Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:36 Rupert Sheldrake: Bringing together the idea of creation and imagination, or evolutionary creativity… . There is a profound crisis in science that will change science as we know it because the two fundamental models concerning the basic nature of reality that we have are coming to a head-on collision. “If the universe is evolving, then the laws of nature are evolving as well.” … [Perhaps] “things are as they are because they were as they were.” … “There must be an interplay between habit and creativity.” . . “Could there be a kind of imagination working in nature?” …
16:32 Terence McKenna: “If the laws of nature are eternal, where were they before the big bang?” … . “The immense improbability that modern science rests on, but cares not to discuss, is this: The belief that the universe sprang from nothing in a single moment.” … “History is the tracks in the snow left by creativities wandering in the divine imagination.” … “Chaos is the birthplace of order. Chaos is not the problem. Chaos is the answer.”
33:55 Rupert: “Matter is in a sense dense because it is so deeply habitual.” … “I’m interested in the posibility that the imagination isn’t all there, all worked out in potential in advance, but rather that the world truly is made up as it goes along.” … “And instead of [imagination] emerging, as it were, from the light in the future, or from a kind of Platonic mind, it may emerge from something much more like the unconscious mind. It may come into light from darkness, and the formative processes of the imagination may not be sparks leaping from the mind of god but rather new forms welling up from the womb of chaos.”
41:24 Terence: “It seems to me that the problem revolves around this notion of purpose.” … “Time is a topological manifold over which events must flow subject to the constraints of the manifold, and I call the surface of the manifold “novelty”.
46:50 Rupert: “The question is, ‘Are the new forms arising in the attractor, or is the attractor simply attracting what is already a diversity of forms through a process that lies between them, as it were, the imagination?’ ”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. I know some of you who’ve been with us here in the salon for a while are probably shocked
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that I actually am getting my third podcast out this week,
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particularly since I’ve been saying for months that I was going to attempt to be more regular and frequent with these programs.
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But since coming into all of this new material that Ralph Abraham gave me,
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I feel obligated to get it all online as soon as I can.
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At the end of this program, I’ll tell you what’s in store for next week,
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but first I know you’re probably as anxious as I am to hear today’s show.
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In the last podcast, you heard Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
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introduce themselves and explain their concept for these trilogues.
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In today’s program, I’m going to play the first side of the first tape
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in the series of conversations that took place at Esalen
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beginning in September 1989.
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And as near as I can tell, this series of ten cassette tapes
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that I’m going to be playing are in the order in which the trial logs were actually held.
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First over several days in 1989, and then again in September of 1990.
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And since each tape is about 90 minutes long, I’m going to present one side of a tape per podcast.
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And that should be just about the right length for those of you who are listening to these programs during your daily commute to work.
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I like the idea of you guys listening to these programs on your way to work, by the way.
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Who knows what kind of subversive thoughts will be riding around with you during the
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day when one of these talks really resonates with you.
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So let’s get on with today’s Mind Candy.
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really resonates with you.
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So let’s get on with today’s mind candy.
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Today’s Trilog begins with Rupert Sheldrake speculating that if the universe is evolving,
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then the laws of nature are evolving as well, which leads Terence McKenna to ask where these laws of nature were before the Big Bang.
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And as you can tell, these guys aren’t afraid to take on a few of the
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big questions that us lesser mortals sometimes shy away from so let’s join
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them now shall we we decided that Rupert would kick off this morning and so he shall. So Terence I want to start by explaining what I
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think the problem is that we’re discussing because I think if we try and
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summarize it and get it clearer it should be easier to see how we’re trying
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to bring together the idea of creation and imagination. So let me explain to everybody what I think the problem
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is as well. There’s a crisis in science at the moment, a profound crisis which is going
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to change science as we know it. And the reason why the crisis is so profound is that two
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of the most fundamental models of reality
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that the West has ever known. These two fundamental models are both within science and they’re
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now in tremendous conflict. They’ve come into head-on collision. And this means that shock
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waves are going through the world of science. The existing worldview of science is an unstable combination of two great plates
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of theory, like continental plates crashing into each other. And where they meet, there
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are going to be major theoretical earthquakes and disruptions and volcanoes of speculation.
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The two models are concerned with the very basic nature of reality. One of these says that the basic nature of reality is permanent,
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that there’s an unchanging permanence
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underlying everything that we know, see, experience, feel, and so on.
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And in classical mechanistic physics, Newtonian physics,
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that permanence is seen as twofold.
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First of all, there’s the permanence of the laws of nature,
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the eternal mathematical laws of nature,
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considered by Newton and Descartes to be ideas in the mind of God,
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God being a mathematician.
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This is a very popular and recurrently popular idea among mathematicians,
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the idea that God is a very popular and recurrently popular idea among mathematicians, the idea that God is a mathematician.
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And it was a view that strongly appealed to them,
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and their image of God was as a kind of a Christian God,
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but with a kind of Platonic or Pythagorean mind,
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containing essentially the mathematical laws of nature.
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So that was one source of permanence, permanent mathematical laws.
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The other source of permanence
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were the permanent atoms
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of which matter was supposed to be composed.
