Program Notes
Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
05:25 Rupert Sheldrake: “And so in human family groups we’d expect the same kind of morphic fields [as in other animal family groups]… . It would mean that family fields, with their morphic fields, would have a kind of memory from the families that contributed to them. The father’s and mother’s families of origin would come together in a family.”
12:12 Rupert: “Whatever the merits or demerits of [Bert] Hellinger’s system, which I think is very interesting and apparently very effective, the idea of making models of the family field seems to me something that one could address in a more general sense.”
20:29 Terence McKenna: “The family thing works because people really are complex chemical systems with genetic affinity.”
22:16 Rupert: “There are amazing cases where young people commit suicide in a way that mimics the unacknowledged death of an ancestor, like suicide by drowning when an ancestor one or two generations before have committed suicide by drowning, but they’ve never been told about it because it was never acknowledged. And you get these extraordinary patterns that repeat.”
26:58 Rupert: “We don’t have adequate models for these family systems, nor the influence of ancestors within them, which my interest in morphic resonance makes me very keen on.”
49:27 Rupert (describing an indigenous belief): “But you have to be on good terms with the ancestors. And what being on good terms, above all, means acknowledging them… . that you name and acknowledge the key ancestors, you acknowledge all the dead in your lineage. And if you miss anyone out they’re going to be angry, and if they’re angry that means trouble.”
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092 - Lone Pine Stories (Part 3)
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094 - Morphogenic Family Fields (Part 2)
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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Well, I hope you haven’t given up on me getting a podcast out this week.
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And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t think I’d get this one out myself.
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I’ve been kind of under the weather, so to speak, ever since posting my last program.
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And once the pain and agony part was over, I was left with practically no energy,
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and I’ve been kind of lethargic these past
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few days. So when I finally fired up my computer and logged into the net this morning, it wasn’t
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with the expectation that I’d get a podcast out today. But then I checked my email, and
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I had a whole bunch of wonderful emails from some of our fellow salonners waiting for me.
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And on top of that, I discovered that several of you have very generously
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made donations to keep these podcasts coming. And so now I’m fired up once again, and I’ll keep them
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coming. So my thanks go out to all of you who have written, and especially to Janus Gate Creative,
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James H., Jason H., John M., Michael, better known as a dime short, William R, and Bailey, otherwise
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known as Beated Bohemian.
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And I also want to thank Yarov.
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I hope I’m pronouncing your name correctly.
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Yarov sent a donation last February, and while I thanked him in an email, I don’t think I
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remembered to mention him in one of the programs.
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Sorry about that, Yarov.
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I very much appreciate your support. In fact, the generosity of all of you touches me deeply.
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So much, in fact, that you have succeeded in restoring my energy to the point where I
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once again feel like coming back here to the salon to be with so many of my good friends.
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I guess one of my motivational issues is that there’s so much to talk about regarding some Thank you. I’m right now going to take the easy route and play the second tape from the June 8th
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Trialog with Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake.
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The tape runs about an hour and 20 minutes, but I’m only going to play part of it right
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now, and then I’ll finish it off in a shorter supplemental podcast in a few days, where
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hopefully I’ll quit procrastinating and also read some of the interesting emails I’ve been
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receiving.
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and also read some of the interesting emails I’ve been receiving.
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So let’s get to it and join the merry trialogers in yet another of their famous conversations.
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It’s Monday, June 8, 1998, 2ish in the afternoon, trialog number 2.
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Family fields.
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I’m interested, as you know,
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in the fields of social groups,
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flocks of birds, schools of fish,
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and packs of wolves,
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groups of human beings.
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And I think all of these have morphic fields,
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and I think that the morphic fields underlying schools of fish,
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flocks of birds, insect colonies,
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help organize the movements of the different animals within them. And I think that the morphic fields underlying schools of fish, flocks of birds, insect colonies,
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help organize the movements of the different animals within them.
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And the ones in packs of wolves enable them to keep in contact with each other over many miles. I think these fields underlie the telepathic bonds between wolf and wolf,
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or between separated animals and other separated animals.
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And the same things apply in the human realm.
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separated animals and other separated animals and the same things apply in the human realm. Telepathy mainly occurs in the human realm between mothers and
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daughters, sons, parents, children, close friends, lovers and the great majority of
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spontaneous telepathic cases do not involve guessing Xeno cards in darkened
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rooms but rather feeling of a sense of emergency by a mother she calls home and the child’s had
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an accident someone feeling a sudden disturbance and suddenly flash about somebody feeling they’re
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in great distress or some sense of alarm it turns out they’ve died this kind of thing this is true
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of dogs and cats too it’s mostly to do with these sorts of feelings that telepathy is involved, emergencies, alarms and so forth, rather than the transfer of visual information
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for its own sake. Anyway, these fields I think underlie all social groups. And in the dog
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and owner thing, I’m looking at the fields between pets and their owners. But when we
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look at human families, these
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fields should also be at work in the human
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family. It would be a classic example of
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a social field.
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In chimpanzee groups, in horse
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groups, these live
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as family groups usually.
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Female with children and
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an associated male.
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Sometimes young males live
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free of the social group, in many species
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they do, but they’re very often family-based groups, horse groups, usually no more than
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about five in wild and feral horses. Wolf packs are usually female with her cubs and
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a male and then some sort of grown-up, more grown-up wolves, but they’re family groups.
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sort of grown up, more grown up wolves, but they’re family
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groups, and so in human
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family groups we’d expect the same kind
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of morphic field
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now this is rather a general and abstract
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kind of consideration
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but it would mean that
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family fields with their morphic fields would have a
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kind of memory from the families
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that contributed to them, the father
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and mother’s families of origin
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would come together in a family you’d, the father and mother’s families of origin, would come
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together in a family. You’d have the husband and wife, the father and mother. You’ve got
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a fusion of, always a fusion of family fields coming together into a given family one with
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their histories and patterns. And, in fact, a whole science or therapy or practice of
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family fields has been worked out in recent years in Germany by what I think the most interesting therapeutic person I’ve come across for a long time, Bert Hellinger.
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Have you heard of Hellinger?
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No.
00:06:17 ►
H-E-L-L-I-N-G-E-R.
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Hellinger’s work is extremely well known in Germany.
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It has a large influence and there’s a great deal of interest in his work.
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He has people following his methods and so on.
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Hellinger used to be a Benedictine.
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He then went, or perhaps as a Benedictine, went to Africa
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where he spent a long time living with the Zulu.
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And although he says this isn’t the direct influence on his therapy,
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the sense of the ancestral connection that the Zulu have
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and what traditional people have, the role of the
00:06:48 ►
ancestors
00:06:48 ►
is a major part of his therapy
00:06:52 ►
anyway he does
00:06:53 ►
I’ve been to one of his things in London
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and I’m meeting him again soon
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and I’ve become quite friendly with him and his
00:07:00 ►
followers because the main
00:07:02 ►
theory they use
00:07:03 ►
to try and understand what’s going
00:07:05 ►
on in these family fields is morphogenetic fields morphic fields
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they think the different theories or models they think is a therapist of
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human families or what human families that they think this is the most
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appropriate kind of model you need a field that links the members of the
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group together and has to be a kind of memory in it. That’s what they want and that’s what
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their family fields are. And morphic fields are that. I mean, there may be other fields
00:07:31 ►
that could perhaps give the same effect. But anyway, so that’s why I was interested in
00:07:36 ►
their work and their interests in mine. And I’ve been very impressed by Hellinger’s work.
