161 - Reality Check

Program Notes

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

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0062500139“We have the concept of the ideal city in the ancient world, most especially the ideal city of Plato’s Republic. So casually we might call that Utopian fantasy. Although Plato did try to actually realize it in the political organization of a particular city. He ended up in jail for that effort. Another thing to kind of keep in the back of your mind as we choose whether or not to associate with this particular strand of the human endeavor [utopianism].“–Ralph Abraham

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0892815108“A restoration of the sense of the life of nature could lead to a new society in which heaven and Earth are mediated through human beings. Human beings would be the mediator of the marriage of heaven and Earth to bring about a harmonious relationship at the whole of nature on this Earth, somehow bringing human society into a right relationship between the Earth and the heavens.” –Rupert Sheldrake

“If you restrict yourself to the realm of the rational, then you only have two choices: utopia or more history. And more history is beginning to look less and less likely.” –Terence McKenna

“I see all these Christian fundamentalists running around, they also believe in the millennium. And they are the major anti-progressive force in most advanced societies.” –Terence McKenna

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0553371304“We have the money, the scientific knowledge, the communications systems and so forth to solve any of our problems, feeding the hungry, curing disease, halting the destruction of the environment. The problem is our minds, that we cannot change our minds as quickly as we can redesign harbors, flatten mountains, cut rain forests, dam rivers, these things pose no problem. Changing our minds is very difficult.” –Terence McKenna

“We represent the individual atoms that are flowing together to make the transcendental object at the end of time.” –Terence McKenna

“The historical record does not support the eschaton.” –Ralph Abraham

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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And even though I planned on cutting back to a podcast every other week,

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I just couldn’t stay away from you for that long.

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You know, I got to thinking about that wonderful grant we received last week from the Magic Mutt Foundation,

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and then in the past couple of days we’ve also received very generous donations from Courtney M. and Carrie T. And they have motivated me to get an extra podcast out to you today. So thank you again,

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Magic Mutt. And thank you, Courtney and Carrie. I really appreciate you being such an important

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part of the salon. And I’m sure that all of our fellow salonners send their thanks to you as well.

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I’m sure that all of our fellow salonners send their thanks to you as well.

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So, it was quite a day on Tuesday.

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Normally, I wouldn’t comment on a U.S. election because politics isn’t the main focus for most of our fellow salonners,

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and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

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But today, I thought it might be interesting to continue to mine the vein that we began last week

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when there

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was also a little 1960s politics involved. As you know, last week we heard a radio interview

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with Dr. Timothy Leary that was recorded in 1966, and that was essentially at the beginning of what

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we now think of as the 60s. Now fast forward about 26 years from that interview, and we get to 1992,

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which is the year that the trialogue we’re about to listen to was recorded. And by an interesting

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coincidence, it happens to also be the final tape in the 1992 trialogue series that I started

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playing a few months back. Technically, the title of this trialogue should be something like The End program I produced back in Florida many years ago, but that’s another story. The reason I want to ask you to consider taking a reality check at this particular moment

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in time is something that I’ll get into after we first hear today’s program.

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As I said, this is the final trialogue in a series that was held at Esalen Institute

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sometime in 1992.

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The participants were Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, and Terence

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McKenna. And for those of you who aren’t really big fans of Terence’s thinking, well, there’s an

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added little treat for you in that Ralph and Rupert really beat up on him in this one, as they

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point out a few inconsistencies in his thinking. It’s really one of their more interesting exchanges, I think, but I’ll let you decide

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that for yourself.

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So now here is Ralph Abraham, sometime back in 1992, setting up the framework for this

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conversation.

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It is the impossible become possible, and yet remaining impossible.

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Sunday morning, it’s appropriate for something special, something sacred.

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We have a short meeting and a long agenda, so I’ll try to exercise discipline here.

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Our project this morning is either a major breakthrough for ourselves

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in understanding our place in history or brazen egomania.

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We want to try to see ourselves, or rather our self as a trinity,

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and our self, this group, this kind of activity,

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in a broader view of history, in the sweep of history,

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in the sweep of history, in the line of some great idea or bad habit,

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which has characterized the human spirit for a long time,

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and to experiment with the idea of connecting with such traditions as are perceived by cultural historians.

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There’s two particular themes that I want to describe as just two possibilities for understanding ourselves in the historical tradition,

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and they are utopianism and millenarianism.

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So in a nutshell,

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utopia is a word that in our language

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has become pretty much synonymous with nonsense,

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and we may not want to see ourselves in this tradition.

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But as understood by cultural historians,

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utopianism is one of the major currents of the European mind,

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and not an old one,

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according to the view of the specialists of the subject.

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according to the view of the specialists of the subject,

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utopianism, although it has ancient roots.

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For example, any kind of idealistic fantasy of the future,

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we would call that utopian. So we have the concept

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of the ideal city in the ancient world, most especially the ideal city of Plato’s Republic.

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So casually we might call that utopian fantasy, although Plato did try to actually realize it in the political organization of a particular city.

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He ended up in jail for that effort.

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Another thing to kind of keep in the back of your mind

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as we choose whether or not to associate with this particular strand of the human endeavor.

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But according to these historians of the European mind,

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utopianism begins on a particular day, at a particular moment,

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and it’s recent, it’s less than 500 years old,

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and in that time became a main theme,

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a chief characteristic theme of the European mind.

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And that day was the day of publication of a book called Utopia

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by Thomas More, M-O-R-E, in 1516. And this word, Utopia, in the title, is a translation

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into Latin of the Greek utopos, meaning nowhere. And this was its initial chief characteristic feature,

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is that it was acknowledged to be nowhere.

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This was a dream not to be made real.

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Also, it was fiction.

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It had characters and plot and story

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and kind of like a soap opera,

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presenting in fictional form various themes of ideal achievement

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that our culture could strive for.

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After 1516, there was a tremendous rise in popularity.

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Well, this book sold real well and had a lot of imitators.

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So there was a huge genre, body of fictional works,

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which became the foundation of the utopian trend,

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but eventually branched into non-fiction as historians began writing literary

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criticism about this tendency.

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And after non-fiction began to be realized, materialized in actual communities that tried

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to live up to the utopian ideals of some or another novel or non-fiction work in this genre.

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For example, thinking of recent books in this type, we could think of Rian Eisler’s book,

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The Chalice and the Blade, one of the most popular books in our group in the world today.

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Chalice and the Blade, one of the most popular books in our group in the world today.

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This is a perfect example of the non-fiction utopian work.

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And I imagine the specialists of this, well, I could name them.

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There’s a couple, a husband and wife team of historians who made their life work the chronicling of this particular trend.

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And they’re called Frank and Francie Manuel.

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They worked 25 years and produced a book 900 pages long,

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and they plunked it down and said,

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we just cannot carry this burden anymore. We’ve hardly began, but somebody else has got to carry it. And they plunked it down and said, we just cannot carry this burden anymore.

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We’ve hardly began, but somebody else has got to carry it.

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They plunked down this 900-page book in 1979.

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In 1979, looking back on the history of utopianism since 1516,

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they said, well, the last chapter in their book is entitled

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Twilight of Utopia. Twilight of Utopia.

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Twilight of Utopia.

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They saw the trend ended.

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500 years, that was it.

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Probably under the influence of our common experience in the 1960s, when the hippies

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of California, Paris, and other places, Amsterdam, Pros, did try once again to materialize a new utopian

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ideal in actual practice, and this even strove for a planetary society based on ideal lines,

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which completely and totally failed.

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So at the time of their writing, they saw the utopian literary current dried up and ended.

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Nevertheless, since then, since 1979, in the publication of the book, there are certain

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surges of renewal in this literature. For example, Rianne Eisler’s book published in 87 or 88, I think.

