110 - Hazelwood House Trialogue (Part 4)

Program Notes

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

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

04:11 Ralph begins with “Fractals on my mind, an epic in four parts.” … Part one, the sandy beach.

13:54 Ralph Abraham: “It’s the fractal boundary, the sandy beach, which destroys determinism.”

16:58 Ralph Abraham: “At the age of one, or two, or three, or something, when speech is beginning, what was going on before that? Presumably, that was what everyone was doing before speech came altogether if there ever was such a time. And that childhood paradigm is not vaporized and replaced when the linguistic phase arrives.”

23:36 Ralph begins his description of “a mathematical model for monogamy”.

26:04 Ralph Abraham: “I’m not saying that order is always bad, but cosmos and chaos just have to be balanced. I wouldn’t elevate chaos above cosmos or vice versa, but systems, probably to be healthy, they need a certain balance.”

33:08 Rupert Sheldrake: “Catholicism, in a sense, is a kind of polytheism. You have all the angels. You have all the saints. When you go into a cathedral there’s all those side chapels and shrines. It’s just like a Hindu temple.”

40:34 Terence McKenna: “The form that I’ve probably fallen under the sway of is some kind of neo-Platonic pyramid of ever-ascending abstract hypothesizations that lead into the One.”

1:12:58 Ralph Abraham: “Science is not mathematical, and mathematics is not science. Science is discovered about the world through the activity of people. Mathematics is an inborn ability that everybody has, like breathing.”

1:25:10 Terence McKenna: “Everyone knows that cannabis is trivial and harmless, but that doesn’t mean that we’re on the brink of changing the social taboos about it. It feels to me as though they will never change.”

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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So, how’s it going for you today?

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Personally, I’ve had a hard time getting going this week.

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If you’ve been following these podcasts for the last couple of months,

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you’ll probably remember that sometime in June I started whining about how much work it was taking to get ready for Burning Man.

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And then, after I got back, I complained that I was out of energy

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and had to recover from Burning Man.

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Well, now it’s October, and I seem to have run out of excuses.

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So it looks like my lack of get-up-and-go is primarily due to the aging process,

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coupled with my own inherent lethargy,

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which can make things difficult to get up the energy once in a while.

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But then I check my email and find it full of comments, suggestions and thank yous

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from so many of our fellow salonners that my energy level shoots back up to the max

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and well, here we go again, getting ready to listen to the end of the Hazelwood House Trilog.

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And again, today’s program will be a bit longer than the one hour I like to keep them to,

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so I want to be sure to get my thank yous in before you get lost in the thicket of thoughts that our merry trialogers create.

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And in addition to Ralph, Rupert, Terrence, Bruce, and Shatul Hayuk, whose music you hear in the background right now,

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I also want to thank three people whose financial donations to the salon have been significant.

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So, thank you very much, Elliot K., Jim, and my fellow grandfather, Robert O.

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And how’s your little granddaughter doing, Robert?

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I’m sure she’s bringing you as much joy as my grandchildren are bringing me.

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They really make my life worthwhile, and I’ll bet it’s the same with you.

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Anyway,

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thank you all for your support of these podcasts. I couldn’t do it without all of your help,

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love, and support, and it’s deeply appreciated. Well, for today’s program, we’ll be picking up where we last left the Hazelwood House Trilog that was held between Rupert Sheldrake, Terrence

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McKenna, and Ralph Abraham back in 1993.

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And we’ll begin with Ralph’s tale that he calls Fractals on My Mind.

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Now, as I’ve been listening to these trilogues with you over the past couple of years,

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I’ve come to expect to hear new insights about our physical world coming from Rupert,

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and over-the-edge metaphysical ideas coming from Terence.

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and over-the-edge metaphysical ideas coming from Terrence.

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But throughout them all, it’s been Ralph who quite often provides the steadiness,

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or ballast, or rudder, or whatever you want to call it,

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that gets their cargo of new ideas safely ashore.

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You know, I’ve got a good friend like that myself, and believe me, he’s saved me from a lot of embarrassment on more than one occasion

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by forcing me to think through some outlandish statement that I’m about to make.

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And his advice is often the first I seek

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because I know he won’t cut me any intellectual slack.

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In the realms we all seem to enjoy talking about,

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it really pays big dividends to have a well-grounded friend covering your back.

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And that’s one of the roles I see Ralph playing here,

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and that is sort of the wise elder guiding a couple of precocious young friends.

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So it was kind of interesting for me that in the talk we’re about to hear,

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I guess maybe about ten minutes into it is when Rupert points out the fact

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that we’re actually listening to a lecture on mathematics in his tale of fractals.

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Well, I couldn’t believe it at first, so I went back and listened to Ralph’s talk again

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from the beginning, and was blown away when I began to think of myself sitting in a college

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classroom and listening to a teacher who could actually inspire me to dig deeper into the

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beauty of mathematics in order to better understand how math directly impacts

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my everyday thinking, even my metaphysical thinking.

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And by the way, my undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering, so I had a lot

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of math along the way, but never was I taught by a poet, who also happened to be a mathematician.

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Just listen with me right now, and I think you’ll hear what I mean.

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right now and I think you’ll hear what I mean.

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Fraptles on my mind.

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An epic in four parts.

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Part one, the sandy beach.

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The three boys put on their wellies They ran down the field

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They swung on the swing

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They rolled down the corn circle

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They came to the river

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They sat on the edge

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Dangling their feet over the stream

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Look, said Rook

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A sandy beach Sure enough, they saw there was a little tiny beach of sand. Terence said, the land reaches down into the water. And Rupert said, no, the water reaches up into the land.

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reaches up into the land.

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Around them, it’s both water and sand.

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It’s the sandy beach.

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It’s a fractal object.

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They stood then.

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They walked in the stream.

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Look, said Terence.

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It circles to the left.

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No, said Rupert. It circles to the left. No, said Rupert.

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It circles to the right.

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It’s turbulent flow, said Ralph.

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It’s a mathematical object.

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It’s chaos.

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On the other side of the stream, there was no beach.

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There was a concrete wall.

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It was not a practical object.

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Rupert said,

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it’s a straight line.

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Terence said,

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it’s a Bauhaus

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excrescent of post-linguistic

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humanoids. humanoid thinking of peanut butter sandwiches then they walked back up the

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slope Rupert said nature has given us a lesson nature is our teacher, and we have learned about the sandy beach.

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The sun had set.

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Ralph pointed to the sky.

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Look, he said.

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They looked and saw there was a silver stripe in the sky, shining there.

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They hadn’t noticed it before.

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It girdled the entire celestial vault.

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It sprung from two legs to the south.

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That way, they saw that its two legs pierced the zodiacal belt.

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It sprung across the midheaven, going somewhere near the polar constellations Rupert said

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I think

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those

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constellations

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over there

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those are

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watery

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that’s

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Pisces

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that’s

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fish

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that’s

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biology

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projected

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on the

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sky

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Terence

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said

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the

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the

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Calvary

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astrologers

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called that

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the

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celestial

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sea

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and

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and

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Ralph said it’s it’s a sandy beach in the sky.

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Rube said, Father Sky is our teacher too. Ralph said, well, there’s a sphere above the

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sky with the sandy beach in it

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and a kind of astral projection

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imprints its shadow

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on the celestial sphere

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and on the terrestrial disk

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as well.

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They went back to the kitchen

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and tugged off their wellies

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and looked for peanut butter

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in the fridge.

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Part one, the sandy beach.

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Part two is called

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Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood.

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This is about bird flight

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so we have to recall that

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pigeons live in a loft

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and the loft radiates a field

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throughout the atmosphere of the planet earth

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all the way around

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and this is a field of intuitive flying instruction throughout the atmosphere of the planet Earth, all the way around.

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And this is a field of intuitive flying instruction.

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Wherever a pigeon might be released, it can consult its intuition in its heart and see a snapshot of itself a moment later in a certain direction.

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And by following itself, it gets the instruction to fly in a certain direction and by following itself it gets the instruction to fly in a certain direction

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which even though it’s not a straight line will eventually lead back to the loft which is the

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attractor of the dynamical system or intuitive field of directions and uh we’ll assume this

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for the sake of discussion this is the morphogenetic field of the loft

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assume this for the sake of discussion. This is the morphogenetic field of the loft. Now we have to put ourselves in the position of someone reading Rupert’s book soon when

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it’s published and trying to do the experiment with the movable loft.

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At first we dispose of monotheism, leave that behind.

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Now we have two lofts.

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The two lofts each radiate morphogenetic field instructions wherever the pigeon might be.

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That’s the fixed loft at home and the movable one just taken off the truck

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or out of the boat or whatever it is.

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The pigeon has spent time in each loft and been trained and feels the impulse of the motor genetic field

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of the kinetongo combination averaged by mathematical functions built into the heart of the bird.

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functions built into the heart of the bird. The result is that after flying the bird will arrive either at the fixed loft or at the movable loft, depending on where it starts.

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This is sort of a mathematical fact, but I hope that experimentalists will try this out. That would mean training a whole bunch of pigeons in the same fixed loft,

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in the same movable loft, and then releasing not all of them, but a certain proportion of them,

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from different locations, sort of neighboring in a region, and later on marking the starting points in that region with the color red for all the starting

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points of birds that flew to the fixed loft and green for all the birds that ended up

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in the movable loft.

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Then we end up with this region is painted park red and park green. These colored regions in dynamical systems theory are called basins.

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The basins might be particularly important if you were of the gambling sort

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and were betting on a certain pigeon whether it would go to the one loft or the other.

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You could certainly win your bet if you knew this colored map

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from successive experiments with the same two lofts and flocks of birds.

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Yes, I am talking about you.

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So it’s important to know where the green and red regions are,

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where the green and red regions are,

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and it could be all red over there,

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sort of toward the home loft, which is in the south,

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and all green over there toward the movable loft, which is in the north,

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but it could be much more complicated,

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because during flight there are all these hills you have to go around,

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and there are certain nests of sparrow hawks that have to be avoided by a wide detour and

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one possibility is that between the red and the green regions there is a sharp line like that bow house concrete wall on the other side of the river and another possibility is that the red and

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green have been stirred and mixed like colors the colors on this carpet, into a pattern with the boundary as a practical object, as a sandy beach.

