Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
04:36 – Terence McKenna introduces the Trialogue concept and history
08:46 – Rupert Sheldrake introduces himself, talks about his theory of morphogenic resonance, and tells of his first meeting with Terence and Ralph
20:16 – Terence talks about his fascination with natural history, gives a little more background on his life, and explains how he came to develop his theory of novelty
32:50 – Ralph Abraham tells how he and Terence met, how Rupert joined the group, and he gives an overview of chaos theory and how it opened up previously unavailable areas of investigation to mathematical analysis. Then he explains how the three of them will attempt to conduct this, their first public trialogue.
46:55 – Terence
* “The flutter of the moth’s wings can trigger a hurricane. This is not a poetic statement. This is a fact of the matter within this kind of description of nature.”
* “The world is not an engine running down toward a heat death, but a tremendous kaleidoscope of unpredictable, creative, open-ended activity on every level.”
* “How the world fits together, it fits together through the infusion of its invisible soul.”
52:33 – Rupert tells “the story of the bunny.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
Well, today’s program is the first of what will be a long series of podcasts of the famous trialogues held by Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake.
00:00:35 ►
I first heard about these lengthy conversations when I read a little book that provided a
00:00:40 ►
few highlights of the first two public trialogues that were held at Esalen in September of 1989
00:00:46 ►
and again a year later.
00:00:48 ►
Although the
00:00:49 ►
book was published in 1992,
00:00:52 ►
I didn’t come across it
00:00:54 ►
until the summer of 1998
00:00:55 ►
when I was attending a workshop that
00:00:57 ►
Terrence McKenna was holding at
00:00:59 ►
Omega Institute in upstate New York.
00:01:02 ►
The bookstore there had all
00:01:03 ►
kinds of interesting items that us
00:01:05 ►
East Coasters seldom came across. Books like Sasha Shulgin’s Pakal, along with copies of most of
00:01:12 ►
Terrence’s work. Since Ralph Abraham and Terrence McKenna were going to be conducting a dialogue
00:01:18 ►
one night while I was there, on a whim I bought a copy of Triologues at the Edge of the West.
00:01:24 ►
On a whim, I bought a copy of Triologues at the Edge of the West.
00:01:29 ►
Mainly, I have to admit, to get the two of them to autograph it for me.
00:01:34 ►
Well, I got their autographs all right, but I also got a whole lot more.
00:01:41 ►
For one thing, their dialogue that hot August night was the inspiration for me to write The Spirit of the Internet.
00:01:46 ►
The other was the great ideas that I found in the Triologues book.
00:01:49 ►
By the way, if you would like to hear the dialogue between Terrence and Ralph that night,
00:01:52 ►
all you have to do is go to my website
00:01:54 ►
and download podcasts number 19 and 20.
00:01:57 ►
And I’ll give you the address URL at the end of the program.
00:02:01 ►
So now we flash forward eight years
00:02:04 ►
to a meeting that Bruce Dahmer and I had
00:02:06 ►
with Ralph Abraham a week ago.
00:02:08 ►
And if you can, just try to imagine my astonishment
00:02:12 ►
to be back face-to-face with Ralph,
00:02:15 ►
who I’d only previously encountered
00:02:17 ►
just long enough to get his autograph.
00:02:20 ►
And there find myself the recipient
00:02:22 ►
of a big, dusty old box of cassette tapes,
00:02:26 ►
which were Ralph’s collection of the majority of the public trilogues that the three of them held.
00:02:31 ►
And to tell the truth, I’m still flabbergasted at my good fortune.
00:02:35 ►
The reason I’m telling this story is for those of you who may find yourselves right now in the situation I was in just ten years ago.
00:02:45 ►
At that time, I was still living in the cubicle world of corporate America.
00:02:50 ►
Granted, I was earning a nice salary and had a generous expense account
00:02:54 ►
and was flying around the world in an attempt to help my company
00:02:58 ►
get people interested in doing business on the Internet.
00:03:01 ►
But in my quiet moments, to be quite honest, I was really a miserable
00:03:05 ►
wreck.
00:03:07 ►
And how I got from there to here still seems like a strange and largely unplanned journey,
00:03:12 ►
but that’s not the point I’m trying to make.
00:03:15 ►
The point is that no matter how bad the situation you think you’re in right now, even if you
00:03:20 ►
have no resources and don’t have the connections you think you need to be able to move into the flow of the worldwide psychedelic community,
00:03:29 ►
you can still do it as long as you don’t give up on your dreams.
00:03:33 ►
Well, enough of my story, I guess. At least for now.
00:03:38 ►
Let’s get on with the trilogues.
00:03:40 ►
So here’s my plan.
00:03:42 ►
Each week I’m going to try to, first of all, podcast some of the many other talks I’ve got stacked up,
00:03:48 ►
along with a few live interviews I’ve scheduled.
00:03:51 ►
Then I’m going to attempt to get two more podcasts out each week,
00:03:54 ►
those being part of this long series of trilogues that these three unique minds held during the period from 1989 to 1998.
00:04:04 ►
My plan is to publish them in the approximate order in which they were given
00:04:08 ►
so that we can follow the progression of their thinking over that decade.
00:04:13 ►
In all, I’ve got about 50 hours or so of this material,
00:04:17 ►
so this project is going to take a little time to complete,
00:04:20 ►
but I think it’s going to be fun and an interesting series.
00:04:24 ►
So, without any further ado, let’s get right to today’s program,
00:04:28 ►
which is from the introduction tape to the series, appropriately titled,
00:04:33 ►
Cast of Characters.
00:04:36 ►
This is an experiment.
00:04:39 ►
It’s also sort of living theater,
00:04:43 ►
because Rupert and Ralph and I have by natural
00:04:48 ►
inclination been discussing the kind of things we’re going to discuss this
00:04:53 ►
weekend privately and with each other in many circumstances and all times of the
00:05:00 ►
day and night for a number of years. So it’s our natural mode.
00:05:06 ►
It’s just that we’ve never done it before
00:05:08 ►
with a lot of people looking on.
