlies all the people who migrated to america of whatever race or background they all migrated that's
what brought them there and this migratory urge which has been i suppose very strong in all sorts of
human populations and indeed maybe just yet another manifestation of migratory age we see in birds and in
plants and indeed in the movement of life from planet planet and there appears to be a double gradient
here with the eastward migration of asian people kind of balancing the western migration of european
people this is actually the the interface where some um the double gradient can produce
an increase of novelty and the mutations and a forward leap perhaps of human evolution could be here
because of this double wave phenomenon a standing wave forming here as forces move both east and west
so can we point to any human creativity of hawaii that exemplifies as like in the malesian archipelago
we're coming together with two great flora and fauna systems ek systems can we see that creativity and
evidence i think latest well i suppose pearl harbor was the moment and the greatest impact of east and west
and the result of that of course was the deployment of nuclear weapons and whereas we don't like this
it is definitely a marvel evolutionary or counter evolutionary step if creative hated as we might
and pearl harbor itself being a volcanic derivative you know has this kind of volcanic effect on world
politics it's interesting that that radiated out the whole biogeography i mean political geography of
today was shaped by carl harbor as we know from all elementary accounts with a lot of background and
so on but there we have another role of hawaii i wonder if you've reflected on that well certainly the
defeat of fascism and the solidification of america relied on that to the point where some historians have
felt that roosevelt knew what the japanese were planning and he allowed it wanted to go with churches
solidified opinion so yes that was its moment on the geopolitical spirit but it was also the moment of
conflict of eastern west east eastern and western power the japanese sought to expand their influence
in the world oh yes and were held back by military means in the end they've now succeeded economically
where they failed militarily and here in hawaii at least politically if you tell me the japanese control
eastern vienna if if the turks were stopped at the walls of vienna and the japanese were stopped it's the
domain from honolulu to vienna that's western civilization's true but is it really the creative
interface it could be between east and west because now it's a kind of stalemate with roughly half of
the island's population coming from the east and half from the west with the native lions trapped in the
field well i think this pacific rim culture that is hypothesized to be emerging hawaii is central to all
of that it's equal distant from sydney lima tokyo and vancouver have they adopted the slogan come to
hawaii in the pacific hub yet if they haven't i'm sure they're not far behind the presence of these
telescopes here at night city world science first second and third largest identical twin of the
largest being built to phoenix well so it's a channel perhaps at least in the human realm for linking us
with the stars another important theme we're looking out in the top of hawaii chosen from the darkest
from here they'll see the the next wave of duck's feet on now arriving for the biosphere two well
what do you think i think that's because the water from around to a halt you're listening to the
psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives one thought at a time well i have a question
for you do you know why i think that you would be able to fit right in perfectly at that kitchen table
with ralph terence and rupert well it's simple because like those three amigos you're spending
your time listening to this podcast rather than talking about last night's football game or something
like that with your friends like it or not some kind of strange mind virus has gotten a hold of us and
is causing us to listen to a long-winded conversation instead of listening to music right now but if i were
you i'd get back to the music right away but if you're still here with me i'll just ramble on a
little bit more you know i don't know about you but i really enjoyed hearing terence talk about
butterflies although it isn't something he talked about very often collecting butterflies was one of
the first things he did after leaving college if i'm not mistaken and just a couple of weeks ago
i mentioned the new book that terence's daughter just published that contained photos of some of
the butterflies he collected and i'll put another link to that book with the program notes to this
podcast but his mention of the way butterflies mutate and change their patterns on their wings in order to
fool the birds who preyed on them got me to thinking about something that either he or tim leary said on
another podcast recently about how you can no longer pick out the heads because the rest of the culture
has co-opted the way that all the heads now look maybe that's why it's so hard to find the others
maybe everyone is one of the others but we're all too afraid to speak up and say so that's an
interesting thought huh i know that it happened to me once you know a guy who is now one of my closest
friends uh he and i worked together for almost a year before we discovered that we shared an interest
in psychedelics you know i'm not holding my breath about seeing an end to the prohibition of our sacred
medicines during my lifetime all i'm really hoping to live to see is a world in which we can at least
discuss them as freely as we talk about the weather or sports and i i also liked uh terence's comment
uh that when there's a shifting boundary that uh that's where the mutants can thrive well it seems
to me like a lot of boundaries are beginning to shift all around the planet let's hope that spells good
news for us psychedelic mutants and i'm not talking about the science fiction version of mutants here
what i'm talking about is a new and improved form of humanity one that can be passed on to our young
just take a look around and uh ask yourself if you want to reincarnate as uh yet another mindless consumer
or do you want to uh mutate into an intelligent focused purposeful human being so let's hear it for
the mutants uh-huh another thing that uh struck me when terence was talking about evolution uh perhaps
just trying things for the sake of variety reminded me of a book that uh you might be interested in
it's uh stephen wolfram's book a new kind of science and uh now i i'll warn you ahead of time
uh that if if you're like me it'll take you probably more than a year to finish reading it it did for me
but uh some people and i count myself among them uh happen to think that wolfram's ideas are as
profound as newton's were when they were first introduced and uh they are as little understood
as well i might add but in any event one of the points he argues for in that book is uh close to
what terence was saying about evolution trying all kinds of things like a mad tinker or something like
that it's an interesting take on the uh processes of evolution and uh not one that's uh completely
accepted or hardly accepted at all by the mainstream which of course makes me want to look at it all the
more closely and uh speaking of the mainstream and ways in which our sacred medicines are entering that
flow wasn't it nice to see that piece uh floating around the net recently about the brilliant latin
american writer uh isabel aliende here's part of the email i'm talking about and i quote when aliende
herself encounters the rare for her but dreaded writer's block she finds an unusual way around it
she drinks a potent shamanic rainforest hallucinogen and disappears into her mind for several days
during this unorthodox excursion isabel and the following text is actually from uh isabel aliende's
new memoir the sum of our days where she says i crossed through the opening and effortlessly
plunged into an absolute void there was no sensation no spirit not a trace of individual consciousness
instead i felt divine absolute presence i was inside the goddess something i can only define as love
an impression of oneness i dissolved into the divine i felt there was no separation between me
and the rest of all that exists all that was light and silence i was left with the certainty that we are
spirits and all that is material is illusory that's the end of her quote she also writes that on that
voyage she lost her fear of fear of death and her writer's block as well and then she resumed her
writing uh usual writing schedule and began working for 10 to 12 hours a day until she completed a book
and speaking of uh someone else who is uh putting in a lot of work each week for our community i want to
thank allison terry for her exceptional work of transcribing six of our podcasts so far and i've posted
links to these transcriptions on our notes from the psychedelic salon blog which you can find at
uh www.psychedelicsalon.org and five of them are terence mckenna lectures and the other is a talk by ann
shulgin not only does allison's work help various scholars who are working on books involving the
work of terence mckenna her transcriptions now mean that some of ann shulgin's and terence mckenna's
brilliance will be available for google to index and bring yet more minds to their work so thank you
so very much allison on behalf of our entire community and once i get caught up a bit i plan on
including some of allison's comments about terence's work here in the salon after spending so much time
with him phrase by phrase she has some interesting comments that i think you'll be interested in hearing
