107 - Hazelwood House Trialogue (Part 1)

Program Notes §

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

04:18 Ralph begins by describing “Terence to himself”.

05:46 Ralph Abraham: “So in our process of trialoging we find it very much enriched by Terence’s phenomenal knowledge of history, and not only that, but his special way of saying it is sort of a, you’re familiar with this here, a bardic skill. So that whatever he says will have [long pause]more effect than it actually deserves” [added with humor that was followed by laughter].

08:36 Terence “shares his view” of Rupert.

09:12 Terence McKenna: “And my intellectual method has always been to seek out the heretical. And so when I heard that Nature had called for the burning of a book [insert title], I burned up my tires on the way to the store to see if I couldn’t obtain a copy.”

16:38 Rupert introduces Ralph.

19:41 Rupert Sheldrake: “His [Ralph Abraham’s] ability to visualize mathematics, I’m sure, is innate. But I think it was enhanced in the late 60s and early 70s by certain inner experiences, which would fall into the category of what Terence calls hands-on pharmacology.”

22:54 Ralph begins his introduction of Rupert.

27:21 Rupert tells the story of his first meeting with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham.

32:00 Rupert Sheldrake: “Part of him [Terence McKenna] is a millenarian prophet. Part of him is a Dominican. He professes to be a pagan, but his Catholic upbringing, his Dominican reasoning, and his experience as an altar boy have never left him.”

34:16 Terence tells about when he first heard of Ralph.

36:43 Terence McKenna: [Speaking about Ralph Abraham]“It’s impossible not to fall in love with the man. He’s the teddy bear of advanced mathematics.”

45:07 Rupert Sheldrake: “[In science,] if you can do things cheaply, you’re completely free, because the only control that they have is through money and giving out funds. And if you don’t need the funds you can do what you like.”

1:13:39 Terence McKenna: “What do I think? Well, not that.”

1:14:20 Terence McKenna: “I’ve always felt that what biology is is a strategy, a chemical strategy, for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy into macro-physical systems called living organisms, and that living organisms somehow work their magic by opening a doorway to the quantum realm through which indeterminacy can come. And I imagine that all nature works like this, with the single exception of human beings, who have been poisoned by language.”

1:19:36 Terence McKenna: “The real question I’m raising is, to what degree does language create the assumption of an unknown future.”

1:24:03 Terence McKenna: “We alone, I think, are tormented by the anxiety of the unknowable future. And it’s an artifact, I maintain, of culture and language.”

1:28:28 Terence McKenna: “And I don’t believe that time is invariant. I didn’t intend to open this up as a general frontal attack on the epistemic methods of modern science, but, in fact, the idea that time is invariant is entirely contradicted by our own experience, and it’s merely an assumption science makes in order to do its business.”

1:29:36 Terence McKenna: “As a practical matter, I don’t think we should confuse our ideologies with our sinuses.”

Previous Episode §

106 - How Rare We Are in the Universe

Next Episode §

108 - Hazelwood House Trialogue (Part 2)

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Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19 ► §

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:23 ► §

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

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Well, even though it’s been less than a week since the last time we got together here in the salon,

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I just couldn’t stay away.

00:00:35 ► §

There are at least a dozen pressing matters at hand right now,

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like all the things I put off doing before my holiday.

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But to tell the truth, all I actually feel like doing is listening to some trilogues I’ve not heard before. So I guess this

00:00:45 ► §

is sort of my way of goofing off by listening to Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert

00:00:50 ► §

Sheldrake hold their first public trilogue outside of California. The conversation we’re about to

00:00:57 ► §

hear was actually held sometime in 1993 at Hazlehurst in England, and their weekend-long

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trilogue was captured on four

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cassette tapes that Ralph Abraham

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loaned to me for the use in these podcasts.

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And each of these

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tapes is 90 minutes long, but

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rather than break them into

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two programs, as I’ve done in the past,

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I’ve decided that since

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we don’t have the commercial constraints

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of radio, well, why am I

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conforming to a one-hour format anyway?

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You obviously can just pause your player whenever you want.

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You know, it’s not like turning off a radio program and missing something.

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So from now on, I just plan on keeping these tapes, side A and side B, all in one podcast.

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And since I did this once before in the past and solicited comments about it, I’m sure that this will be agreeable with most of you because the email I received was essentially all in support of the longer format.

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your comments and I apologize for not getting back to all of you personally. But rest assured,

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I’m thinking about you and now that I’ve got some of your faces in mind after meeting you at Burning Man, well, you’re all becoming much more clear in my mind. It’s really nice to be here in this

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cyberdelic space with you and I hope that you can feel the energy of this mind storm that we’re all

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setting in motion here. I just don’t have any better idea than you do

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right now about what seems to be bubbling up from inside of us, but whatever it is, I’m sure that in

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the end everything is going to be all right, as Terrence said in a dream to a dear friend of mine

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one time. Okay, that’s enough romanticizing for now. Let’s get on with the program and begin with

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Ralph telling Terrence how much he thinks of him,

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but doing so with a lot of humor and back-and-forth teasing among the three of them.

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I really like the way this trilogue begins.

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It sounds as if they were actually having a good time together way back in 1993.

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So let’s join them now.

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So let’s join him now. So, chanting together.

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So, our process, this particular peculiar process of trialoguing began a long time ago,

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for more than ten years we are doing this, but primarily in private.

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And out of this ongoing process for more than a decade are doing this, but primarily in private. And out of

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this ongoing process for more than a decade, we have become, I think, a kind of a unit

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or a triad. And that’s why we don’t want to introduce ourselves individually, but by this

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other trick. So later on during the weekend,

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we’ll speak more about the process of triloguing,

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and of course you’ll see it in action.

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But to introduce ourselves,

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this is not a trilogue, but just a trick.

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But my idea is that we would describe each other as we appear to ourself in the context of this process, triloguing. So I’ll start by describing Terrence to himself from ourself.

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So Terrence seems to be known, better and better known,

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and whenever we walk anywhere, someone will come up and recognize him

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as, it says in our program, ethno-pharmacologist.

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Well, almost a pharmacologist is sort of a verbal doctor or something.

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But

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this kind of

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pharmacology is important to us

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also in our process.

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for me, Terence

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is

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a special

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person because of the breadth

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of his knowledge and the evidence of a phenomenal

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integrity within it.

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So, first of all, when we first met, Terence was persistent in asking me about mathematics,

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the kind of mathematics that I was interested in at that time that nobody else had even heard about.

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And as our relationship developed,

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I saw that he had this philosophy of time, let’s say,

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or maybe even a mathematical model for the structure of time.

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That is an odd thing for a person to be obsessed with.

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And from this obsession, he had to learn a great deal about history.

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So in our process of triloguing, we find it very much enriched by Terence’s phenomenal

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knowledge of history, and not only that, but his special way of saying it. You’re familiar with this here, a bardic skill, so that whatever he says will have more effect than it actually deserves.

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Because of his phenomenon of seeing it and his apparent conviction in it.

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Is he Irish?

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Yes, that’s the Irish force to deal with in a cooperative process.

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Furthermore, what seems to inform or maintain the integrity of his total presentation is some kind of spiritual

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belief. I don’t know exactly the right word for this, but I can tell that you all know

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what I mean anyway. And this spiritual belief is outside of any organized system. So we can most easily

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understand it in the connection

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with the archaic revival

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or pagan spirituality

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or shamanism.

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Anyway, this aspect of Terence,

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every person is a spectrum of all

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kinds of things, and here are just a few of

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Terence’s things that I

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think are the

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most obvious in our process of interaction. The

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primitive spirituality which always speaks against any church guru or leader. And I’m almost done. And I’m squirming there.

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Finally, besides this information-based personal style and integrity,

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there is something else which I think is very important to us,

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and that’s the adventurer.

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That’s the willingness to risk going to some kind of edge and also the

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propulsion to talk about it upon coming back fulfilling some kind of

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responsibility to the community which is beyond which risks more than simply individual development.

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Is this too long?

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Yes.

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That’s it then.

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Good, good.

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Well, so it falls to me to share with you my view of Rupert,

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share with you my view of Rupert who

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I’m not sure when I first became aware

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probably it was the Nature

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review which I think

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Rupert should certainly be very grateful to Nature

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because in their perverse way

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they saved him perhaps from obscurantism by calling for the

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burning of his book and my intellectual method has always been had called for the burning of a book

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I burned up my tires

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on the way to the store to see if I couldn’t

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obtain a copy

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and it was very interesting

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and I added it to the

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slow rising intellectual edifice

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that I had been building for years in the

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area of theoretical biology.

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I was very interested in Driesch and Kemmerer and the school of vitalism that refused to genuflect to the idea that life could be reduced simply

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to physics and chemistry. That seemed to me inadequate. But nevertheless, after reading

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Sheldrake’s book, it just seemed like an intellectual war being well fought in a distant land by someone I was probably not likely to have

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cross my path.

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And I discussed it with other people

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and I was amazed at the animosity

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that rained down upon what seemed to me

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a fundamentally interesting and not easily dismissed concept.

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I can remember one person telling me, you have only to heft the book in your hand to

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tell that it’s bogus.

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Well, I thought they must have an intuition into the nature of scientific theory far beyond

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my own, because I couldn’t

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make the judgment at that stage. And then Rupert, I believe it was through Ralph, contacted

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me and came by bus to see me. I live in the wine country north of San Francisco. And I didn’t know what I expected.

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I was mentored by Eric Jancz, who some of you may know.

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And so my vision of the European academic was of a corpulent, elderly, animated person.

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And I projected that and expected that

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and when Rupert arrived

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and Ralph vectored in

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for that first meeting as well

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isn’t that

00:11:52 ► §

interesting

00:11:54 ► §

and there he was

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and I thought

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I immediately

00:12:02 ► §

fell under the spell

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of his personality, his spirit.

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Scientists, I don’t know if you spend a lot of time with them, but they tend to be pretentious boors, most of them.

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And the higher they rise, the more this quality seems exacerbated in their personality.

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And I have found Rupert to be an incredibly generous, intelligent, forgiving person.

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I feel very privileged to be in the presence of these people.

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I’m sure you all know the cliche when Newton was asked how he did it.

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He said, I stood on the shoulders of giants.

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That’s how it was done.

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And to whatever degree the mathematics of Ralph and the theoretical constructs of Rupert

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have supported my own work and not only my work but the building and maintaining of a personal vision,

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I felt that I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants.

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It’s hard to say what the fate of morphogenetic fields will be in the history of ideas. But I am convinced that given even a halfway level playing field,

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the best ideas always win. And so I’m very keen to stand close to this man because I am absolutely convinced that the light of glory will fall upon him.

