Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:29 Terence McKenna:
“The ego is essentially paranoia institutionalized.”
03:53 Ralph Abraham:
Considers the possibility that ego became strengthened when psychedelic usage became less frequent.
05:29 Terence:
Talks about a “psychedelic rebirth.”
08:15 Terence:
“A calendrical reform would be a wonderful thing, and I have just the calendar all worked out.”
09:48 Terence:
“It’s an effort to deny man’s mortality, this solar calendar. It’s reinforcing a false notion of permanence, and what we actually want is a calendar that says ‘all is flow, all is flux, all relationships are in motion to everything else. It’s a truer picture of the world.”
13:22 Rupert Sheldrake:
Comments on the fact that the Islamic calendar fits the definition of Terence’s suggested calendar.
16:22 Rupert:
“One of the things that’s clear is that chaos is feminine, and creation out of chaos is like the creation out of the womb, coming out of darkness.”
20:56 Terence:
“I think it’s the notion of as above so below.” … “In talking about these things you can’t force closure.”
22:14 Ralph:
Explains how the painting in the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe (the black virgin) is actually a representation of the goddess chaos.
26:19 Terence:
Explains how the Faustian pact with the physical world that humans have made by adopting the “deadly cultural forms” of written language, moveable type, etc. have had a negative impact on our self-image… . “In the absence of this boundary-dissolving ecstasies, and replacing that with the machinations and plottings of the ego leads very, very quickly into a cultural cul de sac… . This was the wrong-turning.”
29:15 Terence:
Explains the difference between dominator and partnership.
33:17 Terence:
“You cannot trust the dominator style not to go psychotic here at the end.” … “Who is it who has the power to pry the dead fingers of the dominator culture from the instrumentality of power?” … “Everyone should understand this, that chaos provides opportunity for commandos of the new persuasion to rush forward and jam vital machinery of the dominator metaphor.”
39:14 Terence:
Discusses the question of whether there can be consciousness without an object.
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065 - Chaos and Imagination (Part 1)
Next Episode
067 - Light and Vision (Part 1)
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:21 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:26 ►
I guess I should point out, by the way, that these trilog conversations build on one another,
00:00:31 ►
so in a minute here, when you hear Ralph Abraham mention a 12-Waddington-Runnel jumper,
00:00:37 ►
well, if you didn’t hear the previous podcast, then you missed their talk about what was once a rather esoteric
00:00:45 ►
sounding concept to me, but now actually seems to be making some sense, or at least so I’ve
00:00:52 ►
led myself to believe. Actually, I think it might be worth your time to go back and listen
00:00:58 ►
to the previous podcast before picking up here. I just did that myself, and I found
00:01:03 ►
that on further listening, some really interesting new ideas are beginning to form in ways that I hadn’t thought of before.
00:01:10 ►
So just as a reminder, I’m going to play a short bit by Terence McKenna from the last podcast.
00:01:18 ►
And it’s one I like to call the cataracts of chaos.
00:01:23 ►
Do you remember it?
00:01:30 ►
called the cataracts of chaos do you remember it we then become the atoms of the world soul and our channel to it is by closing our eyes and obliterating our immediate personalized space-time
00:01:38 ►
locus and falling into the imagination which is running like a river through all of us, endlessly
00:01:49 ►
driven by the hydraulic momentum of the cataracts of chaos, which usher into the creativity
00:02:02 ►
of the imagination. I mean, these river metaphors
00:02:05 ►
are just endlessly applicable to this.
00:02:09 ►
Well, how’s that for an off-the-cuff poetic riff?
00:02:13 ►
Cataracts of Chaos.
00:02:15 ►
Don’t you just love that imagery?
00:02:18 ►
And for some more of the same,
00:02:20 ►
let’s rejoin this discussion
00:02:22 ►
with a great McKinnick quote about the ego.
00:02:28 ►
The ego is basically paranoia institutionalized, I think.
00:02:35 ►
So I guess it’s a package deal.
00:02:37 ►
You’ve got the dominator, you’ve got the patriarchal, you’ve got the ego,
00:02:42 ►
as in our culture we see primarily as a male disease like
00:02:46 ►
testosterone poisoning and well I don’t see it as a male disease I think
00:02:52 ►
everybody in this room has a far stronger ego than they need and in the
00:02:58 ►
society I think the great thing that Rian Eisler did for this discussion was degenderize the terminology
00:03:07 ►
so that instead of talking about patriarchy and all this,
00:03:10 ►
what we should be talking about is dominator versus partnership.
00:03:14 ►
Yes.
00:03:15 ►
But the fact is we have very little personal or historical experience
00:03:20 ►
with dominator matriarchal societies.
00:03:23 ►
Nevertheless, I agree with you.
00:03:24 ►
It’s a good
00:03:25 ►
service she has done and I’ll try to follow. Why not? But in this package deal, I mean,
00:03:35 ►
basically we’re faced with this problem, how to get back to the other paradigm. So one suggestion, I think, if I’m interpreting what you said as, I shouldn’t do that.
00:03:49 ►
That’s sort of a, it’s not exactly a missionary appeal for psychedelic usage.
00:03:53 ►
But since ego is an aspect of the problem, and this ego problem had arose not only by the,
00:04:09 ►
ego problem had arose not only by the through the suppression of psychedelic usage in ritual but even through the gradually increasing interval between the festivals which would be something
00:04:18 ►
like the parameter of the cooling off of the universe out of which crystallizes different through
00:04:25 ►
phase transition different material forms and then the the dominator society
00:04:31 ►
in short had sort of crystallized out through the gradual increase of the
00:04:35 ►
interval between rituals that’s right I mean this is part of it definitely that
00:04:42 ►
the phonetic alphabet is in there, too,
00:04:45 ►
playing a further abstracting role from process
00:04:49 ►
and giving permission for all kinds of curious, disensouling maneuvers
00:04:57 ►
on the part of the dominator ego.