00:07:44 ►
How it works is that you
00:07:46 ►
have somebody comes and they present
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their problem, they tell Hellinger, this is done
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in a group with a lot of people in a kind of
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audience and they say what
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their problem is
00:07:55 ►
and why they’re upset or disturbed
00:07:58 ►
or something and then he
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asks them to constellate their family field
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and what that means is that
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he asks them, your mother, your father, how many brothers and what that means is that they he asked them who
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your mother your father your how many brothers and sisters and so forth then he says now please
00:08:10 ►
pick anyone to be your mother and they pick someone from your pick anyone to your father
00:08:15 ►
they pick them your brothers and so on but the members of their primary family
00:08:19 ►
and their family of origin and then he asked them to arrange them in order,
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place them.
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And when they place… On the stage, sitting in chairs and sort of tabloid.
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No, standing.
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This is like a tabloid, yes.
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And when they do that, you get the most interesting things.
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You see how some people are placed close to each other,
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facing each other,
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some are placed on the periphery,
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sort of facing away from the rest of the family.
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And these people can make models.
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Each one is completely different and quite surprising, these models.
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I saw two or three days of this,
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and a whole series of different family models.
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And you see these extraordinary patterns,
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which immediately, for the person there,
00:08:59 ►
this is their best representation of the family field,
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from the family they come from.
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But when you see this, it’s a whole gestalt, like a snapshot of a system of relationships. This is their best representation of the family field, from the family they come from.
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But when you see this, it’s a whole gestalt,
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like a snapshot of a system of relationship,
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who’s close together, who’s further away,
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who’s facing who, who’s related to whom.
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And sometimes this is so obviously sort of dispersed
00:09:20 ►
and not in relationship, but then the question is,
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how did, if that one’s right out there, facing their back to the rest, what’s happened, why are they there and not closer
00:09:29 ►
to the others, and what dynamics are involved in this whole family group. And in order to
00:09:34 ►
understand that, he often has to go to the family of origin, as the father or the mother
00:09:39 ►
in the family field. So then he’d ask the person to constellate the father’s family field,
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for example. And then
00:09:47 ►
they’d pick someone to be
00:09:49 ►
the father, and then if the father had two or three
00:09:51 ►
brothers, the brothers and the father the parent.
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And they had to put them where they
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were. And sometimes
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they don’t know that well, so they have to guess.
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But they constellate this field.
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And it often turns out
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that the pattern in that first family field
00:10:06 ►
and mirrored in the second one you can see you can just see it in front of you in similar patterns
00:10:11 ►
it sometimes happens that something extraordinary happened in the first field
00:10:15 ►
say for example an uncle drowned as a as a boy a 10-old boy in that family was killed, drowned in a pond.
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And then they often leave them out.
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And he then says, was there anybody in this family that died as a child or that died at birth?
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Quite often they say yes.
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He says, find someone and put them in.
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And very often the whole imbalance in the field is rectified when the missing member is put in,
00:10:43 ►
even if it’s say somebody committed suicide
00:10:45 ►
or a child that died in infancy
00:10:47 ►
in a previous family field
00:10:49 ►
unacknowledged members of the group
00:10:51 ►
cause grave distortions to the system
00:10:54 ►
and his method by putting them in
00:10:56 ►
creates
00:10:58 ►
a whole field
00:10:59 ►
so it can be rearranged
00:11:00 ►
he then rearranges these fields
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so what would happen if sensei was brought in, he asked
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the person, bring them into there
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bring them into there, and then in the Father’s
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field, ask them to
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acknowledge the child
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that died, and put them
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in, and then they say we
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acknowledge you, the people actually say we acknowledge you
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and then they put the child that died in the right order
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of children, right in their place
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between the first born, the secondborn, the thirdborn
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because the order of birth has a huge impact on these fields
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and the number of siblings.
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So here you have a system practically used by Hellinger and his followers
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a fascinating thing and when you see these missing members
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and the field constitution and then the family of origin of the person
00:11:44 ►
that field is sort of readjusted.
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To see a whole field pattern and their role within the field pattern is incredibly therapeutic
00:11:52 ►
and releasing for a lot of people.
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They see that a lot of problems they thought were just their problems are actually their
00:11:57 ►
relations to this whole field of interaction in the family.
00:12:02 ►
So they take seriously a field model of this process and with these
00:12:05 ►
sort of tableau representations one can see this. And so that made me think whatever the
00:12:11 ►
merits or demerits of Hellinger’s system, which I think is very interesting and apparently
00:12:16 ►
very effective, the idea of making models of family fields seems to me something that
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one could address in a more general sense because
00:12:27 ►
there would be certain patterns of dynamics you’d expect if you have a family consisting of mother father and then
00:12:33 ►
one child the simplest ones two three four five what kinds of
00:12:39 ►
Flows of energy is some of this would be kind of common sense in eldest children and in relation to second
00:12:45 ►
children.
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Most people have had two children.
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Say that the eldest ones were more trouble as babies, how to deal with the younger ones
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somehow much easier to get on with.
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But then you get this kind of rivalries going up, sibling rivalries and so on.
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Then families, more complex family fields where you have stepfathers or stepbrothers,
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stepbrothers and sisters, then you get on this stage
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that you get these very complicated family
00:13:08 ►
fields.
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What happens in those in real life? Those are
00:13:12 ►
common nowadays. So one
00:13:14 ►
could make some models of these fields.
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One could also see how the balance
00:13:17 ►
of energies, if you
00:13:19 ►
have a field model like this and you take someone
00:13:22 ►
who’s in the model, move them further
00:13:24 ►
away in whatever space he’ve modelled them,
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and turn them to face out from the rest of the family.
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What kind of dynamics happens there with the rest of the family?
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What happens to them in any group into which they enter,
00:13:36 ►
any new family they form?
00:13:38 ►
What effect does this have?
00:13:40 ►
One could perhaps model this kind of thing.
00:13:42 ►
So I wanted to suggest that maybe it’s possible to make this family field thing
00:13:47 ►
more scientific
00:13:48 ►
investigate it further
00:13:50 ►
make models
00:13:50 ►
and in some way perhaps come up with tests
00:13:53 ►
or empirical studies
00:13:54 ►
that could further the science
00:13:57 ►
or investigation of family fields
00:13:59 ►
well that certainly sounds very interesting
00:14:04 ►
I’m not sure I understand to what degree the use of the word field is justified here.
00:14:25 ►
spatial field like the gravitational field or something is associated with with the family and the individuals have a field like vibrating aura or something
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or does it just mean that the field in a general sense that could be described
00:14:34 ►
let us say just by giving for any two individuals in the family some strength
00:14:41 ►
of the connection plus or minus or something that would be
00:14:46 ►
represented in the tableau when the actors are placed on the stage by the
00:14:52 ►
geographical distance to them or something so that bringing one member in
00:14:56 ►
closer would correspond in this model to just strengthening the community the
00:15:04 ►
bandwidth of the communication channel
00:15:06 ►
or the positivity of the regard or some other simple parameter.
00:15:11 ►
That would be more of a connectionist model,
00:15:14 ►
like an undirected graph with nodes and links and so on.
00:15:19 ►
Is it like links between the people could be just represented by a number,
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or would it be essential in order to understand the experiences of Helmer
00:15:28 ►
to actually have a kind of extended three-dimensional spatial field
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around each individual that has memory and so on?
