Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
01:34 Rupert Sheldrake:
“It’s like the creative process is like the welling up of new forms.” … “I think in our own case the one model for this is dreams.” … “It seems almost impossible to have an expected dream.” … “Our imagination is also released through psychedelics, in its extreme form.” … “Is there a kind of Gaian dreaming taking place on the night side of the planet?”
05:03 Terence McKenna: “I think a Gaian dream would be human history.” … “It [the psychedelic experience] seems rather to be an ontological reality of its own that the human being has simply been privileged to briefly observe.” … “To my mind, the imagination is the source of all creativity.”
07:53 Rupert: “So do you think that the psychedelic experience is then the tapping into the Gain imagination?”
08:02 Terence: “Absolutely, and I think psychedelic experiences and dreams are different only in degree.” … “Imagine in hindsight the wisdom we would impute to Gaia if we were to suddenly realize that what is happening on this planet is that nature knows that the sun is going to explode.”… Perhaps our species has been called forth to organize an escape… . “The Gaian mind is a real mind, and its messages are real messages, and our task … is to try and extract this message…”
14:54 Rupert: “The question for me is this … how is the Gaian imagination related to the solar system, and how is the solar system’s imagination related to the imagination of the galaxy … ?"
15:21 Terence: “Well, I’m not sure I want to follow you into the cosmic Christ.” … “I think there should always be some physical stuff to hang these things on.” … “There are enough places in the solar system where there is enough complex chemistry that I can imagine these very large, self-reflecting entelechies to get going over billions of years.”
17:41 Rupert: “I think a factor that changes everything is the discovery of dark matter… . This recent discovery effectively tells us the whole cosmos and every material thing in it has a kind of unconscious.”
18:34 Terence: “I assume that psychedelics change your channel [of the imagination] … to a channel which is playing the classical music of an alien civilization … " … “Appearances are merely the local slice of the divine imagination.”
29:26 Terence: “A new phenomenon has been discovered in the universe, which is its drawing togetherness, its tendency towards cohesion, its tendency to move toward greater and greater states of wholeness, and not incrementally but in sudden highly punctuated stages that allow phenomenon like history or the 20th century to come into being. These are great leaps forward that nature pushes toward.” … “We each have our own apocalypse, and so I think we should live life in anticipation of it.”
32:02 Terence: “I think probably self-reflection arose fairly early in the history of the Earth, and that the Earth is a minded, integrated kind of entity… . The planet thinks. It perceives.”
35:05 Rupert: “The Earth is alive, and it involves some kind of organizing principle.” … What kind of consciousness, then, does it have? … “Does Gaia have dreams and imaginings?”
42:24 Terence: “Language seems to be seeking to decouple itself from matter.” … “This now is apparently the only way we can keep from destroying the planet, is by literally going off into the imagination, which is not a dimension of the physics of space and time, it’s actually a syntactical dimension.” … “For my money, language is on a journey to the eternal imagination through the process of creativity,
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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 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:28 ►
So, today I’m going to pick up where we left off last week with the trialogue between Terence McKenna,
00:00:31 ►
Rupert Sheldrake, and Ralph Abraham.
00:00:34 ►
While you won’t hear Ralph on this particular program,
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which is side B of tape 1 in the first series of trialogues
00:00:42 ►
that were held at Esalen in September of 1989,
00:00:45 ►
you will be pleased to know that Ralph will be joining in the conversation in the next program
00:00:50 ►
when Chaos Theories enters the discussion.
00:00:54 ►
As I mentioned in the podcast before last, this particular trilogue tape is titled Creativity and Imagination.
00:01:03 ►
And in this, the second part of that discussion,
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we join Terence and Rupert in their speculation
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that having a psychedelic experience
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is like tapping into the guy in imagination.
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But first we begin with Rupert
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talking about the creative process and dreams.
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I think that creativity seems to involve like the unions talk about the welling up of forms
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from the unconscious and it’s as if there’s a kind of creative process like welling up or
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boiling up of new forms an incredible diversity and their forms which are conditioned by memories of what have gone before and existing
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habits. But there are forms which make new syntheses, new patterns. And it could be that
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if there’s a kind of unifying process working upon a boiling up of new forms, that anything
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that comes out, as it were, above the surface of the unconscious or the darkness or the boiling process or the chaos has to take on a kind of unified form, as it were, to come above that surface.
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The light, as it were, into which it comes is a unifying principle.
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So it has to take on a unified form.
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But it could be any unified form.
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form, but it could be any unified form. And as long as it’s a kind of unified form, because it’s a unifying principle into which the creativity is occurring or tending. So I think in our
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own case, the one model for this is dreams, that dreams involve the appearance of these strange stories and
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narratives and symbols and images, which we don’t create with our conscious minds. In
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fact, we usually just forget the whole lot. This wonderful display of psychic creativity
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that happens to each of us nightly is usually just forgotten or disregarded but when we remember our dreams they’re bizarre and unexpected it seems almost impossible to have an expected dream
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and most of them have a continuous element of surprise somewhere hovering around them and
00:03:18 ►
this curious feature of dreams and it raises the question of where they are how they come
00:03:25 ►
from the unions would say that they come from some structuring process in the
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darkness of the collective unconscious and they’d see that as separate a kind
00:03:34 ►
of imagination of matter or imagination of the psyche not a kind of descent from
00:03:40 ►
some higher world but a welling up from a… And so what I’m interested in is that the human imagination
00:03:48 ►
obviously works through dreams.
