Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
10:50 Terence McKenna: “I see the cosmos as a distillery for novelty, and the transcendental object is the novelty of novelty… . a tiny thing which has everything enfolded within it. And that means you’re in another dimension, where all points in this universe have been collapsed into co-tangency.”
16:56 Terence McKenna: “Biology has a complete four dimensional, five dimensional map of the planet’s history.”Ralph Abraham: “What the hell, the comet’s on its way. Let’s get it on.” Terence McKenna: “The planet says, the comet’s on the way. Lets get these monkeys moving towards the production of sufficient complexity that when this impact event occurs it will have a transcendental rather than simply an …” Ralph Abraham: “Have an opportunity to escape into another dimension.” Terence McKenna: “Yes.”
21:02 Terence McKenna: “If you pursue these psychedelic, shamanic plants there is inevitably this conclusion scenario, or this apocalyptic intuition. And I think that shamans have always seen the end. That the human enterprise in three dimensional space has always been finite.”
22:47 Terence McKenna: [discussing knowledge of life after death] “But in fact, I think this is probably the paradigm-shattering, world-condensing event that is bearing down on us.”
25:04 Terence McKenna: “That’s what life is. It’s a chemical strategy for the conquest of dimensionality.”
28:52 Terence McKenna: “So even within the toolbox of ordinary quantum astrophysics there are ways of tinker-toying the syntactical bits together to produce incredibly optimistic transcendental and psychedelic scenarios.”
37:22 Terence describes his “simple way” of thinking about what may happen on December 21, 2012.
39:30 Terence McKenna: “But I’m telling you, Ralph, there’s something out there. There’s something out there, and I’ll know it when I see it.”
40:06 Terence McKenna: “Believe it or not, I hate unanchored speculation. And yet I find myself in the position of leading the charge in the greatest unanchored speculation in the history of crackpot thinking.”
43:33 Terence McKenna: “I think people should drive out and take a look at the Eschaton at the end of the road of history. And what that means is psychedelic self-experimentation. I don’t know of any other way to do it. But if you drive out to the end of the road and take a look at the Eschaton and kick the tires and so forth, then you will be able to come back here and take your place in this society and be a source of moral support and exemplary behavior for other people.”
53:56 Terence McKenna: “No one is directing or controlling the creative energies of this species. It’s being driven by thousands of micro-units called companies, all pursuing agendas they won’t discuss with anybody who hasn’t signed a non-disclosure agreement. So god knows what they’re doing out there, and they’re fiddling with life, and minds, and intelligence, and micro-dimensions, and you name it.”
54:57 Terence McKenna: “It’s the future we’re living in, Hollywood creates it, and we have to swallow it until something better comes along, or until we get sick enough about that system to do something about it.”
55:43 Terence McKenna: “I think here in the final moments in human history we should push the art peddle to the floor and attempt to pour as much beauty into the human design process as we possibly can.”
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108 - Hazelwood House Trialogue (Part 2)
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And before I get into today’s program, I need to apologize to those who downloaded the previous podcast in the first 12 hours after it was posted.
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It seems that I mislabeled the MP3 tag, and it’ll show up in your menu as a second number 107 program. So if you have two Podcast 107s,
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take a close look and you’ll see that
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one should say Part 1 and the other Part 2.
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I fixed that problem now,
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but of course that won’t help you
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if you’re on automatic download
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because there are a lot of those
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that take place in the first few hours
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after I post a new program.
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So even though it’s a small inconvenience for you,
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well, maybe you can just think of it as having a collector’s item.
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Of course, I don’t think there’s much of a hot trading market
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for collectible files right now.
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I don’t know if there is such a thing.
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Well, since this is a somewhat long podcast,
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I want to begin by thanking a few people now so that my thank yous don’t get missed if I put them at the end.
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First of all, I think we’d all like to thank Ralph Abraham and Bruce Dahmer for making these tapes of these trilogues available for me to play here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And I also want to acknowledge those who have made donations of all kinds to help get these messages out to a wider audience.
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I know that many of our fellow salonners are students, young parents,
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and even old guys like me who are living on Social Security,
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and to even make a small donation is really out of the question.
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Well, I’m in the same boat,
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so I want you to know that you shouldn’t feel guilty about
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not donating. Just simply taking some of your time to listen to these podcasts is more than
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enough payment for me. And then if you tell a friend about the show, or blog a comment somewhere,
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or make a CD of your favorite program and pass it along, all of those things, including spending the
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time you’re using right now to listen to this,
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well, all of these things, I think, go into our larger salon hold-on, and we’re all the richer
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for it. And finding myself now older than I planned on getting and living on a fixed income,
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well, I have to tell you that when donations do come in to help with the expenses of these podcasts,
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it’s like having my wildest dreams come true.
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Here I am having fun listening to all these great talks
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and also getting to mess around with a little technology here and there.
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In short, I’m having the best time of my life.
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And then to top it all off, this week the salon received donations from Viple P.
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Hey, Viple, how are you?
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And thanks for yet another donation.
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That’s really nice of you.
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And I also want to thank Mona F., who also made a very generous donation.
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Thank you both.
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And I want to make a special mention for Elena, who started to make a donation,
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but in the process helped me unwind some buggy code
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that kept her from making a payment.
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But by telling me about the problem,
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she provided a very valuable service for the salon.
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So thank you, Elena, who after all her problems,
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persisted until her donation made it through.
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I probably would have given up myself.
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So thank you so very much for hanging in there.
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Well, there’s some other things I want to mention today,
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but first we’d better get into the Trilog.
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As I was thinking about how to introduce today’s program,
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I was trying to figure out how best to recapitulate the end of the last tape in this series.
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But when I began playing tape three,
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which you’re about to hear right now, I discovered that there was a disconnect between the two.
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I’m not sure how much of the trialogue, if any, was lost or what led up to the part we’re about
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to hear. But what you’re hearing with me is exactly as it came off the four cassette tapes
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that Ralph Abraham loaned to me to play here in the psychedelic salon.
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But hey, being psychedelic doesn’t mean that you’re strung out on drugs.
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It means having the ability to think outside the box and to change mental directions without getting psychic whiplash.
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So it shouldn’t be too hard for you to get right up to speed as Rupert Sheldrake asks a question that leads to a discussion of stellar pathology, among other cosmic topics,
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in a trialogue with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham that was held at Hazelwood House in England sometime in 1993.
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So just the question really is how limited is this vision? I mean, are we just talking about the destiny of this mechanic
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which has come under the, for some reason, under some planetary attractor?
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Whether it’s human-made or human-making, we can leave aside for the moment.
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And what’s your view on that? or human making, we can leave aside for a moment.
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And what’s your view on that?
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Well, I’ve thought a lot about it.
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It’s a difficult question.
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If we extend the search for a universal crisis
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beyond the earth, the only evidence
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that has been offered by anybody is there is some kind of problem between nuclear theory,
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which has been very well established for 40 years, and the neutrino output of the sun.
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And in trying to account for this, your choice is either that nuclear theory requires serious modification,
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which doesn’t seem likely since it’s worked in all other cases up till now, or there is in fact something wrong with
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our star.
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Searching for pathology beyond the solar system in the cosmic environment is outside the present reach of our technical ability,
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I tend to think, though the time wave that I’ve elaborated
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can be extended back into the pre-biological domain,
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I tend to think that this is a phenomenon of biology that I’m talking about, and that
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it is just one small planet, and that biology is a process of conquering dimensions, which
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once it starts, as a primal slime, it accelerates and it bootstraps itself to higher and higher levels at tighter and tighter turns of the spiral
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and that we are now in the process of seeing it essentially exhaust and abandon the planet
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and carry itself into this other dimension. So it’s a phenomenon of biology.
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That’s why all these metaphors of Gaia
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and Gaian interaction seem cogent to me.
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But the whole point about biology is that
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the earliest forms of life came with plants, so related to the light
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of the sun. And the whole of biology, the whole of the plant kingdom, the whole of the
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transformation of the atmosphere of the planet has depended not on merely terrestrial events,
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but on our relation to the sun and the wider cosmic environment, since the elements of
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carbon and so on produce dead, dusty or supernovae of exploding stars.
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So biology on earth is rooted in a much larger ecology.
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And so first of all I don’t think the evolution of life on earth can be regarded as merely
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terrestrial or merely biological in that sense.
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And secondly every human culture that’s talked about some light pulling it from ahead, some vision that’s
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drawn, has tended to talk in terms of images of celestial influences of one kind or another.