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Mechanistic biology has failed and for 20 years has been involved in the cover-up of

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the catastrophic failure of its program of reducing life to physics and chemistry.

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It will not happen soon.

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It will not happen ever.

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And when the history of biology is written,

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I’m convinced that Rupert’s work will stand at the turning point

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because the key problem in biology is form and the ideas that have been put forth

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in the past have been inadequate and I think the last thing I would like to say is I’m tremendously

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admiring of Rupert’s simplicity and what I mean by that are two things. Number one, his unwillingness

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to submit himself to the hegemony of scientific, well, the mafia of scientific correctness,

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essentially. He is not an academic. He feeds at the trough of observation, the importance

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of going to the field, the importance of facing the phenomenon unaided by apparatus or even

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mathematics, the importance of the existential confrontation with the thing one wishes to understand.

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And if you know Rupert, to stroll with him

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through an art gallery or a forest

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is to feel the mystery of life

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and the immediacy of that mystery

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and to have a very strong sense of its

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accessibility and that’s very important. I don’t want a Gnostic God that resides outside the

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Imperium. I want a kind of

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pantheistic richness that is right there on the surface.

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So I enjoy playing Byron to Rupert’s Shelley and hope to do so this weekend happy Valentine’s Day

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now I’m going to introduce Ralph

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I met Ralph and Terence as Terence has described when I got off the bus at Sonoma.

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Was it Sonoma? Santa Rosa. Oh, Santa Rosa. Having been sent by a friend in San Francisco

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to meet him, this was in 1982, and Ralph was there too, so I met Terence and Ralph together.

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And that’s when we found we had this way of relating together,

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which for us has been very helpful.

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Well, Ralph is a mathematician, a chaos mathematician,

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but he’s much more than that.

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Most mathematicians are peculiar, and he’s no exception.

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He’s peculiar in a very interesting, accessible way.

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One of the things that he’s done, which some of you may be aware of,

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is made mathematics accessible to ordinary people like ourselves who haven’t studied it.

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The secret of maths is that for those who are skilled practitioners, accessible to ordinary people like ourselves who haven’t studied it.

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The secret of maths is that for those who are skilled practitioners,

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it’s in fact a kind of inner landscape that they see.

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Some of them at least have an amazing visual intuition.

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They’re seeing internal pictures.

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It’s a visual and aesthetic experience.

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Things can go into this landscape, balls roll along,

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answers come out, and they don’t quite know how it happened. Something that’s hard to imagine. But this is what it’s

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all about. And then they write the thing down in symbols, in a notation. And when you look

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at these symbols, which is what we see when we look at maths, it’s like music as if you’ve

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never heard a symphony. All you’ve seen is the score. And if you’ve only seen the score of the symphony, the notes on paper, it doesn’t mean much.

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It’s alienating, it seems somehow dry, abstract.

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But what Ralph has done, among other things, has made this mathematical,

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the visual intuitions that lie behind maths accessible to everybody.

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And this is partly because computers have made it possible to do this,

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and he’s at the leading edge of computer graphics.

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He’s at the University of California at Santa Cruz,

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which is right next to Silicon Valley.

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And partly through simple diagrams,

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his books on visual dynamics, visual mathematics,

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have no equations in them whatever, and introduce you through pictures, through diagrams, his books on visual dynamics, visual mathematics, have no equations in them whatever.

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And introduce you through pictures, through diagrams, seen or imagined in three dimensions,

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to the fundamental principles, not only of classical dynamics, but of chaotic dynamics.

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And for me, this was the first time anyone had unveiled the inner mysteries of what’s going on in maths and made it something that one could grasp intuitively

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it’s rather like having spent all one’s life

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just seeing musical scores

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you suddenly hear the music

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and this is one of Graf’s gifts to be able to do this

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his ability to visualize mathematics

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I’m sure is

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innate, but

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I think it was enhanced

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in the late 60s and early

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70s by certain inner experiences

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which would

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fall into the category of what Terence calls

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hands-on pharmacology.

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these

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he

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took. Ralph is, he doesn’t look like it, but he’s an extremist. and these he took

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Ralph doesn’t look like it

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but he’s an extremist

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and when he does something

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he takes it to extremes

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for the last 20 years

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he’s been taking moderation to extremes

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but when he felt that the secret to understanding the deeper parts of the mathematical landscape

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was substances like DMT, he took that to extremes too.

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And he’s also travelled in India.

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One of the things the three of us had in common was we’ve all spent quite a long time in India.

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So Ralph has been in India. He took that to extremes as well. He’s also studied here in England. He was at Warwick for a while, Warwick University. amidst some woods in a very beautiful place with wonderful woodland and a little valley down beside his house

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deer and wild animals

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graze around

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he

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observes the stars

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he’s got the most agreeable

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system for observing the stars of anyone I know

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namely a hot tub

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located outside his house

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and you can sit in wonderful hot water

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gazing at this clear star and the brilliant stars.

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So he knows the stars from many hours spent observing them in the most comfortable of circumstances.

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He eats, in the most Spartan way, simple vegan food with chopsticks.

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This is what I mean by taking moderation to extremes,

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is a total abstainer from all known noxious substances

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and leads this almost monastic life,

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which I think is part of the spirit of mathematics.

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But he’s also a very sociable creature,

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and although he’s always saying,

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I never go anywhere and I never meet anyone,

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it’s amazing how often you meet him in all sorts of places.

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He also has a great gift for dialogue

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and a great ability to summarise things briefly

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and a great ability to empathise with people of all different kinds. He’s one

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of the few people I know who’s totally unshockable. Now, Ralph, what happens next?

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Oh, yes. I was just thinking that over.

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It all seemed so simple back in the day. We’re not done. We’re only

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half done. Now I’m going to introduce Rupert. So Rupert is into nature. He’s into nature

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and into the spirit. And in nature, he’s into it as a scientist. A lot of people hate

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science, and I must confess I feel very ambivalent about it myself. But Rupert is a scientist

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as a scientist should be, as opposed to how most scientists actually are. And in science he’s really a biologist, so that he’s fascinated

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by life, although he likes the stars, the mysteries of life seem to really absorb him.

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And as a biologist, he’s really a botanist. In fact, he is so into plants that I think when Rupert speaks, you’re

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hearing the leafy green speaking through his mouth. And like Terence, he has a phenomenal

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ability to stand up after seeing a subject printed on a flash card and carry on for an

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hour or two as if he had written

00:24:06 ► §

books on this subject all his life.

00:24:10 ► §

And this

00:24:11 ► §

gift seems to be

00:24:14 ► §

pointed at communicating

00:24:16 ► §

on behalf of

00:24:18 ► §

the mute biosphere,

00:24:21 ► §

the planets

00:24:21 ► §

of the garden

00:24:23 ► §

and the world.

00:24:35 ► §

And there is also, in Rupert-like terms, a special kind of spirituality which also probably comes from plants. But in Rupert’s case, this spirituality is expressed in a Christian form. So unlike

00:24:51 ► §

Terence, who’s a pagan, or me, certainly not a Christian, there’s in Rupert’s integrity

00:24:59 ► §

a kind of living proof, for us a constant reminder of the fact that the ordinary and familiar

00:25:08 ► §

spiritual paths actually work, can work.

00:25:17 ► §

So with the voice of the leafy green and this integrity of a true spiritual connection from the other realms,

00:25:32 ► §

has come this heretical posture of the scientist who cannot say other than what is obvious from

00:25:45 ► §

plants about nature.

00:25:48 ► §

And to say that,

00:25:49 ► §

you would have a choice if you perceived

00:25:51 ► §

this, either to say it or not.

00:25:53 ► §

So here is another aspect

00:25:55 ► §

of Rupert that I think is

00:25:57 ► §

singular

00:25:59 ► §

and maybe for him

00:26:01 ► §

unfortunate, and that is

00:26:03 ► §

the

00:26:04 ► §

courage, the adventure, the dedication,

00:26:10 ► §

the responsibility to report on the weaknesses of science.

00:26:18 ► §

And, you know, it’s very expensive to be a heretic.

00:26:20 ► §

If you had a choice, you wouldn’t be one.

00:26:26 ► §

heretic. If you had a choice, you wouldn’t be one. And the reason for being one is a kind of unyielding integrity, which it would be easier not to have.

00:26:35 ► §

So as part of our group, this is a kind of a skeletal structure. We can never waver too far into speculation which is not based

00:26:49 ► §

on the integrity of our direct observation of a certain something. It has to come back

00:26:56 ► §

to the reason for risking it all, which is the obligation to tell the truth.

00:27:07 ► §

Now, Rupert will introduce Terence.

00:27:09 ► §

No, now I will introduce you.

00:27:12 ► §

Or would you rather do me?

00:27:15 ► §

Ross worked out a mathematical system.

00:27:17 ► §

Now Rupert will introduce Terence.

00:27:19 ► §

Very good.

00:27:27 ► §

well I was on my way to meet Terence

00:27:30 ► §

who I’d never heard of in San Francisco

00:27:31 ► §

the friend who arranged this meeting

00:27:33 ► §

gave me a tape of his

00:27:35 ► §

which I listened to on the bus

00:27:37 ► §

I think it’s the only time I’ve ever

00:27:39 ► §

listened to one of those tape things

00:27:41 ► §

earphones on your ears

00:27:42 ► §

and I heard this extraordinary lecture about the effects of DMT,

00:27:50 ► §

a powerful hallucinogen,

00:27:52 ► §

and an entire family of hallucinogen derivatives.

00:27:58 ► §

And I was amazed that a subject such as this

00:28:00 ► §

was being discussed in such a fascinating, interesting and coherent way

00:28:05 ► §

since previously I’d associated this subject with total incoherence. When I met him I found

00:28:14 ► §

that really he’s a kind of naturalist. Fraser, hello, welcome. We must find you a seat.

00:28:49 ► §

So this is Fraser Clark. We’ll ask you to introduce yourself to my name. I’m Mark.

00:28:50 ► §

At length.

00:28:51 ► §

Thank you.

00:28:51 ► §

My name is…

00:28:53 ► §

My name is…

00:28:55 ► §

Your name?

00:28:56 ► §

I’m Kian.

00:28:56 ► §

Kian.

00:28:57 ► §

Again?

00:28:58 ► §

Kian.

00:28:59 ► §

Kian.

00:29:00 ► §

Work the magazine called Head.

00:29:03 ► §

We’re just completing the process of introduction

00:29:06 ► §

where everyone’s introduced themselves

00:29:08 ► §

and we’re introducing each other.

00:29:09 ► §

So I was just talking about Terence.

00:29:11 ► §

Terence once told me that as a child

00:29:14 ► §

he lived in Colorado near a jam factory

00:29:17 ► §

or a fruit bottling plant, I forget which.