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All material objects
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were supposed to be made of atoms
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which were permanent.
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And these atoms were in movement.
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They combined and permutated.
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Our own bodies
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and everything we see around us
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would be permutations
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and movements
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of those atoms. Those were permanent too, and the movement that they were taking part in was also
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permanent, a constant amount of motion. And these permanences were summed up in the principles of
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conservation of matter and energy. The total amount of matter is always the same, total amount of
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energy is always the same. Nothing really changes in the realm of matter and energy at the most fundamental level. Nor
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do the laws of nature change. Well, that’s the permanent view of nature, which has been
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the basis of physics and of chemistry. And to a large extent, it still is the basis of
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physical and chemical thinking. The other view is the evolutionary view,
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which comes to us from the Judeo-Christian part
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of our cultural heritage.
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And in that view,
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the original part in the Bible is,
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there’s one thing that does change in time, in history,
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and that’s humanity.
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According to the biblical account,
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human beings are undergoing a kind of evolutionary
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process from Adam through the patriarchs, well, first Noah, then the patriarchs, then the history
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of the people of Israel, then the movement from Egypt through the wilderness to the promised land,
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then the subsequent history of the prophets and the kings, then the coming of the Messiah. This
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was a process in history which showed a kind of progressive unfolding development,
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but it was confined to the human spiritual realm.
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In the 17th century, this idea was secularized in the notion of progress through science and technology.
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By the end of the 18th century, the idea of human progress was a dominant idea in Europe.
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By the 19th century, human progressive evolution
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or development was now seen as part of a progressive evolution of all life through the theory of
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biological evolution. And right up in this century, only in 1966, did physicists finally
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abandon their eternal or static cosmology and come to an evolutionary conception of
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the universe. So with the Big Bang, the whole universe is and come to an evolutionary conception of the universe.
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So with the Big Bang,
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the whole universe is now seen to be evolutionary.
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This is a very recent revolution in science
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and it totally changes our world view
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because the most fundamental thing in science
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is its cosmology,
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its basic model of the cosmos.
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And our cosmology has changed
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now from the static, permanent or cyclical view of the cosmos. And our cosmology has changed now from the static, permanent or cyclical view of
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the universe to one which is evolutionary. Now, if nature is evolutionary, if all of nature is
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evolving, what about the eternal laws of nature, which scientists have taken for granted for so
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many centuries? Concepts going right back to Pythagoras and the ancient Greeks.
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Were all the laws of nature there before the Big Bang?
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Well, if they were there before the Big Bang,
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where could they possibly be?
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There was nowhere to be. There was no universe.
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So if the laws of nature were all there before the Big Bang,
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then they must be non-physical, idea-like entities
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dwelling in some kind of permanent mathematical mind,
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be that thought of as the mind of God
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or just the mind of a kind of disembodied mathematician.
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They were thought to be permanent and all there before the universe. This assumption
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is still held by most of our modern cosmologists. It’s something that physicists have not yet begun
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to question seriously. But as you can see, it’s like an idea that’s had the carpet taken from
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under it. It’s sort of hanging over an abyss, because there’s no real reason why we should assume the laws of
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nature are permanent in an evolving universe if the universe is evolving
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then the laws of nature could be evolving as well and in fact the very
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idea of the laws of nature may not be appropriate it may be better to think of
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the habits of nature evolving the Big Bang is like the cracking of the cosmic egg. That’s its mythological
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correlate, the notion of the ancient mythological idea of the cosmos beginning through the hatching
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or the cracking of an egg, followed by the growth of the organism that comes out. It’s an embryological
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metaphor. And we now have a kind of developmental model of the whole universe. It’s like a developing organism.
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It’s not like a machine at all anymore.
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The universe is a growing, developing organism,
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which is differentiating within itself,
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forming new forms and patterns,
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an evolutionary process that on Earth has given rise
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to all the forms of animal and plant life,
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all the different kinds of microbes,
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to ourselves and to the many and varied forms of human culture.
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So the question arises, how does this process happen?
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I myself have been working on a theory which I put forward in my two books, A New Science of Life and The Presence of the Past,
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science of life and the presence of the past, which tries to understand these habits and how the habits of nature can evolve. What I’m suggesting is that there’s a kind of memory
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inherent in each kind of thing through what I call its morphic field, and that this, as
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time goes on, each kind of thing has a kind of collective memory of everything that’s
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happened to all previous similar things.
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So, for example, when a crystal crystallizes, the form its crystal takes depends on the way similar crystals are formed in the past.
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Things are as they are because they were as they were, to use Terence’s, Felicitas’ summary of this theory.
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Terence’s, Felicita’s summary of this theory.
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In the realm of animal behavior,
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the theory says that if animals like rats learn a new trick in one place,
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then just because they’ve learned it,
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rats of the same breed should be able to learn
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the same thing more quickly everywhere else.
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So you train rats to do something in San Francisco
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and all over the world,
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rats of that breed should subsequently
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be able to do it more easily
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through a kind of invisible influence, like a collective mind of the rats that’s changing or developing.
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There’s already evidence that these effects actually occur, and this evidence is summarized in my books.