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A sandy beach in the multigenetic field, so that the separation between the red and green,

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which might mean life and death, might be the red eschaton and the green eschaton.

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It’s a fractal.

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And that means that whatever you would be in the supposed boundary,

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like wherever you are on the sandy beach, if you are a pinhead,

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you might be either in water or on land.

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pinhead you might be either in water or on land and even the tiniest puff of wind could

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blow you from land to water or vice versa so unless it was an entirely windless day you couldn’t even predict whether you’re going to end up in the home roost or the movable roost

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the home roost or the movable roost, in life or death, in the good or the bad eschaton.

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It’s the fractal boundary, the sandy beach, which destroys determinism.

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The Milky Way, as a mythological object, is Chamak, is the early Assyrian goddess of chaos, and her mate Apsu are those two

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branches of the river, which is a projection of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

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The identification of chaos and Milky Way and Chamak and indeterminacy and the creative source of all form is traditional at least for 6,000 years.

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I didn’t make up the fable.

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That’s the end of part two.

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Two roads diverge in a yellow wood.

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These two roads are the red and the green.

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You might as well toss a coin because you can’t get where you’re going on purpose.

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That’s down at the river,

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and that’s the homing pigeons.

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We’re pigeons, and the Eschaton is our home,

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Terence would say.

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And now let’s

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take a deep breath

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we’ve survived

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two lessons of mathematics

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without the

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despicable

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frightening word

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being mentioned

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and

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now on to

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apply

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the concepts

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the context

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of a single individual mind.

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So we have in mind different parts,

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which are somehow dynamical objects,

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where there’s a cycling about, a roving over,

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that repeats a pattern or follows a track for a long time

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until we get out of that track into another one.

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This could be an entire paradigm, whatever that is.

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Let’s say a paradigm is a bunch of basins.

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Like instead of the red and the green, we could have a hundred different colors,

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all of them kind of mixed up practically like this rug.

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colors, all of them kind of mixed up practically like this rug.

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And each of these colored regions might be a group of basins, but between the basins are thicker boundaries that make it more difficult to go through, reflect you from the boundary,

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so that it takes a bigger perturbation

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in the world of thought in order to change that we could call paradigms or personalities or cubby

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holes in the mind. For example, when language came over us, I don’t mean 25,000 years ago,

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well this process started 25,000 years ago, but in the

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history of a single individual, then at the age of one or two or three or something, when

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speech is beginning, what was going on before that? Presumably that was what everyone was doing before speech came all together if there ever was such a time and that childhood paradigm is not vaporized and replaced when the linguistic

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phase arrives instead it’s like covered over and covered it just makes another one of these

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faces so that’s an example, we could call it multiple personality.

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These regions in the mind, normally, should be, the boundaries should be fractal.

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That is to say, more like the sandy beach than like the Bauhaus concrete wall. In the case that

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some training influence creates, instead of the natural sandy beach, a concrete wall,

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then it becomes very difficult to get from one to another.

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When there would be fractal beaches everywhere, then the slightest perturbation,

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a strange idea coming on the radio, would bop you just that millimeter,

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sorry, fraction of an inch, to get from the water to the sand,

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from the one paradigm to another,

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in a normal day in the life, with a lot of perturbations,

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one would rapidly be visiting them, all of the different regions or multiple personalities making up the self.

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So noise in the environment is sufficient to integrate the personality,

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sufficient to integrate the personality. But if there are iron curtains here and there, then it takes a very big perturbation to get out of one paradigm into another, and then you would

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see an individual manifesting the multiple personality syndrome. So since this difficulty,

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at least in this model, which is inspired by Kurt Logine, the founder

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of social psychology, he had a kind of mathematical model for a mind, individual or social, at

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the basis of his invention of social psychology.

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In this model, the healthier state has these sandy beaches, and the basins, the colors

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are all

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mixed up. The pathological state has too much order, like after toilet training or something,

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with these concrete walls, iron curtains. So these iron curtains, I binary with dischaos and chaos binary,

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because we need more sandy beaches.

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So I wouldn’t call this, as they do, the multiple personality disorder.

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I call it the multiple personality dischaos.

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call it the multiple personality dischaos.

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So that’s a Sandy Beach model of a mind which, if we were into clinical psychology,

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we could try developing,

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inventing a therapeutic strategy

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to increase chaos.

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For example, visiting a river, listening to the sound, walking in nature, as opposed to listening to the radio and watching the TV. Watching TV would be good if they somehow put birdsong on there, chanting.

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So, while there are many applications of this that I won’t go into now, I’ll just mention a possible application we could come back to some day, just to point to some possibilities

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for individual psychology before I go on to the fourth and final lap of this course. And this

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has to do with the question, why do people believe in UFOs? Why do people

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want to believe in corn circles? Or this is quite independent of whether UFOs are real or imaginary. It hardly matters not to put down UFOs.

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And why they would want to believe in God or monotheism

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or there is one God and so on.

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I think that the multiple personality,

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this chaos phenomenon is pretty universal in our

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culture

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and there are heavily walled off

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regions

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walls were built

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at different stages

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in life

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and

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the child

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part was

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sealed when there was an authoritarian the child part was sealed

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when there was

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an authoritarian

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trustworthy emotional

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environment that had

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the illusion of absolute truth or something

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so that part is sitting there

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yearning for some

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validation from the outside world

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something like that

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would

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if you wanted to try experiments from the outside world. Something like that would,

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if you wanted to try experiments or you could write a book recommending experiments

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in social psychology in which

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the tendency of people to believe in God,

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you could try to affect it by playing music music therapy

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for

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dischaotic

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religious belief

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and in case of success

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then restore

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pantheism

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which is

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maybe badly needed

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at this time

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instead of going on

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with applications

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to fractals

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in the individual mind I’d like to just go

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on to the collective mind, to our social sphere, in this fourth and final part, and then I’ll

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end with a couple of questions for you guys based on this idea. Well, I wouldn’t have thought of this exactly, but I think Terence suggested that I was guilty

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of making a mathematical model for monogamy, and since that’s true, I might as well share

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it with you.

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And this is it, in fact we we are there so this is

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about the sandy beach in the collective mind and well you we could get to this collective

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mind stepwise as in the Zhuangzi one from nothing comes one, and then two, and then three.

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He says after three any mathematician can make infinity.

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So we’ve got one, now we can just step to two.

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What would be then the application of the Sandy Beach model to a social system consisting

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of two people. Now you have the two people and there’s

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some kind of mathematical model for the psyche, not to be taken too seriously, but

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this is just what psychology does, makes Kurt Levine type models for the psyche

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and now you’ve got like two of them and then they start talking to each other,

00:25:01 ►

touching, cooking and eating together or something like that, and then these two systems are coupled into one.

00:25:07 ►

And of course, the behavior of the coupled system is much more complicated than the behavior of the parts,

00:25:13 ►

and the behavior of the coupled up complex system can’t be predicted or even guessed at

00:25:19 ►

from the full knowledge of the behavior of the two parts.

00:25:23 ►

And besides, you would only know one of the parts if you were involved in this to a degree.

00:25:28 ►

This system then also has this dynamical system.

00:25:32 ►

I mean, the model is, not the people.

00:25:35 ►

And in the model, this complex system has attractors,

00:25:40 ►

that is to say, roost, loft, the movable loft,

00:25:44 ►

the fixed loft, and so on. And the bases, colored red, loft, the movable loft, the fixed loft, and so on,

00:25:46 ►

and the bases colored red, green, and all the other things,

00:25:49 ►

and the boundaries in between either iron curtains or sandy beaches.

00:25:55 ►

And I suppose that monogamy means a contract or behavioral ethic phenomenon in which some of the boundaries

00:26:10 ►

between the parts are heavily walled off, so that it is, as a matter of fact, an unstable

00:26:17 ►

situation of dischaos.

00:26:19 ►

I’m not saying that order is always bad, but cosmos and chaos just have to be balanced.

00:26:29 ►

I wouldn’t elevate chaos above cosmos or vice versa, but systems probably, to be healthy,

00:26:36 ►

they need a certain balance, and understanding monogamy as an iron curtain, then to make

00:26:43 ►

it stable would require a balancing chaos

00:26:46 ►

elsewhere.

00:26:47 ►

That’s the idea.

00:26:49 ►

Otherwise, this multiple personality that’s the system of the two people would have the

00:26:56 ►

multiple personality dischaos, an out-of-balance situation in the direction of order which like the concrete wall doing its best to hold up the bank

00:27:07 ►

for life is uh highly unstable that’s one application then i won’t go into details but

00:27:15 ►

considering two nations instead of two individuals one also gets a model of this sort in which the

00:27:31 ►

a model of this sort in which the stability of the complex system would require adequate balance of chaos and order.

00:27:46 ►

So those are the four parts, and many, just ending these questions for Rupert and Care.

00:27:54 ►

So, Rupert, this model suggests that you have to consider experiments with multiple lofts,

00:27:59 ►

and even with a single loft, you have to consider experiments with multiple pigeons.

00:28:08 ►

And anyway, that’s a consequence of your idea idea your model of what is going on and so I wonder what you think the results maybe you already know of results of

00:28:12 ►

this that have been tried it could for the ancient Egyptian government of course

00:28:18 ►

mean the success or failure in the war with the Hyksos. And for Terence, I think, I just wonder,

00:28:29 ►

what would this do to your idea to consider multiple attractors at the end of time?

00:28:38 ►

Two, three, or more eschatons.

00:28:41 ►

Nothing in what you said seemed to me prohibited this other than a misplaced

00:28:47 ►

iron curtain of the monotheistic type that perhaps filtered the speech of the mushroom

00:28:57 ►

that came through your lips.

00:29:01 ►

Can I see?

00:29:02 ►

There you have it.

00:29:02 ►

Can I see? There you have it.