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Another non-fiction work of this type,

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we could look at Rupert’s book, The Rebirth of Nature, a year ago.

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This year, Terence’s book, Fruit of the Gods.

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I mean, this is just, I’m not saying we must see ourselves in this tradition, but I think certainly if the Mr. and Mrs. Manuel wrote a revised edition of their book,

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they would definitely include these authors in their list.

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My unpublished book, Chaos Gaia Eros,

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could be considered a kind of a chaos utopia. Rupert’s book, Scientific

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Utopia. Terence’s book, Psychedelic Utopia. Rian Eisler’s book, Partnership Political

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Utopia. I mean, there’s different sorts. And in this 900-page work, we have a catalog of every author,

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thousands of works, thousands of communities that started and then were stopped.

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All are chronicled in temporal order in this work.

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Paul Tillich, writing about this trend in 1951,

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made an interesting identification with the Trinity of the prehistoric goddess, manifest in Christianity, let’s say, as the Holy Trinity,

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the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

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the Holy Spirit. He said that

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this particular

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Trinitarian utopian model

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was presented long

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before

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Thomas More in 1516

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in the works of Joachim

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de Fiore in the 12th

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century. So let me

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just read a few words of

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Tillich’s understanding of the

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Trinitarian structure

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of the utopian

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genre, and

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I think this will help us

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to see ourselves in history.

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The result

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is that

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the overwhelming majority of these

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utopias show a triadic movement.

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The original actualization, namely actualization of the essence,

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and then a falling away from this original actualization, namely the present condition.

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And third, the restoration as an expectation that which has fallen away from

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its primordial condition is to be recovered. One of the distinguishing characteristics

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of this triadic movement is the consciousness on the part of those who use this symbolism,

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almost without exception, that the lowest point of the falling away

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has been reached in their time

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in the moment in which

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they themselves live

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it is always

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the last period

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that gives birth to utopia

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illustrative of this and perhaps also

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the best formula that has been given for it

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is Joachim de Fiore’s idea

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that we live in the age

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of consummate sinfulness. Also illustrative is Augustine’s idea that the world empires that

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have come to an end with the last one, the great Roman empire, which he as a Roman loved,

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and that their sole successor is to be the kingdom of God, which is in some

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measure actualized in the church, but whose final actualization will take place only after

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the close of history.

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The same idea is found in India, where it is always the last period in which the theologian

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who speaks of a succession of ages finds himself.

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speaks of a succession of ages finds himself. In Greece, where the Stoics speak about the Iron Age,

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the last, the most wicked. In Marxism, where the class struggle running through the whole of history is seen to have reached a point where revolutionary change has become inevitable

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because without it the human situation would move beyond all hope of redemption.

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would move beyond all hope of redemption. In the biologic fascistic ideologies where decline, decadence of Nietzsche has reached its final stage where a

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counter-movement must set in. All of these instances show that the triadic

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progression is centered on the moment in which the reversal is immediately

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imminent. This is characteristic of all utopian thought.

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Now, another line, millenarianism.

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There are a lot of these,

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but millenarianism has roots in the Jewish idea of the Messiah,

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that there will be a coming of God on earth

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to rescue humanity from a fatal impasse.

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The version that this evolved into in the Christian tradition,

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the apocalypse that is described in the Christian tradition, the apocalypse that is

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described in the New Testament

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where

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there would be a third

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coming of Christ in

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transformational period lasting

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a thousand years. So this was

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I think millionaire

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it’s not only the millennium

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as for example the year 1000 or the year 2000,

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but also the idea of a special period somewhere of 1000 years that’s transitional to our final salvation.

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Salvation is an important aspect of the millennial idea.

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important aspect of the millennial idea.

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But the millennial tradition actually begins after the year 1000,

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when many people were disappointed that there wasn’t,

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well, there were a lot of activities.

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Terence has referred to this three-year period that’s centered on the year 999, is that right?

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this three-year period that’s centered on the year 999.

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Is that right?

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So after that is the beginning of a new millennial hope and an extensive literature

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and an extensive actualization in, well, movements.

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You can call them movements.

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These are characterized always by a prophet,

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the profeti,

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the charismatic leader of a movement,

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a group of people, sometimes very extensive.

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So there is another magisterial,

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historical work on this movement

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by Norman Cohn, published in 1950 and revised after new discoveries

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in 1971.

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And in this book, an incredible catalog, prophet after prophet, movement after movement, the

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beginning, the middle, the end, the literature, the analysis, the description of the similarities

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and so on, all these movements, including the Quakers, the Shakers,

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so many, they are, this also, like the utopian movement,

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is an aspect of the European mind.

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It takes place within the context primarily of Christianity,

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and these millenarial groups are all heretical groups

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departing from one or another dogmatic aspect of the organized church.

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So besides this Christian heretical tendency,

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they tried to organize communities which epitomized a certain ideal.

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Almost invariably, they included sexual freedom as one of the similar tenets

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arising repeatedly in reaction to the idea of sin and sexual repression in the Christian tradition.

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repression in the Christian tradition. In the revised work of Norman Cone of 1971, there is an extensive appendix in which is translated virtually all of the

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extant literature of one particular group, which I think in the 17th century

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was so coinciding with the rise of science in England, was very popular in England,

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and they are called the ranters.

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This group, I think in particular,

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reading about it,

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brought up certain similarities

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with our experience in the 1960s

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and today, a movement in which

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the prophet, obviously obviously is Terence.

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Not Ice Cube?

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And this, one of the chief and to me most mystifying aspects

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of the millenarian movement, as opposed to the utopian, is triadic.

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We have before that was good, which we have now, millenarian movement as opposed to the utopian is triadic.

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We have before that was good, which we have now,

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which is the deepest depression that will ever be seen in human history.

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And we have tomorrow, where the virtues of yesterday will be restored

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together with new enhancements, designer drugs or something that will be even better. On the other hand, the millenarians are dominated by the apocalyptic idea

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where human history will end at a certain moment with the eschaton,

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the eschatology of Christianity culminating in some kind of final moment,

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which is not found in other religions.

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And certainly two of the most outstanding exponents, I think, of this tendency today

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are Terence and José Arguelles, who both agree not only on the eschaton along with

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Teilhard de Chardin, but also they agree on the date, the year 2012,

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based on, in different ways, they came to this agreement.

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Between these two tendencies of the European mind in reaction to Christianity,

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the utopian and the millenarian, there is a certain overlap,

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and there are important similarities and differences.

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So somewhere in the neighborhood of this overlap,

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I think we could see our own trinity in our ten-year history of doing what we’re doing now.

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And maybe if this isn’t too egoistic to try to consider ourselves in these historical trends,

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at least we could say that these trends may have influenced us,

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perhaps unconsciously

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in coming to the positions that we’ve taken.

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And in case that’s so,

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we might want to consider the outcome of other people

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who were under the influence of these traditions

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as they unconsciously responded to these deep runnels

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in the morphic field of our culture.

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So, a context for self-reflection. Well, I think it’s very illuminating, that model.

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It makes a lot of sense to me.

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And I think it clarifies a lot of things.

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I mean, I can see in myself both tendencies at work.

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The utopian tendency is something that’s clearly expressed, for example, in socialism. I spent many years as a socialist.

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And believing that there was this primal state of humanity living in brotherhood,

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then alienation caused by serfdom, the feudal system,

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the rise of capitalism, the industrial state,

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and so imperialism, following a Marxist analysis.

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And then the state where the condition where that is overthrown and one returns to a more

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primitive non-alienated state eventually of people living in communities, sharing their

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goods and the state withering away.