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It works during discussions, through language, through conversations,
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through fantasies, through novels, through our dreams, our aspirations,
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through advertising, and it also is revealed through psychedelics
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in a particularly extreme form
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now in what sense is this imagination
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that we actually know about
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that we know about from experience
00:04:13 ►
related to the imaginative creative principle of nature
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is Gaia as it were
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awake on the side that’s in the sunlight
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and in the side that’s in the darkness
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as it rotates, dreaming at night are the plants,‘s in the sunlight and in the side that’s in the darkness as it rotates
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dreaming at night are the plants the animals the the whole ecosystems the oceans in some
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sense in the dream state when dreams and spontaneous images of what might be possible
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come to them so is there a kind of guy I’m dreaming and does it happen on the night side of the planet? So
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is the imagination, as it were, located? How is it rooted in cosmic events? I mean, what
00:04:53 ►
would the Gaian mind feel like? What form would a Gaian dream take? Or what form would
00:04:57 ►
a Gaian psychedelic experience take? That’s how I’d like to know how you’re thinking of it. I think a Gaian dream would be human history.
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That human history, perhaps it isn’t that the planet sleeps each night,
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but that perhaps it’s been sleeping for 50,000 years
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and is having a dyspeptic dream that causes it to toss and turn.
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But if it could only awaken from that dream,
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it would just shake its head and say,
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my God, I don’t know what it was,
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but I hope it doesn’t come back.
00:05:34 ►
Human history has that quality.
00:05:37 ►
I mean, James Joyce should be mentioned here,
00:05:39 ►
saying history is the nightmare from which I’m trying to awaken.
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And the whole structure of his novels
00:05:47 ►
the integrating of historical data with daily newspapers
00:05:51 ►
and this sort of thing to give reality the quality of a dream
00:05:56 ►
I think your mentioning of the psychedelics is important
00:06:00 ►
you said it was an extreme and intense example of this
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I think that it’s so intense and extreme an example
00:06:08 ►
that it argues strongly that the imagination
00:06:12 ►
is not the human imagination.
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While we may be able to analyze dreams
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and see the acting out of wish fulfillment
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or repressed sexual drives or whatever,
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depending on our theory of dreams,
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the psychedelic experience, it’s preposterous to attempt to analyze it
00:06:33 ►
in terms of human motivation at its intense levels.
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It seems rather to be an ontological reality of its own
00:06:42 ►
that the human being has simply been privileged to briefly
00:06:47 ►
observe, but it says no more, your deep psychedelic experiences say no more about your personality
00:06:57 ►
than that the continent of Africa is making a statement about your personality they are in fact independent objects to my mind the
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divine imagination or the imagination is this the source of all creativity in our dreams in
00:07:18 ►
our psychedelic experiences in the jungles in the currents of the ocean in the jungles, in the currents of the ocean, in the organization of protozoan and microbial life,
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wherever there is large-scale integration
00:07:31 ►
rather than simply raw physics,
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but integration of laws of physics,
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integration of properties of membranes and electrophoresis
00:07:44 ►
and this sort of thing.
00:07:45 ►
This is, it is the creative principle.
00:07:50 ►
Beheld.
00:07:51 ►
Beheld.
00:07:53 ►
So do you think then that in psychedelic experiences you’re actually tapping into, tuning into
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or experiencing something of the Gaian or the cosmic imagination?
00:08:02 ►
Absolutely. And I think that psychedelic experiences and dreams
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are only different in degree
00:08:10 ►
that they are chemical cousins somehow.
00:08:14 ►
And this is why I could see human history as a Gaian dream
00:08:18 ►
because I think every night when you descend into dream
00:08:22 ►
you are potentially open to receiving
00:08:26 ►
Gaian corrective tuning of your life state you will the the whole thing is an
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enzyme driven process we are like an organ of Gaia we are the organ which
00:08:42 ►
binds and releases energy.
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I mean, a liver cell doesn’t need to understand
00:08:48 ►
why it binds and releases enzymes of the liver.
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We bind and release energy for reasons
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perhaps never to be clear to us,
00:08:58 ►
but which place us firmly within the context
00:09:02 ►
of the guy in mind.
00:09:04 ►
We have been chosen out,
00:09:07 ►
and this is not something to have great hubris about.
00:09:11 ►
I mean, indolecetic acid has been chosen out in plant metabolism
00:09:16 ►
to play certain roles.
00:09:19 ►
We have a role, but our role seems to be a major one.
00:09:24 ►
We are like a triggering system out of the general
00:09:29 ►
background of evolutionary processes mediated by incoming radiation to the surface of the earth
00:09:37 ►
and then natural selection suddenly we come with an epigenetic capability.
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We write books, tell stories, dance, sing, carve, paint.
00:09:52 ►
These are not genetic processes.
00:09:54 ►
These are epigenetic processes.
00:09:56 ►
And they bind information and express the Gaian mind very well as an example of how willing I am to introduce or to entertain
00:10:09 ►
this idea concretely. I’ve been talking to a lot of people about ecological crisis and
00:10:16 ►
the fate of the world and this sort of thing. Well, imagine in hindsight the wisdom that we would impute to Gaia
00:10:25 ►
if we were to suddenly realize
00:10:28 ►
that what is happening on this planet
00:10:32 ►
is that nature knows that the sun is going to explode.
00:10:39 ►
And what we are is a kind of response
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to the anticipation of a wounding that 50,000, 5
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million years ago, the geo-heliocentric relationships began to vibrate out of tune. and as a consequence of this,
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a species was called forth that could organize an escape and we are it.
00:11:11 ►
In other words, we are in a divine play.
00:11:14 ►
In line with this and what made me even entertain these ideas
00:11:19 ►
is I had a very bizarre experience recently.
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I was in Hawaii and in our botanical garden,
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there is a very large dead tree, and one limb of this tree sticks far out over the land.
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And Banisteriopsis capi, a large hallucinogenic South American vine,
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is planted at the bottom of this tree.
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And it just has swarmed up this tree and covered it with greenery.