00:29:04 ►

Can I just try and summarize, Ralph, what I think you’ve said, because I’m not sure

00:29:14 ►

I’ve got it.

00:29:15 ►

Okay.

00:29:16 ►

One element seems to be that personalities and, of course, social relationships and international relations and the behaviour of different groups of pigeons

00:29:27 ►

born into different basins

00:29:29 ►

and we can visualise that like being a landscape with different values in it

00:29:33 ►

and so sometimes in a particular region of the ball

00:29:38 ►

we’ll roll down in a particular valley

00:29:40 ►

if it’s another region we’ll roll down in another one

00:29:42 ►

and each of these basins represents a different kind of sub-personality.

00:29:49 ►

Within a marriage or a relationship, then each of the basins represents

00:29:53 ►

what we normally call a personality,

00:29:55 ►

each of which has sub-personalities within it.

00:30:00 ►

These are the different basins.

00:30:02 ►

And you seem to be pointing out that personalities are made up of different sub-personalities

00:30:08 ►

a very fashionable view, everybody is talking about sub-personalities

00:30:13 ►

James Millman says we need a polytheistic psychology where you have all the different gods and goddesses

00:30:19 ►

not only representing the archetypes that we all go through, all these different ones,

00:30:25 ►

we’re possessed by different gods or goddesses at different times,

00:30:29 ►

and we move from one to another.

00:30:32 ►

And we’re not a single personality with different functions,

00:30:37 ►

but we’re a kind of emulsion of all these different personalities.

00:30:41 ►

Then there’s the multiple personality craze in America where people are fascinated

00:30:47 ►

not just by serial killers but by people with multiple personalities and people who do both.

00:30:52 ►

You know, multiple personalities with serial killers. Anyway, there’s a fascination with

00:30:58 ►

multiple personality. There’s the Hillman thing, there’s the computer model, Minsky and the MIT multiple module.

00:31:07 ►

Daniel Dennett, the materialist, has the multiple draft theory of consciousness.

00:31:12 ►

So everywhere we find these multiple models of which yours is one.

00:31:19 ►

And all of them seem to be saying that to get away from monotheism,

00:31:26 ►

which is reflected in psychology by the idea of a central ego, a dominating ego, you’ve got to get away from that too.

00:31:32 ►

So these more democratic models, where you have grassroots democracy, all these different personalities,

00:31:39 ►

that seems to be one drift in what you’re saying.

00:31:42 ►

And that’s one discussion, is whether or not a polytheistic model is possible, or whether

00:31:49 ►

indeed there have been any.

00:31:51 ►

Because in India, which is frequently called polytheistic, you have many gods, but you

00:31:56 ►

have all through all Indian traditions the idea of some state beyond all this, Brahman

00:32:02 ►

or Atman.

00:32:03 ►

And in every system where you actually have polytheism

00:32:06 ►

you have some sense of undifferentiated unity as well

00:32:10 ►

so that’s one point to discuss

00:32:14 ►

the second point you’ll seem to be making is that

00:32:16 ►

the boundary between these different basins is not

00:32:19 ►

a straight line or a rigid wall

00:32:21 ►

but rather a fractal boundary

00:32:23 ►

namely one that has many ins and

00:32:25 ►

outs and curves and filigrees and patterns and therefore moving with that kind of boundary

00:32:31 ►

moving from one to the other is very easy because you never quite know where you are

00:32:37 ►

and you could cross the boundary without realising it whereas if there’s a rigid wall, it’s difficult to get the last of the other.

00:32:45 ►

Is this so clear? Yes.

00:32:47 ►

Right. Well, I’m not sure which points to take up first.

00:32:52 ►

I think I’ll leave pigeons aside for the time being.

00:32:56 ►

I think the idea of the plurality of models, I mean, I’m sure this is…

00:33:02 ►

You’re right, Terence’s model is monotheotheistic in that he has a single eschaton

00:33:10 ►

and this takes us immediately to the plurality to the polytheism versus monotheism.

00:33:16 ►

My view of polytheism is that polytheism in all its actual functional forms, even in its

00:33:22 ►

Catholic form, Catholicism is in a sense a kind of polytheism.

00:33:27 ►

You have all the angels, you have all the saints,

00:33:29 ►

you go into the cathedral, there’s all those side

00:33:31 ►

chapels and shrines. It’s just like a Hindu temple.

00:33:34 ►

You go into a Hindu temple, there’s the goddess of

00:33:37 ►

this, then there’s the planet gods, and then there’ll

00:33:41 ►

be this goddess, and this local god, and then there’s

00:33:43 ►

Ganesh, and then there’s various other gods, Hanuman

00:33:47 ►

and that there’ll be a central shrine, say, of Siva or of Bhishma, which would represent the central unifying principle

00:33:55 ►

So, most forms of polytheism are not radical polytheism

00:34:01 ►

They’re a plurality with some however vaguely defined overarching unity behind it.

00:34:07 ►

So the first point is, are you denying an overarching unity?

00:34:10 ►

No, no.

00:34:11 ►

A radical polytheism.

00:34:12 ►

I think my main message is what you described as the second point.

00:34:18 ►

It has to do with the rigidity of boundaries in between. I think that everybody would agree that there is plurality in religion,

00:34:30 ►

in life, in the mind, in the stream, in the sky, and so on. And I think it’s more important

00:34:39 ►

the rigidity of the boundaries in between. Do you worship in the Shiva temple and then you go to Brahm, is

00:34:45 ►

that okay? Or do you have to be faithful to Brahm and never admit the existence of others

00:34:52 ►

and so on? It’s more the denial of what obviously to children seems to exist that brings about

00:34:59 ►

a disintegration of the personality.

00:35:01 ►

of the personality. Through excessively rigid boundaries rather than fractal boundaries between the

00:35:07 ►

boundaries, it’s easy to go from one to the other.

00:35:12 ►

Yes.

00:35:13 ►

They’re porous to the point of, I mean, when you’re in the stream it’s much more watery

00:35:18 ►

than when you’re on land, but the job of getting into the stream doesn’t really have a shock

00:35:22 ►

of cold water in it because it’s like a permeable membrane, I guess, between basins.

00:35:28 ►

And I think in this religious or mythological context it’s appropriate to think of Shiva and concepts of that sort as attractors.

00:35:37 ►

And then there’s multiple attractors. Everybody knows, considering the population of the planet through all times

00:35:46 ►

is large, and there’s zillions of

00:35:48 ►

attractors, and some people have visited one

00:35:50 ►

and other people have visited

00:35:52 ►

two or three and so on

00:35:54 ►

and this

00:35:55 ►

openness, I guess I would

00:35:58 ►

say, to all

00:36:00 ►

attractors is some kind

00:36:02 ►

00:36:03 ►

prerequisite for stability, for the longevity of a culture

00:36:08 ►

or the health of an individual. And this idea

00:36:12 ►

is based on the cosmology in which the stream

00:36:16 ►

has the same morphology as the heavens, which has the same morphology

00:36:21 ►

as some abstract mathematical object.

00:36:24 ►

Therefore, under the ambiance of this idea, our experience of nature is that these rigid

00:36:37 ►

walls are very unstable.

00:36:40 ►

But they’re not that unstable. Well, they’re not that unstable. If you look at nature, if you look at a plant, for example, there’s membranes around its

00:36:47 ►

leaves, and although they have invagination, stannature, and the air can go in, the surface

00:36:55 ►

of our skin has pores in it and is not absolutely smooth.

00:36:59 ►

But nevertheless, these are clear functional boundaries.

00:37:02 ►

And everywhere you look in biology, you find clear functional boundaries and everywhere you look in biology you find clear functional boundaries

00:37:07 ►

there’s a cell membrane around each cell which may have within the lipid structure

00:37:11 ►

the fatty structure some kind of fractal nature

00:37:15 ►

but it’s not an infinitely permeable boundary

00:37:18 ►

it’s permeable to a point

00:37:20 ►

well it has little holes in it with pumps

00:37:23 ►

which are designed for particular things in the environment.

00:37:26 ►

So the permeability is, as it were, structured in a way that’s rigidly connected with that species.

00:37:34 ►

But if these holes were plugged up with a tube drum or something, then of course the cell would instantly die.

00:37:45 ►

But boundaries, you’re not denying the importance of boundaries, of course.

00:37:50 ►

Your whole model is based on boundaries, isn’t it?

00:37:53 ►

That’s right. It has to do with their crookedness.

00:37:57 ►

And their crookedness is your mathematical model for their permeability.

00:38:01 ►

Yes.

00:38:03 ►

for their permeability. Yes. Okay, we’ve got it straight now.

00:38:07 ►

Does everyone hear how to prioritize?

00:38:10 ►

Yes, well, it seems, I think the hay fever medication must be cutting in.

00:38:18 ►

It seems extraordinarily arcane nature is fractal

00:38:27 ►

and this is the new

00:38:29 ►

discovery and it’s a very powerful

00:38:32 ►

insight but it doesn’t

00:38:33 ►

wipe out

00:38:34 ►

some of the previous accomplishments

00:38:38 ►

I’m thinking

00:38:40 ►

of all the work that was

00:38:42 ►

done to show that it’s also

00:38:43 ►

hierarchical so without tossing

00:38:48 ►

the baby out with the bathwater, it might be better to say it’s fractal and hierarchical

00:38:54 ►

so that in the case of your suggestion to me that the eschaton could be many, I think the eschaton is defined as one. And so the many that you’re

00:39:12 ►

suggesting are sort of subsets of the approach. And then what I’m hearing is that because of the interdimensionality of the fractal,

00:39:26 ►

the boundary transition is,

00:39:32 ►

as Philo-Judeus said of the more perfect logos,

00:39:36 ►

you can never tell the moment when it crosses over

00:39:40 ►

from being heard to being seen.