00:05:11 ►
So hopefully we can attain to the level of spontaneity
00:05:16 ►
and non-recursive chance-taking
00:05:21 ►
that goes on in those kinds of conversations maybe that’s
00:05:28 ►
enough to say I should introduce my two co-presenters most of you know them
00:05:35 ►
already of course Rupert Sheldrake is the author of a new science of life and the presence of the past books which stirred more controversy
00:05:48 ►
in British biology than it had seen in 30 years and got the British journal nature to call his
00:05:56 ►
first book a candidate for burning which suddenly turned the thought of Rupert Sheldrake into a civil liberties issue
00:06:07 ►
because that’s pretty strong talk
00:06:09 ►
Rupert’s idea
00:06:12 ►
which he will I’m sure unfold for you
00:06:15 ►
in his inimitable style
00:06:17 ►
is very dear to my heart
00:06:19 ►
because they dovetail and support each other
00:06:24 ►
we’re both rowing our canoes the same way.
00:06:29 ►
Rupert and our colleague of many years,
00:06:35 ►
standing in my acquaintance since 1972,
00:06:40 ►
a hell-raiser from the 60s
00:06:45 ►
the man who
00:06:46 ►
well no I won’t even say that
00:06:48 ►
a hell raiser from the 60s
00:06:52 ►
a man who brought mathematics to a new fever pitch
00:06:56 ►
in the field of dynamics
00:06:59 ►
and systems modeling
00:07:02 ►
Ralph has been sort of the rock of Gibraltar
00:07:09 ►
of the psychedelic end of eggheadism,
00:07:14 ►
at least for many people that I’ve lived around.
00:07:21 ►
So he runs the Center for the Study of visual mathematics in Santa Cruz is a professor at UC
00:07:31 ►
Santa Cruz author of foundations of mechanics and countless other books plays papers and so forth and so on. So it will be the three of us attempting to sort of weave together
00:07:49 ►
our different perspectives on a very large
00:07:54 ►
and sort of hard to grapple with paradigm shift
00:07:59 ►
that is taking place in the way the Western mind
00:08:03 ►
does its business with reality and you know it may be
00:08:08 ►
the last paradigm shift we ever get so when this cat lands it’s going to have to land on its feet
00:08:18 ►
because immediately facing it will be the theater of activity that is the consequence of the old way of doing it,
00:08:27 ►
which was a very bad way of doing it. So we have to be prepared for a whole new dynamic,
00:08:35 ►
whole new way of linking systems together, thinking about solutions, thinking about the past
00:08:41 ►
and ourselves in the world.
00:08:43 ►
solutions, thinking about the past and ourselves in the world.
00:08:52 ►
Right, well, I’m Rupert Sheldrake. As you’ve all gathered, I’m here with my wife, Jo.
00:08:54 ►
Where is she? Oh, there she is.
00:09:01 ►
I just said I was here with you and you vanished, but then you appeared just on cue.
00:09:09 ►
And with our little boy Merlin, who you may see around, he’s nearly two, and with our babysitter from England who’s called Mandy, who’s just 18.
00:09:14 ►
Six weeks ago she was in her village in Yorkshire
00:09:18 ►
and then she came to work with us and didn’t realise that within a few weeks she’d be at Esalen.
00:09:24 ►
Well, she’s here too.
00:09:26 ►
I’m a biologist by background.
00:09:30 ►
I studied biology because I was interested in animals and plants.
00:09:35 ►
And when I was studying it at Cambridge, I began to have terrible doubts about what I
00:09:43 ►
was doing because everything that really interested me about animals and plants
00:09:47 ►
somehow vanished when I got into the biochemistry laboratories.
00:09:52 ►
I was majoring in biochemistry, and I did a PhD in biochemistry there.
00:09:57 ►
But there’s a curious thing about biochemistry.
00:09:59 ►
You’re doing biochemistry to study the molecular basis of life,
00:10:03 ►
yet the very first thing you do in the laboratory is kill whatever you’re studying, grind it up, extract the enzymes, and then
00:10:10 ►
in a test tube study the properties of some of these molecules extracted from this killed
00:10:15 ►
organism. And it began to occur to me that perhaps this wasn’t the best way to understand
00:10:20 ►
life. But I didn’t quite know what to do about it because
00:10:25 ►
everybody else thought it was definitely was the best way to study life and in
00:10:30 ►
fact that was no other valid way. So this set me thinking and I then came to
00:10:38 ►
realize there was a whole tradition of biology called vitalism which had tried
00:10:44 ►
to adopt a totally different approach to the understanding of life. vitalism which had tried to adopt a totally different
00:10:45 ►
approach to the understanding of life a school which flourished in the 19th
00:10:50 ►
century and which went on till the 1920s when it underwent a transformation into
00:10:57 ►
the organismic or holistic philosophy of nature which really treats the whole of
00:11:02 ►
the universe as alive this was a totally new idea, a new perspective for me.
00:11:07 ►
And I began to see that the science of biology could be reformed,
00:11:12 ►
that this idea that living organisms are truly alive
00:11:16 ►
rather than being just machines,
00:11:18 ►
that’s the official doctrine, the mechanistic theory,
00:11:20 ►
says living organisms are just complicated machines.
00:11:24 ►
Believe it or not, still the official doctrine of academic biology and academic medicine.
00:11:31 ►
And this set up a tremendous tension and I began to see there was a new way of doing it
00:11:37 ►
and I began to see the outlines of a new theory.
00:11:40 ►
I had several insights into how this might happen.
00:11:44 ►
I stayed at Cambridge for about
00:11:46 ►
seven or eight years doing research. Then I went to India, where I worked in an agricultural
00:11:51 ►
institute. These ideas went on developing. I then saw how I could bring them all together
00:12:00 ►
in a synthesis, into a new way of seeing how biology could be done.
00:12:06 ►
And I wrote a book while still in India called A New Science of Life. In it, the basic idea
00:12:11 ►
I’m suggesting is that there’s a kind of inherent memory in all kinds of animals and plants.
00:12:17 ►
Each species has its own collective memory. So each member of the species draws on this
00:12:22 ►
collective memory and in turn contributes to it.
