108 - Hazelwood House Trialogue (Part 2)

Program Notes

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

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

04:32 Terence McKenna: “But the fact of the matter is, there is no reason to believe that time is invariant, and experience argues the contrary.”

12:39 Rupert Sheldrake: “Maybe, you see, that the bonds between pigeons and their home are comparable to the bonds between people and other people, and indeed they may be related to that which holds society together. When we say “the bonds between people”, we may mean something more than a mere metaphor. It may be that there is an actual connection between them… . This kind of social bond, this kind of linkage, may be utterly fundamental.”

17:28 Ralph Abraham: “Especially for people like Americans, who watch television for seven hours a day, there is somehow not enough time away from language.”

17:37 Terence McKenna: “But notice that most prophetic episodes are dream episodes. I think that supports my point that we have lost connection with a kind of fourth dimensional perception that for the rest of nature is absolutely a given.”

25:59 Terence McKenna: “Somehow language is a strategy for holding at bay a much more complex world.”

26:29 Terence McKenna: “The obsession with intellectual closure is inappropriate to talking monkeys, because nowhere is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to achieve a complete understanding of reality. I think part of what we have to do is live with unsolved mysteries that are in principle insoluble. They’re not simply unsolved problems, they are in principle mysterious. All would agree that the highest understanding resides in silence, but it’s the death of conversation.”

30:57 Terence McKenna: “I question whether we actually think in words, or to what degree we do. What you notice when you experiment with these shamanic tools, such as psychoactive plants, is that as the intoxications deepen thought becomes vision, and one thinks in images. And I imagine that this is the aboriginal thought-style, and we must have thought in images for a long time before we downloaded into words.”

35:48 Terence McKenna: “If a prophecy comes true, does that mean then that in principle all of the future is determined? You see, we have to avoid determinism here because a true determinism means thinking is pointless, because in a rigid determinism you think what you think because you couldn’t think anything else. So the concept of truth is utterly without meaning in a rigid determinism.”

37:21 Terence McKenna: “I don’t think the meaning of human existence lies in culture. It lies in the individual. And to access that meaning a certain amount of deconditioning, i.e., alienation, has to take place from a culture. If you’re just a cheerful representative of your culture you’re a kind of mindless boor.”

40:10 Rupert Sheldrake: “There are astonishing powers in the animal and the other realms of nature, which we have just simply been blind to. We’re blind to them if we think in terms of institutional science.”

50:55 Terence introduces the topic of time into the discussion.

52:02 Terence McKenna: “Examine, or recall to yourself for a moment, what it is that orthodoxy teaches about time. It teaches that, for reasons impossible to conceive, the universe sprang from utter nothingness in a single moment. Now whatever you might think about that idea, notice that it is the limit test for credulity. In other words, if you could believe that you could believe anything. It’s impossible to conceive of something more unlikely. Yet this is where science begins its supposedly rational tale of the unfolding of the phenomenal universe. It’s almost as if science is saying, ‘Give us one free miracle and from there the entire thing will procee…

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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

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

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As I mentioned in my previous podcast, I’m going to try and keep my own chatter to a minimum for a few podcasts now while I get back in the groove again.

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And so I’m going to continue playing the recordings of the Hazelwood Trilogues that I began a couple of days ago.

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Basically, I’ve left this conversation unedited. However, there were several sections where people in the audience made long statements,

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but the microphones were so far away from them that I couldn’t make out what they were saying,

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even by enhancing those sections of the audio.

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So I did cut out a few parts of this section of the trialogue.

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So now we’ll pick up where the last podcast left off with Terrence McKenna on a

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riff about redefining what he means by science. And then they will finish their discussion of the

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unknown force field or whatever it is that homing pigeons use to find their way home.

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And at about the halfway point, which will be the beginning of side B of this tape,

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the halfway point,

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which will be the beginning of side B of this tape, Terrence McKenna

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introduces a new topic,

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time. So now

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let’s join Terrence McKenna,

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Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake

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at Hazelwood House

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in England sometime in 1993

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as they conduct

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their first trialogue held outside

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of California.

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I would like to redefine science

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as the study of those phenomena so crude

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that the time in which they are embedded

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is without consequence

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and I suppose

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ball bearings rolling down slopes

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and things like this

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fall into that category

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but the things which interest us

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love affairs

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the fall of empires

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the formation of political movements

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these things always happen in different ways

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there is no theory for much of what happens in the human world

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and I maintain it’s because in the human world

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the invariance of time forces itself upon us

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and so we create categories of human knowledge outside science,

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like psychology, or that’s sort of a fence-sitter,

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but advertising and political theory and this sort of thing.

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So that addresses the invariant time,

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or yes, the variable time that we experience,

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and then we hypothesize a theoretical kind of time

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that is invariant,

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and that’s where we do all this science

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that has led us into these incredibly alienating abstractions.

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This goes back to Newton.

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Newton said time is pure duration. He visualized

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time as an absolutely featureless surface. Well, now notice, Ralph, Aristotle’s effort

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to describe nature with perfect mathematical solids has been abandoned long ago because nowhere do we meet

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perfect mathematical forms in nature. The only perfect mathematical form that has been retained in modern

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scientific theory is the utterly unsupported belief that time,

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no matter at what scale you magnify it, will be found to be utterly featureless.

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There is absolutely no reason to think this,

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and considerable evidence to the contrary.

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The problem is, if we were to ever admit

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that time is a variable medium,

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a thousand years of scientific experiment

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would be swept away, and we would be back to Z.

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scientific experiment would be swept away and we would be back to Z. So it’s just simply a house of cards and better left where it stands, I think. But the fact of the matter

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is there is no reason to believe that time is invariant. And experience argues the contrary.

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No, but the thing is the invariability

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I mean this seems to go a little bit beyond

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the problem of pigeon homing

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well it addresses the problem of

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experiment as a notion

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but I don’t think

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it actually touches it you see

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I think what you’ve been saying

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if we take it down to the

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level of the pigeons again it does

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as you yourself say,

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it would turn out to be an elaborate version of the rubber band theory,

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the rubber filibri or something like that.

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Anyway, the rubber band theory would say

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that they’d be drawn back to the loft.

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And the experiment of moving the loft

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and seeing if they can find the moved loft,

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let’s say they can do that.

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There’s an experiment.

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It would show us something that goes beyond anything

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contemporary science would expect.

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It might or might not fit with your all-time theory.

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It does fit.

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But nevertheless, here we’d have an experiment,

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crude though it is,

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which would show that the existing scientific models

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are inadequate.

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We need something that goes beyond them.

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We need something that shows how them. We need something that shows

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how the pigeon can be linked to the home. The rubber band theory does involve a kind

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of attraction to the home, and in that sense involves a pull in time. So it does raise

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all these questions, perhaps.

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Well, do you have a theory about how this works? I mean, I don’t see how morphogenetic fields are particularly helpful here, unless we…

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Or if they are helpful, then in the boil down, it’s the same thing I’m seeing.

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Yes, I think the more…

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If there’s a field that includes both the pigeon and its loft, so here’s the pigeon,

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here’s its loft, normally they’re the pigeon, here’s its loft.

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Normally they’re together, it’s normally the home.

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You separate them.

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You can either do it by moving the loft or you can do it by moving the pigeon.

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But either way they’re separated.

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They’re part of a single system

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because the pigeon’s world includes its loft,

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its home, its mates, and all the rest of it.

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You move them. they’re now separated parts

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of a single system, they’re linked by a field,

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and the pigeon is attracted within this field

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back towards the home, which functions as the attractor.

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This is where me and Ralph have this different view

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of attractors.

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In dynamics, things are drawn towards attractors,

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and if the loft is an attractor within the field,

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then the pigeon is, as it were, pulled back towards the field.

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It doesn’t need an AA road map of the whole of Britain.

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That’s irrelevant.

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It just feels a pull in a particular direction.

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And so the trouble with the map theory, you see,

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is it has all this information,

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the whole of Britain, you knowon style rising, all these kind of

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features of this road map, it doesn’t need that

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you don’t need that

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you only need, if you’re trying to work out

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where you’re going to go by some method of rationality

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oh well this is an angel theory

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that when I come to the fork in the road

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a guardian angel appears from

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behind a tree and tells me which way to go

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roughly speaking, yes

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or you just feel a pull in a particular direction,

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just feel, you don’t even think about it,

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you just feel that’s the way to go,

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you’re drawn that way.

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I think that’s how the pigeon does it, subjectively.

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I don’t think it necessarily needs to see

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the whole of its future from ape to grave.

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I think it feels a pull towards where its home is, by this kind of

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invisible rubber band, which is actually, if you like, a gradient within the field towards

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an attractor, which is its home. I mean, that’s how you could model it mathematically.

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Yes.

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But you wouldn’t need to bring in the whole of the rest of Britain and a road map. Now,

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if you did need a road map for the whole of the rest of Britain and all the rest of the world,

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then we’d have the question, how would it get it?

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Well, I’ve got a theory how it could get it, but

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I think it might tune in to the collective

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memory of all the other pigeons that have ever

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gone on homing races. All of them see

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the ground they’re flying over.

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If a pigeon could access the

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collective pigeon psyche, or take

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it further, even the collective memory

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of other species,

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not just pigeons.

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If all birds could link up to what all other birds

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had seen, then they would indeed have a global map

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of the world, they could gain access to it.

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But I think that’s possibly going further than we need

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for this rather limited case.

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It may be more relevant in the case of migrations,

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where you have birds migrating over thousands of miles,

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in the case of cuckoos, young cuckoos, migrating to South Africa,

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independent of their parents, that leave in July from England.

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The young cuckoos leave in August.

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They’ve never met their parents because they’re cuckoos.