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Sky, planets, stars, heavenly influences of one sort or another, which suggests to me
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that if we’re to take them literally, and you take most of these things quite literally, really, that we have to look for influences
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from outside the Earth working on us.
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The transcendental object may be located or channeled through the Sun, other stars, planets,
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constellations, something to do with the astronomical environment.
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constellations, something to do with the astronomical environment? Well, if it is truly a higher dimensional object, then it is in some sense everywhere in this
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universe, and so all routes of evolutionary progress may lead into this. It’s a kind of
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may lead into this.
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It’s a kind of universal hologram of time and space into which we enter into some kind of, I suppose,
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galactic community of intelligence or something.
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In other words, biology,
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I understand what you were implying in the early part of your statement.
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I agree, yes, that spores or viruses or bacterium probably percolate and permeate through the physical universe.
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And wherever they come upon a planetary environment in which they can work their magic then life takes hold and from then on
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Life, it’s a battle in which life attempts to modify the abiotic
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Environment and control it and keep it at equilibrium
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Sufficiently for the program of bio of bios to be put into place.
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And that program is to go from this essentially,
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this initial seed to a return
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to the higher hidden source of all
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outside the pleroma of three-dimensional space.
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It’s a kind of Gnostic return idea.
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It’s an idea of alchemical sublimation and rarefaction.
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I see the cosmos as a distillery for novelty,
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and the transcendental object is the novelty of novelties.
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And when we formally define that,
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we discover we are getting
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something like a Leibnizian
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plenum, a monad of some
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sort, a tiny thing which
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has everything
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enfolded within it
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and that means
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that you are in another dimension
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where all points in this
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universe have been collapsed
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into cotangency
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and it is an apotheosis, it is an apocatastasis
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it’s something else in Greek, I’m not sure what
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pure poetry
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while trying to listen to this, did I not observe a consensus that, as a matter of fact, it’s provincial?
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Is that right?
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That I’m suggesting?
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We have a biological catastrophe on planet Earth, while the rest…
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Yes, the Earth is giving birth to a hyper-dimensional being.
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In spite of the fact that the eschaton permeates as a higher dimensional object the entire universe,
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as a matter of fact, it’s got a special sub-eschaton with a more accelerated program of just for us.
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Salvation proceeds on many schedules, my son.
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my son the fact that the galaxy
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is spiral suggests to me
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that in the interest of modesty
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we should probably
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confine this
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supposition to the notion
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that it is happening
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within the galaxy
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it’s perhaps what spiral galaxies
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are about.
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Well, the sun is burning out.
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People believe that.
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A mere half billion years to go,
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which is a little bit longer than the 18 and a half years.
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Well, but excuse me.
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If there is a problem with the neutrino output of the sun,
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the orthodox interpretation of that is that that means the sun has stopped
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and gone off the fusion boil and is in fact just sitting there.
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And the amount of time it would take for evidence of this having gone off the boil
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to percolate to the surface is about 25,000 years
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and the moment that it happens
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eight minutes later
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the radiant energy reaching the earth will drop 60%
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except your lower bound of 25,000 years
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without further discussion
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just to shock you further discussion, let me know.
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Just to shock you, let me take a position much more pessimistic
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than yours.
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There have been several
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close calls lately with
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comments. Some people,
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William Whiston, for example, or
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Emmanuel Velikovsky, felt
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that the beginning of our planet,
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the Big Bang, as a matter of fact,
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was a collision with a comet.
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And in the last couple of years, there have been several close calls.
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In fact, the closest call in history is only three or four years back.
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It seems to me, especially after a good look at the sun, winter without classes,
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that it’s quite likely we would get hit by a comet, and even pretty soon,
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sooner than 25,000 years, maybe sooner than 18 and a half years. our classes, that it’s quite likely we would get hit by a comet, and even pretty soon,
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sooner than 25,000 years, maybe sooner than 18 and a half years. Now suppose that this happened, and then we have an extinction such as we saw 65 million
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years back when Jurassic Park vanished into the ocean.
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vanished into the ocean. Then, all of this biological miracle, accelerating to its own omega point anyway, according to a schedule with exponential condensation to the concrescence
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of the eschaton and the shockwave from the transcendental object at the end of time would be rendered totally insignificant because the cause came by a
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car crash on the highway of the solar system totally independent of the progress of biology
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on planet Earth.
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No, I don’t… you don’t get it.
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It’s entirely possible…
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I didn’t want to bring it up because it’s a little Halloween-ish
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but it’s
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entirely possible that the
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transcendental object at the end of
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time is nothing
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more than a five
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kilometer wide carbonaceous
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chondritic asteroid that in
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a single moment will stand us
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all at the gates of paradise
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and that that is what it means
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trying to destroy my argument by appropriating it
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didn’t i say didn’t didn’t i say that the dissolving of boundaries would eventually
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mean the dissolving of the boundaries between life and death itself? Well, why then, if the eschaton is a comet rapidly approaching New York City,
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why is it necessary to have this increase of complexity,
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the population explosion, the destruction of the ozone layer?
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Well, you know, it’s very interesting.
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Did you know that immediately preceding, by immediately preceding, I mean in the million years preceding the impact that killed the dinosaurs, some enormous extinction was underway that they can’t figure it out.
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It’s like the earth knew or something like that.
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There was an extinction underway when that cometary impact hit.
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And so what I’m suggesting, Ralph, is that biology knows.
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This is back to this morning’s discussion about the homing pigeons.
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Biology has a complete four-dimensional, five-dimensional map of the planet’s history.
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What the hell? The comet’s on the way
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let’s get it on
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the planet said the comet’s on the way
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let’s get these monkeys moving
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toward
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the production of
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sufficient complexity
00:17:18 ►
that when this impact event occurs
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it will have a transcendental
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revenue simply
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an opportunity to escape into another dimension.
00:17:28 ►
Yes. So all of
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history is this curious relationship
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with this intuition that nobody wants to
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face but nobody can quite get rid of. And so here we’re sacrificing goats
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and we’re doing this and we’re doing that because
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We have this very restless feeling that all is not well in three-dimensional space and time and you know
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History keeps bearing it out and now
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It’s it’s upon us. It’s
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Who don’t quite make the extinct at the moment?
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Well, you know, here’s the idea.
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Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine surrealist,
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he had an interesting idea.
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He felt that a species could not enter hyperspace, whatever that means,
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until the last member of that species perished. And so what is happening here is that vast numbers
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of souls are accumulating in some dimension, waiting for us to decently depart this mortal coil so that the human family in a body can find itself at play in the fields of the Lord.
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Crypto-Christian after all.
00:18:59 ►
All along.
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All along.
00:19:02 ►
All along.
00:19:03 ►
Yes.
00:19:02 ►
All along! All along!
00:19:08 ►
But what I want to do is to think this through a bit further.
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Given that there’ll be this…
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We used to think that this great transformation of humanity,
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a kind of collective near-death experience,
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except it would be an actual death experience,
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would be brought about by a nuclear cataclysm.
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Well, although the bonds are still there, that model’s gone out of fashion for some
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reason, and it could easily come back.
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But currently?
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Currently.
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We’re now more into ecological.
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I mean, your list, apart from nuclear proliferation, had the ecological apocalypses.
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Anyway, we’ve got all these models let’s assume that it happens
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that this happens
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there’s this sudden transformation of humanity
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and dogs and cats and everything else
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into this new
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they’re taken up into the transcendental attractor
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now what effect does this have on the rest of the universe?
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that’s my question
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I’m going to leave aside the details on that.
00:20:06 ►
Well, I think it’s not an answerable question,
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but it is in fact what we will then set out to understand,
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that we are literally packing up
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and preparing to decamp from Newtonian space and time
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for the high road of hyper-dimensional existence.
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And we may find ourselves, you know, for the high road of hyper-dimensional existence.
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And we may find ourselves, you know,
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the least in the grand councils of the who-knows-what, or we may find something, I imagine, entirely unsuspecting.
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I mean, in fairness to the audience, I should say,
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these things don’t spring de novo for me.
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I mean, I talked this morning about shamanism anticipating the future
00:20:56 ►
and that that was how that magic was worked.
00:20:58 ►
Well, if you pursue these psychedelic shamanic plants,
00:21:06 ►
there is inevitably this conclusion scenario
00:21:11 ►
or this apocalyptic intuition.
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And I think that shamans have always seen the end,
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that the human enterprise in three-dimensional space
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has always been finite.
