Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:29 Ralph Abraham: “So I should like now to speak about the chaos
of ordinary life and the relationship of this chaos to the imagination.”
05:41 Ralph:
“Chaos, Gaia, and Eros are the gods, or concepts, of the primitive types.”
13:56 Ralph:
“People have a resistance to their own creative imagination, and I’m suggesting that this resistance has a mythological base.”
20:55 Terence McKenna: “Chaos is feminine. Chaos is intuitional. Chaos has a very flirtatious relationship with language.”
22:16 Terence:
“The birthright that connects us to the divine is our poetic capacity, our ability to resonate with an idea of ideal beauty and to create that which transcends our own understanding in the form of art through the imagination.” … “We have a secret history. Knowledge of which has been lost to us and only now is recoverable … " … “We are the victims of an instance of traumatic abuse in childhood as a species.”
24:34 Terence:
“Once we lived in dynamic balance with nature, not as animals do, but as human beings only could but in a way that we have now lost.” … and then he explains what it is that we have lost and how it was lost.
27:46 Terence:
“There are certain episodes in the life of a female which are guaranteed to be boundary dissolving.”
29:00
Terence: “The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is the ability to accept an inherent messiness in your explanation of what’s going on.” … “For me, the creative act is the letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.”
32:37 Terence:
“For me the imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”
37:30 Terence:
“There will come a moment which will be an absolute leap into space, and we will simply have to have the faith that there is something waiting there, because the dominator style has left us no choice.”
45:01 Terence:
“Fear it is that guards the vineyard.” … “So the fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control.”
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064 - Confessions of a Dope Dealer
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066 - Chaos and Imagination (Part 2)
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
So, are you ready for some more trilogues between Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake?
00:00:31 ►
When we left our three merry triloguers in the podcast before last,
00:00:36 ►
they just had concluded their discussion about creativity and chaos.
00:00:41 ►
And in today’s program, we’re going to hear them talk about chaos and the imagination. Or, I should say, and chaos. And in today’s program, we’re going to hear them talk about chaos and the imagination.
00:00:46 ►
I should say, and imagination. We begin with Ralph Abraham going into the history of the word
00:00:54 ►
and the concepts about chaos. And then Terrence McKenna joins in with his thoughts about how
00:00:59 ►
chaos and imagination are connected. If you caught the last podcast from the Psychedelic Salon,
00:01:05 ►
you might remember Sheldon Norberg talking about how,
00:01:08 ►
as he progressed into the world of psychedelic medicines,
00:01:12 ►
his experiences began to shift from those focused primarily on pleasure
00:01:15 ►
to journeys that involved a deeper understanding of his consciousness.
00:01:20 ►
Well, at about a half hour into the trialogue you’re about to hear,
00:01:24 ►
Terence McKenna begins to wax poetic about the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his net, where he’s referring to the net of human imagination on an ocean of chaos.
00:01:35 ►
And the fisherman, of course, is the psychonaut sailing on the seas of consciousness.
00:01:40 ►
Now, I can’t actually say that that’s how things actually are, but it sure is a nice image to use when beginning a psychedelic voyage, don’t you think?
00:01:51 ►
So now let’s listen to Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna discuss chaos and imagination.
00:01:58 ►
Chaos and the imagination.
00:02:08 ►
imagination. Now someone asked about the relationship between the chaos on plane three and the chaos on plane one and I said there was sort of a resonant
00:02:13 ►
relationship. My appreciation of it had increased over these past years. I’m
00:02:20 ►
wearing the mask of chaos but I’m not constrained to stick to the mathematical plane
00:02:28 ►
so I should like now to speak about the chaos of ordinary life
00:02:34 ►
and the relationship of this chaos to the imagination
00:02:37 ►
and along the way I’ll try to explain to you
00:02:42 ►
why I think chaos is the biggest thing since the wheel.
00:02:46 ►
I know, Terrence, you’ve emphasized the importance of chaos
00:02:50 ►
and fractals in your own thinking and so on.
00:02:54 ►
So here will be either more of the same
00:02:56 ►
or maybe a further reason
00:02:58 ►
to regard the chaos revolution as good news.
00:03:06 ►
Somebody came to me last year and gave me a splendid quote about chaos,
00:03:11 ►
knowing that I was writing a popular book on chaos, Guyon Eros,
00:03:16 ►
and it said,
00:03:18 ►
all creation begins in chaos, progresses in chaos, and ends in chaos.
00:03:28 ►
It’s perfect for my book, especially considering that it comes from Homer.
00:03:33 ►
But I couldn’t find it in Homer.
00:03:35 ►
I called a classics professor in my university,
00:03:38 ►
told me about all the lexicons and concordances where every single word in Homer.
00:03:43 ►
The word chaos never appears in Homer.
00:03:47 ►
It is known where it occurs for the first time,
00:03:50 ►
and it occurs for the first time in Hesiod.
00:03:52 ►
He was kind of contemporary, more or less, of Homer,
00:03:56 ►
if a person at all, around 800 B.C.,
00:03:59 ►
the beginning of the Bardic tradition of ancient Greece.
00:04:10 ►
of the bardic tradition of ancient Greece. And in Hesiod, this word chaos appears in a piece called Theogony, which is a theogony, that is to say more or less a creation tale, but the stories
00:04:16 ►
of the creation of the gods and goddesses one by one. Well, they’re not gods and goddesses really,
00:04:21 ►
they’re abstract principles. The three main ones are chaos, Gaia, and eros.
00:04:28 ►
So in this way, thanks to this gentleman,
00:04:30 ►
Augustine de Melo, I’ll be forever in his debt,
00:04:34 ►
I found out about the Hesiodic theogony
00:04:36 ►
and the Orphic Trinity.