00:29:20 ► §

And at night he’d go there

00:29:22 ► §

and out of the night sky

00:29:24 ► §

there was all this fruit

00:29:25 ► §

being made in sheds

00:29:28 ► §

and out of the night sky, out of the darkness

00:29:30 ► §

would appear moths

00:29:32 ► §

of every different description attracted by the bright

00:29:35 ► §

lights of the bottling plants

00:29:36 ► §

and the delicious fruit jam

00:29:38 ► §

or whatever they were making

00:29:39 ► §

and how he used to go and watch there

00:29:42 ► §

is out of the darkness, coloured moths

00:29:44 ► §

just flew in from the sky.

00:29:47 ► §

And it seemed to me a wonderful image of what he does.

00:29:50 ► §

I mean, partly he’s known for his visionary qualities,

00:29:55 ► §

looking for visions which come out of the darkness of the mind, if you like.

00:30:02 ► §

But also he’s quite literally a naturalist, he’s spent years

00:30:06 ► §

travelling through

00:30:08 ► §

Indonesia with his butterfly net

00:30:10 ► §

collecting butterflies

00:30:12 ► §

of various species

00:30:13 ► §

and he’s spent a long time

00:30:15 ► §

exploring the jungles of the Amazon

00:30:18 ► §

and so he’s a kind of naturalist

00:30:22 ► §

of the mind and of nature

00:30:23 ► §

has an extraordinary knowledge of biological subjects,

00:30:29 ► §

including surprising ones like octopuses.

00:30:33 ► §

And at the same time,

00:30:39 ► §

he’s got a curious reductionistic streak in his thinking,

00:30:43 ► §

which can come out under certain conditions.

00:30:45 ► §

He turns into another person

00:30:46 ► §

and can become a savage critic of speculative thought,

00:30:53 ► §

of anything that doesn’t reduce everything

00:30:57 ► §

to the biochemical or molecular level,

00:30:59 ► §

of hallucinatory belief systems,

00:31:04 ► §

of false beliefs of every kind

00:31:07 ► §

and I haven’t quite worked out

00:31:10 ► §

what conditions bring about this phase change

00:31:13 ► §

in Terence’s being

00:31:14 ► §

but you’ll probably see examples of it

00:31:17 ► §

over the weekend

00:31:19 ► §

so he takes on many different personae

00:31:23 ► §

but all of them as Ralph has already indicated,

00:31:29 ► §

come out with this gift of the gap, which comes from his Irish ancestry and also from his Welsh ancestry.

00:31:36 ► §

He’s a mixture of Irish and Welsh.

00:31:40 ► §

Anyway, it’s always a great stimulation to talk to Terence, and you never quite know

00:31:49 ► §

where it’s going to take you, except that sooner or later it takes you to the 21st of

00:31:54 ► §

December 2012, when it’s his fixed belief that the world as we know it will come to

00:31:59 ► §

an end. So part of him is a millenarian prophet, part of him is a Dominican, he professes to

00:32:09 ► §

be a pagan but his Catholic upbringing, his Dominican reasoning and his experience as

00:32:16 ► §

an altar boy have never left him. And in his vision of the end of the world in 2012

00:32:25 ► §

and of the entire historical process throughout the whole of evolutionary history

00:32:30 ► §

being drawn towards some culminating point, namely 2012

00:32:35 ► §

he has a vision of the end which exceeds in zeal and fervour that of

00:32:45 ► §

a great many professional preachers

00:32:48 ► §

of this sort of

00:32:50 ► §

belief

00:32:50 ► §

and although he appears at times

00:32:54 ► §

to be reasonable

00:32:55 ► §

at other times to be

00:32:57 ► §

open to new ideas and so on

00:33:00 ► §

there’s one point

00:33:02 ► §

which is fixed in all this which is

00:33:04 ► §

it’s all going to come

00:33:05 ► §

to an end in 2012. Sometimes this apocalyptic view is tempered by a utopian view that it

00:33:16 ► §

wouldn’t all come to an end in 2012, or at least it needn’t if people all started taking

00:33:22 ► §

DMT or other substances. But then it turns out that if you actually try to envisage what would happen

00:33:29 ► §

in the total change of consciousness in human beings in the entire cosmos in 2012,

00:33:34 ► §

it would be just like everyone taking DMT.

00:33:39 ► §

So these themes weave together, but they always come to the same conclusion.

00:33:44 ► §

So these themes weave together, but they always come to the same conclusion. But it’s put forward in such an extraordinarily varied set of ways,

00:33:49 ► §

in kaleidoscopic forms, that one’s always amazed

00:33:53 ► §

how many different ways there can be of putting over a simple, single idea.

00:34:03 ► §

I’ll forswear the desire to rebut.

00:34:09 ► §

Yes, I’ll yield to the momentum of the program.

00:34:15 ► §

I think I first heard of Ralph years before I met him,

00:34:20 ► §

and it had nothing to do with his professional mathematical accomplishments,

00:34:26 ► §

which are many, but a person who had made a great contribution to the 60s youth rebellion

00:34:35 ► §

in the United States had come upon such bad times that he was essentially living on the street, a brilliant Princeton biochemist.

00:34:49 ► §

And in inquiring after his fate

00:34:53 ► §

and knowing that he had become an indigent person,

00:34:57 ► §

I learned that a mathematician in Santa Cruz

00:35:00 ► §

had invited him into his home and taken care of him

00:35:04 ► §

like a child or a son

00:35:07 ► §

for several years.

00:35:10 ► §

And that fact and an infamous photograph

00:35:16 ► §

taken at the height of the 60s youth revolt,

00:35:20 ► §

which was published far and wide in the United States,

00:35:28 ► §

Revolt which was published far and wide in the United States inflamed and outraged the population because this photograph showed a full professor of

00:35:34 ► §

mathematics leading the charge at the barricades of the revolution attired in

00:35:41 ► §

a flag made of the flag of the United States of America.

00:35:47 ► §

And if you follow American politics, you know we hang for flag desecration.

00:35:54 ► §

So it was an extraordinary thing, a member of the establishment,

00:35:59 ► §

to be caught out in this kind of behavior.

00:36:03 ► §

And then a few years later, in 1972, a person I went to high school with came to me and

00:36:12 ► §

said, there’s someone you absolutely must meet.

00:36:17 ► §

Well, usually when I hear these words, I make an automatic inner decision to, at all costs,

00:36:26 ► §

words, I make an automatic inner decision to, at all costs, to avoid meeting whatever is being offered, because experience is a hard teacher. But this friend of mine persisted,

00:36:36 ► §

and eventually Ralph came to see me. I was living in Berkeley at the time. And it’s impossible not to fall in love with the man.

00:36:47 ► §

He’s the teddy bear of advanced mathematics.

00:36:53 ► §

And a person of extraordinary history and accomplishment.

00:37:01 ► §

He grew up in Vermont, which is one of the poorest and least populated of the American

00:37:08 ► §

states.

00:37:09 ► §

It is truly a remote area.

00:37:13 ► §

And there he gained a love of skiing.

00:37:18 ► §

He I don’t really recall the early details of his career, but I remember I was extraordinarily impressed by the news

00:37:26 ► §

that he had been a fellow of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies,

00:37:32 ► §

where the only other person I was aware of who ever held that title was Albert Einstein.

00:37:39 ► §

No, Ralph didn’t get Einstein’s office,

00:37:42 ► §

but I think he got his bicycle stand, his consolation prize.

00:37:49 ► §

And Ralph was such a maverick, such a chance taker,

00:37:56 ► §

that the tremendously comfortable world of East Coast collegiate mathematics held no sway over him when an opportunity arose to go to California,

00:38:12 ► §

where the University of California was establishing an experimental campus

00:38:18 ► §

with where all kinds of advanced experimental educational ideas would be tried out.

00:38:28 ► §

Ralph was there either in the first year of its operation or very shortly after.

00:38:34 ► §

He, I hope it’s all right to tell this, Ralph, because it impressed me.

00:38:41 ► §

Before he, eventually he had tenure, but he was so loathed by the administration for

00:38:48 ► §

his political activism that I think for 35 years they gave him no raise. They couldn’t

00:38:56 ► §

fire him, but they could make life hell. And he stuck with it until now I think even the most hardcore of the administration

00:39:06 ► §

recognized that in Ralph they have a real gem,

00:39:10 ► §

one of the major thinkers and contributors to what may seem like an arcane field,

00:39:18 ► §

research mathematics.

00:39:20 ► §

But in fact mathematics rules the world from far, far behind the throne.

00:39:27 ► §

Ralph estimated to me at one time that there are only aboutthinking, extraordinarily creative in the abstract realm,

00:39:50 ► §

but never without a human dimension.

00:39:55 ► §

And mathematicians are extraordinary esthetes.

00:39:59 ► §

This is not a quality in your work that is respected in mathematics.

00:40:10 ► §

The more abstruse, the more incomprehensible, the more removed from the human world,

00:40:14 ► §

the more kudos your colleagues will shower upon you. Ralph has made major contributions in the area of model building for natural phenomena.

00:40:21 ► §

natural phenomena everything from

00:40:23 ► §

population theory

00:40:26 ► §

to models

00:40:28 ► §

that prove the impossibility

00:40:29 ► §

of monogamy

00:40:30 ► §

to models of the functioning

00:40:33 ► §

of anorexia nervosa

00:40:35 ► §

and so forth

00:40:37 ► §

an extraordinary rich

00:40:40 ► §

and varied career

00:40:41 ► §

Indian musician

00:40:43 ► §

student of the magical systems

00:40:48 ► §

of the Renaissance

00:40:49 ► §

and of Dr. D,

00:40:51 ► §

founding member of the John D. Society,

00:40:55 ► §

founder of the Institute for Global Analysis,

00:41:02 ► §

IGA, yes,

00:41:03 ► §

and founder of the Institute

00:41:06 ► §

for Visual Mathematics

00:41:08 ► §

the author of several

00:41:10 ► §

books on

00:41:11 ► §

dynamics that have brought

00:41:14 ► §

dynamics from the

00:41:16 ► §

closet of obscurity

00:41:18 ► §

into a field

00:41:20 ► §

that many many people are

00:41:22 ► §

conversant with, largely

00:41:24 ► §

through Ralph’s books and the

00:41:26 ► §

illustrations of them by Chris Shaw. He is not simply a worker on the fringes of advanced

00:41:35 ► §

mathematics. He is author of Foundations of Mechanics. And I dare say anybody who’s written a book titled The Foundations of Anything gets a lot of respect from me.

00:41:49 ► §

Ralph has been an extraordinary friend over the years.

00:41:54 ► §

We see each other as often as our busy lives permit.