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the human enterprise in three-dimensional space has always been finite and in the same way that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny as we look back into the past it seems reasonable then to assume
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that death which we have spent a thousand years turning into a materialist vacuum is in fact not that at all and that there is an enormous mystery that hovers
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over our existence and that it is only unraveled beyond the grave and I would never in my life
00:21:59 ►
have thought that I would have been pushed to this kind of a position. I mean, I spent the first half of my life getting away from this,
00:22:08 ►
but the evidence of these shamanic hallucinogens
00:22:12 ►
is in fact that shamans have always done what they do
00:22:16 ►
via ancestor magic and higher dimensional perception,
00:22:19 ►
and that death is not what naive positivism in the last 500 years has attempted to say that it is.
00:22:28 ►
And I realize that it’s incredible to suppose that here at the apex of materialist, positivist, scientific civilization,
00:22:38 ►
we’re going to make an orthogonal turn into an understanding of what lies
00:22:46 ►
beyond the grave
00:22:47 ►
but in fact I think this is
00:22:49 ►
probably the paradigm
00:22:51 ►
shattering
00:22:52 ►
world condensing
00:22:55 ►
event that is bearing
00:22:57 ►
down on us
00:22:58 ►
well given all that
00:23:03 ►
I want to
00:23:04 ►
I want to know whether this has happened somewhere else.
00:23:08 ►
Because if it could happen on our planet, change the entire conditions of dimensionality
00:23:14 ►
throughout the galaxy or let us perhaps cosmos, there’s no…
00:23:19 ►
What makes you think that our planet’s the curse?
00:23:21 ►
No, I don’t think that.
00:23:22 ►
Ah, well, if it’s happened elsewhere, what effects will it have elsewhere in the galaxy, on planets elsewhere in the galaxy,
00:23:29 ►
what effect do you expect it to have had on us already? Well, it seems to be the content of it
00:23:36 ►
when you explore it, when you explore the adumbrations of the transcendental object and you see all this transhuman alien
00:23:45 ►
data
00:23:46 ►
that is
00:23:48 ►
that is essentially
00:23:51 ►
what it has become
00:23:53 ►
in its past history
00:23:54 ►
it wears upon itself the imprint
00:23:57 ►
because see all life
00:23:59 ►
is finding its way back
00:24:01 ►
to some kind of source
00:24:03 ►
that is in a higher plane and that’s why it
00:24:07 ►
has this alien presentation because it has maybe a thousand civilizations poured
00:24:16 ►
into it or ten thousand or fifty million who can know the universe is old already, but it pervades the universe like a gas
00:24:29 ►
in a higher dimensional space.
00:24:33 ►
What I can’t work out then is whether we’re talking here
00:24:35 ►
about some planetary virus
00:24:38 ►
that gets hold of civilization after civilization
00:24:41 ►
or planet after planet
00:24:42 ►
and causes them to auto-destruct in this particular way
00:24:45 ►
or whether we’re talking about some cosmic process
00:24:49 ►
because whatever it is it seems to be pretty local to planets
00:24:51 ►
it seems to me it’s just a continuation of life’s program
00:24:56 ►
of conquering whatever dimension it’s up against
00:25:00 ►
that it has not yet conquered
00:25:02 ►
and probably that process is endless
00:25:04 ►
that’s
00:25:05 ►
what life is it’s a chemical strategy for the conquest of dimensionality and
00:25:11 ►
it carries out this program come hell or high water just like striking a match
00:25:17 ►
you know biology comes to a planet and then the flame leaps up and then pretty soon it burns out through the exhaustion
00:25:27 ►
of resources and the arrival of the shockwave of the eschaton for that particular planet
00:25:33 ►
biology there is extinguished once again and what is left in the out in the ashes is the
00:25:38 ►
alchemical lapis the sopticrolith, the one thing.
00:25:48 ►
Right?
00:26:01 ►
Yes, well, I wouldn’t expect you to buy into it whole hog.
00:26:06 ►
But it’s interesting because it provides a way of imaging what is happening
00:26:08 ►
that doesn’t fall to some
00:26:10 ►
of the dualisms that haunt
00:26:12 ►
either a reductionist view or an
00:26:14 ►
out and out, gung ho
00:26:15 ►
no questions asked religious
00:26:18 ►
conversion view
00:26:20 ►
and let me say one more thing
00:26:21 ►
while we’re on the subject
00:26:23 ►
because it shouldn’t be left unsaid.
00:26:26 ►
There are orthodox cosmologies that support my contention of the possibility of a universal collapse.
00:26:36 ►
Hans Altven of the Swedish Academy of Sciences has suggested that the universe is what’s called a vacuum fluctuation.
00:26:45 ►
Now, a vacuum fluctuation is a situation where it happens in quantum mechanics,
00:26:51 ►
where a group of particles and antiparticles spring into existence and then annihilate each other.
00:27:00 ►
And because parity is conserved, this creation ex nihilo of matter is allowed by quantum physics.
00:27:08 ►
But an interesting aspect of these vacuum fluctuations is that quantum theory sets no upper limit on their theoretical size.
00:27:18 ►
It merely says that the larger they are, the more improbable they are.
00:27:23 ►
that the larger they are, the more improbable they are.
00:27:27 ►
Well, the universe itself could be a vacuum fluctuation of some 10 high 68 particles,
00:27:32 ►
which sprang into being completely according
00:27:35 ►
and allowed by quantum physics,
00:27:38 ►
separated into a higher dimensional space
00:27:43 ►
and are in fact eventually at some point in the future
00:27:48 ►
going to reconnect and conserve parity.
00:27:52 ►
And Alfven says that in this kind of a higher dimensional collision
00:27:57 ►
all points in both systems would appear to an observer
00:28:01 ►
to become cotangent instantly.
00:28:04 ►
And what that would mean is,
00:28:06 ►
he’s saying that the material universe
00:28:09 ►
potentially could disappear in a single moment
00:28:14 ►
across megaparsecs of space and time,
00:28:18 ►
and all that would be left, Alf then says,
00:28:21 ►
is light, because light does not have an antiparticle
00:28:26 ►
it is different, it is the exception
00:28:29 ►
and no one knows what the physics of light
00:28:32 ►
a universe made only of light
00:28:35 ►
would be like
00:28:36 ►
and I suggest to you that are the many myths
00:28:40 ►
and intuitions that link light to the process
00:28:43 ►
of spiritual advancement
00:28:45 ►
and talk about the generation of the light body and so forth
00:28:49 ►
may anticipate something like this.
00:28:52 ►
So even within the toolbox of ordinary quantum astrophysics,
00:28:57 ►
there are ways of tinker-toying the syntactical bits together
00:29:02 ►
to produce incredibly optimistic,
00:29:05 ►
transcendental and psychedelic scenarios.
00:29:09 ►
There’s no way to personally leap into
00:29:11 ►
the dimensions of hyperspace
00:29:13 ►
in the birth event of the eschaton,
00:29:17 ►
not in quantum physics, I suppose.
00:29:20 ►
We’re talking about a different kind of thing.
00:29:23 ►
What about the timetable, Terence?
00:29:27 ►
So far it seems like your idea is pretty similar to Teilhard de Chardin,
00:29:33 ►
except you said he didn’t give us a timetable.
00:29:38 ►
So assuming we have sunshine for 25,000 years…
00:29:45 ►
When do I think it will occur?
00:29:48 ►
Yeah.
00:29:48 ►
Well, it’s sort of weird to talk about that
00:29:52 ►
because it rests on a formal argument
00:29:56 ►
where you have to look at a lot of historical data.
00:29:59 ►
What I did was I produced curves
00:30:03 ►
that I felt were reflective of the ebb and flow of novelty
00:30:09 ►
in time. Then by fitting these curves to historical data, and granted history is not a quantified
00:30:19 ►
entity, but nevertheless there’s general agreement, for example,
00:30:26 ►
that the Greek Renaissance was a novel time, the 20th century was a novel time.
00:30:31 ►
So by doing this, I slowly refined down a prediction based on a spiral closure, which
00:30:39 ►
makes it happen much faster than you would expect, of the winter solstice of 2012 AD.
00:30:46 ►
After I had made that calculation, I discovered to my amazement
00:30:51 ►
that the Mayan civilization had a very complex cyclical and recursive calendar,
00:30:58 ►
and it too indicated that same date.