00:15:36 ►
Well, maybe a connectionist thing with nodes would be an adequate model.
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But then you could say that what can the connections, the nodes,
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you could just sort of draw a line around the whole thing say this was a set of connections
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or something which would be perhaps just a different way of trying to model the
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field you see the connections insofar as you draw it and say there’s a connection
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a B and it has a given strength you’re presupposing an invisible bond between
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people that would work when the other person was in the next room
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at the very least.
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And therefore you’re proposing a bond which
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whose reality is not
00:16:11 ►
physical in the normal sense, it may be mental,
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emotional, psychic,
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whatever word you choose, but it’s not
00:16:17 ►
sort of smell, touch,
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hearing, I mean those are involved if you’re in the same
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room. And so the
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advantage of the field model is it frees you up from
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thinking that the connections must
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be normal face to face
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communication and they can still exist
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even if you’re apart
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so the family field
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the flock, the school and so on
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is kind of a
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extrapolation backwards
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of psychic pets
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into more psychic bonds in the wild extrapolation backwards of psychic pets into
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more of the psychic
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bonds in the wild
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well I think that the bonds even between
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members of the family you know when people go away
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and they want
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like me I mean I’m attached to my family
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so from here I feel a strong
00:16:59 ►
need to ring up my children to speak
00:17:00 ►
as they go into bed
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even though I’m 6,000 miles away
00:17:04 ►
that bond is a strong
00:17:05 ►
bond for me
00:17:06 ►
and for most people if they’re near us
00:17:09 ►
these bonds are not severed by getting on an airplane
00:17:12 ►
so whatever model you have
00:17:14 ►
of the connections, the connections
00:17:15 ►
have to be of such a nature
00:17:17 ►
that they still persist
00:17:19 ►
I’m suggesting to whatever
00:17:21 ►
the model is to have the same model
00:17:23 ►
as the model we have for the psychic pets
00:17:26 ►
because ethologists
00:17:27 ►
or say these therapists
00:17:29 ►
like the animal equivalent of Hellinger
00:17:31 ►
that analyze cats for example
00:17:34 ►
they describe the relationship of the cat
00:17:36 ►
to the owner person
00:17:38 ►
as
00:17:39 ►
a form of the relation of the cat
00:17:44 ►
to the cat’s mother
00:17:45 ►
that’s been replaced.
00:17:47 ►
The cats, even as they age,
00:17:51 ►
regard themselves as kittens, as it were,
00:17:53 ►
with the owner as the mother cat.
00:17:57 ►
The way they play and rub against you and so on
00:18:00 ►
are derived behaviors from what the cat version of Heller would describe as the family field on the cat level.
00:18:11 ►
And therefore, as we have been thinking about mathematical models for the field that describes the attachment of the cat and owner,
00:18:26 ►
then we would be tempted to use the same model for the family field,
00:18:31 ►
the human family, for example, or flood treatment, so on.
00:18:34 ►
And that would be then some kind of, well, telepathy is the word, I think, or a nonspecific communication channel
00:18:48 ►
between people or animals at a distance.
00:18:52 ►
Yes, although telepathic communications
00:18:54 ►
wouldn’t need to be passing between at all.
00:18:56 ►
Maybe a connectionist model would be fine,
00:18:58 ►
as long as you leave open the nature of the connection
00:19:01 ►
so that the connection doesn’t have to be presupposed
00:19:05 ►
to depend on normal sensory
00:19:07 ►
communication.
00:19:08 ►
In a neural net, if you took
00:19:11 ►
one and it was capable of
00:19:13 ►
say, parsing natural
00:19:15 ►
speech or something, and then you took one of the
00:19:17 ►
nodes out or broke one of the connections
00:19:19 ►
it wouldn’t be able to do that anymore.
00:19:22 ►
So the connectionist
00:19:23 ►
model might be adequate for modeling this
00:19:29 ►
Helen of strategy of bringing in the missing sibling or something. Replacing the node and
00:19:36 ►
the connections which make a functional unit.
00:19:38 ►
Yes. Or what would have happened is that before the sibling died, the family field
00:19:44 ►
had a different structure because it included that sibling.
00:19:47 ►
If the death of the sibling changes the field,
00:19:50 ►
but his point is unless it’s acknowledged,
00:19:53 ►
and unless in some sense the ancestors are acknowledged,
00:19:56 ►
and unless the dead sibling is acknowledged and recognised within the field,
00:20:00 ►
their presence within the field is recognised,
00:20:02 ►
their unrecognised presence can cause terrible disturbances
00:20:06 ►
so some used to recognizing
00:20:08 ►
a kind of virtual
00:20:10 ►
node in the field
00:20:11 ►
I don’t see how that would be
00:20:13 ►
I don’t know how to model that
00:20:15 ►
how could that be important
00:20:17 ►
what is this recognition
00:20:20 ►
consist of
00:20:21 ►
say you are a fish
00:20:23 ►
I’ve recognized you as a fish.
00:20:26 ►
They’re coupled
00:20:27 ►
oscillators and the family
00:20:30 ►
thing works because
00:20:31 ►
people really are complex
00:20:33 ►
chemical systems with genetic
00:20:36 ►
affinities.
00:20:37 ►
You could even suppose a kind
00:20:40 ►
of physical mechanism.
00:20:42 ►
They are coupled oscillators
00:20:44 ►
that impart their waveform
00:20:48 ►
to the local space which encounters the waveforms of these other oscillators
00:20:53 ►
which are very similar to them physically, more similar to them than any
00:20:57 ►
other person or thing, and so there’s a kind of entrainment. Often the things are
00:21:02 ►
these feeling-toned, something has happened to
00:21:05 ►
someone, or I should call someone.
00:21:08 ►
So it indicates
00:21:09 ►
they are like coupled oscillators.