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But it wouldn’t go out onto this one limb that stuck out.
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And it bothered my sense of symmetry that this vine would not
00:12:06 ►
completely cover this tree and I even thought about trying to climb up into
00:12:10 ►
the tree and thread it out onto this limb to get it to do what I wanted so I
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was sitting looking at this tree and this situation, and actually thinking about it, and suddenly the limb fell.
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It broke off.
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And then I thought, the vine sensed that it was unstable.
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It would not invade this domain that it sensed was structurally unstable.
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Well, then I said to myself, but how could it?
00:12:47 ►
What is the mechanism of this sensing of instability?
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And a friend of mine said, well, perhaps the wind impacts on weakened wood
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differently than on unrotted wood,
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and perhaps rhythms in the tree tell it to
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stay away from him and then I realized if one plant has that kind of
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sensitivity to the entering into a domain of danger what must the
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ecosystem of this planet be doing in reaction to what we are doing to the
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planet so it I see the reason this relates to the imagination is because I
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see ourselves in communication with the imagination it is sending images back into the past to try and direct us away from areas of instability.
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It really is the Gaian mind is a real mind.
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Its messages are real messages. attention to detail, whatever we have going, is to try and extract this message
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and eliminate ourselves from the message
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so that we then can see the face of the other
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and respond to what it wants.
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So it isn’t for me a philosophical problem.
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It’s a problem that relates to the politics and action that we take as a
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collectivity and as individuals. Just one more reflection on that. You see, if we tune in through
00:14:38 ►
our own imaginations to the Gaian mind, which certainly seems to be an attractive idea, and
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mind, which certainly seems to me an attractive idea, and I think fits quite well, perhaps,
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with dreams, psychedelic experience, imagination, and so on.
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The question for me is this.
00:15:00 ►
We can relate to the Gaian imagination, let’s take that for granted, but then how is the Gaian imagination related to the imagination of the solar system and that of the solar system
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related to the imagination of the galaxy
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the imagination of the galaxy
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to the imagination of the cosmos
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and then how is that related
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to what we could call the
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imagination of the cosmic attractor
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or God the Father
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or the cosmic Christ
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well I’m not sure that I want to follow you
00:15:24 ►
into the cosmic Christ
00:15:26 ►
for me the mind of the solar system
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I think there should always be some physical stuff to hang these things on
00:15:38 ►
the Gaian mind is not a problem
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the earth teems with life
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a Jovian mind is not a problem. The earth teems with life. A Jovian mind is not a problem because the complex
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chemistry, the metallic behavior of gas ices under pressure and all of this stuff seems
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to me to place enough cards on the table that mind could well emerge in that situation.
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Similarly the oceans of Europa, there are a number of places in the solar system where
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there’s enough complex chemistry that I can imagine these very large self-reflecting entelechies
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to get going over billions of years. But to move from that to the hypothesis of a continuous hierarchy of minds
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out to the level of the galactic mind,
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you have to ask hard questions.
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I mean, how long does it take the galactic mind to think a thought?
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Does it do it instantaneously via morphogenetic fields?
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And if so, then what are the transducing and signal sorting filters through which it goes?
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If it does it through light, then to say that its thoughts are vaster than empires
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and more slow is to suggest that they’re very high-speed phenomena indeed.
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Empires come and go by the thousands before a galactic thought could reach from one side of itself to the other.
00:17:19 ►
But I think that just to…
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If we’re thinking of galactic imaginations in the basis form
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one would be the all the
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probabilistic processes and the stars
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and everything within it if the
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communication is instantaneous
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which it may be
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or if it isn’t we
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don’t really know because I think
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a factor which changes
00:17:42 ►
everything is the discovery of dark matter
00:17:44 ►
the fact that 90 to 95 99% of the matter in the universe is utterly unknown to us.
00:17:51 ►
This recent discovery effectively tells us that the whole cosmos
00:17:54 ►
and every material thing in it has a kind of unconscious,
00:17:58 ►
a material unconscious, an unknown dark realm
00:18:01 ►
which conditions everything that happens,
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the shapes of the galaxies, their interactions, and what’s going on.
00:18:08 ►
But it’s utterly unknown to us.
00:18:11 ►
And so we’ve now got a kind of cosmic material unconscious
00:18:14 ►
which could play the same role as our own unconscious is.
00:18:18 ►
And so your search for the basis of the imagination
00:18:21 ►
in the known phenomena of physics and the visible realm
00:18:24 ►
is certainly
00:18:26 ►
an important one. But the fact is there’s so much more that physics itself has revealed
00:18:30 ►
which is there and could be the basis of any number of processes.
00:18:34 ►
Yes, I assume that psychedelics, for instance, somehow change your channel from the evolutionarily important channel, which
00:18:47 ►
is giving traffic reports, weather reports, and stock market reports, to a channel which
00:18:54 ►
is playing the classical music of an alien civilization. In other words, we tend to tune
00:19:02 ►
to the channel which has big payback in the immediate world,
00:19:06 ►
but that there are these other channels of the imagination not so tailored for human consumption seems obvious to me.
00:19:17 ►
I think that you’re right.
00:19:19 ►
I mean, the memories and hence all objects of cognition are not in wetware, the wetware of brains.
00:19:28 ►
It’s somehow plucked out of a super space of some sort via very subtle quantum mechanical transductions that go on at the molecular level in the brain.
00:19:41 ►
The divine imagination is the reality behind appearances appearances is simply the local
00:19:49 ►
slice of the divine imagination but what you want is a kind of map or a global overview well
00:19:56 ►
perhaps we should open this up if people have something they would like to say this man leads the way. Okay, well of course you’ve fired every neuron in my brain.
00:20:07 ►
I have a somewhat different view of the problem of the eternal scientific laws.