00:39:44 ►

That’s another one of these fractal boundaries that

00:39:48 ►

you’re talking about. Well, if that were all there were to say about it, then no boundary

00:39:55 ►

would be defined or noticed as such. So we’re sort of back to Whitehead’s notion of certain

00:40:05 ►

back to Whitehead’s notion of certain stubborn facts

00:40:09 ►

that are, I suppose, like raisins of resistance embedded in this fractal ocean of infinite permeability.

00:40:16 ►

I don’t have any problem with this,

00:40:20 ►

but nevertheless, I think above all these cycles, boundaries, membrane, there is ultimately a frame that is all-inclusive and defined.

00:40:46 ►

whether this is simply because I’ve been by some form of monotheism on the side,

00:40:53 ►

possibly the form that I’ve probably fallen under the sway of is some kind of neophotonic pyramid of ever-ascending abstract hypostatizations

00:41:04 ►

that lead into the one

00:41:06 ►

I mean if what we mean by the eschaton

00:41:10 ►

is the absence of boundaries

00:41:13 ►

then what we’re saying is that the

00:41:16 ►

fractalization of reality

00:41:18 ►

occurs ultimately on such fine scales

00:41:23 ►

that from the point of view of the perceiver the boundary

00:41:26 ►

has dissolved completely or the boundary and the thing bound have become so homogenized

00:41:33 ►

that it no longer makes sense to speak of boundary and medium you can only speak of this I picture it as a kind of extremely

00:41:45 ►

marbleized liquid or surface

00:41:48 ►

where every domain can be found to be

00:41:51 ►

lying next to a mutually

00:41:54 ►

exclusive other domain and they’re sort of

00:41:58 ►

like the kinds of

00:41:59 ►

diagrams that you get when you carry out

00:42:03 ►

four color mapping problems to

00:42:06 ►

fourth and fifth stages of resolution then you have these extraordinarily complicated

00:42:13 ►

structures where every point lies

00:42:16 ►

next to the boundary that separates it from points that have been somehow defined as other

00:42:23 ►

I’m not sure that we have any disagreement here.

00:42:28 ►

Oh, we do.

00:42:29 ►

Oh, we do.

00:42:30 ►

What is it?

00:42:32 ►

Well, I think what we’ve got here in your description

00:42:37 ►

is a speculation built upon a speculation built upon a speculation

00:42:41 ►

and coming eventually from some kind of absolute and pure faith.

00:42:45 ►

Mindful man faith.

00:42:49 ►

Perhaps one, the one to pertain us with something that you could explore toward

00:42:56 ►

but not actually arrive at.

00:42:58 ►

So we have to understand then on the testimony of those early experts,

00:43:05 ►

that one is an article of faith in our experience.

00:43:09 ►

Even the best traveling shaman has only been so far,

00:43:15 ►

and the assumption of one beyond that is, as a matter of fact,

00:43:19 ►

pure, faithful monotheism at its best.

00:43:23 ►

It’s even called the one.

00:43:24 ►

God has called the one

00:43:26 ►

to make sure that you don’t think

00:43:27 ►

perhaps is two.

00:43:30 ►

Now, I agree with your idea

00:43:32 ►

that the cosmos is hierarchical.

00:43:34 ►

That’s fine with me. And even

00:43:36 ►

I don’t care if it has a finite number of

00:43:38 ►

layers or an infinite number. But

00:43:39 ►

however far you would go

00:43:41 ►

that the wildest shaman has

00:43:43 ►

traveled has seen only another image, maybe more complex,

00:43:49 ►

of what we see in ordinary reality and nature.

00:43:53 ►

And that is, there are multiple bases, there are fractal boundaries,

00:43:57 ►

there are many possibilities, there are different regions,

00:44:00 ►

there’s complexity, there’s harmony, it’s hierarchically organized,

00:44:04 ►

we have never got to the top. Therefore, to say it’s one or it’s two or it’s complexity, there’s harmony, it’s hierarchically organized, we have never got to the top.

00:44:06 ►

Therefore, to say it’s one

00:44:08 ►

or it’s two or it’s three

00:44:09 ►

could only be an article of faith.

00:44:12 ►

It cannot be any kind

00:44:14 ►

of extrapolation

00:44:16 ►

from observation,

00:44:18 ►

normal or arcane

00:44:19 ►

observation. We’re talking about pure

00:44:22 ►

faith here. When you get to the top

00:44:23 ►

frame, I don’t see any

00:44:25 ►

reason why it shouldn’t have two basins and they’re separated by a fractal and that means

00:44:31 ►

that the shaman who comes back and says he knows which one it is is lying well my understanding of that they are a kind of homogenization of levels not present, domains distant,

00:44:49 ►

and that in fact the idea is if you have a sufficient sample of the fractal, not very large,

00:44:58 ►

you can in fact extrapolate the contours of the entire system,

00:45:07 ►

extrapolate the contours of the entire system, so that it isn’t necessary to send a shaman or a mathematician for a total overview, that the sample can be…

00:45:15 ►

Isn’t this what the cosmological principle is, that based on local measurement and local

00:45:23 ►

physics it is allowed to extrapolate.

00:45:27 ►

There’s another monotheistic religion, which is yours in reverse, which says instead of

00:45:31 ►

an eschaton, it’s got a birth at the beginning.

00:45:35 ►

Without an article of faith, you can’t get a cosmological principle.

00:45:39 ►

We don’t have any evidence from the boundaries of space.

00:45:42 ►

any evidence from the boundaries of space. Well, isn’t the idea that fractals are a kind of holographic plane, that the pattern

00:45:52 ►

recurs on many, many levels, but it’s always the same pattern?

00:45:58 ►

So if you have ten levels and you know the pattern on two through seven, you know the

00:46:04 ►

pattern on one, eight, 9, and 10.

00:46:07 ►

No, few fractals in nature have that property,

00:46:10 ►

which is a special property of special fractals,

00:46:13 ►

which are self-similar fractals,

00:46:15 ►

which are, as it were, like integers within the field of all real numbers.

00:46:20 ►

They are exceptional self-similar fractals, mostly.

00:46:23 ►

It just means you have the two basins, red and green, and their boundary is kind of stirred

00:46:28 ►

up so that it has the following property.

00:46:31 ►

Wherever you are in it, you’re within one millimeter of each side, or even a tenth of

00:46:36 ►

a millimeter of each side.

00:46:37 ►

Like in a map.

00:46:38 ►

Like in a contracept.

00:46:39 ►

Well, I guess I somehow have limited my model building to the use of self-similarity.

00:46:50 ►

Just like Pythagoras.

00:46:52 ►

Is this so terrible?

00:46:57 ►

I’m not sure if we allowed you self-similarity in the eschaton,

00:47:02 ►

if that would still establish everyone’s satisfaction, there’s only one.

00:47:09 ►

Well, in my model of the eschaton, at the mathematical level, it is self-similar.

00:47:14 ►

Well, there’s this… Let me tell you about the Wada principle. If you had three basins

00:47:21 ►

fractally entwined, then not only wherever you are in the sandy beach, you’re within

00:47:26 ►

one millimeter of the red and green, but the yellow one is there also.

00:47:31 ►

That means if you travel as a shaman and then you see this pattern at the end of time, if

00:47:36 ►

there would be any jitter in your travel, any blur in your vision, anything slightly human remaining in your travel, then you would see

00:47:46 ►

it as one, even though it isn’t. You just like mistakenly see it as a blur of the three

00:47:55 ►

colors into a kind of a gray eschaton. Well, in some circles this is known as the mystery of the Holy Trinity.

00:48:12 ►

The theological attempts to deal with this problem have led to a variety of models where you have the idea

00:48:16 ►

that the ultimate is not an undifferentiated unity,

00:48:20 ►

but rather a pattern of relationships,

00:48:23 ►

which in the Chinese model you have the yin and the yang

00:48:26 ►

the kind of fractal model between them

00:48:29 ►

and the circle containing the two is the whole

00:48:31 ►

that unifies them

00:48:33 ►

and in the model of the Holy Trinity

00:48:35 ►

there’s a lot of different ways of dealing with it

00:48:39 ►

but one way is the father is the source of the word and the spirit.

00:48:46 ►

And the word is the primary model, is the spoken word.

00:48:50 ►

The spirit is the breath on which you speak the word.

00:48:53 ►

You breathe out and as you speak the word can happen.

00:48:56 ►

Of course, the spoken word, not the written word.

00:48:59 ►

And this, as Jill would tell us, is a pattern of vibrations with harmonics and so on.

00:49:04 ►

Probably some kind of fractal pattern in time.

00:49:07 ►

And it would be hard to say where the… which is the breath and which is the sound

00:49:12 ►

and how you can separate the vibration from the sound and so on.

00:49:15 ►

There would seem to be the kind of model in another very difficult form that you have in mind.

00:49:21 ►

But the principle of unity is not there so much. It’s partly, I suppose,

00:49:27 ►

a kind of experience people report, but it’s also the sense that all these things are related

00:49:32 ►

or hold together. The unity comes from the sense of interrelationship rather than perceiving

00:49:38 ►

some kind of undifferentiated sphere, because all these models of an ultimate unity are

00:49:43 ►

models of a relationship within which

00:49:45 ►

something holds them together

00:49:47 ►

now your model seems to me similar

00:49:49 ►

because the hidden agenda

00:49:51 ►

behind your model is that

00:49:53 ►

although these fractals

00:49:55 ►

set these boundaries and although you can

00:49:57 ►

have any number of boundaries and although

00:49:59 ►

you can’t see unity within these boundaries

00:50:02 ►

the hidden unity behind

00:50:03 ►

all this is the equation governing the fractals.

00:50:07 ►

And for mathematicians, the equation governing the fractals.

00:50:13 ►

Because you see, as a mathematical object, mathematicians have this representation.

00:50:17 ►

You can look on a computer screen at the fractal pattern.

00:50:20 ►

But behind that fractal pattern is a program.

00:50:24 ►

And behind that program is an equation.