00:21:12 ►
So the recognition,
00:21:13 ►
the non-recognition means
00:21:15 ►
the oscillators are coupled, and therefore
00:21:17 ►
this one is, and then it’s
00:21:19 ►
not understood, because we’re not aware of
00:21:22 ►
it. My father’s
00:21:23 ►
sister, Carrie, died when he was
00:21:26 ►
young so she was never even a person
00:21:27 ►
to me, she’s not real
00:21:28 ►
if I
00:21:31 ►
had
00:21:32 ►
interactions with a place in some
00:21:35 ►
structure, say our family
00:21:37 ►
field where she belonged
00:21:39 ►
but I didn’t acknowledge it then I would always be
00:21:41 ►
confused about what’s going on in my life
00:21:43 ►
something like that
00:21:44 ►
because the whole structure of the family field
00:21:48 ►
is you see that if it had
00:21:49 ►
you see there’s a kind of memory in these
00:21:52 ►
fields and so the field
00:21:53 ►
the dynamics of the field are influenced by
00:21:56 ►
the memory of the person
00:21:58 ►
who was there but no longer there
00:21:59 ►
and so the memory is actually working in the dynamics
00:22:02 ►
of the field because all these fields have this kind of
00:22:04 ►
memory but if you don’t recognise it
00:22:06 ►
you don’t understand what’s really going on
00:22:08 ►
in the interactions
00:22:09 ►
and you’re always in the dark
00:22:11 ►
as to why certain puzzling conflicts
00:22:14 ►
or whatever
00:22:14 ►
or suicides
00:22:15 ►
there are amazing cases where you get
00:22:19 ►
members of families, young people commit suicide
00:22:21 ►
in a way that mimics
00:22:23 ►
the unacknowledged death of an ancestor
00:22:25 ►
like suicide by drowning
00:22:27 ►
when an ancestor of
00:22:29 ►
one or two generations before has committed
00:22:31 ►
suicide by drowning but they’ve never been told
00:22:33 ►
about it because it’s never acknowledged
00:22:35 ►
and you get these extraordinary patterns
00:22:37 ►
that repeat, sometimes
00:22:39 ►
literal ones like that
00:22:41 ►
other times sort of morphed ones
00:22:44 ►
and then we have to think of
00:22:46 ►
different models
00:22:48 ►
for the same thing so that there
00:22:49 ►
would be a model
00:22:51 ►
like a connectionist diagram
00:22:53 ►
of a family as it were
00:22:55 ►
and then there’s another drawing
00:22:57 ►
for the family
00:22:59 ►
as I see it
00:23:00 ►
and that if I haven’t acknowledged my Aunt Carrie
00:23:03 ►
then in my model
00:23:05 ►
of family
00:23:05 ►
there’s nothing there
00:23:06 ►
that’s right
00:23:07 ►
but in this other model
00:23:09 ►
of actual interactions
00:23:10 ►
that’s what it is there
00:23:11 ►
maybe we need
00:23:12 ►
a directed graph
00:23:13 ►
where the channel
00:23:14 ►
between you and me
00:23:15 ►
for example
00:23:15 ►
would have two lines
00:23:16 ►
one going that way
00:23:17 ►
as when I speak
00:23:19 ►
or send you a message
00:23:20 ►
and another one
00:23:21 ►
going this way
00:23:22 ►
yes they’d have to be
00:23:23 ►
the connections
00:23:23 ►
would have to have
00:23:24 ►
sort of directed both directions.
00:23:26 ►
So there could be in the case of a family member
00:23:29 ►
who’s not acknowledged that there’s a directed line from that one to me
00:23:33 ►
because I’m receiving but not knowing
00:23:35 ►
and then I’m sending nothing back because I’m not acknowledging.
00:23:38 ►
Yes.
00:23:39 ►
So the acknowledgement of a missing family member
00:23:43 ►
would just consist of the addition into the model
00:23:46 ►
of one link going back.
00:23:47 ►
That’s right. That would be enough.
00:23:49 ►
And in his therapeutic workshops,
00:23:52 ►
where he does this for the family,
00:23:54 ►
and the whole therapy of the particular person
00:23:56 ►
may last half an hour, three quarters of an hour,
00:23:59 ►
with him constellating these fields.
00:24:01 ►
And then in these things,
00:24:02 ►
he asks the person to come
00:24:05 ►
Say that the members of the family have there’s somebody representing them you see in the family field
00:24:11 ►
There’s somebody standing in for themselves. They’re sitting outside it with him
00:24:14 ►
Oh, so say that it was your family field you choose someone to represent you
00:24:18 ►
Oh, I see. So there’d be Ralph in there and so you’re telling him. You now see Ralph in relation to the answer from outside.
00:24:26 ►
And then you see how he…
00:24:27 ►
It’s remodelling.
00:24:28 ►
It’s remodelling.
00:24:29 ►
Yes.
00:24:30 ►
And then you see the other ones,
00:24:32 ►
and he readjusts the field
00:24:34 ►
and puts in the absent or unrecognised members.
00:24:37 ►
And then he asks the members actually standing there
00:24:40 ►
to acknowledge the unacknowledged ones or whatever.
00:24:44 ►
And then he asks you to go and stand in the position of Ralph
00:24:47 ►
in this remodeled field and turn to the unacknowledged one and say,
00:24:52 ►
you are my aunt, I acknowledge you,
00:24:55 ►
and turn to the others and so on
00:24:56 ►
and experience that new constellation from within.
00:24:59 ►
And this has a dramatically changing effect on family fields.
00:25:05 ►
It brings them to consciousness, it recognises these things,
00:25:07 ►
and the acknowledgement is done, and it changes them.
00:25:12 ►
So any model of the fields, you see,
00:25:15 ►
would mean the kind of thing you were saying is to apply.
00:25:18 ►
You’d have a model of the fields as long as you have a map of its perceived today.
00:25:22 ►
And if you’re able to bring about the remodel,
00:25:24 ►
or at least bring your
00:25:25 ►
model of the field into much
00:25:27 ►
more into place connection with what
00:25:29 ►
the field actually is
00:25:31 ►
or was then this has
00:25:34 ►
a therapeutic effect
00:25:35 ►
this is the opposite of institutional
00:25:37 ►
therapy where people go into a
00:25:39 ►
corporation for example
00:25:41 ►
which has an actual structure
00:25:44 ►
and then the directors have the
00:25:46 ►
model and instead of changing the model to fit the actuality they change the actuality to fit the model
00:25:53 ►
yes but they’re in a company where you’ve got you can actually have a more board model of flow
00:25:58 ►
diagram of power I mean this is sort of artificial organizations but family organizations are
00:26:04 ►
although there’s a kind of
00:26:05 ►
archetypal model like the nuclear family model or something like that so they
00:26:09 ►
there are sort of idealized models socially approved and recognized each
00:26:14 ►
family is different and which is different in its own way to paraphrase
00:26:17 ►
Tolstoy and every happy family is the same but every unhappy family is unhappy
00:26:26 ►
in its own way
00:26:28 ►
so there’s a sense
00:26:30 ►
out of shape as it were
00:26:32 ►
the field is sometimes distorted
00:26:34 ►
or whatever
00:26:35 ►
so his model
00:26:38 ►
any model were made would have to take
00:26:41 ►
into account those two things
00:26:42 ►
so it’s a question of how far can one just say well this is an interesting therapy, it’s just one among many and it’s
00:26:48 ►
just that this is its particular trip. But how far can one take says to the idea that
00:26:52 ►
family dynamics are not an arbitrary invention of having there an obvious reality and we
00:26:58 ►
don’t have adequate models for these family systems nor the influence of ancestors within
00:27:04 ►
them which my interest in Morphic resonance
00:27:06 ►
makes me very keen on the fact that there must be this historical memory habit dimension well
00:27:12 ►
then the network can be extended indefinitely it’s simply that people outside the family but
00:27:18 ►
in the neighborhood or in the past are weak coupled. Important teachers in primary school.
00:27:27 ►
Yes.
00:27:27 ►
Things like that.
00:27:28 ►
That sort of thing.
00:27:29 ►
They’re weekly coupled, yes.
00:27:30 ►
Yes.
00:27:31 ►
And then you can have the way that a given…
00:27:35 ►
You could then extend this.
00:27:36 ►
Arnold Mendel is the person who’s pioneered this model
00:27:39 ►
in non-family groups.
00:27:41 ►
Are you familiar with this one?
00:27:43 ►
I am.
