Program Notes

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake

(Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:31 Terence McKenna:
“[The apocalypse] seems to be the unique, unifying thread throughout the
Western religions Most insistently of all religious systems on Earth, it is
the Western systems that have insisted on appointing an end to their world.”

05:07 Terence:
“At the folkloric level, the attractor of the end of the world is very strong.”

07:47 Terence:
“And these religions, which have anticipated this thing in this rather crude end of the world scenario are somehow on to something, something that is, I think, a message that is coming from the biological level, if you will, about the inherent instability of the world.”

12:14 Terence:
“If in fact the concrescence is upon us then really all we can do is chat
about it as it comes down around our ears over the next 25 years.”

14:37 Terence:
“I think we’re standing on the lip of a hyperdimensional volcano of some
sort, toward which all history is being poured at a great rate.”

29:34 Terence:
“So then I thought, my god, we’re not inventing time travel here, what we’re
inventing is a god whistle.”

36:01 Terence:
“You see, the presence of minds is the signifier of nearby singularity.”

37:22 Ralph Abraham:
“The only thing is, that from the morphogenic field point of view there
are quite a number of people believing Saint John the Divine, now that I have
to take seriously.” … Terence: “He felt a quaking in the force,
that’s all, but it’s up to cooler heads to figure out what this quaking is.”

38:10 Ralph:
“The present extinction is the eighth largest [as determined in 1989] catastrophes of the planet in its lifetime. And that’s happening now. So we are in something that big, and to be the biggest one it would be the apocalypse.”

38:10 Terence:
“So that’s why you don’t need John the Divine to tell you there’s an apocalypse
underway.” 

39:49 Ralph:
“It does seem to me that the ecological catastrophe is the appropriate interpretation
of the apocalyptic vision at the present time.”

FasterThanLight-NickHerbert.jpg

The book that Terence McKenna referred to in this podcast is:

“Faster Than Light:
Superluminal Loopholes in Physics”

by Nick Herbert

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Transcript

00:00:00

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:22

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:26

So, how are you today? I hope that the letdown after the holiday season, coupled with some strange winter weather, hasn’t dampened your zester life.

00:00:43

and just general dreariness can get to you after a while.

00:00:47

But before long, spring will have passed us by,

00:00:50

and the big panic will be getting ready for your holiday,

00:00:54

or something like Burning Man, or some other exotic location like that.

00:00:58

But in the meantime, I guess we just have to press on.

00:01:03

And that’s just what we’ve done with this first series of trilogues, because today we’re going to hear the first side of the last tape in this series.

00:01:09

But when you hear Terrence McKenna begin by saying that this is the last of the trilogues, please don’t despair, because there are really many, many more hours of trilogues ahead here in the salon.

00:01:20

What he was referring to was the fact that this recording is the last of the 1989 series of trilogues that they held at the Esalen Institute.

00:01:30

And as it turns out, they continued having these three-way conversations until the summer of 1998.

00:01:37

At least that’s the last one I’ve got a recording of.

00:01:41

Today’s program, which is the first side of the 10th cassette tape in this series,

00:01:46

is titled The Apocalypse. An interesting title, don’t you think? So without any further introduction,

00:01:54

let’s hear what Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake have to say about the apocalypse as seen from their perspective in 1989.

00:02:21

Well, we’ve reached the last of our trilogues, and so it’s fitting that we should cast our minds toward last things, since this both seems to be the theme of the crisis

00:02:28

of the present moment

00:02:30

and also the unique unifying thread

00:02:35

throughout the Western religion

00:02:38

that most insistently of all religious systems on earth,

00:02:44

it is the Western systems that

00:02:46

have insisted in appointing an end to their world the cyclical worlds of

00:02:55

Hinduism are cycles of time so vast that they lose all force on the popular

00:03:01

imagination but what uniquely distinguishes Judaism, Christianity,

00:03:07

and Islam is this insistence that God will come tangential to history in a way that will create a scenario of last days, of a great uptaking of souls into the mystery of God.

00:03:28

This idea, which is called apocalyptic in its more catastrophic version

00:03:36

and millenarian in its more pastoral version,

00:03:48

version is the idea that is the necessary correlative to the concept of Eden and the unique moment of man’s creation by God. If man’s creation

00:03:55

occurred at a unique moment in the history of the universe then presumably

00:04:00

after the expiation of the sin of Eden, God will gather man once again into the mystery.

00:04:08

So this idea, which when encountered

00:04:14

outside the religious framework in individuals,

00:04:19

in a secular or desacralized vocabulary

00:04:25

is labeled pathology,

00:04:28

the expectation of eminent transformation

00:04:32

of the environment with the individual

00:04:35

somehow playing a central role,

00:04:38

this recognized pathological symptom

00:04:40

in the individual is nevertheless

00:04:43

the driving force behind much of our own civilization.

00:04:49

We as educated rationalists, the most rational five percent of society, in spite of our pretensions

00:04:58

to intellectual revolution, we are far, I believe, from feeling the real force of what this is. But at the

00:05:07

folkloric level, the attractor of the end of the world is very strong. And you may recall

00:05:18

some five years ago, the Secretary of the Interior was asked why he wasn’t saving more of America’s forests.

00:05:25

And he replied that since Jesus was coming, he saw no reason to save the forest because the end of the world was imminent.

00:05:34

So I find this thinking very interesting, and I have personally certainly experienced its power.

00:05:44

What is this intuition of the end of the world?

00:05:49

And now that we’re beginning to gather more data, that science is actually beginning to

00:05:56

pay back on the promises made in the 18th century and give us a complete and deep description of at least the physical and

00:06:05

astronomical universe, what we’re seeing is a highly chaotic domain. There isn’t a

00:06:15

stable body in the solar system that isn’t deeply pockmarked with in

00:06:21

asteroidal impact from the inner planets to the moons of

00:06:25

the gas giants there is tremendous visual evidence of catastrophic episodes

00:06:33

throughout the history of the solar system so we discussed in another

00:06:43

meeting inconsistencies in nuclear theory with the output of neutrinos from the sun.