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It leads to the idea also that in human learning
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we all benefit from what other people have learned before
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there’s a kind of collective human memory
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an idea very like Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious
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so habits build up
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and what I’m suggesting is that the regularities of nature are habitual
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they develop as habits
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nature goes along habitually
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new patterns come into
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being, but through repetition they become habitual. The universe is an evolving system
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of habits. But obviously, this is only part of the story. If the universe is an evolving
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system of habits, how do new things ever come into being in the first place? What is the basis of creativity?
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Evolution must involve an interplay on this view between habit and creativity,
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just as our own lives involve an interplay between habit and creativity.
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So, a theory of evolutionary habits demands a theory of evolutionary creativity.
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And how can we understand the creativity that’s given rise to new ideas,
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to Beethoven’s symphonies, to theories in science, to new works of art,
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to new forms of culture, to instincts in birds and animals,
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to the forms of flowers and plants and leaves,
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to the many kinds of rocks and crystals,
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and to all the forms of galactic and stellar and planetary organization.
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What kind of creativity could underlie all those processes?
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Well, there seem to be two basic answers on the market within the conventional world views.
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One is the materialist view that says the whole thing is entirely due to blind chance,
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that there’s nothing but a kind of darkness
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of blind material processes going on,
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and then by blind chance, new things happen.
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That’s the materialist theory.
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And it really says, by saying it’s blind chance,
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it basically says, don’t think about it.
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You know, it’s chance, there’s nothing more that you can say,
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so just forget it, you it, take it for granted
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because there’s no
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reason or there’s nothing intelligible
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about it, it just happens
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and there’s nothing more you can say
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the other
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theory is derived from the platonic
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traditions of platonic theology
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and says that it all happens
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because in a sense it was all made up
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in the mind of God.
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Everything that happens, every new form that appears, corresponds to an eternal archetype,
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a kind of eternal idea in the mind of God. But if evolutionary creativity is creativity that
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keeps on happening, it goes on as the world goes on, it’s going on now. It’s not something that happened once in an act of creation at the beginning.
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If it’s going on now, it may be entirely blind.
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But there may be another model for understanding creativity.
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The other model for understanding creativity, I think, is provided by our own imaginations.
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Our imaginations are not full of fixed platonic ideas,
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which are always the same, like platonic minds.
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They’re ongoing, changing, dynamical processes
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with a kind of creative richness that always surprises us.
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So the question is, if nature is alive rather than dead
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if the universe, if the earth
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have a kind of mind or soul of their own
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if living organisms are in some sense
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mind-like or if there’s a mind-like process at work in nature
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then how does this express its creativity
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and so then the question is
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could this creativity in nature be a product of the imagination of Gaia, of the Gaian mind?
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Could it be a product of the cosmic imagination?
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Could there be a kind of imagination working in nature, which is similar to our own imaginations?
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Could our own imaginations be just one conscious aspect of an imagination working
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through the whole natural world, perhaps unconsciously as it works underneath the
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surface of our dreams, perhaps sometimes consciously? And could this ongoing imagination
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be the basis of evolutionary creativity in nature, just as it is in the human realm?
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evolutionary creativity in nature, just as it is in the human realm.
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So those are the questions that I wanted to raise and ask Terence to follow through on,
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because Terence has studied the imagination more than most of us.
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And in a sense, I regard him as somebody who has a deep understanding of the dynamics of the human imagination and of its wider importance.
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Imagination is the place to focus if you want to understand the emergence of form out of chaos. Of all the arguments that you make in favor of the theory of morphic resonance,
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I think the most powerful one is this question,
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if the laws of nature are eternal,
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where were they before the Big Bang?
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It seems to me that just defeats the whole notion of eternal laws of nature because you either have to hypothesize a kind of platonic super space
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in which for reasons presumably unknowable,
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these were the laws that were present or you have to somehow say that the laws of nature came into being complete and entire at the moment
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of the big bang and it’s very hard to see how laws of nature such as gene segregation and that sort of thing could exist in
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the situation of high temperature physics and non-molecular systems that
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prevailed at the beginning of the universe so my thinking about how pattern came to be in the universe
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has sort of taken all the orthodox positions
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and stood them on their head.
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And I think that’s a useful place to begin.
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How would it be, or is it credible that perhaps what the universe is is a kind of system
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in which more advanced forms of order actually influence previous states of organization
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this is what is emerging in ralph abraham’s work with the chaotic attractors.
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They are attractors.
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That means that they exert influence on less organized states
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and pull them toward some kind of end state.
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And for me, the key to unlocking what is going on with history
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creativity, progressive
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process of all sorts
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is to place
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the state of completion at the end
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but to see it as a kind of
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higher dimensional object which casts an enormous and flickering shadow over the lower dimensions of organization of which this universe is one. In the human domain, when we look at history, what we see is an endless series of anticipations.
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The golden age is coming.
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The Messiah is immediately around the corner.
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Great change is soon to be upon us.
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These are intimations of change.