00:12:34 ►
This means that the instincts of animals, for example, the behavior of cuckoos, the spinning of webs by spiders, are like a memory, a habit of the species.
00:12:42 ►
This inheritance takes place by the process I call morphic resonance, by a kind of invisible, intangible memory.
00:12:48 ►
A kind of resonance between present and past organisms of the same kind.
00:12:52 ►
The same theory helps explain how our own memory works by a resonance between our own past and our present states.
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It leads to the idea that our memories aren’t stored in our brains,
00:12:59 ►
but that we’re tuning into them by this process of morphic resonance.
00:13:03 ►
Anyway, this theory, which I’d been developing,
00:13:07 ►
as the more research I did, the better fit I found it made with the facts.
00:13:11 ►
I found there was already considerable circumstantial evidence for this idea.
00:13:15 ►
But as you can imagine, this idea wouldn’t be very popular
00:13:20 ►
in the realms of academic biochemistry.
00:13:23 ►
And it didn’t win over instantly
00:13:25 ►
all my colleagues in the biochemistry department at Cambridge either.
00:13:30 ►
So when my book on this subject was published,
00:13:34 ►
which I wrote in India,
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there was a considerable controversy in the scientific world.
00:13:40 ►
The theory is testable by experiment.
00:13:42 ►
Various experiments have been done. It is being tested.
00:13:46 ►
I’ve been developing and working on this theory
00:13:48 ►
for the last ten years.
00:13:51 ►
My last book, The Presence of the Past,
00:13:52 ►
that came out recently,
00:13:54 ►
develops it in more detail.
00:13:56 ►
And currently I’m writing a book called The Rebirth of Nature,
00:14:00 ►
which is about the idea that the entire cosmos is alive
00:14:03 ►
rather than just inanimate and mechanistic.
00:14:06 ►
What difference that makes.
00:14:09 ►
Well, when A New Science of Life came out in 1982 in America,
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it came out a year earlier in England,
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I came to California because it was published in Los Angeles by Tarcher.
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I’d never been to California before.
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And I suddenly found myself in a wonderland
00:14:26 ►
which I hadn’t even thought about. I’d lived in India for the previous seven years. Before
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that I’d spent most of my time in Cambridge, England. I had been educated in America at
00:14:41 ►
Harvard, spent a year there doing philosophy philosophy But California was something that I hadn’t even dreamed of
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I found myself here at Esalen. I found an extraordinary new range of things going on
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I hadn’t known about and when I was in San Francisco a friend
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Who I knew from Europe said to me just the day before I left
00:15:04 ►
There’s somebody you must meet.
00:15:06 ►
He’s called Terence McKenna.
00:15:08 ►
He said, you get on this bus in San Francisco,
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you get off at Santa Rosa two hours later,
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and Terence will appear in a large 1956 Buick or whatever.
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And that’ll be Terence McKenna.
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I didn’t know much about Terence, so I went
00:15:27 ►
up there, and in this large 1956 Buick, we headed off into the woods in Sonoma County,
00:15:37 ►
where Terence lives, and there I met both Terence and Ralph, who was there for the day. We had a most interesting time.
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I found that part of my interest in these other realms of reality,
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of course, like many people in this room,
00:15:56 ►
was stimulated by experience with psychedelic substances.
00:15:59 ►
This was before I went to India. When I arrived in India,
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I found that India is a kind of psychedelic realm anyway.
00:16:04 ►
It’s just an amazing place.
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So, in Terence, I found somebody who knew about that whole realm,
00:16:14 ►
who shared with me an interest in India, since it played an important part in his development,
00:16:19 ►
and who had views about the nature of reality, which complemented my own in an extraordinary way.
00:16:25 ►
My own theory is about memory and habit in nature.
00:16:29 ►
Terence, I found, had developed a theory
00:16:31 ►
about novelty and creativity in nature,
00:16:34 ►
a theory about the quality of time and the creative process
00:16:37 ►
as it is related to the ongoing flux of events.
00:16:43 ►
And Ralph had a kind of mathematical theory which was
00:16:49 ►
just the kind of thing that the view of nature I was trying to develop needed,
00:16:53 ►
the idea of nature being drawn by goals or attractors. In the mathematical
00:16:58 ►
science of dynamics there’s this model of reality being pulled from
00:17:02 ►
ahead by things called attractors.
00:17:05 ►
It’s a teleological, animistic view of nature,
00:17:09 ►
which dressed up in the guise of mathematical models,
00:17:13 ►
which I found most fascinating.
00:17:17 ►
And so, for me, the meeting with Ralph and Terence
00:17:20 ►
was a step further towards seeing how one could begin to dream of a world
00:17:24 ►
in which nature was seen as alive,
00:17:27 ►
in which the imagination permeated all reality,
00:17:30 ►
in which animals and plants are seen as part of the living texture, the living components,
00:17:39 ►
the cells in the life of Gaia, and Gaia in the life of the cosmos as a whole.
00:17:43 ►
and the life of Gaia, and Gaia in the life of the cosmos as a whole.
00:17:48 ►
In fact, a view of the world as alive,
00:17:52 ►
which recalls in some respects the old cosmologies of the ancient world,
00:17:54 ►
where the cosmos was seen as a living organism,
00:17:58 ►
where they thought of the whole cosmos as having a soul, the soul of the world, the anima mundi.
00:18:02 ►
And so I found Terence and Ralph both people who were interested in
00:18:08 ►
looking at trying to form a new understanding of what we could call the soul of the world.
00:18:16 ►
So our discussions over the years, over the last seven years, have
00:18:21 ►
spun around many aspects of these things. And when the idea came up of us coming here together at Esalen
00:18:28 ►
to do something together in public,
00:18:31 ►
we’ve so far talked a great deal in private
00:18:33 ►
and react synergistically in a way
00:18:37 ►
that I’ve found extremely stimulating and inspiring.
00:18:42 ►
When this opportunity came up,
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I was delighted that it was possible to be here,
00:18:47 ►
and I’m delighted you’re all here.