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This is the Marxist utopian model with with a millenarian aspect in it,

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because the revolution is the millennial,

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the idea of the revolution ushering in a new age.

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I myself was much influenced by that.

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I was also influenced by scientific utopianism,

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having been educated as a scientist.

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And the primary scientific utopia is, of course,

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Sir Francis Bacon’s book, New Atlantis, published in 1624,

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in which he has this vision of an entirely new order in the world

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where there’s a scientific priesthood

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that operate in this thing called Solomon’s House,

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which is a college that rules this island kingdom.

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Someone’s shipwrecked on an island.

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They find themselves in this kind of ideal state.

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And it’s ideal.

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Everything’s rationally ordered.

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And there’s this scientific priesthood who run the show,

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live in a kind of college where they have organized research.

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They have gardens where they have plant breeding.

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They keep animals to study the animals and for vivisection experiments.

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They have wave machines to create tanks of water with waves in

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so they can study how to make dams and harbors properly

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by studying artificial tides and storms on a small scale through models.

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They study animals and plants.

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They try to develop a universal language.

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This was satirized by Jonathan Swift

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in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels,

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The Voyage to Laputa,

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where there’s this kind of mad academy

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with all these people with insane projects,

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like making sunbeams out of cucumbers

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and making things out of spider’s webs

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and making incredibly strong fibres out of spider’s webs

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and a man there who’s trying to develop a universal language

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which will overcome all divisions between human beings

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by having universal language, the kind of sign language

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he goes round with this heavy knapsack on his back

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and when he wants to say anything

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he fumbles around

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and brings out various signs which

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he shows to people. But

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he ends up with such a heavy bag

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of stuff he can hardly move around with it.

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Anyway, there’s a

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satire of this kind of scientific

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utopianism written by Jonathan Swift

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in the first half of the 18th century.

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That scientific

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utopianism got built into the ideal of progress,

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of technological and scientific progress,

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which was going to liberate mankind from the bondage of poverty,

00:26:35 ►

of disease, of enslavery to the elements of nature,

00:26:39 ►

from fear of storm, fear of cold.

00:26:42 ►

In fact, it’s given rise to the ideology of the modern world.

00:26:46 ►

Our modern world is based on a kind of scientific utopianism.

00:26:50 ►

The whole ideology of development.

00:26:53 ►

Go through the world, here are these people living fairly contentedly

00:26:56 ►

as they always have done in rainforests,

00:26:59 ►

but they haven’t got a cash economy.

00:27:00 ►

So to make a cash economy, make the economy grow,

00:27:03 ►

to get development in place so they can buy video recorders and that kind of thing, cut down the

00:27:09 ►

forests, mine the ground, and have the whole build roads, import trucks, have

00:27:15 ►

Coca-Cola on sale, all this kind of thing which is now the dominant ideology of

00:27:20 ►

the modern world is a transform of scientific utopianism.

00:27:26 ►

Then there’s the liberal political utopianism that has the idea that the socialists

00:27:32 ►

and some of the liberals have the idea that you bring about this utopia

00:27:36 ►

not just through science and technology but through economic and political reform.

00:27:40 ►

So there are more just institutions, more truly democratic ways.

00:27:44 ►

It’s through social change

00:27:46 ►

as well as scientific and technological that this utopia will arise i believed all this for a long

00:27:52 ►

time and i think most of us do because it’s so deeply ingrained in our culture then there’s

00:27:57 ►

another transform of this the new age movement that there’ll be a kind of new utopia brought about through discovery of ancient religious traditions

00:28:08 ►

through finding out about what oriental religions have done

00:28:13 ►

through holistic approaches

00:28:17 ►

harmonious ways of doing things

00:28:19 ►

that a new age will dawn on earth

00:28:21 ►

when everything will once again be in harmony.

00:28:25 ►

This is another kind of utopianism which I’ve been strongly influenced by.

00:28:30 ►

And I think Ralph’s right in saying that my own book, The Rebirth of Nature, is an example of a utopian book.

00:28:39 ►

The essence of the argument that in the past people treated nature as alive, the earth and the heavens.

00:28:45 ►

There was a harmonious relationship because a recognition of the life and sacredness of nature

00:28:51 ►

gave a different way of relating to it than this alienated, mechanistic way of treating nature

00:28:58 ►

as just a bunch of raw materials to exploit for profit.

00:29:09 ►

exploit for profit. So a restoration of the sense of the life of nature could lead to a new society in which heaven and earth are mediated through human beings. Human beings would be the mediator

00:29:16 ►

of the marriage of heaven and earth to bring about a harmonious relationship of the whole of nature

00:29:22 ►

on this earth and somehow bringing human society into a right

00:29:26 ►

relationship to the earth and the heavens well that is indeed the vision that lies under behind

00:29:33 ►

my book which Ralph rightly points out and of course some of Terence’s mixed in his thinking

00:29:39 ►

half of Terence’s thinking is utopian the other half millenarian. The utopian side is the psychedelic revival,

00:29:46 ►

where there was this ancient society where people had a wonderful time harmoniously living

00:29:52 ►

on the earth with tremendous vision of all these amazing realms somehow related to botany

00:30:00 ►

and their ecology. Psychedelic vision, collective orgies,

00:30:07 ►

dissolving ego boundaries.

00:30:10 ►

Then it all went wrong.

00:30:12 ►

The deserts dried, the earth dried up,

00:30:14 ►

the fungi retreated,

00:30:17 ►

the psychedelic visions became less and less frequent,

00:30:20 ►

became substituted by what was originally the medium for storing the mushroom,

00:30:22 ►

namely a honey solution fermented,

00:30:24 ►

turned into alcohol,

00:30:26 ►

and one then plumbed the bottom depths

00:30:29 ►

represented by modern society to be restored,

00:30:33 ►

the original paradise to be restored

00:30:35 ►

by the mass cultivation of mushrooms,

00:30:38 ►

the smoking of DMT,

00:30:40 ►

and other psychedelic revival processes.

00:30:47 ►

Thus would dawn the psychedelic utopia.

00:30:52 ►

Well, and Ralph, of course, has another version of this,

00:30:56 ►

the mathematical utopia,

00:30:58 ►

where the great, regulative, eternal,

00:31:04 ►

if not eternal, at least objective, mathematical structures, the mathematical landscape,

00:31:10 ►

the underlying principles which unify the earth and the heavens,

00:31:14 ►

the fundamental principles reflected in all nature, heavenly and terrestrial,

00:31:19 ►

become visible, not just to a few high priests of mathematics, but visible to potentially anybody through the medium of computer modelling.

00:31:31 ►

And thus there’s a kind of democratisation of gnosis,

00:31:37 ►

that direct knowledge of fundamentals,

00:31:39 ►

which mathematics has had as its guiding light through the centuries and the millennia.

00:31:44 ►

mathematics has had as its guiding light through the centuries and the millennia.

00:31:51 ►

And that this Gnostic seeing behind the scenes into the roots of the way things are becomes commonly available, no longer just through psychedelic visions,

00:31:56 ►

but through computer models which can be shared and entered into by many people.

00:32:02 ►

This is what we talked about how long ago?

00:32:06 ►

It seems like weeks ago.

00:32:07 ►

It was actually about 36 hours ago, wasn’t it?

00:32:10 ►

When we were talking about computers

00:32:12 ►

and the psychedelics yesterday morning,

00:32:15 ►

24 hours ago.

00:32:17 ►

And I think that what happened yesterday afternoon

00:32:21 ►

in our rather unsatisfactory discussion

00:32:23 ►

was that we that Terence,

00:32:26 ►

by the rules of that discussion, was denied his usual millenarian way out and was asked

00:32:33 ►

to consider what would happen if the millennium were postponed, if it didn’t all happen in

00:32:38 ►

And this forced us out of the field of millenarianism into the field of utopianism.

