Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:24 Terence McKenna: “When you start looking at the question of
these disincarnate entities, the first thing that strikes you is their persistence in human experience and folklore. This is not something unusual or statistically rare.”
07:57 Terence:
“The eradication of spirit from the visible world has been a project prosecuted with great zeal concomitant with the rise of modern science.”
10:01 Terence:
“If we examine the history of early modern science, we discover that some of the major movers and shakers were in fact being guided and directed in the formulation of early science by disincarnate entities.”
12:59 Terence:
“The aversion to the irrational is something that science inherited from Christianity.”
17:59 Ralph Abraham: “I think it was in 879 in the council of Byzantium
that spirit was made illegal, and then we went from three to two, so there’s only body and soul … and this is, I think, the reason why no one knows the difference between spirit and soul and thinks that they’re the same.”
21:01 Terence:
“Did you know that the dogma of purgatory, in Christian theology, was not created by theologians in Rome. It was created by Saint Patrick in an effort to make Christian doctrine more commiserate with Celtic folk beliefs in the process of converting Ireland to Christianity?”
22:12 Terence:
“The major tool for contacting these entities in any kind of controllable fashion is psychedelic compounds, especially DMT and the tryptamines. And those sort of experiences seem to line up pretty well with the Celtic fokelore.”
27:37 Terence:
“The irrational, in this objectified form, is very active in the process that we call history. It’s just that we don’t like to admit that because we’re committed to an official philosophy of reason and casuistry.”
33:57 Rupert Sheldrake: “The realm of our dreams is a personal nightly journeying into these realms of other entities.”
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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 the holidays treating you all okay?
00:00:28 ►
My guess is that I’m probably not the only one who’s kind of looked at like somewhat of an outsider at these holiday gatherings.
00:00:36 ►
But hey, that fits right in with today’s trialogue topic about entities.
00:00:41 ►
about entities.
00:00:44 ►
And I guess to the uninitiated,
00:00:47 ►
our psychedelic community might look and sound like some strange collection of other world entities from time to time,
00:00:51 ►
but hey, that just goes with the territory.
00:00:54 ►
If you’ve been with us for the past few weeks,
00:00:57 ►
you know that we’re slowly working our way through a series of recordings
00:01:00 ►
that were made at Esalen in 1989 and 1990
00:01:04 ►
when Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham,
00:01:07 ►
and Rupert Sheldrake got together and conducted a series of three-way conversations that they
00:01:11 ►
called a trialogue.
00:01:14 ►
And the tape I’m going to play today was simply labeled Entities, and it begins with a more
00:01:18 ►
complete description of the topic by Terrence McKenna.
00:01:22 ►
So let’s join them now.
00:01:24 ►
Oh, and by the way, the occasional background noise that you hear was actually in the original
00:01:29 ►
tape recording.
00:01:30 ►
I don’t want you to think that it’s me doing the heavy breathing every once in a while.
00:01:36 ►
I’m afraid that’s just the price we have to pay for pumping up the volume a little extra
00:01:39 ►
to make these podcasts easier to hear in a noisy environment.
00:01:43 ►
And so with that, let’s listen in on some of Terence McKenna’s thoughts about entities.
00:01:53 ►
Well, this morning’s discussion will revolve around the exotic theme of disincarnate intelligences and non-human entities that seem to occupy a kind of
00:02:12 ►
undefined ontological limbo in terms of precisely what their status in the world is.
00:02:20 ►
Whatever their status in the world is, when you start looking at the question of these disincarnate entities,
00:02:28 ►
the first thing that strikes you is their persistence
00:02:32 ►
in human experience and folklore.
00:02:37 ►
This is not something unusual or statistically rare
00:02:43 ►
in all times and in all places.
00:02:46 ►
With the possible exception of Western Europe for the past 200 years,
00:02:51 ►
a kind of social commerce between human beings and various kinds of disincarnate entities
00:02:58 ►
or non-human intelligences was taken for granted.
00:03:07 ►
non-human intelligences was taken for granted and this could be as simple as the Celtic farmer’s wife
00:03:13 ►
leaving out a pitcher of milk for the Fae folk or it could take more
00:03:16 ►
elaborate forms
00:03:24 ►
Because the second aspect of this question that you encountered is the tremendous
00:03:27 ►
variety of these entities that we’re apparently talking about a kind of
00:03:33 ►
parallel taxa in another continuum because we have grinders, gnomes, the list is endless and that’s only the list within the context of the European imagination. takes on the potential for non-human intelligent life forms you have a truly
00:04:07 ►
vast array of peculiar creatures all expressive of a very fundamental belief
00:04:15 ►
system that seems to be inimical to the human condition well before we get into the history of this idea,
00:04:26 ►
it might be good to simply review the logical options
00:04:32 ►
that are open to us in examining a phenomenon of this sort.
00:04:37 ►
And I take the logical options to be basically three,
00:04:42 ►
that these entities are in some sense, or that some of these entities
00:04:48 ►
are rare but physical, and they sort of operate somewhere between the Koliakant and the Bigfoot.
00:05:01 ►
It potentially could be imagined moving from the realm of mythology into the realm
00:05:07 ►
of established zoological or botanical fact.
00:05:11 ►
And this has in fact happened in some fairly unspectacular cases.
00:05:17 ►
This is certainly the least interesting.
00:05:19 ►
But for example, the Yeti is a creature which refuses to declare whether it is simply a rare member of the ordinary taxa of this planet or something quite different.