00:27:44 ►
You know Arnold Mendel. But in his book, The Year
00:27:46 ►
One, he talks about the modelling
00:27:48 ►
of social groups, how you have a social
00:27:50 ►
group and that each social group is a kind
00:27:52 ►
of organism. And therefore
00:27:54 ►
there’ll be different roles taken up by different
00:27:56 ►
people within the group. And in
00:27:58 ►
lots of groups, for example, there’ll be a tend to be
00:28:00 ►
somebody who’s a grumbler or a complainer
00:28:02 ►
and who sort of focuses
00:28:04 ►
and vocalises the sort of grumble takes on the role of making complaints which
00:28:09 ►
other people in the group might be too shy or too restrained to make but
00:28:13 ►
somehow they have made and then they can also project onto the grumbler a kind of
00:28:17 ►
negativity or hostility this is a dynamic that happens within groups and
00:28:22 ►
quite often if one grumbler leaves the
00:28:25 ►
group or is expelled someone else has to take on that role of being a grumbler so
00:28:30 ►
he has a kind of field theory what I’d call a field I don’t know if he calls it a
00:28:33 ►
field theory but I’d call it a field theory of groups which is less
00:28:38 ►
interesting than Hellinger’s in the sense that Hellinger has this family
00:28:41 ►
dimension this time dimension with with innumerable examples.
00:28:46 ►
He has hundreds of videos of his doing this with different family groups.
00:28:50 ►
You can see one after another of these groups before your eyes in video.
00:28:53 ►
They’re very interesting.
00:28:55 ►
But Mindell is a more abstract theory based on him working with groups in therapy sessions
00:28:59 ►
or in town meetings or workshops.
00:29:01 ►
We’ve got 30 people for a few days.
00:29:05 ►
It doesn’t have the same kind of historical depth,
00:29:08 ►
but it’s still dealing with the same kind of Greek model.
00:29:12 ►
Well, the idea of memory, then,
00:29:16 ►
Hellinger’s interest in memory in the field concept
00:29:20 ►
has to do with having the ancestors in the tableau.
00:29:24 ►
Is that right? Yes. Well, how do with having the ancestors in the tableau yes well how do
00:29:26 ►
you understand the influence of a acknowledge or unacknowledged ancestor
00:29:31 ►
generation or two back on this the part of the family unit that consists of the
00:29:38 ►
currently living members how to understand that if it was a two
00:29:42 ►
generations back you’ve never met them, what’s the difference
00:29:45 ►
how do you understand it
00:29:48 ►
well because
00:29:49 ►
say when you have a partner
00:29:52 ►
you get married or not married
00:29:54 ►
it’s the case maybe you have children
00:29:56 ►
you then have a family field
00:29:58 ►
and assuming the parents are together
00:30:00 ►
your expectations
00:30:01 ►
of the way you behave to your children
00:30:03 ►
no one’s ever trained you how to raise children. You’ve never mentioned at school. So how do you know how to treat
00:30:10 ►
your kids? Well, the only model you’ve got is either looking at friends doing the most,
00:30:15 ►
but the one that runs deepest for you is what happened in your own family. And so you bring
00:30:21 ►
to the situation a kind of memory of the whole dynamics of your family of origin.
00:30:27 ►
And the same goes for your wife or your partner or the mother of the children.
00:30:32 ►
She brings to it the dynamics from her whole family of origin.
00:30:34 ►
You and she then have different expectations of how the family is going to work
00:30:41 ►
because you’ve got two different kinds of fields.
00:30:43 ►
And she may expect quite different kind of fields and she may expect
00:30:45 ►
quite different things of you and of the way you treat the children and the kids than you expect
00:30:49 ►
of her and of the kids and so on and this can either lead to some kind of compromise in fact
00:30:55 ►
over time somehow it has to accommodate in some way but it can also lead to a lot of conflicts
00:31:00 ►
they’re different models and expectations so you bring these fields with you as it were unconsciously
00:31:06 ►
because they’re the fields in which you were in that group
00:31:10 ►
there with the sort of field pattern,
00:31:11 ►
you’re now in a new family group and you helped,
00:31:14 ►
you bring that field pattern in
00:31:16 ►
and it sort of fuses with that of your partner.
00:31:17 ►
But that’s the only, you can learn from other models,
00:31:20 ►
you can know other families, you can live with other groups.
00:31:23 ►
So basically you bring live with other groups so basically
00:31:25 ►
you bring it with you so then do you think cross-cultural marriages are more
00:31:31 ►
fraught than marriages within class and cultural domains well that would be an
00:31:40 ►
empirical question you know one would predict that there would be certain
00:31:44 ►
kinds of problems.
00:31:45 ►
Say you take marriages between English people and Indians or Pakistanis,
00:31:50 ►
then you could do a model,
00:31:53 ►
the Hellinger-type model of the Indian family field.
00:31:56 ►
You could interview Indians, look at Indian family structures.
00:31:59 ►
They’d probably have quite different sort of expectations and field patterns
00:32:02 ►
from the people from nuclear families
00:32:05 ►
growing up in suburbs in England or America. And if that’s the case, you could actually
00:32:11 ►
predict what would happen when you put these two, what kinds of conflicts are likely to
00:32:15 ►
result, what kinds of expectations the man and woman from these different kinds of backgrounds
00:32:21 ►
are going to have within this. And you could talk to people who deal in marriage counselling
00:32:26 ►
with mixed marriages and see whether these are indeed
00:32:28 ►
the kinds of recurrent problems they encounter.
00:32:32 ►
So you could, by talking to sociologists, social workers
00:32:35 ►
and people who actually deal with dysfunctional families
00:32:39 ►
of various kinds, or functional families,
00:32:42 ►
this would be an empirical study on family dynamics
00:32:46 ►
from different backgrounds
00:32:47 ►
so you could actually approach it all
00:32:50 ►
you could make models
00:32:52 ►
and you could actually test them
00:32:53 ►
because there’s all different kinds of families
00:32:55 ►
and fields coming together
00:32:57 ►
so I think the
00:32:58 ►
model then of the family field
00:33:02 ►
would have to consist of more than the nodes
00:33:04 ►
and the connections and so on the creation of the family field would have to consist of more than the nodes and the connections and so on.
00:33:05 ►
The creation of the tableau with the patient of the director includes not only where the actors are standing,
00:33:15 ►
but also which direction they’re facing.
00:33:17 ►
Yes.
00:33:17 ►
And maybe their posture or any kind of body language representation,
00:33:28 ►
facial expression, things like that?
00:33:31 ►
Yes, well it doesn’t usually, it can involve posture.
00:33:35 ►
Because when we think of animal behavior
00:33:38 ►
in the sense of how you raise your children and so on,
00:33:40 ►
then there are many, many attributes of a noah
00:33:46 ►
an individual member of the family
00:33:48 ►
their
00:33:49 ►
attitude
00:33:52 ►
of
00:33:52 ►
servitude or their willingness
00:33:56 ►
to sacrifice, compromise
00:33:58 ►
and all
00:34:00 ►
these things that we know
00:34:01 ►
varies from culture to culture
00:34:03 ►
they call the roles the division of labor of the mother and father and so on.
00:34:10 ►
The father drives the other species of birds away from the nest and so on.
00:34:18 ►
So some kind of modeling or even a simple representation of these behaviors would have to be attached.
00:34:23 ►
or even a simple representation of these behaviors would have to be attached.
00:34:25 ►
Otherwise, the model would be too simple
00:34:28 ►
to really indicate the difference
00:34:30 ►
between different generations
00:34:32 ►
and people from different families
00:34:34 ►
coming from different family groups marrying and so on.
00:34:39 ►
Yes, well, it might help.
00:34:40 ►
The geometry wouldn’t be enough.
00:34:42 ►
Well, it might help in starting these models
00:34:44 ►
with different species of birds,
00:34:46 ►
for example, where you’ve got more
00:34:48 ►
standardized patterns, and where you can
00:34:50 ►
actually observe what happens.