00:20:12 ►
In my opinion, the question of did these laws exist prior to the Big Bang is a non-question.
00:20:19 ►
It’s like the old Zen question of what happens to your fist when you open your hand.
00:20:23 ►
Because in my view,
00:20:25 ►
these scientific laws are not objects in space and time. If they were objects in space and
00:20:31 ►
time, of course they could not exist before the Big Bang. In my view, these scientific
00:20:36 ►
laws are linguistic structures that we create, that we choose, in order to give reasonably good expression to the regularities that we measure in the world,
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and which we use for prediction and control purposes.
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For example, we have an equation to express the gravity relationship,
00:21:01 ►
relationship.
00:21:04 ►
And we have placed in that equation to key in
00:21:07 ►
the acceleration of the force of gravity.
00:21:11 ►
It’s not 32 feet per second per second.
00:21:15 ►
It differs somewhat from that
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and it differs depending on where you measure it on the Earth.
00:21:20 ►
And it’s even conceivable to imagine
00:21:22 ►
that it might change with space and time because it’s even conceivable to imagine that it might change with space and with time.
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Because it’s been going on for so many billions of years now, in Rupert’s view,
00:21:32 ►
I’m sure that it would be unlikely to change very much, but it’s perfectly possible for it to change.
00:21:38 ►
And the point I want to make is that science provides, in that equation,
00:21:46 ►
is that science provides in that equation an opportunity to clue in this different change, if that change is necessary, for purposes of prediction and control. I think that the
00:21:52 ►
laws of nature can be used for purposes of prediction and control within the kind of developing evolutionary
00:22:05 ►
cosmology that
00:22:08 ►
Rupert has expressed
00:22:09 ►
alright well then
00:22:10 ►
yes
00:22:13 ►
I mean the thing is that there are two
00:22:15 ►
theological views you see that are possible
00:22:18 ►
about this if the laws of nature
00:22:19 ►
linguistic structures outside space
00:22:22 ►
and time
00:22:22 ►
at least in the Judeo-Christian world, the
00:22:26 ►
prevailing archetype is the word of God. They’re the word of God. They’re the logos, which
00:22:32 ►
is the traditional theological view of the laws of nature. So then it really comes down
00:22:38 ►
to a theological question. Do we think that the word of God is a kind of eternally sonorous set of vibrations or linguistic structures
00:22:47 ►
that’s somehow permanently there in the permanent mind of a transcendent God?
00:22:52 ►
Or is the word of God something that God speaks and, like real words, is a series of processes in time?
00:23:00 ►
Spoken words are not eternally there.
00:23:02 ►
They’re things that take time to speak.
00:23:02 ►
spoken words are not eternally there.
00:23:04 ►
They’re things that take time to speak.
00:23:08 ►
And the underlying basis of a spoken word is the flow of the spirit or the breath.
00:23:11 ►
So are the words of God, if we take this Logos model,
00:23:14 ►
spoken words that involve a process in time,
00:23:18 ►
or are they like a sort of encyclopedia
00:23:20 ►
that’s written words that can be sort of eternal?
00:23:24 ►
No. In my my view they’re not
00:23:27 ►
i don’t see the theological argument is a non-argument to me because i i reject the
00:23:34 ►
idea of the mind of god as having a structure in the universe or again i come back to these scientific laws of nature as human formulations created like tools,
00:23:49 ►
created like a set of wrenches in our kit bag, not a part of any eternal structure whatsoever.
00:23:56 ►
But at the same time, I recognize that certain of these laws that we have created are of such a nature that it would be very hard to
00:24:07 ►
conceive of us having a science without them.
00:24:10 ►
Well, I think that there are a couple of issues here. First of all, what has always given
00:24:15 ►
science its tremendous cachet was its ability to produce in the realm of application and technology.
00:24:29 ►
So I agree with you that these things are like wrenches,
00:24:35 ►
but that is not at all satisfying to a philosopher of science who doesn’t care about the application,
00:24:39 ►
but wants to know, you know, is this or is this not in fact so?
00:24:44 ►
wants to know, you know, is this or is this not in fact so.
00:24:52 ►
Rupert is suggesting that laws are habits and that habits change over time.
00:24:54 ►
They’re incremental.
00:24:56 ►
Therefore, in his view, no law is in fact a law.
00:25:01 ►
It’s a tendency or a creeping gradient of some sort. Now, the argument for this is that
00:25:10 ►
we’ve only been measuring the constants we use to describe the universe. We’ve only been measuring
00:25:16 ►
them for a hundred years on one planet. We say that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second,
00:25:25 ►
and we’ve measured it on one planet for 100 years,
00:25:29 ►
and we extrapolate this statement to the entire cosmos.
00:25:33 ►
If, in fact, laws are local and invariant,
00:25:40 ►
then this is going to be a hard swallow,
00:25:43 ►
because it makes science no more than a series of localized opinions.
00:25:49 ►
It turns science into folklore.
00:25:52 ►
The thing that personally I find a personal discovery of,
00:25:59 ►
and I hope it comes from reading outside,
00:26:01 ►
is just a realm of pure geometric possibility, of pure form and symmetry.
00:26:10 ►
And this seems to me the underlying Pythagorean or Platonic concept, and that it does exist
00:26:17 ►
outside of time, and that it’s some sort of template off of which possibility hangs.
00:26:23 ►
some sort of template off of which possibility hangs,
00:26:30 ►
and that what undergoes the formality of actually occurring resonates against this template
00:26:33 ►
and also most likely resonates against what has been
00:26:36 ►
materially manifested, so that it’s going to be re-tominated.
00:26:39 ►
Yes, well, I agree with what you’re saying about a template.