00:04:39 ►
Now, the meaning of chaos,
00:04:40 ►
the first time the word appeared in literature,
00:04:44 ►
has got nothing whatsoever,
00:04:46 ►
apparently, superficially, to do with what we mean by chaos in the English language and
00:04:53 ►
in ordinary life. It meant only to Hesiod, according to the lexicon, the gaping void
00:05:00 ►
left, the gaping void, sort of the gaping void between heaven and earth out of which the
00:05:08 ►
creation came so creation out of chaos yes but the chaos did not mean disorder or anything negative
00:05:15 ►
it only meant this gaping void well after reading in detail about the significance of this and the
00:05:22 ►
other those proper nouns in Greek literature,
00:05:27 ►
beginning with a capital letter,
00:05:29 ►
they don’t mean people or anything like people.
00:05:31 ►
They’re more abstract principles,
00:05:32 ►
particularly in Homer and Hesiod
00:05:34 ►
and in the Orphic literature, the Orphic hymns.
00:05:39 ►
So these chaos, Gaia, Eros,
00:05:44 ►
I mean, it’s a trinity,
00:05:46 ►
and it’s associated with, they’re the gods of,
00:05:49 ►
or concepts of the primitive types.
00:05:51 ►
Chaos is a sky concept, and Gaia, of course, is an earth concept.
00:05:58 ►
And Eros is, Eros is actually a bisexual, it says in the literature,
00:06:03 ►
but that means what we would call an androgyne,
00:06:05 ►
you know, a double-sexed person or concept,
00:06:09 ►
whereas chaos is definitely a feminine word
00:06:12 ►
as it appears in Hesiod.
00:06:15 ►
Gaia is feminine, chaos is feminine,
00:06:17 ►
and Eris has got this ambivalence.
00:06:21 ►
And they’re the most abstract, earliest proto-concepts
00:06:26 ►
of sky, earth, and the creative tension in between.
00:06:31 ►
Well, after understanding that, you look up,
00:06:33 ►
you think of these different interpretations,
00:06:35 ►
sky, God concept, the gap in the opening and so on.
00:06:38 ►
When you look at the sky,
00:06:40 ►
the most obvious chief characteristic feature of the sky
00:06:44 ►
is the Milky Way,
00:06:46 ►
and it does appear as a kind of a gap between this and that,
00:06:51 ►
the two sides of the Milky Way.
00:06:53 ►
The sky, as understood by primitive people, is sort of like an Easter basket.
00:06:58 ►
And you have the ecliptic, is around the waist, kind of a snake, and all what is below
00:07:06 ►
that is considered the underworld. And then you have this handle across the top
00:07:11 ►
to hold it, which is the Milky Way. It’s the royal road of the gods traveling
00:07:16 ►
between the underworld and the overworld. And this is, it’s analyzed in extensive
00:07:21 ►
detail in a thick book called Hamlet’s Mill. So looking further
00:07:28 ►
then at chaos as the Milky Way, you see like the photograph that Terence has
00:07:33 ►
just showed, the prototypical chaos in the sense of randomness or disorder
00:07:38 ►
and so on. Understanding that, you can then connect the word with an earlier word
00:07:46 ►
concept or god or goddess, meaning the same thing as what you visually see
00:07:52 ►
represented in the Milky Way itself, and that is in one of its most popular
00:07:58 ►
representations, Tiamat, the goddess of chaos, from Enuma Elish, the creation poem, the greatest epic poem 1870 or so, was the first discovery.
00:08:34 ►
There was this story of the origin of the gods and the creation of the world by Tiamat and Apsu, the god and goddess of chaos, who
00:08:48 ►
lived in the water, one more sweet water and the other salt water.
00:08:52 ►
And they created then the whole pantheon and the whole world and so on.
00:08:55 ►
But eventually along came Marduk.
00:08:58 ►
Marduk was a younger generation of gods and the next generation.
00:09:03 ►
And there was a conflict between the older
00:09:05 ►
and the younger gods over how the world ought to be run. And apparently this conflict was
00:09:12 ►
taking place in the form of a social transformation, a transformation represented in the mythological
00:09:19 ►
by the demotion of Apsu and Tiamat from the pantheon of Babylon, the city Babylon,
00:09:26 ►
and the replacement by Marduk eventually became the god,
00:09:30 ►
Mr. Big, of Babylon around 2000 B.C.,
00:09:36 ►
coinciding with a sweep of patriarchy over that city,
00:09:40 ►
propelled on a new type of war chariot
00:09:43 ►
with spoked wheels instead of solid wheels.
00:09:47 ►
Am I digressing too much?
00:09:49 ►
No, you’ve reached the wheel.
00:09:53 ►
Well, I’ve reached the spoke wheel, and its association with, is this accidental?
00:09:58 ►
I don’t know, with the patriarchy, and the fact that the wheel itself, as a mathematical
00:10:02 ►
model, is the paradigm of order.
00:10:06 ►
What we mean by order is either the thing is static, it’s constant,
00:10:10 ►
its order is that of homeostasis, like more or less the temperature of planet Earth,
00:10:15 ►
or it’s regularly changing in a circle, a divine mathematical form, according to Plato,
00:10:23 ►
as the planets were supposed to move
00:10:27 ►
before Kepler, who introduced the ellipse.
00:10:32 ►
Fantastic transformation,
00:10:35 ►
punctual catastrophe in the history of consciousness.
00:10:40 ►
In short, according to this epic,
00:10:44 ►
Enuma Elish, Tiamat was killed in the most violent way, ripped to pieces, creating the world, creating a new order by our hero of Valallon, Mr. Marduk.
00:10:57 ►
Also, Bel, Bao, and so on. His New Year’s celebration was honored at the New Year time all over old Europe,
00:11:07 ►
including at Stonehenge. At the New Year’s festival, this epic poem was read,
00:11:14 ►
so annually was the reminder that chaos is bad, chaos has been killed, chaos has
00:11:20 ►
been replaced by order, an order associated with perfect periodic, the wheel, the cycle, the perfect roundness, and so on.