00:05:00 ►
Well, we still have mathematics and music.
00:05:02 ►
Yes, but so few had them.
00:05:04 ►
Few did. Well, we still have mathematics and music. Yes, but so few had them. Few did.
00:05:06 ►
Well, we tuned up.
00:05:07 ►
And those few who did were the creative engines of those societies.
00:05:12 ►
They kept the connection to the muse.
00:05:14 ►
Well, are we supposed to…
00:05:16 ►
Do you think that if the Eleusinian mysteries could be reinstituted,
00:05:19 ►
which I guess is ridiculous because it’s part of a package,
00:05:23 ►
now lost in homeless.
00:05:27 ►
Well, I think the psychedelic rebirth is an effort to find our way back to something like that.
00:05:35 ►
I mean, we don’t have to advocate mass psychedelic conversion.
00:05:40 ►
The sly thing to do is to call attention to the words of someone who’s dead,
00:05:45 ►
to Arthur Kessler, great anti-communist freedom fighter and scientific intellectual.
00:05:53 ►
And in a book called The Ghost in the Machine,
00:05:57 ►
his final conclusion is that there has to be mass pharmacological intervention to…
00:06:08 ►
He wants a drug that destroys territoriality he thinks that well this is just a unpsychedelic analysis of the same problem I mean the dissolving
00:06:16 ►
of boundaries is certainly the an anti-territoriality drug so we are not the first nor the most eminent to suggest this kind of
00:06:29 ►
re-engineering of the human animal. Our reflexes and our mental set is highly and well adapted to
00:06:39 ►
the stoning to death of woolly mastodons. But since we so rarely do that anymore,
00:06:48 ►
we need to retool for living in peace and universal brotherhood.
00:06:56 ►
Well, do you think that some of our existing national holidays or something
00:07:01 ►
could be changed or that a mythological mutation could be introduced
00:07:07 ►
which would go in this direction.
00:07:08 ►
For example, in Switzerland,
00:07:10 ►
they recently invented Faschung,
00:07:12 ►
or I think Fasnacht, they call it there.
00:07:15 ►
They had no ritual at all, barely Christmas,
00:07:18 ►
and there was a suffering of enormous boredom
00:07:21 ►
among people there.
00:07:22 ►
It was said that there was no known way
00:07:24 ►
to make a new friend in Switzerland.
00:07:27 ►
I don’t know how it started,
00:07:28 ►
but just a few years ago recently
00:07:30 ►
they started this Fasnacht,
00:07:32 ►
which is in February,
00:07:33 ►
three days of day and night alcoholic revelry
00:07:37 ►
around the fantastic reenactment
00:07:42 ►
of a medieval drama,
00:07:44 ►
which involves people marching in the streets in parades
00:07:47 ►
led by musicians who practice a medieval song on medieval instruments
00:07:52 ►
all year long just for this three-day ceremony.
00:07:55 ►
And now it is said that during Fasnacht you can make a new friend.
00:08:02 ►
Well, it’s a new tradition.
00:08:06 ►
Something along that line that I’ve advocated,
00:08:10 ►
sometimes facetiously, sometimes seriously,
00:08:13 ►
is that a calendrical reform would be a wonderful thing,
00:08:19 ►
and I have just the calendar all worked out,
00:08:22 ►
and I won’t lay it all out here tonight,
00:08:26 ►
but the basic notion is that
00:08:28 ►
it’s a lunar calendar of 13 lunar cycles,
00:08:33 ►
so it has 384 days.
00:08:35 ►
Consequently, it precesses 19 days
00:08:38 ►
against the solar year.
00:08:40 ►
Well, this would have the effect
00:08:42 ►
of taking the great yearly events of the calendar and through the lifetime of a person, they would slowly move through the seasons. And you as a child celebrated Christmas in winter.
00:09:10 ►
As a teenager you would celebrate it in spring.
00:09:14 ►
And as a young adult you would celebrate it in high summer.
00:09:16 ►
And as an older person it would occur in autumn. And then when you were truly old Christmas would have returned again and occur in winter.
00:09:26 ►
returned again and occur in winter and the notion here is to overcome this really really bad idea in my opinion it’s very much a dominator idea that the
00:09:35 ►
calendar should be anchored rigidly at the equinoctial and solsticeal points
00:09:42 ►
that sends the message that there is stability. It’s an effort to deny
00:09:48 ►
man’s mortality, this solar calendar. It’s reinforcing a false notion of permanence.
00:09:57 ►
And what we actually want is a calendar that says to us, all flow all is flux all relationships are in motion
00:10:07 ►
to everything else a truer picture of the world now you see this may seem
00:10:12 ►
trivial and like this is why eggheads are harmless that this guy would bother
00:10:17 ►
to tell us something like this but think about it The calendar is the largest frame there is in which all other contexts are somehow subsets.
00:10:31 ►
So if we yield the structure of the calendar to the dominators and let them tell us what kind of calendar we shall have,
00:10:40 ►
then we shall all live within the context of their framework.
00:10:46 ►
I think changing the calendar is an extremely interesting idea
00:10:53 ►
because I think it would have tremendous consequences
00:10:56 ►
and it would not be opposed by the dominators until it was too late
00:11:01 ►
because they would regard it as some kind of a crank thing
00:11:05 ►
because they would not realize
00:11:08 ►
that what you were twiddling with
00:11:10 ►
were the dials of the whole civilization’s image
00:11:14 ►
of time and change and itself.