00:32:46 ►

Utopianism is to do not…

00:32:48 ►

Millenarianism, especially since millenarians usually have the end conveniently close,

00:32:54 ►

not too close, but close enough so that it could be in our lifetimes,

00:32:59 ►

not too close that it’ll happen tomorrow or next year.

00:33:02 ►

2012 is a perfect date from that point of view,

00:33:05 ►

20 years away. It’ll see us out for quite a while. It’s not too close. So here’s this perfect date,

00:33:17 ►

and it really means that one doesn’t have to think too much about what happens between then,

00:33:22 ►

now and then, because part of the millenarian scenario

00:33:25 ►

as in the book of the apocalypse

00:33:27 ►

as in the book of Daniel

00:33:29 ►

which in this Jewish apocalyptic

00:33:31 ►

literature of which the Christian

00:33:33 ►

apocalypse is a derivative

00:33:35 ►

this is really a Jewish tradition

00:33:37 ►

it’s also present in Islam to some extent

00:33:39 ►

the end of

00:33:42 ►

history involves

00:33:44 ►

appalling plagues it involves appalling plagues

00:33:46 ►

it involves appalling diseases that sweep

00:33:48 ►

the earth, great earthquakes

00:33:50 ►

eruptions, the seas

00:33:52 ►

turning to blood, a whole series

00:33:54 ►

of disasters, ecological

00:33:56 ►

social catastrophes

00:33:59 ►

including plagues and

00:34:00 ►

diseases and of course it’s only

00:34:02 ►

too easy to see all these things

00:34:04 ►

coming to bear on our society,

00:34:07 ►

an inevitable collapse and catastrophe.

00:34:10 ►

And this is always the precondition for the millennium.

00:34:13 ►

There has to be this sense of not just things…

00:34:16 ►

Utopianism may have touched bottom now,

00:34:18 ►

but millenarianism involves things getting even worse.

00:34:23 ►

Until the only way out

00:34:25 ►

is this total miraculous transformation

00:34:28 ►

the coming of the Messiah

00:34:30 ►

the descent of angelic powers

00:34:32 ►

or in Terence’s version

00:34:35 ►

well he has many versions

00:34:36 ►

many ways of imagining this end of history

00:34:40 ►

all of them resemble in some way

00:34:42 ►

a kind of collective DMT trip

00:34:45 ►

or if you like a near death or a birth experience

00:34:52 ►

where one passes through an appalling time of disturbance

00:34:55 ►

and then there’s an emergence into some totally new realm of being

00:34:59 ►

so the apocalyptic tradition doesn’t try to stop things getting worse necessarily

00:35:06 ►

it regards it as inevitable

00:35:07 ►

as part of a process being worked out

00:35:10 ►

and I think that this is the conflict we all find ourselves in

00:35:14 ►

certainly we got becalmed yesterday afternoon

00:35:18 ►

in this area between apocalypse and millenarianism and utopianism

00:35:23 ►

the utopian vision nowadays is not

00:35:26 ►

very strong, there are not many utopians

00:35:28 ►

around, the old utopianism

00:35:30 ►

the socialist one

00:35:31 ►

there’s hardly anyone who’s into that anymore

00:35:34 ►

the scientific and technological

00:35:36 ►

utopia, who believes the world

00:35:38 ►

will be saved by more science and technology

00:35:40 ►

just run by technocrats

00:35:42 ►

the idea

00:35:44 ►

the kind of United Nations social,

00:35:47 ►

the world government type of utopias

00:35:49 ►

of which there have been many proposed this century,

00:35:52 ►

embodied in the United Nations or the European common market,

00:35:56 ►

represents a kind of federalist ideal

00:35:59 ►

which still has some vigor and is still important.

00:36:02 ►

And I’m not knocking these. I think they’re very important,

00:36:05 ►

but I don’t meet many people who are wildly enthusiastic about the United Nations

00:36:10 ►

or even the European common market as the sole solution to all our ills.

00:36:15 ►

I mean, they have a role to play.

00:36:17 ►

So that isn’t exactly something that commands incredible widespread popular enthusiasm.

00:36:23 ►

commands incredible widespread popular enthusiasm.

00:36:29 ►

So these utopian visions that have guided so much of humanistic and socialistic thinking in the present century,

00:36:32 ►

secular humanism and socialism,

00:36:34 ►

have put their trust in this kind of rational reform,

00:36:37 ►

education, science and technology, world government,

00:36:40 ►

rational discussion.

00:36:42 ►

The Rio summit was an attempt to bring that model of world

00:36:46 ►

agreement to bear on the ecological

00:36:48 ►

crisis and

00:36:49 ►

according to the old style utopian

00:36:52 ►

international federalist dreams

00:36:54 ►

everyone would have agreed this is the best thing

00:36:56 ►

to do, gone back and all the countries

00:36:58 ►

hammered down to compromise, put it in

00:37:00 ►

place and humanity guided by

00:37:02 ►

science would have rationally dealt

00:37:04 ►

with the environmental

00:37:05 ►

problem. As we know that’s not what happened. So utopianism is still there, it’s still important,

00:37:13 ►

it’s still strong and an element of my thinking is utopian, an element of Ralph’s thinking is

00:37:18 ►

utopian, an element of Terence’s thinking is utopian and probably an element of all our

00:37:23 ►

thinking is utopian. But what became clear all our thinking is utopian but what became clear

00:37:26 ►

yesterday afternoon is that utopianism is not enough we’re in the field of millenarianism

00:37:31 ►

whether we like it or not we’re approaching a millennium now all these apocalyptic type

00:37:37 ►

disasters are in place the eggs the aids plague the um the um, the toxic waste, the changing climate.

00:37:46 ►

And these kinds of scenarios, signs of the end, are upon us over population.

00:37:54 ►

And this puts us very much in the field of this millenarian process.

00:37:59 ►

And that is, of course, part of the Christian view of history,

00:38:04 ►

which has become now spread throughout the whole world.

00:38:07 ►

Although many people are no longer Christian,

00:38:12 ►

this has created a kind of morphic field, a model of history,

00:38:16 ►

which has come to imbue our whole society.

00:38:19 ►

And, of course, Terence is one of its leading exponents.

00:38:22 ►

What I’d like to do now is ask Terence

00:38:25 ►

how he sees these two strands in his own thinking.

00:38:29 ►

On the one hand, the archaic revival you see is psychedelic utopianism.

00:38:34 ►

On the other hand, the time wave, the end in 2012,

00:38:38 ►

and a great deal of his thinking is millenarian.

00:38:42 ►

And since he represents both so eloquently,

00:38:45 ►

I’d like to know how you see them connecting or linking together.

00:38:53 ►

Yes, well, you’re quite right

00:38:56 ►

about analysing both strains of thought in my thinking.

00:39:03 ►

Utopianism is, as you rightly say,

00:39:07 ►

somewhat in discredit.

00:39:10 ►

On the other hand,

00:39:11 ►

if you restrict yourself

00:39:12 ►

to the realm of the rational,

00:39:15 ►

then you only have two choices,

00:39:19 ►

utopia or more history.

00:39:23 ►

And more history is beginning to look less and less likely.

00:39:29 ►

A hundred years ago, that would have been,

00:39:32 ►

well, no, probably these two things have been balanced

00:39:35 ►

in people’s minds for a long time.

00:39:38 ►

At the beginning of Ulysses, Stephan Daedalus says,

00:39:43 ►

History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.

00:39:47 ►

And I really feel that.

00:39:49 ►

I can’t imagine a thousand more years of human history,

00:39:56 ►

more wars, more discoveries,

00:40:00 ►

more topless photos of Fergie,

00:40:03 ►

more and more and more,

00:40:07 ►

endless to no meaning.