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It’s almost as though the transcendental object that is the great
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attractor in many many dimensions throws out images of itself which filtered down
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through these lower dimensional matrices and actually are the basis of the
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appitition of nature for greater expression of form,
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the appetition of the human soul for greater immersion in beauty,
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the appetition of human history for greater expression of complexity.
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So when I think about these terms, chaos, creativity, imagination, I see them, it’s like a three-stroke engine of some sort. a reinforcing cycle that then stabilizes organisms, processes that are caught up in this in the
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phenomenon of being.
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The phenomenon of being is this self-synergizing engine of an out of chaos, through creativity into the imagination back into chaos out into
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creativity so forth and so on and it operates on many levels simultaneously
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so that the planet is undergoing a destiny the model you know deep time the
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time of geology was only really deep time the time of geology
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was only really discovered around the turn of this century
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and it is cosmically ennobling
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to think of the universe as a thing of great age
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but I think that it’s time to put in place
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next to the notion of deep cosmic time the
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notion of chaotic sudden change cusp flux and sudden perturbation because at
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what deep time has revealed as we’ve pushed our understanding of the career of organic life
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back 65 million years, 270 million years, what we see is tremendous punctuation built
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into the universe in the case of the earth in the form of asteroidal impacts. This thing which happened 65 million years ago, nothing larger
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than a chicken walked away from it on this planet. So there’s a strange paradox where
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taking deep time seriously, the message of deep time is you may not have as much time as you thought that the universe is dynamic
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capable of turning sudden corners so then the imagination becomes a kind of
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beacon the imagination is as it were a scout sent ahead or something which has preceded us into history
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and in fact is a kind of eschatological object.
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It is shedding influence, the morphogenetic field, if you wish.
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If the morphogenetic field is not subject to the inverse square law of
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decreased influence over distance then I as a layman don’t see why Rupert we
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couldn’t locate it at the conclusion of process because you know one of the
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things that’s always puzzled me about the Big Bang is it’s a singularity.
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This is the term physicists use for it.
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This means theory cannot predict it, and yet it is necessary to make everything which follows from it happen.
00:24:21 ►
So you just say, you know, there’s no reason for this, we have no argument for this,
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but the rest of the theory needs it. So it’s a singularity. And the immense improbability which
00:24:34 ►
modern science rests on, but cares not to discuss, is this, the belief that the universe sprang from nothing in a single moment.
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Well, if you can make that leap to believe that,
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it’s very hard to see what you couldn’t believe.
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That is almost the limiting case of credulity, I would think.
00:25:01 ►
So in order to save of the phenomenon I would propose
00:25:05 ►
a different
00:25:06 ►
idea
00:25:06 ►
that
00:25:07 ►
and I think
00:25:09 ►
it is
00:25:10 ►
eminently
00:25:10 ►
reasonable
00:25:11 ►
and it is
00:25:13 ►
that as
00:25:14 ►
the complexity
00:25:15 ►
of a system
00:25:16 ►
increases
00:25:17 ►
so too
00:25:19 ►
does the
00:25:20 ►
likelihood
00:25:21 ►
of its
00:25:22 ►
generating
00:25:23 ►
a singularity
00:25:24 ►
or an unpredictable perturbation.
00:25:28 ►
So the pre-existent state of the universe,
00:25:32 ►
I imagine to be extremely simple,
00:25:36 ►
an unflawed nothingness.
00:25:39 ►
In other words, the least likely situation
00:25:43 ►
in which you would expect a singularity to emerge.
00:25:46 ►
But now let’s look at the other end of the historical continuum of the history of the universe.
00:25:53 ►
Let’s look at the world we are living in, which is full of 106 elements,
00:26:05 ►
106 elements, tremendous gradients of energy ranging from what’s going on inside pulsars and quasars
00:26:10 ►
to what is going on inside viruses and cells,
00:26:15 ►
tremendous organizational capacity at the atomic level,
00:26:20 ►
at the molecular level,
00:26:22 ►
at the level of molecular polymerization, at the level of membranes and gels
00:26:29 ►
at the level of cells and organelles organisms societies so forth and so on in other words the
00:26:38 ►
universe at this moment is a tremendously complicated, integrated, multi-leveled, dynamic thing,
00:26:48 ►
and every passing moment it becomes more so. This is what evolution, history, compression of time,
00:26:57 ►
what all these things are attempting to indicate, is the increasing complexity of reality. Well, then, is it not reasonable to suspect
00:27:07 ►
that if a singularity is necessary to explain this universe,
00:27:13 ►
that singularity must emerge rather near the end
00:27:17 ►
of the complexification process rather than its beginning?
00:27:22 ►
You see, we simply have to reverse our preconceptions
00:27:26 ►
about the flow of cause and effect
00:27:29 ►
and then we get a great attractor
00:27:33 ►
that pulls all organization and structure
00:27:37 ►
toward itself over several billion years
00:27:40 ►
and as the objects of its attraction grow closer to its proximity
00:27:48 ►
they somehow interpenetrate they set up standing wave patterns of interference
00:27:57 ►
new possible new properties become emergent and the entire thing complexifies.
00:28:06 ►
Well, to my mind, this is the divine imagination.
00:28:13 ►
This is what Blake called it.