00:31:04 ►
And then I think if you take these World Bank,
00:31:08 ►
United Nations strict objective data curves
00:31:13 ►
and put in the fudge factor of the unexpected,
00:31:19 ►
it seems pretty reasonable to suppose
00:31:21 ►
that at least there is there a nexus of prophetistic intensity
00:31:29 ►
of some sort that has caused a number of traditions for some reason to get focused on the late
00:31:36 ►
months of 2012 AD. When I attempted to understand objectively what could be going on there,
00:31:47 ►
tempted to understand objectively what could be going on there using computer simulations
00:31:55 ►
of the star fields, a program called Voyager that lets you see any place in the solar system
00:32:04 ►
10,000 years in the past or 10,000 years in the future. It turns out that there is something unique about this December 21,
00:32:07 ►
2012 solstice. It’s a solstice which will occur at the heliacal rising of the galaxy.
00:32:17 ►
What that means is once every 26,000 years in the precession of the great year,
00:32:29 ►
there will be a winter solstice sunrise that catches 28 degrees Sagittarius
00:32:35 ►
on the plane of the galactic ecliptic.
00:32:38 ►
What does that mean?
00:32:40 ►
Who knows?
00:32:42 ►
Certainly not me.
00:32:43 ►
In Hamlet’s Mill by
00:32:46 ►
Giorgio de Santillana
00:32:47 ►
and Helga van Dechend, who were
00:32:49 ►
both very well-respected
00:32:52 ►
historians of science,
00:32:54 ►
they suggested
00:32:55 ►
that for
00:32:57 ►
ancient peoples, these were
00:33:00 ►
somehow galactic
00:33:01 ►
gates or way stations
00:33:03 ►
of some sort through which souls had to transit
00:33:07 ►
to make their way back to their higher and hidden home.
00:33:12 ►
This is not compelling stuff to me.
00:33:15 ►
I find it a little too mediumistic or something, but nevertheless it is an objective fact that
00:33:22 ►
the heliacal rising of the galaxy, which occurs once in 26,000 years, will occur on this date I chose,
00:33:30 ►
and that I did not know that at the time, nor did I know the heliacal rising.
00:33:33 ►
Well, that’s interesting, I agree, but let’s look at this.
00:33:36 ►
We have here the coincidence of three different things.
00:33:40 ►
One is what you did, looking at historical data, which I think we could fairly describe as a novel and very interesting and fancy kind of mathematical extrapolation of historical data that does sort of culminate in a point.
00:33:58 ►
We grant you that. The other two things, the Mayan calendar and the greatest astronomical conjunction in 26,000 years,
00:34:08 ►
these are both periodic phenomena.
00:34:10 ►
The Mayan calendar repeats a cycle in 26,000 years,
00:34:14 ►
and the greatest conjunction in the galaxy, from our perspective in the galaxy,
00:34:20 ►
recurs every 26,000 years.
00:34:22 ►
So they could be expected to recur once more before the sun gives its last gasp and biology
00:34:29 ►
must extinct.
00:34:32 ►
So if we would like to weigh these things equally, it would kind of suggest that your
00:34:37 ►
mathematical extrapolation, which is good, I like it, but it’s not the same as the reportage of a shamanic clairvoyance
00:34:48 ►
that you were talking about of a hyper-dimensional investigation.
00:34:52 ►
This is more like academic scholarship with huge database of history
00:34:57 ►
and this imaginative curve used to extrapolate data.
00:35:03 ►
So this suggests that your extrapolation curve could actually be reversed,
00:35:08 ►
like you take it like this, it ends here,
00:35:10 ►
you take it out and you rotate it around and you put it back there.
00:35:14 ►
And then you have a completely different model,
00:35:16 ►
which must necessarily, without a doubt,
00:35:18 ►
equally well or poorly fit the historical data up to now,
00:35:22 ►
and yet it has a future, but only for 26,000
00:35:25 ►
more years.
00:35:26 ►
In spite of this, that it’s not a shamanic reportage, it’s not an ironclad extrapolation,
00:35:34 ►
and it’s not a coincidence with two other disparate eschatological predictions, then
00:35:43 ►
I think the case for this actually being the Omega Point
00:35:48 ►
is weak. You should think about this. It’s an important day. It’s some kind of transformation.
00:35:53 ►
As far as the transition from all of us into the fifth dimension, I don’t see a case for it.
00:36:02 ►
Well, you’d have to go into, you’d have to look at it, because what it comes down to
00:36:07 ►
then is a very fine-tuned argument, looking at a particular curve, looking at a…
00:36:12 ►
So look at the curve, reflect it around, and put it on the other side. What’s to contradict
00:36:18 ►
this? History sort of starts running backwards from the point of view…
00:36:22 ►
Well, I’m not sure if I can explain, but there is an answer, and I’ll try.
00:36:26 ►
It’s something like this.
00:36:29 ►
It’s a damped oscillation.
00:36:31 ►
It actually does run down.
00:36:34 ►
It isn’t elegant to try to make it one cycle
00:36:41 ►
within a larger or extrapolated set of larger cycles
00:36:46 ►
because it has
00:36:47 ►
a built in spin down
00:36:49 ►
factor in it that makes it pretty clear
00:36:52 ►
that it is a single
00:36:54 ►
it’s many cycles
00:36:55 ►
embedded within many other cycles
00:36:57 ►
but on its highest level
00:36:59 ►
it actually has a beginning and it actually
00:37:02 ►
has an end
00:37:02 ►
it just seems to you looking at this radically implausible, that there would be any future after this point.
00:37:11 ►
Well, I’ve thought of many, many ways of thinking about this that would make it not so catastrophically radical.
00:37:23 ►
And here’s a very simple way
00:37:25 ►
that makes everybody feel a little better
00:37:27 ►
suppose
00:37:29 ►
that what happens on
00:37:31 ►
December 21st 2012
00:37:33 ►
is
00:37:34 ►
physicists who have been laboring
00:37:36 ►
for some time toward the technology
00:37:39 ►
of time travel
00:37:40 ►
actually succeed
00:37:42 ►
well then suddenly the wave is fulfilled and yet the heavens
00:37:47 ►
do not fall and angels don’t appear to lift us into paradise.
00:37:52 ►
It simply shows that the reason history ended at that date was because after the invention
00:38:00 ►
of time travel, the notion of a seriality of events ceases to have any meaning.
00:38:07 ►
And so everybody agrees, well, history ended yesterday, and it did end, and we now live
00:38:14 ►
in the post-historical, atemporal bubble where you not only tell where you live, but
00:38:19 ►
when you live.
00:38:21 ►
And everything would be very nicely fulfilled then, and people would say, well,
00:38:26 ►
the people who saw it coming got highly agitated because they didn’t realize what it was that
00:38:31 ►
was coming.
00:38:32 ►
Now we know what was coming.
00:38:34 ►
It turns out to be just like the invention of the steam engine or the power of flight
00:38:38 ►
or anything like that.
00:38:39 ►
There are, you see, we needn’t assume these cosmic dimensions to the transformation.
00:38:45 ►
You’ve given this up?
00:38:46 ►
But we must assume the transformation.
00:38:48 ►
There are still some alternatives?
00:38:50 ►
Oh, there are other alternatives. Here’s a good one.
00:38:53 ►
How about this one?
00:38:55 ►
December 21st, 2012 AD, I drop dead.
00:38:59 ►
Then everyone says, well, how peculiar.
00:39:03 ►
It was only about him.
00:39:06 ►
That’s really controversial.
00:39:15 ►
It was just we were all swept along for 45 years in some bizarre mathematical hallucination
00:39:18 ►
that this very glib Irishman was able to foist off.
00:39:23 ►
And it’s totally fulfilled.
00:39:24 ►
And yet, again, the heavens
00:39:27 ►
don’t fall nor the oceans boil.
00:39:30 ►
But I’m telling you, Ralph, there’s something out there.
00:39:34 ►
There’s something out there.
00:39:35 ►
There’s something out there.
00:39:37 ►
And I’ll know it when I see it, and I expect you at my elbow.
00:39:52 ►
it. I expect you at my elbow. Well, I’m sort of a bad person to try this all out. And I’m kind of an unfortunate bearer of this message because if you knew me, you would know that
00:39:58 ►
I’m actually not a very pleasant or nice person. And I’m very hard on, there’s nothing, believe it or not, I
00:40:09 ►
hate unanchored speculation. And yet I find myself in the position of leading the charge
00:40:17 ►
and the greatest unanchored speculation in the history of crackpot thinking. So it bothers me.