so uh allison i know that i owe you an email or two and i'll get back to our project soon i'm just
running way behind so far this year and maybe i can catch up a bit by uh reading this email from
jeff m because it's similar to quite a few others i've received and uh so i'll try to catch up with
a bunch of you with this one and then uh pointing you to a thread that i plan to begin over at the
girl report.com here's what jeff had to say i have heard the names of many books
that sound fascinating in the talks you put out so i would greatly appreciate it if you would suggest
a few of them that you think i would enjoy i think that i would be especially interested in any books
about consciousness science and the universe i'm sure those are broad topics and you have many books you
could suggest so i leave it up to you to continue to guide my psychedelic thinking
p.s a side effect of my recent fascination with consciousness has been a love for dreams
i am teaching myself how to become a lucid dreamer and have had some success so far
i was so excited when i saw your recent podcast titled psychedelic dreams but even though it was
fascinating it was not on the subject i thought it would be on if there are any talks or books that
you would like to suggest to amuse my interest in dreams please say so well uh like i said i'll try to
get a thread going maybe somebody else can get it going before i get out there but uh i don't know of
any good dream books right off hand but i'm sure some of our fellow salonners do and that they also
have some good ideas about your first question so i'll be watching uh what others have to say uh
over there and adding my own two cents once in a while another email comes from matt r who says
i'm a new listener to your podcast and i really enjoy it in one of your podcasts either you or
someone else mentioned that they like seattle they went on to mention that if it wasn't for other
issues they would probably want to live there do you remember this or happen to know
what issues they were talking about i live near seattle and i'm starting to get uneasy about the
fault lines below us is that what they were referring to or is it there are certain locations
that are predicted to be more dangerous at the 2012 event just curious if you know what insight
that person had about the seattle area hmm i don't remember anything about a fault line
the only comment i think i might have made would have been about the long wet winters
up in that part of the world i've kind of become addicted to seeing the sun every day now that i
live here in southern california and so i might have slipped up and said something along those lines
but i don't know anything about fault lines up that way yeah maybe some of our fellow salonners do but
i do know i love the area and all the people up there so it didn't rain so much i'd probably be
living there another email comes from daniel l who said you might already be aware of this
but in case you're not i wanted to tell you that dr phil made an episode about salvia
a very negative and biased episode for example dr phil tells a 16 year old who got quote addicted
to salvia that salvia is the cause he failed school not mentioning that he might have failed
school anyway and that it doesn't have to be attributed to salvia as he automatically assumed
he also compared it to lsd and labeled all users of it as stupid funny uh stupid is a word i would
actually use to describe dr phil and his entire audience including oprah but that's uh just my
opinion daniel goes on might be of interest to uh comment on your podcast as it demonstrates very
clearly and unsubtly how the media still tend to go demonize every drug and regard it as
a team problem my suggestion is that you watch the episode before you go to bed as it otherwise might
get you into a bad mood for the rest of the day the show is available on youtube in two parts and
and i'll post a link along with program notes for this podcast well thanks for sending the link and
pointing that out daniel as you say this once again clearly points out how much disinformation about
psychoactive substances is being passed on by the corporate media but as for the non-corporate media
if you're interested in some talk about the upcoming 2009 burning man festival you can
get a good taste of it on sancho and cody's podcast black light in the attic i've mentioned
their podcast before because it's one of my favorites and and not just because i joined them in their
podcast number 14 to talk about their plans for this year's burn and by the way i did buy my own
ticket just yesterday so it looks like i'm committed to returning the palenque norte playa logs to black
rock city again this year and i can almost hear the groans from some of our fellow slaughters who get tired
of hearing me talk about burning man but take heart because this year i'll try to keep most of my burning
man talk confined to sancho and cody's podcasts rather than repeat too many times the same things
over and over here of course uh i haven't told sancho and cody that yet but i know that they're
listening and they'll get the news right along with you hope that's all right with you guys and by the
way i i didn't mention it when we talked on skype the other day but afterwards it dawned on me that
we hadn't known each other and hung out together for years like it felt like you know with all of the
stories i've heard on uh their podcasts i feel like we're old friends and uh i hope that's the way it
is uh with you and me too you know even though we haven't been together in the same physical space
we have been together here in the theater of the mind here in cyberdelic space and uh somehow that
makes the world seem a little more friendly uh if you know what i mean and i hear there's a chance
i'm actually going to get to meet cody in person if he can arrange to get out this way for the annual
southern california writers conference the weekend of february 13th uh my our friend mateo uh by the
way has arranged for a fifty dollar discount to listeners of the sea realm blacklight and psychedelics
salon podcast so if you're interested in attending uh just tell the conference ticket sellers that uh
you're a listener of this podcast and they supposedly will give you the discount and if they don't just
look for mateo and i'm i'm sure he'll run interference for you as he's done for me on more than one occasion
but i digress actually mateo will be teaching two workshops at the conference as well as doing one-on-one
manuscript consultations and i'll post the link so you can see who all of the other speakers are
but if you do plan to attend why don't you go to www.mattpalmeri m-a-t-t-p-a-l-l-a-m-a-r-y dot com
and let him know via the contact link that you're going and maybe we'll put together a little mini salon
or something like that another piece of information i want to pass along comes from lewis c who says
after listening to the number 143 trilogue rethinking societies i was wondering what your opinion is
on the venus project resource-based societies or the zeitgeist movement where to begin
first of all i should say that i don't know a whole lot about any of them other than they seem
on first glance to be heading in the right direction i've visited the website of the venus
project several times and i find that i can spend a significant amount of time they're just poking
around and learning about the many interesting things that they're doing and in general it seems
obvious that we have to quickly learn how to convert our wasteful ways into a sustainable society
in fact that seems to me to be our most important project yet so many of us humans are spending the
majority of our time and resources building bigger and more lethal weapons so my hat is off to anyone
and everyone who is working on projects that will help lead us out of the dead end of consumerism
however fanciful and even unpractical some of them may seem any any movement that is peaceful
sustainable and is repulsed by war is a step in the right direction in my book
and if i don't cut this off now i'll never get back to working on my new now long overdue book but i
do want to mention that there is a new interview with rupert sheldrake that has recently been posted on
shamanic freedom radio dot automatic dot com this is a new podcast that i haven't yet had an opportunity
to listen to and while i normally don't plug podcasts until they get 10 or so episodes posted
but since the podcaster is a fellow slawner and participant over at the girl report dot com forums
and since his fourth program is an interview with someone we just heard from today well
i thought i'd tell you about it anyway and i do plan on listening to that interview in the next few days
myself now as always i'll close this podcast by saying that this and all of the podcasts from the
psychedelic salon are available for your use under the creative commons attribution non-commercial
share alike 3.0 license and if you have any questions about that just click the creative commons link at
the bottom of the psychedelic salon web page which you can find at psychedelics salon.org and that's also
where you'll find the program notes for these podcasts and for now this is lorenzo signing off from
cyberdelic space be well my friends
greetings from cyberdelic space this is lorenzo and i'm your host here in the psychedelic salon
so how's this season coming along if you live in the northern hemisphere i i hope you're keeping warm
but if you live down under i already know how your summer is going it's going very hot from what i hear
and since these podcasts reach fellow saloners in over 100 countries and in almost every weather pattern