00:06:50

Is there a problem there?

00:06:52

Human history itself, to my mind, can be seen as a kind of shockwave attendant upon the eschatology.

00:07:03

attendant upon the eschatology that if we were to imagine for a moment

00:07:07

that God or a super-transmundane mind

00:07:11

were to enter into the ordinary biological

00:07:17

and evolutionary life of a planet,

00:07:20

then I think we would have to agree

00:07:22

that there would be some kind of shockwave of anticipation,

00:07:28

some kind of sense of the eminence of the disruption of ordinary events before it was in fact eminent.

00:07:36

And this very brief period which we have experienced over the past 20,000 years, is this thing, I believe.

00:07:46

And these religions, which have anticipated this thing

00:07:49

in this rather crude end-of-the-world scenario,

00:07:53

are somehow on to something,

00:07:56

something that is, I think,

00:07:58

a message coming from the biological level, if you will,

00:08:03

about the inherent instability of the world.

00:08:08

Ralph’s models and Prigogine’s models

00:08:11

and all this has established the role

00:08:13

of the unexpected perturbation in the creation of the cosmos,

00:08:17

but I don’t think we’ve quite factored it in

00:08:21

to our day-to-day model of what’s going on.

00:08:24

One of the startling things that I find when I look back on my own life

00:08:30

of slightly more than 40 years

00:08:32

is the number of things that have happened in my life

00:08:37

that we were told would never happen.

00:08:41

I mean, I have seen presidents assassinated,

00:08:44

human beings landed on the moon, robots to Mars,

00:08:49

all of these high improbabilities in a single lifespan, which we all share. So I think that

00:08:57

we are sort of on automatic pilot with our assumptions that in spite of all our theory making, we

00:09:06

are living in basically a probabilistic, synchronistically flattened universal plane. What if the urgency

00:09:20

and the uniqueness of the human historical moment actually signaled yet more urgent

00:09:28

and even more exotic moments to come,

00:09:32

and that we are somehow witness to a major phase transition

00:09:37

in the career of self-reflecting bios in the universe,

00:09:42

and that for us it’s the end of the world but you know this is a meaningless

00:09:48

phrase it’s simply a complete systemic reorganization on the scale of metamorphosis

00:09:56

in lepidoptera it’s just a complete meltdown of the previous world system and then a recasting at the behest of

00:10:07

higher mind, Gaian mind, the world soul, it isn’t clear. But if we could strip the

00:10:17

provincialism from the message of these apocalyptic religions, I think they explain what history is.

00:10:28

They have a deep intuition of instability.

00:10:33

And in the same way that I described

00:10:36

the reluctance of plants in a botanical garden

00:10:40

to venture out on an unstable tree limb,

00:10:43

I think these apocalyptic religions

00:10:47

are trying… they are all prophetistic religions. They are trying to extract something out of

00:10:56

the human future that is of no casual interest. It may in fact involve the survival, yes or

00:11:07

It may, in fact, involve the survival, yes or no, of the planet. So I’m interested in ideas like that the transcendental object is somehow leaking information back into the past at a 3% rate or something like that that Shamans and mystics and psychedelic travelers are in fact getting a very

00:11:30

incomplete low-grade

00:11:32

signal about this event that is I think

00:11:37

Based on what we talked about last night somehow built into the structure of space and time that the the presence of our minds indicates that we are very near

00:11:48

this enormous, congressing singularity.

00:11:52

Minds cannot exist except within 25,000 years

00:11:57

of complete congressance of one of these things.

00:12:00

They do not arise in parts of the universe

00:12:03

where congressance is not approaching its climax. So I don’t really know the

00:12:12

relevance of all this for theory-making if in fact the the concrescence is upon

00:12:17

us, then really all we can do is chat about it as it comes down around our

00:12:21

ears over the next 25 years and it we are in such

00:12:26

a tidal grip of the field that it really doesn’t matter we can only observe it

00:12:31

knowing having you know the meager satisfaction that we made a amusing

00:12:37

model of it if longer periods of time are available, then it might be worthwhile to undertake to study this phenomenon

00:12:48

and its role in human history and so forth and so on. But it’s more than simply the calendrical

00:12:56

pressure from the approach of the second millennium. It’s also all these graphs drawn by very straight people of resources and population density and demand

00:13:09

for hydroelectric energy and levels of strontium and milk and all of this stuff. I mean, who can

00:13:15

look at all this stuff and not say it’s either the yawning grave or there’s going to be a complete the lake is going to turn over there’s going to be a complete

00:13:27

system reversal because this cannot go on it’s abiotic and i think life has a terrifying

00:13:37

tenaciousness i mean life seized hold of this planet a billion years ago, a billion and a half, two billion years ago, and managed it through hellfire again and again, and life kept hold of this chunk of ground.

00:14:06

So I think the advent of intelligence

00:14:12

must signal a crisis of a greater magnitude.

00:14:16

That’s why I suggest that the stellar dynamics

00:14:19

should be looked at very carefully or something like that.

00:14:22

It’s a different order of magnitude,

00:14:25

and it’s seeping into our religions and into our politics

00:14:29

and into our psychedelic experiences

00:14:34

and into the general imagination.

00:14:37

I think we’re standing on the lip of a hyperdimensional volcano

00:14:42

of some sort toward which all history is being poured

00:14:47

at a great rate we have the peculiar good fortune of fulfilling the wish

00:14:53

conveyed in the Irish toast may you be alive at the end of the world so that’s

00:15:01

it gentlemen now we can just kick this around. Some questions come up. Yes.

00:15:09

There seem to be two stages to this apocalyptic vision, this particular one.

00:15:18

First is, the first stage is the confidence in an apocalypse coming sometime.

00:15:27

And the other component is the location of the date, 20 years or so hence.