00:40:26 ►
See my method, which I can’t really go into tonight,
00:40:30 ►
but it’s very formal.
00:40:32 ►
What I say is,
00:40:36 ►
it’s very easy to predict the future
00:40:39 ►
because who the hell can say you’re wrong, you know?
00:40:43 ►
It’s just fire-free zone.
00:40:45 ►
Predicting the past, on the other hand,
00:40:49 ►
is very, very difficult because it’s happened.
00:40:52 ►
So if you’re wrong, everyone will know.
00:40:56 ►
So what I have done is make the career out of predicting the past
00:41:02 ►
with a wave which proceeds right past the present
00:41:07 ►
moment into the future and my argument to my skeptics is my wave has correctly
00:41:14 ►
predicted any past moment that you can conceive of therefore there is a certain
00:41:22 ►
intellectual obligation to at least take seriously the contention that it predicts the part of history that finely grained argument about the vicissitudes of history and where the
00:41:51 ►
great changes lie.
00:41:53 ►
And without that, it’s a sort of arm waving at this point.
00:42:00 ►
Terence, I just got one final question I want to ask you about this
00:42:05 ►
which is that other people who tell us
00:42:07 ►
the end is at hand
00:42:08 ►
as in placards
00:42:10 ►
the end is at hand
00:42:11 ►
prepare to meet by doom
00:42:13 ►
suggest that this requires
00:42:16 ►
some kind of special moral preparation
00:42:18 ►
on our part
00:42:19 ►
now, does yours come
00:42:21 ►
willy nilly
00:42:23 ►
no need to get ready for it in any particular way?
00:42:26 ►
Would you recommend some special kind of preparation?
00:42:32 ►
Well, this is a very difficult question for me,
00:42:35 ►
because much of what I was involved in many years ago was political activism, political struggle, and yet when I go to my sources on this matter,
00:42:51 ►
they assure me that it’s a done deal, and that possibly one might spend one’s time reassuring other people, but only if you felt like it. It’s the walls are now so high,
00:43:11 ►
the creodes so deep, the momentum so tremendous, that I really don’t think anything could swerve
00:43:18 ►
or divert us from what we are being drawn into. I wasn’t thinking in terms of more recycling and so on.
00:43:27 ►
I was thinking in terms of moral preparation
00:43:30 ►
or conscious preparation.
00:43:32 ►
Well, conscious preparation.
00:43:34 ►
I think people should drive out and take a look at the eschaton
00:43:37 ►
at the end of the road of history.
00:43:40 ►
And what that means is psychedelic self-experimentation.
00:43:44 ►
I don’t know of any other way to do it.
00:43:47 ►
But if you drive out to the end of the road and take a look at the eschaton and kick the tires and so forth,
00:43:54 ►
then you will be able to come back here and take your place in this society
00:43:59 ►
and be a source of moral support and exemplary behavior for other people.
00:44:05 ►
Because I think that as we approach the eschaton, remember I called history its shock wave,
00:44:13 ►
literally the cue forces, as engineers call them, the vibrational forces that will rip
00:44:20 ►
the wings off an airplane as it approaches hypersonic speed.
00:44:27 ►
History is good.
00:44:29 ►
That’s what I meant when I said it will be a white-knuckle ride.
00:44:35 ►
There is an outlandish amount of vibration in the next 19 years.
00:44:41 ►
It’s going to look good, then bad, then worse, then good, then bad.
00:44:46 ►
And if you haven’t driven out to the end of the road and taken a look at what’s waiting it’ll just drive you nuts what the next 20 years are going to be like because all the resonances
00:44:54 ►
of all past time are now in the close packing phase as the thing is squeezed down and the contradictions are rubbing up against each other. Boundaries
00:45:07 ►
are dissolving all around us. The Soviet Union? Gone! Yugoslavia? Gone! America is a great
00:45:15 ►
power? Gone! Good taste? Gone! Boundaries dissolving all around us this is going to happen faster and faster and faster
00:45:26 ►
and governments now, all they’re doing
00:45:29 ►
is managing a spreading wildfire
00:45:33 ►
of uncontrolled catastrophes
00:45:35 ►
and trying to keep us in the dark
00:45:37 ►
about how bad things really are
00:45:40 ►
and so it’s good to go out and take a look
00:45:44 ►
and reassure yourself that it’s good to go out and take a look and reassure
00:45:46 ►
yourself that
00:45:47 ►
it’s there
00:45:49 ►
I think we should
00:45:59 ►
it is a possibility, I think we could discuss it
00:46:02 ►
now
00:46:02 ►
or do you have another point?
00:46:04 ►
No, we’ve reached the time to open it up.
00:46:08 ►
Terence, you sound to me like a psychedelic version of Karl Marx.
00:46:12 ►
Well, Marx was the last great millenarian theoretician
00:46:17 ►
in Western civilization, that’s right.
00:46:20 ►
He was convinced that history was the result of interplay
00:46:24 ►
of conflicting classes
00:46:26 ►
and once that conflict had been removed, history itself would cease.
00:46:31 ►
And I hear a similar story, except the players are not the classes in society,
00:46:39 ►
but the various forms of global problems that we have.
00:46:43 ►
but these various forms of global problems that we have. And it could be that it’s a kind of test arranged by this
00:46:50 ►
attractor down the end of the road there
00:46:51 ►
that’s leering at us and saying,
00:46:54 ►
let’s see if you guys can get yourselves together enough
00:46:57 ►
to get around this one and show us that you can reach
00:47:00 ►
a higher stage of evolution.
00:47:03 ►
If you don’t make it, you don’t survive. If you do make it, then you go to the higher stage of evolution. If you don’t make it, you don’t survive.
00:47:06 ►
If you do make it, then you go to the next step of the line.
00:47:09 ►
It’s an initiation ritual.
00:47:11 ►
A sort of, yes.
00:47:12 ►
I shouldn’t put it in this kind of crazyology.
00:47:14 ►
A series of hurdles to be leaped as we approach the end.
00:47:18 ►
It’s not the kind of language.
00:47:19 ►
It’s not the kind of language that we express it with.
00:47:22 ►
It’s a fun way of talking about it.
00:47:25 ►
So it might not be the end.
00:47:26 ►
It might just be like entering the Masons or something like that.
00:47:30 ►
Yes, well, it’s impossible to say.
00:47:34 ►
But you’re right, certainly, that all of these factors are coming together.
00:47:38 ►
I don’t see it as class war.
00:47:40 ►
I see it as a kind of universal Manichaean struggle between habit and novelty.
00:47:48 ►
And, you know, habit is forever dragging novelty back down to its level, and novelty is forever
00:47:56 ►
conniving new ways to escape the control of habit. But the good news is over vast spans of time novelty always wins
00:48:06 ►
and what we’re simply seeing is novelty crossing a particularly significant milestone
00:48:13 ►
in its infinite journey outward towards self-expression.
00:48:17 ►
What about all these people that say we’re really crossing from the Piscean Age to the Aquarian Age
00:48:23 ►
and the emergence of high-speed electronic communications, etc., etc.,
00:48:28 ►
is the typical symptom of the Aquarian Age,
00:48:31 ►
and it’s high-speed communication.
00:48:33 ►
I’m not an astrologer, but all this turbulence
00:48:35 ►
is because we’re right at the point where we’re crossing.
00:48:39 ►
See, I think that as we approach this eschatological object,
00:48:44 ►
the number of interpretations of what it is will just proliferate exponentially.
00:48:50 ►
I mean, false prophets of all sorts and thousands of variants will arise because everyone can feel it,
00:49:00 ►
and yet everyone has a unique perspective on it that then distorts their description of it.
00:49:08 ►
I mean, I think that all the messiahs and mystics of human history can be seen in this light.
00:49:16 ►
You could almost have a geometric theory of messiahhood and just say,
00:49:22 ►
if you were in the big league, the Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, Manai, Mahavira league,
00:49:30 ►
then you just caught a very bright reflection from the distant spinning eschaton,
00:49:38 ►
and then you embodied it and became a microcosm of that distant macrocosm.
00:49:46 ►
And religions are set marching by this means.
00:49:50 ►
Well, then the guy parading down at Hyde Park with the sign,
00:49:54 ►
the only difference between him and the big leaguers
00:49:57 ►
is he got a smaller scintilla of the noetic energy.
00:50:02 ►
And so then with each of us,
00:50:06 ►
we each have a perspective on the eschaton.