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And their parents, in any case, push off before the young ones are ready to fly.

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They go all that way.

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And I think that in that case, they must be tuning them at least to a kind of collective

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cuckoo memory that includes

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features of the landscape over which they fly

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but the rubber band

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theory wouldn’t necessitate

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even that you see

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it would necessitate maybe some degree of

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collective memory but it would essentially

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have this kind of pull, directional pull

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well there’s still seems to me some degree of collective memory but it would essentially have this kind of pull directional pull well there still seems to me

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some kind of problem

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either

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a mathematical or cognitive

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problem when

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the loft is moved

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then the dynamical system

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which extends

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essentially over the whole of the planet

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wherever this pigeon may be released which extends essentially over the whole of the planet,

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wherever this pigeon may be released,

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and all the way back,

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has to receive the feeling which direction to go from the guardian angel or whatever.

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And that directional field all over the planet

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has changed when the loft was moved.

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So the question arises,

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how does the attractor when the loft was moved. So the question arises, how does

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the attractor, the loft, extend

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its field and directional

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instruction all over the planet?

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And I don’t think that

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the idea of morphic resonance

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helps here, because no other pigeon has

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flown to that particular loft.

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No, I’m not talking about morphic resonance, I’m talking

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about the field itself. Morphic resonance

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is a memory of how to do it.

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If you have a magnet, say you have a magnet, a pile of iron filings here,

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and you have a magnet over here, and you put the magnet there,

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these iron filings will be drawn towards it,

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and you’ll see lines of force moving towards it.

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If you then move the magnet over here, you don’t have to,

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there’s an immediate adjustment to the magnet.

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The loft itself, yes itself simply functions as a magnet

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as it were

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in another field which is not an electromagnetic field

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but it’s sort of an emotional field

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yes

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and the loft is like a magnet

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and so you move the loft

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it’s just like moving a magnet automatically

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now the iron fans or whatever go there

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that’s basically the model you’re suggesting

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and the reason that I can’t find my car

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in the parking garage is because

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I’m not emotionally attached to it.

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And I’ve never been in love with it.

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I could get an Italian car.

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Well, it’s a thing about, I mean in the human realm,

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it could apply to finding people.

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Jill does an experiment, well she doesn’t call it an experiment, in her workshops where people form pairs

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and they can first find each other by humming with their eyes closed.

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Then after they’ve got good at that, you can then find your partner with your eyes closed

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so you can’t see just by feeling

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where they are and heading for them in that direction.

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And now that’s an example of this possible magnetic pull in the human world.

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I’ve tried doing this experiment with our children on grounds that it ought to be particularly

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strong with children and it turned out Merlin was extremely good at finding me and then

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I discovered he was peeping.

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It turned out Merlin was extremely good at finding me.

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And then I discovered he was peeping.

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So I’m afraid this experiment,

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he couldn’t quite see the value of totally objective,

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utterly controlled scientific study.

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So I mean, it may be that you see that the bonds between pigeons and their home

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are comparable to the bonds between people and other people. And indeed, they may be related to the kind of social, that which holds societies together.

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When we say there’s a bond between people, we may mean something more than a mere metaphor.

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It may be that there is an actual connection between them.

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And so we have many examples from the human realm.

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A child falls ill hundreds of miles away and their mother immediately starts worrying and rings

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up on the telephone. This may be another manifestation of the same kind of thing. And it may be part

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of the social bonding. I mean, the motive of the pigeon to go home is social. It’s not

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merely geographical. If it hasn’t got mates and so on, it doesn’t bother. If you try racing

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them in the winter when they’ve got no social motivation, they hang out wherever

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they can.

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They join into other people’s lofts and so on.

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And it may well be that the pigeon that spent such a pleasant ten days here at Hazelwood,

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like most of us, discovered this is a really nice place to be.

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And it didn’t have a sufficiently strong motivation to get home. So we may be looking here at something that’s essentially a social bond,

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but which because we’re never in exactly the same place as somebody else,

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two bodies can’t exist, we’re always separated to some degree,

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however small, from those we are bonded to.

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And often in the case of birds that fly foraging for food, in the case of

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migratory birds, in the case of all animals that have to go out, the bees that have to

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forage out from their hives and then come back, there must be some way in which these

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social bonds extend into a geographical dimension and then become spatial directional bonds

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to find the home group. In the case of wolves,

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there are these cases reported by naturalists

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of packs of wolves that go out hunting.

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A wolf may be injured, sometimes they’re injured,

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and then they stay behind in a kind of lair

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while the whole pack goes hunting.

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And there’s this book by W.J. Long called How I Must Talk

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about his tracking of wolves through

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the Canada in the snow.

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The pack would go out hunting about 20 miles and went around and then killed an animal

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quite silently, no baying, they do it quietly.

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And then from the tracks he found that the wounded wolf had taken the shortest line from

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where it was to the place where they had just come and joined the rest of the pack in got a meal and the track shows on the straight

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line not followed the center very well and he showed it couldn’t just be sound

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and it couldn’t be smelling because the wind was blowing the wrong way so this kind of

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social bond this kind of linkage may be utterly fundamental you see pigeon penning

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may be related to the social field in some sense and its extension over the I’m sensing a kind of convergence here where even Terence could find something to agree

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with that there is a sixth sense.

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It is a field phenomenon, like the quantum field. It’s a social field that’s

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involved with the flocking of birds, the schooling of fish, and with herds of animals and packs

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of wolves. You had a question, you started us off, what would this teach us, or what would that mean to us in terms of our future?

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And it could be that humans are somehow divorced from the significance of this field,

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so whenever the guardian angel speaks, they always do the opposite or something.

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they always do the opposite or something. And if we wanted to understand the population explosion, the demise of the planet, and all

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these wars and the manifestation of hatred and sources of evil and so on, a candidate

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for the disharmony in the human species would be its disconnection with this field.

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And here’s where Terence comes in, that somehow it’s the implication of language is to submit

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to it is to lose your connection with the field.

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So we all have done experiments in not speaking, for example, meditation, for example, dreaming,

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where the antithesis of language has an opportunity to come forward and to attempt to reconnect us to this field, a harmonizing influence that entrains us but not for long, especially for

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people like Americans who watch television for seven hours a day. There is somehow not

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enough time away from language.

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But notice that most prophetic episodes are dream episodes. I think that supports my point that we’ve lost connection

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with a kind of fourth dimensional perception that for the rest of nature is absolutely

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a given.

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Why do you think it’s a given on the rest of nature? I mean, I don’t still see why you

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need to have the pigeon knowing the whole of its future.

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Well, because you have many, many cases of this kind of thing. Animals that are put in

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the pound by owners who are moving, and then the owners move 700 miles and the animal escapes

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from the pound and it doesn’t return to the ancestral home it returns to the new apartment in a different city the monarch butterflies the homing pigeons a whole host of mysterious

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phenomena become utterly transparent and trivial if you simply hypothesize that for them the future doesn’t have this occluded character

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that it has for us as a result of our acquiescence in the language behavior.

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It seems to me it’s just the most…

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But it’s not just a problem in time, it’s a problem in space.

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You could say that they know they’re going to wind up at the new home

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but still you’ve got the problem of how they know which way to go.

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Well, presumably they see themselves

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at every point in their life

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not just the high or low points

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in a minute in the future

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they’re a minute ahead of where they are

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so they just go that way

00:19:15 ►

in other words they can always see it

00:19:18 ►

from where they are

00:19:19 ►

it’s always ahead of them

00:19:22 ►

in the same way that we navigate through space

00:19:24 ►

I mean if you were a two-dimensional creature the things that we do

00:19:30 ►

navigating in three-dimensional space would be absolutely mysterious and

00:19:35 ►

generate all kinds of metaphysical speculation and hypotheses and so forth and so on. But, I mean, why should nature

00:19:46 ►

imprison itself within a temporal domain?

00:19:52 ►

Clearly, for us, it’s an artifact of language.

00:19:56 ►

I mean, we talk about future tenses, past tenses.

00:19:59 ►

Those aren’t descriptive of the future and the past.

00:20:03 ►

They create it.

00:20:05 ►

That’s why I put in the possible exception of perhaps there are human languages

00:20:11 ►

where this is not happening and therefore they are much closer to animal perception.

00:20:17 ►

The mysterious, quote-unquote, mysterious behavior of the Australian Aborigines.

00:20:23 ►

quote, mysterious behavior of the Australian Aborigines.

00:20:26 ►

The Hopi, these peoples,

00:20:30 ►

they seem capable of things that to us are like magic,

00:20:36 ►

but the magic is all done by knowing what’s going to happen. So if they simply imbibe that animal understanding,

00:20:41 ►

then to them it’s trivial.

00:20:43 ►

That seems to me the most elegant explanation.

00:20:48 ►

And it doesn’t require new undetected fields

00:20:51 ►

or any of these other somewhat cobbled together mechanisms.

00:20:59 ►

Just another dimension.

00:21:01 ►

Well, we know it’s there.

00:21:03 ►

There’s no debate about that. shamans in aboriginal society especially the ones that were

00:21:25 ►

using psychoactive plants

00:21:28 ►

that all the magic

00:21:29 ►

that they do suddenly

00:21:32 ►

becomes not so mysterious

00:21:33 ►

if you simply assume

00:21:36 ►

that by

00:21:37 ►

perturbing the ordinary

00:21:40 ►

brain states and ordinary

00:21:41 ►

language states they then

00:21:44 ►

let in this hyperdimensional understanding

00:21:48 ►

because look at what shamans do really.

00:21:52 ►

They predict weather, that’s classical,

00:21:56 ►

that demands a knowledge of the future.

00:21:59 ►

They tell the tribe where the game has gone,

00:22:03 ►

also requiring a knowledge of the future, and they rarely

00:22:07 ►

lose a patient.