00:42:00 ► §

And I go to him not for insight into advanced mathematics, which other than my own narrow interests in the field remains arcane, but for his insight into the human condition. always has very insightful advice and he is

00:42:26 ► §

above all an

00:42:28 ► §

extraordinary human being

00:42:29 ► §

so there you have it

00:42:33 ► §

three white guys on

00:42:36 ► §

a roll

00:42:36 ► §

baby into the

00:42:40 ► §

dusk

00:42:40 ► §

do you want me to do something about the lights

00:42:43 ► §

yes

00:42:43 ► §

I think maybe we better have the lights lights which will be gone for a while?

00:42:45 ► §

Yes.

00:42:46 ► §

I think maybe we better have the lights on. I wanted to ask for a consensus on this question

00:42:49 ► §

but it’s impossible in the dark.

00:42:53 ► §

It’s just ten.

00:42:54 ► §

It’s getting sleep.

00:42:55 ► §

It’s just ten.

00:42:58 ► §

Whoa.

00:43:00 ► §

No, that’s fine.

00:43:02 ► §

That’s good.

00:43:03 ► §

No, the other one’s better.

00:43:15 ► §

All right. There are people in the room it was beginning to sound like an induction we’ve never done that before

00:43:17 ► §

and we’ll never do it again

00:43:18 ► §

but I’m glad we did it once.

00:43:27 ► §

It was very interesting, to us at least.

00:43:30 ► §

You might be curious to know what we’re going to do next,

00:43:34 ► §

et cetera, et cetera.

00:43:35 ► §

And we have a scheduled plan for tomorrow.

00:43:38 ► §

I think it’s best if I share it with you.

00:43:42 ► §

We want to meet three times tomorrow for

00:43:45 ► §

sessions. You know, we’ve had

00:43:48 ► §

as we said

00:43:49 ► §

private trilogues over a

00:43:52 ► §

decade. We’ve had public

00:43:53 ► §

trilogues twice before. This

00:43:55 ► §

will be the third. And so

00:43:57 ► §

basically we are following

00:44:00 ► §

the plan of the

00:44:02 ► §

other two because they were

00:44:03 ► §

more or less successful.

00:44:08 ► §

But on the other hand, they were in California, so that’s not a totally inappropriate plan. However,

00:44:12 ► §

we can start with this.

00:44:14 ► §

Yes, science.

00:44:17 ► §

And the focus of this book is on

00:44:21 ► §

areas of research which have been either completely or largely

00:44:26 ► §

neglected because they simply don’t fit in to the present view of the world. And because

00:44:32 ► §

they’ve been so neglected by orthodox institutional science, there are quite simple experiments

00:44:41 ► §

to open up these fields that could be done,

00:44:47 ► §

in many cases for budgets of less than £10.

00:44:53 ► §

And as soon as one realises that important research can be cheap,

00:44:59 ► §

then the terrible Stalinist restrictions that institutional science has, you can’t do it unless you’ve got approval, peer reviews, grants, committees and so on.

00:45:06 ► §

Terrible stranglehold of orthodoxy. But if you can do things cheaply, you’re completely free, because the only control

00:45:11 ► §

they have is through money, giving out funds. And if you don’t need the funds, you can do

00:45:15 ► §

what you like. And science in the past grew out of a fertile field of amateur research,

00:45:22 ► §

even as eminent a scientist as Charles Darwin, never had a

00:45:26 ► §

government grant or an academic post. He lived as a private man, a gentleman in his own house

00:45:32 ► §

and did most of his research in the garden with his son Francis. Well, he also kept pigeons.

00:45:39 ► §

Now, homing pigeons are kept by 200,000 people in Britain. It’s largely a working class sport.

00:45:46 ► §

It doesn’t cost much, but it does cost more than £10.

00:45:49 ► §

This experiment would cost about £350, the one I’m going to talk about.

00:45:55 ► §

But this is one of the experiments in the book.

00:45:58 ► §

It’s the one with which the book opens, or almost opens.

00:46:04 ► §

And the reason I wanted to talk about it today

00:46:07 ► §

is because I haven’t yet discussed this with Ralph and Terence

00:46:11 ► §

and the present state of play which I’m going to summarise now

00:46:16 ► §

shows that there have been investigations of homing pigeons

00:46:21 ► §

it’s one of the few areas where research has been done

00:46:23 ► §

and it’s led to the conclusion that we really do not know. We haven’t a clue how they do it.

00:46:30 ► §

And in this state of the utterly unknown, I don’t know how they do it either. So I was hoping that

00:46:37 ► §

by talking about it with Ralph and Terence, it might become clearer or possibly even more obscure.

00:46:43 ► §

it might become clearer or possibly even more obscure.

00:46:51 ► §

At any rate, it’s something that I really want to discuss with them and this is the opportunity to do it

00:46:52 ► §

and I hope you’ll all find this of interest too

00:46:55 ► §

because the situation we’re in is one of an acknowledged fact.

00:47:02 ► §

Pigeons can home from huge distances.

00:47:04 ► §

You can take a pigeon, a homing

00:47:06 ► §

pigeon, 700 miles from its loft and release it and it’ll be home that evening if it’s

00:47:12 ► §

a fast flying bird. Pigeon racing enthusiasts do this regularly. Every Saturday, today for

00:47:21 ► §

example, in the spring and the summer,

00:47:25 ► §

people are racing pigeons.

00:47:26 ► §

Sometimes pigeon racing clubs have been released

00:47:29 ► §

in northern Spain, sometimes they take them

00:47:32 ► §

to the north of Scotland, sometimes they’re released

00:47:35 ► §

in other parts of the continent.

00:47:37 ► §

And they’re taken away, they’re taken in baskets

00:47:42 ► §

on cranes or on lorries.

00:47:44 ► §

They’re released, the baskets are opened,

00:47:46 ► §

the pigeons circle around and they fly straight home.

00:47:50 ► §

And then the people whose pigeons come back fastest,

00:47:53 ► §

they have a little time clock,

00:47:55 ► §

and there’s a thing on the leg of the pigeon they stamp.

00:47:57 ► §

Then they calculate the exact distance to that owner’s loft

00:48:01 ► §

and work out the speed.

00:48:02 ► §

The ones that come first win the prize.

00:48:04 ► §

It’s a very competitive sport.

00:48:07 ► §

They win cups, there are cash prizes.

00:48:10 ► §

Good racing birds can sell for as much as £5,000 for breeding.

00:48:14 ► §

Ordinary ones cost about £5.

00:48:17 ► §

Anyway, here’s a phenomenon.

00:48:20 ► §

Everyone agrees they can do it.

00:48:22 ► §

And moreover, it’s part of a much wider phenomenon.

00:48:24 ► §

Dogs and cats can home if you live a long way away from home.

00:48:28 ► §

Even cows can home.

00:48:30 ► §

Thousands of other species of birds and animals can home.

00:48:33 ► §

It’s very widespread.

00:48:35 ► §

It’s just the pigeons are the best known example.

00:48:38 ► §

Now, how do they do it?

00:48:41 ► §

Well, Charles Darwin was one of the first

00:48:43 ► §

to put forward a theory.

00:48:44 ► §

He said, well, maybe they do it by remembering all the twists and turns of the outward journey.

00:48:50 ► §

This theory was tested, and to test it, people anesthetized pigeons, put them in rotating

00:48:57 ► §

drums and drove them in vans, sealed, closed vans, by very devious routes, to the point of release.

00:49:06 ► §

And when the pigeons came round from the anesthetic

00:49:09 ► §

and overcame the ill effects of this treatment

00:49:11 ► §

on the way out, when they were released,

00:49:14 ► §

they circled around and flew straight home.

00:49:19 ► §

So nobody any longer believes that’s possible.

00:49:22 ► §

They can’t remember the twists and turns

00:49:24 ► §

of the upward journey.

00:49:25 ► §

This experiment’s been done many times,

00:49:28 ► §

sometimes with slow rotating drums,

00:49:30 ► §

sometimes with drums rotating so fast

00:49:33 ► §

that the poor birds are sort of centrifuged

00:49:35 ► §

against the edges of the drum.

00:49:38 ► §

And despite these appalling maltreatments,

00:49:40 ► §

the pigeons go straight home.

00:49:43 ► §

So that’s theory number one.

00:49:46 ► §

That’s not how they do it.

00:49:48 ► §

Second theory,

00:49:50 ► §

that they do it by smell.

00:49:52 ► §

That they sniff the air and sniff

00:49:54 ► §

their home. This of course, smell

00:49:56 ► §

is usually what people propose when

00:49:58 ► §

animals show uncanny powers

00:50:00 ► §

that can’t be explained. They usually say,

00:50:02 ► §

well it must be an extraordinarily good sense of smell.

00:50:05 ► §

Well, this has been tested too.

00:50:07 ► §

First of all, it’s not very plausible.

00:50:08 ► §

If you release a bird in Spain and it flies to England

00:50:12 ► §

and the home is downwind from the point where you release it

00:50:16 ► §

rather than upwind, in other words, it’s flying with the wind,

00:50:19 ► §

there’s no way smells could blow from its loft in England

00:50:22 ► §

to Spain against the wind.

00:50:24 ► §

So this theory is inherently

00:50:26 ► §

implausible. Nevertheless,

00:50:28 ► §

because everything

00:50:30 ► §

else has failed, it’s believed

00:50:31 ► §

impassionately by some researchers in the field,

00:50:34 ► §

particularly the Italians.

00:50:37 ► §

So,

00:50:38 ► §

anyway, this has been

00:50:40 ► §

tested too. People have blocked

00:50:41 ► §

up their nostrils with sealing wax.

00:50:47 ► §

They still get home. They’ve severed their olfactory nerves, poor birds, they still get home. And they’ve anaesthetised

00:50:55 ► §

their nasal mucosa with xylocaine or other local anaesthetics and they still set off

00:51:00 ► §

straight away in the homeward direction and get home. So it’s not smell.

00:51:08 ► §

Next theory, they do it by the sun, somehow calculating the latitude and longitude

00:51:10 ► §

from the sun’s position.

00:51:12 ► §

Well, pigeons can home on cloudy days,

00:51:16 ► §

and they can also be trained to home at night,

00:51:19 ► §

so they don’t need to see the sun or even the stars.

00:51:22 ► §

But if they can see the sun,

00:51:24 ► §

then they use the sun as a kind of rough compass,

00:51:27 ► §

more or less as we would, if you want to keep your bearings,

00:51:30 ► §

keep the sun on your right, that kind of thing.