00:50:27 ►

And when it comes to equations, mathematicians would certainly admit there can be many different

00:50:33 ►

equations, many mathematical functions, but for this given fractal pattern, there’s presumably

00:50:39 ►

one equation governing it, and that contains different different elements but they’re related together by

00:50:45 ►

the equals sign of the equation

00:50:47 ►

and by the whole structure of the equation

00:50:49 ►

as a kind of unity containing diversity

00:50:51 ►

as a mathematical object

00:50:53 ►

which for most mathematicians

00:50:55 ►

exists in some kind of platonic realm

00:50:57 ►

beyond space and time

00:50:59 ►

even if this platonic realm is only

00:51:01 ►

in the imagination of mathematicians

00:51:03 ►

there’s some kind of hidden unity

00:51:05 ►

containing the diversity that generates this entire thing

00:51:09 ►

we’ve been talking about

00:51:10 ►

so I would say unity is implicit in any mathematical model

00:51:14 ►

in the hidden mathematical object

00:51:17 ►

behind the manifested pattern

00:51:19 ►

well that’s true but it still makes a difference

00:51:23 ►

if you fly to the home boost where your mate is,

00:51:26 ►

or you fly to the mobile loft where there’s just this army captain waiting to give you your food.

00:51:35 ►

I think that my point is not so much about the multiplicity or unity.

00:51:40 ►

I agree that everything is unified in one thing, at least the better if it is.

00:51:46 ►

The point is more about the boundaries, that if you have the dynamical system with different basins

00:51:53 ►

and they have fractal boundaries with the water property, then, as a matter of fact,

00:51:58 ►

no matter how you perceive it, no matter what experiment you do, you will perceive unity.

00:52:06 ►

When you don’t perceive unity is in the pathological case when you have the iron curtains.

00:52:11 ►

If you have iron curtains, then unity essentially has been defeated by a disease of dischaos.

00:52:20 ►

And therefore when we see this in nature, in history, in social systems, in ourselves

00:52:26 ►

we have to beware about these iron curtains

00:52:31 ►

because they create, as it were, a unnecessarily multiple situation

00:52:37 ►

which is the multiple personality syndrome

00:52:40 ►

which is a real problem for some people

00:52:44 ►

and is a problem to some extent for all people.

00:52:48 ►

As we have, for example, here, expressed a yearning for a peaceful state beyond language,

00:52:56 ►

then I’m calling that one of these boundaries, and if you practice chanting, meditation, and so on,

00:53:01 ►

then you are intentionally increasing the fractality of the boundary, and therefore

00:53:09 ►

the integration of the parts into unity.

00:53:12 ►

If unity is your goal, then you have to examine the fractal width of all your boundaries and

00:53:19 ►

guard against things that are too thin.

00:53:22 ►

So how do you fractalize your boundaries?

00:53:24 ►

Can you give a personal example

00:53:26 ►

well

00:53:30 ►

in the

00:53:31 ►

emerging science of neural nets

00:53:34 ►

this is called annealing

00:53:36 ►

one thing you can do is

00:53:40 ►

take a psychedelic another thing you can do

00:53:42 ►

is go to a different culture

00:53:44 ►

which is really

00:53:45 ►

really different and stay there for seven years on a farm or something and um just need to do a

00:53:54 ►

lot well if you have for courage have a mate of any gender then you’re certainly in a more chaotic

00:54:05 ►

situation than

00:54:06 ►

but these

00:54:09 ►

two person units

00:54:11 ►

do definitely have diseases we know that

00:54:14 ►

and a few of them survive

00:54:16 ►

and I’m

00:54:18 ►

making a suggestion here as to what’s

00:54:20 ►

the trouble which

00:54:21 ►

might not be validated by further

00:54:23 ►

study but to the degree that it was it was just

00:54:26 ►

a strategy a kind of a therapeutic technique and people are coming out by the way this idea

00:54:33 ►

for therapy and relationships can you give an example of how that would work in therapy in

00:54:40 ►

the relationship the care of the transfer ization boundaries, not in the model but I mean

00:54:46 ►

in the kind of therapeutic personal way.

00:54:48 ►

Well, people, first of all there’s a diagnostic phase in which the therapist is turned in

00:54:56 ►

chaos theory instead of Freudian theory. And when a boundary has been detected with a pathologically low dimension or thickness,

00:55:12 ►

then a therapy has to be devised specially for it, and that would consist of some carefully

00:55:20 ►

safeguarded experiments in the violation of the boundary and the mixing of the boundaries

00:55:26 ►

one common

00:55:28 ►

strategy involves play in a

00:55:30 ►

sandbox, you’ve seen this

00:55:32 ►

therapist’s office has

00:55:34 ►

all these toys and that

00:55:35 ►

returns to a pre-verbal

00:55:38 ►

mode of

00:55:40 ►

expression and well

00:55:41 ►

people are clever at therapies

00:55:44 ►

I’m not, I’m not a therapist but I think that an advance in theory is helpful in devising therapies.

00:55:49 ►

Now, what’s happening with this fad of multiples in the United States is that people who suffer this

00:55:57 ►

are getting together in small groups for self-therapy because they feel that the therapist not having multiple personalities with chaos

00:56:08 ►

has no idea really what’s going on.

00:56:11 ►

So the theory coming from the therapist

00:56:12 ►

can’t possibly be right.

00:56:13 ►

So these groups are studying chaos theory

00:56:16 ►

and the therapy that they’ve devised

00:56:18 ►

is a psychodrama,

00:56:21 ►

which they write, direct, and perform in public

00:56:24 ►

in sort of street theaters

00:56:25 ►

in cities around the United States.

00:56:28 ►

There’s a network of these that base their approach on my paper on the multiple, what

00:56:39 ►

was it called, Personality Dischaos, it’s called.

00:56:43 ►

called personality dischaos, it’s called.

00:56:48 ►

So we’ll see.

00:56:49 ►

I can give you a report next year how these experiments work out.

00:56:52 ►

Some therapists believe that they may be fatal

00:56:54 ►

and I should be imprisoned.

00:56:59 ►

But the patients themselves are very enthusiastic.

00:57:02 ►

They’re really having such a wonderful time.

00:57:05 ►

It applies to bipolarity.

00:57:07 ►

You know, depression is a really serious condition.

00:57:09 ►

If you’re depressed, I mean, you are so unhappy,

00:57:12 ►

life is so painful, you can’t really go on.

00:57:15 ►

And if a therapy was devised that cured bipolar personality dischaos without drugs then a lot of people

00:57:29 ►

would be helped. This is not a fad, it’s a really serious disease.

00:57:35 ►

So dischaos, the psychodrama is designed to break down boundaries, rigid boundaries.

00:57:44 ►

Yes, to increase their fractal dimension.

00:57:48 ►

What do you do with people whose boundaries are too low already?

00:57:51 ►

There are certain people, for example, in conversation

00:57:53 ►

who run from one attractor or creator or basin to another,

00:57:58 ►

so they jump from subject to subject with alarming rapidity,

00:58:02 ►

and you can barely keep up.

00:58:04 ►

Now, these seem to be people who

00:58:05 ►

have fractals of high dimension

00:58:08 ►

in their mental attractor

00:58:10 ►

structure, what do you do

00:58:11 ►

with them to reduce the dimensions

00:58:14 ►

of their fractals?

00:58:15 ►

well I’d start with beer or maybe a shandy

00:58:18 ►

and then go on to wine

00:58:19 ►

laughter

00:58:20 ►

laughter

00:58:23 ►

laughter

00:58:24 ►

laughter

00:58:24 ►

so Ralph, given what you’ve said about the goals of this therapy,

00:58:32 ►

wouldn’t it just be simpler to give these people psychedelics?

00:58:39 ►

Well, personally, I’ve had good results with psychedelics,

00:58:41 ►

but I’m not sure everyone would.

00:58:41 ►

I’ve had good results with psychedelics but I’m not sure everyone

00:58:43 ►

would

00:58:44 ►

and

00:58:46 ►

maybe there

00:58:49 ►

well it’d be nice

00:58:51 ►

if we had several alternative strategies

00:58:53 ►

some of which could be done on a

00:58:55 ►

on a Sunday evening

00:58:57 ►

where you still feel okay

00:58:59 ►

about going to work on Monday morning

00:59:01 ►

well since you morning like vitamin pills

00:59:06 ►

since you have such good luck with psychedelics

00:59:09 ►

why are you so reluctant to advocate

00:59:11 ►

well I do

00:59:14 ►

I have been advocating psychedelics

00:59:17 ►

in public or at least

00:59:19 ►

if not advocating

00:59:21 ►

confessing that for me

00:59:24 ►

there have been very good results.

00:59:25 ►

I’ve had a certain amount, but quite recently, of hostile mail and telephone calls.

00:59:29 ►

Even people coming to the university to hasten my demise, they seem to think they’re drugs, that psychedelics are drugs.

00:59:47 ►

there’s also the aspect of legality where many people are in jail

00:59:49 ►

with 20, 30 and 40 year jail sentences

00:59:51 ►

so I think that the atmosphere of paranoia

00:59:56 ►

in the world today

00:59:57 ►

might even make them much less effective

01:00:01 ►

as medicine for dischaos

01:00:04 ►

and psychodrama and therapy.

01:00:10 ►

Because of the paranoia, the legal status.

01:00:14 ►

But if that barrier were removed,

01:00:17 ►

and it sounds like you’re advocating something fairly close to what Salvador Roquette

01:00:23 ►

and that school settled into. I don’t know Salvador Roquette and that school settled into.

01:00:26 ►

I don’t know Salvador Roquette.

01:00:29 ►

Well, he was a psychotherapist who worked in Mexico for many years

01:00:33 ►

and gives people psychedelics,

01:00:35 ►

but he also then assaults them with Auschwitz footage

01:00:40 ►

and all of the very highly charged emotional material

01:00:46 ►

the idea being to

01:00:48 ►

just reduce them to some

01:00:50 ►

absolutely basic

01:00:52 ►

jelly of

01:00:53 ►

dissolved boundaries and

01:00:55 ►

sounds disgusting

01:00:57 ►

to me I agree I’m trying to find out how

01:01:00 ►

what you’re advocating is different

01:01:02 ►

oh it takes only very subtle

01:01:04 ►

medicine to decrease rigid walls.