00:05:33 ►
The second option that lies before us when we look at the ontological status of these entities is what I would think of as the Jungian position.
00:05:43 ►
is what I would think of as the Jungian position.
00:05:48 ►
And to demonstrate it, I’ll simply quote Jung on the subject of sprites and elementals.
00:05:52 ►
He calls them autonomous fragments of psychic energy
00:05:58 ►
which have temporarily escaped from the controlling power of the ego.
00:06:04 ►
In other words, this is what I
00:06:06 ►
would call the mentalist reductionist approach to disincarnate
00:06:13 ►
entities and intelligences. It’s saying they are somehow part and parcel of our
00:06:21 ►
own minds and their existence is dependent upon our
00:06:27 ►
conceiving them as objects in our imagination however
00:06:32 ►
pathologically
00:06:33 ►
Expressed in other words the humanist position that all God’s entities and so on the many projections
00:06:39 ►
Exactly exactly the projection state mental net well escaped from the controlling force of the ego.
00:06:47 ►
It’s a wonderful image.
00:06:49 ►
And then the third and obviously more interesting
00:06:53 ►
but fraught with argumentative pitfalls
00:06:58 ►
is that these are, one, non-physical
00:07:01 ►
and, two, autonomous in their existence in some sort, in some sense.
00:07:06 ►
In other words, that they actually do carry on an existence independent of their being perceived by human beings.
00:07:15 ►
And this is the position, the classical position, of those who have had the largest amount of experience dealing with these entities,
00:07:26 ►
which are shamans, ecstatics, and so-called sensitive or edge types in all kinds of social situations.
00:07:37 ►
This position, which is the most, in a sense, elegant and commiserate with the evidence
00:07:45 ►
that they are in fact autonomous and non-physical
00:07:49 ►
nevertheless poses a tremendous barrier
00:07:52 ►
for the scientific and Western mind
00:07:55 ►
because the eradication of spirit from the visible world
00:08:01 ►
has been a project prosecuted with great zeal,
00:08:06 ►
concomitant to the rise of modern science.
00:08:10 ►
And the admission that that project overlooked something as fundamental
00:08:16 ►
as a communicating intelligent agency co-present with us on this planet would be more than a dangerous admission of
00:08:27 ►
The failure of an intellectual method it would pretty much seal the bankruptcy of an intellectual method
00:08:34 ►
So science has handled this problem by creating a tiny subset within its vast
00:08:41 ►
mansion of concerns
00:08:43 ►
called
00:08:44 ►
schizophrenia and schizophrenia has been within its vast mansion of concerns called schizophrenia.
00:08:46 ►
And schizophrenia has been deemed a concern of psychologists,
00:08:53 ►
not the most honored members of the legion of the house of science.
00:08:58 ►
And they have been told to take care of this problem, please.
00:09:02 ►
And this is where we get the Jungian
00:09:05 ►
mentalist reductionist model what’s interesting about that model which is
00:09:11 ►
the reigning model of what entities may be is that its appeal is in direct
00:09:20 ►
proportion to your lack of direct experience with the phenomenon that it
00:09:25 ►
seeks to explain in other words everyone who has ever encountered the
00:09:30 ►
disincarnate intelligence of this sort knows that this is a pitifully inadequate
00:09:38 ►
a woefully inadequate description of the phenomenon before Before I close, I just want to make one digression
00:09:48 ►
to drive home the point that this is not a pursuit of dilettantes or obscurantists,
00:09:56 ►
the question of the status of these entities, because if we examine the history of early modern science, we discover that some of the major movers and shakers in that situation
00:10:10 ►
were in fact being guided and directed in the formulation of early science
00:10:18 ►
by disincarnate entities.
00:10:22 ►
In the case of John Dee, the great flower of Elizabethan science, he actually had commerce with angels and all sorts of entities of this type over decades. scientific rationalism than Rene Descartes actually was set on the path
00:10:47 ►
toward the realization of the ideals of modern science by an angel who appeared
00:10:53 ►
to him in a dream and told him that the conquest of nature is to be achieved
00:10:59 ►
through measure and number this en, which is really the battle cry of modern science, first passed
00:11:08 ►
from the lips of an angel. And then the well-known example of Kekula, the discoverer of the benzene
00:11:16 ►
ring, by seeing the Ouroboric symbol, the snake taking its tail in its mouth, the ancient
00:11:22 ►
symbol of eternity, and understanding that it was the solution to a molecular structure problem that he had been
00:11:29 ►
dealing with. This aspect of science, that much of its premises have been
00:11:36 ►
transferred to mankind from a hidden realm of higher intelligence, is
00:11:41 ►
completely suppressed in its own official history which is that
00:11:45 ►
it’s the story of rational thoughts conquest of the dark world of
00:11:50 ►
superstition so I think as we look at these entities as we try to place them
00:11:58 ►
in context to human society and a more a way of internalizing what they can do for us is to look more toward
00:12:09 ►
the shamanic model where these spirits were not only identified but the adjective helping
00:12:18 ►
was added and what was envisioned was a kind of symbiosis between ourselves and an invisible world of higher intent.
00:12:28 ►
And this has certainly been lacking in the expression of modern science as a social force.
00:12:34 ►
And it wouldn’t be a bad idea, perhaps, in any future model of society,
00:12:43 ►
to attempt to inculcate into it whatever wisdom, whatever insight is represented
00:12:50 ►
by these forces.