00:40:14 ►

On the other hand, Utopia, which the efforts to build it have become more and more fierce,

00:40:17 ►

and the efforts more and more horrifying. I mean, we’ve had in this century two serious efforts to build Utopia.

00:40:23 ►

Let’s make it three.

00:40:25 ►

The American, the Nazi,

00:40:28 ►

and the Soviet attempts to build utopias,

00:40:31 ►

all ended very, very badly, I think.

00:40:36 ►

The National Socialist utopia

00:40:39 ►

ended in the Second World War

00:40:41 ►

and in an utter discrediting of fantasy fascism.

00:40:46 ►

And the Soviet Union, we know that story.

00:40:50 ►

Our own story is in the act of unraveling

00:40:53 ►

at the moment, I think.

00:40:54 ►

And so where does that leave us then?

00:40:58 ►

It leaves us facing this most unlikely of all scenarios,

00:41:04 ►

which is the millenarian.

00:41:07 ►

And it’s irrational.

00:41:09 ►

The other is rational, you know,

00:41:12 ►

out of human plans, dreams, and institutions,

00:41:17 ►

some more humane order might be fashioned.

00:41:21 ►

That’s the hope of utopianism.

00:41:25 ►

And the conflict in my thinking is

00:41:28 ►

I believe in the millennium,

00:41:31 ►

but I think it’s politically

00:41:33 ►

a disempowering idea.

00:41:38 ►

I see all these Christian fundamentalists

00:41:41 ►

running around.

00:41:42 ►

They also believe in the millennium.

00:41:45 ►

And they are the major anti-progressive force in most advanced societies.

00:41:57 ►

So how should we react to this dilemma?

00:42:03 ►

How should we react to this dilemma?

00:42:05 ►

Well, in order to understand it,

00:42:11 ►

I think it’s worth looking slightly afield for a moment.

00:42:15 ►

What we’re really talking about here are origins and endpoints.

00:42:19 ►

And we’ve really been talking this morning about endpoints.

00:42:21 ►

But what about origins? The dominant and virtually unchallenged myth of our origin

00:42:28 ►

is either that God created us in seven days

00:42:34 ►

along with all the rest of creation,

00:42:37 ►

or that the universe was born out of nothingness

00:42:42 ►

in a single moment for no reason.

00:42:46 ►

These are the two choices on the menu.

00:42:49 ►

Neither terribly compelling to rationalists, I dare say.

00:42:54 ►

Interesting to note that this scientific explanation,

00:43:00 ►

the universe sprang from nothing in a single instant.

00:43:04 ►

However we may think of it in terms of its veracity

00:43:08 ►

notice that it’s the limit case for credulity

00:43:13 ►

you understand what I mean?

00:43:17 ►

I mean that if you can believe that

00:43:21 ►

hell, you can believe anything

00:43:23 ►

sit down and try and think of something more

00:43:29 ►

improbable than that contention.” So it’s like they open up with the one-two punch and

00:43:38 ►

say, you know, put that in front of them. If they can swallow that then you know the hydrogen bond

00:43:46 ►

gene segregation and whatever will follow hard the pace because the hard

00:43:52 ►

swallow comes first well I maintain that it’s a very odd place to look for what that’s called is a singularity.

00:44:08 ►

And many theories require a singularity.

00:44:12 ►

That means in order to kickstart the intellectual engine,

00:44:16 ►

you have to go outside the system and you get one free hypothesis.

00:44:23 ►

And then once you’ve used that up,

00:44:26 ►

your system has to run very, very smoothly,

00:44:30 ►

clear down to the end.

00:44:32 ►

So science uses up its one free hypothesis

00:44:35 ►

with the Big Bang, and it says, you know,

00:44:39 ►

give me the first 10 to the minus high 12 nanoseconds,

00:44:46 ►

and if I can do smoke and mirrors in that,

00:44:49 ►

then the rest will proceed quite in an orderly fashion.

00:44:57 ►

Now that’s orthodoxy, you’ve got to understand.

00:45:02 ►

That’s what the straight people believe.

00:45:02 ►

That’s orthodoxy, you’ve got to understand.

00:45:04 ►

That’s what the straight people believe. So I think that if you get one free singularity in your model building,

00:45:13 ►

a more likely place to put it would be not in a featureless, dimensionless, processless vacuum,

00:45:26 ►

super vacuum, it isn’t even a vacuum,

00:45:30 ►

at the beginning,

00:45:31 ►

but why not look toward a domain of many temperature regimes,

00:45:38 ►

many forms of energy, many languages,

00:45:42 ►

many chemical systems,

00:45:44 ►

many different levels of energy exchange.

00:45:48 ►

In other words, why not look for the singularity

00:45:51 ►

late in the life of the universe

00:45:54 ►

instead of in the immediate moments of its birth?

00:46:01 ►

Then what you have is a picture not of a process being pushed by causality towards

00:46:09 ►

some heat death billions of years in the future, but what you get is a picture of a universe

00:46:18 ►

that is flowing naturally toward a dwell point or a low point in the energy landscape

00:46:26 ►

that’s at the end that

00:46:30 ►

Organization

00:46:31 ►

transcends itself

00:46:33 ►

produces more complex organization which transcends itself which produces more complex organization and

00:46:41 ►

conceivably out of a process of

00:46:44 ►

avalanching complexity like that,

00:46:46 ►

you might actually get a singularity of some sort.

00:46:52 ►

And this singularity would have the character of an attractor.

00:46:58 ►

Now I grant you that it’s irrational,

00:47:02 ►

but our little discussion of the birth of the universe should convince you that it’s irrational, but our little discussion of the birth of the universe

00:47:05 ►

should convince you that it’s all irrational.

00:47:09 ►

That doesn’t get you tossed out of the game.

00:47:12 ►

That’s the name of the game.

00:47:15 ►

So being hopefully a sane person,

00:47:19 ►

my own inner dialogue goes back and forth

00:47:24 ►

between the desire to preserve rationality

00:47:27 ►

and hence channel energy toward utopian hope,

00:47:32 ►

which is reasonable.

00:47:35 ►

After all, we have the money, the scientific knowledge,

00:47:40 ►

the communication systems and so forth

00:47:44 ►

to solve any of our problems

00:47:46 ►

feeding the hungry, curing disease

00:47:49 ►

halting the destruction of the environment

00:47:51 ►

the problem is our minds

00:47:54 ►

that we cannot change our minds

00:47:57 ►

as quickly as we can redesign harbors

00:47:59 ►

flatten mountains, cut rainforests

00:48:03 ►

dam rivers, these things pose no problem.

00:48:06 ►

Changing our minds is very difficult.

00:48:09 ►

And because I see that, and because I see it from a psychedelic point of view,

00:48:16 ►

and because I don’t want to abandon myself to despair,

00:48:21 ►

instead I see then this transcendental object at the end of time. This is not part

00:48:29 ►

of the utopian schema. This is part of the millenarian revelation. But it’s a very persistent idea in all times and all places.

00:48:46 ►

This highly unlikely concept has been kept alive.

00:48:50 ►

And I think that we are blinding ourselves to the intentionality present in our world.

00:49:03 ►

I think you have to be carrying

00:49:05 ►

a lot of unusual intellectual baggage

00:49:08 ►

to not see the last thousand years

00:49:13 ►

as a moving toward a maximizing

00:49:16 ►

of some kind of set of goals.

00:49:18 ►

I mean, it’s not the triumphal march

00:49:22 ►

into God’s kingdom envisioned by Christianity, but neither

00:49:28 ►

is it the trendless fluctuation that is taught in the academies. I mean, if you go to a university

00:49:36 ►

and ask them what is history, they will tell you it is a trendlessly fluctuating process.