on earth i guess i have to say to all of our fellow saloners stay warm stay cool and i'm glad the weather
is perfect where you are i guess that should cover most bases huh now let's get on with today's program
two weeks ago i played the first of two cassette tapes that ralph abraham loaned to me they were
recordings of a private trial log between him and terence mckenna and rupert sheldrake and unless like
me you are interested in history particularly the history of the internet you may not find today's talk
all to your liking because it took place 15 years ago and dealt with this newfangled thing called the
world wide web the recording was made at terence's home on the big island of hawaii and at the time
he still wasn't connected to the internet there however it does sound like terence was very much
up to speed on the potential of the net and ralph as we all know has been at the forefront of the
evolution of the net since long before the web was invented however as you will hear rupert wasn't all
that convinced that people would actually contribute content to the web unless they were getting paid for
it of course uh today rupert also provides a lot of free content on the web what a difference a few
years make huh and just so you know i edited out a lot of the beginning of this recording because
it was mainly ralph abraham describing to rupert what the internet was the date was sometime in 1994
which means that the world wide web was less than two years old at the time although the internet
itself was around 25 years old by then and ralph's description of and enthusiasm for the web when it
was still in such a primitive state marks him as one of its earliest prominent proponents and i have to
say that his foresight was truly amazing when you hear ralph winding up his introduction by saying that
there are already tens of thousands of people creating web pages on the internet think about
where we are today with tens of millions of people pouring their creativity into the web every hour of
every day of the year so where were you back in 1994 were you already connected to the net and up to
speed with where ralph already was at the time just keep in mind that the world wide web was less than
two years old when this conversation was held and most of us were uh if we were connecting to it at all
we're connecting to it through 1500 baud modems and that was the world that these three amigos were
living in when they had this little conversation in hawaii there are tens of thousands of people
essentially devoting all of their waking hours for creative works for which there is no return except
the joy of creativity we have a region of absolutely unbridled unrestricted creativity on a scale that
boggles the mind a scale never before seen and what are people doing why are they doing this it's all
because uh i i think that people involved in this field as as i feel a unique uh window of opportunity
for the creation of a new future so that uh brings me to my particular focus for our conversation on
on the world wide web that this seems to me and uh to other people who are careful observers of the scene
that the miracle for which we've been waiting the uh aquarian conspiracy the descent of the super
mind the omega point and so on is actually happening now the internet is the physical substrate or the
a physical substrate as it were for the creation of a new future and of all the people who have
predicted this event in some detail in the past the one that impressed me the most understanding
what's actually happening now is uh thier de chandain's um concept that he began uh publishing in 1924
most of you didn't start reading until 1954 when his first book was published mostly the phenomenon of
man there he described the world wide web without using these terms without any reference to an
electronic a physical substrate described in great detail what i think is is happening in a metaphor now i
would use the metaphor of um the neural net the neural net is the physiology concepts there are the
individual souls in the picture of thier de chardin are the nodes of a neural net and they're connected by links
and his vision of the omega point was a process taking up to 500 years in which the quality of the links
between the individual nodes and the number of links between the individual nodes suddenly began to grow
substantially in a kind of a paranormal phenomenon if not telepathy then intuition or just sensitivity
consideration love or something would would amplify the strength of the connection between the different
minds of souls and and so on and in this neural net analog picture would be created the the super mind
the noosphere and so this is the process that he called noogenesis so i believe that the the world
wide web is as a matter of fact the noogenesis of the noosphere of the future this is it now what's
happening what could happen i mean there's a spectrum of possibilities the cessation of this creative
activity within the internet which is the self-organization of new reality is not one of the
possibilities for the future that i imagine the creation of this thing is going forward everybody in
the world will be connected to it anybody who has a television or a telephone for example will
automatically be connected to this without them asking or doing anything there it is it may have
a fee or may not have a fee these are among the spectrum of possibilities for the future so that's an
idea what the world wide web is about and how i see it as an opportunity to amplify uh create trigger
participate in the spiritual revolution all what we've talked about the motivation for a lot of our books
writing speaking and so on suddenly this uh our opportunities in ordinary media pale in comparison with
the opportunity presented us who put you to take it on the internet in the form of this worldwide web on the
physicianship level four well it's very interesting enough i love hearing you talk about it because
your enthusiasm is infectious i mean it's a kind of ultimate uh technophilia that we've embraced here
i mean god as computer i agree completely i think this is the compressence we've been waiting for this is
the outer shell of the omega point that history has been moving toward uh the implications are mind-boggling and
so difficult to discern is this biology preparing to shed itself and decant into another dimension
isn't it interesting that it is ultimately wires bolts electrons but its profits and its adherents reach
for the language for the language of theology to station morporeal body of god in human society it is the end
of history as far as i can see we've been talking since the 60s about boundary dissolution interconnectivity
so forth and so on assuming these things would arrive in pharmacological powerful craft for that it is
disturbing you put your finger on the absence of the feminine i wonder if perhaps the first world wide
web was and that in a sense that the engineering mentality is doing is simply hardwiring the information
yeah bringing the guys up to speed and introducing them to the reality of boundaryless community we should
call it the second web the man sort of a duel of the second sex yes women have always spun and moved in
these webs and now men are in the process of being feminized are learning this trick but implementing it
in the way they know best which is through i i just cannot see the edges of this i think you're right
that the thing we have heralded that seems so unlikely that seemed in fact to require and no pun is
intended a day of sex machina the day of sex machina is now with us and what's wonderful is that it cuts
down no forests it creates no new slums it is in fact invisible and so the people who might
for various reasons seek to slow it down subvert it manage it uh are in fact unaware of it they are
perfectly controlled in control of the land masses of the planet it's plutonium resources it's petroleum
resources they do not understand that these are not the key to the game the key to the game is information
and connectivity and connectivity and in that domain this thing has to have a morphogenetic it seems to
have a morphogenetic impulse of its own as a morphogenesis i would be interested in what you have
to think about it and rupert as the proponent of the morphogenetic field i wondered how this fits in
is it relevant irrelevant the shining example or metaphor of what you're talking about or is it in
fact uh a part of the of the processes that that you're interested honestly i don't know what to make
of it um because i find uh i'm very sorry to say my skeptical um impulses being activated because
my own experience is that i have already have access to vast amounts of information libraries
the whole of london's libraries at my feet cambridge university library incredible information through
newspapers mail stacks of unread magazines and so forth i'm very aware of an incredible information
overload my problem is having time to read what's already there and the state that ralph has
described as people browsing idly through the net you know finding out amazing nuggets of information
here and there presupposes a vast amount of leisure um in which people altruistic
leisure in which people are just connecting things up and being creative for its own sake without hope
of reward and without needed recompense and somehow i can't get this picture into focus because it doesn't
correspond with the reality i know it may be a failure of the visionary instincts um it may just be
uh british cynicism surfacing but um i can't quite see how this fits into the lives of people who have to
make a living and i can see it as a leisure of pursuit a hobby like hand radio um