00:12:52 ►
Now, I suppose it would be not fair to close without mentioning that the aversion to the
00:13:00 ►
irrational is something that science inherited from Christianity and that
00:13:07 ►
what all of these voices of nature of the sky of the earth were suppressed by
00:13:16 ►
Christianity in favor of the trying mystery of the Trinity and a rebirth or
00:13:22 ►
a rise in the volume of the voices of the
00:13:26 ►
elementals which is how I interpret what’s going on seems to me part and
00:13:31 ►
parcel with the ecological crisis of the planet I mean the planet is attempting
00:13:38 ►
to speak everything which can signify is reaching out toward humanity to try and reclaim us for the
00:13:47 ►
family of nature from this rather pathological trip that we’ve been on for
00:13:53 ►
a long time so the elementals these voices the promptings of the
00:13:58 ►
disincarnate entities are if not to be heeded, certainly to be carefully considered and studied.
00:14:08 ►
We are wandering in a wilderness,
00:14:10 ►
and here is a prompting voice.
00:14:13 ►
So then the analysis,
00:14:15 ►
without prior commitment to any kind of epistemic conclusion,
00:14:20 ►
would seem very useful at this point.
00:14:24 ►
So that’s all I really have to say about it.
00:14:27 ►
I’ll bet.
00:14:34 ►
Well, I think this is very modest, Terence,
00:14:38 ►
that you have given the survey of these different views.
00:14:41 ►
Actually, we have our own view
00:14:44 ►
as we’ll evolve in these different views. Actually, we have our own view as we’ll
00:14:46 ►
evolve in these next minutes.
00:14:48 ►
So I’d like to attempt to give a rocket boost into our own sphere
00:14:54 ►
here to get started.
00:14:55 ►
And I’ll try a model, sort of a mathematical model,
00:15:00 ►
which I think we’re all close to.
00:15:02 ►
And that is the trinity of early Christianity,
00:15:06 ►
which came directly from the Neoplatonic.
00:15:09 ►
This is the one called not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, but the body, the
00:15:16 ►
soul, and the spirit.
00:15:17 ►
Here the body is more or less the Gaia of the Orphic trinity, the material, ordinary
00:15:22 ►
reality, the matter, energy, universe, and
00:15:26 ►
soul is the soul we speak about, and the spirit is kind of a medium in between the body and
00:15:31 ►
the soul, like the Holy Ghost.
00:15:35 ►
And I think that entities, that there are kind of abstract entities, that the logos contains intelligence, information, evolving stuff.
00:15:50 ►
And we could just sort of try identifying this with the top layer, and so the world
00:15:55 ►
soul level.
00:15:57 ►
And here are kind of abstract, we don’t know how, we don’t have a cognitive strategy for
00:16:01 ►
dealing directly with entities in the world soul.
00:16:10 ►
But the world soul is coupled to this, the Gaia level, where our minds are operating closer to the material plane than the soul plane
00:16:20 ►
because of the limitations of language.
00:16:23 ►
The separation of conscious and unconscious
00:16:25 ►
has to do with this triad model.
00:16:29 ►
So as an abstract entity, difficult to cognate
00:16:33 ►
because of its complexity
00:16:34 ►
and the multidimensional spheres of the world’s soul,
00:16:38 ►
reaches down, propagates through the spirit,
00:16:41 ►
which is a kind of like an electromagnetic field,
00:16:44 ►
a medium, you see,
00:16:45 ►
extending between these parallel planes or concentric spheres of soul and
00:16:51 ►
individual mind, then it comes more and more into cognitive forms which belong
00:16:56 ►
to our mind in its evolution in the sense of morphogenetic field.
00:17:02 ►
And then it gets into representations which are culturally dependent,
00:17:08 ►
such as fairies, Dakinis, and elementals, and so on. This is just a background model
00:17:16 ►
where I think we’re closer than…this is closest to three of your list, the non-physical
00:17:22 ►
but real. But it also allows for a kind of a spectrum of
00:17:27 ►
different forms of what are essentially the same entities, and that their representation
00:17:32 ►
— they might be timeless, more or less, in the celestial sphere, as it were, but their
00:17:40 ►
cognitive map into our own consciousness dep dependent on our paradigm, our worldview,
00:17:46 ►
and so on is evolving. And for this reason, you get in different cultures the elves, the fairies,
00:17:52 ►
the pantheon of gods, and so on. And particularly in the Christian, even though this triune model
00:17:57 ►
was made illegal, I think it was in 879 in the Council of Byzantium that the spirit was made
00:18:03 ►
illegal, and then we went from three to two, so there’s only body and soul.
00:18:08 ►
For this reason that no one nowadays, this is, I think, the reason why no one knows the
00:18:13 ►
difference between spirit and soul, and thinks that they’re the same.
00:18:16 ►
And we talk about spiritual, the inspiration, bringing down the spirit into the world, which
00:18:22 ►
we need now, because our society’s had an expiration
00:18:25 ►
over the past 200 years, as you said.
00:18:28 ►
In order to have an inspiration,
00:18:30 ►
we have to know what is spirit and what is soul,
00:18:33 ►
if they’re not the same.
00:18:34 ►
And we need to learn this model or some other model
00:18:39 ►
if there is one more appropriate to our time.
00:18:42 ►
So I think that this is a context in which we could place
00:18:48 ►
in parallel and with full validity all of these different representations. And in this
00:18:53 ►
list, in your initial taxonomy, I think we should include the saints and saintesses of
00:18:59 ►
the Christian and the Catholic religion, because in spite of the one God,
00:19:05 ►
the Yahweh theme of the Judeo-Christian tradition,
00:19:08 ►
there exists always this changing and local list of deities,
00:19:19 ►
which actually are the Christian form of these elves and so on.