00:22:10 ►

That means they know who’s going to make it and who isn’t, and they refuse all cases perceived

00:22:15 ►

to be fatal.

00:22:16 ►

So here are three examples of shamanic magic, all easily explained by the simple assumption

00:22:27 ►

that they can perceive to some degree the future,

00:22:30 ►

which is occluded to ordinary people,

00:22:33 ►

locked in ordinary language and brain states.

00:22:36 ►

Q.E.D.

00:22:42 ►

Do the pigeons do a ritual, then, to get in touch with it?

00:22:46 ►

No, animals are in this place to begin with.

00:22:49 ►

You see, look at the shaman, to push this point in.

00:22:53 ►

What is the shaman’s strategy for attaining his special knowledge?

00:22:57 ►

He becomes like an animal.

00:22:59 ►

He is master of animals.

00:23:00 ►

He dresses in skins.

00:23:02 ►

He growls.

00:23:03 ►

He talks to pigeons.

00:23:04 ►

He talks to the animals, he perturbs his brain

00:23:08 ►

state with ordeals or drugs or something like this, but the very close association of the

00:23:14 ►

shaman to the animal mind suggests that that’s the clue to entering this atemporal or 4D

00:23:24 ►

perceptual sphere.

00:23:28 ►

And as Joe mentioned at the beginning,

00:23:30 ►

in the Christian tradition,

00:23:32 ►

the principal symbol of the Holy Spirit,

00:23:35 ►

which is that which gives inspired prophecy,

00:23:38 ►

shamanic-type gifts of healing,

00:23:40 ►

all the gifts of the Spirit,

00:23:41 ►

including speaking, tongues, prophecy, healing and so forth, discernments and intuitions of various kinds are symbolised by the pigeon.

00:23:54 ►

So there’s some curious way in which the dove, well known at the biblical times for its homing powers, the Egyptians had a homing pigeon service in ancient Egypt. So the choice of the pigeon was not just plucked out of nowhere.

00:24:08 ►

Noah’s Ark is the first biblical story of the pigeon,

00:24:11 ►

where the pigeon is sent off and comes back with the homes,

00:24:14 ►

with an olive twig.

00:24:17 ►

So right from the beginning, the pigeon is seen as a messenger

00:24:19 ►

that can find out things in distant places

00:24:21 ►

and come home and bring back the information.

00:24:24 ►

So you could say that central

00:24:25 ►

to the whole Western tradition,

00:24:28 ►

this shamanic thing of becoming like an animal,

00:24:31 ►

in this case, somehow entering the mind of the pigeon

00:24:34 ►

or in some way assimilating to the state of the pigeon

00:24:39 ►

is the basis of the gift of knowledge,

00:24:41 ►

prophecy and spiritual power.

00:24:46 ►

It sounds right to me.

00:24:49 ►

Sir, should we now…

00:24:52 ►

Yes, I think so.

00:24:54 ►

Let us now open this up and then we can…

00:24:59 ►

I’d like to ask him a question. Do you suggest that if we extend our language of life in our mind, that we don’t…

00:25:09 ►

Yes.

00:25:12 ►

I’m told to go into a room and to feel up in no way and to feel constantly like they might again do you suggest

00:25:26 ►

we might grow

00:25:28 ►

this extra thing

00:25:29 ►

essentially yes

00:25:32 ►

I mean I think it might take some time

00:25:34 ►

but I think

00:25:35 ►

as a strategy

00:25:37 ►

for

00:25:38 ►

expanded awareness

00:25:41 ►

that’s how it would present itself

00:25:44 ►

experientially.

00:25:45 ►

Trappist monasteries do this. All Aboriginal peoples sequester the young men and women

00:25:54 ►

often by themselves for a period of silence. Somehow language is a strategy for holding at bay a much more complex world

00:26:07 ►

that if we can, by any means, remove the language-forming capacity, even…

00:26:15 ►

What’s the trouble with it?

00:26:16 ►

The trouble is the complete contradiction with everything you’re saying.

00:26:20 ►

You’re using the language to…

00:26:22 ►

Well, who was it said, I contradict myself said I contradict myself I contradict myself the obsession with intellectual

00:26:32 ►

closure is inappropriate to talking monkeys because nowhere is it writ large that talking

00:26:41 ►

monkeys should be able to achieve a complete understanding of reality.

00:26:46 ►

I think part of what we have to do is live with unsolved mysteries

00:26:51 ►

that are in principle insoluble.

00:26:54 ►

They’re not simply unsolved problems.

00:26:56 ►

They are in principle mysterious.

00:26:59 ►

All would agree that the highest understanding resides in silence but it’s the death of conversation

00:27:08 ►

hardly to speak of weekend workshops.

00:27:11 ►

So if language is a deterrent agent and the principle of the survivor is the fittest,

00:27:19 ►

why do you think it developed? well maybe it’s a maladaptive trait

00:27:27 ►

many maladaptive traits develop

00:27:29 ►

I’m not willing to say that

00:27:31 ►

I think it has

00:27:32 ►

for us it’s a substitute

00:27:40 ►

for other forms of cohesion

00:27:43 ►

like pheromones which are a kind of

00:27:47 ►

language that knit together insect societies are originally we were

00:27:54 ►

possibly fairly unsocial creatures in other words human beings may have paired and reared their children in secret.

00:28:09 ►

We’ve created societies of billions of people, and the linkage is language,

00:28:15 ►

and it’s an unsteady linkage, as we can see.

00:28:20 ►

I mean, I don’t have an answer for why language evolved presumably we were pack animals

00:28:26 ►

like wolves or horses

00:28:27 ►

and tribal cultures

00:28:30 ►

pack animals are the animals

00:28:32 ►

that produce complex signaling

00:28:34 ►

systems to coordinate

00:28:36 ►

themselves in space with

00:28:38 ►

barks and yips and yells

00:28:40 ►

they coordinate

00:28:42 ►

hunting activity and this sort of thing

00:28:44 ►

it may be that that relatively benign adaptation carried further becomes something else.

00:28:53 ►

What we do, I think, that no other animal does is we carry out symbolic activity.

00:29:03 ►

and it’s this symbolic activity that has closed us off

00:29:05 ►

from the reality

00:29:07 ►

of what lies outside the symbol system

00:29:11 ►

symbolic activity

00:29:15 ►

everything we do

00:29:17 ►

I mean for instance

00:29:18 ►

think of a child

00:29:20 ►

lying in a crib

00:29:22 ►

with an open window

00:29:24 ►

and a hummingbird comes through the room well this

00:29:27 ►

is like a miracle it’s all light and iridescence and whirring sound and the child is sucked into

00:29:36 ►

the presence of a miracle and then its nurse or its mother comes into the room and says, It’s a bird, baby, bird.

00:29:47 ►

Suddenly the miracle is collapsed into a lexeme.

00:29:53 ►

And by the time you are five years old,

00:29:56 ►

the entirety of reality has been very carefully mosaicked over with words.

00:30:03 ►

And to burst through that to whatever reality lies beyond

00:30:07 ►

is the task of a mystic or a shaman and it’s extraordinarily difficult.

00:30:14 ►

That’s what I mean by trading in the world for symbolic signification.

00:30:20 ►

What do you think in words?

00:30:34 ►

But we think in words. And I’m not sure in the specific language where we talk of words, but communication or reasoning, because we think in words. And we are the words that we are thinking in, as you said, communicated to us by our parents, because communication communication, to maintain the level of communication.

00:30:50 ►

And what would happen, how would we develop our thinking processes in alternatives to words?

00:30:58 ►

Well, I question whether we actually think in words or to what degree we do. What you notice when you experiment with these shamanic tools such as psychoactive plants

00:31:12 ►

is that as the intoxications deepen, thought becomes vision and one thinks in images.

00:31:22 ►

and one thinks in images.

00:31:29 ►

And I imagine that this is the Aboriginal thought style,

00:31:32 ►

and we must have thought in images for a long time before we downloaded into words.

00:31:37 ►

To the degree that people think in images,

00:31:40 ►

I think they are a different sort of person

00:31:42 ►

than the word-oriented person.

00:31:45 ►

I think thinking in words may be an artifact of writing and print

00:31:51 ►

and may have been most intensified in the last thousand years.

00:31:56 ►

I mean, sensory ratios are incredibly subject to cultural modification.

00:32:03 ►

As an example of what I mean by that,

00:32:05 ►

St. Augustine, to prove his piety,

00:32:10 ►

they would open a book of scripture in front of him

00:32:13 ►

and without making a sound,

00:32:15 ►

he would examine it for a few minutes

00:32:18 ►

and then they would close the book and question him

00:32:21 ►

and he was able to discuss what was written there on the page.

00:32:26 ►

He was the only man in Europe, in other words, who could read silently and it was thought

00:32:32 ►

a miracle.

00:32:34 ►

Well, we all read silently and think nothing of it.

00:32:38 ►

So I think the mind is very malleable and the imprint of culture very deep.

00:32:45 ►

You know McLuhan suggested that the concept of the citizen, the concept of the industrial

00:32:53 ►

assembly line were both artifacts of print and would have been incomprehensible in a

00:33:02 ►

manuscript culture. This is an area where we are very naive

00:33:08 ►

how our languages affect our view of the world.

00:33:16 ►

We are part of a continuum in nature,

00:33:19 ►

but animals know us on a different part of consciousness.

00:33:22 ►

They don’t come to make moral choices.

00:33:24 ►

They are not running around killing each other in Bosnia.

00:33:27 ►

They are preying on each other for food. They are limited.

00:33:30 ►

All the people in this room are probably concerned about the world.