00:11:17 ►
So that’s one thing that could be done.
00:11:20 ►
That’s a bit technical,
00:11:21 ►
but I think we’ve got to admit
00:11:23 ►
that is a major Ronald jumper.
00:11:30 ►
I would say that is a 12 Waddington Ronald jumper.
00:11:36 ►
And so that suggests to me that it’s time for a little play, a little mathematical play,
00:11:44 ►
and the construction of a chaos-theoretic model for the imagination,
00:11:49 ►
explaining why runnel jumping is important
00:11:51 ►
and giving a map as to how to do it.
00:11:54 ►
Well, you’re right, it’s runnel jumping.
00:11:58 ►
The year 2000 provides a built-in opportunity
00:12:01 ►
to switch the train to a new track,
00:12:05 ►
because at these millenario moments,
00:12:09 ►
there’s a certain uncertainty about how to proceed in the mass mind.
00:12:14 ►
And if you just jumped up onto the stage and said,
00:12:17 ►
this is it, folks, you might be able to pull it off.
00:12:24 ►
Well, maybe if it was too difficult,
00:12:27 ►
one could be satisfied to introduce a wandering festival,
00:12:30 ►
which, if indeed it were attractive,
00:12:33 ►
as attractors are supposed to be,
00:12:35 ►
would eventually win out in a gradual solar…
00:12:39 ►
That’s a great idea.
00:12:39 ►
So it would be like one full moon later every year.
00:12:43 ►
Yeah, but it will become the New Year’s festival in time
00:12:46 ►
because of the ritual that’s designed for it.
00:12:49 ►
That’s a great idea.
00:12:50 ►
Something like Mardi Gras.
00:12:51 ►
Something like a wandering Mardi Gras.
00:12:53 ►
Mardi Gras is the right idea, right?
00:12:56 ►
It’s the right spirit.
00:12:58 ►
You break the…
00:12:59 ►
I mean, it’s a chaos festival.
00:13:00 ►
We could call it the…
00:13:01 ►
Destroy all order.
00:13:02 ►
The day of the cosmic giggle.
00:13:05 ►
Yeah.
00:13:06 ►
Well, it’s Runnel Jump Day.
00:13:08 ►
Runnel Jump Day.
00:13:10 ►
Yeah.
00:13:11 ►
Well, perhaps we should get some Sheldrake-ian feedback.
00:13:15 ►
Yes.
00:13:16 ►
Well, the first thing that occurs to me, just on a few technical details, is this calendar
00:13:27 ►
that processes and is loona-ware around the year so the major festivals move around and
00:13:32 ►
therefore it breaks the dominated mould, is already in place in the world. It’s the calendar
00:13:38 ►
of the Islamic world. And the Ramadan, the feast of Ramadan, the fasting month, the feast at the end of it
00:13:47 ►
shifts, processes around the year so that people who had Ramadan in winter then have
00:13:51 ►
it in the dry season or the monsoon in the course of their lives.
00:13:54 ►
But it does seem to me that it’s not exactly a total confirmation of your theory.
00:13:59 ►
Where is the argument here?
00:14:04 ►
Well… The people of feminist society
00:14:08 ►
are very tolerant.
00:14:10 ►
They’re running on this calendar.
00:14:13 ►
Well, now, is it precisely
00:14:15 ►
a 384-day, 13-month calendar?
00:14:18 ►
I don’t know if it’s 12 or 13 months,
00:14:20 ►
but it’s certainly a very calendar.
00:14:22 ►
And it certainly processes around…
00:14:24 ►
Well, I know in ancient Israel there were 384-day calendars, thirteen months but it’s certainly a calendar. And it certainly processes around the calendar.
00:14:25 ►
Well I know in ancient Israel there were 384 day calendars but your point is certainly unwelcome.
00:14:40 ►
I’m still baffled about chaos, you see, because as soon as the negative aspects of chaos everyone disapproves of,
00:14:51 ►
even Merlin knows that they’re meant to be disapproved of, because having ticked out his food from the bowl,
00:14:56 ►
he then points and says, mess!
00:15:04 ►
The thing is that we’ve had the meaning of chaos of course shifts as most things do,
00:15:09 ►
but this one shifted a lot this evening and I’m still trying to keep up with it.
00:15:14 ►
We start off with chaos not being with any negative connotation but just the yawning
00:15:19 ►
void.
00:15:20 ►
In fact, as Ralph explained, something like the sky then it’s the great womb perhaps or the source of
00:15:27 ►
all things or whatever it’s a diff it then gets turned into this Tiamat who is slain or actually
00:15:37 ►
in the first chapter of the book of Genesis then it’s the it’s the deep and the model of creation there the
00:15:46 ►
spirit meet on the face of the waters sounds to me like a wave theory of
00:15:51 ►
creation and wind on water sets up waves but we that’s another version of the
00:15:56 ►
chaos theory and I think it’s more interesting on the magic slaying monster
00:16:01 ►
because they’re in the wind moving on the face of the waters. And chaos there is the deep.
00:16:06 ►
It’s the abyssal void from which all things can come forth.
00:16:10 ►
It’s the primary cosmic womb.
00:16:13 ►
Anyway, so we’ve heard about that, the sky.
00:16:16 ►
Then we hear the negative connotations.
00:16:20 ►
And one of the things that’s clear is that chaos is feminine.
00:16:24 ►
And creation out of chaos is like the creation out of the womb coming out of darkness.