00:18:51 ►
And what we’re hoping to do
00:18:53 ►
is to talk about aspects of the world soul.
00:18:57 ►
And it turned out, when we were discussing this,
00:19:00 ►
that each of us seemed to be representing a principle.
00:19:04 ►
And these three principles in interaction form a kind of trinity.
00:19:08 ►
And the structure of our trialogue
00:19:12 ►
is going to reflect the different interactions of those principles.
00:19:18 ►
The principle which I’m representing
00:19:21 ►
is the principle of evolutionary creativity.
00:19:25 ►
How is it that the whole of nature
00:19:28 ►
is somehow creative in an evolutionary sense?
00:19:32 ►
The basis of my entire theory
00:19:34 ►
suggests that the laws of nature
00:19:36 ►
are not fixed eternal truths that have always been there,
00:19:39 ►
but habits which have evolved in the course of evolution itself.
00:19:44 ►
So I think there’s a kind of habit principle in nature.
00:19:47 ►
There must also be a creative principle in nature
00:19:49 ►
to give the universe its evolutionary and yet regular way of behaving.
00:19:55 ►
So in these trilogues,
00:19:57 ►
I’m going to be representing the principle of evolutionary creativity,
00:20:05 ►
the evolutionary principle including the habit that builds up
00:20:10 ►
and the creation that leads to new forms.
00:20:16 ►
Well, in many ways, my history is similar to Rupert’s,
00:20:22 ►
in many ways different.
00:20:23 ►
I think what we share most notably
00:20:26 ►
was a very early involvement in nature
00:20:30 ►
and a fascination with what used to be called natural history,
00:20:36 ►
which means bugs, rocks, butterflies and stars.
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And my own life has not been particularly academic.
00:20:50 ►
I graduated from the University of California,
00:20:53 ►
but managed to stretch the degree-taking process out over 12 years
00:20:59 ►
that went from 1965 to whatever that is,
00:21:05 ►
and a lot of traveling in India,
00:21:07 ►
I thought I was an art historian.
00:21:11 ►
In my early LSD experiences,
00:21:14 ►
I seemed to see motifs and structures
00:21:20 ►
that gave me an interest in Tibetan Buddhism.
00:21:26 ►
And I went to India with the intent of studying the Tibetan language and quickly found that
00:21:33 ►
the whole thing was just overwhelming and that I was just, you know, a human atom in
00:21:39 ►
the sea of India and that the notion of encompassing or understanding what this was was clearly
00:21:47 ►
the task of a lifetime. And several times in my life I have acted out this sort of ricocheting
00:21:56 ►
relationship between the humanities and the sciences. At times know losing myself in the study of certain schools of poetry or
00:22:10 ►
literature or painting and then at other times spending years reading philosophy of science
00:22:17 ►
and epistemic basis of physics and this sort of thing always trying to get a resolution on the
00:22:28 ►
content of my experience my lived experience which included the
00:22:35 ►
psychedelic experience which for me from very early on was this kind of tremendous mystery or conundrum which was set down in the middle of
00:22:49 ►
my being and it still continues like that i keep returning to that testing all the ideas against
00:22:59 ►
uh against the fullness of experience that that represents well for me just having sort of mind
00:23:08 ►
that i do this meant model building and an interest in the models of others and in the 1970s
00:23:19 ►
i carried out a critique of scientific method
00:23:25 ►
and the implicit philosophical assumptions of science
00:23:29 ►
and convinced myself that it was pretty much
00:23:32 ►
just whistling past the graveyard,
00:23:35 ►
that it was all done with smoke and mirrors.
00:23:40 ►
The actual understanding of what it means
00:23:43 ►
to be a living, thinking organism
00:23:45 ►
is nowhere tangential to what science is telling us about the world.
00:23:52 ►
And so I became interested then in revisioning causality.
00:23:59 ►
It seemed to me that the problem lie somewhere with the definition of time that there had
00:24:06 ►
been a misunderstanding and I of course when you read dissident views on time or
00:24:14 ►
when you did in the 50s and 60s you read Carl Jung who wrote about what was
00:24:19 ►
called synchronicity which he called an acausal connecting principle. And I spend a lot of
00:24:26 ►
time on that, but it isn’t ultimately satisfying. If you analyze it carefully, it isn’t ultimately
00:24:33 ►
an explanation. It’s more like a counter mapping. It tells you that connectedness can occur
00:24:42 ►
differently than in the stream of cause and effect but it doesn’t
00:24:48 ►
exactly explain to you why this is so then i i became interested uh in other views of time and my own theory which Rupert mentioned about novelty I began to see that what I was groping
00:25:11 ►
toward was the notion that time is not a flat plane but it’s some kind of surface over which events flow,
00:25:27 ►
sometimes fast, sometimes slow,
00:25:32 ►
in the same way that water makes its way over a landscape.
00:25:36 ►
And where flow is rapid, phase transitions occur
00:25:40 ►
and turbulence enters the picture.
00:25:44 ►
And turbulence is mathematically a very
00:25:46 ►
different creature from laminar flow Ralph is an expert on all of this but
00:25:52 ►
anyway I wanted to follow very deeply and to its ultimate conclusions this
00:25:57 ►
notion that what we had left out of our model of the world was the idea that time is actually composed not of a homogeneous
00:26:08 ►
medium but of some set of elements or interconnected parts which are in flux and out of this i created
00:26:18 ►
progressively more and more formal models and they were like novelty engines and before the word fractals was even invented
00:26:29 ►
These curves these recursive equations that I was working with were in fact
00:26:35 ►
Fractal of the fractal type. So I think what’s happening, you know is there’s a general
00:26:44 ►
Awareness of a need for new mathematical objects
00:26:49 ►
and new uh uh models of process to connect up the world in a meaningful way i think it was p.w bridgman in one of his essays said that a coincidence is what you have left over
00:27:09 ►
when you apply a bad theory you know if you’re getting a lot of coincidences after you get your
00:27:17 ►
theory in place then maybe the theory is not so good well our world is haunted by coincidence the main difference
00:27:25 ►
between our world and the world that science tells us we’re living in is that
00:27:31 ►
science denies the quirky freaky cosmic giggle high plottedness completely
00:27:40 ►
improbable totally quirky humor that binds everything together and that makes it something other than an engine in which atoms blindly run, in Whitehead’s phrase. led me first to Ralph, who was great good support,
00:28:05 ►
but he held my hand long years before I even thought I understood him.