00:11:32 ►
For 2,000 years, this poem was read in a festival lasting 11 years called the Akitu Festival in Babylon,
00:11:42 ►
with similar, almost identical festivals in Egypt, the Osiris
00:11:47 ►
festival of Dendera, in Crete, the Dionysian ritual of the new year, and in Canaan, in
00:11:56 ►
the Israelite festival surviving to this day, Sukkoth, which begins next month.
00:12:02 ►
Sukkoth, which begins next month.
00:12:09 ►
All of this, just to the importance of the chaos revolution now,
00:12:14 ►
is that chaos has recovered from being demoted,
00:12:16 ►
from being banished to the unconscious,
00:12:20 ►
in around 2000 BC or so, from then up to now four or maybe five thousand years of the repression of chaos.
00:12:25 ►
I mean, chaos is to this day in our culture a bad word.
00:12:29 ►
We have to watch out for chaos.
00:12:31 ►
It ruins your love life.
00:12:32 ►
It has to be replaced by order.
00:12:34 ►
Scientists most especially hate it and so on.
00:12:36 ►
The fact that scientists, of all people, in the temple of science,
00:12:39 ►
that Tiamat has to be accepted as a friend and replaced upon her throne,
00:12:44 ►
this is big news.
00:12:45 ►
Now, a little bit of lore about chaos.
00:12:49 ►
And now, about the imagination.
00:12:54 ►
Since we have developed this theme, I think, to all our satisfaction,
00:12:59 ►
the connection between chaos and creativity,
00:13:03 ►
the creative as… now we’re connecting.
00:13:09 ►
I’m going to try to make a direct link from chaos to the imagination, but it’s completely unnecessary because we’ve already got the linked to chaos the repression of
00:13:25 ►
imagination the evil shadow the bad name of chaos must therefore result in an
00:13:34 ►
impedance a resistance to imagination so the creative imagination manifest most profoundly by people like Euler, like Beethoven, like Wagner.
00:13:51 ►
This imagination should, of course, be functioning in everyone, but people have a resistance to their
00:13:58 ►
own creative imagination, and I’m suggesting that this resistance has a mythological base, a ritual base,
00:14:06 ►
and historically represents a very deep creode,
00:14:11 ►
a runnel in the morphogenetic field of a depth of three to five Waddingtons.
00:14:19 ►
Well, this is a unit that Rupert and I have worked out for measuring the depth of runnels.
00:14:27 ►
Well, this is a unit that Rupert and I have worked out for measuring the depth of Reynolds. So we’ve got a really it’s not only a personal failing.
00:14:30 ►
If you find it difficult to write poetry when you sit down at your desk, you see.
00:14:39 ►
Repeat what? Yes. what yes 25 as the case may be I could try another pass nearby but I
00:14:53 ►
can’t remember where we are the waddington they just want to hear the word stealing a line from
00:15:05 ►
Terence’s current book.
00:15:07 ►
There are habits.
00:15:09 ►
Habits, according to
00:15:11 ►
Rupert, are
00:15:12 ►
tunnels. They’re, you know,
00:15:15 ►
deeply worn paths, labyrinths
00:15:17 ►
in the morphogenetic field.
00:15:19 ►
But habits
00:15:21 ►
is a habit.
00:15:22 ►
There’s a habit of habits. That’s the line I’m stealing
00:15:24 ►
from Terence’s book.
00:15:27 ►
And the habit of habits has, as a mathematical model,
00:15:32 ►
these creodes, that’s the attractor and the basin.
00:15:39 ►
Any state in the basin tends to the attractor.
00:15:44 ►
The attractor.
00:15:48 ►
The attractor is the teleology of its habit.
00:15:54 ►
So the habit of habits is the habit of living in a landscape, a landscape with peaks and valleys,
00:15:58 ►
where we have the tendency to go down the track to the attractor.
00:16:04 ►
Do I digress too far?
00:16:07 ►
So, the habit of habits is good.
00:16:18 ►
And some habits may be harmful.
00:16:21 ►
And one thing that creates a really deep runnel
00:16:24 ►
is the repetition for 11 days
00:16:27 ►
a row once a year for 2,000 to 3,000 years. So that makes it a more serious matter. I
00:16:35 ►
mean, it’s going to cost you a lot if you’re going to a psychotherapist to get cured of
00:16:40 ►
your difficulties in creative imagination. It’s going to be cheaper to fix up something
00:16:46 ►
that only started last year.
00:16:51 ►
Like thinking bisexuality is bad or something.
00:16:55 ►
So we felt that we wanted to quantify
00:16:58 ►
the depth of a runnel.
00:17:00 ►
And I’m not going to say it’s proportional
00:17:02 ►
exactly to the number of days of the repetition
00:17:04 ►
and the frequency, the annual,
00:17:07 ►
but there’s, since Waddington introduced
00:17:12 ►
the concept creode in connection with embryology
00:17:15 ►
as Rupert has explained,
00:17:18 ►
we thought it appropriate to take his name
00:17:20 ►
like resistance, ohm,
00:17:24 ►
there’s Maxwell’s you know, there’s
00:17:26 ►
Maxwell’s
00:17:26 ►
Henry’s, there’s
00:17:27 ►
Faraday’s, there’s
00:17:28 ►
Gilbert’s, there’s
00:17:29 ►
Ampere’s, Watts,
00:17:33 ►
as in Watts
00:17:34 ►
Tower, and
00:17:35 ►
Waddington, as
00:17:41 ►
in the depth of
00:17:42 ►
the creode.
00:17:43 ►
And for a
00:17:44 ►
really deep
00:17:44 ►
creode,
00:17:45 ►
I recommend for your consideration
00:17:47 ►
the New Year’s Festival of Akitu,
00:17:50 ►
together with its complete descriptions,
00:17:52 ►
the subject of numerous books of length,
00:17:54 ►
300 pages or so,
00:17:56 ►
by a fantastic field of scholarship known to few.