00:16:30 ►
So one of the metaphors that Terence used of the imagination was dipping down necks into the ocean of the deep and pulling up coelacanths or whatever out of the imagination. Well, he used that image,
00:16:45 ►
which would correspond to the kind of imagery
00:16:47 ►
used by the Jungians about the unconscious
00:16:49 ►
and bubbling up from below.
00:16:52 ►
And it would also fit with the idea
00:16:55 ►
of creativity welling up from the earth
00:16:59 ►
and the creation of the earth
00:17:00 ►
bringing forth from within the darkness.
00:17:03 ►
Again, a model that’s used in Genesis.
00:17:07 ►
The biblical account of creation
00:17:09 ►
doesn’t have God creating animals and plants.
00:17:12 ►
It has God starting off by saying,
00:17:15 ►
let the earth bring forth grass and herbs and trees.
00:17:19 ►
And the earth then brings them forth.
00:17:21 ►
The earth brings them forth from herself
00:17:23 ►
and presumably from the darkness of the center of the earth anyway that’s one
00:17:29 ►
model the chaos is a kind of feminine womb or all-containing potentiality from
00:17:34 ►
which things come forth and you dredge them up but then you also use the
00:17:40 ►
metaphor of the imagination descending from above, which is a traditional Platonic or Neoplatonic imagery of creativity coming down from above and becoming
00:17:53 ►
more and more manifest through a series of stages.
00:17:56 ►
So that’s a top-down model of creativity, and the chaos one’s a bottom-up model of creativity.
00:18:02 ►
The interesting thing is that most theories of creativity
00:18:05 ►
I’ve come across oscillate unstably between those two models. I usually try to resolve
00:18:13 ►
the conflict by saying, well, it must be a mixture of both. But this top-down and bottom-up
00:18:19 ►
creativity model occur in a miserable context, and I was fascinated that both of them emerged in your talk this evening
00:18:25 ►
but in the realm of
00:18:28 ►
theology they emerge
00:18:29 ►
in what’s called
00:18:31 ►
descending and ascending Christology
00:18:33 ►
in the first three gospels
00:18:35 ►
in the New Testament the model is
00:18:37 ►
that Jesus Christ is born
00:18:39 ►
as a child
00:18:41 ►
he’s initiated by John the Baptist
00:18:43 ►
a new spiritual illumination occurs at the time of his baptism.
00:18:48 ►
And he undergoes a development and becomes God.
00:18:51 ►
So it’s a process, a bottom-up developmental process of a man becoming God.
00:18:58 ►
But then in St. John’s Gospel, you’ve got the opposite model,
00:19:01 ►
which is the platonic model of the Word becoming flesh.
00:19:04 ►
And you have the idea of God becoming man, the top-down model of creativity. And it’s interesting
00:19:10 ►
that they’ve co-existed in Christian theology ever since the New Testament in a kind of
00:19:14 ►
tension where at one time people emphasise one and at other times they emphasise the
00:19:19 ►
other. And I think in most discussions of creativity one gets into this unstable oscillation.
00:19:27 ►
Ralph has it too, of course, because chaos on the one hand is this chaotic indeterminate process
00:19:34 ►
which in some sense liberates us from some of the older models of control and mechanistic determinism and so on.
00:19:42 ►
But on the other hand he also wants the top-down thing
00:19:45 ►
because he wants models or possibly even the generation of chaos
00:19:50 ►
to come from some simple mathematical principles,
00:19:53 ►
which are definitely a top-down model.
00:19:55 ►
So we’ve still got the attempt to tame chaos by modelling it
00:20:00 ►
from the top-down.
00:20:03 ►
And mathematical modelling of chaos
00:20:05 ►
if not exactly in the
00:20:07 ►
dominating mould
00:20:08 ►
is still I think within the St. George
00:20:11 ►
and the dragon archetype
00:20:13 ►
it’s the tear mat at St. George
00:20:15 ►
slaying the dragon, actually St. George
00:20:17 ►
doesn’t slay the dragon, he pierces
00:20:19 ►
the dragon and tames it
00:20:21 ►
and leads it captive into the city
00:20:23 ►
but the dragon in that myth is obviously
00:20:27 ►
another form of the monster and chaos. Anyway, I was interested to see what you thought about
00:20:34 ►
this unstable notion of creativity and this unstable notion of imagination which has some
00:20:40 ►
of it being dredged up from below and the rest coming down from above. How would you
00:20:44 ►
understand these metaphors? Are they just alternative things that one switches from
00:20:49 ►
one track to another? Are they different pictures of the same process, or are they complementary
00:20:54 ►
processes?
00:20:55 ►
No, I think they’re different pictures of the same process. I mean, in the afternoon
00:21:01 ►
session, there was the image of the star of David as the interpenetration
00:21:06 ►
of the two triangles
00:21:07 ►
I think it’s the notion of
00:21:09 ►
as above so below
00:21:11 ►
you don’t understand it
00:21:13 ►
unless you’re somehow able to
00:21:15 ►
hold both images
00:21:17 ►
simultaneously
00:21:18 ►
this is a general idea
00:21:22 ►
I think that in talking about
00:21:23 ►
these kinds of things you can’t
00:21:26 ►
force closure you have to be able to it is alchemical thinking because the
00:21:34 ►
things that are being described are are multi-dimensional objects in a way that
00:21:42 ►
they can sustain seemingly contradictory descriptions.
00:21:48 ►
It’s not double talk, or at least if it is, it’s sincere double talk. It’s just that these
00:21:55 ►
things are compound complex concepts that seem to have to have this overlay to be correctly appreciated.