00:28:11 ►
I’m not sure I understand him now.
00:28:14 ►
And by him I mean only the tiny iota of him,
00:28:18 ►
which is this crusty little theory out of which we make our bread.
00:28:22 ►
Rupert, I read the new science of life and had read all the
00:28:31 ►
other radical biology which preceded it and knew that there hadn’t been anything for 15 years that
00:28:39 ►
you know Schrödinger brilliantly anticipated the discovery of DNA, and then Joseph Needham and L.L. White,
00:28:47 ►
and, well, Eric Jansch should be mentioned, actually,
00:28:52 ►
as a precursor of us all, I think.
00:28:55 ►
I mean, Eric Jansch was a great pioneer, a great soul,
00:29:00 ►
and he saw very deeply into whole systems,
00:29:04 ►
as did Ilya Prigoghin, the Belgian thermodynamicist.
00:29:08 ►
And I think a lot of all of what we’re doing comes out of that.
00:29:12 ►
What Prigozhin showed that just brought down the house
00:29:16 ►
was that there could be perturbations of physical systems
00:29:23 ►
that were unpredictable and that would cause the whole
00:29:28 ►
system to actually move to a more ordered state than the initial state. And this perturbation
00:29:36 ►
to higher states of order looks suspiciously like a violation of the supposedly inviolate second law of thermodynamics.
00:29:46 ►
So that looks like a doorway into an energetic hyperspace,
00:29:53 ►
somehow a way around the no free lunch rule.
00:29:57 ►
We’ll talk more about this.
00:29:59 ►
But these guys, Prigozhin and Jansch, anticipated and were in many ways
00:30:04 ►
inspirational to what we all are doing so
00:30:09 ►
then before I hand this on to Ralph in terms of the way the weekend will be structured and to
00:30:17 ►
give us something to hang all this on Rupert mentioned the triadic structure of the dialogues and that he would be
00:30:27 ►
representing the creative evolutionary impulse I will represent that the divine
00:30:35 ►
imagination the imagination Allah William Blake in other words this domain this legacy of the human mind in which culture and
00:30:50 ►
dream and personal and historical aspiration takes place we’re seeing all of these things
00:30:58 ►
as aspects of the world soul you see the notion of morphogenesis the notion of fields that
00:31:08 ►
shape form eventually this question of how intelligent is the world soul or how
00:31:15 ►
mind like is the Gaian control system is just going to give way to the perception that the answer lies probably to the left of
00:31:26 ►
well more mind like than yourself because it is not we who are in a
00:31:32 ►
position to define these things so the the notion of the world soul is properly properly vivified and pictured and endowed with qualities and properties that are exponential
00:31:52 ►
so i will take that position my great concern as far as these dialogues is
00:32:00 ►
concerned is novelty the emergence of the unpredictable and the truly new out of the
00:32:08 ►
background of the recursive and iterative processes of nature. How can there be novelty
00:32:16 ►
and what exactly is it? And since very clearly we are the cutting edge of its self-expression,
00:32:26 ►
then unraveling this question about what is novelty
00:32:30 ►
is going to take us very close to the question of what
00:32:34 ►
is human nature?
00:32:35 ►
What are we doing in this phase space?
00:32:38 ►
What is the nature of the turbulence
00:32:41 ►
that we necessarily have to describe as ourselves
00:32:48 ►
well next of all i’d like to introduce terence mckenna this is terence you weren’t oh yeah
00:32:57 ►
sorry about that rupert terence i’m r. Creation, imagination, my mask is chaos.
00:33:12 ►
So I was brought up in a field of music,
00:33:16 ►
but I was attracted to mathematics early.
00:33:21 ►
And when I was 14, I played in the State Symphony.
00:33:27 ►
After that I started in mathematics,
00:33:30 ►
and I became a professor at Berkeley when I was 23.
00:33:33 ►
I had an easy way in mathematics, and the way the system works,
00:33:38 ►
the carpet is unrolled in front of you.
00:33:40 ►
You have a few choices,
00:33:43 ►
but basically before you even know what’s happening,
00:33:45 ►
the carpet is unrolled and you’re down the runnel into whatever you can do that’s useful
00:33:51 ►
to the system. In this process, I lost nature. My interest in anything natural atrophied.
00:34:04 ►
my interest in anything natural atrophied.
00:34:08 ►
I mean, as a child, I suppose I was interested in everything.
00:34:13 ►
And for this loss, I mean, I don’t know the names of trees, for example. I can smell them, but I can hardly tell them apart.
00:34:18 ►
But there was a great gain because I love it out there.
00:34:22 ►
I love to be off the planet.
00:34:24 ►
I always did. And to this day, I love to be off the planet. I always did.
00:34:25 ►
And to this day, I spend very little time on planet Earth.
00:34:31 ►
So it went on in this way.
00:34:33 ►
And by 1967, I was a professor at Princeton.
00:34:37 ►
I had written three books on mathematics
00:34:39 ►
that you need a microscope to read.
00:34:43 ►
And I had been studying for a long while chaos,
00:34:47 ►
but we didn’t call it chaos then,
00:34:49 ►
and we didn’t see in it any role in the natural world
00:34:53 ►
or in social transformation
00:34:54 ►
or in the evolution of consciousness
00:34:57 ►
because we didn’t think about anything out there.
00:35:00 ►
You know, we’re just working on this.
00:35:01 ►
But personally, my expectation was
00:35:04 ►
that anything I invented or discovered or assisted in developing
00:35:09 ►
would become abundantly useful in the human sphere in about a century or so.