00:26:43 ►
I mean, this is this idea of a topology that I want to put out.
00:26:49 ►
Rupert and I were again last night after the meeting
00:26:53 ►
talking about the idea of God as a mathematical mind had come up,
00:26:59 ►
and I was saying how much a mathematically minded God would miss
00:27:05 ►
how impoverished that concept is
00:27:08 ►
because the primary qualities of experience
00:27:11 ►
which are color, light, tactility
00:27:15 ►
and then even subtler things
00:27:18 ►
like, you know, appetition for the past and the future
00:27:23 ►
so all of this would be eliminated from the idea of the mathematical God.
00:27:29 ►
In a way, the way I see it is it’s almost as though there is a wire frame.
00:27:37 ►
Yes, that the future is almost a kind of mathematical wire frame
00:27:41 ►
and that that’s what God quote unquote knows
00:27:46 ►
in eternity
00:27:47 ►
but the whole point of the game
00:27:50 ►
is into this wire frame
00:27:52 ►
flows
00:27:53 ►
the living
00:27:56 ►
richness
00:27:56 ►
the perverse
00:27:58 ►
creativity
00:28:01 ►
the unpredictability
00:28:03 ►
the perturbations the interference patterns that create them,
00:28:08 ►
the living fact of the felt presence.
00:28:13 ►
And then that wave of complexification dies down and leaves in its wake the fossil imprint of its passage, which is memory.
00:28:26 ►
So you have the wireframe,
00:28:29 ►
then the moment of interface of the wireframe with the memory,
00:28:33 ►
which is what we call the present,
00:28:34 ►
which is absolutely what’s happening,
00:28:37 ►
the richest part of it,
00:28:38 ►
and then the wake,
00:28:42 ►
the shockwave of the eschatological moment of the now,
00:28:47 ►
which is just the historical record of its having occurred.
00:28:52 ►
I always think in terms of politics,
00:28:55 ►
so I want to weld us into not three disparate points of view,
00:29:01 ►
but a movement with a forward thrust.
00:29:04 ►
So I’ve suggested that what you’re
00:29:06 ►
witnessing is the birth of geometric compressionism or morphogenetic compressionism or psychedelic
00:29:16 ►
compressionism depending on which one of us is talking I’m sure you can figure out who
00:29:20 ►
is who but the idea is drawing together that a new phenomenon has been discovered
00:29:28 ►
in the universe which is its drawing togetherness its tendency toward cohesion its tendency to move
00:29:36 ►
toward greater and greater states of wholeness and not incrementally but but in sudden, highly punctuated stages
00:29:46 ►
that allow phenomena like history or the 20th century to come into being.
00:29:53 ►
These are great leaps forward toward this cohesion that nature pushes toward.
00:30:00 ►
And as I said, I don’t think that it’s millions of years in the future.
00:30:05 ►
I think this millions of years in the future stuff was a very brief phase in scientific
00:30:11 ►
discourse and that as organisms, what we need to come to terms with is the chaos, the turbulence,
00:30:20 ►
the turmoil, the ephemerality, and the high-stakes nature of the game.
00:30:25 ►
You know, even if no asteroid strikes the Earth, each one of us in this room will die.
00:30:33 ►
And so life is guaranteed to be interesting,
00:30:37 ►
even if you don’t live in one of these epochs when there is asteroidal impact or geomagnetic reversal.
00:30:46 ►
Nevertheless, the ultimate challenge is built into the biological script.
00:30:52 ►
We each have our own apocalypse,
00:30:56 ►
and so I think we should live life in anticipation of it.
00:31:01 ►
This gradient mind that you referred to, what is it?
00:31:07 ►
Oh, Gaia mind.
00:31:09 ►
What is that?
00:31:10 ►
Well, it’s the notion that for me, and I’m sure Rupert has a different notion, but for
00:31:17 ►
me it’s the notion that the Linnaean species are an illusion of the classificatory impulse of the human mind and that
00:31:26 ►
really what we have on this planet are not distinct species but levels and
00:31:32 ►
levels of gene swarming and control and that intelligence creativity is such a positive adaptation
00:31:46 ►
for any biological system that possesses it
00:31:51 ►
that I think the planet wouldn’t have waited 5 billion years
00:31:55 ►
to allow self-reflecting intelligence in an organism such as ourselves.
00:32:01 ►
such as ourselves I think probably self-reflection arose
00:32:06 ►
fairly early in the history of the earth
00:32:10 ►
and that the earth is a minded
00:32:12 ►
integrated kind of entity
00:32:15 ►
how this works is hard for us to model
00:32:20 ►
because we’ve only had the image
00:32:23 ►
to guide us for ten years or so but the planet thinks it
00:32:31 ►
perceives life has a petition for more life and for an extension of itself and the best strategies
00:32:41 ►
are cognitive so that all of these things that we see happening on the planet
00:32:48 ►
that we take to be miraculously ordered results of random processes
00:32:53 ►
may actually be the result of the creation of a great engine of cognition,
00:33:02 ►
that history is the thought of Gaia, biology is the musings of geology,
00:33:10 ►
and so forth and so on, that we have been wrong to claim consciousness as the unique
00:33:16 ►
capacity of human beings. It is, in fact, a general property of organization. And the larger the organization, the more conscious it may well be.
00:33:29 ►
So that the… I don’t feel man, human beings are set against nature.
00:33:35 ►
I think we occupy a special role in nature, but it’s a sanctioned role.
00:33:42 ►
There is no such thing as getting out of control because the control system is so
00:33:49 ►
deep and so vast that it’s inconceivable. But what is happening may appear to be out of control
00:33:58 ►
because we are not in full connection with what the purpose of all this is. Yeah, Ruki.