00:33:35 ►

And I think one of the things I would like you gentlemen to address in some way is the feeling that things might be moving in some place which is better.

00:33:46 ►

And I think to try and bring things into some notion that we, the animals,

00:33:57 ►

are in some better place, no, it’s not healthy.

00:34:00 ►

Well, I didn’t mean to suggest they’re in a better place.

00:34:03 ►

As I hear what you’re saying, you’re saying the glory of our humanness is our free will.

00:34:09 ►

No, I’m not saying that.

00:34:09 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:10 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:10 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:10 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:10 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:10 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:10 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:10 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:10 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:10 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:10 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:11 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that.

00:34:12 ►

I’m not saying that. that we make form us as individuals, not as a species. And so in an animal situation,

00:34:30 ►

the individual animal, I think, is not, that’s not what is of interest there. We differentiate

00:34:38 ►

ourselves from each other by the choices that we make

00:34:45 ►

and that requires this unknowable future dimension.

00:34:50 ►

This-

00:34:51 ►

You just poo-pooed it.

00:34:52 ►

You said we don’t need it, it’s an illusion.

00:34:54 ►

Well, I didn’t poo-poo it, I said animals don’t have it.

00:34:59 ►

Clearly we are of a different order.

00:35:04 ►

I’m not a pro-animal, anti-human sort.

00:35:11 ►

I think the human world is definitely the most interesting world, but I think maybe

00:35:17 ►

you’ve put your finger on it, that without this illusion of an unknowable future, we would not differentiate as individuals.

00:35:28 ►

So it’s a happy flaw.

00:35:31 ►

O Felix Coppa.

00:35:32 ►

Right?

00:35:33 ►

And some people have always been afraid of prophecy.

00:35:34 ►

But that’s how the moral of the matter is.

00:35:38 ►

Well, it raises real questions about free will, that’s for sure.

00:35:43 ►

I mean, one can suppose it raises real questions.

00:35:46 ►

I mean, if one can, if a prophecy comes true, does that mean then that in principle all

00:35:53 ►

of the future is determined? You see, we have to avoid determinism here because a true determinism means thinking is pointless.

00:36:06 ►

Because in a rigid determinism, you think what you think because you couldn’t think anything else.

00:36:12 ►

So the concept of truth is utterly without meaning in a rigid determinism.

00:36:20 ►

So perhaps in the pursuit of truth, the unknown future is a necessity

00:36:27 ►

and it allows our individuation from each other

00:36:32 ►

and that is the particular hallmark of our species

00:36:37 ►

is that we are a population of individuals,

00:36:39 ►

not a population that is defined genetically.

00:36:45 ►

Where is the challenge in that?

00:36:48 ►

These language structures are very provisional.

00:36:52 ►

Every culture assumes that it is building an edifice of eternal truth,

00:36:59 ►

but every culture has all other cultures as examples before it

00:37:04 ►

of parochiality, provincialism, and limited understanding.

00:37:10 ►

Why we then should assume that our culture is any more provisional than any other

00:37:17 ►

is simply a matter of hubris and historical momentum.

00:37:21 ►

I don’t think the meaning of human existence lies in

00:37:26 ►

culture, it lies in the

00:37:27 ►

individual and to become

00:37:30 ►

to access

00:37:31 ►

that meaning a certain amount of

00:37:33 ►

deconditioning, i.e.

00:37:36 ►

alienation has to

00:37:37 ►

take place from a culture

00:37:39 ►

if you’re just a cheerful representative

00:37:41 ►

of your culture, you’re a kind of

00:37:44 ►

mindless boor,

00:37:45 ►

whether you represent Japanese culture,

00:37:48 ►

Indonesian culture, or whatever.

00:37:50 ►

We require distance between ourselves

00:37:53 ►

and the object of our contemplation

00:37:56 ►

in order to define ourselves.

00:37:59 ►

And I think to go on with this,

00:38:01 ►

Terence earlier pointed out

00:38:02 ►

that the animal state is pre-language,

00:38:04 ►

but the state advocated

00:38:05 ►

by mystics and all great

00:38:07 ►

religions is to go beyond language

00:38:10 ►

it’s not, none of them, none of the

00:38:12 ►

great religious or spiritual traditions say

00:38:14 ►

human conscious, the end is where

00:38:16 ►

it’s at, all of them point beyond

00:38:18 ►

it and all of them point to

00:38:19 ►

states of contemplation, mystical insight

00:38:22 ►

prayer, intuition

00:38:23 ►

which go beyond the limitations of language.

00:38:28 ►

So I don’t think, I didn’t take what Terence was saying

00:38:31 ►

to be the denigration of all human culture and all language,

00:38:34 ►

but pointing out its limitations,

00:38:36 ►

which are agreed on by the greatest traditions we have.

00:38:43 ►

Well, I think these, in a sense, all these animals can be our teachers

00:38:47 ►

I think that the

00:38:49 ►

part of my interest in

00:38:51 ►

the hoeing pigeons and indeed

00:38:52 ►

the other experiments that I’ve

00:38:55 ►

been thinking about lately

00:38:56 ►

is to help to see

00:38:59 ►

that there’s much more to the natural world

00:39:01 ►

and certainly much more to the animal world

00:39:02 ►

than current models allow.

00:39:05 ►

The current models of

00:39:07 ►

biology, of institutional biology

00:39:09 ►

say all animals and plants

00:39:11 ►

are pure machines, totally explainable

00:39:13 ►

in terms of A-level physics.

00:39:16 ►

I mean, they don’t even take

00:39:17 ►

quantum physics into it.

00:39:19 ►

If you do, then you get weird

00:39:21 ►

phenomena like non-locality, which would

00:39:23 ►

mean pigeon homing might not be such a mystery.

00:39:27 ►

So the attempt to reduce all animals and the whole of nature

00:39:33 ►

has been going on for a long time,

00:39:36 ►

and it’s part of the triumphalist culture we have.

00:39:39 ►

Our culture is based on the agenda of conquering nature.

00:39:43 ►

You can conquer the whole of nature,

00:39:44 ►

and now we’ve told every other culture in the world

00:39:46 ►

that’s where it’s at.

00:39:47 ►

Development programs, logging operations and so on.

00:39:51 ►

So the ecological crisis is a result of working out

00:39:55 ►

this particular way of thinking about nature

00:39:57 ►

and other species.

00:39:59 ►

I think that recovering a sense of…

00:40:01 ►

I don’t think that anybody here is saying

00:40:04 ►

we’ve got to say animals are better

00:40:06 ►

than us and denigrate the whole human race, but to recognize that there are astonishing

00:40:11 ►

powers in the animal and the other realms of nature, which we’ve just simply been blind

00:40:16 ►

to. We’re blind to them if we think in terms of institutional science. People who actually

00:40:21 ►

know animals well, people who train horses, who keep dogs and cats,

00:40:26 ►

and who actually observe their behaviour, know full well that they have very often uncanny,

00:40:31 ►

or seemingly uncanny powers of learning, which go beyond what we would expect on the basis of textbook biology.

00:40:39 ►

So I think these are ways of learning more about the world in which we live,

00:40:43 ►

and more about the biological context of our lives.

00:40:46 ►

And when we come to dolphins, then indeed, if we take big brains to be the criteria of our superiority to the rest of the animal kingdom,

00:40:57 ►

then we have to face the fact that whales and several other animals have bigger brains than us.

00:41:03 ►

What are they doing with all that cerebral capacity?

00:41:05 ►

They’re certainly not building media empires

00:41:08 ►

and constructing television programs and so on.

00:41:12 ►

So I think that this interest in dolphins and whales

00:41:16 ►

as having a different kind of consciousness

00:41:19 ►

and possibly a more harmonious and telepathic consciousness

00:41:23 ►

is another way in which people are trying to learn from the animal kingdom.

00:41:28 ►

But, I mean, it creates a kind of humility in ourselves, doesn’t it,

00:41:32 ►

to realize that here are these astonishing social forms

00:41:35 ►

based on kinds of consciousness quite different from our own

00:41:39 ►

and possibly more advanced in certain ways.

00:41:44 ►

And all we regard them in, at least all Japanese fishermen

00:41:47 ►

regard the dolphins as nuisances,

00:41:49 ►

forgetting in the way of their drift nets.

00:41:51 ►

And the whales are simply a resource to be exploited

00:41:54 ►

and Norwegians want to resume it because it’s good

00:41:57 ►

for the, to save job losses in Northern Norway,

00:42:00 ►

that kind of thing.

00:42:01 ►

There’s a clash of value systems here.

00:42:04 ►

I think the whole of our modern

00:42:05 ►

civilization is in a crisis because of this

00:42:08 ►

clash of value systems

00:42:09 ►

so what’s really going on

00:42:11 ►

in the rest of nature

00:42:12 ►

rediscovering what’s happening is very important

00:42:15 ►

it does have wider consequences

00:42:17 ►

for our future as a species

00:42:19 ►

and a civilization

00:42:20 ►

these are not mere

00:42:22 ►

questions of idle curiosity.

00:42:29 ►

Well, I find this a little

00:42:31 ►

dissatisfying somehow to

00:42:33 ►

stop on this point.

00:42:38 ►

We didn’t

00:42:39 ►

resolve

00:42:41 ►

what I think is the basic question

00:42:43 ►

about the homing pigeon,

00:42:44 ►

especially in connection with its significance for ourselves,

00:42:49 ►

because here we have a couple of divergent views.

00:42:55 ►

Even if we concede that the loft radiates a field,

00:43:00 ►

that the homing pigeon follows this field by a process of clairvoyance,

00:43:05 ►

in which it has a precognition of its position a moment hence, and just goes in that direction.