um i can't quite get this um i can't quite get this um well in the past if you sought information you
would seek only as far as you had to and that was usually your local library and the quality of your
conclusions where you'd inevitably be infected with this kind of parochialism uh for instance in the
old world if you wanted a picture of the mona lisa you would look up leonardo da vinci in the
encyclopedia britannica on the world wide web if you want a picture of the mona lisa you call up the
camera in the gallery that is staring at the mona lisa you don't call up an image of the mona lisa
you call up the thing itself i can't imagine that i mean human beings are defined by localisms
what kind of world would it be if there were no localisms in other words if concepts like british
somali chinese that were utterly meaningless because everyone moved in the same cultural super space
now what's been said about capitalism which also tries to create a homogenous cultural super space
is that it does it by appealing to the lowest common denominator by forcing bedouins in their
huts to watch dallas it seems to me the argument for this is that it preserves diversity
it it it really celebrates all information without uh bias and ralph neglected to mention although i'm sure
he's aware uh the original internet was constructed by the american military as a system of communication
specifically designed to survive a thermonuclear attack hence it has been designed to be indestructible
there is no central control to bomb or blow up hence the very people who created it find it impossible to
control it so it's a cultural his great appeal is that it's out of control yes it's totally out of control it's
chaotic friends and we if we always wondered what would happen if you let creativity go in an infinite
sphere of resources what what would happen and here it is well the the the internet and the worldwide
web are not really comparable to the traditional sources of information like books and magazines that
you're comprised your familiar world but suppose it were suppose that there was nothing on it but books and
magazines then it's still um fits very closely tailored description of noogenesis process because the access
to all that information has suddenly changed now all those books in the village museum not really accessible we
know that we we went there together and we saw that we couldn't actually request a book without
getting a card which is very difficult to get i mean access is severely restricted six million six
billion people in the world and and they just won't fit through the door there but on the on the internet
people can have free access to all these materials is true at the more popular sites at the moment
you have to wait in line up to a minute or sometimes even two minutes to get a certain book
but just think that everything is the same the same information exactly but the access is amplified
by factors of hundreds of thousands that's the strength of the link the numbers of the links
that's the most obvious thing that's changing is access there are all these books on it you see a lot
of books i want and information are very obscure they're things i have to find in obscure libraries
and even if you go and look through their computerized index you find it only goes back to 1960 or 1970
or something the university of london if i want to look up books prior to 1970 i have to go to some
ancient card index now the idea that all those scientific journals all those books that one
person every three or four years looks at are actually someone's going to take all the expense of
entering all this information no they're not unlikely they're not it'll be very limited information
however at the rate that the books are being published now is almost every year so many books
are published that that's as many books as were ever published before in the history of time
so obviously five to ten years from now most books will be digitally available they will and
they're not typically driven optical characters but i'll tell you one book that's available now on
the world wide web uh terence i don't know if you know this but the most obscure book in the world
the voynish manuscript is available on the world wide web the most obscure and rare manuscript in the
world has been totally digitized and it's full of pictures as well as text the other thing i think
it's very hard to predict the impact of is um no matter how obscure your field of interest or your
self-definition you can find the others third world handicapped lesbian mothers will all be able to
communicate with each other new communities uh ukrainian speaking morphogenesis under 30 with a
history of ketamine abuse will be able to find and discuss this with each other so some genetic
processes run amok well it seems fine if you know what you're looking for you see but i think the point
about the ordinary media and the way they work when i read the guardian newspaper in the morning um i'm
in particularly interest in certain kinds of things there's a whole lot of other things that i see
that i wouldn't normally look for i would never dial up half these things well the guardian newspaper is
on the worldwide web and furthermore it's indexed now you read a book many of us start reading a book
from the back we like to have a look at the index see if it's a large one or a small one i see this book
on island ecology it's got 60 pages of indexed three columns i think this is a great book many books on
the world wide web are indexed completely every single word is in the index that means it's much easier
to find what you're looking for okay well let's say that it has this amazing resource and so what the
next question really is what kind of research projects or creativity you want to do on it i mean
i can think of several examples right now i think the main areas that it would be useful for would be
terence's chosen sphere sphere as a matter of fact i mean one thing i'm very interested in you see is
the quality of time i'm interested in the way the physical constants may fluctuate
And this is something Terence has interested me not, I have to say, primarily focused on the time wave itself, but on the general possibility that the time wave is an example of a quality of time phenomenon.
I'm interested in the empirical side of it. So I'd be interested in sunspot data, tide data, deviations from things from power companies and so on, rate of accident reports, suicide rate statistics, all these things which could reflect changing qualities of time.
I myself wouldn't be able to do much with them, because I wouldn't have the mathematical means to do correlation analyses and all the things that you can do by comparing vast data sets.
But that kind of research would be possible. And a new kind of time, quality of time research would be possible through the world right now.
Okay, I can easily see that possibility. I can also see the number of people who are really interested in those, quite the very small, not hundreds of thousands or millions, maybe a dozen of them.
Interested in this kind of research?
Well, one thing worth talking about is, and it seems clear that this is a general quality of the late 20th century, that opportunity creates, that as some of us are moving off into accessing the central computers at Kiev State University, and so on,
some of us can't read the ingredients. And a lot of people are going to fall through the web. They've fallen through every web in history.
And so then, an issue emerges. Is this something being created for an elite? And what kind of an elite is it? It's certainly not an elite of wealth. It's an elite of intelligence.
Now, notice that throughout history, the most oppressed group has not been the Jews, the Irish, the Black. They've taken their hits. But the most consistently oppressed group of people throughout human history have been smart people.
And now comes a tool for smart people, utterly incomprehensible to dullards, that is essentially the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb. And if, in fact, consciousness expansion is to be our salvation, then this must be, this is chaotic as the web is.
What it is, is it's a controlled psychedelic experience, spreading through the populace at the highest levels of the intelligentsia.
It's more like a one-way psychedelic experience, that after one hit of LSD or something, your mind is altered permanently. After you have browsed and gotten used to this phenomenon, it's almost impossible to forget it.
Or ever go back.
So, since you can speak from experience, and I certainly can't, what breakthroughs in your life have happened, other than the vision of the world, like what it could be in the future, the visionary side of it, what actual benefits have you derived from it?
Well, the most, I think, in our context of common activities and so on, I would say the most evident and significant aspect in my life, affected by the World Wide Web, is my motivation for authoring.
I certainly am ready to give up writing books or intellectual activity other than sitting in a garden speaking as we are right now.
If the only result is publishing a book that's read by 1,000 people or publishing an article that's read by 100 people, this is an awful lot of work for no result, whatever.
Even though I love the process of making books. And there's nothing more I want to do. I have 1,000 ideas for writing books. There's just no reason to continue.
Now, however, I see that I can freely self-publish all my creative energy and reach, my World Wide Web site has been cruised by probably 100,000, 100,000 people just in one year.
And he sells advanced mathematical software. What if he was selling dildos?