00:50:10 ►
And to the degree that we cultivate and fan that flame,
00:50:15 ►
we get an insight through the filter of our personal circumstance,
00:50:20 ►
the infinite interprets itself to us.
00:50:24 ►
Something like that.
00:50:26 ►
So we’re all just a little bit more.
00:50:29 ►
Fall in.
00:50:30 ►
We’re all carrying a tiny piece of the whole
00:50:34 ►
and at the end of time
00:50:36 ►
each person will make their contribution.
00:50:39 ►
Yes, we’re like motes being drawn in.
00:50:43 ►
Like leaf-molching ants.
00:50:46 ►
But what if we’re all aspects of God?
00:50:50 ►
Yes, although I think God is a contaminated term,
00:50:53 ►
but we’re all aspects of the transcendental other.
00:50:58 ►
And our deployment in three-dimensional space and time
00:51:03 ►
is just one aspect of its being,
00:51:06 ►
and we are in the process of finding our way to a noble point of transition
00:51:12 ►
into a different dimension of its self-expression.
00:51:17 ►
What do you think about the three-dimensional self-expression?
00:51:22 ►
Creativity, complexity, density of connectedness.
00:51:26 ►
And one reason I love this notion, you see,
00:51:30 ►
is because even the positivists agree
00:51:33 ►
that the most densely ramified physical material
00:51:38 ►
known in the universe is the human neocortex.
00:51:43 ►
So suddenly, no longer are we observers of the cosmic drama. It turns out it
00:51:49 ►
was our opera all along and the universal drama of the production and preservation of complexity
00:51:58 ►
is met in us. We represent the most precious distillation of this four, five, six billion year process
00:52:09 ►
of the production and the conservation of novelty.
00:52:13 ►
It returns us to the center of the cosmic drama and ennobles the human condition thereby.
00:52:22 ►
Well, so now there are new technical
00:52:25 ►
salvation being offered
00:52:28 ►
the possibility
00:52:30 ►
no one knows
00:52:31 ►
well not some people think they know
00:52:34 ►
but it is assumed
00:52:36 ►
possible to perhaps
00:52:37 ►
migrate into some kind of
00:52:40 ►
dimension of electronic
00:52:41 ►
micro storage or something
00:52:43 ►
we’re all going to live in
00:52:46 ►
a gold ytterbium supercooled cube buried a thousand feet beneath Copernicus and
00:52:53 ►
abandon the earth to animal life or you know that’s not very attractive to me on
00:53:00 ►
the other hand I’ve never been downloaded into a chip so I suppose one
00:53:06 ►
shouldn’t knock it till they’ve tried it but the virtual realities that I have
00:53:12 ►
seen have been hideously sterile and cartoon-like on the other hand you know
00:53:18 ►
predicting the pace of technological innovation especially with these new technologies
00:53:25 ►
is very
00:53:26 ►
very tricky
00:53:27 ►
human
00:53:28 ►
the study
00:53:29 ►
of neural
00:53:29 ►
networks
00:53:30 ►
parallel
00:53:31 ►
arrays
00:53:31 ►
they are
00:53:33 ►
pushing out
00:53:34 ►
in directions
00:53:35 ►
where there
00:53:36 ►
could be
00:53:36 ►
unexpected
00:53:37 ►
breakthroughs
00:53:38 ►
in the
00:53:39 ►
imaging of
00:53:40 ►
human
00:53:40 ►
intelligence
00:53:41 ►
or take
00:53:43 ►
the cold
00:53:43 ►
fusion thing
00:53:44 ►
a couple of years ago
00:53:45 ►
it turned out not to be so
00:53:48 ►
but for a moment
00:53:49 ►
the whole thing
00:53:50 ►
hung in the balance there
00:53:53 ►
there could be more of this
00:53:55 ►
kind of thing
00:53:56 ►
no one is directing or controlling
00:53:59 ►
the creative energies of this species
00:54:01 ►
it’s being driven by
00:54:03 ►
thousands of micro units called
00:54:05 ►
companies all pursuing agendas they won’t discuss with anybody who hasn’t
00:54:10 ►
signed a non-disclosure agreement so God knows what they’re doing out there and
00:54:16 ►
they’re fiddling with life and mind and intelligence and micro dimensions and you name it. So given the past history of technological
00:54:29 ►
development I certainly wouldn’t rule out breakthroughs that could make the timetable
00:54:35 ►
of my scenario even seem conservative.
00:54:38 ►
Even less than a miracle could as a matter of fact sort of turn it around, push it to a new phase,
00:54:47 ►
like co-fusion.
00:54:49 ►
Yes, or superconducting thinking machines, or any of a number of things.
00:54:55 ►
So what’s the future?
00:54:57 ►
It’s the future we’re living in. Hollywood creates it, and we have to swallow it until
00:55:03 ►
something better comes along
00:55:06 ►
or until we get sick enough of that system to do something about it.
00:55:14 ►
Like what? Well the design process of human civilization has been left to Bauhaus Bratz with their eye on
00:55:27 ►
their checkbook. That has created this international airport style of human
00:55:35 ►
coral reef that is absolutely abiotic and toxic. So art, I think here in the final moments of human history, we should push the
00:55:49 ►
art pedal to the floor and attempt to pour as much beauty into the human design process
00:55:59 ►
as we possibly can. Too long have we wandered from the notion that the good, the true, and the
00:56:06 ►
beautiful are somehow inextricably linked and modernity teaches otherwise,
00:56:12 ►
but modernity has failed.
00:56:22 ►
well a revisified shamanism
00:56:25 ►
which would be
00:56:27 ►
the culmination of this
00:56:29 ►
program of art
00:56:31 ►
that I’m suggesting
00:56:32 ►
essentially on one level
00:56:34 ►
shamanism is
00:56:36 ►
the art of gaining
00:56:38 ►
a familiarity with death
00:56:40 ►
and this is
00:56:43 ►
what we must do I think because we’ve
00:56:45 ►
become so alienated
00:56:48 ►
from it so
00:56:49 ►
part of what I talk about
00:56:51 ►
is a neo-archaism
00:56:53 ►
that what we are
00:56:55 ►
by leaving history
00:56:57 ►
we’re returning to the values
00:57:00 ►
that preceded
00:57:02 ►
history which
00:57:03 ►
where there was a great de-emphasis
00:57:07 ►
on material culture
00:57:08 ►
and a great emphasis
00:57:11 ►
on human bonding, feelings, cognition
00:57:17 ►
that sort of thing
00:57:19 ►
we have to re-empower our sense of self
00:57:23 ►
we have accepted our place in a very rigid hierarchy
00:57:28 ►
as consumers of images, products, and ideas.
00:57:32 ►
And as everything dissolves,
00:57:36 ►
responsibility will flow inward to the individual
00:57:40 ►
and we will be more and more held responsible
00:57:43 ►
for ourselves, our actions, our presentation.
00:57:47 ►
No more can we say, well, I’m white, or I’m American, or it won’t work.
00:57:55 ►
We’re entering into a domain of such freedom that the responsibility will be concomitant.
00:58:05 ►
And this is a beautiful thing.
00:58:07 ►
This is what all the struggle was about,
00:58:10 ►
human unfoldment.
00:58:11 ►
This is why all those kings were hung
00:58:14 ►
and all those enemies of the human spirit
00:58:20 ►
were turned back and defeated.
00:58:25 ►
spirit turned back and defeated.
00:58:33 ►
So each individual must die to be collected, reborn to the collectivity.
00:58:36 ►
That sounds right. That sounds right.
00:58:42 ►
Yes. Well, somehow the modalities of both must be preserved in a higher union.
00:58:51 ►
This is the union of opposites, the coincidencia positorum that Jung and alchemy is all about.
00:58:58 ►
Well, I really see, I mean, now that we’re on to this metaphor what I’ve really
00:59:06 ►
been saying here this evening is that
00:59:09 ►
history is an alchemical process this
00:59:13 ►
novelty that I’m talking about being
00:59:15 ►
conserved we might as well have been
00:59:17 ►
talking about the soffic waters or
00:59:20 ►
something it’s history is the act of calling into existence the perfect tool
00:59:28 ►
which is discovered to be the self itself but in a sense what history is is
00:59:36 ►
a process of turning ourselves inside out so that the soul becomes visibly manifest in three-dimensional space
00:59:45 ►
and the body becomes an object freely commanded in the imagination.