00:43:12 ►

There’s still, I think, the fundamental question has to do with the utter determinism of this,

00:43:19 ►

whether the homing pigeon sees a variety of future positions

00:43:25 ►

and has to test them out by some process

00:43:28 ►

to determine which one is the most connected to the loved one or to the home,

00:43:34 ►

or whether there is only one vision and it just follows it.

00:43:37 ►

That’s the fundamental question,

00:43:39 ►

because thinking of our species as the homing pigeon,

00:43:44 ►

and we’re hoping to get home.

00:43:47 ►

If the future is totally determined, probably the likeliest outcome is the demise of the

00:43:54 ►

entire species, if not the biosphere itself.

00:43:56 ►

And of course, there’s no trouble for carrots having affected that. But most people, I think, are seeing a variety of possible outcomes

00:44:07 ►

and seeking a way to ennoble their own life by a philosophical position of empowerment,

00:44:16 ►

in which what you do, which choice you make, by what criteria you prioritize the possible futures, would actually lead in one direction instead

00:44:27 ►

of the other one.

00:44:29 ►

Thus, in the context of free will for the homing trajectory of the entire species, life

00:44:36 ►

obtains a moral meaning.

00:44:38 ►

If it matters what we do, that’s one thing.

00:44:41 ►

If it doesn’t matter what we do, that’s another. Therefore it sort of matters whether it matters or not if you do what I mean.

00:44:48 ►

I think Bell’s theorem in quantum theory says, there’s this principle that if things have been part of the same system and they’re separated, they retain an instantaneous

00:45:02 ►

correlation even if they’re miles apart, even if they’re going apart at the speed of light.

00:45:07 ►

Now, this is part of quantum theory,

00:45:10 ►

and it’s totally unlike anything in conventional physics.

00:45:14 ►

And so the whole pigeon is separated from its home or from its loved ones,

00:45:19 ►

and if Bell’s theorem applies at the larger scale,

00:45:23 ►

then you could say they’re part of the same system.

00:45:25 ►

They retain a non-local or non-separable connection.

00:45:29 ►

This could be the basis of the rubber band

00:45:31 ►

or the homing system or whatever.

00:45:34 ►

You could say that.

00:45:35 ►

The trouble is that physicists don’t…

00:45:38 ►

They don’t know whether Bell’s theorem

00:45:40 ►

applies in the larger scale or not.

00:45:43 ►

Most of them want an easy life and so they say,

00:45:45 ►

well, Bell’s theorem is fine if you’re dealing with these microscopic systems. It doesn’t seem

00:45:51 ►

to have any effects anywhere else. We’ll just regard it as a peculiar feature of microscopic physics.

00:45:57 ►

But it could be that there are other physicists, including Ralph’s friend Nick Herbert, who’s spent years puzzling and wrestling with the consequences of Bell’s theorem, thinking it must or may have implications at the larger scale realm.

00:46:15 ►

And you see, homing pigeons may indeed come to be seen as a large-scale manifestation of the same principle.

00:46:21 ►

I mean, I myself think that’s quite likely a possibility

00:46:25 ►

but Ralph knows Nick Vatterman

00:46:28 ►

has talked about these things more

00:46:29 ►

so what do you think about that Ralph?

00:46:31 ►

Well what I think is that

00:46:34 ►

quantum mechanics

00:46:35 ►

applies to a different realm and

00:46:37 ►

it provides us with

00:46:39 ►

metaphors and Bell’s theorem

00:46:41 ►

is a stimulating

00:46:43 ►

metaphor to understand this phenomenon of bonding, but

00:46:48 ►

to take this model too seriously seems to me ridiculous.

00:46:52 ►

You’ve got to really explore this, and taking into consideration how complex life is, you know, we’ll find out in a while,

00:47:01 ►

that one gravitates towards certain certain people who are terribly important.

00:47:06 ►

It’s like I’m part of a certain group of people.

00:47:08 ►

You know, the fact that I’m a friend, and if you came from where I came from,

00:47:12 ►

and ended up knowing people that I didn’t know, it’s quite extraordinary what it’s like to

00:47:16 ►

I’m in quite a conscious way towards certain people.

00:47:19 ►

It’s a little bit maybe we’re a part of them because maybe we share a vision.

00:47:24 ►

I mean, there are other levels of it.

00:47:27 ►

It’s a sort of human talent.

00:47:29 ►

And also the thing about the pigeons,

00:47:31 ►

they’ve always been undervalued.

00:47:33 ►

Animals, they’re not seen as having consciousness.

00:47:36 ►

So therefore people say,

00:47:37 ►

they’re just animals who’ve got a plan

00:47:39 ►

of how to make a living.

00:47:41 ►

It seems very disjointed.

00:47:42 ►

But in fact, there is this pigeon consciousness.

00:47:44 ►

It’s not enough except this vision as a talent.

00:47:46 ►

There are many talents that haven’t explained the great damage, haven’t explained any great talent.

00:47:51 ►

This is an animal talent, it’s a talent that they have, it’s God given, it’s innate, it’s what they do, it’s what they’re very good at.

00:47:59 ►

And it’s kind of beyond our comprehension I don’t think it’s beyond our comprehension

00:48:07 ►

It’s a lot of things, you’ve been through lots of things

00:48:10 ►

Yeah, there have been probably many things

00:48:11 ►

There are a multitude of things they’re doing, come on

00:48:13 ►

Yeah, I just wanted to ask you, do they do anything else?

00:48:20 ►

I mean, this is the thing we always hear about family divisions, about the tone of things

00:48:24 ►

Well this is the thing that they’ve been trained to do.

00:48:27 ►

And if you think about it, you see, under normal conditions,

00:48:30 ►

no bird or animal would ever do this.

00:48:32 ►

In a homing experiment, the pigeon is captured by the owner grabbing it,

00:48:37 ►

putting it inside a basket,

00:48:39 ►

and it’s transported on a train or a lorry for hundreds of miles.

00:48:42 ►

Well, in nature, that doesn’t happen to animals very much.

00:48:45 ►

If they go away from home they usually go under their own steam and the normal circumstances is

00:48:51 ►

that the pigeons range out from Trafalgar Square or wherever they live and they forage. In Trafalgar

00:48:57 ►

Square they don’t have to go far usually because all these tourists feed them there but normally

00:49:01 ►

pigeons live on buildings or on rocks. The original habitat of the homing pigeon is it’s a rock pigeon, lives on rocks, on cliffs.

00:49:09 ►

That’s why they like buildings, like buildings in London, because they like cliffs. And they

00:49:15 ►

go out and forage and they find their way home. That’s the biological basis and they’ve

00:49:19 ►

somehow got this to a very high degree and they’ve been selected over many generations.

00:49:24 ►

But they have all the normal bird life as well.

00:49:26 ►

The talent is a bit like that as well, isn’t it? It kind of often operates in the striking

00:49:30 ►

of friends, self and self.

00:49:32 ►

Yes. And these pigeons have also been selected very strongly over many generations. Pigeons

00:49:37 ►

that aren’t very good at homing don’t make it back from races and they don’t get bread

00:49:41 ►

from in the next generation. So there’s been tremendously strong selection.

00:49:49 ►

Anyway, yes, I think that these,

00:49:53 ►

how this relates to human affinities and so on comes back to this question of the social bonding

00:49:56 ►

being the underlying basis for all these forms of behaviour

00:49:59 ►

and what forms of affinity or bonding are involved.

00:50:03 ►

We don’t know much about that.

00:50:04 ►

Well, we love each other, you know. We’re not that very involved. We don’t know much about that.

00:50:05 ►

Well, we could say, you know, that mother-father is loving,

00:50:08 ►

and the father is loving.

00:50:10 ►

Yes, but that’s another subject.

00:50:13 ►

I think maybe…

00:50:15 ►

Well, maybe it’s… Well, maybe it isn’t, but…

00:50:18 ►

It’s the bond which draws two unrighteous people together.

00:50:21 ►

I remember, when it’s the love that takes it’s giving back to children,

00:50:26 ►

eggs and nests. I mean…

00:50:28 ►

Well, some people would find that an unflattering comparison

00:50:30 ►

because we like to think human love different

00:50:32 ►

but I think that would be…

00:50:34 ►

But we’re homing from now on.

00:50:36 ►

It’s the

00:50:38 ►

I’m homing!

00:50:40 ►

Right.

00:50:42 ►

We’ve actually

00:50:44 ►

passed our point

00:50:45 ►

to which we should be breaking up

00:50:47 ►

well

00:50:47 ►

the subject for tonight’s

00:50:57 ►

trialogue is a

00:50:59 ►

subject near and dear to my

00:51:01 ►

heart

00:51:01 ►

you might even say it has my initials on it.

00:51:07 ►

I had decided to talk about time

00:51:10 ►

and then there was a request to do so,

00:51:13 ►

so that must be the general drift

00:51:16 ►

of our interest and intent

00:51:19 ►

as far as what I can contribute.

00:51:24 ►

I’m very interested in time. I’m very interested in time

00:51:26 ►

I’m very interested in the largest

00:51:28 ►

frames into which

00:51:30 ►

phenomena can be

00:51:32 ►

fitted and

00:51:34 ►

sort of the

00:51:35 ►

various

00:51:38 ►

ways in which we view

00:51:40 ►

our humanness

00:51:42 ►

if we change the way

00:51:44 ►

we look at time and i think that it’s sufficiently

00:51:50 ►

unsecured by science that we need feel no trepidation about doing this what i mean by that is examine or recall to yourself for a moment

00:52:06 ►

what it is that orthodoxy teaches about time.

00:52:10 ►

It teaches that for reasons impossible to conceive,

00:52:18 ►

the universe sprang from utter nothingness in a single moment.

00:52:27 ►

Now, whatever you might think about that idea,

00:52:29 ►

notice that it is the limit test for credulity.