00:19:25 ►
And we have the idea of the timeless forms,
00:19:29 ►
or even there’s an evolution, let us say,
00:19:31 ►
on a slower time scale in the celestial sphere,
00:19:35 ►
but their representations are multifarious,
00:19:37 ►
and these representations closer to our own cognition,
00:19:40 ►
these are evolving very rapidly.
00:19:43 ►
Now we have the different time scales, kind of like mathematical physics, that we can deal
00:19:48 ►
with in discussing this.
00:19:50 ►
That makes possible, in other words, to make identifications between an earth spirit of
00:19:55 ►
this culture and an earth spirit of that culture.
00:19:57 ►
As in the diffusion of mythology, there is what Jung called archetypes, just suggest that different layers in a spectrum of reality
00:20:06 ►
or particularness or individuality of these things.
00:20:11 ►
Well, one of the things that you have to wonder
00:20:15 ►
if you go for that it’s a non-physical autonomous entity of some sort,
00:20:21 ►
then that raises another set of questions,
00:20:24 ►
which is, is it a non-physical
00:20:26 ►
autonomous entity unrelated to us, except by the fact that we can share the same communication
00:20:35 ►
space? Or is it in fact somehow related to our own existence, not in the sense of being dependent upon it or maintained by it,
00:20:46 ►
but all this talk of soul and spirit leads then to the question of the relationship of the dead
00:20:55 ►
to these disincarnate entities.
00:20:59 ►
It’s very interesting.
00:21:00 ►
Did you know that the dogma of purgatory in Christian theology was
00:21:07 ►
not created by theologians in Rome it was created by st. Patrick in an effort
00:21:16 ►
to make Christian doctrine more commiserate with Celtic folk belief in
00:21:22 ►
the process of converting Ireland to Christianity
00:21:26 ►
because the very faith that was in place when Patrick landed in Ireland was a
00:21:33 ►
faith that the dead souls coexist with us invisibly in ordinary space and can
00:21:42 ►
be seen by people who have a special ability.
00:21:46 ►
And he took that notion and turned it into purgatory,
00:21:50 ►
and it was so successful in the conversion of Ireland
00:21:53 ►
that later councils wrote that into general church dogma.
00:21:57 ►
But it was a genuflection to the Celtic folk belief
00:22:02 ►
in this way station of souls that was all
00:22:06 ►
around them and of course we’ve not mentioned that for modern people the
00:22:12 ►
major tool for contacting these entities in any kind of controllable fashion is
00:22:18 ►
psychedelic compounds especially DMT and tryptamines, and those sort of experiences seem to line
00:22:28 ►
up pretty well with the Celtic folklore concerning the habits, humor, style, and presentational
00:22:39 ►
mode of these entities, or at least a class of these entities, the little people class of these
00:22:46 ►
entities?
00:22:48 ►
Well, of course, the Celtic people came from Eastern Europe, you know, and they had contact
00:22:54 ►
with the cradle of civilization, as it’s called, or they were the cradle of civilization.
00:23:00 ►
And the view of the underworld introduced into church canon by St. Patrick
00:23:08 ►
we have already in the Sumerian Babylonian uberitic models.
00:23:15 ►
The Sumerian myth of Inanna and Demucy, for example.
00:23:22 ►
You have Inanna goes to the underworld
00:23:25 ►
and speaks with her sister Ereshkigal,
00:23:28 ►
who is the queen of the underworld.
00:23:30 ►
So somehow this is very old,
00:23:32 ►
the land of the dead, the journey of the dead.
00:23:35 ►
I mean, we’re touching really deep stuff here.
00:23:38 ►
Chatal Hayuk, there are all these skeletons
00:23:40 ►
were stuffed under the house
00:23:41 ►
that evidently were left outside in the prairie
00:23:44 ►
to decompose, and when nothing but bones were left, they were like folded up in convenient
00:23:48 ►
bundles tied and stuffed under the house.
00:23:52 ►
So this is an example of one aspect, the mythological side, the birth and death, the deepest layers
00:24:03 ►
of the very tradition.
00:24:06 ►
But in my model of the spirit between the mundane and the celestial spheres,
00:24:13 ►
I think that there is a prehistory going back much deeper
00:24:19 ►
in which this was more or less light,
00:24:21 ►
metaphors of light and so on that were particularized in
00:24:25 ►
human form, near human form, and whatever forms were reasonable in a given culture,
00:24:32 ►
then in whatever language of form is available in the mind of that culture, then these entities
00:24:40 ►
would have to materialize in those forms.
00:24:43 ►
And I think that the underworld, even
00:24:45 ►
though it goes back at least 2,000 years to Sumer, is a displacement from this middle
00:24:52 ►
between us and the sky, that some bit of sky, you see, was brought low. And this has to
00:24:57 ►
do with the patriarchal takeover and the creation of the unconscious to begin with, that something was essentially made bad
00:25:06 ►
in the perpetual difficulty of our species
00:25:10 ►
in dealing with the birth and death experiences.
00:25:13 ►
You used the word language,
00:25:16 ►
and it occurs to me
00:25:18 ►
all of these disincarnate entities
00:25:22 ►
would be but dancing hallucinations before us
00:25:27 ►
were it not for the fact that they possess the ability to address us in languages which we can cognize
00:25:34 ►
and instantly we transfer to them a whole new power and importance because they speak, because they are transferring information from somewhere
00:25:50 ►
to us, and only a very small percentage of which are we able to do anything with.