00:34:52 ►
Because there is a division of labor
00:34:53 ►
with birds, and say a gander
00:34:56 ►
will defend the nest of the goose and
00:34:58 ►
some birds, cuckoos,
00:35:00 ►
do it a totally different way, of course,
00:35:02 ►
and the baby cuckoo is like a pathology
00:35:04 ►
in the nest of other birds.
00:35:05 ►
So there are all different patterns among birds in the division of labour,
00:35:08 ►
but they’re fairly consistent within the species.
00:35:11 ►
So if one had a model that would work for these,
00:35:15 ►
the family fields are more complicated.
00:35:16 ►
Human family situations are far more complicated
00:35:19 ►
than those of many animals.
00:35:21 ►
And the beauty of looking at bird families
00:35:23 ►
is that you could have 20, 30 different kinds
00:35:26 ►
of behavior already documented
00:35:28 ►
by naturalists, the family
00:35:30 ►
life of different birds, the number of little
00:35:32 ►
birds they have, the way they teach and fly
00:35:34 ►
whether they have social groups
00:35:36 ►
or not, like flocks, some birds have
00:35:38 ►
flocks, some don’t
00:35:39 ►
there’d be a lot of scope, anyone
00:35:42 ►
who could come up with a good model
00:35:43 ►
would have a large amount of natural history at their feet as territory to explore
00:35:49 ►
with this modeling technique because right now the kinds of models that
00:35:53 ►
ethologists have of groups are not terrible well their their focus has been
00:35:58 ►
distorted by the Richard Dawkins type people where it’s all the selfish genes
00:36:02 ►
and it’s seen as individual competition and struggle and maybe that perspective has something to
00:36:07 ►
offer to this modeling process but it hasn’t led to any kind of emphasis or
00:36:13 ►
attempts to model these the dynamics these groups very effectively the other
00:36:19 ►
thing you have to take into consideration is a family is an organism evolving through time. The arrangement, the
00:36:29 ►
tableau is a snapshot in time. It also, I mean, one could assume it’s the patient or
00:36:37 ►
the client’s relationship to their family at the present moment. But on the other hand, if you’re going to bring in ancestors, is the ancestor influencing
00:36:47 ►
the field as a child, as a middle-aged person, as an elderly person? Did their influence
00:36:55 ►
on the field change through time? And then there seems to be sort of a dichotomy. There’s a static now, but it’s being modified by a shifting past
00:37:07 ►
as these ancestors exert differing influences
00:37:12 ►
on the situation,
00:37:13 ►
depending on where in their own life history they are.
00:37:18 ►
Yes, and in some tribal cultures,
00:37:20 ►
like the Sora in India,
00:37:22 ►
this is the kind of thing ancestors,
00:37:24 ►
you know, the role of the ancestors
00:37:25 ►
actually being documented by anthropologists
00:37:27 ►
there’s a whole body of anthropological
00:37:30 ►
data here
00:37:30 ►
there’s the Saur where my friend
00:37:34 ►
Piers Lutebsky was an anthropologist
00:37:36 ►
and I visited him in the field
00:37:38 ►
in Bihar
00:37:39 ►
no in Orissa
00:37:40 ►
in Karaput district of Orissa
00:37:43 ►
he was living in the Saur village
00:37:44 ►
he was living with the Shema
00:37:45 ►
and they had a whole
00:37:48 ►
very complicated doctrine
00:37:50 ►
about what happened to you when you died
00:37:51 ►
say you died by suicide
00:37:53 ►
you went to the sun
00:37:55 ►
if you died of smallpox
00:37:57 ►
you went to a kind of leopard spirit
00:37:59 ►
and there were different groups
00:38:01 ►
and the ancestors who died of that
00:38:03 ►
all went to the same place, so you were with them.
00:38:06 ►
And you wanted to get the living into your group when they died
00:38:09 ►
rather than someone else because you wanted to be with them.
00:38:11 ►
So you were always competing death spirits, different modes of death,
00:38:15 ►
containing ancestors, competing for the living.
00:38:19 ►
And the best way to deal with this is to make peace with them
00:38:22 ►
and to make offerings.
00:38:24 ►
Every year there’s these buffalo sacrifices for the ancestors.
00:38:27 ►
If you give blood and appease the ancestors,
00:38:30 ►
then they’ll be happier and they won’t feel so needy
00:38:33 ►
and they’re not going to try and grab you so much,
00:38:35 ►
and so you buy them off.
00:38:37 ►
But after two or three generations,
00:38:39 ►
their individual identity, their names, begin to fade.
00:38:43 ►
And they’re sort of liberated over time from that
00:38:45 ►
sort of obsessive thing until the
00:38:47 ►
souls are sort of set free, at which
00:38:49 ►
time they become butterflies.
00:38:52 ►
So when you see
00:38:53 ►
butterflies flying around you in the forest
00:38:55 ►
or in the village, these are the liberated
00:38:57 ►
souls of distant ancestors whose
00:38:59 ►
influence is no longer
00:39:00 ►
particularly important in this whole
00:39:03 ►
economy of death and recruitment
00:39:05 ►
well this is the memory
00:39:08 ►
model for the conspiracy theorists
00:39:10 ►
yes except that
00:39:12 ►
there’s lots of different
00:39:13 ►
it’s like a competing
00:39:15 ►
well there are sort of competing
00:39:18 ►
conspiracies and there are certain
00:39:20 ►
stones you can trip over in the forest
00:39:22 ►
there are certain ones that catch people
00:39:24 ►
who stumble and make you stumble in the forest, but you have to be on good
00:39:27 ►
terms with the ancestors.
00:39:29 ►
And what being on good terms with them above all means acknowledging them.
00:39:33 ►
It means in the sacrifice of blood, that you name and acknowledge the key ancestors.
00:39:39 ►
You acknowledge all the dead in your lineage.
00:39:42 ►
And if you miss anyone out, they’re going to be angry.
00:39:44 ►
And if they’re angry, that means trouble.
00:39:47 ►
So this is their cosmology, the way they see it.
00:39:50 ►
And each tribe, each group, has its own theory of the ancestors.
00:39:55 ►
The Japanese and Chinese, especially the Chinese,
00:39:57 ►
have an elaborate sense of the role and importance of the ancestors.
00:40:01 ►
With all these offerings they make of paper houses and whatnot.