00:49:46 ►

you it is a trendlessly fluctuating process. What they mean is it isn’t going anywhere.

00:49:54 ►

Well, now that’s interesting. If it is a trendlessly fluctuating process, then it is the only such process ever observed anywhere. Processes are not trendless. They always are under the aegis of some set of parameters which are being maximized.

00:50:08 ►

If a desert is drying out, then water vapor levels are dropping.

00:50:15 ►

That’s what’s being maximized, is dryness.

00:50:18 ►

To think of history, the very process in which mind is embedded

00:50:23 ►

and through which it expresses itself as trendless,

00:50:28 ►

it’s an existential…

00:50:31 ►

Sorry to interrupt. It’s Lorenzo here just to let you know that I guess I didn’t do too good of a job in digitizing this tape.

00:50:40 ►

Apparently it came to an end and cut off, but after I turned the tape over and resumed

00:50:45 ►

the process, well, I guess I screwed up somehow. The somehow, of course, being the fact that we’d

00:50:52 ►

been up for several days and nights doing all of this digitizing, and my brain must have become a

00:50:57 ►

little digitized in the process. Anyway, I apologize for cutting Terrence off in mid-sentence just now,

00:51:03 ►

and I apologize in advance for it just

00:51:06 ►

now more or less jumping into the middle of a thought and at a different recording level at

00:51:10 ►

that. I know there really isn’t any good reason for this, but had you been there, I’m sure you

00:51:16 ►

would understand completely. And now back to Terrence. Going back to Plato to say that if man if God did not exist human beings would create God

00:51:29 ►

we are creating God our cultural machinery our dreams of integration balance care for each other, care for the world. These are God-like aspirations.

00:51:47 ►

I mean, we really aspire to be God.

00:51:50 ►

We talk about becoming the caretakers of the world.

00:51:54 ►

We don’t want to be Adam and Eve

00:51:57 ►

chewing on the fruit in the garden.

00:51:59 ►

We want to be the gardener, as in the original scenario.

00:52:03 ►

I think that the power that we have

00:52:09 ►

in our possession means we will realize these dreams. If not a real millennium, if not a real eschaton, then a virtual eschaton,

00:52:26 ►

created with such care and finesse and attention to detail

00:52:31 ►

that it becomes an alternative reality of some sort.

00:52:36 ►

So I think people who say you set the scale too tight,

00:52:42 ►

if you were saying this would happen in a thousand years or 500 years, it

00:52:47 ►

would just be interesting table talk. But by saying it’s going to happen in 20 years,

00:52:52 ►

you present us with an impossible choice. But the rates of closure, the speed of acceleration toward the omega point

00:53:06 ►

is exponentially accelerating.

00:53:10 ►

We cannot imagine 2012 by looking backward 20 years

00:53:18 ►

and then saying we have that much more time to go through

00:53:22 ►

before we reach this moment.

00:53:27 ►

We have much more time because time is moving faster. We are compressing more events into it. And I think that, you

00:53:38 ►

know, this guy Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book, and he’s what I would consider a secular humanist, a rationalist of some sort.

00:53:47 ►

And yet the theme of the book is that time is speeding up.

00:53:53 ►

And we all say this every time Russia shudders and a few more provinces are spun off into independence.

00:54:02 ►

Then cocktail party habitués bore each other for weeks

00:54:06 ►

by telling each other,

00:54:08 ►

have you noticed the time is speeding up?

00:54:11 ►

Well, I would like to take that seriously

00:54:15 ►

and say it is speeding up.

00:54:18 ►

Not human time,

00:54:20 ►

but the time of physics is accelerating. You know, we can imagine ourselves colliding with an

00:54:29 ►

asteroid or being battered by earthquakes or something like that, but what we can’t conceive

00:54:35 ►

of is that we are on a collision course with a kind of hyperdimensional object of some sort. What people always object to the millenarian intuition with

00:54:49 ►

is they say, well, you say a transcendental object

00:54:54 ►

is coming orthogonal to history.

00:54:59 ►

Don’t you find it a little odd

00:55:01 ►

that it’s going to occur in your lifetime?

00:55:04 ►

How convenient. Out of billions of years,

00:55:07 ►

it’s going to occur in your lifetime. Out of billions of years, this event is going to

00:55:14 ►

precisely come tangential to 20th century history. That objection is not an objection at all.

00:55:28 ►

objection is not an objection at all. It’s an argument in favor of my position, because you see,

00:55:40 ►

history is the trumpet of judgment. A million years ago, there were only animals and plants and rivers and glaciers on this planet. Human history announces the coming of the eschaton.

00:55:48 ►

Human history, you know, when you open a door,

00:55:51 ►

first there’s a crack of light that streams into the darkness.

00:55:57 ►

That’s human history.

00:55:59 ►

We have cracked the door.

00:56:01 ►

It only lasts about 25,000 years.

00:56:06 ►

It creates an order in nature never before seen. The order in nature represented by a technology using

00:56:13 ►

language using loving dreaming species and then you push the door open and you

00:56:20 ►

see that aha history was the shockwave that preceded the eschaton.

00:56:27 ►

This is pretty straight Christian dogma.

00:56:33 ►

This is what all these people have been saying, you know,

00:56:36 ►

is that there is a covenant between human beings and God Almighty

00:56:40 ►

and that the contract will be kept, the promise will be kept. I think it will be kept,

00:56:48 ►

and I think the challenge of science is to overcome the struggle with religion

00:56:57 ►

that characterized science’s emergence, and that now science must guide us into the presence of the eschaton using the

00:57:09 ►

tools and the descriptive approaches that science has perfected in other words the proper attitude

00:57:17 ►

toward the eschaton is not prayer and sacrifice alone the proper attitude is inquisitive understanding, curiosity, and delighted

00:57:29 ►

anticipation. It is an object in nature like the electron, the spiral galaxy, and the human body.

00:57:39 ►

The end of history is a complex, a nexus, to use Whitehead’s word, of temporal complexity that accounts for

00:57:48 ►

our existence. Without the eschaton, there would have been no human beings, no you, no me, no

00:57:58 ►

pyramids, no Stonehenge, no Catholic Church, no Hasidism none of these things would exist

00:58:05 ►

they are the precursive anticipations

00:58:09 ►

of the perfection that lies

00:58:12 ►

at the end of the morphogenetic

00:58:14 ►

process of self-expression

00:58:17 ►

that history is

00:58:19 ►

and that we are a part of

00:58:23 ►

in the sense that we represent the individual atoms

00:58:26 ►

that are flowing together to make the transcendental object at the end of time.

00:58:35 ►

I will put myself out of business long before 2012

00:58:40 ►

if other people don’t start seeing things my way because part of the prophecy if you will

00:58:51 ►

is that awareness that this is happening will spread not simply through those who take their

00:58:59 ►

inspiration from Gideon but among those who study particle physics, temporal matrices, and general modeling

00:59:10 ►

of nature. Nature cannot be made sense of without this kind of a singularity. Science recognized

00:59:18 ►

that. They just put the singularity out of reach and safely in the past, but they can’t explain organism,

00:59:27 ►

intelligence, or history. To do that, you have to take this mysterious moment of concrescent

00:59:35 ►

involutional totality and put it in the end state. It’s a matter of simple logical necessity.

00:59:42 ►

The fact that it was achieved by

00:59:45 ►

psychedelically driven visionary shamanizing only shows how similar these

00:59:53 ►

two methods are in their conclusions that’s all

00:59:59 ►

well I’m really a little disappointed to us. Oh, my God. I can’t take any more disappointment.