00:35:15 ►
So one day after my third book was done and I was exhausted and I looked up
00:35:19 ►
and all the students were out in the courtyard demonstrating about the Vietnam War
00:35:22 ►
and to open the university
00:35:25 ►
to women students and so on. I said, what exactly is going on? Here, they said, take
00:35:30 ►
this. And so, like many people in that year or around that time, in 1967, my career had
00:35:42 ►
a bifurcation. And I went off the track the track and maybe I was as far as the track was
00:35:49 ►
concerned I might have been permanently burned out by them I mean morning noon and night in the world
00:35:55 ►
of mathematical symbols it it’s enough you know so I went off the track with psychedelics with
00:36:03 ►
meditation but especially with searching, with trying everything.
00:36:06 ►
And eventually I was living in a cave in the Himalayas.
00:36:10 ►
And I got, again, a call to come back.
00:36:16 ►
And when I returned to California,
00:36:19 ►
I was standing on a street corner in Santa Cruz in white pajamas.
00:36:23 ►
And a car stopped.
00:36:25 ►
An old friend from a previous lifetime said,
00:36:28 ►
There’s somebody you have to meet. Get in the car.
00:36:31 ►
I had nothing to do. It sounded okay, and in that time I believed that everything goes perfectly.
00:36:38 ►
You just go along with the flow, as they said.
00:36:41 ►
I didn’t know it would be a two-hour drive.
00:36:43 ►
So I got in the car. There was the two-hour drive to Berkeley, and I was literally dumped out of the car on Terrence’s
00:36:49 ►
front step. I never heard of Terrence at that time, 1972. And I went in, and what happened
00:36:56 ►
then I would still say, although we’ve had many wonderful talks and exciting, thrilling,
00:37:02 ►
and nutritious times in the meanwhile,
00:37:07 ►
that that was quite a miraculous chat.
00:37:11 ►
Many subjects came up, not psychedelics.
00:37:12 ►
I mean, many subjects came up,
00:37:16 ►
and every subject was the occasion of a discovery of a most miraculous resonance of ideas.
00:37:20 ►
How to grow mushrooms, outer space, I don’t know,
00:37:23 ►
anything you could think of,
00:37:25 ►
all passed by in the course of an hour or two.
00:37:27 ►
In this way, we became friends.
00:37:30 ►
And this habit we had, this activity that we do, I mean, we never go for a hike or something
00:37:36 ►
like that.
00:37:37 ►
We sit in the evening and talk.
00:37:40 ►
And what happens is synergistic, miraculous growth, evolutionary.
00:37:47 ►
Well, I found, I did in the course of time return to mathematics,
00:37:51 ►
even doing what I had done previously, chaos,
00:37:54 ►
but then chaos had become known.
00:37:56 ►
You see, my estimate of a century was off.
00:37:59 ►
It was a numerical error, one of my worst, one of my best, because life is a lot more fun since a hundred years
00:38:10 ►
became ten, see, like it’s going faster now.
00:38:13 ►
And I began in my work to think about applications to the problems of the world, to the evolution
00:38:23 ►
of consciousness, to the destruction of the planet, and so on.
00:38:29 ►
And in this revitalization of my work,
00:38:33 ►
and eventually the whole field of mathematics,
00:38:36 ►
my conversations with Terence,
00:38:38 ►
whereas I think we thought of them as just good fun,
00:38:42 ►
that they did have a really fundamental influence on everything
00:38:47 ►
I’ve done since.
00:38:49 ►
So fun, or I would say fun is insulting.
00:38:51 ►
I mean thrilling because of going to the edge, going beyond the edge, having company there,
00:38:57 ►
finding things which you can bring back and they work, and become part of everything you’re
00:39:02 ►
doing. And along the way, Terence introduced me to this person he mentioned, Eric Yonch,
00:39:10 ►
who bothered me to write a paper,
00:39:12 ►
and that was the first time that I had tried writing for a journal or a book or something,
00:39:18 ►
the kind of thing that we had talked about,
00:39:20 ►
which I always considered to be just a little too far out to be condensed onto
00:39:29 ►
paper to show to people who read. I mean, who are they? They’re scholars in universities
00:39:34 ►
or something. So Eric Jansch bothered me to write in this way, and what came out, I think,
00:39:43 ►
although I wrote many in a way more practical, understandable,
00:39:48 ►
and valuable things in the meanwhile, if they’re worth anything, they seem to be worth more
00:39:53 ►
than that. Nevertheless, that paper contained, as a kind of clairvoyance, the very definite
00:40:02 ►
prefiguration of everything that’s happened between then, 1975, and now,
00:40:08 ►
which is quite a lot of development on the frontiers of mathematics,
00:40:14 ►
of reconnection between mathematics and the other departments in a university,
00:40:19 ►
most especially the social sciences, the things, therapies,
00:40:24 ►
and the understanding of society and history,
00:40:26 ►
and all what might be the most valuable when we come to try to interact with the creation of our future in a conscious way.
00:40:40 ►
Then, a little later, as Rupert said, I was in Terence’s living room.
00:40:46 ►
The phone rang.
00:40:47 ►
Terence answered and he says, we have to go to the bus station to pick up Rupert Sheldrake.
00:40:53 ►
I said, who’s that?
00:40:54 ►
It sounds vaguely familiar.
00:40:55 ►
Who’s that?
00:40:56 ►
So in the car on the way to the bus station, Terence gave me, as only he can do, the compressed into a nutshell poetic essence of Rupert’s book on the
00:41:07 ►
hypothesis of formative causation and and and we plucked the land from the bus
00:41:14 ►
station and took him home to the spiderweb and then we found I felt
00:41:22 ►
another miracle and that the synergy of two was extended to three.
00:41:27 ►
For me, a totally unexpected new frontier.
00:41:32 ►
I mean, the close relationship of two people is well known,
00:41:36 ►
and the close relationship of three people is known but rare.
00:41:41 ►
And in the time since 1982, now there’s seven years of this, I think we have all been
00:41:49 ►
nourished in many ways and inspired by our relationship, by the reception of information
00:41:58 ►
from the field that takes place without effort in the context of our talks in private in the living room.
00:42:06 ►
So this weekend, as described as an experimental weekend,
00:42:10 ►
I think there are several different experiments.