01:01:08 ►

Even the very idea of it may be enough, as a matter of fact.

01:01:11 ►

Well, that’s anyway the therapy idea.

01:01:14 ►

Once your consciousness is adjusted

01:01:17 ►

so that your sensitivity to your own process

01:01:20 ►

actually observes these things and considers them undesirable,

01:01:26 ►

then automatically they begin to disappear

01:01:29 ►

under the self-creative action of one’s own psyche.

01:01:34 ►

After all, nature is there too,

01:01:36 ►

and mathematical necessity reveals itself in the Milky Way,

01:01:41 ►

in the sandy beach, and in the human psyche as well.

01:01:44 ►

There is a tendency toward health.

01:01:46 ►

I think that these diseases of the rigid barriers, like other diseases,

01:01:52 ►

consist primarily of the rejection of the cure, and the cure can be found within.

01:01:56 ►

Unlike hay fever and a lot of things, this can actually be treated within.

01:02:01 ►

One has to get the idea, thus, when people suffer this,

01:02:14 ►

which is essentially universal, it is an inheritance from a culture which has the disease itself. So the cure consists of identifying the difficulty as essentially a cultural pattern and then disowning it by becoming more of an expatriate of your own culture.

01:02:29 ►

That’s why visiting another culture and living there even for three months

01:02:33 ►

is sometimes enough to liberate people from a rigid pattern.

01:02:39 ►

So the diagnosis comes very close to the 19th century diagnosis for most difficulties is

01:02:47 ►

a few months at the seashore, in Italy preferably.

01:02:56 ►

In other words, in both cases you want to establish this extra environmental attitude

01:03:02 ►

through distance from cultural values, either achieved

01:03:06 ►

through journeys with drugs or journeys to foreign exotic lands.

01:03:10 ►

A walk in the woods is perhaps all it takes.

01:03:14 ►

So it’s a search for perspective achieved by distancing.

01:03:19 ►

It’s a kind of a mathematical perspective.

01:03:22 ►

Yeah, well, is there another kind? It’s only appropriate because our culture has suffered this particular disease

01:03:28 ►

over a mere span of 6,000 years.

01:03:32 ►

That’s all we have to recover from.

01:03:34 ►

The particular disease being boundary anxiety?

01:03:38 ►

Patriarchal, monotheistic, hierarchical.

01:03:43 ►

monotheistic, hierarchical Well, has it constipated linear toilet train?

01:03:50 ►

Yes, etc.

01:03:52 ►

Is there any culture that has managed to avoid this chaos? well I think so

01:04:06 ►

but I don’t have

01:04:08 ►

exact experience

01:04:10 ►

of aboriginal cultures

01:04:12 ►

the one we live in has by now

01:04:14 ►

covered the entire globe

01:04:16 ►

and the exceptions are near to

01:04:18 ►

extinction but there are some

01:04:20 ►

anthropologists used to go

01:04:22 ►

and study wild tribes before

01:04:24 ►

they were contacted by the external civilization,

01:04:27 ►

now dominating the entire sphere, which arrived, unfortunately, to them in the form of this anthropologist,

01:04:34 ►

which was the kiss of death for that culture.

01:04:38 ►

But what you’re suggesting, Ralph, is that archaic lifestyles were more boundaries, which is a theme near and dear

01:04:47 ►

to me. I mean, certainly in living Amazon cultures, one of the hardest things to put

01:04:53 ►

up with when you’re there is the fact that there are no boundaries. You know, that everybody

01:04:59 ►

lives in a wall-less grand house defecation sexuality, death

01:05:06 ►

domestic hassling

01:05:07 ►

disciplining of children

01:05:09 ►

everything goes on

01:05:11 ►

in the presence of everyone else

01:05:13 ►

and no one from age

01:05:15 ►

6 to 90 feels any

01:05:17 ►

constraint whatsoever about

01:05:19 ►

making comments, suggestions

01:05:22 ►

and offering

01:05:23 ►

free advice

01:05:24 ►

it’s a hard thing to embrace making comments, suggestions, and offering free advice.

01:05:26 ►

It’s a hard thing to embrace,

01:05:30 ►

even with the knowledge that it’s going to be good for you.

01:05:42 ►

Well, there are degrees of boundaries,

01:05:44 ►

but I think the permeability of the boundaries

01:05:48 ►

is important, and our culture has perhaps excess attention devoted to the walled fortress,

01:06:01 ►

necessitated by whatever the violence of of these people which some would associate

01:06:06 ►

with the patriarchy

01:06:08 ►

and so called

01:06:10 ►

testosterone poisoning

01:06:11 ►

whatever it is

01:06:14 ►

there has been

01:06:16 ►

the necessity of

01:06:18 ►

concrete walls around the town

01:06:20 ►

locks on the doors of the houses

01:06:23 ►

electronic motion detectors, video

01:06:26 ►

cameras at the bank card place, and so on.

01:06:32 ►

Our culture is, perhaps there’s an increase of complexity as we approach the eschaton.

01:06:41 ►

Perhaps there’s a decrease in that the fractality is actually

01:06:45 ►

vanishing at an alarming rate. That’s what it means the death of nature.

01:06:51 ►

Ralph, when I last visited your house in Santa Cruz I noticed a rigid straight

01:06:56 ►

fence dividing your property from your very undesirable neighbors who have

01:07:02 ►

motorcycle scrambles on their land and have terrible noise.

01:07:05 ►

Yes, they’re all boys with guns, that’s right.

01:07:07 ►

That’s right.

01:07:07 ►

Well, what we need here is a new product, the fractal fence bar, which would go down

01:07:13 ►

very well in California.

01:07:14 ►

Some boundary instead of old style posts with barbed wire.

01:07:18 ►

Excellent.

01:07:19 ►

It’s sort of amazing where people get lost.

01:07:34 ►

I think we should pass this and get on with it. We’ll subvert the world. Well then just for the slightest low gust of wind or chaotic event these motorcycles that suddenly zoom past your front door yes we’d have these gateways

01:07:46 ►

like cell membranes have

01:07:47 ►

nice people could go right through

01:07:49 ►

those with spirit guides

01:07:56 ►

have we reached the point

01:08:03 ►

I think we could.

01:08:05 ►

Yes.

01:08:06 ►

Is it okay?

01:08:07 ►

Yes.

01:08:08 ►

Let’s have some questions.

01:08:09 ►

Yes.

01:08:10 ►

Yes.

01:08:11 ►

Well, everyone is stuck there. It’s a Janus. We have our individuality perceived according to our own paradigm,

01:08:32 ►

which is a paradigm of individuality,

01:08:34 ►

and then there is our participation in a group, another group,

01:08:38 ►

and so on, which is the study of cultural anthropology or sociology.

01:08:46 ►

And we don’t know sometimes if our individuality actually exists, and other times we don’t

01:08:52 ►

know if we belong to any network at all.

01:08:56 ►

So we could perhaps think of these as two faces, as it were.

01:09:03 ►

That means that each one is itself a paradigm that means that

01:09:08 ►

These different paradigms exist simultaneously

01:09:11 ►

within us the individual paradigm where my neighbors say I can do anything I want on my own property and

01:09:19 ►

Including smoking tobacco well

01:09:26 ►

including smoking tobacco, well, the other one says, I exist for the group, or the group is punishing me now,

01:09:30 ►

or I better get up and cook for the group, and so on, and a lot of other ones.

01:09:36 ►

And the important thing is that if you adopt this view of the self or individual as a structure, which like all of these levels are part of

01:09:49 ►

the structure, and that’s the self, at least from the point of view of a single point,

01:09:53 ►

and if you’re looking from a single point, which is probably a different point for each

01:09:58 ►

of those personalities, then this whole structure, well, that’s it.

01:10:04 ►

That’s the self, and it’s also the group

01:10:07 ►

seen from different points

01:10:08 ►

if you insist on

01:10:10 ►

logical consistency

01:10:13 ►

compatibility

01:10:15 ►

harmony between all these

01:10:17 ►

different individuals

01:10:18 ►

then you’re in trouble

01:10:20 ►

because then you’re trying to impose a structure on it

01:10:22 ►

say logical consistency

01:10:24 ►

which is impossible and which if you’re trying to impose a structure on it, say logical consistency, which is impossible and which, if you’re obsessed with it, if you’re insistent upon it, can

01:10:31 ►

only result in the rejection of the consciousness of those certain personalities which then

01:10:37 ►

vanish under the carpet where they move around sort of controlling the show without any supervision.

01:10:43 ►

move around sort of controlling the show without any supervision.

01:10:51 ►

So this is, I think, a really important aspect of the peculiarity of our culture,

01:10:57 ►

that back in those Neoplatonic times, we had Plato and Aristotle. They argued. They had completely different, like one is north-south, the other is east-west or something.

01:11:02 ►

Together, they give a good map, The transmission of the Greek miracle over time through early Christianity and early

01:11:11 ►

Islam gave, by means of some historical accident, a phenomenal imbalance, accentuation to the

01:11:22 ►

Aristotelian, that is, the perspective of formal logic,

01:11:26 ►

that is, the insistence upon absolute truth, that is, the perversity of modern science.

01:11:32 ►

That’s the Aristotelian, unfortunately, without the balance of the platonic.

01:11:39 ►

When this Aristotelian imbalance aspect of our culture comes into our own

01:11:45 ►

psyche we

01:11:46 ►

then may

01:11:46 ►

ask for

01:11:47 ►

without

01:11:48 ►

different

01:11:48 ►

parts

01:11:49 ►

some

01:11:49 ►

logical

01:11:49 ►

compatibility

01:11:50 ►

and that’s

01:11:51 ►

a very

01:11:52 ►

unhealthy

01:11:53 ►

state

01:11:54 ►

so we

01:11:55 ►

can accept

01:11:56 ►

the individual

01:11:56 ►

and the

01:11:57 ►

social

01:11:57 ►

without

01:11:58 ►

conflict

01:11:59 ►

even though

01:11:59 ►

they’re

01:11:59 ►

conflicting

01:12:00 ►

just because

01:12:01 ►

they are

01:12:01 ►

and their

01:12:02 ►

partnership

01:12:02 ►

too

01:12:03 ►

is just because they are, and their partnership, too, is… Yeah, it sounds great.