So the opportunity of reaching people, which people may be unaffected by what I write, and that's okay, but at least there will be the possibility that somehow motivates me to do more work.
Furthermore, using electronic tools, preparing material to be published electronically is very seamless, so I find I can go at a much greater rate.
I'm planning to do about four volumes a year. I have a dozen ideas waiting as I always have, but for the first time, I anticipate completing them all shortly and making them available to people who will actually access them, discuss them, and do something similar in response.
They'll publish a book back.
Heaven forbid! I mean, I have the dreadful prospect awaiting me when I return home next week from Hawaii of a stack of mail, several feet high, which I know will contain at least 20 bulky envelopes, which will contain exactly the kind of thing you're talking about.
People's creative work in progress. Theories of the universe, why Einstein went wrong, why evolution should be understood in a new way.
I understand, too. You don't have to do that.
Why set has insights on a great many things that I ought to be interested in.
The idea of a torrent of this stuff pouring into my computer is enough to put me off the table, because the amount of creativity around already is far too much, in my opinion. I don't know that we need more.
You know, but out of this stack of 30 feet high of manuscripts, you might find one valuable book.
Among all these cranks, there'll be one Steve Rook.
I know, but then one would be in the unenviable position of the editor of the magazine.
I mean, I know we get a lot of this mail through the post, but, you know, talk to people like Noetic Sciences or New Age magazine, and what comes into them, you know, in terms of unsolicited manuscripts, is enormous.
And the editor has the unenviable task of looking through all this stuff and trying to decide which is just...
Well, I'm grateful they're doing it, and that I didn't have to do it myself.
On the World Wide Web, we each have to be our own editor. That's a lengthy...
No, people will publish whatever they please without restraint, and then people will browse whatever they please without restraint.
And what we're talking about is a thousand-fold increase of creativity all over the planet by people who've never had the opportunity before to create anything.
They put a window into the World Wide Web in a public place in Los Angeles, and who crowded around it were gang members who felt that they had the opportunity to participate in society for the first time.
This creativity can't be bad.
As an informational environment, what's being said is you get much more interesting evolutionary situations out of species-dense environments than very sparsely inhabited environments.
I think what Ralph is saying is that the ideological environment is about to turn into the equivalent of an Amazonian rainforest.
Exactly.
Where it has been an Arctic tundra.
Exactly.
Yes.
Well, yes, but it means that the amount of time somebody's going to have to spend doing this editing function.
I mean, when there's a vast overload of information...
Nobody has to edit anything because this is not...
They have to select, though.
Only the readers.
Exactly.
But it means each...
I mean, I...
I just...
I just give thanks every day for the fact there are editors filtering out the vast amount of stuff from newspapers and magazines, so I don't have to read all the stuff that's submitted to them.
And I'm sure sometimes they make mistakes, and sometimes they have fascist inclinations, and sometimes they're...
Well, you've been edited out a lot.
I've been edited out a lot myself.
I'm a victim of this process, but...
You know, so have lots of other people.
And the...
I just don't see how anyone could navigate through this total overload of creativity.
Well, there are robots.
The thing, Ralph, or I mean, Rupert, you've been edited out a lot.
If someone's interested in Rupert Sheldrake, their only choice now is to approach you through your critics, who have published widely.
If they could simply enter the word Sheldrake and have your words before them, rather than the interpretation of your words via hostile media, many people would come to you.
They wouldn't say, well, he must be a crank, or Nature magazine doesn't approve, or so forth and so on.
Well, they can right now just look out Sheldrake and books in print and order the book in a bookstore, which isn't already there.
And if everyone can get, this is a trivial point compared with the elevated tone of our discourse so far, but if everybody could get copies of all our books free of charge on the World Wide Web, how are we going to pay for the grocery bills that will enable us to have enough metabolic energy to switch on the computer?
Well, my publisher is petrified that I'll put my book on the World Wide Web, and of course, his fear is justified because I am going to put it on the World Wide Web.
But here is my idea about that, that I'm trying to reassure my publisher with.
If anyone goes into the bookstore and finds your book on the shelf, they can stand there and read it on the hook and not buy it.
Their only reason for buying it is they really want to buy it and take it home, and it would be exactly the same on the World Wide Web,
because it's very uncomfortable to sit in front of a terminal and read an entire book.
That's just not the idea of the thing. If you browse a book and you like it, you'll go to the bookstore and buy it. That's what I think.
Meanwhile, there'll be many manuscripts which publishers and editors have rejected, like some of your books were rejected and then they waited for a long time.
Meanwhile, they could have been read by everybody on the World Wide Web who wouldn't mind standing on the hook in the bookstore as it were,
if there was simply no alternative. So I think personally that my book sales, my royalty statements, will be enhanced by putting entire books on the World Wide Web.
There are these informatic robots going around indexing things, and this is a terrific relief of individual people.
For example, in the past, I get stacks of mail where people are requesting the reprint of an article in some journal which is inaccessible to them,
and I've usually responded by making a copy and sending it. In fact, I've been spending over these past years the average of $6,000 a year
just copying materials and having them mailed out. That's the cost of the secretary, the postage, and the copying.
Now, all of that will be rendered unnecessary because people are not even going to write to me asking for the article because they know it's on the World Wide Web.
Well, some of them don't already, but they soon will because I'm going to have business cards made that contain nothing but my name and my World Wide Web address.
Yes, okay, but now, coming to your point about the meriosphere and the time of the show there, I can't quite get, again, how more information, more interactive will lead to this,
since, as I understand, at least through the more mystical aspects of human unity, they're not things that are necessarily mediated by information transfer,
by the digital text or audio.
Well, now you're disagreeing with Teilhard de Chardin, not with me.
But I agree that there's a terrific possibility that this opportunity I'm talking about turns out to be a big flop,
maybe the biggest flop in history. I don't think it will, but that's one of the dangers,
and that's why our responsibility is to at least check it out, browse around there, and see if we think, after that,
that there's an opportunity or no, and if so, to give it some creative energy,
because what it will be in the future will depend on what kind of people would, whatever motives, actually go there.
Okay, well, I ought to be in instant combat, because what I'm in the process of doing through the Seven Experiments book
is trying to launch a whole grassroots research project, a resurgence of amateur and grassroots science.
Perfect opportunity for you.
That involves going directly to people and around institutions.
And also, people who are doing similar research things, networking up with each other.
I only have this to say, though, as I mentioned before, my experience so far with the internet,
trying to find people who have telepathic caps, that may when they're telephoning, a specific request,
was that mostly what I got was junk comments about it from armchair sceptics,
two pieces of information that were relevant from people who failed to respond rather inquire.
So, I think most of the people who are the most active and interesting informants about their caps at the moment
are people who are the last to join the world by breath.
They're not computer nerds. They're people who like keeping dogs.
Well, we're talking here about a creative process that I imagine would be on the scale of three to five years
before coming to fruition. And I can well imagine a website called Animal Magic,
where a lot of the things that you'll be paying your secretary to do will take place automatically.
It's called alt.pets and alt.cats, and it already exists.
Those exist? Yeah. What is alt.pets?
A huge conference on the internet.