00:17:59 ►
We know about archaeology, anthropology, history,
00:18:04 ►
comparative religion, and so on what
00:18:07 ►
about OT Old Testament studies the most voluminous incredible field of the
00:18:13 ►
greatest scholarship of the most minute details all interdisciplinary has
00:18:19 ►
produced among other things a comparative study of New Year’s
00:18:22 ►
festivals around the world. Amazing
00:18:25 ►
evidence of morphic resonance on a planetary scale in society before radio,
00:18:31 ►
before sailing ships. Global manifestation evidence of resonance with
00:18:40 ►
the guy in mind on the same level as the distribution of these so-called Venus figurines
00:18:46 ►
of the Gravettian culture all over the planet.
00:18:52 ►
So chaos and the imagination, the repression of chaos, the obstruction of imagination,
00:18:59 ►
the final development over these thousands of years of serious and perhaps fatal ecological
00:19:06 ►
problems that we have today.
00:19:09 ►
Suggestion of the growth of a problem beyond all bound with nobody even trying to do anything
00:19:18 ►
about it, as associated with lack of imagination. And therefore, an artifact,
00:19:26 ►
a consequence of a cultural flaw
00:19:28 ►
that came in with the patriarchy.
00:19:31 ►
Now, I’m not saying
00:19:32 ►
that patriarchal culture is bad
00:19:33 ►
because it’s patriarchal,
00:19:35 ►
although I would say that too.
00:19:37 ►
That belongs in another context.
00:19:38 ►
I would say besides all that,
00:19:41 ►
it’s bad because it’s repressed chaos.
00:19:43 ►
It’s made chaos bad.
00:19:44 ►
It’s made Marduk good the god of
00:19:46 ►
law and order no we would like to reject that so the planet can be saved so life and love can be
00:19:52 ►
saved and lo and behold along comes an event as big as the development of the wheel as positive
00:19:59 ►
perhaps as whatever negative was the discovery of the wheel due to the fact that without getting rid of the wheel
00:20:06 ►
we don’t have to give up our automobiles.
00:20:09 ►
We are regaining chaos for potential partnership with the wheel.
00:20:14 ►
Chaos and order. Chaos and cosmos.
00:20:17 ►
Chaos and the imagination.
00:20:41 ►
Yes, well, chaos in the imagination and the notion here is in everyday life, in the dimension in which we find ourselves.
00:20:49 ►
I would like to sort of expand on what Ralph has been saying with my own perspective on it.
00:20:54 ►
Chaos is feminine.
00:20:57 ►
Chaos is intuitional.
00:21:00 ►
Chaos has a very flirtatious relationship with language.
00:21:11 ►
And the process of creating a culture has to do with how we relate to this thing.
00:21:27 ►
And since we’re talking about everyday life,
00:21:29 ►
it seems reasonable to talk about how we come to be
00:21:34 ►
in the kind of planetary mess that we’re in
00:21:38 ►
and whether these extremely rarefied and abstract matters
00:21:43 ►
that we’ve been talking about
00:21:45 ►
can in any way be brought tangential to the burning planet.
00:21:51 ►
And I think that they can.
00:21:54 ►
That the key is the power number one of chaos,
00:21:59 ►
which is feminine and beyond prediction and beyond full rational apprehension, and the imagination,
00:22:10 ►
which is our richest legacy, really the birthright that connects us to the divine, is our poetic capacity, our ability to resonate with an idea of ideal beauty and to create
00:22:29 ►
that which transcends our own understanding in the form of art through the imagination.
00:22:37 ►
So what does all this say about the situation we’re in and how we got here? Well, I believe that the importance of the
00:22:48 ►
psychedelics is primary here and that it doesn’t simply have to do with the fact that they synergize
00:22:57 ►
cognition, which they do do, and the synthetics as well as the natural ones but it’s deeper than
00:23:07 ►
that it’s that we have a secret history knowledge of which has been lost to us
00:23:16 ►
and only is now recoverable in the light of the kind of mindset that becomes possible to us
00:23:25 ►
if we accept the new paradigm.
00:23:29 ►
And what this secret history is and has to do with
00:23:33 ►
and how it relates to the Gaian mind and the world soul
00:23:36 ►
is that we are the victims of an instance of traumatic abuse in childhood as a species because a symbiotic
00:23:52 ►
relationship with the world girdling intelligence of the planet which was mediated through plants, through shamanism, I mean, it wasn’t an abstraction, it was an experience,
00:24:07 ►
was eventually broken up and disrupted
00:24:12 ►
by progressive climatic drying of the Eurasian and African landmass.
00:24:22 ►
And so this is literally the fall into history the expulsion from
00:24:27 ►
Eden all these primary myths of a golden age found and lost have to do with the
00:24:33 ►
fact that once we lived in dynamic balance with nature not as animals do but as human beings only could but in a way that we have now lost
00:24:48 ►
well what how have we lost it and what have we lost how we have lost it is the
00:24:56 ►
the way in which these psychoactive compounds that were being brought into
00:25:02 ►
the diet were acting is they were
00:25:05 ►
psycholitic upon the formation of the ego they literally suppressed the
00:25:12 ►
formulation of the eat the formation of the ego and promoted instead
00:25:17 ►
collectivist tribal partnership values which were operating intuitionally in a resonance
00:25:26 ►
relationship with the
00:25:28 ►
feminine vegetable matrix of the planet. In other words
00:25:32 ►
nothing was verbalized, everything was felt
00:25:35 ►
everything was intuited
00:25:38 ►
and regularly at the new and full moon
00:25:41 ►
these small groups of hunter-gatherers
00:25:44 ►
later pastoralists, gathered and took these
00:25:50 ►
hallucinogenic plants and dissolved boundaries and engaged in group sex and annealed, a new
00:26:00 ►
word that we’ve brought in here, anneeled the irregularities that had cropped up in people’s
00:26:06 ►
personal self-imaging in the interval since the last session. And this kept everything
00:26:15 ►
grounded on the plane of that which is important, i.e. the values of the group, of the species,
00:26:24 ►
which is important, i.e. the values of the group, of the species,
00:26:28 ►
of dynamic balance with the ecosystem, and so forth and so on.