01:12:13 ►

I never…

01:12:14 ►

I mean, Terrence was suggesting everybody take five grams of dried mushrooms.

01:12:19 ►

Maybe one of these little balls under the tongue would do.

01:12:23 ►

maybe one of these little balls under the tongue would do.

01:12:33 ►

I might take this opportunity to just speak in defense about the image of mathematics that you projected,

01:12:35 ►

and I think that this could be helpful to everyone

01:12:39 ►

because I don’t know how many people have come to me and said,

01:12:42 ►

I hope it won’t be too mathematical.

01:12:45 ►

Mathematics is not a science.

01:12:47 ►

It’s sort of the opposite of a science.

01:12:48 ►

Science is science.

01:12:49 ►

We know what that is, or we don’t know.

01:12:51 ►

There’s a lot of different images,

01:12:53 ►

but somehow it has to do with an absolute truth observed about nature

01:12:58 ►

by doing it a certain way with a discipline

01:12:59 ►

which is miraculously good in terms of getting rid of the foggy stuff

01:13:06 ►

and giving all people on the planet a consensus about what’s going on,

01:13:10 ►

not speaking down science.

01:13:13 ►

But science is not mathematical, and mathematics is not science.

01:13:16 ►

Science is discovered about the world through the activity of people.

01:13:20 ►

Mathematics is an inborn ability that everybody has,

01:13:23 ►

like breathing, pumping the blood, we don’t know how it works, and so on.

01:13:27 ►

It is not an equation behind the picture you see in the book.

01:13:32 ►

The picture that you see in the book, which you recognize and it immediately means something to you in terms of what you’re doing,

01:13:38 ►

that’s the mathematics.

01:13:40 ►

Mathematics is an abstract vocabulary of space-time patterns.

01:13:45 ►

That’s all.

01:13:46 ►

If somebody figured out some cute way to stuff into an equation

01:13:50 ►

or a computer diskette or something, they’re fine.

01:13:53 ►

But computer graphics has made visible mathematics,

01:13:58 ►

like a slide projector put into Terence’s head

01:14:02 ►

would project the shadow of the eschaton onto the wall.

01:14:16 ►

So everybody can do it. The story I told about the three boys at the beach, that’s mathematics.

01:14:23 ►

I think once you understand what mathematics is

01:14:26 ►

every single one of us before lunch could be inventing new branch of

01:14:31 ►

mathematics mathematics is simply the formal relationships between defined sets

01:14:38 ►

and you can define the sets you know they could be hexagrams they could be triangles they could be groups of

01:14:47 ►

11 dots you set up the terms and then watch the system run and derive the rules and that’s a new

01:14:56 ►

branch it doesn’t need language it’s pre-linguistic children can do it as soon as you’ve observed

01:15:02 ►

a similarity between the left bank of the stream and

01:15:05 ►

the right bank, between the right bank and the Milky Way and so on, you are performing

01:15:09 ►

mathematical functions and each… that’s all there is to it, except that somehow the subject

01:15:20 ►

has been misunderstood on such a massive scale within the school system

01:15:25 ►

that everyone’s been convinced incorrectly that they can’t do mathematics.

01:15:30 ►

And that’s everyone, including Nobel Prize winning physicists and so on,

01:15:34 ►

have math anxiety because of the school system.

01:15:43 ►

Then there is no chaos and there is no order.

01:15:48 ►

Chaos is a kind of order.

01:15:51 ►

And order is a kind of chaos.

01:15:54 ►

So I think, I know this sounds like double talk,

01:15:58 ►

but the whole idea is just to somehow disabuse yourself of the habit

01:16:02 ►

of overemphasizing something by perceiving the value in the other.

01:16:09 ►

You know Jung psychoanalyzed God. This was bold. I think it was the last book before he died.

01:16:18 ►

Answer to Job. He psychoanalyzed God. He psychoanalyzed Yahweh, and he found a fractal mixture of two basins,

01:16:28 ►

good and evil, that can’t exist without.

01:16:32 ►

That is, in other words, the ultimate model behind all the mathematical models for all

01:16:39 ►

the dichotomies before construction or after deconstruction.

01:16:47 ►

That is the red and green practically mixed they’re still red they’re still green but they’re so close together that’s uh

01:16:55 ►

anyway yin’s deconstruction of yahweh yes well this think, what Rupert was suggesting at one point.

01:17:06 ►

There, the idea about the sacred trinity, or the original chi-partite structure of the goddess.

01:17:15 ►

Each part is present in every part, and there is no distinction between the divine world and the mundane world.

01:17:26 ►

in other words no distinction between the divine world and the mundane world and if there is a distinction where a culture has made a distinction then that distinction is uh as it were creating

01:17:34 ►

dis-ease in the culture by setting aside infinity from something else ordinary ordinary reality, family, life. And then you get a temple with a thick concrete wall around it

01:17:47 ►

and the divinity within and outside.

01:17:50 ►

And so then there’s the progressive parturition of like unzipping a zipper

01:17:58 ►

where one thing after another is desacralized.

01:18:02 ►

And now we live in a world which is totally desacralized and now we live in a world which is totally desacralized

01:18:06 ►

and the resacralization

01:18:08 ►

of the world

01:18:10 ►

could be as simple as

01:18:12 ►

zipping up this zipper again

01:18:14 ►

but we don’t know exactly where the handle is

01:18:16 ►

we can’t recover the

01:18:21 ►

aboriginal state of consciousness

01:18:23 ►

because it’s extinct, I guess.

01:18:25 ►

But we’re trying.

01:18:26 ►

But we’re trying to find it in this, the multiple personality idea then suggests

01:18:33 ►

that it’s there.

01:18:34 ►

It’s still there in each person under the wall.

01:18:39 ►

The aboriginal state of consciousness involves as far as we know, taboos, in other

01:18:44 ►

words, boundaries of what’s restricted.

01:18:47 ►

It’s not without boundaries at all.

01:18:49 ►

All the early books on anthropology,

01:18:51 ►

Sir James Fraser and all those kind of people,

01:18:53 ►

were fascinated by taboo structures.

01:18:56 ►

As soon as anthropologists arrived anywhere,

01:18:58 ►

they found systems of taboos.

01:19:00 ►

And that’s why early 20th century anthropology,

01:19:03 ►

Freud wrote a book on totem and taboo,

01:19:05 ►

and he was very interested in this question.

01:19:08 ►

And taboo means that which is forgiven.

01:19:10 ►

And the idea that there are these boundaries set up by culture

01:19:14 ►

seems utterly fundamental to all cultures.

01:19:17 ►

Well, but don’t you…

01:19:17 ►

Not just patriarchal, etc.

01:19:20 ►

Don’t you think they were projecting a lot of that?

01:19:23 ►

After all, people like James Fraser and Freud came from the most taboo ruled societies that have ever existed on earth.

01:19:31 ►

Victorian England and Fin de Siecle Vienna were so taboo obsessed, so constipated, so hidden from themselves that they very probably carried that into their work as a projection.

01:19:48 ►

But not just that. I mean, like among Australian Aborigines, the idea that there are certain initiation rites that boys go through

01:19:55 ►

when they’re shown certain objects which can only be seen by initiated men, not by women, not by boys beneath the age of initiation. And this kind of pattern, presumably, wasn’t just made up by anthropologists.

01:20:08 ►

These things are found everywhere, things of that general kind.

01:20:12 ►

And the idea of boundaries seems fundamental to human culture.

01:20:17 ►

And the boundaries in so-called primitive societies are much more rigid than in our own in many ways.

01:20:23 ►

And like in India for example,

01:20:26 ►

the boundary between the left and the right hand. You use your left hand for wiping your

01:20:31 ►

bottom after going to the lavatory and it’s considered unclean and pure and so on, with

01:20:36 ►

an actual daily reinforcement of that reality. You use your right hand for eating and if

01:20:42 ►

you give someone a present, you must give it with the right hand. I was always having to tell my guests in india for heaven’s sake don’t give people things to your

01:20:48 ►

left hand then the shop pay with the money you just don’t do that and you have to learn all these

01:20:54 ►

cultural divisions when you go and live in another culture it’s not just that we’re attested boundaries

01:21:00 ►

we’re impacting us culture many of them have been broken down. So I think there’s something extremely important about these boundaries which will factor a model…

01:21:09 ►

Well I never spoke against the boundaries, I think that…

01:21:12 ►

No, they’re not even practical. In traditional cultures, they seem, the ones I’ve encountered,

01:21:18 ►

haven’t had a kind of practical permeable quality, they’ve had a quality of extreme authority to them.

01:21:26 ►

Well, there’s a suggestion, I think, about Aboriginal society has to do with the presence

01:21:31 ►

of the divine throughout the world, that you share, hadn’t we?

01:21:39 ►

And that’s one particular boundary that we have that those traditional societies didn’t have,

01:21:45 ►

even though they had other ones.

01:21:47 ►

So maybe there’s a law of the conservation of boundaries

01:21:52 ►

or the maintenance of a certain degree of complexity of structure

01:21:55 ►

that we find in all societies,

01:21:57 ►

and these boundaries have to be put somewhere,

01:22:01 ►

and we just have to see that they’re more or less in the appropriate places.

01:22:05 ►

And I don’t think they’re weaker or stronger the taboos we overthrow are the weak ones

01:22:12 ►

but we’re ruled by incredibly strong taboos i was visited once in hawaii by a bunch of germans

01:22:20 ►

and i took them down to the beach and this woman immediately whipped her top off.

01:22:26 ►

And she knew that you can’t do that in America,

01:22:30 ►

but she didn’t believe it because it was so inconceivable to her.