00:52:34 ►

In other words, if you believe that, you could believe anything.

00:52:38 ►

It’s impossible to conceive of something more unlikely.

00:52:43 ►

Yet this is where science begins

00:52:47 ►

its supposed rational tale

00:52:50 ►

of the unfolding of the phenomenal universe.

00:52:54 ►

It’s almost as if science is saying,

00:52:56 ►

give us one free miracle,

00:52:59 ►

and from there the entire thing will proceed

00:53:02 ►

with a seamless causal explanation.

00:53:09 ►

But there is an aspect to the phenomenal universe

00:53:14 ►

that I think impinges on anyone who undertakes to examine it

00:53:19 ►

that is not given any weight whatsoever by science.

00:53:26 ►

And that is that when we look at the span of time

00:53:30 ►

which stretches from the Big Bang to the present moment,

00:53:33 ►

it’s very clear, I think, that complexity has aggregated

00:53:40 ►

toward the nether end of this process

00:53:43 ►

in the dimensions in which we find ourselves.

00:53:49 ►

And, for example, the early universe was very hot,

00:53:55 ►

and only a kind of electron plasma could exist.

00:53:59 ►

Hence, there was no atomic physics, no molecular chemistry, only the physics of plasma.

00:54:09 ►

By cooling, complexity appears. This is not argued.

00:54:16 ►

But what interests me is that each successive advance into complexity occurred much faster than the stage which preceded it.

00:54:27 ►

So the first billion years of the life of the universe was an extraordinarily

00:54:33 ►

boring and empty period. Basically atomic systems were forming, the simplest

00:54:41 ►

elements were aggregating into stars, this permitted fusion, the cooking out of heavier elements,

00:54:49 ►

and after some long period of time, carbon appeared.

00:54:53 ►

And of course, four-valent carbon then permits a whole new set of properties to emerge, including ultimately life.

00:55:06 ►

And I’m moving through this very quickly

00:55:08 ►

because what I want to concentrate on is what I call the short epoch.

00:55:15 ►

And my terminology here is largely drawn from Alfred North Whitehead,

00:55:21 ►

who I think is the great unsung hero

00:55:25 ►

of British 20th century philosophy.

00:55:28 ►

And he had a notion of a progression of epochs

00:55:34 ►

leading toward what he called concrescence.

00:55:38 ►

And I’ve taken this notion of concrescence

00:55:42 ►

and attempted to construct a temporal

00:55:45 ►

cosmology

00:55:46 ►

that

00:55:47 ►

literally

00:55:48 ►

stands on

00:55:49 ►

its head

00:55:50 ►

the explanation

00:55:51 ►

00:55:52 ►

science

00:55:53 ►

because I

00:55:54 ►

don’t believe

00:55:55 ►

the universe

00:55:55 ►

is pushed

00:55:57 ►

outward

00:55:57 ►

into

00:55:58 ►

substantial

00:55:59 ►

existence

00:56:00 ►

by the

00:56:01 ►

primal

00:56:02 ►

explosion

00:56:03 ►

I believe

00:56:04 ►

the universe is being pulled and shaped into an ever

00:56:10 ►

more complexified and compressive entity that is in fact a transcendental attractor. Transcendental

00:56:20 ►

in the sense of residing in a higher dimension than ordinary space and transcendental in the sense of residing in a higher dimension than ordinary space,

00:56:25 ►

and transcendental in the feeling tone sense in which we ordinarily use that.

00:56:34 ►

Now, this idea is basically just Catholicism with the chrome stripped off,

00:56:44 ►

unless, or, you know,

00:56:46 ►

Teilhard de Chardinism of a certain sort,

00:56:49 ►

the idea of the omega point,

00:56:51 ►

the idea of a telos attracting

00:56:54 ►

and drawing history into itself.

00:56:56 ►

But what I’m interested to consider

00:56:59 ►

is that most delicate of all questions

00:57:03 ►

in prophetic systems of this sort,

00:57:07 ►

and that is, when? When?

00:57:11 ►

Science evades this issue by setting us down

00:57:15 ►

somewhere between the Big Bang and the heat death of the universe

00:57:20 ►

imagined millions of years in the future.

00:57:24 ►

universe imagined millions of years in the future.

00:57:32 ►

Science notice also completely marginalizes human experience. We are told that we live on a typical planet, around a typical star, at the edge of a typical

00:57:39 ►

galaxy, and that we are animals of a complex type but easily identified to more typical

00:57:47 ►

forms.

00:57:49 ►

My notion is to take seriously the apparent vectoring in of universal intent on the human world and keeping away from the pitfalls of religion to try and talk

00:58:09 ►

about why that might be happening.

00:58:11 ►

And I think it might be happening for the followingology and that this is a concept that we have not

00:58:28 ►

sufficiently entertained but which we are going to be forced to entertain as

00:58:34 ►

the planetary crisis created by modernity of bills toward some kind of

00:58:41 ►

come some kind of climax what I mean by that history is the shockwave of eschatology

00:58:49 ►

is something like this.

00:58:53 ►

Animal, if this planet were a planet of hummingbirds,

00:58:59 ►

woodchucks, giraffes, and grasslands,

00:59:02 ►

then Darwinian mechanics as modified by molecular biology

00:59:09 ►

would be sufficient to explain what’s going on.

00:59:13 ►

The fly in the ointment of that simple schema is ourselves.

00:59:20 ►

We represent some other order of existence.

00:59:26 ►

We, this afternoon, talked about language.

00:59:30 ►

My notion is that out of the broad moving stream of animal evolution,

00:59:36 ►

a species was selected, fell victim to, the terminology can vary but a higher animal

00:59:47 ►

fell under the influence

00:59:50 ►

of an attractor

00:59:51 ►

pulling us in the direction

00:59:54 ►

of symbolic activity

00:59:56 ►

and this is what we have been involved in

00:59:59 ►

through theater, dance, poetry

01:00:02 ►

chant, magic, religion, science, politics, cognitive and symbolic activity.

01:00:10 ►

And it’s only occupied, for all practical purposes, outside the dreary world of chipping flint and picking fleas,

01:00:19 ►

less than 25,000 years.

01:00:22 ►

It’s a blink of an eye on the cosmic scale.

01:00:26 ►

It is the shock wave which precedes eschatology.

01:00:31 ►

An analogy would be,

01:00:33 ►

think of the undisturbed surface of a pond.

01:00:37 ►

If the pond begins to boil,

01:00:41 ►

it indicates that some enormous protein form

01:00:44 ►

is moving beneath the surface and is about to in fact make its presence visible.

01:00:51 ►

This is what history is on the surface of nature.

01:00:55 ►

It’s a boiling anticipation of the emergence of the compressants or the transcendental object at the end of time.

01:01:06 ►

And it has been anathema to discuss this in secular society,

01:01:12 ►

even New Age secularism,

01:01:15 ►

because this has always been the province of beastly priests

01:01:20 ►

and their hideously hierarchical and constipated religions

01:01:25 ►

so that decent people have tended to turn away from it.

01:01:31 ►

But in fact, this is some kind of primary intuition about our circumstance.

01:01:38 ►

And the reason it’s important is because we now are in a situation of planetary crisis

01:01:46 ►

where you don’t have to be an enthusiast for Whiteheadian metaphysics

01:01:51 ►

or psilocybin or the more arcane metaphors of Terence McKenna

01:01:59 ►

to realize that we are approaching our limits.

01:02:04 ►

It’s inconceivable to speak of 500 years in the human future.

01:02:10 ►

History is a self-consuming process, and all we need to do at this point is extrapolate

01:02:17 ►

any of a number of curves.

01:02:19 ►

Here are some of my favorites.

01:02:21 ►

are some of my favorites.

01:02:27 ►

The spread of epidemic sexually transmitted diseases, the proliferation of thermonuclear weapons,

01:02:31 ►

the dissolution of the atmospheric ozone,

01:02:35 ►

the rise in world population.

01:02:38 ►

When these curves are extrapolated,

01:02:41 ►

it’s very clear that we have taken

01:02:45 ►

business as usual off the menu.

01:02:48 ►

And I would prefer, rather than imagine

01:02:54 ►

that this is a situation driven by the momentum

01:03:00 ►

of bad historical decisions,

01:03:05 ►

and therefore our responsibility,

01:03:08 ►

the wrecking of the planet and so forth,

01:03:10 ►

I would rather prefer to believe

01:03:12 ►

that what we’re witnessing is something like a birth,

01:03:17 ►

and that it is built into the laws of physics,

01:03:21 ►

what we’re witnessing.

01:03:22 ►

That we are literally on a collision course with an object

01:03:26 ►

that we cannot exactly discern it lies below the event horizon of rational apprehendability

01:03:36 ►

at this point but the east is streaked with the blush of rosy dawn for sure. And what it portends, I think,

01:03:49 ►

is an end to our fall,

01:03:55 ►

an end to our sojourn in matter,

01:03:59 ►

and an end to our separateness.

01:04:03 ►

And it lies now so close to us in historical time

01:04:08 ►

by virtue of our having collapsed our options

01:04:12 ►

in three-dimensional space

01:04:14 ►

that you need only close your eyes,

01:04:17 ►

have a dream,

01:04:19 ►

take a shamanic hallucinogen,

01:04:22 ►

practice yoga,

01:04:23 ►

and there you will see it.

01:04:25 ►

It’s an attractor which has been working on the species at least a million years,

01:04:33 ►

and I maintain that this is actually somehow a universal attractor,

01:04:39 ►

and we represent a compressence of complexity that is truly transcendental.

01:04:47 ►

You know, James Joyce said, if you want to be phoenixed, you’ve got to be parked.

01:04:54 ►

Up in the end, prospector, you sprout all your worth and whoop your wings.