00:42:12 ►
And one is to see if our trialogue can be exported or shared.
00:42:21 ►
And there have already been a few experiments with dialogue,
00:42:25 ►
sharing dialogues in public, some more and some less successful.
00:42:31 ►
Trilog is the next frontier, because it’s very problematic, even in private.
00:42:40 ►
And another experiment that we will have to attempt this weekend is the
00:42:47 ►
more the clear identification or the the self-consciousness of what each of our
00:42:53 ►
roles is in the process that takes place so my role is chaos. And the reason is that actually Rupert and Terence have very well expressed
00:43:11 ►
their expectation for the assistance of mathematics in the development of their own thought. You
00:43:18 ►
need models, you need structures, and there is this new language of attractors which seems to apply not only
00:43:26 ►
to the physical but also the biological and not only the biological but also the social
00:43:32 ►
sciences.
00:43:35 ►
So this language before chaos theory was already a useful tool, an important technology for model building,
00:43:47 ►
for trying to understand the complex, the mysterious.
00:43:52 ►
But particularly with the advent of chaos theory, providing us with models for chaotic phenomenon,
00:43:58 ►
that opens up to view to the process of the mathematical assistance of understanding,
00:44:06 ►
opens up to this view all of those processes which previously were too complex
00:44:11 ►
to submit to any kind of understanding, verbalization, dialogue,
00:44:17 ►
beyond some kind of wave of the hand, exciting, it’s miraculous this also works but it does,
00:44:24 ►
a kind of a poetic resonance phenomenon in which without words, exciting, it’s a miraculous, this also works, but it does, a kind of a poetic
00:44:25 ►
resonance phenomenon in which, without words, essentially, the idea is transferred from
00:44:31 ►
one individual to another.
00:44:34 ►
So it’s opened up.
00:44:36 ►
These complex phenomenon, characterized by chaotic irregular, that is to say, not well
00:44:42 ►
ordered in the previous paradigm, space-time
00:44:47 ►
structure. For example, relationships among people, the states and change of states of
00:44:55 ►
society, the whole process of history, the intuitive experience, subjective experience of relationship and so on, all of this, what we always wanted to come under the view of a better understanding.
00:45:14 ►
Suddenly it’s possible, but although it’s possible, it’s not done. But we can do it, so we can try to do it.
00:45:27 ►
do it. So we can try to do it. And that means, if this is at all possible, that when these tools would be applied in the areas of thought, you know, what these two guys are thinking
00:45:34 ►
about, what they have told you about, that the possibility there is to escalate those
00:45:41 ►
areas, presently troubled by a certain vagueness, a certain difficulty in
00:45:47 ►
communicating the definite what you think about it to somebody else, the vagueness which makes
00:45:54 ►
possible the condemnation of orthodox scientific community trying to burn the book and so on,
00:46:01 ►
can sweep that confusion away through the application, the construction, the provision
00:46:09 ►
of the same kind of definite, mathematic, trustworthy models
00:46:14 ►
in these areas, consciousness, creativity, imagination,
00:46:21 ►
novelty, evolution, conscious participation in the creation of a future
00:46:26 ►
well worth living and able to live on a long-term basis on this planet.
00:46:32 ►
We are trying, it’s the frontier of our own.
00:46:36 ►
Our experiment, then, is not only to somehow reproduce or share something we have done,
00:46:41 ►
but to continue our process over the frontier of our own understanding
00:46:48 ►
to a new understanding for us, and including you in the process.
00:46:55 ►
One of the things that comes out of chaos theory that is very important, I think, for
00:47:00 ►
everybody to keep in mind, because it is anchored in the bedrock of mathematics
00:47:06 ►
for whatever that’s worth
00:47:09 ►
is that
00:47:11 ►
the flutter of the moth’s wing
00:47:16 ►
can trigger the hurricane
00:47:18 ►
this is not a poetic statement
00:47:22 ►
this is the fact of the matter within this kind of description of nature.
00:47:28 ►
In other words, very small changes create cascades into where whole states shift and are perturbed.
00:47:39 ►
And this is the kind of situation that we are facing as a society and a planetary species.
00:47:48 ►
We have the resources, we have the knowledge, but what we seem to lack is the will to implement
00:47:59 ►
these things, to actually step back from from the abyss so it has to come through a change of mind and
00:48:09 ►
this new mathematical stuff is telling us that the intimations of mysticism the intimation of a
00:48:21 ►
possibility of transcendence is all firmly grounded. We just have to now,
00:48:28 ►
it’s almost as though mathematics is the extreme cutting edge of human understanding.
00:48:33 ►
How can we quickly export these new understandings that release us from a need for closure,
00:48:41 ►
that free us from an either-or universe how can we quickly export these models
00:48:47 ►
from the realm of research mathematics into the realm of of daily life well I think that the the
00:48:57 ►
way it’s done is through replication of memes and generation of new ideas.
00:49:06 ►
So for me, more and more, the motivation to do these kinds of groups
00:49:10 ►
is I really see it as politics, almost at the viral level,
00:49:16 ►
that we are trying to create new languages and new concepts
00:49:21 ►
and not only create them, but teach them to you and we ourselves repeat them
00:49:28 ►
over and over again and you feed back into this and then we refine the meme and then a meme is
00:49:35 ►
like a gene it can be replicated it can be replicated by either being simply repeated
00:49:46 ►
by either being simply repeated or by being told to others who then repeat it. And we have not seen language as the playing field of the creation of the new paradigm,
00:49:56 ►
but that’s really where it is.
00:49:58 ►
We can transform ourselves no more quickly than we transform our language.
00:50:04 ►
no more quickly than we transform our language.
00:50:07 ►
And the way we transform our language is by really pushing on the envelope of the act of communication.
00:50:14 ►
You know, the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland says,
00:50:18 ►
say what you mean and mean what you say.
00:50:21 ►
I do.
00:50:23 ►
And this is the thing,
00:50:26 ►
a search for clarity in a new domain of language.
00:50:31 ►
Rupert’s notions revision causality,
00:50:34 ►
that means induct you into an entirely new way
00:50:39 ►
in which things happen.