00:59:53 ►
You know, the patristic father Justinian taught
00:59:56 ►
that the resurrection body would be spherical,
01:00:00 ►
just to the joy of heathen controversialists, I might add,
01:00:04 ►
because it made him so open to attack
01:00:07 ►
but it’s an incredibly modern anticipation
01:00:10 ►
of ourselves going into a kind of quasi-union with our technology
01:00:19 ►
what is it Yeats says in Sailing to Byzantium
01:00:23 ►
the part about how I would be a thing of gold and gold and once out of nature
01:00:30 ►
I would be a thing of gold and gold enamelling
01:00:35 ►
Set upon a branch to sing of what has been and what will be
01:00:40 ►
That is the idea that we change ourselves into an eternal, golden, superconducting, perfected object that transcends death, transcends space and time, and has no apparent connection to our physical image as animals. It’s the alchemical sublimation.
01:01:06 ►
All alchemical processes are like fractal anticipations of this final rendering of the stone itself. It seems to me this is a very, very individual world, a very individual world, which affects us now.
01:01:28 ►
It’s not of nature. It’s going against us.
01:01:32 ►
And you’re right, it’s not of man.
01:01:36 ►
No, no, it is the alchemical idea is not that one goes against nature,
01:01:42 ►
but that one aids nature and catalyzes it and it’s very
01:01:48 ►
explicit in alchemical thinking that what one does is one makes it happen faster one accelerates
01:01:58 ►
catalyzes natural processes and so this is what we would be doing we would essentially be by
01:02:06 ►
making by transforming ourselves in this way we bring ever closer the final the
01:02:14 ►
final apocatastrophe I think about that enlightenment, as far as I have my sight, is given at a time.
01:02:26 ►
It’s been beyond the causes.
01:02:28 ►
This seems to be a personal, not a collective, thing.
01:02:33 ►
I think that time, the world is time.
01:02:37 ►
It has kind of, it’s a different market of what we appear to be in our own.
01:02:41 ►
There are just these things that turn out at a time and there’s different learnings. Well, no, that…
01:02:48 ►
No, one has stepped from the mortal corner.
01:02:58 ►
Yes.
01:03:00 ►
Plato said time is the moving image of eternity.
01:03:04 ►
And so eternity is outside the wheel
01:03:09 ►
and that is what I mean by this higher dimension of completeness
01:03:14 ►
it is eternity and all time rests within it I don’t know if you do not think that we do this in the species, but I think it’s an individual.
01:03:30 ►
Well, if it happens in the individual, then it’s a property of the species.
01:03:35 ►
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and vice versa.
01:03:39 ►
There are only these fractal adumbrations of the transformative process on every level.
01:03:47 ►
Yes, that’s what I mean.
01:03:51 ►
Well, we’re past time, I see.
01:03:54 ►
Thank you for your indulgence.
01:03:55 ►
And thank you again for your indulgence.
01:04:10 ►
I have to admit that after listening with you to the first tape in this four-tape series from Hazel Woodhouse,
01:04:12 ►
I was a little disappointed in it.
01:04:17 ►
I guess they kind of lost me with the long discussion about homing pigeons.
01:04:23 ►
But by the time they got going with the tape we just heard, I thought they were back in the best of form. In particular, I was taken by some things Terrence said about the transcendental object at the end of time that I hadn’t heard before.
01:04:32 ►
If I understood him right, it could be anything from a comet impact to a revelation about what happens after bodily death.
01:04:40 ►
And that, that thought has opened a whole new door for me.
01:04:44 ►
And that, that thought has opened a whole new door for me.
01:04:50 ►
It isn’t all that difficult for me to envision what our planetary state of mind would be if we knew that a comet impact was imminent.
01:04:53 ►
But what if, just what if, every human on the planet suddenly knew, with absolute certainty,
01:05:00 ►
exactly what is going to happen to them after their body dies?
01:05:05 ►
Now, if you already have a preconceived idea of what that means,
01:05:09 ►
try to put it aside for a moment
01:05:11 ►
and think about having absolutely no doubt at all
01:05:14 ►
about the revelation that you and everyone else on the planet just had about life and death.
01:05:19 ►
As Terrence said, that would definitely qualify as a world-condensing event.
01:05:26 ►
Now, I know that I’m not talking to everybody here in the salon right now,
01:05:30 ►
but I’m sure that there are a few others besides myself who’ve experienced one of those world-condensing events.
01:05:37 ►
For me, two of them came during ayahuasca ceremonies, and there have been others.
01:05:43 ►
But if you’ve been there there you know what i’m talking
01:05:45 ►
about unfortunately such experiences are truly ineffable you know they they can’t be put into
01:05:52 ►
human words but what you can take away from these experiences rare though they are is an absolute
01:05:59 ►
certainty that in the end everything is just going to turn out just fine. I can’t even tell you why I feel this way,
01:06:06 ►
but we are really getting close to something completely new
01:06:09 ►
and unexpected in the realm of consciousness.
01:06:12 ►
At least, that’s my hunch.
01:06:14 ►
Now, if you think back to where Terence was just now talking about
01:06:18 ►
a revivified shamanism, or archaic revival,
01:06:22 ►
and the form of human consciousness back before what we now think of as human history,
01:06:28 ►
well, just stop for a moment and consider the possibility, even if it’s only a very remote possibility.
01:06:34 ►
But what if, as the Yuga cycle says, there once truly was a great golden age,
01:06:41 ►
and that we are finally on our way back up to do it again?
01:06:44 ►
golden age, and that we are finally on our way back up to do it again.
01:06:49 ►
Well, if that actually is the case, then what Terence is talking about isn’t just some form of primitive, live-in-the-jungle existence.
01:06:52 ►
If he’s talking about some form of consciousness that either can exist or maybe even once did
01:06:58 ►
exist in some past age, well then finally I think I’m beginning to understand what he
01:07:04 ►
means by an archaic revival.
01:07:06 ►
I guess I’m maybe a little slow on this, but reading Terrence for me is sometimes like when I read Emerson.
01:07:14 ►
They both seem to make sense to me, but I find it difficult to explain to somebody else what they’re saying.
01:07:21 ►
I guess I’m rambling now, so I better wrap this up.
01:07:24 ►
But one last thing about the
01:07:25 ►
trialogue we just heard. If you remember, at one point Terence McKenna put down on cold fusion
01:07:32 ►
technology as being not real or a hoax or something, and I think it’s important to note that
01:07:37 ►
while that was a case presented by the mainstream media back in 1993, the facts since then have borne out the fact that this
01:07:46 ►
is a very real technology and one that is now being widely investigated in many places
01:07:51 ►
around the world.
01:07:53 ►
So I guess that’s at least one thing Terence would have been happy to learn had he stuck
01:07:58 ►
around a while longer.
01:08:00 ►
Okay, now how about a little podcasting news?
01:08:04 ►
The other day I was listening to KMO’s Sea Realm podcast and heard him read an email from two of the salonners who I met at Burning Man.
01:08:12 ►
And in it they told of a shared vision they had for a moment on the playa.
01:08:16 ►
I remember them telling me about that just before one of those extremely rare experiences that lets you know that we haven’t even seen the tip of the consciousness iceberg yet.
01:08:31 ►
And I noticed that the Burning Man story’s KMO was relaying came in basically two flavors.
01:08:37 ►
The first time burner experience and the somewhat jaded long time burner experience.
01:08:43 ►
the somewhat jaded long time burner experience.
01:08:50 ►
Right now, I’ve been there just enough times to begin developing a somewhat jaded edge about that event,
01:08:55 ►
but I’m still new enough to the experience that I’ll probably go back a few more times.
01:08:59 ►
In a few weeks, I’ll be playing Dale Pendle’s Plylog,
01:09:03 ►
in which he discusses the changes that have taken place at Burning Man in the last few years.
01:09:07 ►
In fact, Dale has even written a follow-up essay on the topic.
01:09:11 ►
I think you’ll find the entire discussion quite interesting,
01:09:14 ►
even if you’ve never even been to an event like that.
01:09:19 ►
Another news item is that, thanks to Xandor and a helper or two,
01:09:24 ►
there is now a psychedelic salon forum on thegrowreport.org.
01:09:28 ►
And if you go to that site and click on the link for the forums,
01:09:31 ►
you’ll find quite a wide range of discussions taking place.
01:09:36 ►
All of the podcasters on the Cannabis Podcast Network have their own forums there.
01:09:39 ►
And I try to stop by there a couple times each week.