00:22:09 ►
As above, so below. That’s where that disposes of the problem name the Catholic the Virgin of Guadalupe
00:22:27 ►
yes
00:22:29 ►
so Rupert took me into the church of Holy Cross
00:22:32 ►
in Santa Cruz where I had never gone
00:22:34 ►
and showed that there was a shrine
00:22:37 ►
of Our Lady
00:22:38 ►
the Virgin of Guadalupe
00:22:40 ►
there as a
00:22:42 ►
black goddess
00:22:44 ►
and so a
00:22:47 ►
phonic earth mother figure, right, but
00:22:50 ►
she’s wearing a dress or cloth with
00:22:53 ►
stars printed all over it. Well, in the
00:22:57 ►
history of the chaos concept, as I gave
00:23:02 ►
it, you have a syncretism of the Hesiodic chaos, the Milky Way, which
00:23:08 ►
is celestial, with the Tiamat concept carrying our current meaning of chaos as part of its
00:23:14 ►
idea, which is Tiamat was a water goddess and was symbolized as a dragon or a sea serpent in Babylon. And there are numerous pictures in Babylonian art
00:23:28 ►
of this sea serpent with a halter,
00:23:32 ►
Marduk standing on its back, holding the reins,
00:23:36 ►
driving it along.
00:23:37 ►
Marduk has conquered this sea serpent.
00:23:39 ►
So for some reason, the history of mythology at this point required in the syncretism
00:23:48 ►
that a celestial figure should be overlaying on a thonic one, an earth figure.
00:23:57 ►
And it happens.
00:23:58 ►
I mean, there are so many gods and goddesses in the Pantheon,
00:24:00 ►
and frequently they are different aspects of the same thing.
00:24:03 ►
in the Pantheon, and frequently they are different aspects of the same thing.
00:24:07 ►
Here I think it’s good to have this Easter basket figure that the sky as a hemisphere, as a visible hemisphere,
00:24:13 ►
comes to an end on the horizon and then the earth begins,
00:24:15 ►
whether it’s flat or hemispherical or whatever.
00:24:20 ►
And the connection between the sky and the earth is actually through the Milky Way,
00:24:24 ►
which is the royal road of the gods,
00:24:27 ►
through which Orpheus, for example, goes to the underworld to look for Eurydice or whoever,
00:24:34 ►
and goes down the Milky Way and then disappears underneath,
00:24:38 ►
and is supposed to come up in this same way.
00:24:40 ►
So the duality, I think, between the sky and the earth and the actual connection between where this basket, where the handle of the basket connects to the woven part, is actually where the mathematical model meets the unconscious of the guy in mind, where the mathematical version of chaos meets the chaos of everyday life
00:25:05 ►
where if there is going to be
00:25:08 ►
erotic or synergetic
00:25:10 ►
relationship between the earth
00:25:12 ►
and sky versions of chaos
00:25:14 ►
including creativity and the
00:25:16 ►
imagination is going to take place
00:25:18 ►
at the joint where the handle attaches
00:25:19 ►
to the basket
00:25:20 ►
yes I wanted to say Ralph
00:25:23 ►
that reminded me
00:25:26 ►
that it was good
00:25:27 ►
that you mentioned
00:25:28 ►
Eleusis.
00:25:29 ►
And I agree with Ralph
00:25:31 ►
that this was
00:25:32 ►
a great turning point
00:25:34 ►
and a cultural episode
00:25:37 ►
not frequently enough
00:25:38 ►
discussed.
00:25:40 ►
That this thousands
00:25:42 ►
and thousands of years
00:25:43 ►
of this goddess-worshipping,
00:25:47 ►
orgiastic, psychedelic religion
00:25:49 ►
finally is confined to a few shrines in Greece and Crete
00:25:59 ►
and then ultimately a few shrines only in Greece
00:26:02 ►
until the time of Alaric the Visigoth,
00:26:07 ►
who is the clown who finally did it under. And so that this boundary dissolving relationship to the vegetable Gaian
00:26:16 ►
mind is even in our tradition only about 1700 years in the past. But it’s in that 1700 years in the past but it’s in that 1700 years
00:26:27 ►
in the absence of a dialogue
00:26:30 ►
with the Gaian expression of chaos
00:26:34 ►
that we have elaborated these successively
00:26:38 ►
more and more deadly cultural forms
00:26:41 ►
just beginning with the phonetic alphabet and moving on
00:26:46 ►
to movable type and each one of these things has had tremendous negative
00:26:52 ►
consequences on our self-image and entangled us deeper and deeper within a
00:26:59 ►
kind of Faustian pact with the physical world and it’s that blindness
00:27:06 ►
that has led us to the present situation
00:27:12 ►
so it’s in the absence of this boundary dissolving ecstasis
00:27:17 ►
and replacing that
00:27:19 ►
with the machinations and plottings of the ego
00:27:24 ►
leads very very quickly into a cultural cul-de-sac
00:27:29 ►
from which we are now gathered here to debate
00:27:32 ►
whether there is or is not any escape.
00:27:36 ►
So it’s very powerful.
00:27:37 ►
This was the wrong turning.
00:27:40 ►
And studying that wrong turning and what was betrayed
00:27:43 ►
and what came out on top and what was suppressed,
00:27:46 ►
we see that by running the film backwards, we could perhaps in some sense restore that previous situation.
00:27:57 ►
And that involves opening our lives to chaos in whatever way,
00:28:04 ►
opening our lives to chaos in whatever way,
00:28:10 ►
becoming much more a part of the will of the world soul than recapturing that Greek sense of fate
00:28:17 ►
that has been replaced in our minds by this Faustian sense
00:28:22 ►
that is an illusion of control and dominance. So that
00:28:30 ►
was all I wanted to say about that. Shall we take questions?