00:25:57 ►
And I wonder exactly what this is about.
00:26:01 ►
The traditional notion, and I’m sort of restricting myself now to the
00:26:06 ►
no mouth end of this is that they are artificers of some sort they are
00:26:13 ►
master artisans working in metals and with jewels and that sort of thing well
00:26:19 ►
then is the whole sense shamanism we know begins with a kind of deep interpenetration into early metallurgy
00:26:29 ►
that in fact the smith and the shaman are two twin brothers
00:26:35 ►
that are linked together in the working with matter, the extraction of energy from matter well then is this whispering from the demon
00:26:47 ►
artificers a phrase which Jung uses the whisperings of the demon artificers have
00:26:52 ►
led us into technological self-expression and perhaps indeed into
00:26:57 ►
self-expression period so it’s the languages that pose the problem.
00:27:05 ►
Otherwise it would simply be a vision be held before the eyes,
00:27:09 ►
open to interpretations of all sorts.
00:27:12 ►
But the fact that they speak to us and we understand
00:27:16 ►
is very, very puzzling.
00:27:18 ►
And I don’t think modern thinkers don’t even want to talk about it.
00:27:22 ►
They just call this schizophrenia and put you in a small room and leave you there.
00:27:28 ►
But a fair reading, as you mentioned last night, Ralph,
00:27:32 ►
of the history of modern science,
00:27:34 ►
as presented by somebody like Thomas Kuhn,
00:27:36 ►
shows that the irrational,
00:27:39 ►
in this objectified form,
00:27:43 ►
is very active in the process that we call history.
00:27:48 ►
It’s just that we don’t like to admit that because we’re committed to an official philosophy of reason and casuistry.
00:27:59 ►
We have two different models going on here in information transmission, as it were.
00:28:05 ►
There’s the horizontal theory of cultural diffusion, where, for example, since you mentioned that these entities are artisans in metal,
00:28:18 ►
then perhaps we learn metalworking from them. So the Chalcolithic Revolution or the Agricultural Revolution,
00:28:29 ►
we see that it took place in one part of the world later than another part. It suggests
00:28:34 ►
an outgoing circle wave of transmission. The Agricultural Revolution in Britain was in 3500 BC, in France in 4500 BC,
00:28:47 ►
in Anatolia in 7000 BC, and so on.
00:28:49 ►
So not only it moves, it moves slowly,
00:28:51 ►
it’s been tracked by archaeologists and so on.
00:28:53 ►
This is the horizontal theory.
00:28:56 ►
On the other hand, if we need,
00:28:59 ►
for our future evolution and for our past history as well,
00:29:03 ►
that brought us successfully to this point,
00:29:05 ►
to have inspiration, to make shamanistic journeys, to travel vertically and to go
00:29:11 ►
into the world of the spirit, reaching out joyously toward the celestial sphere where
00:29:18 ►
some of this information we need has been stored up somehow or is in a process of evolution.
00:29:24 ►
Then we would expect that the
00:29:25 ►
Chalcolithic, I mean the fairy folk, would have shown people how to work bronze in many different
00:29:30 ►
places at the same time, or maybe what has traveled in cultural diffusion is just the habit, the wish,
00:29:38 ►
or the means, the technology of communicating with angels, so that we can receive this information.
00:29:44 ►
of communicating with angels so that we can receive this information Descartes was somehow open to this dream Kiku it was open to this dream and we actually
00:29:50 ►
have worked hard the three of us in the pursuit of our own dreams in order to
00:29:55 ►
draw information down vertically from the celestial spheres in order to read
00:30:00 ►
inspire our own generation with this sacred knowledge.
00:30:09 ►
So we have these two dimensions in our model,
00:30:12 ►
whereas modern science and the so-called modern paradigm has allowed only one dimension, the horizontal diffusion.
00:30:16 ►
As far as the original inspiration for bronze metalworking,
00:30:21 ►
that would be an accident that took place near a volcano or I don’t know.
00:30:28 ►
Why do you suppose early modern science became so averse to these phenomena at the same time
00:30:35 ►
that there was such a zeal for the cataloging and description of all the productions of ordinary
00:30:43 ►
nature?
00:30:47 ►
Well, that’s a giant question.
00:30:51 ►
We know where it happened and when it happened in a short span of time, and we can study the history of that time, let us say, between John Dee and Newton in England, and we can
00:30:56 ►
study everything that went on.
00:30:57 ►
We still don’t understand what went wrong, because none of the developments in the scientific
00:31:03 ►
enlightenment seem to be explicitly adverse to angels.
00:31:08 ►
And Newton believed in alchemy, and that means particularly astrological alchemy, the little
00:31:16 ►
astrology, and that means that the significance of the stars, the hand of God and the reality of the Trinity, the full Trinity,
00:31:28 ►
that means the body, the soul, the spirit, and so on.
00:31:32 ►
At the same time, Descartes also, Descartes and Newton,
00:31:35 ►
that we frequently blame for our mechanistic paradigm and so on,
00:31:40 ►
they were full of the spirit themselves,
00:31:42 ►
yet they daren’t speak because of the examples of fascist terrorism all around them,
00:31:50 ►
what had happened to other people who spoke.
00:31:52 ►
Giordano Bruno, I think, is one of the most particular cases.