01:00:08 ►

I fully expect to be meeting for another trialogue in 2012.

01:00:14 ►

I think it’ll be quite an important one.

01:00:16 ►

I’ll be 76.

01:00:17 ►

I think that’s not too old to get it on.

01:00:21 ►

Get what on?

01:00:26 ►

Get this on. I never wanted to be on 85 anyway

01:00:29 ►

I think that

01:00:30 ►

I challenge you

01:00:33 ►

I try to challenge you both

01:00:35 ►

to leap to another

01:00:37 ►

level of discussion in the

01:00:39 ►

hermeneutical circle by considering

01:00:41 ►

ourselves in these traditions

01:00:43 ►

Rupert responded by doing that,

01:00:47 ►

and I think maybe when he at the end challenged you with a question, perhaps you felt defensive,

01:00:54 ►

but I feel that rather than rewarding us with a consideration of yourself in the tradition,

01:00:59 ►

you instead just played another millenarian tape, agreed an excellent one.

01:01:05 ►

And it is an interesting idea, but it is not a consideration of this millennial obsession of yours

01:01:11 ►

in the context of a deep habit, a runnel in the morphic field of our civilization.

01:01:18 ►

If one did, then I think it looks more like this.

01:01:23 ►

We have habits. We have habits of thinking about

01:01:26 ►

time. We have philosophy of time,

01:01:28 ►

consideration of time, according to

01:01:30 ►

certain models. The idea

01:01:32 ►

of time having a singularity

01:01:34 ►

at the beginning and singularity at the end

01:01:36 ►

is one model of time.

01:01:38 ►

As Rupert has observed in the past,

01:01:40 ►

when you believe in the Big

01:01:42 ►

Bang, which you correctly

01:01:44 ►

pointed out is extremely improbable.

01:01:46 ►

If you can believe this, you can believe anything.

01:01:48 ►

You then contradict yourself by suggesting that if you can believe that,

01:01:52 ►

well, you gullible ones believe this, that there’s a singularity at the end.

01:01:57 ►

There’s more evidence of a singularity at the end.

01:02:01 ►

The situation is quite symmetrical,

01:02:09 ►

to me that the situation is quite symmetrical, and either the singularity of the end, the eschaton pose that explains the origin of life, for example, such miracles that science

01:02:15 ►

confounds science, or the singularity at the beginning creates, and what’s the difference?

01:02:22 ►

Then there’s another model of time, the cyclical one, where we have this cycle of the four ages, which is repeated indefinitely, and

01:02:29 ►

not only the golden ages in the past, but the golden ages in the future, too. And the

01:02:34 ►

utopian Trinitarian model is a version of that laid down by Joachim when he changed the classical four-epoch model into a three-epoch model to agree with the Christian trinity.

01:02:52 ►

Now, these two habits, which account for, basically, for the utopian and the millennial obsessions of the human species over this historical period of 6,000 years.

01:03:07 ►

These were enabled by certain mathematical models of time

01:03:11 ►

coming into existence, into consciousness.

01:03:13 ►

We have a line, we understand a line,

01:03:15 ►

and we think of a linear model of time.

01:03:17 ►

We’ve got a circle, now we know circles,

01:03:20 ►

so our mathematical consciousness is growing.

01:03:22 ►

Well, recently we have new models for time.

01:03:26 ►

Even the greatest exponent of the fractal model of time, yourself,

01:03:33 ►

has, I think, contributed enormously to the history of the philosophy of time

01:03:37 ►

by giving a new model.

01:03:39 ►

And chaos theory, likewise, has given many new models for transformation

01:03:44 ►

which transcend

01:03:46 ►

the singularity concept.

01:03:48 ►

There are transformations that we observe in nature, but now that our mental apparatus,

01:03:55 ►

our mathematical cognitive capabilities, has evolved to a certain point where we can recognize

01:04:01 ►

many other forms of transformation as being canonical things that nature does.

01:04:07 ►

Rianne Eisler has very cleverly, I think, adapted this new development in mathematical

01:04:13 ►

consciousness in her own utopian vision by proposing that social transformations such

01:04:20 ►

as the Renaissance, which is the ultimate New Age dream, the Aquarian age, that when

01:04:27 ►

the pole star moves into a new constellation, that will be enough because of the power of

01:04:36 ►

the heavenly realms to awaken a new level of consciousness in us.

01:04:39 ►

There would be, in other words, the New Age expectation is for a social transformation a future um history

01:04:47 ►

which is not boring you said you’re bored with life the repetition just another photograph of

01:04:53 ►

ferguson i think actually the dream of a social transformation has historical support you said

01:05:02 ►

what history is the trumpet of the human experience. We have

01:05:06 ►

to compare our

01:05:08 ►

fantasy of what is going on with the historical

01:05:10 ►

record. The historical record

01:05:12 ►

does not support the eschaton.

01:05:15 ►

It just doesn’t. That is

01:05:16 ►

a particular interpretation based on

01:05:18 ►

a very archaic, a very

01:05:20 ►

old, the oldest model of time

01:05:22 ►

in the history of

01:05:24 ►

consciousness is the one that you’ve

01:05:27 ►

implied to justify your millennial obsession.

01:05:31 ►

Explain why it doesn’t support the eschaton.

01:05:34 ►

I don’t understand.

01:05:35 ►

It doesn’t support the eschaton in distinction to the other models.

01:05:41 ►

History is actually written according to a conceptual model

01:05:47 ►

at the beginning

01:05:49 ►

of what you were saying

01:05:50 ►

you said that the two possibilities

01:05:52 ►

the singularity

01:05:55 ►

at the beginning

01:05:56 ►

and at the end of the process

01:05:58 ►

of universal becoming

01:06:00 ►

seemed co-equal

01:06:02 ►

but to me

01:06:03 ►

equally improbable.

01:06:05 ►

You pointed it out.

01:06:06 ►

No, I didn’t say that.

01:06:07 ►

I said I think it’s much more probable

01:06:09 ►

to find it at the end of a process

01:06:12 ►

when you have great complexity

01:06:14 ►

than to believe it would spring

01:06:17 ►

from a state of utter nothingness.

01:06:20 ►

Why isn’t the historical record

01:06:22 ►

compatible with the idea

01:06:23 ►

of in our immediate future,

01:06:28 ►

is an upcoming, amazing, difficult, and creative social transformation, such as the Renaissance?

01:06:36 ►

That means we have a future which is not boring.

01:06:40 ►

It may be boring until we get in the vicinity of a transformation.

01:06:44 ►

The transformation will be a chaotic transient from one attractor to another,

01:06:49 ►

a period of destabilization when all constraint of history is lifted.

01:06:55 ►

Novelty is empowered to actually do something instead of being constantly frustrated.

01:07:01 ►

And then we wake up one morning and read in the paper that the sun is

01:07:06 ►

rising in a different way. This has happened in the past. It’s in the historical record of the

01:07:10 ►

people who wrote the history by whatever their model, whether it’s the cyclic model for history

01:07:15 ►

or the linear progressive model for history or whatever. Here’s a new model. It goes along

01:07:20 ►

boringly the same for a while. Eventually there’s a destabilization, you have a rapid change to a new equilibrium, and among these different equilibria there is perhaps a kind

01:07:31 ►

of progression in the long run. In that model, these catastrophic transformations are announced

01:07:37 ►

by plagues, by the crash of Russia, the dissolution of the established structures, out of which Phoenix from the

01:07:47 ►

ashes comes a new organization which might be glorious.

01:07:50 ►

Now, in this transformational model of history, we have the longest view written in a book

01:07:56 ►

is Jim Lovelock’s History of the Earth, called The Ages of Gaia.