00:26:34 ►
Well, when this was disrupted, and the supplies of these plants were diminished, and new religious forms arose, and the time between the great festivals grew longer and longer,
00:26:50 ►
grew longer and longer, the ego begins to take hold, first as a kind of cancerous aberration, but then quickly becoming a new style of behavior, which quickly then eliminates all other styles
00:26:58 ►
of behavior by suppressing access to the chaos. And this is the point I want to make,
00:27:06 ►
that there is, between the ego and full understanding of reality,
00:27:13 ►
a barrier, a problem,
00:27:15 ►
the fear of the ego to surrender to the fact of chaos.
00:27:21 ►
Now, in a pre-modern society, no woman could escape chaos because of the
00:27:30 ►
automatic birth script that would have women give birth over and over and over unto death
00:27:37 ►
in these societies. Women are biologically scripted into being much closer to this thing simply because there are certain episodes in the life of a female
00:27:48 ►
which are guaranteed to be boundary-dissolving.
00:27:53 ►
And in fact, the whole psychology of feminine sexuality,
00:27:58 ►
which is the acceptance of penetration,
00:28:01 ►
is an entirely different relationship to boundary than the male
00:28:05 ►
relationship which is you know to be able to fulfill the potential to
00:28:11 ►
penetrate so chaos is what we have lost touch with this is why it has been given
00:28:19 ►
a bad name because it is feared by the dominant archetype of our world which is
00:28:27 ►
the ego which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control
00:28:37 ►
and the the furious modeling process and this will now sound like a knock on modeling the furious
00:28:45 ►
modeling process that the ego endlessly carries out is an effort to fight the
00:28:52 ►
absence of closure the ego wants closure it wants a complete explanation the
00:28:59 ►
beginning of wisdom I believe is the ability to accept an inherent messiness in your explanation of what’s
00:29:10 ►
going on because nowhere is it writ that human minds should be able to give a full accounting
00:29:17 ►
of creation in all dimensions and on all levels you know Wittgenstein had this idea that philosophy should be
00:29:26 ►
what he called true enough.
00:29:29 ►
And I think that’s a great idea.
00:29:32 ►
Let’s just make it true enough
00:29:34 ►
because that’s as true as it can be gotten.
00:29:39 ►
Well, so the imagination is chaos.
00:29:45 ►
New forms are fetched out of this chaos.
00:29:49 ►
For me, the creative act is the letting down of the net of human imagination
00:29:57 ►
into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended
00:30:01 ►
and the attempt to bring out of it ideas to
00:30:06 ►
bring out of it you know sometimes and this is part this is my model for the
00:30:12 ►
psychedelic experience that it is the night sea journey that it is the lone
00:30:17 ►
fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets and you let these nets down and sometimes something tears through them
00:30:28 ►
that leaves them in shreds and you just row for sure and put your head under your bed and pray
00:30:35 ►
and at other times what slips through are the minutiae the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing and but sometimes you
00:30:48 ►
know you actually can bring home something that is food that is food for
00:30:54 ►
the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward so we
00:31:01 ►
haven’t talked that much about art and aesthetics, but I think in the human
00:31:06 ►
world the appetition is for beauty, to my mind. And this is another place where the
00:31:18 ►
Platonism shines radiantly through, you know, because Plato held that the good was the true and that both were
00:31:27 ►
the beautiful. And this is a very quaint idea from the point of view of modern philosophy,
00:31:33 ►
but I think, you know, it’s in the bones when you actually connect yourself up to the planet.
00:31:50 ►
self up to the planet. That’s why chaos is capable of being the tremendous repository of ordered beauty that it is, because there is no chaos in the old definition, which is to say that which by any definition or any test is found to be disordered,
00:32:06 ►
that is just a kind of a hell notion,
00:32:12 ►
a kind of hypostatization of an ultimate state of disorder.
00:32:17 ►
But nowhere in the world that is deployed through space and time do you encounter that.
00:32:24 ►
Instead what you encounter that instead
00:32:25 ►
what you encounter is embedded order upon embedded order this fractal this
00:32:32 ►
fractal thing and then finally for me the imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.
00:32:51 ►
And, you know, it’s on a very crude level when it’s you make your mask and I make my mask and
00:32:57 ►
then we dance around together. And it’s even at a very crude level when it’s you design your
00:33:03 ►
shopping mall and I’ll design my world trade center
00:33:06 ►
and we’ll put them on the same piece of real estate.
00:33:09 ►
But we’re coming now into, through media, I believe,
00:33:14 ►
through virtual reality and human-machine integration
00:33:17 ►
and this kind of thing, into a situation
00:33:21 ►
where the imagination is going to be something that we can share, that the path of mind
00:33:29 ►
through its own meanderings will become something that can be recorded and played back. We will have
00:33:35 ►
the possibility of living in our own past or, you know, creating and trading realities as art.
00:33:45 ►
And art, as life lived in the imagination,
00:33:50 ►
is the great archetype which rears itself up at the end of history.
00:33:55 ►
Life in the imagination.
00:33:57 ►
The imagination is this auric field
00:34:02 ►
which surrounds the transcendental object at greater and greater depth as you
00:34:09 ►
approach the transcendental object and as we now close distance with it all uh all of our
00:34:18 ►
our cultural expression all of our self-awareness is taking on this curiously designed quality.
00:34:27 ►
I mean, you must have noticed this, that the world is very heavily designed in a way that
00:34:33 ►
it never was before.