00:34:03 ►
Yes, let me try and put it a different way,
00:34:06 ►
answering the same question about the Gaian mind,
00:34:10 ►
because it’s obviously one of the things
00:34:12 ►
we’re interested in talking about here.
00:34:16 ►
Starting just from another straightforward starting point,
00:34:22 ►
the idea of Gaia, put forward by Lovelock and other
00:34:26 ►
scientists is that the earth
00:34:28 ►
using the name mother earth
00:34:29 ►
Gaia is the mother earth of the
00:34:32 ►
Greeks that the whole earth is
00:34:34 ►
a living organism and that
00:34:36 ►
if the whole earth is a living
00:34:38 ►
organism and I think in that organism
00:34:40 ►
we have to include the moon as well
00:34:42 ►
because the moon orbits the earth and in some
00:34:44 ►
sense sets its rhythms of time and tide,
00:34:47 ►
and is part of the Gaian system.
00:34:51 ►
That the earth is a living organism, including the moon, the atmosphere, all the living things on it, the oceans and so on,
00:34:58 ►
behaves together in a way that has an organic, integrated, holistic quality,
00:35:05 ►
that the earth is alive,
00:35:06 ►
and its life involves some kind of organizing principle.
00:35:11 ►
At that stage, a lot of people then say,
00:35:13 ►
well, if the earth is alive, then in some sense it must be conscious,
00:35:17 ►
or in some sense the earth must have a mind.
00:35:20 ►
And one of the questions I think we’re exploring is,
00:35:23 ►
just in what sense can we think of the earth as conscious or having a mind?
00:35:27 ►
What might the Gaian mind consist of?
00:35:30 ►
The traditional view of the earth is that it’s an inanimate assembly of a bit of rock hurtling around the sun with a thin film of moisture and life on its surface.
00:35:40 ►
But the whole thing is just an inanimate mechanism with no life, no purpose, no spontaneity,
00:35:46 ►
no creativity of its own. Merely the environment in which other random purposeless processes take
00:35:54 ►
place. That’s the standard view. But if the earth does have a mind of her own or a life of her own,
00:36:01 ►
a spontaneity of her own, is it entirely unconscious, like our own unconscious minds?
00:36:06 ►
Does it come to consciousness?
00:36:08 ►
Does Gaia have dreams? Does Gaia have imaginings?
00:36:12 ►
This is, I think, the questions that underlie Terence’s use of the phrase
00:36:16 ►
the Gaian mind.
00:36:19 ►
And I think it’s a question that’s bound to arise.
00:36:21 ►
Millions of people are now talking about Gaia, planet Earth, as a living whole. And the question really, one of the questions we’re exploring
00:36:29 ►
is what kind of mind would this living whole have? Does this living whole have a mind at
00:36:34 ►
all? Is it just blind instinctive? If it has a mind, does it have an imagination? And if
00:36:39 ►
so, what kind of imagination does it have? How much is that imagination coloured by mathematical principles
00:36:47 ►
or geometrical forms which may permeate the whole universe?
00:36:51 ►
How much of it spontaneously arises on Earth in the evolutionary process?
00:36:56 ►
How much is it related to the cosmic imagination throughout the whole cosmos?
00:37:00 ►
So I think these are the questions it raises,
00:37:02 ►
and I think that that’s another way of coming to it, just starting with the idea of the earth as a living organism. It implies and raises
00:37:09 ►
the question of the mind of the earth, if it has one, or the soul of the earth. Some would say that
00:37:15 ►
the mind’s just another aspect subjectively experienced of the physical changes in the brain.
00:37:21 ►
Others would say it’s a kind of shadow or epiphenomenon of the functioning of the brain. If we take that view of the mind, we would expect to the Gaian mind, if it exists,
00:37:31 ►
to correspond to some set of complex physical processes going on on earth. Well, I think if
00:37:37 ►
we wanted to see it that way, we could make a good case for there being a base to the mind.
00:37:41 ►
I’d put the magma of the Earth’s core, these flowing currents,
00:37:48 ►
as some perhaps like the limbus or the hypothalamus,
00:37:50 ►
the sort of long-term driving things with a solid nucleus inside,
00:37:53 ►
associated with changing magnetic fields
00:37:55 ►
and polar reversals every few million years,
00:37:58 ►
and the whole of this being the underground process,
00:38:02 ►
virtually unknown to us,
00:38:04 ►
which is driving the process of
00:38:06 ►
continental drift, earthquakes, volcanoes
00:38:08 ►
and is actually shaping the morphogenesis
00:38:10 ►
of the surface of the earth through the
00:38:12 ►
distribution of the continents
00:38:13 ►
and then there’s the Gaian breath
00:38:15 ►
which is the atmospheric
00:38:18 ►
flows of the wind
00:38:20 ►
then there’s the Gaian circulation
00:38:22 ►
of the oceans
00:38:23 ►
there are many of these systems all of
00:38:25 ►
which are indeterminate all of which are probabilistic and all of which could respond to
00:38:30 ►
as it were kinds of thoughts or impulses of guy so one can find many ways of thinking about the
00:38:37 ►
physical basis for the guy and mind which would also include in my opinion the earth’s magnetic
00:38:42 ►
field the magnetosphere which trails like a great tail on the dark side of the Earth, which surrounds the Earth,
00:38:50 ►
and which, as it changes and responds and resonates to sunspots,
00:38:56 ►
affects the whole patterns of electromagnetic communication through radio waves.
00:39:00 ►
All of this, the field of the Earth, which would, I think, be one of the bases for the Gaian
00:39:05 ►
mind. Even the known fields, the gravitational and the electromagnetic fields, stretch far beyond
00:39:10 ►
the surface of the earth. So all these would be possible bases for the Gaian mind, or bases of
00:39:17 ►
its interaction with what’s going on, as well as the actual minds of organisms, animals, and plants.