00:51:34 ► §

And if you shift their time sense by raising them,

00:51:37 ► §

so they’re shifted by six hours,

00:51:40 ► §

they think it’s six hours early,

00:51:42 ► §

you switch on lights early in the morning,

00:51:44 ► §

you cover their cage or loft at six hours early from sunset.

00:51:49 ► §

You can make them think the time’s been shifted by six hours.

00:51:52 ► §

When you release them on a sunny day,

00:51:53 ► §

they set off 90 degrees in the wrong direction.

00:51:57 ► §

So they use the sun as a compass.

00:51:58 ► §

But after a mile or two,

00:51:59 ► §

they realize they’re going the wrong way.

00:52:01 ► §

They change course and go home.

00:52:06 ► §

Landmarks are inherently unfeasible because if you release the birds hundreds of miles from anywhere they’ve been

00:52:12 ► §

before, landmarks couldn’t possibly explain it. Although they undoubtedly use landmarks

00:52:17 ► §

on their way when they’re close to their home, just the final bit. Anyway, this theory also

00:52:23 ► §

has been tested to destruction.

00:52:26 ► §

And this was tested by equipping the pigeons

00:52:29 ► §

with frosted glass contact lenses,

00:52:31 ► §

which meant they couldn’t see anything at all,

00:52:35 ► §

or only the vaguest blur of shapes

00:52:38 ► §

when they were very close.

00:52:41 ► §

And pigeons with frosted glass contact lenses can’t fly very normally.

00:52:47 ► §

They take off and the whole bird points upwards.

00:52:51 ► §

They’re not under ideal conditions for flying.

00:52:55 ► §

But nevertheless, such birds can be released up to 100 miles away or more.

00:53:01 ► §

And some of them get picked off by sparrowhawks,

00:53:03 ► §

who immediately see that they’re flying in a peculiar way

00:53:06 ► §

but others can get within

00:53:10 ► §

two or three hundred yards of the loft

00:53:13 ► §

they crash into trees or telegraph posts

00:53:15 ► §

or flop down on the ground

00:53:17 ► §

within a hundred yards of the loft in some cases

00:53:19 ► §

they need to see for the last hundred yards

00:53:22 ► §

but it’s incredible that they can actually get so close.

00:53:26 ► §

Sometimes they overfly the loft and then within a mile or two realize they’ve gone too far

00:53:30 ► §

and turn around and come back. So it’s not landmarks. And that leaves only magnetism.

00:53:38 ► §

And this again is something until the 70s most scientists were very reluctant to consider

00:53:43 ► §

because previously magnetism as an animal sense

00:53:46 ► §

has been associated with animal magnetism, mesmerism,

00:53:50 ► §

and a whole range of fringe subjects they didn’t want to mess with.

00:53:54 ► §

Plus the fact it seems so unlikely that pigeons could detect

00:53:57 ► §

a field as weak as the Earth’s magnetic field.

00:54:00 ► §

Well, it’s been shown that some migratory birds

00:54:03 ► §

can detect the Earth’s magnetic field.

00:54:06 ► §

They can tell where north and south are from the magnetic field.

00:54:11 ► §

They do seem to have a kind of inherent compass.

00:54:14 ► §

But magnetism can’t explain how they get home,

00:54:18 ► §

because even if they could measure the dip of the compass,

00:54:20 ► §

i.e. the angle towards it dips down,

00:54:23 ► §

at the north pole it points straight down

00:54:25 ► §

and the equator is parallel. If they could measure the dip, they could tell how far north

00:54:29 ► §

or south they’d been taken. But if you took pigeons due east or west, the dip would be

00:54:34 ► §

exactly the same as at home. It wouldn’t give them any information on whether they were

00:54:39 ► §

east, west, or west. And pigeons can home equally well from all compass points. So even in principle,

00:54:46 ► §

the magnet won’t explain it. They do seem to have a kind of vague magnetic compass sense.

00:54:53 ► §

But this wouldn’t explain homing. If you had a magnetic compass in your pocket and you

00:54:57 ► §

were parachuted into a strange place and said, all right, get home, here’s a compass, you

00:55:02 ► §

wouldn’t be able to do it because you’d know where north and south were,

00:55:05 ► §

but you wouldn’t know where home was.

00:55:07 ► §

A compass alone can’t get you home.

00:55:10 ► §

Anyway, to disrupt the magnetic sense,

00:55:13 ► §

pigeons have been treated experimentally in two ways.

00:55:16 ► §

Firstly, they’ve had magnets strapped to them,

00:55:19 ► §

which would, as they flap their wings,

00:55:21 ► §

these moving magnets would totally overwhelm

00:55:23 ► §

the magnetic sense.

00:55:25 ► §

And secondly, they’ve been degaussed

00:55:28 ► §

by being put in extremely strong magnetic fields

00:55:31 ► §

that would demagnetize any magnetically sensitive

00:55:36 ► §

parts within them.

00:55:39 ► §

Well, these demagnetized pigeons

00:55:41 ► §

and pigeons with magnets strapped to them

00:55:43 ► §

to confuse their magnetic sense

00:55:44 ► §

or with magnetic coils over their heads,

00:55:47 ► §

still get home perfectly all right.

00:55:50 ► §

Well, that’s the current state of play.

00:55:54 ► §

Every hypothesis has been tested to destruction.

00:55:57 ► §

They’ve all failed.

00:55:59 ► §

And the remaining ones,

00:56:01 ► §

the only one that you occasionally hear is,

00:56:05 ► §

well, maybe they hear their home from hundreds of miles away

00:56:08 ► §

because of extremely sensitive hearing.

00:56:11 ► §

Even that one won’t work

00:56:13 ► §

because pigeons that can’t hear can still get home.

00:56:18 ► §

So everything has been tried.

00:56:22 ► §

Everything within the last ten years has finally, the most rigorous tests have been done in the last ten years.

00:56:29 ► §

All these theories have failed. Nobody has a clue how they do it.

00:56:33 ► §

And pigeon homing is the tip of the iceberg of a vast range of unexplained biological phenomena which include the migration of swallows,

00:56:41 ► §

how they come back to Hazelwood every year, having flown to Southern Africa in the winter. The migration of cuckoos, the migration of salmon, eels, and so on.

00:56:51 ► §

These are usually explained in terms of smell, the fish runs, which only works really within

00:56:56 ► §

a few miles of the home river. It doesn’t explain how they can get thousands of miles

00:57:00 ► §

through the oceans to the right place. So there’s a huge number of phenomena to do with migratory and homing senses in animals

00:57:09 ► §

which are unexplained.

00:57:11 ► §

And human beings probably have similar powers too.

00:57:15 ► §

Not very well developed in modern urban people, although even some urban people have quite

00:57:21 ► §

a good sense of direction.

00:57:23 ► §

But extremely well developed and nomadic people

00:57:25 ► §

like Australian Aborigines,

00:57:28 ► §

South African Bushmen,

00:57:30 ► §

and also the Polynesian Navigators.

00:57:34 ► §

Now they probably use ordinary senses as well,

00:57:36 ► §

but this is a whole range of unsolved problems

00:57:40 ► §

which is hardly touched by science,

00:57:42 ► §

which leads to the idea that animals,

00:57:44 ► §

and probably we too,

00:57:46 ► §

may have senses of science undreamt of within existing science.

00:57:51 ► §

So that’s the present state of play, and the experiment that I’m proposing is very simple.

00:57:58 ► §

I can outline it briefly.

00:58:00 ► §

I think that the evidence suggests there must be some unknown sense, force or power

00:58:05 ► §

connecting the pigeons to their home.

00:58:08 ► §

Now what it is, I don’t know.

00:58:09 ► §

My image of it is a kind of invisible elastic band

00:58:12 ► §

taken away and stretched and may tend to be pulled back.

00:58:16 ► §

It gives them a kind of directional sense.

00:58:19 ► §

I’m not bothering at the moment about the possible physical basis of this,

00:58:22 ► §

whether it’s part of existing physics,

00:58:24 ► §

whether it’s an extension of non-locality

00:58:27 ► §

in quantum physics,

00:58:28 ► §

whether it requires a new field.

00:58:30 ► §

That question is open.

00:58:32 ► §

But with this simple model of an invisible connection,

00:58:35 ► §

the experiment I’m proposing

00:58:36 ► §

is the converse of those done so far.

00:58:39 ► §

If the pigeon’s connected to its home,

00:58:41 ► §

then the usual experiment involves

00:58:43 ► §

taking the pigeon from the home, and it comes back. My experiment involves taking the home

00:58:49 ► §

from the pigeons. This involves the use of a mobile pigeon loft which is

00:58:55 ► §

essentially a simple pigeon shed mounted on the farm trailer on wheels. They can

00:59:00 ► §

be moved around and I’ve actually done this experiment, first in Ireland and secondly in Suffolk.

00:59:07 ► §

So far, I haven’t been able to carry it past the first phase,

00:59:11 ► §

the training phase.

00:59:13 ► §

I’ve found, however, it’s possible to train pigeons

00:59:15 ► §

to home to a mobile loft.

00:59:17 ► §

They don’t expect their home to move any more than we do.

00:59:20 ► §

And the first time you take them out of it,

00:59:22 ► §

you move their home just 100 yards the first time. And when out of it, you move their home just a hundred yards

00:59:25 ► §

the first time, and when you release them, they can see perfectly well that it’s not

00:59:29 ► §

where it was before, but they go on flying around the place where it was before. It takes

00:59:33 ► §

them hours before they’ll go into the loft in its new position. That’s how we’d behave

00:59:38 ► §

if we went home after being here at Hazelwood and found our home a hundred yards down the

00:59:42 ► §

street. Most of us wouldn’t just go straight in and settle down to it in our letters and so on. We’d probably go

00:59:50 ► §

round and round in circles round the place where it was before and look awfully puzzled.

00:59:54 ► §

Well, that’s what pigeons do. But if you keep doing this, after three or four times, they

00:59:59 ► §

just get used to it. They realise they’re sort of nomads or gypsies now. And they go straight

01:00:05 ► §

in. They’ll find the home up to two or three miles away within ten minutes and go straight

01:00:09 ► §

in. You can do this. And in the First World War, the Belgian, German and British military

01:00:16 ► §

pigeon corps had mobile lofts. The British had 200 mobile lofts and converted London

01:00:22 ► §

buses by the end of the First World War.

01:00:25 ► §

And there is still a mobile pigeon loft research project going on in Europe.

01:00:30 ► §

The Swiss Army is the last army in Europe to have home in pigeons.

01:00:34 ► §

And the head of the officer commanding pigeons, Dr. Hans-Peter Lipp,

01:00:40 ► §

I’m now in correspondence with. He’s at the University of Zurich.

01:00:45 ► §

And he’s carrying out a fascinating research program on military uses of mobile lofts in Switzerland at the moment.