What's that? It's a news group. How this works is you write a letter and it's posted there,
and everyone's letters ever written are posted there in sequence. You can read them or not.
You can scan them for keywords and only read the interesting ones.
And you can ask for stories of telepathic cats.
Well, that's what happened. It was in the cat network. This question was asked about telepathic cats.
And it was much less successful than my peers through BBC radio programs, newspapers, magazines, etc.
Well, the World Wide Web is a totally different structure than news groups.
Because you can post things which elicit responses without doing any work.
I mean, you have your articles and books and so on on the subject, the experiments that you've suggested,
and the description of information that you would like to collect and where to send it, which might not be you,
and all of this is posted there. And people who browse by are not necessarily people who habitually respond to a particular news group.
It's sort of a much more horizontally diffuse structure.
But I'm surprised, Ralph, that you say you think it could be subverted or derailed.
I think it's just built into the evolutionary and morphogenetic unfolding of the cosmos,
and that it could no more be stopped than mitochondria or societal organization.
There is some powerful faith. Yes, I agree to a point.
I think that, as you said, the internet began as a military network.
And it depended on, well, first came the Unix operating system.
This was made by the people working for the telephone company.
I think that these different bits of creativity that finally we see assembled into the World Wide Web,
something of tremendous importance, that each of these things was done in such a way,
almost unconsciously by the people, with various elements that are inexplicable at the moment,
that were the essential elements to make the next step possible.
For example, Unix's multitasking. It automatically has network protocols built in.
All these things were necessary. And I think that the creative people, for example,
Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web idea, all of these people were inspired by angels.
That is to say, that a divine mandate is somehow manifest, consciously or unconsciously, through them,
so that when they are doing their constructive, creative work with these hardware and software bits,
they do that in such a way that eventually they can be plugged in and all this will work.
So it does seem to be actually a divine architecture which is manifesting in this thing,
just like in the orders of nature, in biological evolution.
It's so much like biological evolution, and it's so appropriate that we should discuss it here in Hawaii,
which has one of the more recent islands.
And yet still you doubt the apotheosis in 2012.
I'm not going to carry on about the battle of good and evil and the fallen angels and so on,
but I do think it's quite possible that something very, very disappointing will happen to this internet in the future.
For example, it's recently under discussion whether every access should be charged as a long distance call by the homecoming.
That right away would destroy the democracy that makes the World Wide Web so exciting.
I think if they made that decision, a parallel organization would offer an alternate service.
Alternate. There is alternate already.
Alternate. There you see, it's unstoppable.
It's unstoppable.
It's like DNA. Once it's there, stand back.
But I can see it leading to a great proliferation, like speciation in the Amazon, which you compared it with.
Right.
A vast number of species.
It could, I mean, already we have an incredible speciational interest, just going to any magazine store,
and there's tens of thousands of magazines on incredible specialist topics.
Rabbit breeding, orchid flying.
It's wonderful, but it makes us love the whole pet peeve, you know?
Of course it does, but the thing is that this internet,
which could lead to a vast proliferation of special interest groups, a speciation of, you know, subcultures and so on worldwide.
It's, it doesn't have what Daya de Chanda had in his vision of the mirror sphere, which is not just thousands and thousands of little groups of special interest communicating worldwide, but some unifying principle of humanity, and that I don't get.
I can, I can easily see how there could be groups discussing experiments with psychic dogs and cats.
That's why we've got to get busy and put some out there.
Well, because the whole nature of it is based on endless proliferation or fragmentation or differentiation,
which is actually one of the processes in evolution.
It leads to millions of species of people in the Amazon.
But what does that add up to?
It's one of the biggest and most possible problems for all theorists of evolution.
What's the reason for all this diversity?
Why do we need, or why does evolution need this incredible diversity?
Since we like to think that the entire path of cosmic evolution for billions of years is ourselves, heading towards this crucial point in 2012.
And that this seems to be, you know, there's a human focus based in our thinking about evolution.
Tyler de Chanda exhibited this humanistic bias very strongly that the mirror sphere was to do with some human process.
Yeah.
Well, that rather leaves out all the millions of species of beetles.
Now, here we have something that's like a sort of vast speciation within the human world of information transfer,
made possible by these groups, this net.
But where is there any unifying principle that could be,
and what we, what the whole modern world seems to be based on is,
you know, there's two principles.
One is global capitalism and unification of markets and that kind of thing.
And the other is endless fragmentation into special interest groups, nationalist groups and that kind of thing.
And, and it's rather hard for me to see where the unifying whole would be in this,
other than the technology that makes it possible, which will be owned by Rupert Murdoch.
It creates a super organism.
It dissolves national boundaries, it dissolves class controls, religious controls.
It creates a super organism.
It may not be that it's going to make the world better for white male intellectuals.
It may be that that's not its purpose at all.
It may be that it has an emergent, um, telos of its own.
And that asking what it's for would be like a meatless asking what is evolution for.
Uh, I think it will supersede this.
I don't know how much monkey meat will be connected to the world wide web when the web is complete.
It may shed the monkey meat somewhere along the way.
Here we diverge.
I, I, I don't think that at all.
I, I, I think that the goal in my own little view here of what's coming of all this,
and this is why I said it'd be, it's possibly a huge flop.
It'd be a huge, uh, disappointment if Rupert's fantasy turned out to be the actual future of the computer revolution.
What I see, its future is, is that somehow the ex, exalted self-image of humanity will be corrected.
That we will end up after a spiritual transformation in, um, a better relationship with the biosphere.
So that we can have a future.
And, and how to achieve that, it depends on somehow, um, fantastic acceleration in the process of education.
So that people get information, get what I'm struggling to put on the world wide web as fast as possible.
Ecological models that people can actually play in ecological games like SimCity,
in which you see what happens if you cut down the Amazon jungle completely and, and so on.
That disinformation becomes widely accessible in a form that doesn't even require literacy.
And, and the, the world wide web itself, I think, will become extinct in a very short time.
This is a transitional phase in which, um, a divine process is set in motion,
giving us the necessary, uh, ingredients now missing in our system,
which allow us to evolve to a species which can actually coexist sensitively with the environment.
Yeah, unless you put your finger on it.
We're not, we're not going to be downloaded into this virtual reality.
I don't think so.
We're going to end up without electricity and having a, a, a stable population.
The, the population explosion could end, let's say, because of the world wide web.
This is my greatest dream.
Well.
By making people aware of the population explosion.
And giving them information.
Many people don't know, don't know anything.
In many cultures you can't even ask because to ask would be to draw attention to yourself
and get great, uh, uh, a program laid upon you.
Yes, here it's arriving in a brown wrapper.
I can't quite see how in this, you know, in the most impoverished villages of East Africa,
you know, access to the world wide web is going to leap over primary education, literacy,
and all these things which they don't have.
And you've got to be literate.
You've got to speak English.
You know, the, you've got to have the access to this technology.
You've got to be trained.
I mean, I think this is always going to be a...
Well, that's all today.
I mean, you should think of this, it's on a parallel track with many other greatly innovative
processes.
For instance, nanotechnology.