00:34:36 ►
Morphogenetic fields of great size and scope, which are international schools of architecture and design touch whole continents. Entire cities are
00:34:47 ►
given certain ambiances. This is the summoning of the imagination into the human scale. It’s like a
00:34:56 ►
god that we wish to call down and draw to earth. I mean, this is why William Blake called it the divine imagination,
00:35:06 ►
because it is the four-gated city.
00:35:09 ►
It is the flying saucer.
00:35:11 ►
We are on a journey to meet this great attractor,
00:35:17 ►
and as we close distance with it,
00:35:19 ►
it is more and more a multifaceted mirror of our images of beauty. So it’s like an ascending learning curve
00:35:29 ►
that becomes asymptotic. And at that point, you’re face to face with a mystery, a living mystery
00:35:39 ►
that is within each and all of us. It’s the imagination that argues for the divine spark in human beings.
00:35:50 ►
It’s absolutely confounding if you try to get biology
00:35:55 ►
to produce it for you as a necessary quantity.
00:35:58 ►
It isn’t that.
00:36:00 ►
It’s an emanation from above.
00:36:02 ►
It is literally a descent of the world soul into all of us.
00:36:09 ►
We then become the atoms of the world soul,
00:36:14 ►
and our channel to it is by closing our eyes
00:36:18 ►
and obliterating our immediate personalized space-time locus
00:36:23 ►
and falling into the imagination which
00:36:27 ►
is running like a river through all of us endlessly driven by the you know the
00:36:37 ►
heist hydraulic momentum of the cataracts of chaos which usher into the creativity of the imagination.
00:36:47 ►
I mean, these river metaphors are just endlessly applicable to this.
00:36:52 ►
The flowing of forces over landscapes,
00:36:55 ►
the pressure of chaos on the imagination to create creativity,
00:37:01 ►
and it’s looping back into the same.
00:37:04 ►
and it’s looping back into the same.
00:37:13 ►
I mean, these things are the icons for the world that wants to be.
00:37:18 ►
But the key is surrender and dissolution of boundaries,
00:37:20 ►
dissolution of the ego,
00:37:29 ►
and a trust in the love of the goddess which transcends rational understanding there will come a moment which will be an absolute leap into space and we will
00:37:34 ►
simply have to have the faith that there is something waiting there because the has left us no choice. So that’s my wrap on that.
00:37:51 ►
The cataracts of chaos.
00:37:56 ►
They roll off his tongue, you see,
00:38:00 ►
which obviously has a direct connection
00:38:03 ►
to the cataracts of chaos.
00:38:07 ►
So while we are progressing toward a dialogue, now is the idea.
00:38:11 ►
But there’s so many different ideas to respond to here.
00:38:17 ►
I’ll try to limit myself to one or two.
00:38:22 ►
I’d like to try to connect these up, these two statements.
00:38:29 ►
And I think the key, the intersection, is the Eleusinian mysteries.
00:38:36 ►
And this is not validated by all the scholarly research, just speculation. It was generally supposed by historians that there’s sort
00:38:46 ►
of a straight line from Babylon to Ugarit to Minoan Crete to Mycenae to
00:38:54 ►
Athens and so on. So it was supposed that there’s a cultural diffusion including
00:39:00 ►
the festivals which as I said are very similar. But in the Babylonian festival, you already had, by 2000 BC,
00:39:10 ►
the extensive domination of the male god of order and the patriarchy and so on.
00:39:19 ►
Whereas in Minoan Crete, you find, according to the evidence of the excavators
00:39:25 ►
and all who have examined the artworks that remain,
00:39:30 ►
an outstanding, a long-lasting fluorescence of partnership culture
00:39:35 ►
with no domination by a male god.
00:39:40 ►
So there is a little question mark there as far as the diffusion from Babylon to Crete.
00:39:46 ►
Instead, there’s a complementary theory of a renewal of the partnership concept in Crete coming from India
00:39:57 ►
in the early days of Cretan culture in 3000 BC. In any case, it’s established that there’s the diffusion from Crete to Greece, and the
00:40:11 ►
last remainder of the Cretan culture, which is a very interesting one, it must have been
00:40:16 ►
sort of the last vestige in all aspects of life.
00:40:31 ►
The Eleusinian mysteries and the related mysteries of Plua were said to be identical to those
00:40:38 ►
in Crete which were celebrated publicly, though they became secret after the patriarchal takeover
00:40:46 ►
by the Mycenaeans in Crete
00:40:48 ►
and the exportation of this dual culture to Greece
00:40:53 ►
where you had kind of the overworld and the underworld,
00:40:55 ►
the conscious and the unconscious,
00:40:57 ►
and the goddess and the partnership of gods and goddesses of Crete
00:41:01 ►
continued to exist in Greece,
00:41:05 ►
but as this accepted but still unacceptable secret festival.
00:41:12 ►
And among the aspects of the Cretan and Eleusinian
00:41:16 ►
and Pluif festivals are the sexual rites
00:41:22 ►
and psychedelic rites
00:41:25 ►
celebrated in a highly specified ritual format
00:41:32 ►
and on an annual basis.
00:41:36 ►
So it is a speculation on what happened to the cataracts of chaos
00:41:41 ►
in the hands of the patriarchy.
00:41:44 ►
This is, I don’t know, I think you guys know a lot more about this than I do,
00:41:49 ►
but our conversation has stimulated this speculation.
00:41:55 ►
In the patriarchy, because of the patrilineal aspect,
00:41:58 ►
you have to know who is the father of the children, not just who is the mother,
00:42:03 ►
and therefore monogamy is very important,
00:42:05 ►
and this was in a strong conflict with the ritual.
00:42:10 ►
And so sooner or later, that aspect had to go.
00:42:16 ►
I don’t see that there’s any…
00:42:19 ►
I don’t understand the direct connection
00:42:23 ►
between the patriarchy and the repression of chaos.