00:15:35

You mean in my personal belief?

00:15:37

Yes.

00:15:38

So about the first one, it does seem sort of logical somehow that if there’s a big bang at the beginning,

00:15:50

there would be a big bang at the end, and the creation story in Genesis and the precedent myths

00:15:58

might somehow seem to imply that, but I don’t know.

00:16:03

I wouldn’t think that’s enough to go on you know but then you said

00:16:07

that in the uh in these traditions hebrew christian islam that there’s a definite tradition

00:16:14

um of an end in the mild form the millinery and in the strong form the apocalyptic

00:16:20

correct well what is it exactly what is the Secretary of the Interior referring to?

00:16:28

He’s referring to…

00:16:29

In the Gospels or somewhere?

00:16:31

No, in the Revelation of St. John, this thing is laid out.

00:16:35

It’s very complex.

00:16:37

Angels come and pour down diseases.

00:16:41

Oceans boil.

00:16:42

It takes a long time.

00:16:47

diseases oceans boil it takes a long time there are plagues of scorpion like creatures that come from the interior of the earth certain people are marked with

00:16:52

the sign and they are the elect and this it’s just this completely bizarre

00:17:01

production that is the moment the most puzzling pieces of

00:17:06

literature in the Christian canon.

00:17:08

And the textual basis

00:17:09

for this

00:17:12

fantasy is entirely this

00:17:14

revelation of St. John the Divine.

00:17:16

That’s right. Is that the apocalyptic,

00:17:17

the millenarian, or both? Both.

00:17:20

Yes, because at the end you see

00:17:22

the twelve-gated city,

00:17:24

the new Jerusalem, a flying saucer, comes.

00:17:27

I mean, you can tell.

00:17:28

I mean, the description is, you know, it’s covered with jewels.

00:17:31

It has 12 gates.

00:17:33

It’s God’s kingdom come to earth, and it comes to receive the elect.

00:17:37

And as the oceans boil away and the damned are dragged into hell for eternity,

00:17:43

the damned are dragged into hell for eternity. These people with these special things shining in their heads

00:17:47

go into this thing to be with God in eternity,

00:17:51

and the whole thing is flushed.

00:17:55

We’ll have the sunglasses specially ready to sell them.

00:17:59

In this textual basis for this fantasy,

00:18:03

is there any idea about the date?

00:18:08

Well, yeah.

00:18:09

At the time of Christ,

00:18:11

the people who immediately followed Christ

00:18:14

expected it within their lifetime.

00:18:16

Amen, amen, I say unto you,

00:18:18

this generation shall not pass away

00:18:21

until these things are accomplished.

00:18:24

It was expected immediately immediately and there

00:18:27

was this like weird there’s been disappointment after disappointment well yes there was this weird

00:18:32

120 year period where they didn’t get the serious job of getting organized together because

00:18:38

everybody was standing around waiting for the end of the world. And then after about 120 years,

00:18:45

people like Origen and Eusebius and these people came forward

00:18:50

and said, listen, enough of this waiting for the end of the world.

00:18:55

We have to get this scene organized.

00:18:56

It’s seriously overdue.

00:18:57

Yes, let’s get organized and get our hands on some real estate.

00:19:03

Now that it’s so seriously overdue

00:19:06

and people have been disappointed time after time,

00:19:08

I would think that the force of the prophecy has declined.

00:19:12

In any case, I just want to ask you this.

00:19:14

Have you any way of guessing

00:19:15

why the Secretary of the Interior

00:19:18

thought that the end was coming imminently?

00:19:21

I know why you think so.

00:19:22

Yes, because there are all these fundamentalist cults

00:19:26

in the United States,

00:19:28

some whose adherents number in the tens of millions,

00:19:32

who believe that it’s happening,

00:19:37

that it’s underway.

00:19:38

I mean, within the spectrum of Christian belief,

00:19:40

you can go with the Seventh-day Adventists

00:19:43

who hold the most extreme position,

00:19:45

which is that it occurred in 1847.

00:19:49

I love that position.

00:19:54

And that we are

00:19:56

now living in the millennium.

00:19:58

This is the millennium.

00:19:59

Can’t you tell?

00:20:01

So that’s the most

00:20:02

right-wing view.

00:20:07

And then there are those who undergo the formality of at least locating the date decently in the near future.

00:20:12

And the year 2000, it’s the end.

00:20:16

The turning of the aeon.

00:20:18

Everybody has a way of decoding.

00:20:21

This is one of the weird things about millenarian speculation.

00:20:24

The person who discovers the key things about millenarian speculation the person who

00:20:25

discovers the key to the millenarian date it always is just a few years ahead it’s you

00:20:34

now i just have a couple more questions for the direct examination then we’ll turn the witness

00:20:38

over for the cross-examination okay how many uh what what, more or less, of the human population of planet Earth at

00:20:46

the moment is involved in this Hebrew, Christian, and Islam religion?

00:20:51

A third, I’d say.

00:20:53

I could say maybe…

00:20:55

However, if you’re trying to count the adherence to the Apocalypse Theory, you have

00:21:00

to count all the adherence of scientism as well because they too with their

00:21:05

you know greenhouse

00:21:07

effects and CFCs

00:21:09

and acid rain I mean they’re the most

00:21:11

that’s another story I do think that

00:21:13

might be even a bigger danger but that’s

00:21:15

another story right now I’m after

00:21:17

the revelation of St. John the Divine

00:21:19

no this is the end of the world

00:21:21

scenario of scientism

00:21:23

and then we’ve had the end of the world scenario of nuclear holocaust

00:21:27

hanging over us for decades.

00:21:28

That’s right.

00:21:29

And that’s a ready-to-hand scenario.

00:21:31

Oh, yeah, the ocean.

00:21:32

But it’s coming from the same culture.

00:21:34

But I just wonder how much credibility to give to the Christian apocalyptic vision

00:21:43

when less than half the human population is involved.