01:05:01 ►

He said the end is nearer than you might wish to be congealed.

01:05:06 ►

And I’m essentially carrying this same notion

01:05:12 ►

because I think that otherwise we’re going to be victimized

01:05:16 ►

by an enormous pessimism arising out of the bankruptcy

01:05:21 ►

of science, positivism, ordinary politics, so forth and so on.

01:05:27 ►

The ride to the end of history is going to be a white knuckle experience.

01:05:33 ►

And I offer this metaphor in the hope that it may make the trip to the transcendental object

01:05:43 ►

glittering at the end of time

01:05:46 ►

an easier rhyme

01:05:48 ►

gentlemen

01:05:50 ►

well

01:05:59 ►

let me fill in the footnotes

01:06:04 ►

it refers to the last things the final things Ah yes, let me fill in the footnotes.

01:06:11 ►

Esk, it refers to the last things, the final things, the eschaton.

01:06:18 ►

The eschaton is a kind of neutral way of saying what some people call the Buddha Maitreya, what some people call the flying saucer at the end of history, the second coming.

01:06:28 ►

It’s the last thing, the eschaton.

01:06:36 ►

And I see it as a kind of, what I think is happening is that all boundaries are dissolving and the boundaries between men and women, between society and nature,

01:06:43 ►

and ultimately the boundaries between life and

01:06:47 ►

death. And we are going truly beyond ambiguity, beyond syntax. We have been trapped in a kind

01:06:55 ►

of demonic simulacrum for 25,000 years, created out of language, and now somehow this accelerating process of involuted connectedness

01:07:10 ►

that characterizes this quite hedian progression of epochs toward the compressence is in fact

01:07:18 ►

being fulfilled and it’s I think quite quite extraordinary

01:07:24 ►

and it’s, I think, quite extraordinary.

01:07:30 ►

Well, this, I think, Terence,

01:07:32 ►

it sounds a little more optimistic than I’ve heard you before.

01:07:35 ►

I’m not mistaken that although

01:07:39 ►

in this model you accepted

01:07:42 ►

one miracle of science, the Big Bang fantasy, for your

01:07:48 ►

creation myth, and then you reflected it into a similar event coming in the near future

01:07:56 ►

about which you’re concerned with the wind, but I think you spared us and didn’t mention

01:08:01 ►

the date this time. Yes, I thought it should be sort of a generalized discussion

01:08:08 ►

of the assumptions that come out of this kind of thinking.

01:08:11 ►

But when the forthcoming event,

01:08:15 ►

that the optimistic part is that,

01:08:17 ►

I think for the first time I’ve heard you describe it at a birth,

01:08:21 ►

the optimistic event is interpreted by you as an eschaton

01:08:27 ►

this is, I think, a myth made real

01:08:32 ►

like a Christmas tree where the events of history are kind of pasted on it

01:08:37 ►

and as this tree sort of shapes to a point at the top

01:08:41 ►

you’ve drawn history around it in an ascending spiral that just ends at

01:08:47 ►

that point where they put the star.

01:08:51 ►

Now I think this is a myth, and that history can be wound on the form in a lot of different

01:08:59 ►

ways, and only by starting with an assumption, which to me is very symmetric and identical to the big birth of the universe

01:09:11 ►

for which you make fun of science.

01:09:13 ►

I agree with you there.

01:09:15 ►

That far we’re together.

01:09:18 ►

But it puts me in mind of the history of history,

01:09:23 ►

where the concept of time in different cultures suits different

01:09:28 ►

models of which there are but few.

01:09:31 ►

There’s the bang-to-bang model which you share with Teilhard de Chardin.

01:09:37 ►

There’s the infinite linear progress model which is pretty much discredited now by everyone. There’s the reflection model, where a cycle is completed and then repeats at the beginning

01:09:49 ►

and four more epochs, or five or ten, in a cycle of epochs which might be never-ending.

01:09:57 ►

There’s the Kurt Gödel model, in which time goes forward and closes on itself without reflection

01:10:07 ►

by going around a torus and coming back—many ancient societies share this one where it

01:10:13 ►

was understood that this is something like your theory of the homing pigeon, that every

01:10:20 ►

action we are doing today will be repeated again another day.

01:10:27 ►

I think also that these different models for history, which are essentially mythical structures

01:10:33 ►

that is, no pseudo-scientific evidence could be given to distinguish one from another,

01:10:39 ►

they start on the basis of belief.

01:10:42 ►

And then it is thought that what follows from this particular belief of a certain model

01:10:46 ►

of history is the actual evolution of that culture into some shape which is to a degree

01:10:50 ►

determined by the model and which has been analyzed in the different cultures, comparing

01:10:55 ►

the different evolutions of the culture with the creation myth and model for historical

01:11:01 ►

time in each one.

01:11:03 ►

Eric Vogelin, for example.

01:11:06 ►

Then it’s also thought that,

01:11:08 ►

well, now that we have archaeology,

01:11:12 ►

cultural history, and so on,

01:11:13 ►

we know this much.

01:11:15 ►

We know there’s different models of time historically

01:11:17 ►

that they fit into a certain pattern,

01:11:20 ►

and by and large it’s thought that

01:11:21 ►

they give guidance to the evolution

01:11:24 ►

of that culture itself. In other words, if it’s thought that they give guidance to the evolution of that culture itself.

01:11:25 ►

In other words, if it’s not true that tomorrow is already determined

01:11:30 ►

and we just have to do a good job to follow our dream,

01:11:34 ►

if it’s possible that what we do, think, or say affects the future,

01:11:41 ►

then it’s important which historical model we choose,

01:11:45 ►

because the myth itself guides action, determines evolution, at least influences to a degree the outcome.

01:11:54 ►

I’m not saying that belief in an eschaton guarantees an eschaton,

01:11:58 ►

because I don’t think the influence of our belief is that seriously important.

01:12:05 ►

I don’t see, though, even accepting the Christmas tree and the point with the star, I don’t

01:12:09 ►

see why it would be a birth or a death or anything other than a simple cultural transformation,

01:12:17 ►

which is more or less timed by, presaged by, announced by the shockwave at the end of,

01:12:23 ►

well, this epoch.

01:12:25 ►

Why not just a simple social transformation like the Renaissance? by the shockwave at the end of, well, this epoch.

01:12:29 ►

Why not just a simple social transformation like the Renaissance?

01:12:31 ►

Well, because the planet can’t bring forth further societies.

01:12:38 ►

We’ve come to the end of our road in Newtonian space.

01:12:43 ►

And that’s what I wanted to say I mean wouldn’t you

01:12:46 ►

agree Ralph that when we look back over the whole history of life as known to us

01:12:54 ►

what it appears to be is some kind of strategy for the conquest of

01:13:02 ►

dimensionality in other words the earliest forms of life

01:13:06 ►

were fixed slimes of some sort.

01:13:09 ►

And then you get very early motility,

01:13:15 ►

but no sense organs, the being literally feels its way

01:13:19 ►

from one point of perception to another.

01:13:22 ►

Then you get sequestering of light-sensitive pigment on

01:13:27 ►

the cell, and the notion of a gradient of here and there appears.

01:13:33 ►

And then, for a long, long time, it’s the coordination of, you know, backbones, skeletons,

01:13:40 ►

binocular vision, so forth and so on, then with us some fundamental boundary is crossed because we are beginning not,

01:13:53 ►

apparently the conquest of terrestrial space through memory and strategic triangulation of data out of memory,

01:14:10 ►

and then with the invention of epigenetic coding, writing electronic databases,

01:14:16 ►

an ever more deep and thorough spreading out into time.

01:14:24 ►

And so this eschatonic transition that I’m talking about,

01:14:28 ►

essentially all that’s happening is that

01:14:31 ►

the deployed world of three-dimensional space

01:14:36 ►

shrinks to the point where all points are cotangent.

01:14:40 ►

And it literally goes into hyperspace.

01:14:43 ►

It’s no longer a metaphorical hyperspace. And so what we’re saying here is, you’re right, it’s no big deal, and yet what it actually will come to be seen to be is a transition from one dimension of existence to another, but a continuation of this universal program of self-expansion

01:15:09 ►

and transcendence that can be traced back to the earliest and most primitive kind of

01:15:15 ►

protoplasm.

01:15:16 ►

Isn’t this a fancy way of saying we’re running out of time?

01:15:21 ►

Yes, time is speeding up.

01:15:24 ►

There isn’t much left

01:15:25 ►

you know someone said time is God’s way

01:15:28 ►

of keeping everything from happening all at once

01:15:30 ►

well my notion is that we are caught

01:15:34 ►

think of the transcendental attractor

01:15:37 ►

as a kind of black hole

01:15:39 ►

into which we have fallen into

01:15:42 ►

its basin of attraction

01:15:43 ►

and now we’re circling ever faster, ever deeper,

01:15:47 ►

as we approximate an approach to this singularity.

01:15:52 ►

The eschaton is simply a singularity.

01:15:56 ►

It exceeds rational apprehendability.

01:15:59 ►

Somehow, intrinsically, in principle,

01:16:02 ►

it lies outside the framework of possible description.

01:16:07 ►

We’re on a collision course with the unspeakable,

01:16:14 ►

and that explains why we are not groveling around like groundhogs and other animals, we have been selected out for this very, very peculiar metamorphosis

01:16:31 ►

via information and the conquest of dimensions to become something completely other,

01:16:39 ►

a new ontological order of being.

01:16:42 ►

As we represent now a new ontological order of being when

01:16:46 ►

contrasted to animal life now we’re apparently about to take one more step but it’s too early

01:16:53 ►

to tell let me just respond for one minute then we’ll we’ll see what rupert thinks of this

01:16:59 ►

i’m afraid i’m basically um so pessimistic I can’t really dispute this or go on.