00:40:08 ►
And I think if one were looking at this empirically in the human realm
00:40:09 ►
one would perhaps have models for different
00:40:11 ►
species of birds but coming back to the human
00:40:14 ►
realm, to compare the dynamics
00:40:16 ►
which you could do partly from
00:40:17 ►
anthropology and partly from modern
00:40:19 ►
sociology of
00:40:21 ►
say Chinese families
00:40:23 ►
typical Chinese families where there’s a high degree
00:40:26 ►
of acknowledgement of the ancestors
00:40:27 ►
with modern American families or western
00:40:30 ►
families, fragmented
00:40:32 ►
dissociated
00:40:34 ►
chaotic, where there’s a very low
00:40:36 ►
degree of acknowledgement of the ancestors
00:40:38 ►
and see what kinds of patterns
00:40:40 ►
occur there and then you could look at Chinese Americans
00:40:42 ►
who may have abandoned all the ancestor
00:40:44 ►
worship thing and just assimilated
00:40:45 ►
to mainstream American society
00:40:47 ►
do they have particular
00:40:49 ►
qualities or do they just become like
00:40:51 ►
Americans? They stumble a lot
00:40:53 ►
they stumble a lot
00:40:55 ►
they must because a lot of angry ancestors
00:40:58 ►
were accustomed to a great degree
00:40:59 ►
of… well you’d expect that you see
00:41:02 ►
but maybe they go on acknowledging
00:41:04 ►
them, a lot of the Chinese are very traditional
00:41:06 ►
so you know there’s a whole
00:41:08 ►
field of research here, the role of the
00:41:10 ►
ancestors because every culture
00:41:12 ►
has its own way of dealing with them
00:41:13 ►
and its own way of acknowledging them
00:41:16 ►
and in the Christian tradition
00:41:17 ►
the festival of All Hallows and All Souls
00:41:20 ►
Halloween is the eve of All Hallows
00:41:22 ►
November the 1st and All Souls Day
00:41:24 ►
November the 2nd is when requiem masses Hallows, November the 1st, and All Souls Day, November the 2nd,
00:41:25 ►
is when Requiem Masses are offered for all the dead,
00:41:28 ►
all the departed,
00:41:30 ►
in which you can particularly hand in the names
00:41:33 ►
of particular ancestors of particular people
00:41:36 ►
who don’t have their names read out of the Requiem Mass.
00:41:39 ►
So I do this myself.
00:41:41 ►
So there’s an acknowledged social form in our culture
00:41:43 ►
for acknowledging and naming the ancestors
00:41:46 ►
in a traditional ceremony.
00:41:49 ►
So there are great variations in our own culture
00:41:54 ►
between the degree to which people within different families
00:41:57 ►
and traditions acknowledge the ancestors.
00:41:59 ►
The Roman Catholics do it more than the Protestants
00:42:01 ►
because of this phenomenon of requiem masses
00:42:04 ►
and the observance of All Souls Day, which Protestants because of this phenomenon of requiem masses and the
00:42:05 ►
observance of All Souls Day which Protestants don’t observe. So it’s a rich field for investigation
00:42:13 ►
you see in sociology, anthropology, model building etc. but as yet more or less unexplored.
00:42:21 ►
Do you think these ideas could be extrapolated to non-human
00:42:25 ►
families with any degree
00:42:27 ►
that you would learn anything
00:42:29 ►
useful? Yes, it would have to be exactly
00:42:32 ►
the same, perhaps
00:42:33 ►
simpler. Like bird
00:42:35 ►
families, maybe
00:42:38 ►
all the behaviors
00:42:40 ►
that we could quantify
00:42:42 ►
are ones that
00:42:43 ►
mythologists had been traditionally observing
00:42:46 ►
and they might have missed a lot
00:42:48 ►
of things, like the role of the
00:42:49 ►
ancestors among birds, I don’t think they ever noticed
00:42:52 ►
was the
00:42:54 ►
ancestry knowledge, are there any
00:42:55 ►
you know, are there any
00:42:57 ►
bird families with three generations
00:42:59 ►
I guess you could ask, what is
00:43:02 ►
a family? Does an insect
00:43:04 ►
have a family? Well an insect have a family?
00:43:06 ►
A termite certainly does, on the ground scale.
00:43:08 ►
Social insects do, but for instance…
00:43:11 ►
Well, a social group, it wouldn’t have to be a family.
00:43:14 ►
Whatever group that you can observe,
00:43:15 ►
like you observe a school of fish,
00:43:17 ►
you might not know the ancestry or the kinship diagram,
00:43:21 ►
but if you could quantify the observables,
00:43:26 ►
whatever ethologists observe
00:43:28 ►
about birds, the gander is
00:43:29 ►
aggressive and attacks other birds, so that
00:43:32 ►
would be a number from 1 to 10 of
00:43:33 ►
aggression. Then the mother
00:43:35 ►
nourishes by going and getting food, chewing it up,
00:43:38 ►
spitting it in their mouths, and that nourishment
00:43:40 ►
is another parameter. So
00:43:41 ►
whatever the ethologists
00:43:43 ►
observe more or less defines the model
00:43:46 ►
that they have of bird groups or families
00:43:49 ►
and likewise whatever species have been observed.
00:43:53 ►
I don’t think there is any mathematical modeling effort
00:43:55 ►
that’s been going on among ethologists
00:43:58 ►
or anthropologists for that matter.
00:44:00 ►
But really this theory is saying
00:44:02 ►
that it’s genetic similarity that
00:44:06 ►
engages on the strength of the bond
00:44:11 ►
or I veto that
00:44:13 ►
it may or may not
00:44:14 ►
so twins would then be in a special position
00:44:16 ►
well they are in a special position
00:44:18 ►
as traditionally acknowledged and revealed by modern twin research
00:44:21 ►
they are
00:44:23 ►
but genetic similarity you see the mother and the father They are. But genetic similarity is, you see, but the
00:44:26 ►
mother and the father, the children have a genetic similarity to the mother and the father.
00:44:30 ►
The mother and the father have no necessary genetic similarity. And it’s also possible
00:44:35 ►
for members of a pack of wolves, you know, a wolf, a male may join a group. So you do
00:44:40 ►
have interchange between groups and exogamyamy marrying to a group outside the familiar group
00:44:46 ►
is the rule rather than the exception so although you so that one at least one member of the group
00:44:53 ►
the father or the mother is going to have a different unrelated genetic nature so it’s not
00:44:57 ►
a necessary feature of these bonds to have genetic similarity they may or may not have it and it may
00:45:02 ►
be they’re stronger in the social insects
00:45:05 ►
where you’ve got all these castes of workers
00:45:07 ►
derived from the queen
00:45:08 ►
and sharing half the genes of their sisters with each other
00:45:13 ►
they have a great many genes in common
00:45:15 ►
yes, this may give a kind of more telepathic type connection between them
00:45:20 ►
but I wouldn’t put genetics as our key
00:45:24 ►
it’s not going to help us much in this particular discussion
00:45:27 ►
so can you imagine a strong link between a person
00:45:30 ►
and their great-grandfather’s second wife
00:45:36 ►
to whom they have no relation other than that
00:45:42 ►
oh no, if it’s the second wife
00:45:44 ►
it would be relatively irrelevant
00:45:46 ►
and Hellinger
00:45:47 ►
when we’re doing this modelling
00:45:49 ►
when we look at what he thinks
00:45:50 ►
it’s the family of origin
00:45:52 ►
what would matter is the time when your great-grandfather
00:45:55 ►
when your grandfather was born
00:45:56 ►
his family of origin
00:46:00 ►
it may later include when he’s 12
00:46:02 ►
15, his father marrying again or something
00:46:04 ►
but it would be the origin field you look at
00:46:06 ►
and these later ones have
00:46:08 ►
relatively small effect
00:46:09 ►
so
00:46:11 ►
they’ve already got their ideas about what
00:46:14 ►
weightings you’d give to these different
00:46:16 ►
people in drama
00:46:18 ►
but the difference between birds
00:46:20 ►
and people is that the
00:46:22 ►
general pattern of a bird
00:46:24 ►
family is given instinctively. It’s
00:46:26 ►
by a morphic field, I would say, with such a deep and strong morphic resonance, you’ve
00:46:30 ►
got a kind of basic pattern that the whole species lies within. And if you have a deviant
00:46:36 ►
family, subsequent ones would get morphic resonance from their own deviant family of
00:46:41 ►
origin, but they’d also get resonance from sort of a huge runoff
00:46:45 ►
in creative family life
00:46:47 ►
now in the human world where there’s no
00:46:49 ►
genetically determined
00:46:51 ►
family structure
00:46:52 ►
because it’s cultural, a great deal of human
00:46:55 ►
cultural evolution is sort of decoupled
00:46:57 ►
from genetics
00:46:58 ►
it’s the difference
00:47:01 ►
between Italian families
00:47:03 ►
and Jewish families and English families and American families and stuff.