00:21:46

It doesn’t mean that just that half of the planet

00:21:48

would be vaporized while the other half kept on going.

00:21:53

No, see, I don’t think it’s a vaporizing.

00:21:55

What it is is all these scenarios are metaphors

00:21:59

for something really weird.

00:22:03

Well, that’s true.

00:22:04

I know about the flying saucer.

00:22:05

We’re in a much better position to anticipate it

00:22:08

than John the Divine of Patmos was.

00:22:12

Well, you sort of started on the scientific end

00:22:14

with the mention of the astronomical chaos

00:22:17

and the craters on all the other bodies

00:22:21

and the fall of neutrinos from the sun and so on.

00:22:25

Catastrophic scenarios scenarios you mean yes yes well the positive scenarios are simply more

00:22:32

far-fetched I mean one of the ones I’ve been playing with recently that I really

00:22:37

like is that it ain’t no big deal it’s just that time travel is discovered.

00:22:46

It’s a technological artifact.

00:22:49

It’s done in laboratories.

00:22:49

The door is open on this little tunnel, and you just walk through.

00:22:52

And history ends.

00:22:54

History ends.

00:22:55

Just bang, it ends.

00:22:57

And that’s the end of history.

00:22:58

And people look back at it the way you look back at the Pueos or something and say you know people used to live

00:23:06

like that in linear time weird all all you know waiting for stuff to happen and and all in this

00:23:14

weird jelly of stiffened dimensionality and boy aren’t we glad we’ve got that behind us

00:23:22

and to the people who were born in it the

00:23:26

previous mode of existence would be mere rumor and it would be simply a

00:23:30

technological artifact I think that this actually after reading Nick Herbert’s

00:23:36

book this did I talk to you about the idea about the kind of time machine where he hypothesized this notion of a principle which works like this time travel is

00:23:51

possible once it’s discovered you’ll be able to travel into the future when you’re in the future

00:23:58

you’ll be able to travel back into the past but no further than the moment of the discovery of the first time

00:24:08

machine, because before that moment there were no time machines, and how can you take

00:24:14

a time machine into a universe where time machines don’t exist?

00:24:17

With nobody knowing it.

00:24:19

Yes.

00:24:19

So there is this physical barrier to time travel past the moment of discovery of it,

00:24:27

backward before that moment.

00:24:29

Well, I thought this was very interesting because I wanted to imagine,

00:24:33

this is a practical apocalypse.

00:24:35

This is a, I wanted to imagine what would it be like if this kind of time machine were discovered? And so I imagined that it’s December

00:24:49

22nd, 2012 AD at the La Charrera World Temporal Mechanics Institute, and they’re counting down,

00:24:58

and the lady tempo knot has been strapped into the time machine and they count down and they push the button

00:25:06

and she sails off into the future.

00:25:08

Now the interesting question is

00:25:10

what happens right there in the next moment?

00:25:15

Millions of people arrive

00:25:16

from a more populated part of the universe.

00:25:19

Millions of time machines arrive

00:25:22

from all possible parts of the future.

00:25:25

Sneaking through the bushes pretending they were there all the time.

00:25:28

Asking for groceries.

00:25:29

To see the moment, this historic moment, the first time travel which defines the barrier

00:25:37

as far as you can go in your time machine.

00:25:39

And people say to each other, have you been to the edge?

00:25:41

It’s 35,000 years from here. Have you been back and seen the Abraham machine take off?

00:25:50

Well, so I loved this idea, and I held it for about 48 hours as a great gimmick.

00:25:59

And then I realized that there was a peculiar problem with it,

00:26:03

which has to do with the grandfather paradox, that one of these people from the far future could stop off on their

00:26:10

way back to see Ralph’s machine take off.

00:26:13

They could stop off and kill their grandfather and set this paradox in motion, which has

00:26:18

been the defeat of all time travel schemes. So then I had what I believe is

00:26:25

a serious delusional breakthrough,

00:26:34

which was I said,

00:26:36

aha, there’s something,

00:26:38

oh, well, here’s the model that you have to have

00:26:40

to understand the next stage of this argument

00:26:43

about the apocalypse.

00:26:44

You know how the Bernoulli gas laws work. that you have to have to understand the next stage of this argument about the apocalypse.

00:26:45

You know how the Bernoulli gas laws work.

00:26:48

So imagine a vacuum-filled elliptical tank.

00:26:56

We introduce a burst of oxygen at one end of this tank.

00:27:01

Now, according to Bernoulli’s laws, what happens? It diffuses

00:27:06

evenly throughout and comes to a state of equilibrium, correct? Well let’s think

00:27:12

for a moment of the planet. Now we’ll make a geometric model one dimension

00:27:16

down. Think of how today, 1989, on this planet, we have all kinds of different levels of cultural achievement,

00:27:27

like we have central Tokyo and Beverly Hills,

00:27:32

but we also have Amazon rainforest people and pygmies and berbers and all these people.

00:27:38

Well, now, if you think of cultural values and technological prowess and scientific acumen as

00:27:48

particles in this gaseous environment then which way do you think values are

00:27:55

moving in order to establish equilibrium well the answer is obvious more people

00:28:01

in the Amazon are interested in what the Japanese are thinking than Japanese are interested in what

00:28:07

Amazonian Indians are thinking in other words the higher state of cultural accomplishment

00:28:13

is slowly swamping all

00:28:16

less advanced states of cultural accomplishment for without arguing about

00:28:22

What these terms mean in terms of advanced.

00:28:25

But one culture is swamping another.

00:28:28

Okay, to return to the time travel problem then,

00:28:32

a weird effect would ensue upon the invention

00:28:37

of this forward-going kind of time travel that I’m hypothesizing.

00:28:42

It can be described with several different linguistic models.

00:28:47

One way of saying it is

00:28:49

when the Lady Temponaut goes off into the future,

00:28:53

all of the rest of the future

00:28:57

unto, as Wordworth says,

00:29:00

as long as date shall give a name to time,

00:29:05

all of that future undergoes some kind of collapse

00:29:10

and happens instantly.