00:28:32 ►
That’s a good place to stop, I think, this phase, and a good time for some audience participation.
00:28:41 ►
I know there is a fatigue factor at this time.
00:28:46 ►
some audience participation I know there is a fatigue factor at this time it’s nice to get the validation of the feminine principle emerging
00:28:52 ►
so I just wanted to say that
00:28:55 ►
but what would happen if the feminine principle emerged
00:29:01 ►
and became the dominant principle
00:29:04 ►
it isn’t this domination The feminine principle emerged and became the dominant principle.
00:29:05 ►
It isn’t the dominancy.
00:29:08 ►
No, because it isn’t really the femininity.
00:29:11 ►
See, that style of talking has to be overcome
00:29:15 ►
because it’s really the difference between dominator and partnership.
00:29:20 ►
Could you explain that more, then?
00:29:22 ►
Okay. Partnership is where everybody has an appropriate role
00:29:30 ►
which they carry out,
00:29:33 ►
and it’s sort of implicit,
00:29:35 ►
and everybody is able to occupy many of these roles.
00:29:40 ►
So roles aren’t fixed habits.
00:29:42 ►
They’re not scripted and the dominator style
00:29:48 ►
is simply the style of ego
00:29:51 ►
it involves the dominant male
00:29:54 ►
territoriality
00:29:56 ►
pecking orders
00:30:00 ►
fixed rules of behavior and presentation all of this sort of thing
00:30:12 ►
what would happen if we had a partnership society is that we would
00:30:18 ►
manage the planet for the good of the group which is certainly not what is happening now now the dominant metaphor
00:30:30 ►
including even the very popular democracy metaphor or mean is basically every man for himself and I
00:30:43 ►
think there’s going to have it’s going to have to be
00:30:45 ►
a kind of socialist democracy
00:30:48 ►
we were just saying before we came
00:30:50 ►
in here that recent
00:30:51 ►
studies of world economies
00:30:54 ►
show that the most successful
00:30:56 ►
world economies are
00:30:58 ►
capitalist economies
00:30:59 ►
strongly managed by
00:31:01 ►
quasi-socialist regimes
00:31:03 ►
i.e. Japan and West Germany,
00:31:06 ►
are doing much better than the open-ended laissez-faire style of capitalism
00:31:12 ►
that’s practiced here.
00:31:14 ►
My fantasy of what a partnership society would be like
00:31:19 ►
is everybody would behave appropriately, you know,
00:31:24 ►
and there would be this
00:31:25 ►
zen-like smoothness
00:31:28 ►
to all interaction
00:31:30 ►
and I’ve been on the edge
00:31:34 ►
of partnership societies
00:31:36 ►
in the Amazon
00:31:37 ►
where I really felt
00:31:39 ►
that I could see this happening
00:31:41 ►
and I have certainly been
00:31:42 ►
in psychedelic sessions
00:31:44 ►
in the Amazon where people who were one generation removed from that
00:31:51 ►
kind of partnership tribalism recovered it during the ceremony and were able to
00:31:58 ►
act out the way of the ancestors it, you know, the most horrific thing that is put against the women
00:32:11 ►
followers of Dionysius was that they devoured their children at the height of their frenzy.
00:32:19 ►
I mean, this is a human crime for which, so far as I know, there is not even a name in English.
00:32:25 ►
I mean, it must be… I can’t even create it.
00:32:32 ►
But this is what we are doing.
00:32:35 ►
This is what we as a society are guilty of,
00:32:38 ►
a crime previous generations couldn’t even conceive of.
00:32:42 ►
It’s the absolute apotheosis of dominator fury. And that’s why, you know, you want to talk about real life stuff and ecological crisis in the midst of the effort to save the rainforests, which as we all know are terribly damaged and endangered, the dominator mentality has conceived a plan to aerially drop herbicide
00:33:09 ►
onto the Amazon in order to wipe out coca plants. So this is like, you know, you cannot trust the
00:33:17 ►
dominator style not to go psychotic here at the end. I mean end they may have to surround the place
00:33:26 ►
and lay siege to it
00:33:27 ►
and the question is who are they
00:33:29 ►
who is it who has the power
00:33:32 ►
to pry the dead fingers
00:33:34 ►
of the dominator culture
00:33:36 ►
from the instrumentality
00:33:37 ►
of power
00:33:38 ►
this is why the
00:33:41 ►
chaos which is rising
00:33:44 ►
in the world it is literally the Gaian fury.
00:33:49 ►
It is a moment of opportunity.
00:33:52 ►
Everyone should understand this, that chaos provides opportunity for commandos of the new persuasion to rush forward and jam vital machinery of the dominator metaphor.
00:34:09 ►
So the key to a correct political stance in a situation of chaos is to be alert to opportunity,
00:34:19 ►
because it will come. The whole thing is advanced incrementally
00:34:26 ►
by people who are always aware of the possibility
00:34:29 ►
that the next moment will be the one
00:34:32 ►
in which to take a step forward.
00:34:35 ►
And not surrender?
00:34:38 ►
Surrender to the Gaian mind,
00:34:42 ►
to the intuition of the forward cascade into chaos but never
00:34:48 ►
surrender to to the dominator metaphor because it will eventually it’s death I
00:34:55 ►
mean it’s death it’s unhappiness it’s neurosis sexual impotence it’s fear of
00:35:00 ►
other people it’s xenophobia it’s all these things it’s psychosis other people, it’s xenophobia, it’s all these things.
00:35:10 ►
It’s psychosis on a mass cultural scale.