00:31:56 ►
If you have to point at a particular case,
00:31:58 ►
hear the fact that he was burned at the stake
00:32:00 ►
in a field in Rome
00:32:01 ►
in front of an enthusiastic, cheering audience
00:32:03 ►
of 300,000 people on Easter
00:32:07 ►
Sunday or something that he was offered his last chance to recant and denied it. He said,
00:32:12 ►
if you’ll only say that the world is finite, we’ll let you go. And he thought and he said,
00:32:17 ►
I shouldn’t say that, so I won’t. And they burned it. Well well that would be one kind of thing
00:32:26 ►
I mean it must be
00:32:27 ►
a factor in there
00:32:28 ►
and yet
00:32:28 ►
he
00:32:29 ►
he didn’t recant
00:32:31 ►
as Galileo did
00:32:32 ►
and
00:32:33 ►
well
00:32:35 ►
the whole ambiance
00:32:36 ►
of his world
00:32:37 ►
was
00:32:38 ►
one of stellar
00:32:40 ►
demons
00:32:41 ►
being called down
00:32:43 ►
and this was how
00:32:44 ►
renaissance magic worked,
00:32:46 ►
was by the communication with these stellar demons,
00:32:50 ►
they were called,
00:32:51 ►
and the lining up of resonant incenses,
00:32:57 ►
minerals, colors,
00:32:59 ►
to draw these things down.
00:33:02 ►
Perhaps they succeeded,
00:33:04 ►
and out of the Renaissance came modern
00:33:07 ►
science after the pact was made. Starting with an astronomical revolution. Yes. And
00:33:14 ►
I mean for me the question seems to be are these classes of entity that you
00:33:22 ►
that one can experience and which I think principally are experienced by most people in the realm of dreams.
00:33:28 ►
Because in our dreams we travel in a realm where we ourselves can travel in a strange way.
00:33:33 ►
We meet people who are dead.
00:33:35 ►
We meet other people from different parts of the world.
00:33:38 ►
We meet strange situations and experiences, quite unpredictable.
00:33:42 ►
Our dreams live in a kind of autonomous realm.
00:33:45 ►
Now the reductionist theory is that’s just because it’s part of our own psyche. The traditional
00:33:50 ►
theory is that in our dreams we travel out of our bodies and we do enter what the theosophists
00:33:54 ►
call the astral plane or this other realm. The realm of our dreams is a personal nightly
00:34:01 ►
journeying into these realms of other entities,
00:34:08 ►
sometimes penetrating some realms, other times others.
00:34:10 ►
Some people have dreams of angelic beings,
00:34:14 ►
others have dreams of nightmare qualities, of hellish qualities,
00:34:17 ►
that all these are different regions, as it were,
00:34:19 ►
of heaven, hell and purgatory,
00:34:21 ►
which can actually be accessed through the dreams.
00:34:26 ►
That’s the idea, autonomous dreams, and all people throughout the world believe when you dream you travel out of your body in
00:34:28 ►
another realm and this therefore means that the realm of entities includes the
00:34:34 ►
realms of the dead, the realms of the dreamers and the imaginative world of
00:34:39 ►
the dreamers. And then also does the realm of entities include the spirits of species
00:34:47 ►
for example the spirit of the earth the spirit of the solar system the spirit of
00:34:52 ►
each star which would be these stellar geniuses or angels angelic
00:34:56 ►
intelligences the spirits of each species of vegetation of plant mushroom
00:35:01 ►
of you know of fly of each kind of each species of plant or animal has its own
00:35:06 ►
way of being, its own repetitive form, its own way of seeing the world and
00:35:10 ►
experiencing it, its own way of reflecting participation in the whole
00:35:14 ►
from a different point of view from anything else, like a kind of monad.
00:35:18 ►
So if each species has its own spirit or guardian spirit or in a Christian
00:35:23 ►
terminology perhaps guardian angel, but at any rate its own kind of spirit then these are things that shamans have talked to about wolf
00:35:31 ►
spirits crow spirits and all these animal spirits which are a major part of the shamanic fauna
00:35:37 ►
and then there are plant spirits of various kinds and then nature spirits waterfall spirits
00:35:43 ►
niads you know as you mentioned all these traditional ariads, mountain spirits, tree spirits and so forth. This would
00:35:51 ►
be the natural historical basis of the entire system, it seems to me, rooted in the species
00:35:55 ►
of nature, the intelligences of each species of bird and of animal and of its characteristic
00:36:00 ►
space, its own characteristic spirit. You know, like if you become like a hawk,
00:36:06 ►
you fly like a hawk, you see like a hawk,
00:36:08 ►
you take on a kind of hawk-like quality of being.
00:36:11 ►
These sort of hawk spirits and stuff are all biologically grounded
00:36:15 ►
and the others, the angelic ones,
00:36:17 ►
are rooted in actual stars and planetary systems
00:36:20 ►
and galactic spirits.
00:36:22 ►
So the whole system is a system of intelligences
00:36:26 ►
which in some sense either have a bodily aspect
00:36:29 ►
or were at one time embodied, like the dead, the departed.
00:36:33 ►
So that is it all grounded in the bodily aspect of the world, as it were,
00:36:38 ►
or is there a free-floating, totally separate realm of entities,
00:36:41 ►
an entirely autonomous kind, that are kind of free living.
00:36:48 ►
Now, it seems to me that Ralph’s model of the world soul and the world imagination would admit either of these possibilities.