00:47:07 ►
And families in New England and California is not particularly genetic. It’s cultural.
00:47:13 ►
And the fact that families have changed through divorce, etc., etc., over the last hundred years, much smaller family sizes.
00:47:20 ►
A hundred years ago, most of our ancestors would have had six, seven siblings.
00:47:25 ►
Mine did.
00:47:26 ►
Now you’ve got much smaller nuclear families, higher rates of divorce has changed, so it’s
00:47:30 ►
not genetic.
00:47:31 ►
It’s much too quick.
00:47:33 ►
So genetics doesn’t really help as much.
00:47:35 ►
And that’s why in the human realm the only model that you can rely on is not a genetically
00:47:41 ►
inherited model, because you don’t have that, whereas animals do.
00:47:48 ►
But there’s the cultural experience in which you grew up and the cultural models around you.
00:47:52 ►
So that’s why I think that although one could have
00:47:55 ►
a certain class of models that would handle human families
00:47:58 ►
and bird families,
00:48:00 ►
the human ones are always going to be much more complicated.
00:48:03 ►
Much more complicated
00:48:04 ►
because you’d have to model
00:48:06 ►
the cultures as well
00:48:07 ►
so maybe birds are
00:48:09 ►
easier because they’re monocultural
00:48:11 ►
in a sense
00:48:12 ►
culture is also simpler
00:48:15 ►
but once a class of models had been
00:48:17 ►
built up in one field it would be a matter of
00:48:20 ►
extending it to the other
00:48:21 ►
yes that’s why it would be
00:48:23 ►
easiest to start with the simplest models,
00:48:26 ►
simplest cases,
00:48:29 ►
and then easily extrapolate upward
00:48:32 ►
and turn it to human species and eventually to whales and so on.
00:48:38 ►
Is it a metaphor?
00:48:44 ►
I hate to cut this off right here, but my energy levels are running low,
00:48:48 ►
and so I’m going to call it a day for now.
00:48:51 ►
But I’ll get the remaining part of this trialogue out as soon as I can,
00:48:54 ►
hopefully in the next few days.
00:48:56 ►
I haven’t heard the end of this conversation yet myself,
00:48:59 ►
but already Rupert has given me a lot to think about along the lines of family morphogenic fields.
00:49:06 ►
In fact, it may even open up a whole new line of dialogue between my cousins and myself.
00:49:11 ►
At least I hope it will.
00:49:13 ►
While I’m thinking of it, I want to say something about the sound quality in some of these podcasts.
00:49:19 ►
Believe it or not, I actually do edit the talks I play,
00:49:22 ►
and in some cases I’ve even been successful in cleaning up the sound significantly.
00:49:27 ►
But there are some instances, like today’s trialogue,
00:49:30 ►
that were recorded with a hum in them.
00:49:33 ►
And as hard as I tried, I wasn’t able to remove that hum
00:49:36 ►
without causing a little distortion in the speaker’s voices.
00:49:39 ►
And so I decided that the hum was less annoying than the voice changes
00:49:43 ►
and left it just as it was recorded.
00:49:46 ►
Now, I also know that there are among us here in the salon quite a few audio experts like Brian and John H.
00:49:53 ►
And I sincerely appreciate your offers of help.
00:49:56 ►
And that goes to all of you who have written to offer technical assistance.
00:50:00 ►
My problem is that I’ve got kind of a tiger by the tail here and I don’t want to let go until I fully understand my exit strategy.
00:50:07 ►
The tiger, of course, is the psychedelic salon.
00:50:11 ►
And to be honest, I never really gave any thought to having much of an audience,
00:50:14 ►
and so I figured it was a nice hobby that I could drop if I ever got tired of it.
00:50:19 ►
But now it’s grown into something much more than I expected,
00:50:23 ►
and to tell the truth, it’s really giving me a problem with what I think of as my main life’s work, which is to finish a novel I’ve been working on for over four years now.
00:50:34 ►
But don’t get me wrong, I’m doing these podcasts because there really isn’t anything I’d rather be doing.
00:50:40 ►
You writers out there know how easy it is to find something to do other than to do what you came here to do.
00:50:47 ►
And I do realize that if I’m ever going to get back to work on my new book,
00:50:51 ►
I’m going to have to figure a way to offload some of the back-end work involved in these podcasts
00:50:56 ►
and maintaining several websites.
00:50:59 ►
So I’ve been working on a long-range plan to turn the salon into more of a community project,
00:51:04 ►
and working on a long-range plan to turn the salon into more of a community project,
00:51:10 ►
which, of course, would allow us to bring in more of the work being done by many of our regulars here in the salon.
00:51:15 ►
My reason for mentioning this right now is that I know some of you are getting frustrated at my slow response to your suggestions and comments and offers of help,
00:51:19 ►
and I hear you loud and clear, and I’m pretty much in agreement with most of your suggestions.
00:51:24 ►
But I don’t want to make any false steps, because we’ve really got a nice thing going here, you know.
00:51:29 ►
When I’m recording these podcasts, I really do feel like I’m sitting there beside you and having a conversation.
00:51:36 ►
And I don’t want to do anything that will change that feeling for me,
00:51:39 ►
because if this becomes a job or something I’m not wanting to do most of the time,
00:51:45 ►
well, then I suspect that we’ll all lose interest in this interesting psychedelic experiment.
00:51:51 ►
So my plan is to continue exploring your ideas
00:51:54 ►
and come up with some suggestions that we can all kick around
00:51:57 ►
until we figure out how to continue growing our connections
00:52:01 ►
and exchanging ideas among the worldwide psychedelic community.
00:52:05 ►
And sometime after this year’s Burning Man Festival, where I hope to kick around some
00:52:09 ►
of these ideas in person with you, I’ll let all of you volunteers and potential volunteers
00:52:14 ►
know what I’ve come up with once we get back from the burn, and we’ll figure out how all
00:52:20 ►
of you can become more involved in this fun project of spreading the truth about what I believe to be the only real hope for our species’ long-term survival.
00:52:30 ►
And that is the hope that comes from increasing our understanding of psychedelic substances.
00:52:35 ►
Well, that’s a little heavier note than I planned on ending on, but I want to get the first part of this talk out today so you don’t think I’ve disappeared on you like Queer Ninja has. Thank you. And, hey, be well, my friend. Now, before I go, I want to mention, as always,
00:53:05 ►
that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
00:53:08 ►
are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareLike 2.5 license.
00:53:14 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
00:53:15 ►
you can just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
00:53:20 ►
which you can also find at www.psychedelicsalon.org.
00:53:25 ►
And if you have any questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions about these podcasts,
00:53:29 ►
well, just send them to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.
00:53:34 ►
And thanks again to Jacques Cordell and Wells, otherwise known as Chateau Hayouk,
00:53:39 ►
for the use of your music here in the salon.
00:53:41 ►
And a big thank you again to Janice Gate Creative, James, Jason, John M., A Dime Short, Yarov, and William. Thank you. enjoy the time we spend together here each week, and I know that you probably feel the same way.
00:54:05 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.