00:29:12

It happens instantly so that the most advanced state

00:29:18

of human accomplishment,

00:29:20

even if it be billions of years in the future

00:29:24

and absolutely beyond our ability to imagine in any way,

00:29:28

will appear one millisecond later on the other side of this barrier.

00:29:34

So then I thought, my God, we’re not inventing time travel here.

00:29:38

What we’re inventing is time death.

00:29:41

A god whistle.

00:29:42

That’s what it is.

00:29:44

It’s a god whistle. That’s what it is. It’s a god whistle. You create this technology and it

00:29:48

just takes the entire future history of the universe up until its conclusion and compresses

00:29:54

it down into the next few milliseconds as the thing spins down. And then you are face to face with the end purpose of all evolution and all process and all pattern and all energy, space, time and matter.

00:30:13

You come out next to the big girl.

00:30:17

And this would work, I think.

00:30:21

This is not the edge of the West.

00:30:22

It’s the edge of the rest.

00:30:23

The edge of the rest.’s the edge of the rest the edge of the rest

00:30:25

yes

00:30:26

so there you have it

00:30:29

a complete fulfillment

00:30:31

of the monotheistic intuition

00:30:34

of apocalypse

00:30:35

and what it is

00:30:37

it’s wonderful

00:30:38

it’s that we figured it out

00:30:40

it’s like the universe is this huge conundrum

00:30:44

and you’re in there and you’re

00:30:45

suffering and it’s just this weird dream and then there’s science and religion and magic and you’re

00:30:50

fumbling and you’re and then you slowly go toward this thing and it turns out it is the stone is

00:30:56

real there is alchemical gold and when you grasp this to yourself then you, you know, time ends, space ends, matter ends, everything ends, and you

00:31:07

go into the conclusion, the payoff, the jackpot.

00:31:11

You go over the cusp and you meet the management.

00:31:17

Probably this hasn’t happened yet.

00:31:19

No, 2012, I think.

00:31:21

2012, I think.

00:31:24

That brings us to the second question.

00:31:30

As to this 2012, as already discussed,

00:31:33

there were different alternatives in the interpretation of this date

00:31:36

as based on the time wave by itself,

00:31:40

such as a reflection point of zero novelty and so on.

00:31:44

such as a reflection point of zero novelty and so on.

00:31:52

So I think that this particular apocalyptic fantasy of yours is actually a syncretism between the apocalyptic paranoia on the one hand

00:31:57

and the time wave on the other hand,

00:32:00

because even if one is convinced of apocalypse but not knowing when,

00:32:03

it’s not necessary to associate it to the year 2012.

00:32:08

No, no, it certainly isn’t.

00:32:12

It isn’t necessary to associate it with that.

00:32:14

That’s a more, that, you know, you enter into the slippery realm of human judgment

00:32:20

and data fields and this and that.

00:32:22

The fact that it fits it so well and that

00:32:25

without the time wave there is all this millenarian and apocalyptic pressure

00:32:31

because of the turn of the millennium seems pretty suggestive to me. The Mayan

00:32:36

thing is another coincidence. I mean really the Mayans and the Christians

00:32:43

were within 12 years of each other in a a way, if you take the year 2000.

00:32:47

We have the coincidence of several sacred documents.

00:32:51

Yes.

00:32:51

The revelation of St. John the Divine.

00:32:53

Yes.

00:32:54

The time wave, another sacred document in software form.

00:32:59

The Mayans.

00:33:00

And the software.

00:33:01

And the Judeo-Christian calendar. Or the Gregorian calendar.

00:33:06

No, I don’t think a round number like 2000 has got anything to do…

00:33:11

I mean, it didn’t happen in the year 1000.

00:33:13

No, but there was millenarian hysteria like you wouldn’t believe.

00:33:17

That’s insignificant.

00:33:17

I mean, they didn’t get any work done for two years.

00:33:19

Benedict had studied 60 different cultures,

00:33:22

and she charted them out by all different parameters and finally she sorted them into three bins, the Apollonian, the Dionysian,

00:33:32

and the paranoid.

00:33:33

Now it just happens that a paranoid culture, having this paranoid religion, or at least

00:33:40

with a paranoid element in it, contributed by St. John the Divine, happened to get these extraordinary technical powers

00:33:47

which are great generators of toxicity and so on?

00:33:52

Well, the term paranoid is designed to make you not like it.

00:33:59

The implicit point of view in calling it paranoid is one of scientism. Having

00:34:07

been called paranoid, I know that this is what they do. If you’re labeled this,

00:34:13

nobody’s going to look into it. It makes the implicit assumption that

00:34:18

there’s nothing to be paranoid about. Yet, in fact, we live in a very peculiar and dynamic and unsteady

00:34:28

universe and it’s very important to us as creatures to have stability

00:34:33

equilibrium and evenness of conditions so to argue it isn’t paranoia it may

00:34:40

well in fact be a be a sensitivity to the…

00:34:45

They always say that.

00:34:47

Yes, that’s fine.

00:34:48

But the fact is, from my point of view,

00:34:51

I mean, I’m just a person hanging around here.

00:34:53

I’ve never read the Revelation of St. John the Divine.

00:34:57

Maybe I will or maybe I won’t.

00:34:58

If I do read it, I certainly don’t believe

00:35:00

that it’s any kind of document with any credibility.

00:35:04

You see, I know that there are some

00:35:06

fundamentalist Christians around

00:35:07

who take every word of the Bible very seriously

00:35:10

and they believe it.

00:35:11

But here is like, as far as I’m concerned,

00:35:13

somebody’s paranoid fantasy was put down in a book

00:35:15

that other people take seriously, so now they’re paranoid too.

00:35:18

I don’t think revelations

00:35:19

is the interesting thing to discuss.

00:35:21

What’s the interesting thing?