01:22:36 ►

While I could not conceive of doing it any other way

01:22:40 ►

and realized that wave upon wave of social disruption would flow from this

01:22:46 ►

absurdly trivial act because a taboo had been violated that was just, one just doesn’t do

01:22:56 ►

that.

01:22:59 ►

So we choose.

01:23:01 ►

So you told us, we’re so happy.

01:23:03 ►

Absolutely.

01:23:09 ►

Instantly. Public beach in Hawaii. The Maine hang is quite an interesting one.

01:23:11 ►

In traditional cultures, it’s a name that is very highly specified.

01:23:18 ►

And like in traditional Japan, the whole heritage name,

01:23:22 ►

from the formal ones, you gradually got down to less and less boundaries.

01:23:26 ►

And in England, you know, the Anon-Tin-Tai, you told your husband,

01:23:31 ►

you told him, in India they do that, but nowadays, even that got into court by the Christian,

01:23:39 ►

or even the Tatmadaw, the Tibetan.

01:23:42 ►

So in those times, the boundaries got more and more flingy between people

01:23:47 ►

well the boundaries move that’s right but wherever they are sitting at any given moment

01:23:53 ►

they are incredibly rigidly maintained again for all reasons i mean i remember when i lived

01:24:00 ►

in benares that my houseboat was anchored near the bathing ghat, and you could watch a thousand women wading into the a thigh, and it seemed perfectly reasonable to them

01:24:27 ►

to walk into the river fully clothed

01:24:30 ►

in order to preserve a sense of modesty.

01:24:35 ►

It did not seem to them silly, irrational, or preposterous.

01:24:40 ►

And yet, wasn’t it?

01:24:42 ►

And isn’t it absurd for Americans to keep, American women to keep their tops on at the beach?

01:24:49 ►

yes, but it goes without saying, it’s beyond question

01:24:56 ►

and then the taboos that are negotiable change over time

01:25:00 ►

but they usually don’t address the central concerns of the society. I mean, for instance,

01:25:09 ►

this thing about topless beaches, all the beaches of France and Italy are topless. That

01:25:14 ►

means nothing in America. It will never change. I cannot conceive of it changing. The situation with cannabis is similar. Everyone knows

01:25:26 ►

that cannabis is trivial

01:25:28 ►

and harmless, but that

01:25:30 ►

doesn’t mean that we’re on the brink

01:25:32 ►

of changing the social

01:25:34 ►

taboos about it.

01:25:36 ►

It feels to me as though they will

01:25:38 ►

never change.

01:25:39 ►

Those taboos are denominated

01:25:41 ►

as the present taboos.

01:25:44 ►

Yes, I agree.

01:25:45 ►

I think that one of the, speaking of all these divisions,

01:25:49 ►

one of the strongest divisions is the division between the sacred and the profane.

01:25:54 ►

They seem to be like oil and water.

01:25:57 ►

And once a profane domain is established,

01:26:10 ►

is established, it will struggle with all of its resources to resist a resacralizing of that space.

01:26:19 ►

That’s what has made Western civilization so toxic, is the fact that it is a continuous and spreading profanation,

01:26:27 ►

apparently to be carried on until the extinction of the planet unless those few heretical voices that dare to oppose the imposition of this boundary are heard.

01:26:34 ►

And so the significance of the ablution is that

01:26:36 ►

you can start to probably recharging it

01:26:40 ►

and it’s really a possibility.

01:26:43 ►

Well, so you’re suggesting there are pathological taboos and taboos which actually maintain health.

01:26:50 ►

Yeah.

01:26:50 ►

I mean, the taboo about the hand that Rupert mentioned is probably a health-based taboo.

01:26:57 ►

You don’t want to be transmitting amoebas to your friends or yourself.

01:27:01 ►

Well, we don’t want to eat poisonous plants. We don’t want to eat…

01:27:05 ►

But poison, it becomes a word, this is a word so fraught with cultural…

01:27:12 ►

We’re talking about amanita varna or something. Well your first shot of the scotch,

01:27:18 ►

this doesn’t convince you that this is a toxic substance, but

01:27:22 ►

no it turns out to be the basis of an entire culture lifestyle and philosophy

01:27:38 ►

my rule when taking a shower in the Ganges, I would let my little bucket off the front of my houseboat,

01:27:47 ►

was it’s pure, there’s no turd larger than a thumb in it.

01:27:54 ►

So this is how India deals with the sacred river Ganges.

01:27:59 ►

This is where the bodies are being dumped, this is where the garbage is going.

01:28:04 ►

They don’t seem

01:28:05 ►

to perceive any contradiction there. So why they should be so hoity-toity about taking

01:28:14 ►

a shower, it doesn’t make any sense. They’re not honoring the river by keeping themselves

01:28:21 ►

there.

01:28:21 ►

But they do honor the river.

01:28:23 ►

They do honor the river, but these particular acts that we’re discussing

01:28:28 ►

i don’t think they’re viewed as honoring the river i don’t know what the history of indian

01:28:34 ►

prudence is i suspected what i was seeing was victorian ethos run mad.

01:29:05 ►

Thank you. That’s exactly what I meant at the beginning where Jung cycled in like God and found a fractal mixture of good and evil. And then, of course, we see it everywhere in nature. And the Ganges is not dirty water.

01:29:08 ►

It’s actually a fractal mixture of excrement and clean water.

01:29:12 ►

And nature is fractal, and the poisonous plants are growing intermixed with the food.

01:29:21 ►

So that’s just the way of it, this planet. And when our societies

01:29:26 ►

are more like nature, maybe they have more longevity or maybe not. And maybe the mathematical

01:29:33 ►

model helps to look at it or maybe not. But in any case, we succeeded to draw back from

01:29:39 ►

the eschaton and the humming pigeons and somehow arrive in the society that we live in.

01:29:45 ►

So the boundary is a rigidification of habit.

01:29:50 ►

Yes, the boundary is a kind of a materialization of habit, I guess.

01:29:55 ►

And nature itself seems to have evolved.

01:30:00 ►

The structure came out of chaos in the process of creation in which order emerged and structure is made

01:30:08 ►

and matter materializes around habits and so on.

01:30:15 ►

In our personal life, in our family, in our school and institutions and so on,

01:30:21 ►

we have a lot of freedom, it seems, to behave this way or that.

01:30:26 ►

And within some realm we have choices, and that’s why I think it’s good to have a mathematical

01:30:36 ►

view of all this, because it does give you a way to extrapolate from nature, to make

01:30:43 ►

analogies between nature and the structures we’re living in.

01:30:47 ►

And that’s kind of diagnostic in itself.

01:30:52 ►

Maybe we should stop here.

01:30:55 ►

What do you think?

01:30:57 ►

Sure, it feels like we’ve hit the moon boundary.

01:31:05 ►

Since this has already been an overly long podcast,

01:31:08 ►

I’ll refrain from any comments on the trialogue we just heard,

01:31:11 ►

other than to say that, once again, it seemed like it was Ralph Abraham

01:31:15 ►

who had to gallop in and save the day from some of Terrence’s more ungrounded speculations.

01:31:21 ►

But what great fun to listen to the three of these guys bounce such

01:31:26 ►

entertaining ideas off one another.

01:31:28 ►

And there still are a few more

01:31:30 ►

of these trilog tapes to go.

01:31:32 ►

Today’s conversation was the end

01:31:34 ►

of the Hazelwood House trilogues, but

01:31:35 ►

there are still others that

01:31:38 ►

they held that I haven’t had a chance to podcast yet.

01:31:40 ►

So you can rest assured

01:31:42 ►

that over time you’ll eventually hear the

01:31:44 ►

rest of them here in the salon

01:31:45 ►

too. Now before I make a final comment, I want to mention, like I do every week, that this and all

01:31:51 ►

of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution

01:31:56 ►

Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license, which basically means you can use parts or all of this

01:32:02 ►

program if you want. Just go to the creativecommons.org site and you can read all about it.

01:32:08 ►

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

01:32:12 ►

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

01:32:17 ►

And as a final note, I want to mention the passing of my friend Bud Wilkinson.

01:32:22 ►

Bud had just turned 91 years old shortly before he died,

01:32:26 ►

quite peacefully, I’m told, and with most of his children by his side.

01:32:30 ►

And while I realize that the chances are slim that you knew Bud,

01:32:34 ►

one of the reasons I want to mention him now is to point out how

01:32:38 ►

just being a nice person can help make the world a little bit better for all of us.

01:32:44 ►

I only met Bud a couple of years ago when a mutual friend introduced us at the gym we both use several times a week.

01:32:50 ►

And the image of him shuffling into the gym each morning is still quite vivid for me

01:32:55 ►

because the few moments I spent visiting with him on those mornings made going to the gym

01:33:00 ►

something that I actually looked forward to rather than dreaded.

01:33:04 ►

It was his smile that got

01:33:05 ►

you first, and I don’t think I’ll ever hear the word smile without first thinking of Bud. He

01:33:12 ►

simply radiated vibrant energy and great joy. As it turned out, we figured that way back in the 50s,

01:33:19 ►

Bud had actually worked at some of the Chicago baseball games I attended as a boy. So we spent a lot of time talking about Chicago and, of course, Notre Dame football,

01:33:29 ►

which was one of his favorite topics.

01:33:31 ►

Like my own dad, Bud hadn’t attended Notre Dame,

01:33:34 ►

but was part of the subway alumni that the Chicago sports writers often talk about.

01:33:40 ►

Now, why am I spending all this time talking about an old man

01:33:43 ►

that I just casually spoke with at the gym?

01:33:46 ►

Well, first of all, it’s because I miss him.

01:33:48 ►

And I want to thank him for his smile and for helping to make this world just a little easier for me to make my way through each day.

01:33:56 ►

And I guess that I wanted to point out to you that the next time you smile at a stranger,

01:34:01 ►

you just may be making someone’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad

01:34:05 ►

day just a little more bearable. And besides, I’m told that it takes fewer muscles to smile than to

01:34:11 ►

frown. So relax, be happy, and smile as often as you can. For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from

01:34:20 ►

Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

110 - Hazelwood House Trialogue (Part 4)

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