I mean, today to access the web, you need a desk full of equipment.
Tomorrow, something will be glued to your thumbnail.
And, uh, the, I think we're retreating from three-dimensional space.
And that, uh, nanotechnological robots, such as we discussed the other night, are going
to give us an incredible insight into how nature works.
Nature is taking it all back.
And all that will survive at the human world are those portions that are able to mirror nature
sufficiently to survive the winoing.
And, uh, you know, gasoline engines, plutonium technologies, uh, these things will not survive
the winoing.
But nature is a world wide web.
That's, that was the first world wide web.
And in a sense what this is, is a kind of integration.
I think you can think anything you want, if you're a hummingbird, an ant, a beetle.
But we build in 3D.
And this has set off an avalanche of problems for ourselves, for the environment.
Uh, if we retract from three-dimensional space, and move into this informational space, virtual
space, cyberspace, the planet, heave an enormous cyberspace.
The pressure is released.
And we avoid distinction.
This thing, extinction, this thing we, uh, find so precious.
Our humanness can be preserved along with nature.
But only at the expense of abandoning the mechanistic three-dimensional technologies
that have carried us this far.
And the world wide web begins to look like a mind.
It begins to look like a virtual, uh, reality.
I think it's probably equivalent to animals leaving the sea.
We are leaving 3D.
Occasionally we leap into cyberspace, gulp the rich oxygen there of information for a few
minutes, then turn off the computer and fall back.
This may be the shamanic journey of the future.
Yeah.
So we have to collapse into the 2D of a TV screen in order to reach out.
No, no.
The 2D of the TV screen is simply a door, a gate, a window.
It's a window pane.
You go through the window, and then you're in this fantastic multi-dimensional space,
which is, has all the dimensions of a DNT trip or something.
It's like, astonishingly rich.
And its feeling of reality is enormous.
You can travel around, and although things are changing fast, you know where you are,
you recognize certain mainstays, skeletal structures that don't change.
You learn your way around, traveling on the skeleton.
And we will have a different relationship to memory.
I mean, by the time you're 25 years old, if you've been working on your virtual environment,
which is a sense, your self, your unique self, experientially the thing will be the size of Manhattan.
Yes.
You know?
Your hobbies, your trips.
My private Manhattan.
Private fantasy.
It will be vast.
And every human being on Earth will have one of these, and it won't require the cutting of a single tree,
the extracting of a single drop of petroleum.
Well, the trouble is, I think there's something lacking with this vision,
and I think that's probably the reason why 98% of the people on Earth are male nerds.
Because there's two points.
Firstly, it would be great if what you say is true, and it could mean that people could live in local communities.
It seems to me the way forward is local economies.
And most green theoreticians think that the only way forward is to...
I think it would be a good thing.
localize economies, minimize travel, minimize movements and so on, and to minimize our impact
on the environment, have more food produced locally and so forth, local economies. That
could be that this virtual space you're talking about and this traveling around the world and
these computers would remove people's mood to travel around so much, and to have global
access without going there. But the fact of the matter is that I find myself that I actually
like coming in person to Hawaii and like being in person talking to you two, even though
this involves expending vast amounts of aviation fuel. But this is your vacation. You don't
go out flying in New York to hassle our alive agent. No, but the thing is that I think that
this need for not just multi-dimensional virtual experience, but actual experience of bodily
being there, is very, very deep in human beings, right? Can't quite see how it's going to replace
it.
Not replace it, it may just decrease it slightly.
Do you think so? I mean, is there any evidence that people on the World Wide Web actually spend
more, spend less on travel, spend less on, you know, living more ecological...
No, no, no. This is not a matter of evidence, you see, because the thing is in the process
of creation, but what it will become is what we dream it to be. We're going to participate
in its creation, if it has any potential whatsoever for good, which I think is potential, not only
its potential is enormous, but we have nothing else which compares. In fact, one thing it does
is illuminate how feeble are all other proposed solutions, because they are just theories involving
nobody on the planet. So you have a theory, an interesting one, for limiting the population
explosion. Terence has another theory. We've said these theories, we've put them in books
that are read by a few people, and we've seen that we are totally impotent, in fact, in participating
in the future, in the creation of the future, in whatever we think we do. Fly on the airplane
or not, fly on the airplane or not, is actually not going to include the outcome whatsoever.
But participation in the world wide web might, even if it's only a long shot, a 1% chance.
It dwarfs enormously any other chance that we've got. I'll do a proof of concept experiment
out here. I'm going to create a life that makes it unnecessary for me to leave this island,
indeed practically unnecessary for me to leave this hill, and yet I am determined to, at the
same time, continue to expand my influence, be read by more people, discussed by more people,
and influence more people, because I will cease to speak to groups of 45 people in people's
living rooms, and I will begin to speak to hundreds of thousands of generally more intelligent
people, who are accessing me and my ideas through the net.
Yes, well, free of charge, yes. And I see you next year, reduced to digging up fairly edible roots
in this forest. Gnawing at the bark of trees.
Well, it is possible to sell things on the web, and it is possible to ask for donations
on the web, and so on. And these are the two principal ways we have bought groceries in the
past, so that we don't have to dig tubers. And our request, I mean, writing grant proposals
is terrible more. I've given it up completely. At the same time, I'd really like to receive
a grant. I'm very loathe to waste a minute asking for one. So, I think that the enhancement
of my visibility on the World Wide Web, and if there is any merit whatsoever in what's
doing, and as it's realized by people, I mean philanthropists, will be cruising the
World Wide Web. Looking for opportunities to give money away. Absolutely. Looking for opportunities
to get the most bang for the buck. Well, I think it's very important to plan the parameters,
but I think one should expect that it will exceed all plans and blueprints. I think it has,
it's part of the culture. It is culture. And in that sense, it has a life and a morphology
of its own. No technology in human history has ever had the effects that its inventors
proposed it would have. And no technology in human history has ever affected so many people
so quickly as this one does. Even if you don't own a computer, you don't realize the world
is working better because your accountant is on the web, your broker is on the web, your
doctor is on the web. You may not be, but your life is substantially improved by the existences.
Your agent is on the web auctioning your works. Yes. Well, all has made it true. But for the thing
to, and what human beings need is not just information. They need relationship, community, etc.
All that work will continue as usual. Won't be diminished a bit by the addition of a new mode.
Better to be on the web six hours a day than watching the damn television, which is what
people do and call communities easily. Well, I agree. Compared to television, this can't be worse.
I think half an hour a day on the web or half an hour, three times a week on the web would
very, very significantly enhance a lot of lives, like physical exercise.
So in terms of actual community relationship, child rearing and stuff, somehow that's all
left in its present state. Absolutely.
Which isn't very satisfactory. Absolutely. There will be a subtle change, at best, in which
people become more aware of other people. Far away. Yeah. That it becomes not so far away.
The world shrinking. But I mean, it won't actually affect the problems to do with
people's marriages, families, neighborhoods, crime on the streets, and that kind of thing.
No. All that would be the same. This is just a terrific increase in intelligence of the species,
that's all. But it would be, it's much more restrictive than the transformation you talked
about in the first place, then, you see, because what really matters in terms of daily living?