00:35:23

Possible scenarios of sudden catastrophic phase transition

00:35:27

in the natural world.

00:35:28

Well, now, nuclear winter, I believe in that.

00:35:30

Well, but these are mundane.

00:35:32

I mean, I outlined one for you that had a little teeth in it.

00:35:35

There are others.

00:35:38

You know, this thing we talked about

00:35:40

where the matter and anti-matter universes

00:35:45

collide and leave a photonic

00:35:47

shell under the aegis

00:35:49

of a new physics

00:35:51

well that’s scheduled for 5 billion years hence

00:35:53

or tomorrow

00:35:55

there is no way to predict

00:35:57

when such a thing would happen

00:35:59

and the notion that it’s far away

00:36:01

you see the presence of minds

00:36:03

is the signifier of nearby singularity it’s far away. You see the presence of minds is the signifier of nearby

00:36:06

singularity. It’s totally hypothetical anyway. It’s just a model. That idea that minds

00:36:12

signify the nearby approach of the singularity? No, the universe and the anti-universe in the

00:36:18

synchro clash. Oh yeah, I know, but you can put 20 or 30 of these things. There are

00:36:22

all kinds of… I think the asteroid collision, I mean a comet,

00:36:25

I mean that’s likely.

00:36:26

There was a near pass recently, I think it was last month.

00:36:28

Oh yes, and did you see when it’s coming back?

00:36:31
00:36:33

And it’s going to come closer.

00:36:36

That’s the last song.

00:36:37

Now I believe it myself.

00:36:39

I clipped it out of Astronomy magazine.

00:36:42

I knew people would doubt.

00:36:43

They said,

00:36:41

out of Astronomy Magazine.

00:36:43

I knew people would doubt.

00:36:45

They said,

00:36:50

exact computation is impossible,

00:36:52

but late in 2012.

00:36:57

No, but the author was so fan of yours.

00:36:59

No, it was Astronomy Magazine. It was Lick Observatory or something.

00:37:03

All right.

00:37:05

I’m ready to admit that there are a number of coincidences about the year 2012,

00:37:10

and some of them are ominous.

00:37:13

Well, I’m very hopeful, and I lead the movement.

00:37:16

I’m not willing to give any credibility to St. John the Divine.

00:37:18

I don’t give St. John the Divine any credibility, except that…

00:37:22

The only thing is that from the morphogenetic field point of view, there’s quite a number of people believing St. John the Divine any credibility, except that… The only thing is that from the morphogenetic field point of view,

00:37:26

there’s quite a number of people believing St. John the Divine.

00:37:28

Now, that I have to take seriously.

00:37:30

He felt a quaking in the Force, that’s all.

00:37:33

But it’s up to cooler heads to figure out

00:37:36

what this quaking of the Force is.

00:37:38

I mean, we have much better techniques than John the Divine.

00:37:41

So nuclear winter is much more likely

00:37:44

than any of these other things we discussed.

00:37:46

Well, but see, I don’t think a nuclear war is likely. But without a nuclear war, just with continued

00:37:52

toxification, CO2 outgassing, CFCs, the scenario is totally apocalyptic.

00:38:00

See, I think we are facing a serious ecological crisis, an evolutionary challenge of unprecedented…

00:38:05

You know, James Lovelock…

00:38:07

If we don’t have a miracle every day, we’re not going to make it.

00:38:10

The present extinction is one of the eighth largest catastrophes of the planet in its

00:38:19

lifetime.

00:38:20

So far.

00:38:21

And so that’s happening now.

00:38:23

Like, we are in something that big.

00:38:26

I mean, to be the biggest one,

00:38:27

it’d be the apocalypse.

00:38:28

Well, that’s why you don’t need John the Divine

00:38:31

to tell you that there’s an apocalypse underway.

00:38:34

The scientists could.

00:38:34

But it may not be a fatal one

00:38:36

because there’s not a prophecy

00:38:41

with any credibility to me

00:38:43

that says there isn’t some way to make it through,

00:38:46

although I have to admit I’m extremely doubtful

00:38:49

of the intelligence of the species to find it.

00:38:51

Well, it depends on what’s causing the problem.

00:38:54

If you think man is the problem…

00:38:57

Man is the problem.

00:38:58

Well, what about this sudden appearance

00:39:00

of large and repeated glaciations

00:39:03

in the last five million

00:39:05

years this indicates either something is wrong with the Sun or the geodynamics of

00:39:09

the planet there never were glaciers before no there never were glaciers

00:39:14

before glaciers are new in the life of the earth they’re not something that you

00:39:21

see back and back and back and all parameters of planetary

00:39:27

stability become more and more unstable as you approach the present now is that

00:39:33

just that the older a plan it is we’re hovering in a field of chaos yes well

00:39:39

it’s only man is the problem or maybe human beings are the answer. Well, the Earth could zip off its orbit and head out to space.

00:39:48

That’s a possibility.

00:39:49

But it does seem to me that the ecological catastrophe

00:39:55

is the appropriate interpretation of the apocalyptic vision at the present time.

00:40:02

I agree with that.

00:40:03

Well, so do I, but I don’t think there are alternative views

00:40:05

because historically speaking

00:40:07

this millenarian apocalyptic

00:40:09

tendency in Christianity

00:40:11

which inspired millenarian

00:40:13

movements through the ages, inspired among

00:40:15

others the pilgrim fathers to come

00:40:17

to a new world in America which was seen as

00:40:19

the chosen land, you know. It’s all part

00:40:21

of the same kind of thing, this

00:40:23

prophetic tradition of

00:40:24

and it

00:40:26

also inspired bacon’s vision of unlimited progress through science and technology through organized

00:40:32

research the transformation of nature man’s conquest of nature through putting nature on

00:40:36

the rack and torturing her this man’s dominion over nature was there in order to bring about

00:40:43

a kind of millenarian state a technological utopia

00:40:46

the first technological utopia where there’d be peace and prosperity and there’d be these wise

00:40:52

scientist priest figures running everything and always finding out ways to make things better

00:40:57

so it’s the idea of a kind of new eden or a new promised land flowing with milk and honey

00:41:02

material abundance etc through the scientific control and conquest of nature.