00:28:16 ►
This is the only way I can conceive of it.
00:28:21 ►
Rupert and I were chatting last night in our room about the aboriginal nature of God,
00:28:27 ►
this idea which is built into Whitehead,
00:28:31 ►
that somehow time is the theater of God’s becoming,
00:28:36 ►
but it’s also, from the point of view of a higher dimensional manifold,
00:28:41 ►
a kind of fait accompli.
00:28:44 ►
And this is no contradiction, or if it is it’s
00:28:47 ►
all right because in these realms of higher ontology you’re always asked to avoid closure
00:28:54 ►
and hold the notion of a coincidentia posit orum a union of opposites the thing is both what it is and what it is not, and yet it somehow escapes contradiction, and that’s how the open system is maintained. That’s how the miracle of life is possible.
00:29:30 ►
So I sort of think of the divine imagination as the class of all things both possible and beautiful.
00:29:33 ►
It’s a kind of reverse Platonism.
00:29:42 ►
The attractor is at the bottom of a very deep pit into which all phenomena is cascading and being brought into a kind of compressed state.
00:29:47 ►
This is happening in the biological realm through the career of the evolution of life,
00:29:54 ►
which paleontological data makes clear.
00:29:58 ►
But it’s also simultaneously happening in the world as we experience it within our culture.
00:30:06 ►
In other words, what we call history.
00:30:09 ►
History is the tracks in the snow left by creativities wandering in the divine imagination.
00:30:21 ►
And if you are a student of theories of history,
00:30:24 ►
you know that these tracks in the snow
00:30:27 ►
what is taught in modern universities these days
00:30:32 ►
is that these tracks in the snow are going nowhere
00:30:36 ►
the technical term is trendlessly fluctuating
00:30:41 ►
and we’re told that history is this kind of process it’s trendlessly fluctuating. And we’re told that history is this kind of process. It’s trendlessly
00:30:47 ►
fluctuating. It goes here, it goes there. It’s called a random walk in information theory. It
00:30:55 ►
means you just wander around. And well, it’s very interesting. Now we begin to see through the marvel of the new mathematics that random walks are
00:31:08 ►
not random at all, that a sufficiently long random walk becomes a fractal structure of
00:31:15 ►
extraordinary depth and beauty.
00:31:19 ►
So you see, really what has to happen partially this weekend is for us to see chaos not as something that degrades information and is somehow the enemy of order,
00:31:34 ►
but rather chaos is the birthplace of order. Chaos is not the problem, chaos is the answer.
00:31:44 ►
Chaos is not the problem, chaos is the answer.
00:31:52 ►
It’s the inability to surrender that is the major cultural problem. This is because everybody’s personality is structured around the male ego.
00:31:59 ►
This tumorous growth that has come upon us since the collapse of the resistance
00:32:27 ►
of this need to surrender to the imagination it amazes me I was somewhere
00:32:33 ►
recently and two people who I didn’t know were sitting at a table next to me
00:32:39 ►
in a restaurant and one of them was explaining to the other one something
00:32:43 ►
about the dynamics of the atmosphere
00:32:46 ►
and the person to whom it was being explained
00:32:49 ►
was very intently trying to understand
00:32:52 ►
this complex phenomenon
00:32:54 ►
and I thought to myself, amazing
00:32:56 ►
these people go at this as though the weather wouldn’t happen
00:33:01 ►
unless they understood its functioning
00:33:04 ►
and they place great
00:33:06 ►
importance upon it we each place great importance upon our own ability to
00:33:13 ►
understand reality as though you were an understudy for God there’s something so
00:33:19 ►
that if anything happened and they tapped you, you’d be able to say, that’s all right, I can handle it, I understand thermodynamics and all this.
00:33:28 ►
No problem.
00:33:30 ►
Well, this is not exactly this abandonment to the partnership life lived in the creative imagination that I had in mind.
00:33:47 ►
the creative imagination that I had in mind. Well, we could go on and on about this, but I hope this has stirred up something in you and we can go forward with it.
00:33:55 ►
Well, I think the, I’m very interested that you start your description of the imagination
00:34:00 ►
from the cosmic attractor or the, which sounds to me like a combination of Plato, Thomas Taylor, and Teilhard de Chardin.
00:34:10 ►
It’s the idea of the omega point, and Teilhard de Chardin is the attractor of the whole evolutionary process.
00:34:17 ►
It’s all being drawn towards this end point,
00:34:20 ►
which is actually very like Aristotle’s conception of God, too.
00:34:23 ►
He thought that the prime mover of the heavenly spheres as the heavens went round was God.
00:34:29 ►
The heavens were not being pushed by God, they were being pulled by God,
00:34:33 ►
who was so attractive that the motion of the heavens was kept eternally,
00:34:38 ►
especially in the outer spheres, in very fast rotational movement.
00:34:42 ►
The fast rotation being the closest they could achieve
00:34:46 ►
to the divine state of eternal bliss.
00:34:49 ►
And God was the prime mover by pulling the entire cosmic process,
00:34:54 ►
by attracting it.
00:34:55 ►
So I think that this idea of attraction,
00:34:59 ►
it has ancient roots.