01:00:52 ► §

He and I are exchanging notes on the subject. It’s the only other research project going on of this kind.

01:00:58 ► §

His objectives are quite different though. They’re to find ways of carrying messages more effectively.

01:01:09 ► §

Anyway, the key experiment is you move the mobile loft 50 miles, let’s say,

01:01:12 ► §

after you’ve trained the birds and see if they can find it.

01:01:18 ► §

If you move it downwind from the point of release so they couldn’t smell it,

01:01:22 ► §

and if the pigeons can find it quite quickly, fly straight there,

01:01:30 ► §

then this would suggest there’s an invisible connection between them and their home. The next question is, is it between the loft itself and them and the loft itself or the other pigeons? You leave some of their nearest and

01:01:33 ► §

dearest in the loft. And you can do further experiments then by taking the nearest and

01:01:37 ► §

dearest somewhere else and seeing whether they find the nearest and dearest or whether

01:01:41 ► §

they find the physical structure of the loft. Anyway, this research is relatively cheap.

01:01:49 ► §

I mean, £500 would cover the entire project.

01:01:52 ► §

It’s well within the capacity of the five million pigeon panseers worldwide who keep

01:01:57 ► §

pigeons and are well experienced in dealing with them.

01:02:00 ► §

How the experiment will turn out, I don’t know. But here is a profound mystery, the tip of the iceberg of a whole series of biological mysteries,

01:02:11 ► §

which have been more or less neglected.

01:02:14 ► §

And if there is a new power, force or sense involved, what might it imply? What might it tell us?

01:02:21 ► §

And where would we go from there?

01:02:24 ► §

And that’s the question I wanted to raise with Ralph and Terence. what might it tell us? And where would we go from there?

01:02:28 ► §

And that’s the question I wanted to raise with Ralph and Terence.

01:02:34 ► §

Well, thanks for the question.

01:02:39 ► §

Maybe I could ask you for just a couple of little details first.

01:02:42 ► §

When they race the pigeons,

01:02:48 ► §

and then the winner is the pigeon returning to the home loft first.

01:02:49 ► §

Yes. But these home lofts are all in different cities, different streets, and so on.

01:02:54 ► §

So how does it work?

01:02:58 ► §

The wife of the pigeon racer is at home, and when the mate comes,

01:03:04 ► §

then pulls out the cellular telephone and calls

01:03:07 ► §

headquarters? No, the pigeon, the racing pigeon has a little thing on its leg, a ring for

01:03:13 ► §

the race, with its number and the race number. They all have those when they’re released.

01:03:19 ► §

When it gets into the loft, it actually enters the loft, the pigeon fancier is waiting there,

01:03:23 ► §

he captures the bird, takes this ring off its leg, he has a sealed time clock issued by the local

01:03:29 ► §

racing pigeon federation, he stamps this thing with the time it’s come home, and then they

01:03:34 ► §

all send in these tags with the time stamped by these sealed clocks, and they then calculate

01:03:40 ► §

from the point of release, say it’s Wick in Scotland, they then calculate the distance, straight line distance

01:03:47 ► §

to each of these houses, divide the distance by the time,

01:03:52 ► §

and they get the average speed.

01:03:54 ► §

So there’s no account for difficulties

01:03:56 ► §

and anomalous obstacles encountered along the way,

01:04:00 ► §

like sparrow hawks.

01:04:02 ► §

No, no, well if they’re killed by a sparrow hawk, they don’t win the race.

01:04:07 ► §

Yes.

01:04:09 ► §

One more question about the nearest and dearest.

01:04:12 ► §

Now the home loft that they’re racing to, which is still at home…

01:04:16 ► §

Yes…that has family members in it or not?

01:04:19 ► §

Yes. There’s a whole bunch of pigeons in the loft… Absolutely.

01:04:22 ► §

…and only one of them or two of them are racing.

01:04:24 ► §

There’s three… There’s two… racing. There’s several racing systems used.

01:04:28 ► §

They have to have a motive to get home. If you race them in the winter, they don’t home very well.

01:04:32 ► §

But if you race them, they usually race them in the spring and summer.

01:04:35 ► §

Either when they’ve got eggs and young, so they have an incentive

01:04:40 ► §

to get back to their family. Or there’s another system called the jealousy system

01:04:44 ► §

widely practiced, where pigeons are monogamous.

01:04:49 ► §

They form pairs, at least for the year.

01:04:53 ► §

And it’s a kind of limited monogamy, but at least for that year.

01:04:56 ► §

So they wait until they’ve paired up.

01:04:59 ► §

Then they show, if, say, they’re racing the cockbird,

01:05:02 ► §

they then hold the cockbird and put another cockbird

01:05:06 ► §

with its mate so that the two

01:05:08 ► §

start billing. Disgusting.

01:05:10 ► §

Then they take it in its basket

01:05:12 ► §

to the north of Scotland and release it

01:05:14 ► §

and it gets home real fast.

01:05:20 ► §

Its competitive spirit will stop at nothing.

01:05:23 ► §

And

01:05:24 ► §

does the pigeon home to an empty lot?

01:05:28 ► §

I mean, it requires it to be populated with nearest and dearest.

01:05:31 ► §

I’m thinking of Bell’s theorem.

01:05:33 ► §

I don’t know.

01:05:35 ► §

No pigeon racer would normally home to an empty lot.

01:05:38 ► §

What about Dr. Hans-Peter Lipp of the Swiss Army?

01:05:42 ► §

Yes, he’s done it to an empty lot, and I’ve done it to an empty loft,

01:05:46 ► §

but not over long distances.

01:05:50 ► §

Well, I…

01:05:51 ► §

Yes.

01:05:54 ► §

Has anything happened to the example

01:05:56 ► §

where all this was used?

01:05:58 ► §

To empty lofts?

01:06:00 ► §

I don’t know.

01:06:00 ► §

I’ve only done it over short distances.

01:06:03 ► §

But probably they could have.

01:06:05 ► §

But the thing is, they’re not very…

01:06:06 ► §

Certainly the practical experience…

01:06:09 ► §

Pigeon races have been doing this for a hundred years.

01:06:11 ► §

It’s been a competitive sport.

01:06:14 ► §

They’ve found a long experience that the way to win races

01:06:17 ► §

is to have this easy-to-understand personal motivation, as it were.

01:06:22 ► §

The stronger the motivation, the tighter the elastic band

01:06:27 ► §

yes

01:06:27 ► §

now I’m getting the elastic band theory down

01:06:30 ► §

well alright

01:06:32 ► §

I’m ready to

01:06:33 ► §

risk an answer to the question

01:06:36 ► §

Terence is getting ready to bite

01:06:41 ► §

so first of all I think we could wish for a homing pigeon or monarch butterfly or something that spoke.

01:06:52 ► §

Then we could ask them the question you’re posing, and they’d answer.

01:06:56 ► §

But actually, I wouldn’t trust the answer, because this homing pigeon might also have a theory

01:07:02 ► §

that, like mine, is much too elaborate and unnecessary

01:07:05 ► §

when actually there’s some simpler explanation but they don’t know it.

01:07:10 ► §

For example, the Polynesian navigators, if you ask them how they do it.

01:07:15 ► §

In fact, there was an English navigator who went to the South Pacific and apprenticed himself to a native navigator.

01:07:22 ► §

You know, they go over a hundred miles to the nearest island and get it dead on without compass and on cloudy days and so on. So they

01:07:33 ► §

have a theory, but I don’t believe it. So we’ll just have to make up our own.

01:07:40 ► §

So this is my fantasy that, well, first of all, I’m accepting the premise that ordinary fields don’t do, so it’s a

01:07:50 ► §

kind of an ESP.

01:07:51 ► §

And then we want to learn from doing experiments like you proposed on the phenomenon to get

01:07:56 ► §

an idea what it is or how it works.

01:07:59 ► §

And so this is just a fantasy about that.

01:08:02 ► §

Well, can we focus on the that. Yes.

01:08:07 ► §

Well, I don’t know.

01:08:12 ► §

I’ll try talking a little louder

01:08:14 ► §

and see if that helps.

01:08:17 ► §

So,

01:08:18 ► §

thinking of bats now,

01:08:19 ► §

which have been studied in a room

01:08:21 ► §

just like this one with wires

01:08:23 ► §

just like that.

01:08:25 ► §

And in the daytime, of course, the bat will fly around missing the wires

01:08:30 ► §

and not flying into the wall using vision primarily, we suppose.

01:08:35 ► §

And then at night they do the same thing without vision because of sonar.

01:08:40 ► §

So in this case there is another field explanation and it’s well established that it’s sonar.

01:08:46 ► §

So I suppose based on bats that the brain and the mind are able to image the results

01:08:55 ► §

of sonar experiments in a kind of image which is the same kind of image that the eyes form.

01:09:02 ► §

In other words, that instead of hearing, oh, there’s a sound over there and trying to compute

01:09:06 ► §

that’s an echo and so on, that bat sees the room with its ears in exactly the same representation,

01:09:13 ► §

a three-dimensional visual representation that’s dynamic, that it can fly through its

01:09:18 ► §

own sonar receptions and that the representations are the same.

01:09:22 ► §

Then if somebody suddenly turned the lights on,

01:09:26 ► §

the bat would not hesitate and fall to the ground

01:09:28 ► §

because it has to switch from system A to system B,

01:09:31 ► §

that the visual representation of the room would exactly overlay

01:09:35 ► §

precisely the same image as the sonar image of the room.

01:09:40 ► §

Similarly, dolphins, they have this melon that’s called a huge sensory organ and receives sonar waves,

01:09:48 ► §

and they form a visual type.

01:09:51 ► §

This is just a speculation.

01:09:53 ► §

And both in the case of bats and dolphins, the visual representation is three-dimensional, more than ours,

01:10:00 ► §

which gives them, in a way, a kind of a higher IQ.

01:10:09 ► §

Then that’s a way of seeing.

01:10:12 ► §

In other words, for bats and dolphins, in the case of dolphins and whales,

01:10:19 ► §

they can see almost the entire planet as a three-dimensional object with its curvature and so on.

01:10:25 ► §

So if there were a sixth sense that homing pigeons and monarch butterflies have, and maybe we do too to a degree, then I would suppose that it works like that.

01:10:32 ► §

So after the pigeon is rotated, doped, transported 4,000 miles and released,

01:10:40 ► §

then with its sixth sense it’s seeing a very detailed three-dimensional road map

01:10:46 ► §

of the entire planet, essentially, which is there in this field somehow, just as we consult

01:10:52 ► §

the road map.