00:41:07

Well, it’s that scenario

00:41:08

which is now causing the economic catastrophes.

00:41:11

That scenario has actually worked.

00:41:13

And there’s a sense in which the apocalyptic scenario

00:41:15

we find ourselves in

00:41:17

is a product of the apocalyptic myth of history.

00:41:20

Yes, good point.

00:41:21

So it’s in a sense a self-fulfilling prophecy.

00:41:25

And I think that the tendency of mythic,

00:41:27

the myths of science have an interesting dynamic

00:41:29

because they start with the Faust myths

00:41:31

where Faust sells his soul to the devil

00:41:33

in return for unlimited knowledge and power

00:41:37

for a fixed period, 24 years.

00:41:39

But when you get to the later development,

00:41:47

at the end of the period, Faust is dragged down to hell,

00:41:50

and then in Goethe’s Faust,

00:41:51

because he’s an Enlightenment figure who believes in progress,

00:41:54

Faust is actually taken up to heaven.

00:41:56

He’s rescued from the demons at the last minute.

00:41:58

That all became implausible,

00:42:00

and the modern form of the Faust myth was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,

00:42:03

where the scientist is destroyed by his own creation, no longer by any supernatural machinery.

00:42:10

But the whole of the kind of supernatural machinery of first becomes natural destruction by his own monster in the case of Frankenstein.

00:42:17

And it’s obvious that the nuclear threat has a Frankenstein quality to it.

00:42:21

And it’s also obvious that the destruction of the environment and the ecological

00:42:25

crisis has this kind of mythological base

00:42:27

which is apocalyptic.

00:42:31

Well, we have to do surgery

00:42:33

on the mythological base

00:42:35

due to the self-fulfilling

00:42:37

prophecy mechanism that while we don’t

00:42:39

understand it exactly, we see it working

00:42:41

in history. So,

00:42:43

in connection with

00:42:44

revision of the religion of the West, I think one good thing would

00:42:54

be a modification of the revelation of St. John or relegation of it to another place.

00:42:59

I mean, it has to be, I think, reinterpretation was the word you suggested

00:43:05

you need to switch the vision onto another

00:43:08

track

00:43:09

yes, well, how can we control

00:43:12

the apocalypse

00:43:13

so that even though

00:43:15

the self-fulfilling part of it

00:43:18

can’t be stopped

00:43:19

it can be steered toward

00:43:21

a tolerable

00:43:23

conclusion

00:43:24

well, first one, historical note it can be steered toward a tolerable conclusion.

00:43:27

Well, first one, historical note,

00:43:30

that the revelation of St. John the Divine is not a unique phenomenon in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

00:43:34

It’s in a succession of apocalyptic books

00:43:36

which abounded around the time of Christ,

00:43:38

because many people believed that the end was literally at hand.

00:43:41

St. John the Baptist’s message was,

00:43:43

repent for the end is at hand.

00:43:44

It was a period very similar to our own, in the sense that the idea of the end being at hand. St. John the Baptist’s message was repent for the end is at hand. It was a period

00:43:45

very similar to our own in the sense that the idea of the end being at hand was widely believed only

00:43:50

too credible to them for whatever their reasons were. The book of Daniel in the Old Testament is

00:43:56

an apocalyptic prophetic book and is a precursor of the revelation of St. John the Divine. These

00:44:03

are just two examples in a large and extensive literature. It pervades the teachings of St. John the Divine. These are just two examples in a large and extensive literature.

00:44:05

It pervades the teachings of Jesus, this apocalyptic sense of

00:44:11

the changing of everything.

00:44:14

So,

00:44:16

where was I?

00:44:17

About Daniel.

00:44:18

Oh yes, Daniel. That it pervades the thing and it pervades, it comes very early on because the promise of the

00:44:28

to Abraham, it starts with Abraham.

00:44:34

God promises Abraham that he’ll take him and his descendants to another land,

00:44:35

he’ll give them a land.

00:44:39

There’s a promise of a land where wonderful things will happen.

00:44:42

Abraham’s children shall be as the sands of the sea, and he shall be the father of many nations.

00:44:46

And these are promises about things that haven’t happened but will happen

00:44:48

and through faith in these promises

00:44:50

history is made

00:44:51

and there’s a passage in

00:44:53

the 11th chapter of the epistle to the Hebrews

00:44:56

which is

00:44:57

in the New Testament a doctrine to Jewish

00:45:00

Christians and

00:45:02

there’s a whole sermon on faith

00:45:03

how the entire motor of history

00:45:05

for the Jewish people

00:45:06

was this faith in what they hadn’t yet seen.

00:45:09

Faith is the substance of things hoped for.

00:45:11

The passage begins,

00:45:13

and by faith Abraham went out

00:45:14

to find a strange land,

00:45:15

not having seen it,

00:45:16

or even glimpsed it afar off.

00:45:18

By faith Moses led the people of Israel

00:45:20

out of Egypt to the promised land.

00:45:23

And then by faith Noah

00:45:25

built the ark knowing not for what or when and so when the rains came he’d

00:45:30

already built this ark and everyone else was drowned and he and his family took

00:45:34

off all these things are done by faith and it ends with this thing about how

00:45:39

though we are moving by faith towards a new state, a promised land, because if we

00:45:46

belong to the cities of the world as we know them we’d go back to those cities

00:45:49

but we’re moving onwards and it ends with that famous passage, we’re strangers

00:45:53

and pilgrims in this land. So there’s this sense of being on a journey through time

00:45:58

towards some destiny in the future which can be a different place like America.

00:46:02

The Pilgrim Fathers were inspired by this mythology

00:46:05

to come to America and see in it a new promised land.