00:35:01 ►
It’s something that in this century has been brought out by Thay de Chardin. I think
00:35:06 ►
actually we have to have some notion of an attractor
00:35:09 ►
for the evolutionary process of the cosmos
00:35:12 ►
and this has now actually become part of common
00:35:15 ►
discussion through the anthropic cosmological
00:35:18 ►
principle which is the idea of the whole
00:35:21 ►
cosmic evolution being in some sense
00:35:24 ►
designed so that it could give rise to human cosmologists.
00:35:29 ►
This is the conception, this is the form the argument usually takes within cosmology.
00:35:35 ►
The argument is the cosmos must be such as to have allowed the evolution of carbon-based life
00:35:42 ►
on at least one planet, and then to allow the evolution of human intelligence
00:35:46 ►
so that we cosmologists could be around to discuss it.
00:35:50 ►
Well, this in a sense is a fairly obvious point to make.
00:35:54 ►
You wouldn’t think it was very controversial, but it is.
00:35:58 ►
Because it implies that there’s some purposive organisation in the cosmos
00:36:03 ►
that’s given rise to cosmologists and other people as a kind of by-product. Well this is what
00:36:16 ►
they’re busy talking about in modern cosmology, the anthropic cosmological
00:36:20 ►
principle. If there is an attractor in the evolutionary process,
00:36:26 ►
which I think there must be,
00:36:28 ►
I agree with that,
00:36:30 ►
then the question is
00:36:30 ►
how does it work
00:36:31 ►
in the process
00:36:32 ►
of evolutionary creativity?
00:36:34 ►
One way is to make this attractor
00:36:37 ►
a kind of platonic mind
00:36:39 ►
in the future,
00:36:40 ►
which is what Terence,
00:36:41 ►
you seem to be doing,
00:36:43 ►
making it the old platonic mind
00:36:45 ►
containing all possible forms and archetypes
00:36:48 ►
somewhere out there in the future.
00:36:50 ►
And then this somehow interacts with what’s going on now.
00:36:55 ►
The way I understood it from Terence’s description
00:36:57 ►
was that there’s an ongoing system in the cosmos,
00:37:01 ►
in the world where we are now,
00:37:03 ►
an ongoing system of habits built up through the past,
00:37:08 ►
what’s happened in the past.
00:37:10 ►
And habits have a certain density.
00:37:12 ►
I mean, matter is in a sense dense because it’s so deeply habitual.
00:37:16 ►
There’s a sense in which habits are the basis of the kind of density
00:37:19 ►
and the sheer materiality of the natural world
00:37:22 ►
and its sheer resistance to the imagination
00:37:25 ►
the fact that everything is so deeply embedded in habit
00:37:29 ►
and then left to themselves of course
00:37:34 ►
habits would just fossilize
00:37:35 ►
and the whole world would just become intensely repetitively habitual
00:37:39 ►
but they can’t be left to themselves
00:37:41 ►
because there’s other active process going on
00:37:44 ►
which is the cosmological expansion associated with the continued presence of chaos within the universe,
00:37:51 ►
which means that habits are permanently, or all the time, or at least intermittently,
00:37:55 ►
being disrupted by unexpected accidents like asteroids hitting the Earth.
00:38:00 ►
Or, as we see in our own lives lives our habits are permanently being disrupted by unexpected
00:38:07 ►
accidents this creates new conditions new possibilities vacuums where new things can
00:38:14 ►
happen and somehow as i understood it between this the needs the vacuums the ongoing
00:38:20 ►
crises of the present the the problems, the tensions.
00:38:26 ►
These then somehow interact with the cosmic attractor,
00:38:30 ►
and it’s as if sparks pass between them.
00:38:34 ►
What’s the situation or the problems now attracting to themselves
00:38:38 ►
those aspects of the divine mind which are appropriate to the present circumstances,
00:38:43 ►
creating a kind of imaginative
00:38:45 ►
penumbra around what’s actually happening a whole realm of the imagination related to what’s going
00:38:51 ►
on just as our own imaginations are related to what we’re interested in our own dreams reflect
00:38:57 ►
our own preoccupations and interests and drives and hidden motivations. So the imagination working in that way by a kind of spark between this divine mind
00:39:08 ►
or cosmic attractor and the present situation.
00:39:13 ►
Well, that’s what I understood you to be saying.
00:39:16 ►
And I think that’s all right,
00:39:19 ►
except that I myself find it more interesting to,
00:39:23 ►
instead of say everything that can possibly
00:39:25 ►
happen is already there, which is in a sense a way of denying creativity. It says that
00:39:30 ►
creativity is simply the manifest of a future potentiality or possibility which is also
00:39:35 ►
at the same time eternal. Because the future of the cosmos must at least have endured as
00:39:40 ►
long as the cosmos. And in a sense the final unified attractor
00:39:45 ►
is in a sense a reflection
00:39:47 ►
of the primal unified state of the Big Bang.
00:39:50 ►
The two have a symmetrical relationship to them.