00:36:56 ►
You know, whether all entities have a kind of biological or physical base, be it a star, a species of animals or plants, a kind of crystal or whatever so that everything at one point passes through matter
00:37:08 ►
and that passage through matter allows the eternal existence of the form
00:37:14 ►
in this other realm after the matter has dissolved from the form
00:37:21 ►
and then somehow biological existence is fraught with
00:37:26 ►
these intimations of immortality. Who knows why? I mean we just pick up on our
00:37:34 ►
own destiny as it were and it lies in this animate but disincarnate realm.
00:37:41 ►
Well that would be a very happy scenario. Well I would rather speak of animal
00:37:47 ►
souls than animal spirits and so on. Preserving a soul for somehow the ultimate end of the
00:37:54 ►
great chain of being. And spirit is, may be, which is some sort of elastic medium connecting it all up. It might be the venue of our travels
00:38:08 ►
in dreams and shamanistic journeys and so on
00:38:11 ►
because maybe we cannot reach,
00:38:12 ►
not in consciousness anyway,
00:38:14 ►
all the way to the soul.
00:38:15 ►
We have visions of the logos
00:38:17 ►
that may be very close to the soul.
00:38:19 ►
On the soul level,
00:38:21 ►
certainly it’s all connected up
00:38:22 ►
and all is one as in the oversoul
00:38:24 ►
of Emerson and Thoreau and so on. and all is one as in the oversoul of Emerson
00:38:25 ►
and Thoreau and so on. There’s a great pancake in the sky which may participate in the material
00:38:31 ►
world by ripping off a piece of it, rips off and then incarnates in a blob of protoplasm
00:38:38 ►
or something as a bad habit, as this incarnation, like our eating meat or something.
00:38:50 ►
But in this view, which I think is the essence of the Hermetic tradition,
00:38:52 ►
everything has soul.
00:38:56 ►
Spirit is just spirit. It’s like air, but everything has soul.
00:38:59 ►
Animals have soul. Rocks have soul. Souls are permanent. Their occupation in a rock or in a tree is temporary.
00:39:02 ►
permanent. Their occupation in a rock or in a tree is
00:39:03 ►
temporary. The interaction
00:39:05 ►
between these different
00:39:07 ►
planes is one of a resonant
00:39:09 ►
wave phenomenon that has
00:39:12 ►
at different
00:39:13 ►
places along the great
00:39:16 ►
chain has more or
00:39:18 ►
less of the particulate aspect
00:39:20 ►
of ordinary reality where
00:39:21 ►
we are beings should be a
00:39:24 ►
connected geometric object,
00:39:26 ►
for example, is only here and there. Other places it’s all spread out like moving wallpaper.
00:39:31 ►
So in this view, a kind of hermetic view, we have a greatest opportunity to understand ourselves, our history, and I think to take a stance for a real future. Because the history
00:39:50 ►
on this scale of the world soul, the morphogenesis, first, this biological life on planet Earth
00:39:56 ►
is very recent in the global time scale, whether you believe in the Big Bang and the scientific
00:40:00 ►
creation myth or not, that certainly the morphogenesis of the stars,
00:40:07 ►
I mean, these entities that have taken from time to time in their history
00:40:11 ►
incarnation in constellations in the sky or whatever,
00:40:14 ►
they’ve long preceded.
00:40:16 ►
They have a whole lot more experience
00:40:18 ►
than the incarnation in the atmosphere
00:40:21 ►
at the moment when they decided to have oxygen.
00:40:26 ►
How was this?
00:40:28 ►
Here’s a great catastrophe in our evolution, which is not quite explained,
00:40:32 ►
the chicken and the egg problem in this evolutionary great step.
00:40:35 ►
We got the oxygen.
00:40:37 ►
It has something to do with the incarnation of a whim of spirit,
00:40:40 ►
of imagination on the level of the world soul, decided to screw around with the
00:40:47 ►
organisms in the ocean on planet Earth and create oxygen and see what happened.
00:40:52 ►
And all of this has enormous history compared to the extreme youth of our incarnation in
00:41:00 ►
animal mammalian bodies and human bodies and the development of language and so on.
00:41:05 ►
So in traveling up the great chain of being toward the world soul,
00:41:10 ►
we’re getting in touch with these things
00:41:11 ►
which must precede any capability we have of verbalization
00:41:15 ►
or understanding in mammalian experience and so on.
00:41:18 ►
And yet they do seem to reach out for contact.
00:41:20 ►
And then they try, I suppose suppose to learn our language and communicate as
00:41:25 ►
the the corn circles in England for example apparently are a kind of a
00:41:31 ►
semiotic where a cornfield as an organism of the world soul or the guy in
00:41:36 ►
soul as they to particularize to planet Earth the guy in soul is trying to speak
00:41:41 ►
to us and find some language so developing an alphabet little by little, just as we developed cuneiform.
00:41:48 ►
You see, I think the best theory of them really would be that Asraf says it’s the world soul communicating to us.
00:41:53 ►
But if it turned out that in fact it were exactly what the most persuaded school of rationalist explainers believes it is,
00:42:00 ►
namely whirlwinds of a particularly focused kind, you suddenly discover they’re right.
00:42:05 ►
Suddenly whirlwinds can take on entirely new patterns of focus and write new patterns,
00:42:10 ►
and so there’s a kind of spirit behind the whirlwind that’s really expressed itself.
00:42:14 ►
Well, the…
00:42:15 ►
As many traditions have always believed.
00:42:17 ►
The spiraling form of the whirlwind, a whirlwind is probably an extremely complex,
00:42:23 ►
organized entity.
00:42:26 ►
It’s an expression of DNA.
00:42:31 ►
It’s an expression of the ordering morphology of the galaxy.