00:46:09

It’s inspired the migratory ages of the Northern Europeans

00:46:13

for centuries now, this vision.

00:46:16

And it’s also inspired the attempt to change the world

00:46:21

through science and technology.

00:46:22

But it’s so deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition

00:46:25

that mere tampering with the book of Revelation won’t make it go away.

00:46:29

It’s fundamental to the entire historical orientation of the religion.

00:46:33

As I was listening to this talk with you just now,

00:46:37

it dawned on me that none of the speakers had actually defined the word apocalypse.

00:46:42

So I took a quick look in my dictionary

00:46:44

and learned that the first definition of the word, at least according took a quick look in my dictionary and learned that the

00:46:45

first definition of the word, at least according to the Oxford Dictionary, means revelation.

00:46:52

And the second definition goes on to say that it especially means a revelation about the

00:46:57

end of the world. So the question, at least for me, becomes what do we mean by the end

00:47:04

of the world?

00:47:07

Are we talking about the physical end of this planet,

00:47:12

or are we only really talking about the end of the human species, our world?

00:47:19

Now that I say that out loud, it strikes me as rather presumptuous to call this place our world.

00:47:27

We’re certainly a part of this world, but to call it ours seems to be the root cause of how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place.

00:47:30

But hey, you already know that.

00:47:36

I guess I should refrain from preaching to the choir, at least for today.

00:47:40

So let’s talk about some of the email I’ve been receiving. First of all, if you sent me an email message recently, you might have received one of

00:47:46

those automatic replies asking you to verify that you’re a real person and not a spammer.

00:47:52

I’m sorry to put you through this inconvenience, but before I turned on that feature, I was

00:47:57

receiving close to a thousand spams a day, and now most of that has gone away. But in the process,

00:48:04

I accidentally deleted some of your email

00:48:06

that the new procedure was filing in a folder that I thought was junk, but it really wasn’t.

00:48:12

The bottom line is that I’ve decided to sweep the decks clean and take the pressure off myself

00:48:18

about answering all of the emails that have stacked up in the past few weeks.

00:48:22

And if you’re one of the more than 100 people who I’ve not answered yet,

00:48:26

well, I truly am sorry about not replying personally to your messages,

00:48:31

particularly because I get so much enjoyment out of hearing from you.

00:48:35

But if I don’t draw a line and try to go forward,

00:48:38

my backlog is going to continue growing,

00:48:40

and I’m going to keep losing sleep at night by feeling guilty about not answering you.

00:48:45

So I’ll try to do a better job at responding from here on out,

00:48:49

and when time permits, I’ll also read a sampling of the thoughtful comments that I’ve been receiving.

00:48:55

Like the one I got the other day from Steve, who writes from South Africa and says,

00:49:00

What caught my ear was the concept of the underground university.

00:49:04

What caught my ear was the concept of the underground university.

00:49:11

Since we are kind of involved in education and designing edutainment programs, I have an idea.

00:49:23

Go and have a look at www.gurten.com, which is designed as a knowledge cafe or knowledge sharing community.

00:49:25

Maybe setting up something which allows members to make connections with each other in the underground university, a place where everyone

00:49:30

is student and professor simultaneously. For our part, we have a life skills program that we’d be

00:49:37

delighted to make available on such a system. Well, Steve, that’s kind of you, and I do like

00:49:43

the offer of setting up something that allows members to make connections with each other in sort of an underground university kind of way.

00:49:51

So if any of you knows of something like that already underway, please let me know and I’ll pass it along.

00:49:56

Or if you’ve got some ideas on how to do this as a part of the psychedelic salon, I’d also like to hear about it.

00:50:03

I also received an interesting email from Connor, who writes from down under in Australia. Thank you. and has become fairly disillusioned with a society that is manipulative and restrictive,

00:50:25

and often just plain stupid.

00:50:28

And he continues,

00:50:29

Australia is a big continent,

00:50:32

so we’re trying to find some way to connect the Australian psychedelic community,

00:50:36

and a podcast seems like it might offer just that.

00:50:40

Well, I really applaud your efforts, Colin,

00:50:42

and you bring up a point that several others have also mentioned,

00:50:45

and that is how can we all continue to get ever more interconnected through a wide range of special interest podcasts like these.

00:50:54

You know, almost every week somebody tells me about their new podcast, and I always go out and download an episode to check it out.

00:51:01

And now, to be brutally honest, I can’t say that some of the early programs will keep

00:51:05

me coming back. But hey, that was true of the podcast from the psychedelic salon. And

00:51:11

even though I still have this crummy old microphone and still don’t quite know what I’m doing,

00:51:17

they are getting slightly better. So I’ve decided that before I plug any new programs

00:51:22

here in the salon, it might be best if you’ve already produced eight or ten shows so that the early learning kinks have been worked out and that you’re sure you’re going to keep podcasting on a regular schedule.

00:51:35

That said, if you want to check out the first couple episodes in Colin’s new podcast, you can find it at dictionarypsychedelica.blogspot.com.

00:51:48

And Colin finishes email by saying,

00:51:53

Do you know of any other good podcasts that look at the psychedelic world and consciousness expansion?

00:51:59

Well, as I’ve mentioned before, my current favorites are the programs on the Cannabis Podcast Network.

00:52:05

And also, I think you might like some of the programs that KMO does over at the C-Roam.

00:52:13

You can find links to these and a few others on our main podcast page, which is at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.

00:52:25

Before I go, I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.

00:52:30

If you have any questions about that, you can click on the link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,

00:52:35

which may be found at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.

00:52:41

And if you still have questions, you can send them to me in an email at lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.

00:52:45

Next week, I’ll be back with the conclusion of today’s trialogue,

00:52:49

and I’ll also let you know what I’ll be podcasting in the future and when I’ll be podcasting some more of these trialogues.

00:52:53

Thanks again to Chantal Hayouk for letting us use your music here in the Salon.

00:52:58

And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

00:53:03

Be well, my friends.