00:35:16 ►
We have been so long victimized by it that we’re like, you know,
00:35:21 ►
well, no, that’s almost too harsh, but…
00:35:26 ►
Well, what I was going to say was the kind of culture that we inherit
00:35:29 ►
from the late Roman emergence of Christian dominance
00:35:34 ►
is the kind of culture that I imagine would come into existence
00:35:38 ►
if the Third Reich had lasted a thousand years
00:35:41 ►
in other words you know the rough edges get smoothed off but the
00:35:46 ►
the main human suppressing thrust is kept fully in place. And now it’s no
00:35:57 ►
longer a personal or cultural matter that we are so deeply diseased by this kind of neurotic conditioning because the
00:36:09 ►
planet itself is at stake.
00:36:11 ►
The arsenals that have been piled up, the industrial processes that have been set in
00:36:16 ►
motion, there has to be an over, a phase transition. The cusp must be just ahead,
00:36:27 ►
or else we will just script ourselves out of existence.
00:36:32 ►
I might interject at this point that we had great teaching
00:36:37 ►
on some of these points from Rian Eisler’s book,
00:36:41 ►
The Chalice and the Blade.
00:36:43 ►
Not only on the characteristics,
00:36:45 ►
the potential characteristics of a partnership society
00:36:49 ►
and the history of the dominator society,
00:36:52 ►
but also on the role of chaos in social transformation.
00:36:57 ►
And this book, if you want to just eyeball it,
00:36:59 ►
they do have it here in the bookstore.
00:37:04 ►
Ralph, I’m just curious if you or Gertrude are familiar with the ideas of Hans Moravec,
00:37:13 ►
who’s an AI and robotics specialist, who has a new book where he claims that, talk about falling through imagination, that we will, the human beings will, within 50 years, be downloading their brains into robotic vehicles, into computer minds. only responsible to be able to take in the face of a technological disaster,
00:37:47 ►
but also, or traumatic change in our environment,
00:37:52 ►
but also as a technological imperative.
00:37:54 ►
Anyway, he claims that this is what we’ll fix.
00:37:57 ►
Are you familiar with him?
00:37:58 ►
I’m not familiar with him myself.
00:38:00 ►
I have heard this kind of future fantasy before. It’s sort of, it’s a far-fetched
00:38:09 ►
alternative to Terence’s idea that the leap into space is an imperative for our future.
00:38:18 ►
And personally, I’m not interested in this kind of future fantasy. I think that it would be nice if some alternative,
00:38:27 ►
such as this may be the arrival of the aliens in the spacecraft,
00:38:31 ►
one parked over each large city and so on.
00:38:33 ►
If there is such a miraculous resolution of our problems, that’s fine.
00:38:38 ►
Then we don’t have to worry about it.
00:38:40 ►
But what is our challenge at this time, I think,
00:38:43 ►
is to try to solve the problem within the existing context.
00:38:47 ►
That’s the real challenge.
00:38:50 ►
Although I’m not as pessimistic as Ralph, I think there could be that there is potentially what I call a forward escape into technology.
00:39:00 ►
I mean, downloading our brains into computers is absolutely 16th century.
00:39:06 ►
If you will carry it far.
00:39:08 ►
But if you, you know, possibly, well, this question of whether there can be consciousness without an object is interesting.
00:39:21 ►
And it is possible that there are virtual realities into which
00:39:25 ►
we may migrate you know one trend that’s been noticed in cultural evolution is
00:39:33 ►
what’s called neoteny the the retention of adolescent characteristics in the adult form. And we all have this.
00:39:46 ►
Our hairlessness is an infantile hairlessness.
00:39:50 ►
And many other aspects of this are preservation of infantile form.
00:39:57 ►
And on the microcosmic scale of human history,
00:40:01 ►
each generation views the generation which it spawns as more
00:40:07 ►
childish more childlike and it’s possible to imagine that especially if
00:40:16 ►
the notion of the sanctity of life tears loose and manages to inculcate itself deeply into jurisprudence,
00:40:25 ►
it’s possible to imagine gigantic electronic hives
00:40:30 ►
in which very nearly fetal human beings by the billions
00:40:36 ►
are connected into a self-sustaining virtual reality,
00:40:42 ►
and that it’s a tremendous privilege to get your papers to vacation in 3D
00:40:48 ►
and that 3D becomes a kind of exotic resort destination and that most people spend their
00:40:58 ►
lives in sorts of levitons of the imagination as larval forms integrated into machinery a
00:41:08 ►
pleasant vision but…
00:41:10 ►
Parents, I think we’re reaching the cusp.
00:41:12 ►
I think so, yes. Well, here’s…
00:41:14 ►
In terms of dissolving ego boundaries, with your work in therapy today, there’s a lot of
00:41:22 ►
controversy about building a solid ego before we can transcend the ego,
00:41:29 ►
versus just transcending it before you have integrated yourself.
00:41:33 ►
And I was wondering if you could speak to that in relation to what you believe needs to happen.
00:41:38 ►
Well, I don’t really feel the force of that.
00:41:42 ►
I think maybe we need to retool the terminology. I’m not suggesting
00:41:47 ►
that people should be fearful, meek, and self-effacing, which is sort of what I imagine a person who
00:41:58 ►
might be diagnosed as having a weakened ego to be. I would say they have a self-esteem problem and that the self
00:42:06 ►
and the ego can be clearly distinguished here there may be individual cases where
00:42:14 ►
people are socially dysfunctional because they can’t assert themselves but
00:42:19 ►
by and large the overwhelming tendency is in the other direction one thing on this
00:42:30 ►
dissolution I would say that the current state of the electronic global
00:42:38 ►
communications event a long way to transcending all these boundaries they
00:42:43 ►
disappear to the down from…
00:42:46 ►
Dissolving boundaries.