00:42:33 ►
I would expect a higher…
00:42:36 ►
Yes, it’s a higher order form of life.
00:42:40 ►
But it still has a spiraling energy form.
00:42:46 ►
Well, maybe some kind of breakthrough is not far away when you
00:42:47 ►
these facts I
00:42:50 ►
recited about the early
00:42:52 ►
modern science and how all these guys
00:42:54 ►
were shaped in their ideas by
00:42:55 ►
converse with these entities.
00:42:58 ►
What would it be like to take that
00:42:59 ►
notion seriously enough to actually
00:43:02 ►
open a kind of
00:43:04 ►
embassy to the invisible so that we could
00:43:08 ►
have commerce and treaties and exchange of patents. Yes, we shamans are ambassadors.
00:43:17 ►
Well, this must be what in fact is going on, but what you need to do is bring a lot to it.
00:43:24 ►
I mean, if you understand the differential
00:43:26 ►
calculus and the theory of hyperfine reactions, you may be able to work out a different treaty
00:43:33 ►
than if all you understand is blow guns and canoe manufacture.
00:43:38 ►
Well, that’s where mathematical modeling comes in, as Ralph must be thinking.
00:43:53 ►
Well, I confess that I do have in mind a mathematical model for the world so spirit and mundane that I would like to run as a video game in arcades or at Disneyland or something,
00:44:01 ►
because the bad habits of science in the past 400 years have had the unfortunate
00:44:10 ►
effect of depriving us of a mathematical model of the spirit and the soul, and therefore
00:44:15 ►
our understanding of the material world is just because of these peculiar selection,
00:44:22 ►
the selectivity of scientists as it evolved, you know, they
00:44:25 ►
neglected the spirit world as far as modeling is concerned. So our
00:44:29 ►
understanding could be advanced. I mean, our understanding is somewhere, it’s not
00:44:35 ►
nowhere, because we have ideas of fairies, angels, saints, and so on. I wonder how
00:44:41 ►
accurate and reliable the maps are that the occultists have accumulated in their fashion over the past couple of hundred years. lieutenants, generals, majors, they were assigned different medals, each had its
00:45:05 ►
own sigil, each had its own dedicated incenses that were to be burned.
00:45:11 ►
Yes, we don’t tell you the history of that, you probably know it. A.E. Wade is derived
00:45:16 ►
from the Enochian. The Enochian is the revelation to John Dee of an earlier
00:45:22 ►
magic. And when we look in the literature
00:45:25 ►
of the pre-Christian Jews in Jerusalem,
00:45:29 ►
and especially in Alexandria,
00:45:32 ►
there we find the Merkaba mysticism.
00:45:35 ►
In heaven, you know, there’s the seventh heaven.
00:45:38 ►
In seventh heaven, actually, there are eight heavens
00:45:40 ►
according to the Merkaba mystics.
00:45:43 ►
These are visualized as kind of concentric
00:45:46 ►
spheres, and this is a particular visualization
00:45:48 ►
of the spirit,
00:45:50 ►
of the logos, of the elastic medium
00:45:52 ►
between here and the end of the great chain of
00:45:54 ►
being, the one God.
00:45:57 ►
Well,
00:45:58 ►
we’re going to have to end on that
00:46:00 ►
note for now, but like you,
00:46:02 ►
I’m really curious about where they’re going to
00:46:04 ►
go from here,
00:46:10 ►
so I’ll do my best to get the continuation of this trial log out in the next couple of days,
00:46:16 ►
for sure. As I listened to this conversation with you, I kept thinking about Graham Hancock’s new book, Supernatural. I’ll go into that in more detail at a later date, but for those of you who
00:46:22 ►
may be interested in a scholarly investigation
00:46:25 ►
into the origins of art and religion and the human experience, you may want to pick up
00:46:30 ►
a copy of this new book, because in it, Graham Hancock does a really good job of covering
00:46:35 ►
the current state of research into prehistoric cave art and its possible connection to psychedelic
00:46:41 ►
plants.
00:46:43 ►
And in the area of disincarnate entities, such as this trialogue covers, Hancock’s book
00:46:48 ►
really shines, so you might want to take a quick look at that.
00:46:52 ►
You know, I’ve got several emails that I want to mention, along with answers to some of
00:46:56 ►
the questions I’ve received in the past couple of weeks, but if I’m going to get the next
00:47:00 ►
part of this trialogue out yet this week, I’m going to have to cut it short for today and begin working on the next program,
00:47:07 ►
which I plan on getting out by the end of this week.
00:47:10 ►
But before I go, I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
00:47:15 ►
are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 2.5 license.
00:47:22 ►
If you have any questions about that, you can click on the link at the bottom of the
00:47:26 ►
Psychedelic Salon webpage,
00:47:28 ►
which you can find at
00:47:29 ►
matrixmasters.com
00:47:31 ►
slash podcast. And if you still
00:47:34 ►
have any questions, just send them to me
00:47:36 ►
in an email. That’s
00:47:37 ►
lorenzo at matrixmasters.com
00:47:40 ►
And a
00:47:42 ►
big thank you to Chateau Hayouk for
00:47:44 ►
the use of their music here in the Psychedelic Salon. And a big thank you to Chateau Hayouk for the use of their music here in this psychedelic
00:47:46 ►
salon. And thank you as well to all of you who are out there with us in cyberdelic space.
00:47:52 ►
It’s nice to know you’re there. And so for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic
00:47:58 ►
space. Be well, my friends.