00:39:53 ►
They’re part of a familiar model of history
00:39:55 ►
in which the end in some sense reflects the beginning
00:39:57 ►
or in which the end in some sense
00:40:01 ►
is the beginning at a higher turn of the spiral
00:40:03 ►
whichever model one prefers.
00:40:08 ►
But I’m interested in the possibility that the imagination
00:40:09 ►
isn’t all there, all worked
00:40:12 ►
out in potential, in advance
00:40:14 ►
but rather that the
00:40:15 ►
world truly is made up
00:40:17 ►
as it goes along
00:40:18 ►
and this is something that
00:40:22 ►
I think
00:40:24 ►
in Bergson’s book, Creative Imagination,
00:40:27 ►
he very strongly emphasizes that evolution implies ongoing creativity.
00:40:32 ►
And we’ll do anything we can to avoid this notion
00:40:35 ►
because it’s so extremely difficult to conceive of ongoing creativity.
00:40:40 ►
You either have this tendency to reject the question and say,
00:40:43 ►
well, it’s ongoing creativity but it’s random, so you can’t think about it, or substitute some kind of platonic realm for creativity where it’s all there already in some sense.
00:40:55 ►
So what I’m trying to look at is a third possibility where the imagination really is made up as it goes along. And instead of emerging, as it were, from the light in the future or
00:41:05 ►
from a kind of platonic mind, it may emerge from something much more like the unconscious
00:41:10 ►
mind. It may come into light from darkness. And the formative processes of the imagination
00:41:16 ►
may not be sparks leaping from the mind of God, but rather new forms welling up from
00:41:22 ►
the womb of chaos.
00:41:27 ►
new forms welling up from the womb of chaos. Well, it’s very interesting to hear you say this, because I shouldn’t have predicted it. Let me see if I can explain why. It seems to me the problem
00:41:37 ►
revolves around this notion of purpose. Is there one one is there not one
00:41:45 ►
if there is one what is it
00:41:47 ►
well the
00:41:48 ►
19th century science
00:41:52 ►
was at tremendous pains
00:41:54 ►
to eliminate purpose
00:41:56 ►
from all of its model
00:41:57 ►
building in order to
00:41:59 ►
make once and for all
00:42:02 ►
a clean break with the
00:42:04 ►
contaminating power of
00:42:05 ►
deism essentially
00:42:07 ►
so that for instance in
00:42:09 ►
evolutionary theory as it was
00:42:12 ►
evolved in the 19th century
00:42:13 ►
the stress
00:42:15 ►
the great breakthrough for them you see
00:42:17 ►
was that they had a random
00:42:19 ►
process
00:42:20 ►
they didn’t know that it was mutation
00:42:23 ►
through radiation but they called it sporting or the production of variant types a random process
00:42:30 ►
And then a second random process which was selection for fitness to the environment
00:42:37 ►
And you run these two random processes head into each other and out of it emerges
00:42:48 ►
exquisite order animals plants ecosystems so they said you see we have no need for God or purposes or divine plans we show that out of the
00:42:58 ►
chaos of the moment emerges order and this tendency was so strong in 19th century and early 20th century biology that
00:43:09 ►
for instance they sought to entirely appropriate the word evolution and it was not to be used in
00:43:20 ►
any other context I had a biologist once say to me if it doesn’t involve
00:43:26 ►
genes it isn’t evolution so you cannot talk about the evolution of the novel
00:43:32 ►
the sonata socialism it has to involve genes well it largely through the work
00:43:41 ►
of Eric Yonch who we mentioned last night, this was overthrown.
00:43:48 ►
I don’t believe that everything is finished somehow
00:43:53 ►
in some deterministic sense at the end of the cosmos,
00:43:57 ►
but I do believe that there is some kind of intimation of purpose
00:44:07 ►
that keeps peregrinations of processes through time
00:44:12 ►
from simply becoming random walks.
00:44:16 ►
If you believe that all of the imagination
00:44:20 ►
is being made up in the present,
00:44:23 ►
then you’re back with the trendlessly fluctuating theorists of history.
00:44:30 ►
Because if none of it exists in the future,
00:44:34 ►
then there is no compass point upon which to fix
00:44:38 ►
to guide the process forward.
00:44:41 ►
Now, I know you’re familiar with C.H. Waddington’s idea of Creodes and for
00:44:47 ►
me that’s been the way to preserve your intuition of that it’s all being made
00:44:54 ►
all at once and the my strong intuition and I think the logical necessity for
00:45:02 ►
this compass point in the future and the way you do it is you say that the universe is not determined in what will happen,
00:45:12 ►
what will undergo what Whitehead calls the formality of occurring,
00:45:17 ►
but rather the universe is determined in the way I mentioned last night.
00:45:24 ►
in the way I mentioned last night.
00:45:27 ►
Time is a topological manifold over which events must flow
00:45:30 ►
subject to the constraints of the manifold.
00:45:34 ►
And I call the surface of the manifold novelty
00:45:37 ►
and believe that we can say
00:45:42 ►
where in history great outbreaks of novelty occurred and so forth,
00:45:47 ►
but that is not what’s important for this argument.