00:42:27 ►
But I can see the simple explanation for the repression of the other aspect of these rights
00:42:32 ►
that were celebrated together, that somehow, I don’t know if they go together, of sexual
00:42:37 ►
license and the psychedelic ritual. Anyway, the illusinian mysteries disappeared
00:42:45 ►
and what we are left with is this control of Marduk order,
00:42:51 ►
the constipation of the imagination,
00:42:56 ►
and in our fantasy it’s consequent the world problems.
00:43:02 ►
Now there are some open questions here I’m not addressing
00:43:06 ►
maybe you can consider one is if we consider the practical aspect of what
00:43:12 ►
we’re talking about in these world problems it seems like a main motor of
00:43:16 ►
world problem is the population explosion so I I don’t know would it
00:43:22 ►
would do you think it would be true if we had a partnership society instead of a patriarchal, a dominator society, would we still have the population explosion? That’s what I don’t understand.
00:43:51 ►
You said that you didn’t understand the suppression of other parts of the partnership society other than the orgies which confused knowledge about who was the father.
00:43:58 ►
Yeah, you see, the New Year’s festival continued on to our day,
00:44:10 ►
festival continued on to our day, but these aspects of it were removed and replaced with, in all cases, with the recital of the conquest of chaos by the God of Order. And part of
00:44:17 ►
his conquest, I assume, was the elimination of sexual license as well as psychedelic ritual.
00:44:25 ►
Don’t you think it’s because the ego is basically a control trip?
00:44:33 ►
And so the ego, the person who has the ego,
00:44:39 ►
becomes the center of the space in which they’re operating in.
00:44:44 ►
They control the women
00:44:46 ►
assuming it’s a man, they control the resources, and they… Vigilance is the key.
00:44:56 ►
It reminds me of the national motto of Albania which is, fear it is that guards the vineyard so this is definitely an egocentric dominator view
00:45:12 ►
and so the fear of the psychedelic experience
00:45:15 ►
is quite literally the fear of losing control
00:45:18 ►
and even if you approach dominator types today
00:45:22 ►
and say wouldn’t you like to try some psilocybin?
00:45:25 ►
Say, I’m afraid I would lose control.
00:45:29 ►
This is the great…
00:45:30 ►
And it’s not important to maintain control if you are not in control in the first place by definition.
00:45:39 ►
In a tribal society, for instance, where there is no property and where there are no assigned sleeping places,
00:45:46 ►
everyone behaves according to something which we can only call whim.
00:45:56 ►
But whim has replaced, you know, mine, yours, my spot, your spot, my food, your food, and the psychedelic thing dissolves this and makes it all very threatening and throws it all up for grabs.
00:46:14 ►
And then you have to rely on group values and not yourself.
00:46:26 ►
As I was listening with you to Terrence McKenna just now,
00:46:31 ►
I was taken by his rap about sharing imagination and playing back imaginings when I thought of it in context of his first and I guess maybe his only encounter with others
00:46:38 ►
through the 3D avatar world that Bruce Dahmer and Terrence’s son Finn
00:46:43 ►
and some others created to host Terrence’s first online workshop. Thank you. Not long ago, I saw a homemade video that was taken on Terrence’s end of that event,
00:47:11 ►
and it was really cool to see how almost childlike he was as he interacted with others in cyberspace.
00:47:17 ►
It was almost as if you could see the wheels turning in his mind with all kinds of new ideas about the possibilities that these alternative worlds present for the evolution of our consciousness.
00:47:23 ►
Sadly, that event took place only about a week or so before the seizure that revealed
00:47:29 ►
the fact that Terrence had a very large mushroom-shaped tumor in his brain.
00:47:35 ►
What an amazing person he was.
00:47:37 ►
What an amazing mind.
00:47:39 ►
And thanks to a lot of people and the advent of podcasting, all of us here in the Psychedelic Salon can still hear the words of the irreplaceable Terrence McKenna,
00:47:49 ►
along with the wonderful thoughts and comments by Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake,
00:47:55 ►
and a lot of others here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:47:58 ►
One other thing I want to point out is that while there is only a brief mention of Ralph Abraham’s book,
00:48:04 ►
Chaos, Gaia, and
00:48:06 ►
Eros, if you haven’t had the chance to read it yet, I highly recommend it. And if you’re worried that
00:48:11 ►
the chaos part deals with math, well, don’t worry. You won’t find any equations in it. Instead, you’ll
00:48:18 ►
find a very readable and concise history of some esoteric knowledge that you might have missed in school.
00:48:28 ►
Also, I want to thank all of you who sent emails this week.
00:48:34 ►
It’s always nice to receive your comments and suggestions, and it truly warms the cockles of my heart when you say such nice things about these podcasts.
00:48:38 ►
You know, it’s interesting how your emails sometimes seem to arrive with comments that
00:48:43 ►
are right in line with something that I was thinking
00:48:45 ►
just a few minutes before I checked my mail.
00:48:48 ►
For example, this morning I was thinking that this new schedule of putting out three podcasts a week
00:48:54 ►
might be a little too much.
00:48:56 ►
I know I’m not getting a lot of other things done that I want to do,
00:48:59 ►
and I was worrying that maybe I’m overloading your MP3 inboxes.
00:49:03 ►
And then comes a note from a listener calling himself Wooden Chip,
00:49:08 ►
who writes from what he says, the bald prairies of Saskatchewan,
00:49:14 ►
to say that, and I quote,
00:49:16 ►
it’s the small dose hits of psychedelic info that keep my far out bone in tune
00:49:21 ►
and offer balance in this consciously constricted western culture
00:49:26 ►
well i sure hear you there and well wooden ship you’ve convinced me to keep up these three a week
00:49:32 ►
podcasts a while longer at least until this first series of trial logs is all online and since we’re
00:49:39 ►
only on the first side of tape three right now it looks like we’ve got at least seven more weeks to
00:49:43 ►
go to finish up the 89 and 90 trial logs and of course that still leaves quite a few more to go since they continued
00:49:51 ►
holding these interesting conversations until the summer of 1998 and hey i love your handle by the
00:49:57 ►
way i have a special affinity for wooden ships myself since i had the great good fortune to do
00:50:03 ►
a pacific crossing in a-rigged wooden sailing ship.