01:10:53 ► §

First of all, it has to orient the road map, the holographic three-dimensional image of

01:11:01 ► §

its world, where the visual world, when it looks,

01:11:05 ► §

has to sort of rotate things around and get them aligned,

01:11:08 ► §

and after that first step, it can then fly in the map.

01:11:12 ► §

And then things like smells, which are smells,

01:11:16 ► §

the sun, the magnetic field, these things are factors,

01:11:19 ► §

and they would be kind of labeled on the map

01:11:22 ► §

by the road association.

01:11:30 ► §

And so this still doesn’t explain how to get home, though, because you have to know where home is marked.

01:11:31 ► §

Like, how many times have you parked your car in the three-level structure, and then

01:11:34 ► §

you come out of the department store after too much shopping, you can’t remember where

01:11:38 ► §

the car is.

01:11:39 ► §

But you know the map of the three-dimensional garage.

01:11:42 ► §

It has three floors.

01:11:44 ► §

They’re square.

01:11:45 ► §

They’re labeled.

01:11:45 ► §

There’s north, south, east, and west.

01:11:47 ► §

And you can navigate anywhere to a known position in the garage.

01:11:51 ► §

However, the position of your own home is unknown.

01:11:55 ► §

Therefore, you don’t know how to find the car.

01:11:58 ► §

So given the sixth sense with a complete road map of the world as a three dimensional object containing smells

01:12:05 ► §

containing trees, containing

01:12:08 ► §

magnetic fields, containing

01:12:10 ► §

the sun and the motion

01:12:12 ► §

of the zodiac and the celestial

01:12:14 ► §

the polar

01:12:15 ► §

constellations and so on

01:12:17 ► §

still there must be some kind of

01:12:20 ► §

beacon

01:12:22 ► §

where the home is supposed to be

01:12:24 ► §

so even in the sixth field

01:12:26 ► §

sixth sense theory

01:12:27 ► §

that’s still a mystery

01:12:30 ► §

now we’ve got to the point where you could

01:12:32 ► §

speak to the pigeon and ask

01:12:33 ► §

how is home represented on this

01:12:35 ► §

map

01:12:36 ► §

and the pull of a rubber band

01:12:40 ► §

is one idea

01:12:42 ► §

but I have a feeling that if there is

01:12:44 ► §

an obstacle, a serious obstacle,

01:12:49 ► §

between the pigeon and the loft, then it will find a way around.

01:12:53 ► §

It does.

01:12:54 ► §

It does. See, so it’s better to have a map than a rubber band. I think the rubber

01:12:58 ► §

band theory is too simple. Also, the rubber band, well, considering jealousy and so on, I don’t know, but the

01:13:07 ► §

rubber band, the longer it’s pulled, the tighter it is. And that’s the opposite of most fields

01:13:12 ► §

that we know, where the farther you get away from home, the weaker is the pull. So I would

01:13:19 ► §

think that it more or less appears as a beacon, that part of this field. And the question would be, how is the physical information of a location,

01:13:29 ► §

especially a recently moved location,

01:13:34 ► §

inserted into the field?

01:13:35 ► §

That would be sort of a final mystery in this picture.

01:13:39 ► §

What do I think?

01:13:41 ► §

Well, not that.

01:13:40 ► §

What do I think?

01:13:43 ► §

Well, not that.

01:13:51 ► §

It seems to me, if I can download this into language, that the problem is not with the pigeon.

01:13:55 ► §

The problem is with the experimenter.

01:13:59 ► §

That we know from studying quantum mechanics that things are not simply located in space and time.

01:14:12 ► §

This is what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

01:14:25 ► §

I’ve always felt that what biology is, is a strategy, a chemical strategy,

01:14:28 ► §

for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy

01:14:33 ► §

into macro-physical systems called living organisms,

01:14:39 ► §

and that living organisms somehow work their magic

01:14:43 ► §

by opening a doorway to the quantum realm

01:14:47 ► §

through which indeterminacy can come.

01:14:50 ► §

And I imagine that all nature works like this with the single exception of human beings

01:15:02 ► §

who have been poisoned by language.

01:15:05 ► §

And that language has inculcated in us the very strong illusion of an unknown future.

01:15:15 ► §

But that, in fact, the future is not unknowable if you can decondition yourself from the assumption of spatial concreteness.

01:15:28 ► §

So the answer to how the pigeon finds its way home is that a portion of the pigeon’s

01:15:35 ► §

mind is already home and never left home.

01:15:40 ► §

And that we gazing at this assume that pigeons, monarch butterflies, so forth, are simpler systems than ourselves.

01:15:50 ► §

But in fact, our assumption of the unknowability of the future creates a problem here where there is no problem.

01:16:03 ► §

creates a problem here where there is no problem,

01:16:07 ► §

and that it’s only in the domain of language,

01:16:10 ► §

and perhaps only in the domain of certain languages,

01:16:14 ► §

that this can become a problem.

01:16:19 ► §

To put it simply, I assume that if you are a pigeon,

01:16:23 ► §

we speak here of asking the pigeon,

01:16:25 ► §

if you had the consciousness of a pigeon you would not have a diminutive form of human consciousness

01:16:30 ► §

you would have a consciousness

01:16:31 ► §

that we can obviously based on this discussion

01:16:35 ► §

barely conceive of

01:16:37 ► §

because the consciousness of the pigeon

01:16:40 ► §

is a continual awareness extending from egg to death.

01:16:46 ► §

And the particular moment in space and time

01:16:49 ► §

in which an English-speaking person confronts a pigeon

01:16:52 ► §

is, for the pigeon, not noticeably distinct

01:16:58 ► §

from all the other serial moments of its life.

01:17:02 ► §

So the problem is in the way the question is asked and

01:17:08 ► §

in the way human beings interpret the data that is deployed in front of them. After all,

01:17:15 ► §

in the animal world, the future is always rather like the past because novelty is rather suppressed in the animal world.

01:17:27 ► §

Most things that happen have happened before and will happen again.

01:17:32 ► §

So my expectation would simply be that what we’re seeing when we confront these kinds

01:17:41 ► §

of edge phenomenon in biology is the beginning of a set of phenomena

01:17:47 ► §

which, when correctly interpreted, will bring the idea of quantum mechanical biology out

01:17:55 ► §

of the realm of charge transfer and intercellular and subcellular activity and into the domain

01:18:04 ► §

of the whole organism.

01:18:06 ► §

I’m not sure this is the solution, but it does cause the problem to disappear.

01:18:12 ► §

Exactly. It’s not the solution, but it causes the question to go away.

01:18:18 ► §

I wish I could say that Rupert and I had…

01:18:21 ► §

I thought that’s what solutions were supposed to be.

01:18:23 ► §

I thought that’s what solutions were supposed to be.

01:18:30 ► §

If Rupert and I had got together last night and tried to predict what you would say,

01:18:35 ► §

then I would have bet on that, but still you exceeded my worst expectations.

01:18:46 ► §

Are you saying, have I got this right, that the entire life history of the pigeon is more or less determined at the outset,

01:18:49 ► §

including the trip away from the loft and the trip back.

01:18:53 ► §

So as a matter of fact… It never went anywhere.

01:18:54 ► §

It never went anywhere.

01:18:55 ► §

Yes.

01:18:56 ► §

That’s what I thought.

01:18:58 ► §

It’s only when you have a three-dimensional grid imposed by language laid over this that there appears to be a problem

01:19:07 ► §

in other words there is a some kind of a totality about it but we section it and deny it and then

01:19:15 ► §

we come up with a dilemma what about the pigeons that get picked off by sparrowhawks on the way

01:19:21 ► §

that was predetermined as well they They doubtless saw that as well.

01:19:27 ► §

They were born under Scorpio.

01:19:29 ► §

What can you do?

01:19:30 ► §

Well, I mean, I offer,

01:19:33 ► §

it’s not entirely facetious.

01:19:36 ► §

The real question I’m raising is

01:19:38 ► §

to what degree does language

01:19:40 ► §

create the assumption of an unknown future?

01:19:44 ► §

To what degree does it somehow dampen

01:19:51 ► §

a sense of the future that I imagine is very highly evolved

01:19:55 ► §

in the absence of language?

01:20:00 ► §

I still can’t grasp it.

01:20:01 ► §

Do you mean that when the pigeon’s released,

01:20:04 ► §

part of its mind is still at home, its return home is in the future, and in some sense that helps it to get home?

01:20:12 ► §

Yes, you and I have talked about this before. You’ve always said the morphogenetic fields drive push from behind.

01:20:22 ► §

No, I’ve always said they pull from in front.

01:20:25 ► §

Oh, well, so then, yes, so they’re attractors.

01:20:28 ► §

Well, so this is partly that,

01:20:31 ► §

and partly that the consciousness of the organism

01:20:34 ► §

is distributed in time in a way that makes it capable

01:20:39 ► §

of doing miracles from our point of view,

01:20:42 ► §

but from its own point of view, there’s nothing unusual

01:20:46 ► §

going on here at all. Well, you wouldn’t be at all surprised then if, as a matter of fact,

01:20:52 ► §

the race was won by the clever pigeon that actually vanished at the point of release

01:20:57 ► §

and simultaneously appeared back in the law. Well, if you’re suggesting some kind of virtual tunneling

01:21:06 ► §

as an amplified

01:21:08 ► §

quantum mechanical effect,

01:21:11 ► §

perhaps

01:21:12 ► §

we have the

01:21:13 ► §

solution to spontaneous

01:21:15 ► §

combustion here well in hand

01:21:18 ► §

or something like that.

01:21:20 ► §

But I still think

01:21:22 ► §

it’s different whether the future is

01:21:24 ► §

totally determined or if the consciousness of the future includes several alternatives.

01:21:29 ► §

And in case it contains several alternatives, then sooner or later the pigeon will be presented by a fork in the road

01:21:37 ► §

and have to decide which way to go.

01:21:40 ► §

Furthermore, the pigeon, if it had control of all physical levels, would not

01:21:47 ► §

have to fly. But here we see the poor guy is lumbering along, gets tired, stops for

01:21:53 ► §

food and so on. We imagine this is at least the fundamental assumption for our discussion

01:22:01 ► §

that pigeon flight is subject to our own concept of the world, including

01:22:06 ► §

the laws of physics and so on, much as we feel they should be extended and want to extend

01:22:11 ► §

them by studying pigeons and doing these experiments. The idea is to somehow modify our view of

01:22:19 ► §

the world by engulfing the pigeon view of the world for our greater benefit.

01:22:35 ► §

So I think there’s still missing here some kind of mechanism for the pigeon to follow this line,

01:22:43 ► §

this stretched rubber band of its own consciousness that occupies an extended region of space and time to follow it so that his ordinary physical

01:22:45 ► §

body ends up back where his consciousness is. How does it do it?