01:17:08 ►

Nevertheless, for the sake of theory, let me say that this pessimism is just a matter of faith

01:17:14 ►

because using these historical arguments and timings you’ve just described,

01:17:20 ►

we have sort of mixed here together the good and the bad.

01:17:26 ►

Everything is accelerating.

01:17:27 ►

On the one hand, we have the population explosion itself, the destruction of the biosphere,

01:17:32 ►

and so on.

01:17:33 ►

The complexity, the rate, the seriousness of all this, the irreversibility, the finality,

01:17:40 ►

the eschatology of this is, as a matter of fact, climaxing. Meanwhile, we have language, as you say, if it’s 25,000 euro or 60,000

01:17:50 ►

or even at most 100,000 as some people think.

01:17:54 ►

That is really recent on the time scale we’re talking about.

01:17:57 ►

And then we have such things as agriculture and the urban revolution,

01:18:09 ►

and now we have automobiles and airplanes and computers.

01:18:12 ►

You spoke about memory.

01:18:14 ►

Computer memory has somehow increased our intelligence by an enormous amount.

01:18:19 ►

So on the good side, we have all this increase in the complexity

01:18:23 ►

and the fractal dimension of life is

01:18:27 ►

more or less to our benefit so we have as it were a race between two processes both of which growing

01:18:34 ►

faster exponentially but we don’t know for sure which one is growing more and furthermore the

01:18:41 ►

possibility of a miracle can be ruled out due to the fact that we wouldn’t even have got this far without a whole series of miracles.

01:18:50 ►

For example, the miraculous appearance of oxygen in the atmosphere.

01:18:56 ►

So if there is a race… it’s a subtle matter I think the way in which the myth of the eschaton

01:19:07 ►

could intervene in this race

01:19:09 ►

between the two accelerating processes

01:19:11 ►

that’s all I wanted to say

01:19:13 ►

what do you think Rup?

01:19:16 ►

well I think

01:19:17 ►

I mean I agree with you

01:19:21 ►

this is a cultural pattern

01:19:23 ►

the Judeo-Christian tradition

01:19:24 ►

takes further tendencies

01:19:26 ►

already there in early civilizations

01:19:28 ►

a sense of movement towards some end

01:19:32 ►

apocalyptic prophecy

01:19:34 ►

the last book of the Bible, the book of the apocalypse

01:19:37 ►

speaks of things not unlike those that Terence does

01:19:40 ►

it’s very similar

01:19:42 ►

and as he’s well aware this apocalyptic nature of his thinking

01:19:49 ►

is a transform of a vision which appears in Christianity

01:19:53 ►

and in Jewish messianic and apocalyptic literature.

01:19:57 ►

So the question is, to what extent is the pattern of acceleration

01:20:02 ►

we see in our culture a product of the fact our culture

01:20:04 ►

is based on this myth of history

01:20:06 ►

or to what

01:20:08 ►

extent do these visions

01:20:09 ►

reflect some true perception

01:20:12 ►

of a cosmic process

01:20:13 ►

something far beyond history

01:20:15 ►

that’s not easy to decide because

01:20:17 ►

although there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy

01:20:20 ►

built into these cultural patterns

01:20:22 ►

we’re now seeing

01:20:23 ►

these dreams coming true in many ways,

01:20:26 ►

these things that have led to

01:20:27 ►

emphasising novelty, innovation, change,

01:20:32 ►

moving faster and faster.

01:20:35 ►

These are both prophesied and believed in

01:20:37 ►

and coming true,

01:20:39 ►

and it makes it easier to believe in them.

01:20:41 ►

So it’s all self-fulfilling.

01:20:42 ►

But we’ve now spread it to the rest of the world,

01:20:45 ►

so it seems pretty global.

01:20:48 ►

Does it go beyond this?

01:20:49 ►

For me, this is the big question.

01:20:51 ►

Is there a real, in this prophetic vision,

01:20:55 ►

a real influence of something beyond humanity,

01:20:58 ►

beyond history, which Terence thinks there is,

01:21:01 ►

namely the transcendental object, the attractor,

01:21:03 ►

or as Teil de Chardin would put it,

01:21:05 ►

the omega point.

01:21:09 ►

Or is there not?

01:21:10 ►

And if there is, how limited is it

01:21:13 ►

in its range of application?

01:21:16 ►

Are we talking, as Terence sometimes seems to be,

01:21:19 ►

about something just happening on Earth?

01:21:21 ►

I mean, I have the same problem

01:21:22 ►

with Christian apocalyptic speculation

01:21:26 ►

tyler de chandin for example he talks of the narrow sphere around the earth and this growing

01:21:31 ►

emergence of consciousness here is he talking about the transformation of this planet

01:21:36 ►

and of humanity or is he talking transformation of the entire universe and you have the same

01:21:42 ►

ambiguity in the new testament when saint paul writes the

01:21:45 ►

whole creation groaneth in travel and the idea of the whole universe groaning in travel for the

01:21:53 ►

coming of a new birth of a new age so this is the real question i have to turn to tonight is

01:22:00 ►

how provincial is this vision if um are we talking about the future of human culture on this planet?

01:22:09 ►

Or are we talking about the future of the solar system,

01:22:13 ►

the galaxy, or even the entire cosmos?

01:22:15 ►

Because if we’re talking about this planet,

01:22:18 ►

a lot of these accelerating changes,

01:22:20 ►

graphs, extrapolations look pretty plausible.

01:22:23 ►

If we’re talking about the solar system or the galaxy,

01:22:27 ►

I don’t think astronomers in the last few years or decades

01:22:31 ►

have suddenly noticed curves rushing off

01:22:33 ►

to some extreme point where we can expect stars

01:22:38 ►

all over the galaxy to turn into supernovae,

01:22:41 ►

planets all over the solar system to collapse, crumble,

01:22:44 ►

or otherwise undergo dramatic alteration.

01:22:47 ►

The history that we’re so preoccupied with here on Earth, human history and the effects of human activities,

01:22:54 ►

doesn’t, as far as we know, seem to be mirrored in changes going on anywhere else in the solar system, the galaxy or the cosmos.

01:23:03 ►

So just the question really is how limited is this vision?

01:23:06 ►

And are we just talking about the destiny

01:23:08 ►

of a small planet which has come onto the,

01:23:12 ►

for some reason under some planetary attractor?

01:23:16 ►

Whether it’s human made or human making,

01:23:20 ►

we can leave aside for the moment.

01:23:23 ►

And what’s your view on that?

01:23:21 ►

We can leave aside for the moment.

01:23:24 ►

And what’s your view on that?

01:23:32 ►

Well, I’m not intentionally cutting this trialogue off right here.

01:23:35 ►

It’s just where this tape ran out.

01:23:40 ►

And I’ll get the next one in this series out to you early next week, as soon as I can.

01:23:45 ►

And I want to thank those of you who wrote to say that they don’t mind the longer format, particularly those of you who are funny about it, like this one I got from Tom

01:23:51 ►

Barbalay. Tom, by the way, is the host of the Noble Eight podcast and the Biota podcast,

01:23:58 ►

and I’ll put links to those in the program notes here and also on our Psychedelic Salon

01:24:02 ►

webpage. You can hear interviews with

01:24:05 ►

people like Bruce Dahmer and a whole lot of other really fascinating people over there.

01:24:10 ►

Anyway, here’s what Tom said. A quick note to say I like the new entire format. The only problem I

01:24:17 ►

have found is in hitting pause. When the trial logs were divided by sides, you had taken on the

01:24:23 ►

responsibility to create a division,

01:24:25 ►

and there was little that could be done bar to wait for the next installment.

01:24:29 ►

Giving the listener the power to pause means, I am sure, more exercise will be had,

01:24:35 ►

more people will stay in their cars to listen to the end,

01:24:38 ►

and people will travel to the end of their train lines rather than stopping the flow.

01:24:43 ►

I found this problem myself this morning, although I was able to hit pause eventually.

01:24:48 ►

I did feel some guilt, however.

01:24:52 ►

Well, for sure I don’t want to make anybody feel guilty, so sorry about that.

01:24:58 ►

And so that I don’t feel guilty about forgetting to say this, I sure want to send my thanks

01:25:03 ►

to Stephen B. and Michael M.,

01:25:06 ►

both of whom made donations this week. And Michael, you’ll probably remember better as a dime short,

01:25:13 ►

who’s also been a regular contributor here to the salon. So thank you both for your kind donations,

01:25:19 ►

and rest assured, I plan on seeing that yours and all of the donations to the Psychedelic Salon are put to good use directly in the service of these podcasts.

01:25:29 ►

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

01:25:42 ►

and if you have any questions about that just click on the Creative Commons link

01:25:44 ►

at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage

01:25:46 ►

which may be found at psychedelicsalon.org

01:25:50 ►

and if you have any questions, comments, complaints

01:25:53 ►

or suggestions about these podcasts

01:25:54 ►

well just send them to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com

01:25:58 ►

Chantal Hayuk, thanks again for letting me use your music here in the salon

01:26:03 ►

and thanks again to Ralph, Rupert

01:26:06 ►

and Terrence for holding these

01:26:07 ►

fascinating conversations.

01:26:09 ►

And to Bruce Dahmer for obtaining

01:26:11 ►

the recordings for us to listen to here

01:26:14 ►

in the salon.

01:26:15 ►

Well, that’s about it for today, but

01:26:17 ►

I’ll be back soon with

01:26:19 ►

installment three of the Hazelwood

01:26:21 ►

Trilogues. I’ll see you then.

01:26:24 ►

For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:26:29 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

108 - Hazelwood House Trialogue (Part 2)

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