00:42:48 ►
…characteristic boundaries and differentials, and recreating the McLuhan’s tribal village.
00:42:55 ►
Well, a lot of people disagree with me. Maybe Ralph does, I don’t know. But I think of the whole cybernetic thing as a feminization people as sometimes women find
00:43:06 ►
are disturbed by this because they tend to think of machines as cold and emotionally neutral and
00:43:14 ►
all that but the actual effect is what you’re talking about this dissolving of boundaries the
00:43:20 ►
free movement of information a new fluid fluidity, a new accessibility,
00:43:26 ►
new dimensions of freedom that are definitely promotional of chaos.
00:43:32 ►
It’s got good runnel potential.
00:43:34 ►
Runnel potential.
00:43:36 ►
Well, why don’t we turn now to the films
00:43:39 ►
and to close off the live part of the broadcast and move on.
00:43:47 ►
Is that all right with everybody?
00:43:49 ►
Okay, thank you very much.
00:43:56 ►
So, what do you think about Terrence’s idea
00:43:59 ►
of changing the calendar?
00:44:02 ►
How do we go about making that happen, do you think?
00:44:01 ►
changing the calendar.
00:44:04 ►
How do we go about making that happen, do you think?
00:44:10 ►
You know, I also like his idea for a 384-day year.
00:44:12 ►
What do you all think about that?
00:44:16 ►
Also, what about Ralph’s idea of a wandering festival?
00:44:19 ►
I just love all those ideas myself.
00:44:21 ►
The question, of course, still remains, how do those of us who resonate with some of those ideas begin to implement them?
00:44:27 ►
Well, you got me on that one.
00:44:30 ►
But if any of you get something started along those lines, please let me know by emailing the information to Lorenzo at MatrixMasters.com.
00:44:40 ►
And I’ll do what I can to help promote your activities and get the word out a little bit. www.mrmrm.com his remark that in a perfect partnership society, quote, everyone would behave appropriately.
00:45:09 ►
Well, that’s exactly the way I see life on the playa at Burning Man.
00:45:13 ►
Maybe it looks out of control if you’ve never been there, but believe me,
00:45:18 ►
all of us freaks out there sure do think we’re behaving appropriately,
00:45:24 ►
which, of of course includes having
00:45:25 ►
a lot of pretty outrageous fun, but without getting in somebody else’s space, if you know
00:45:31 ►
what I mean. And didn’t you just love it just now when McKenna got a little subversive when
00:45:37 ►
he said, everyone should understand this, that chaos provides opportunity for commandos of the new persuasion to rush forward
00:45:47 ►
and jam vital machinery of the dominator metaphor. What a bard he was, a real poet. Commandos
00:45:55 ►
of the new persuasion. Now there’s an outfit that I’d sure like to join. And you’ve really got to admire Ralph and Rupert,
00:46:05 ►
whose ideas are equally captivating,
00:46:08 ►
but you’ve just got to admire them
00:46:10 ►
for having the courage to share the stage
00:46:13 ►
with a wordsmith like Terrence McKenna.
00:46:16 ►
I don’t know about you,
00:46:17 ►
but I’m really enjoying listening to these trilogues.
00:46:21 ►
And I guess, actually, if my email is any indication,
00:46:24 ►
you’re all enjoying them too.
00:46:27 ►
For example, Derek wrote to say that perhaps the combined energy of Ralph Rupert and Terrence
00:46:32 ►
may even add a new dimension to their individual presentations
00:46:37 ►
that may not have come out if they’d just each given stand-alone talks
00:46:42 ►
instead of using the trialogue method.
00:46:45 ►
That’s a really good point, Derek.
00:46:47 ►
I hadn’t thought about that myself before, but now that you mention it, I definitely agree.
00:46:53 ►
There’s just something about their banter and having to stay on their toes, so to speak,
00:46:58 ►
that seems to make these conversations stand out as much as they do.
00:47:03 ►
And Derek also pointed out a couple of his other favorite podcasts, which are, one goes
00:47:08 ►
by the name Unwelcome Guests, and the other is Princeton’s University Channel podcast.
00:47:15 ►
I haven’t had a chance to check them out yet myself, but since they come from a fellow
00:47:19 ►
psychedelic salonner, I’m sure they probably will be of interest to many of us.
00:47:25 ►
Well, I guess I better wrap this up for now and start working on the next podcast.
00:47:30 ►
First, I’ve got to decide who’s talk to use for the next program.
00:47:35 ►
I’ve still got some talks from this year’s Burning Man lectures that I’d like to get out to you,
00:47:40 ►
and I’ve got my interview with Myron Stolaroff,
00:47:42 ►
as well as a bunch more from John Hanna’s Mind States conferences yet to play.
00:47:48 ►
And eventually, you’ll hear them all, I’m sure.
00:47:51 ►
And I’ll also be continuing, of course, this Trilogues series with the fourth tape in the first series of Trilogues.
00:47:58 ►
And that tape’s titled, The World’s Soul and the Mushroom.
00:48:03 ►
I wonder what that’s going to be about.
00:48:05 ►
Well, we’ll soon see.
00:48:08 ►
And before I go, I guess I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
00:48:13 ►
are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 2.5 license.
00:48:20 ►
And if you have any questions about that, you can click on the link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webcast page,
00:48:26 ►
which may be found at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.
00:48:31 ►
And if you still have questions, you can always send them in an email to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.
00:48:38 ►
And my thanks as always to Chateau Hayuk for the use of their music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:48:43 ►
And thank you, all of you, once again for joining us here in the salon.
00:48:49 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:48:54 ►
Be well, my friends. Into the light of your naked love.