00:50:07 ►
And if you’re into that kind of a trip too, well, you can see some of my photos from those days on my website at matrixmasters.com.
00:50:15 ►
Or you can also find the entire listing of all 65 podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon.
00:50:20 ►
Just go to matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.
00:50:28 ►
Alex Lon. Just go to matrixmasters.com slash podcasts. Also, I received some good advice from Chris who suggested something that John M. also told me a few months ago, and that is that
00:50:33 ►
I should consider putting up this series of podcasts on BitTorrent. And I promise I’m going
00:50:40 ►
to follow up on that soon, and maybe with a little of Chris’s help once he finishes exams.
00:50:44 ►
going to follow up on that soon and maybe with a little of Chris’s help once he finishes exams and good luck on the exams Chris and same to the rest of you who are out there cramming right now
00:50:50 ►
hey uh shouldn’t you all be studying right now instead of listening to this podcast
00:50:56 ►
but I shouldn’t talk one of the reasons I’m not getting very far along on my website revisions as
00:51:03 ►
I think I should have,
00:51:05 ►
is that I’ve gotten hooked on the podcasts from the Cannabis Podcast Network.
00:51:10 ►
I just learned about them from KMO a few weeks ago, and he hosts the Sea Realm Podcast.
00:51:16 ►
Now I’m going back and catching up on all of their programs.
00:51:20 ►
Not only is there a lot of good information being podcast on the Cannabis Network,
00:51:25 ►
but their programs are also a lot of fun to listen to,
00:51:29 ►
particularly if you don’t always have close friends to share a little smoke with,
00:51:33 ►
or a little vapor, as the case may be.
00:51:37 ►
And just to give you a feeling of how upbeat their programs are on the Cannabis Podcast Network,
00:51:42 ►
as soon as I’m done here and sign off, I’m going to play a little clip from one of Queer
00:51:47 ►
Ninja’s podcasts, which are titled The Sounds of Worldwide Weed, where you can hear some
00:51:53 ►
really good world music, a nice wide variety of it.
00:51:57 ►
Now, I haven’t checked with Queer Ninja to see if this is okay, because from what I understand,
00:52:02 ►
he’s right now recovering from a flood that ravaged his remote Scottish home.
00:52:08 ►
So I don’t want to add to your email queue right now, Queer Ninja, and I hope you’re recovering from your flood.
00:52:14 ►
The sound bite, though, that I’m going to play is actually sort of a plug that Queer Ninja did for the entire group of programs on their network.
00:52:22 ►
But his happiness and enthusiasm for life, I believe,
00:52:26 ►
would come out even if he was just reading a telephone book.
00:52:29 ►
I think you’ll see what I mean in a minute.
00:52:32 ►
And as I try to do in every podcast,
00:52:34 ►
I want to thank my friends Jacques Cordell and Wells,
00:52:37 ►
otherwise known as Chateau Hayouk,
00:52:39 ►
for letting me use some of their music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:52:43 ►
I hope you guys are having a great year end.
00:52:47 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:52:52 ►
Be well, my friends.
00:52:58 ►
Hey, how’s it going? How’s it going?
00:53:00 ►
This is Queen Ninja and this is the Sounds of World Wide Wide, episode four, man.
00:53:05 ►
Welcome along. This is a big yellow mug edition the Sounds of World Wide Wide, Episode 4, man.
00:53:05 ►
Welcome along.
00:53:07 ►
This is a big Yellow Mog edition.
00:53:08 ►
It’s quite a special edition.
00:53:12 ►
I want to share with you some of the journey of my very good friend who’s traveling in Africa.
00:53:14 ►
And this is coming up in the second half of the show.
00:53:21 ►
In this half, though, I just want to say a great big hello to everyone who’s emailed and left comments from around the world, man. Hello to Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, Japan, East, West and Southern United States,
00:53:26 ►
Canada, Bolivia and Romania.
00:53:30 ►
Big hello to Romania.
00:53:31 ►
I’ve never even been there, man.
00:53:33 ►
Hello.
00:53:35 ►
Anyways, anyways, music in this half of the show
00:53:38 ►
featuring artists from Cipumatu,
00:53:40 ►
Blue Dude, Bedouin Soundcrash
00:53:42 ►
and coming up after that,
00:53:44 ►
we’re going to have some musical accompaniment
00:53:46 ►
where we take a little peek into a vast journey accompanied by some tunes from Eastern Africa and beyond.
00:53:53 ►
And always listeners’ emails and comments, which is my personal favorite part.
00:53:58 ►
I really like to get all fluffy, you know what I mean?
00:54:01 ►
Get some nice emails from people.
00:54:02 ►
Drop me a line, man.
00:54:03 ►
You know the drill.
00:54:10 ►
My email address is koreanindia at delphine.co.uk you can also leave a comment there on the website like uh good i think it’s three listeners last week left some comments
00:54:14 ►
there on the website at delphine.co.uk home of the dope cast home of the sounds of worldwide weed
00:54:21 ►
and home of mr bud’s grow shop so diverse programming to compensate for, you know what I mean,
00:54:28 ►
the lack of mainstream coverage that our people get.
00:54:32 ►
You know what I mean?
00:54:32 ►
That’s a good stone that people get, man.
00:54:35 ►
And it’s beautiful to have to come together like this.
00:54:37 ►
It’s great, man.
00:54:38 ►
I have so much fun making this show every week.
00:54:40 ►
I really don’t know what I would do without it, though.
00:54:42 ►
So with that in mind, I want to get this show kicked off man and the first track this is an out of town classic i got
00:54:50 ►
lots of feedback from middle fluffy clouds but that’s