Well, if a spiritual transformation took place, then I think that some of the other problems
might be ameliorated significantly, most especially crime.
And, and anyway, Ralph talked about the four levels on the internet.
We're on the web. That's today. Tomorrow is level five.
At Seacraft, it was very clear to me that 3D imaging is what's happening,
and that the internet is real estate. You walk into it.
Various forms of visual and head-mounted display problems are all being solved,
and it's very soon, literally, the computer screen will be a doorway.
Yes, the World Wide Web is headed for virtual reality. There's no doubt about that.
It's already in construction.
That. And then, you know, the difference between Newtonian space and cultural space would be seamless.
Yes.
I look forward to a day when people will live in an ecologically balanced earth,
a few hundred million healthy, well-fed, intelligent people who will be essentially
at a very aboriginal level of cultural expression.
But if you transpose yourself into the body of one of these people,
you will notice that when they close their eyes, there are menus hanging in space.
And those menus are the gateway to the cultural dimension, which is not to be seen or touched anywhere.
It's in the mind, not my mind, the collective mind.
It's what it is. It's the creation of a telepathic collectivity.
I think it will be mainly dominated, at least for children, by things like Sonic Hedgehog
and the banal fantasies of video game makers.
Don't you think that that, it will simply channel people into...
Well, it's not driven from the top down, the way all these other mediums are.
You know, electrical power, distributed from a station.
Radio, sent from a central transmitter.
TV, same deal. This is nowhere.
The games for children will be made up by children.
They won't be sold by anybody because creativity becomes so easy.
There's already a third-grade classroom on the World Wide Web
where the children are publishing their drawings.
And children take to this stuff.
They have no bias. They have no inertia toward print culture.
They just take to this stuff.
The wiring to jack into this thing has somehow been built in from the beginning.
They're so facile. They're so good at it.
Reading is actually a very peculiar, abstract,
abstract activity that requires great training.
Yes.
While being on the web, any primate can do it once they're shown the ropes.
Well, there.
So there you have it.
Let's turn it off.
The king said to the most, sorry.
You're listening to the Psychedelic Salon
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
Back in 1994, I wouldn't have agreed with Terence
when he said that any primate can use the internet.
But today I'm in complete agreement.
Shortly after turning three years old,
one of my grandchildren began using the mouse on her parents' computer.
She's four now and knows the difference between a PC mouse and a Mac mouse.
Not only that, she's been able to find her way around some very complex children's sites quite easily.
And I've noticed that many of her little friends are equally skilled in accessing the internet,
at four years old.
It's as Ralph, I think it was, said,
we seem to actually have been pre-wired for this experience.
Now, one thing I feel I should point out, though,
is that Terence was wrong when he said that the internet was designed to withstand a nuclear attack.
That's an old urban myth that has been shut down numerous times.
And if you want to know more about the early days of the internet from its very beginning at BBN,
then a good place to start is with the book
Where Wizards Stay Up Late, The Origins of the Internet, by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon.
It's a really good read if you're into geek stories.
And I actually worked with and know a lot of the people mentioned in that book.
So I can verify a lot of those stories.
And one of those stories has to do with the urban myth that Terence so blithely passed along.
I'm also sure that you noticed how all three of them had the impression that the web was going to basically remain a guy thing.
But from what I know, it didn't work out that way.
And today, there are about the same number of women on the net as men.
I could be wrong about that, but that's what my impression is.
And, of course, Terence's idea that it wouldn't destroy the environment has kind of gone by the wayside
now that we understand how much of the world's electrical power is dedicated to keeping the internet humming along day and night.
But back in 94, I doubt if anyone was even close in their forecasts for where the net was going.
Recently, John P posted the following comment on OneMansBlog.com that points out how fast this technology has evolved in the past 15 years.
He said,
At that time, people were using 14.4 baud modems to dial into an internet service provider and read pages on the web.
And the number of sites was only in the hundreds or possibly thousands.
Compare that to today.
There are 160 million sites and I visit them on my 10,000 baud modem cable connection, a 700 times increase.
My house has more bandwidth than the backbone in 1994.
I was also happy to hear that Ralph was talking about Teilhard Desjardins in relation to the internet and back in 1994 on top of it.
I didn't get it quite so early on.
In fact, I didn't publish my book, The Spirit of the Internet, Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness until 2000.
And in it, my main premise was the correlation between the way in which the internet was evolving and how this was reflected in Teilhard's work.
So it was thrilling for me to hear this confirmation of my ideas coming from Ralph and coming so long before I picked it up myself.
Which again leads me to think that I have yet to have my first original thought.
I'm just really good at picking up on other people's thoughts that are out in the Neuosphere, as Teilhard would have us believe.
Now, if you would like to hear how Terrence's and Ralph's thoughts about the net evolved over the next five years after this conversation we just heard,
you can hear their two hour talk titled The World Wide Web and the Millennium, which I podcast three years ago as podcast numbers 19 and 20.
And, of course, this was recorded in 1999, five years after the talk we just heard.
And you can download both of those for free, of course, through iTunes or some other aggregator or directly from our website, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
Now, I plan to read a couple of emails today, but a few days ago I learned that my friend Fraser Clark died last week.
And so I'm not feeling very talkative right now.
When I first learned of his death via Facebook, actually, I thought it was a prank.
And I still can't believe it, but that's the sad truth, I'm afraid.
And Fraser's death hit me on several levels, including the sobering thought that I was older than him.
Now, by the time you hear this podcast, Fraser's online wake and funeral will most likely be over.
But you'll be hearing more about him from me in the months ahead.
I guess the main headline right now that I would write for Fraser is to say that he was Tim Leary, Terence McKenna and a dozen other of his peers all rolled into one.
And Fraser Clark, in my humble opinion, was a man of mythical proportions, and I'll miss him greatly.
So right now, I'm going to take a little break and go back and re-listen to my podcast, number 45, which featured Fraser giving a lecture at Stanford University here in California.
It's titled, Rave Culture and the End of the World, As We Know It.
And it still remains one of my all-time favorite podcasts, even over most of Terence's talks.
I'll have more to say about Fraser Clark in future podcasts, where I'll collect some more of his material for you to listen to.
But right now, I've still got to absorb the fact that he's moved on to his next big adventure.
For many of us, Fraser was either a mentor, role model, teacher, wizard, sorcerer, or all of the above.
There simply was no other like him, and we will all miss him dearly.
I'm going to close now with a piece of music I played once before.
It's called Miss About You, and was written and performed by my friend Queer Ninja.
Some of you know him from the Sounds of Worldwide Weed podcast.
And if I'm not mistaken, the vocals are by his friend Sharon.
When I asked Ninja for permission to use it again, he said, of course, and he added,
Fraser Clark was a fascinating person who tried his hardest to get the light and love to us all.
And I might add, he succeeded magnificently.
Without a doubt, there are literally millions of members of the psychedelic community who have benefited either directly or indirectly from the inspired genius of Fraser Clark.
For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
Sail on, dear Fraser.
We'll catch up with you when we can.
This is nice.
Lighten your arm and smile.
You're the secret.