01:09:42 ►
Maybe I’ll catch you in their chat room one day.
01:09:51 ►
Actually, I tried the chat feature, which I think is coming from dopetheme.co.uk, which is the network’s home.
01:09:55 ►
And I found Queer Ninja and Wink in there to chat with for a bit.
01:10:03 ►
And they tell me that around 2 o’clock Saturday Pacific time is when a bunch of people from the EU are in the chat room there.
01:10:06 ►
So I might try to stop by and catch some of you there too.
01:10:11 ►
And while I’m talking about dopetheme.co.uk,
01:10:14 ►
I should mention that in just two more days, they’re going to be adding yet another program to their already stellar lineup of podcasts.
01:10:19 ►
I think that the program’s going to be called BB’s Lounge or something like that,
01:10:24 ►
but it’ll definitely feature Black Beauty, the lovely voiced lady from down under, who you can already hear in various places on the network.
01:10:32 ►
But now she’ll have her very own program, and we’re all looking forward to that.
01:10:37 ►
So welcome, Black Beauty.
01:10:38 ►
It’s good to have you here with us.
01:10:41 ►
If you’ve been to the psychedelicsalon.org blog recently, you’ll probably notice that
01:10:46 ►
on the home page, I’m only showing the complete contents of the most recent post. The main
01:10:52 ►
reason for this is to keep Google from thinking we’re trying to cheat on them by having two
01:10:57 ►
copies of all the posts online. So now after that first post, you’ll have to click on the
01:11:02 ►
continue reading link, or just click on the title of the post, and you’ll be taken to the full article on its own page.
01:11:09 ►
Now, realize this may confuse you at first, because it looks like the download links don’t work.
01:11:15 ►
So I’ll try to figure out a hack that’ll make it a little bit more clear,
01:11:18 ►
and in case you haven’t visited that blog to view the program notes for these podcasts,
01:11:24 ►
you might want to stop by and check out some of the sidebar links.
01:11:27 ►
It’ll take you to all kinds of current news topics that I suspect you’ll be interested in.
01:11:33 ►
And the comments section under each of these podcast listings now is starting to grow, too, and some very interesting discussions going on there.
01:11:42 ►
When I get back to podcasting some of the ply logs we recorded at Burning Man this year, I’ll also be talking more
01:11:48 ►
about this year’s event. But right now I want to bring you up to date on three
01:11:52 ►
intrepid salonners who you last heard of as they left the UK
01:11:55 ►
and made their way to Black Rock City. Well, Martin
01:11:59 ►
and his two traveling companions spent some time hanging out with us and
01:12:03 ►
talking about their travel plans,
01:12:06 ►
which were quite ambitious, I might add.
01:12:09 ►
And so now it’s exciting for me
01:12:11 ►
to yesterday have received an email from Martin,
01:12:14 ►
part of which I’ll read for you right now.
01:12:17 ►
Lorenzo, it was good seeing you at the burn.
01:12:20 ►
Being there really blew me away.
01:12:22 ►
It was bigger, better, and much more profound
01:12:24 ►
than I expected.
01:12:25 ►
But most of all, the presence of real magic.
01:12:29 ►
After the burn, we flew down to Lima, and we’ve now spent three weeks traveling around the Andes.
01:12:34 ►
The highlight so far is clearly Cusco.
01:12:37 ►
Once the center of the Inca Empire, this beautiful city is surrounded by old ruins and is also an obligatory stop on the way to Machu Picchu.
01:12:46 ►
At the moment, there’s a real buzz happening here.
01:12:50 ►
Shamanism is everywhere.
01:12:52 ►
With both ayahuasca and San Pedro fully legal and a huge Western interest, you see it and
01:12:57 ►
hear it all over the place.
01:12:59 ►
There’s loads of companies organizing treks up to and around Machu Picchu.
01:13:04 ►
They’ve been doing this for decades, but
01:13:05 ►
now there’s something else on the menu, psychedelics. And it’s not cheap kicks. It seems to be done with
01:13:11 ►
responsibility and integrity. We had the opportunity to do a San Pedro session up in the hills
01:13:16 ►
overlooking Cusco. A truly amazing day with this gentle and bright plant ally. The rocks came alive
01:13:23 ►
and at points in the ruins,
01:13:25 ►
the energy became so strong and intense
01:13:28 ►
that it was almost overwhelming.
01:13:30 ►
Boy, you know, Martin, you’re bringing back memory
01:13:32 ►
of a time I had down at the ruins in Palenque
01:13:35 ►
under similar circumstances.
01:13:37 ►
And what you say about the energy is really amazing.
01:13:41 ►
You can actually see it.
01:13:43 ►
Continuing with this email now.
01:13:45 ►
Tonight we’re off to Bolivia, where we’ve got just over two weeks of traveling
01:13:50 ►
before we’ve got to make our way back up to Peru and out into the Amazon for our six-week ayahuasca retreat.
01:13:57 ►
I’m very excited, but also a bit nervous.
01:14:00 ►
I’ve been speaking to lots of people here with lots of experience,
01:14:03 ►
and I know that this is sure no walk in the park.
01:14:06 ►
Real hard work with real issues, but also, I hope, euphoric ecstasy.
01:14:12 ►
I hope everything is well with you and Mary C.
01:14:14 ►
Send my love to her and everyone else I had the pleasure to meet on the playa.
01:14:18 ►
I’ll keep you posted.
01:14:19 ►
Lots of love and light, Martin.
01:14:22 ►
Well, Martin, we’ll be waiting for your next report.
01:14:26 ►
And if you get a chance to post some pictures of your travels,
01:14:29 ►
please let me know and I’ll pass the link on to your friends here in the Psychedelic Salon.
01:14:33 ►
As you’ll hear a few podcasts from now,
01:14:36 ►
I’ve got some mixed emotions about the Burning Man Festival.
01:14:40 ►
But there is one thing that became very clear to me this year.
01:14:43 ►
No matter what I think about the festival or how it’s changing, the real point of the event, at
01:14:49 ►
least for me, is to reunite with old friends and to make some connections
01:14:54 ►
with new ones. I have to admit that I was really blown away at how many people
01:14:59 ►
came up to Mary C and me at the Bern this year and said that they were
01:15:02 ►
regulars here in the salon. It’s so good to be able to put some faces to the names that I’ve read in emails.
01:15:09 ►
I can’t say that I’ve got all of your names and faces correctly sorted out,
01:15:13 ►
but I can tell you that your faces are permanently etched in my mind.
01:15:18 ►
So even though I might be a little grumpy about Burning Man right now,
01:15:22 ►
I’ll most likely return again next year, just to be able to
01:15:26 ►
spend some more time with
01:15:27 ►
Brooke and La, John, Darren,
01:15:30 ►
Mark, and all the rest of the wonderful
01:15:32 ►
people in the pod cluster.
01:15:33 ►
It really felt like family, and
01:15:35 ►
I want to feel that way again, so
01:15:37 ►
there’s a good chance I’ll be back again next year.
01:15:40 ►
But to be honest, I’m
01:15:41 ►
also hoping that John Hanna will
01:15:43 ►
produce another Mind States conference before then
01:15:46 ►
so I can get back together with all of you without so much dust in the air.
01:15:51 ►
Gosh, here I go on about Burning Man again. It just won’t let me alone today.
01:15:56 ►
Well, before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:16:01 ►
are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.
01:16:07 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the
01:16:10 ►
bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which is at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:16:15 ►
And if you have any questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions about these podcasts, well,
01:16:20 ►
just send them to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.
01:16:24 ►
And I guess I should mention that matrixmasters.com is also my personal website.
01:16:30 ►
I know that some of you might have become a little confused
01:16:32 ►
in clicking around on the psychedelicsalon.org blog
01:16:35 ►
because you often wind up on matrixmasters.com.
01:16:39 ►
That’s because before I started podcasting,
01:16:43 ►
the Matrixmasters site was where I spent most of my online time.
01:16:47 ►
But since I started doing these podcasts, I really haven’t added a lot of new material to that site.
01:16:52 ►
However, many of my essays are there, along with a brief resume or CV for those who are interested in those kind of things.
01:17:00 ►
And also I want to thank Jacques Cordell and Wells, my friends who make music under the name Chateau Hayouk
01:17:06 ►
thanks again for the use of your music here in the salon
01:17:09 ►
you guys, really appreciate it
01:17:11 ►
and for now this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space
01:17:15 ►
be well my friends Thank you.