00:50:41 ►
And this is, after all,
00:50:43 ►
where we’re all spending a lot of our time the models that
00:50:48 ►
Ralph is working with show that the world is not an engine running down toward a heat death
00:50:56 ►
but a tremendous kaleidoscope of unpredictable creative open-ended activity on every level.
00:51:06 ►
I mean, it’s really a dazzlingly kaleidoscopic vision.
00:51:10 ►
It’s like a Sufi hierophany or something,
00:51:16 ►
but we’re seeing it on the screens of computer simulations
00:51:22 ►
of this mathematical domain that is also the neural domain, that
00:51:27 ►
is also the social domain, that is also the eco-planetary domain.
00:51:33 ►
This is not error, this is not mysticism, this is the real facts of how it is, how the
00:51:40 ►
world fits together. It fits together through the infusion of its invisible soul,
00:51:47 ►
the mathematical and field-oriented structures
00:51:51 ►
that make it into a whole,
00:51:54 ►
a cosmos in which we are living
00:51:57 ►
and which we can find our way in
00:52:00 ►
if we will open ourselves up to this image,
00:52:04 ►
see ourselves as microcosmic
00:52:06 ►
reflections of this macrocosmic order the soul of human beings as a reflection
00:52:14 ►
of the world soul and then building of a modern vocabulary to describe and
00:52:20 ►
revivify these things and hopefully make it the world into a better place.
00:52:28 ►
Well I think that’s the notion. Do either of you want to say anything?
00:52:33 ►
Yes, I can’t resist telling the story about the bunny.
00:52:38 ►
I’m going to tell you the story about the bunny, which is the fastest travelling meme in London right now.
00:52:49 ►
The story happened recently in London, according to the friend of friend network through which it travels.
00:52:56 ►
Two neighbours on bad terms with each other.
00:53:01 ►
One lot of neighbours have a dog.
00:53:03 ►
The other have kids who have a bunny
00:53:05 ►
that lives in a hutch in the garden, or the yard, as you say in America. Well, the woman
00:53:13 ►
with the dog in one house was on bad terms with the other, and when one evening there
00:53:18 ►
was a scratching at the door, she opened it, and there was her dog with the dead bunny in its mouth all covered with with mud
00:53:27 ►
she was absolutely horrified she couldn’t bring herself to tell the neighbors what had happened
00:53:32 ►
it was just too awful so she panicked the only thing she could think of was to wash the bunny
00:53:38 ►
which she did and then she shampooed it and then with a hair dryer she fluffed it all up
00:53:44 ►
until it looked as good as she could make it look and then when a hair dryer she fluffed it all up until it looked as good
00:53:45 ►
as she could make it look.
00:53:47 ►
And then when the neighbours had gone to bed she crept into their garden and put it back
00:53:52 ►
in the hutch.
00:53:54 ►
And then she went to bed.
00:53:57 ►
In the morning, as she’d expected, the dreadful moment arrived when there were sobs and cries
00:54:02 ►
and sounds of astonishment and agitation from the garden next
00:54:06 ►
door so after a while she went and looked over the fence and said to them what’s the problem
00:54:12 ►
and they were all looking into the hutch the kids were shrieking and she said what’s the problem is
00:54:18 ►
the bunny dead and they said yes yes it yesterday morning, and then we buried it in the garden.
00:54:29 ►
Thank you all very much for coming.
00:54:31 ►
I appreciate it.
00:54:32 ►
I’m sure my colleagues will as well.
00:54:40 ►
So now the stage is set,
00:54:42 ►
and you know a little bit about these three characters.
00:54:46 ►
In a couple of days, we’ll pick up where this tape left off and begin with Side A of Tape 1 in the series, which is titled Creativity and Imagination.
00:54:57 ►
And although I know it’s never wise to talk about something that isn’t finished yet, I’m going to put some pressure on myself and let you know about the revisions I’m making
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to the Psychedelic Salon website.
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In case you’ve never visited our site yet,
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there are two ways to get there.
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One is via matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.
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Just remember, you are the master of your own matrix,
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so it’s matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.
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Or you can go to www.psychedelicsalon all one word
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psychedelicsalon.net and both addresses will take you to the same page but what i’m in the process
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of doing right now is to rebuild the podcast section in a more friendly format. So before too much longer, each new podcast will have more detailed program notes
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and we’ll also have a place for you to comment on the programs.
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Starting with this podcast, my program notes are going to be a little more detailed.
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For example, I’m going to provide the number of minutes and seconds into each program
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when Terrence, Ralph, and Rupert each begin a new rap.
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That way you DJs out there who are looking for samples of Terrence’s words of wisdom
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can find some of his quotes a little bit easier.
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There will be some other features as well.
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Mainly I’m going to provide a better way for you to contact me via email.
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Right now I’m getting close to a thousand spam emails a day,
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and as a result I’m afraid that my spam filters are not letting some of your comments get through.
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And I do read all of them that get into my inbox and I’m trying my best to reply to them whenever I can.
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But by having an email form on the website I think I can better ensure that your comments, suggestions and complaints will have a better chance of getting through.
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So if you’ve sent me an email and haven’t heard back,
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I’m sorry about that.
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Your comments and ideas are important to me,
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and so I’ll do my best to give you a clear channel
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sometime in the near future.
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Before I go, I want to give my deep appreciation
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and thanks to Bruce Dahmer.
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Without his efforts, this collection
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might never have seen the light of day.
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Not only did he make the initial contact with Ralph about the tapes,
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he also stayed up with me for three days and nights
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helping to rip these cassettes into digital format.
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And you’ll be hearing a lot more from Bruce, by the way,
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in a new podcast channel that I’ll be kicking off after the first of the year.
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Also, my sincere thanks and appreciation go out to Ralph Abraham,
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who not only participated in these great conversations,
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but who also preserved them for all of us to hear.
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And also, thank you to Shetl Hayuk for the use of your music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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You guys are the greatest. I really appreciate it.
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And for now, this is Lorenzo
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signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.