00:39:24 ►
I mean, the Gaian mind may be able
00:39:26 ►
to act directly on these minds through field-like processes. I myself would think of the Gaian
00:39:31 ►
mind and our own minds as more like field-like processes which interact with our brains.
00:39:37 ►
And the Gaian mind is interacting with living processes, the atmosphere, the earth’s core,
00:39:43 ►
the magma flows, the magnetic field,
00:39:45 ►
interacting with them but not being reducible to them.
00:39:49 ►
I guess my question is really about the relationship to creation and creativity and imagination.
00:40:00 ►
Is there a qualitative aspect to that that is evolutionary?
00:40:06 ►
The suggestion I can bring up is that there could be a kind of evolutionary field creode,
00:40:11 ►
meaning that there is a pathway that when conscious beings are on a planet,
00:40:18 ►
the evolutionary field creode would be looking for a kind of an aesthetic, a kind of sensibility.
00:40:24 ►
you feel creole, you’d be looking for a kind of an aesthetic, a kind of sensibility.
00:40:30 ►
And I would propose the symbiotic relationship is an example of this.
00:40:34 ►
Well, creoles are pathways of change which have endpoints.
00:40:40 ►
And for those who’ve not been following the literature on creoles, the idea is this, when an embryo develops, for example, a liver,
00:40:46 ►
a group of cells develop into your liver,
00:40:48 ►
another group of cells develop into your kidneys,
00:40:50 ►
that the pathways of change they go through
00:40:53 ►
are attracted towards an end point,
00:40:56 ►
which is the mature kidney or the mature liver,
00:40:59 ►
that they’re drawn towards that.
00:41:01 ►
And this pathway of change drawn towards an end point is called a creode.
00:41:06 ►
It’s considered to be an object within a morphic or a morphogenetic field.
00:41:11 ►
Now, if there’s the idea of the cosmic attractor
00:41:15 ►
and the idea of an evolutionary creode,
00:41:17 ►
as I understand what you’re saying,
00:41:19 ►
is that one could say the entire evolutionary process of the Earth
00:41:23 ►
or even of the whole cosmos, is a kind of creode,
00:41:26 ►
and Terence’s description of the cosmic attractor
00:41:29 ►
would be the end point of the evolutionary creode.
00:41:32 ►
So in a sense, using the term creode brings us back to that model
00:41:36 ►
we were talking about just now.
00:41:38 ►
I was kind of missing, listening to this discussion,
00:41:40 ►
what the meaning of the creation of the imagination was before.
00:41:44 ►
What is the purpose of this object? What is the fulfillment of the creation of the imagination was before, what is the purpose of this something,
00:41:47 ►
what is the fulfillment of this?
00:41:49 ►
Can I make a shock?
00:41:52 ►
Yes.
00:41:53 ►
Well, I’m not sure I understand all of what you’re saying,
00:41:57 ►
but in terms of this qualitative thing,
00:42:00 ►
which is deepening,
00:42:01 ►
which is the purposefulness of it all,
00:42:05 ►
it’s interesting when you look at the whole life of the universe
00:42:09 ►
and the way processes have evolved,
00:42:12 ►
there is a tendency that has been going on for a very long time
00:42:17 ►
that has been accelerated at each step.
00:42:20 ►
And what I call it is language seems to be seeking to decouple itself from matter.
00:42:30 ►
DNA was the first language, and it’s a language written at the molecular level,
00:42:36 ►
and it’s faithfully physical replicant is made of it,
00:42:41 ►
and then that template is used to create proteins, which are the statements in this language.
00:42:48 ►
Well, that’s how all nature does it, except human beings.
00:42:54 ►
And we have this epigenetic capability.
00:42:58 ►
We can write books, dance, sculpt, paint, all the things that I mentioned. Well then, when you look at the 20th century,
00:43:06 ►
the tendency to dance, paint, sculpt, and so forth
00:43:10 ►
has, through technology, become ever more released
00:43:16 ►
from the constraints of matter,
00:43:19 ►
so that now we paint on computer screens,
00:43:23 ►
we merge, we sculpt with computers, we sculpt with light
00:43:28 ►
and directions rather than in matter. So I think that why this is, who can say, but the
00:43:39 ►
only thing as complex as organic life is syntax. And syntax seems to have a life of its own
00:43:47 ►
it is trying to shed the material matrix which was its basis now this I’m sure we
00:43:55 ►
don’t have time to discuss it now but perhaps later this creates strong
00:43:59 ►
reactions in people because we have a tendency to want things to be folded back into nature.
00:44:07 ►
We don’t want this gnostic ascent to the radiant unspeakable. But nevertheless, it appears
00:44:14 ►
that language in a kind of hellish marriage with technology has given us no way out except
00:44:21 ►
a forward escape into the further embodiment of language.
00:44:28 ►
This now is apparently the only way we can keep from destroying the planet
00:44:32 ►
is by literally going off into the imagination,
00:44:37 ►
which is not a dimension of the physics of space and time.
00:44:42 ►
It’s actually a syntactical dimension.
00:44:42 ►
of the physics of space and time,
00:44:44 ►
it’s actually a syntactical dimension. So the integration of media and human beings
00:44:50 ►
and creative processes like CAD-CAM
00:44:53 ►
and this sort of thing
00:44:54 ►
seem to me to say language is shedding the primate body
00:45:00 ►
that gave it epigenetic articulation
00:45:03 ►
in much the same way that language shed the rest of organic nature
00:45:09 ►
when in one part of itself it moved off
00:45:12 ►
into the potential for linguistic expression
00:45:16 ►
that our biological organization makes possible.