01:22:54 ► §

Well, an analogy would be, you know, when you run a cartoon or a film backwards, there’s

01:23:03 ► §

a spectacle of wild confusion,

01:23:06 ► §

but miraculously everything manages to end up

01:23:09 ► §

in the right place.

01:23:11 ► §

So what we had, it isn’t that there really aren’t choices.

01:23:17 ► §

For a pigeon, when it comes into awareness,

01:23:22 ► §

it comes into all the awareness it will ever have.

01:23:26 ► §

It’s like getting your memories at the moment of birth,

01:23:29 ► §

your deathbed memories handed to you at the moment of birth.

01:23:33 ► §

So then essentially for the pigeon, it’s a kind of play.

01:23:39 ► §

It knows what’s going to happen.

01:23:42 ► §

It doesn’t even know that it knows what’s going to happen

01:23:45 ► §

because that’s the nature of its perception,

01:23:47 ► §

a complete spectrum of understanding of its entire life.

01:23:51 ► §

And then it goes through it and it unfolds as anticipated,

01:23:56 ► §

although the pigeon doesn’t have the concept anticipated.

01:23:59 ► §

We looking at it have that concept.

01:24:03 ► §

And we alone, I I think are tormented

01:24:06 ► §

by the anxiety

01:24:07 ► §

of the unknowable

01:24:09 ► §

future and it’s an artifact

01:24:12 ► §

I maintain of

01:24:14 ► §

culture and language

01:24:15 ► §

and so it has given us

01:24:18 ► §

and we impute it

01:24:20 ► §

to the rest of nature

01:24:21 ► §

but in fact things like monarch butterflies

01:24:24 ► §

pigeon homing, and

01:24:26 ► §

some of these other phenomena are clues to us that imputing our consciousness into nature

01:24:34 ► §

creates problems like the one we’re discussing here.

01:24:39 ► §

I don’t know exactly why you resist this, because I think it’s simply a more elegant

01:24:43 ► §

statement of the rubber band theory

01:24:46 ► §

well that means that except for

01:24:48 ► §

our ignorance caused by

01:24:50 ► §

the

01:24:50 ► §

power of language that

01:24:53 ► §

we would have the consciousness

01:24:56 ► §

of a pigeon and therefore

01:24:57 ► §

see our entire

01:24:59 ► §

lifetime so this according

01:25:02 ► §

to this view

01:25:02 ► §

the baby pigeon check upon pecking out of the shell,

01:25:08 ► §

is like waking from a dream, looking around and realizing that, oh damn, I’m the one that’s

01:25:16 ► §

going to have to race three years from now, and they’re going to put this other jerk in

01:25:20 ► §

there with my mate.

01:25:21 ► §

Well, but you see, you use language to portray

01:25:25 ► §

the state of mind of the pigeon

01:25:27 ► §

that immediately collapses

01:25:30 ► §

its four-dimensional vector

01:25:31 ► §

into three dimensions, and then it becomes

01:25:33 ► §

no longer a pigeon, but

01:25:35 ► §

a person talking

01:25:37 ► §

like a pigeon.

01:25:38 ► §

Is the pigeon then aware or unaware

01:25:41 ► §

of its entire history from birth

01:25:43 ► §

till death? It’s aware, but it’s not aware that it’s a history.

01:25:49 ► §

You see, history is a…

01:25:51 ► §

One timeless moment.

01:25:52 ► §

One timeless moment.

01:25:53 ► §

And we could go further with this and say

01:25:57 ► §

this explains our own curious relationship

01:26:01 ► §

to the prophetic and the anticipated

01:26:04 ► §

instead of, like the pigeon

01:26:06 ► §

having a 95% clear view of the full spectrum of its existence by opting into

01:26:15 ► §

language we have perhaps a 5% view of the future so we’re tormented by

01:26:21 ► §

Messiah’s prophecies we lean toward astrology and computer modeling

01:26:28 ► §

and all of these advanced tools then give us a very weak and wavering math of the future

01:26:38 ► §

which we nevertheless pay great credence to to worry a great deal about. I’m suggesting that theoretically,

01:26:46 ► §

if we could step away from language,

01:26:49 ► §

and perhaps this is what Zen anchorites

01:26:53 ► §

and people like that do,

01:26:54 ► §

that isn’t this what they teach,

01:26:56 ► §

that you fall into a timeless realm

01:26:59 ► §

where there is no threat

01:27:02 ► §

and all things are seen with a kind of great leveling and anxiety leaves the circuit.

01:27:10 ► §

So I’m suggesting, you know, one more version of the fall,

01:27:15 ► §

that from the fourth dimensional world of nature complete in time,

01:27:20 ► §

we fell into the limited world of language and an unclear future and hence great anxiety

01:27:28 ► §

about that and hence conundrums like how do the pigeons find their way home well this suggests

01:27:35 ► §

that we should stop talking and writing books and just hum i’ve always felt that.

01:27:48 ► §

Rather like a pigeon.

01:27:49 ► §

Does this imply, I mean, is this as I

01:27:52 ► §

suspect a polite way of

01:27:54 ► §

saying that Rupert’s current

01:27:55 ► §

book and the homing pigeon

01:27:58 ► §

experiment is a total waste of time

01:28:00 ► §

and even if it only costs ten pounds

01:28:02 ► §

it’s a shame?

01:28:04 ► §

Well, that’s a wider issue but you know

01:28:07 ► §

you know very well that i think experiment as currently understood is futile because all

01:28:19 ► §

experiments including i assume all the experiments in ru’s book, make the assumption that time is invariant.

01:28:28 ► §

And I don’t believe that time is invariant.

01:28:32 ► §

So we’re now going to, I mean, I didn’t intend to open this up

01:28:36 ► §

as a general frontal attack on the epistemic methods of modern science,

01:28:41 ► §

but in fact, the idea that time is invariant is entirely contradicted

01:28:49 ► §

by our own experience, and it’s merely an assumption science makes in order to do its

01:28:55 ► §

business.

01:28:56 ► §

I believe that we have a case here of multiple personality in action, and now I’m going to

01:29:02 ► §

undertake to prove it.

01:29:01 ► §

of multiple personality in action,

01:29:04 ► §

and now I’m going to undertake to prove it.

01:29:09 ► §

So it’s supposed that Rupert had in his book an eighth chapter,

01:29:11 ► §

an experiment with homeopathic medicine.

01:29:14 ► §

And this experiment was done,

01:29:17 ► §

and the outcome of it was that

01:29:19 ► §

a flower power was discovered

01:29:21 ► §

which absolutely and instantly cures hay fever,

01:29:26 ► §

then you would be interested in the result of the experiment or not?

01:29:31 ► §

Sure.

01:29:33 ► §

I rest my case.

01:29:35 ► §

Well, as a practical matter,

01:29:39 ► §

I don’t think we should confuse our ideologies with our sinuses.

01:29:53 ► §

No, you see, I would like to redefine science as the study of those phenomena so crude

01:30:05 ► §

that the time in which they are embedded is without consequence.

01:30:17 ► §

You’ve really got to love Terence McKenna, don’t you?

01:30:20 ► §

He can think those great lofty thoughts,

01:30:23 ► §

and then when it suits him, he can say something like,

01:30:26 ► §

As a practical matter, I don’t think we should confuse our ideologies with our sinuses.

01:30:32 ► §

Sometimes when I listen to Terrence, I think he’s actually reciting from Alice in Wonderland,

01:30:37 ► §

the way he can whiplash my mind with those sudden idea shifts.

01:30:41 ► §

And I guess I probably should have warned you that Rupert was going to go on

01:30:45 ► §

what I thought was an insufferably long riff about all of the ways scientists have tried to uncover

01:30:51 ► §

how homing pigeons find their way home. But after thinking about it, I now understand why he took so

01:30:57 ► §

much time on that topic. And he just said, hey, we’ve done every kind of experiment we can think

01:31:02 ► §

of and we still don’t know how they do it. Well, if that was all he had to say about it,

01:31:06 ► §

I doubt if it would have finally struck me that,

01:31:09 ► §

hey, what he’s talking about here is a scientific principle,

01:31:13 ► §

an important one that we still don’t have a clue about.

01:31:16 ► §

And that, my friends, is really big news when you think about it that way.

01:31:21 ► §

In a way, it’s like we’re still living in a world

01:31:23 ► §

that doesn’t understand something as fundamental as gravity or electromagnetism. My guess is that we still

01:31:30 ► §

haven’t even come close to the most basic understanding about this universe. Maybe we’ll

01:31:35 ► §

learn more about it by listening to the rest of the Hazelhurst trilogues. And that’s my

01:31:39 ► §

plan. In fact, if all goes well, I’ll have the next installment of these trialogues out by the end of this coming weekend.

01:31:47 ► §

And after I get all three of these out, the three remaining tapes,

01:31:52 ► §

then we’ll get back to the pliologues that were recorded at Burning Man this year.

01:31:57 ► §

And before I go, I want to thank our fellow salonners who have searched out and then forwarded information

01:32:03 ► §

that may be of help to Sasha Shulgin in his

01:32:05 ► §

battle with dry macular degeneration. All of your suggestions and comments have been passed along

01:32:11 ► §

to the Shulgins now, and Anne asked me to thank all of you for your good wishes and your help.

01:32:17 ► §

Like me, they’re still unpacking from their trip to Burning Man, but they sound like they

01:32:22 ► §

weathered all the storms on the playa quite well, and they’re in really good spirits.

01:32:26 ► §

So that’s about it for today, but I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts

01:32:31 ► §

from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial

01:32:36 ► §

Sharealike 2.5 license.

01:32:38 ► §

And if you have any questions about that, just click on the Creative Commons link at

01:32:42 ► §

the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which may be found at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:32:48 ► §

And if you have any questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions about these podcasts,

01:32:52 ► §

well, just send them to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.

01:32:57 ► §

And Jacques Cordell and Wells, sometimes known as Chateau Hayouk,

01:33:01 ► §

thanks again for letting me use your music here in the salon.

01:33:04 ► §

Chateau Hayouk. Thanks again for letting me use your music here in the salon.

01:33:08 ► §

Also, a big thank you goes out to Ralph Abraham for letting us play his Trilog tapes here in the salon, and to

01:33:12 ► §

Bruce Dahmer, who not only made the arrangements with Ralph, but who also stayed up

01:33:15 ► §

for several days and nights digitizing the box of old cassette tapes

01:33:20 ► §

Ralph had loaned us. And thank you for joining us here in the

01:33:24 ► §

salon again today.

01:33:25 ► §

I hope to see you back here again real soon.

01:33:28 ► §

For now, this is Lorenzo

01:33:30 ► §

signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:33:32 ► §

Be well, my friends.