00:45:50 ►
What’s important for this argument is that without knowing any of its content,
00:45:56 ►
we can place the novelty of novelties, the novelty to the nth power of novelty,
00:46:04 ►
we can place it at the end of the historical process
00:46:08 ►
and then watch it operate as an attractor
00:46:12 ►
without having any information about it at all
00:46:16 ►
that is really of its essence,
00:46:20 ►
which I think comes very close still,
00:46:23 ►
though all this modern jargon has been hung onto it,
00:46:26 ►
to Neoplatonism.
00:46:29 ►
We have to maintain the unknowability of God,
00:46:34 ►
hence the ultimate unknowability of the imagination,
00:46:40 ►
but nevertheless we have to grant it as an attractor, nevertheless.
00:46:46 ►
That would be my take on that.
00:46:50 ►
Well, I mean, it’s partly a question of, as I see it,
00:46:55 ►
of what role one thinks the attractor has.
00:46:57 ►
I think that the cosmic attractor, as Teilhard de Chardin conceives it,
00:47:02 ►
or as Aristotle conceives it,
00:47:04 ►
is drawing things towards a state of higher unity.
00:47:08 ►
That’s how you could express it.
00:47:10 ►
So one could say there’s a process
00:47:11 ►
that attracts the entire evolutionary process
00:47:14 ►
of drawing things towards states of higher unity.
00:47:17 ►
And not just states in general,
00:47:19 ►
but as many possible states as can be.
00:47:22 ►
Otherwise, why would there be so many forms of life,
00:47:24 ►
so much variety in nature?
00:47:28 ►
But it may be…
00:47:29 ►
You see, the question is,
00:47:30 ►
are the new forms arising in the attractor?
00:47:33 ►
Or is the attractor simply attracting
00:47:35 ►
what’s already a diversity of forms
00:47:37 ►
through a process that lies between them,
00:47:42 ►
as it were, the imagination?
00:47:43 ►
a process that lies between them, as it were, the imagination.
00:47:51 ►
As much as I hate to leave this discussion right now,
00:47:53 ►
our time is up for today.
00:47:59 ►
But never fear, next week you’ll be able to hear the conclusion of this topic,
00:48:04 ►
which the cassette tape lists as Creativity and Imagination.
00:48:10 ►
And that program will be published as close to next Wednesday as I can manage.
00:48:14 ►
And it will be followed on Friday by the first part of the second tape,
00:48:17 ►
which is titled Creativity and Chaos,
00:48:20 ►
where you will be joined, I’m sure, by Ralph Abraham,
00:48:25 ►
who has more than a passing familiarity with the subject of chaos.
00:48:29 ►
Before the next two trialogue podcasts, though,
00:48:34 ►
on Monday I plan on presenting the talk that Myron Stoleroff gave at the 100th birthday celebration that was held in Switzerland for Dr. Hoffman last January.
00:48:41 ►
His talk is titled, LSD and the Future of Human Consciousness,
00:48:46 ►
and I think you’re going to find it most interesting. Before I go, I want to thank Ralph Abraham, not only for participating
00:48:54 ►
in these trilogues, but also for preserving them on cassette tape and allowing me to podcast them.
00:49:00 ►
Thank you to Bruce Dahmer as well, for without his efforts, these tapes may have slipped away from us.
00:49:06 ►
I should also mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.
00:49:18 ►
And if you have any questions about any of this, you can click on the link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which may be found at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts. Thank you. You can always send them to me in an email to Lorenzo at MatrixMasters.com.
00:49:47 ►
And for the music we are using here each week, I want to again thank Jacques Cordell and Wells, otherwise known as Chateau Hayouk.
00:49:56 ►
Thanks again, guys.
00:49:58 ►
And one last great big thank you goes out this week to Chris Case, one of our European salonners, for telling
00:50:06 ►
me about my RSS feed screw-up in the last podcast. If, like Chris, your machine downloads
00:50:14 ►
each new podcast shortly after I post them, then you were probably disappointed for the
00:50:20 ►
first 12 hours after I posted the last show. Just as I was creating that feed,
00:50:26 ►
there was a bunch of confusion taking place here
00:50:29 ►
in what I laughingly call my office.
00:50:33 ►
And I kind of lost track where I was in the process.
00:50:37 ►
That meant the RSS feed didn’t have the correct link to the program,
00:50:41 ►
at least initially.
00:50:43 ►
But fortunately, Chris found the error and let me know so that I could fix it.
00:50:48 ►
Thanks again, Chris, and I’m sure that the rest of our fellow psychedelic salonners
00:50:53 ►
appreciate it as much as I did.
00:50:55 ►
And you can find Chris on the web, by the way, at http://floatingworldweb.com.
00:51:03 ►
That’s all one word, floatingworldweb.com.
00:51:07 ►
It’s a really cool site, and if you’re like me, you’ll probably find a lot there to keep your interest.
00:51:14 ►
Well, I guess that’s about it for this week.
00:51:16 ►
I hope you all have the opportunity to dance and party this whole weekend ahead.
00:51:23 ►
And I happen to know that a lot of you will be doing just that.
00:51:26 ►
So, for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:51:32 ►
Be well, my friends. I’m a lady. I’m a lady.