00:45:21 ►
So for my money, language is on a journey to the eternal imagination
00:45:27 ►
through the process of creativity, having begun in chaos and having a kind of inevitable end
00:45:37 ►
in chaos, more properly, you know, revisioned, remet, re-understood.
00:45:44 ►
you know, revisioned, remet, re-understood.
00:45:48 ►
Well, perhaps we should break for lunch.
00:45:49 ►
It’s after lunch.
00:45:51 ►
Thank you very much.
00:45:54 ►
This was very useful, I think.
00:45:55 ►
I hope you enjoyed it.
00:46:08 ►
If I remember correctly, the next tape in this series brings in Ralph Abraham,
00:46:13 ►
who will be expanding on the concept of language that Terrence just raised.
00:46:19 ►
Although, like many of us psychedelic slaughters, I first started listening to these trilogues
00:46:24 ►
in search of a new little soundbite or two from the great Bard McKenna,
00:46:29 ►
but I’m really beginning to appreciate why Ralph and Terrence think so highly of Rupert.
00:46:33 ►
What an interesting way he has of looking at things.
00:46:37 ►
For example, I’ve long thought that Gaia was sentient,
00:46:39 ►
but I never actually took that thought to the next level and wondered about Gaia’s dreams and imagination.
00:46:43 ►
For me, that adds an entirely new dimension to the way I look at life today.
00:46:49 ►
Now I’m wondering if my life is just another one of Gaia’s dreams.
00:46:54 ►
At times, it certainly seems weird enough to be somebody’s dream,
00:47:00 ►
and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if that was the case for some of you, too.
00:47:04 ►
But I guess there’s no way we’re ever going to know some of these things,
00:47:08 ►
at least not while we’re still walking around in these monkey bodies.
00:47:13 ►
But if you’re still looking for some more challenging thoughts to get your mind around today,
00:47:18 ►
you might want to check out a podcast that Tim Donovan wrote and told me about.
00:47:23 ►
Check out a podcast that Tim Donovan wrote and told me about.
00:47:28 ►
If you go to webcast.berkeley.edu slash courses,
00:47:32 ►
you’ll find a list of Berkeley courses that have been podcast.
00:47:37 ►
And among those courses are some by the very talented Dr. David Presti,
00:47:40 ►
who is Berkeley’s senior lecturer on neurobiology.
00:47:47 ►
And according to Tim, Dr. Presti presents entheogens in a very fair and perceivably reverent context. Now, I haven’t had a chance to listen to one of Dr. Presti’s lectures
00:47:53 ►
myself just yet, mainly because I’ve lost my pod. I guess that sounds kind of weird,
00:48:01 ►
but you know what I mean. At least I hope so.
00:48:12 ►
Anyway, I plan on listening to some of the lectures from his course number, PSYCH119,
00:48:15 ►
which is titled, Drugs and Human Behavior.
00:48:20 ►
And thank you, Tim, for letting us know about these podcasts.
00:48:26 ►
Another audio file you might be interested in is one that my friend Michael Shields told me about.
00:48:34 ►
Because the URL is a long one, I’ll put the link on our podcast page with the program notes about this podcast,
00:48:39 ►
which is number 61 from the Psychedelic Salon, by the way.
00:48:45 ►
And the talk that Michael told me about is by Fred Turner of Stanford University.
00:48:49 ►
And in it, he discusses his new book, which is titled,
00:48:57 ►
From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Stuart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.
00:49:02 ►
Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about this new book, and I quote,
00:49:05 ►
Less a biography of Brand than a swirl of relationships surrounding him.
00:49:08 ►
The book shows how the ride of the Merry Pranksters
00:49:12 ►
and LSD experimentation
00:49:13 ►
led to the early online discussion board,
00:49:16 ►
Whole Earth Electronic Link,
00:49:18 ►
the Well,
00:49:20 ►
and into the digital utopianism
00:49:22 ►
surrounding the hyperlinked World Wide Web.
00:49:25 ►
End quote.
00:49:27 ►
Now, given my renewed interest in the Merry Pranksters,
00:49:30 ►
since meeting some of them just a couple weeks ago,
00:49:33 ►
I’m taking the synchronicity of Michael’s pointing out this book
00:49:37 ►
to be a sign that I’d better listen to Turner’s commentary
00:49:40 ►
and buy a copy of the book myself.
00:49:42 ►
And if any of you have already read it, I’d love to hear what you think about it.
00:49:47 ►
Before I go, I guess I should mention
00:49:49 ►
that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
00:49:52 ►
are protected under the Creative Commons
00:49:55 ►
Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.
00:50:00 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
00:50:01 ►
you can click on the link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
00:50:06 ►
which you can find at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.
00:50:10 ►
And if you still have questions, you can just send them an email to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.
00:50:18 ►
In a couple of days, I’ll get the next trialogue podcast out,
00:50:22 ►
which will be the first side of the second tape in the
00:50:25 ►
1989 to 1990
00:50:27 ►
trialogue series
00:50:28 ►
and it’s titled
00:50:30 ►
Creativity and Chaos
00:50:31 ►
and in that program
00:50:33 ►
among other things
00:50:35 ►
you’ll hear Ralph Abraham
00:50:36 ►
give a short overview
00:50:38 ►
of chaos theory
00:50:39 ►
why chaos theory
00:50:41 ►
is good for you
00:50:41 ►
and his explanation
00:50:43 ►
of what mathematics
00:50:44 ►
means to him.
00:50:46 ►
In addition to thanking Chateau Hayuk for the use of their music here in the Psychedelic Salon,
00:50:53 ►
I also want to thank Ralph Abraham for making these tapes available,
00:50:57 ►
and to Bruce Dahmer, without whom we wouldn’t be hearing them today.
00:51:02 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo,
00:51:05 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:51:08 ►
Be well, my friends.