01:08:08 ►

history of the earth called the ages of Gaia. And in the ages of Gaia he describes the whole history of life on the planet as a series of equilibria punctuated by these catastrophic

01:08:16 ►

transformations. And he says in the history of the planet there are eight of them that are really major transformations the last one is a 65

01:08:28 ►

million bp um well which shows the kind of attention

01:08:37 ►

so in that view even the human species could disappear and life may be boring for microbes

01:08:42 ►

but they must go on the The biosphere is not over.

01:08:45 ►

Life is over.

01:08:46 ►

Maybe the eschaton is there for the human species.

01:08:48 ►

Well, I don’t know.

01:08:49 ►

I’m feeling like slightly mauled in all this

01:08:52 ►

because, as you know, I’m the purveyor of a mathematically precise theory

01:08:58 ►

which, as you know, cannot be laid out in the time remaining before this group. So I’m being thrashed because it’s known

01:09:08 ►

that I will not bring up the big guns, and so I have to sit and listen to this.

01:09:19 ►

The reason I don’t buy the idea that this is simply one more renaissance

01:09:27 ►

or one more Gothic revival is because these processes have occurred faster and faster,

01:09:36 ►

these breakthroughs to novelty.

01:09:38 ►

So it’s just not that they happen, it’s that they happen faster and faster,

01:09:43 ►

and whatever James Lovelock’s

01:09:46 ►

affinity for something happening 65 million years ago a few things of high

01:09:51 ►

interest have happened since like everything having to do with the human world and when you look at human

01:10:00 ►

history and technology and the spread of peoples and genes and so forth and so on,

01:10:06 ►

it’s clear that we have reached some kind of limit.

01:10:09 ►

Maybe you get one more Renaissance before you slam into the wall, but not a dozen, not

01:10:16 ►

a hundred.

01:10:17 ►

This is not the Renaissance.

01:10:19 ►

This is not the rise of Rome.

01:10:21 ►

This is the final global crisis, and the objective data supports that.

01:10:30 ►

I know, but it’s so provincial, Terence. I mean, there’s a sense in which this millenarian

01:10:37 ►

vision is a product of a historical model that grew up within one branch of human consciousness,

01:10:43 ►

the Judeo-Christian-Islamic branch.

01:10:46 ►

There’s a sense in which you could argue

01:10:47 ►

that all this is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

01:10:50 ►

Having unleashed these millenarian visions,

01:10:52 ►

our history has been driven by millenarian visions

01:10:55 ►

which has actually empowered and directed

01:10:57 ►

the discovery of America,

01:11:00 ►

the opening up of the new world,

01:11:01 ►

the development of the atom bomb,

01:11:03 ►

the rise of science and technology.

01:11:07 ►

Most of the things that are actually creating the crisis are man-made.

01:11:11 ►

And therefore there’s a sense in which this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

01:11:15 ►

And even if we collide into this wall of history here on Earth,

01:11:19 ►

I find it quite incredible that the rest of the solar system

01:11:22 ►

is just going to shut up shop and go out of business,

01:11:25 ►

let alone the galaxy, let alone the clusters of galaxies.

01:11:28 ►

And here’s a man who thinks the sun is alive.

01:11:31 ►

All right, the sun could undergo a tremendous transformation.

01:11:36 ►

I’ll concede the entire solar system to you.

01:11:42 ►

But that leaves an awful lot else.

01:11:45 ►

The rest of the galaxy.

01:11:47 ►

I’ll take it.

01:11:48 ►

I’ll have it.

01:11:50 ►

The galaxy can take care of itself.

01:11:53 ►

Well, no, it can’t, you see,

01:11:55 ►

because we now move…

01:11:56 ►

This is what I mean about provincial thinking.

01:11:58 ►

First of all,

01:12:00 ►

it’s limited to a tiny fraction of the cosmos.

01:12:04 ►

And I see the same problem with Teilhard de Chardin.

01:12:07 ►

Is the Omega point just about human destiny on Earth,

01:12:09 ►

or just the destiny of the Earth, or even the solar system?

01:12:12 ►

Or is it about the entire cosmos?

01:12:15 ►

Countless trillions of galaxies, stars everywhere, incredible.

01:12:20 ►

I can’t believe that the extinction of human life on Earth,

01:12:24 ►

the kind of transformation you’re talking about,

01:12:27 ►

even the implosion of the entire solar system is going to set up more than the most minute ripples throughout even our galaxy.

01:12:34 ►

Well, but implicit in that objection is that you really think those galaxies are there.

01:12:41 ►

You really believe that there are light, millions of light years of space and

01:12:46 ►

time filled with spiral galaxies. That could all be scrim. The true size of the cosmic

01:12:58 ►

stage is a hotly debated subject even among the experts. And when you say it’s too local, then you

01:13:07 ►

attack it if one takes the other

01:13:09 ►

position and say, but then how can you

01:13:11 ►

possibly believe that it’s universal?

01:13:13 ►

Well, you only have two choices, either

01:13:16 ►

what you disdainfully call

01:13:17 ►

provincialism or what you disdainfully

01:13:21 ►

call universalism. It’s got to be one or the other.

01:13:26 ►

I am uncomfortable with the universal thing myself.

01:13:30 ►

However, I also am uncomfortable with the idea

01:13:33 ►

that the universe, as described by Newtonian astronomers,

01:13:38 ►

should just be absolutely unchallenged.

01:13:42 ►

This anthropocentric principle that they’ve begun to allow into

01:13:49 ►

their deliberations suggests that, you know, maybe the stars aren’t as fixed in their courses

01:13:56 ►

as we imagine, and that somehow events on the Earth could have a kind of cosmic significance.

01:14:07 ►

I mean, I’m just speculating.

01:14:09 ►

I’m not well-wet in two things.

01:14:11 ►

Well, let me…

01:14:13 ►

First, I’ll deal with my other objection to millenarianism,

01:14:16 ►

as proposed by you.

01:14:17 ►

We have ten minutes.

01:14:19 ►

Yeah, we have to go.

01:14:20 ►

Okay, very quickly.

01:14:21 ►

The true millenarian vision in the apocalyptic tradition

01:14:25 ►

is more like what Ralph says.

01:14:27 ►

It’s not a total,

01:14:30 ►

everything suddenly disappears in a blinding light.

01:14:33 ►

It’s a period of transformation followed by a millennium,

01:14:36 ►

a period of the kingdom of heaven on earth.

01:14:39 ►

Now, that, I think, is something that’s lacking from your vision.

01:14:44 ►

At least you don’t think beyond this 2012.

01:14:46 ►

No, I wouldn’t prefer the term eschatonic or something like that.

01:14:51 ►

Yours is much more absolute.

01:14:53 ►

Yes, right.

01:14:53 ►

Now, I’m more inclined to traditional millenarianism, like Ralph is,

01:14:57 ►

a transitional period followed by some kind of kingdom of heaven on earth.

01:15:02 ►

And what I think the kingdom of heaven on earth could involve

01:15:04 ►

is, first of all, psychedelics what i think the kingdom of heaven on earth could involve is first of all psychedelics secondly the revival of animism thirdly mathematical objects visible

01:15:11 ►

to all through computers and fourthly communication with the stars so that through conscious

01:15:18 ►

communication a network of consciousness begins to link up far beyond the earth to other stars other galaxies

01:15:26 ►

along the lines we were discussing last night a thousand years to effect this linking up of

01:15:32 ►

consciousness throughout the entire cosmos at the end of which the true and absolute eschaton might

01:15:38 ►

be possible right now it would be confined to earth or at least the solar system. Well, the only difference you and I have on this

01:15:46 ►

is I think that this thousand years

01:15:49 ►

will probably, should be scaled back by two orders of magnitude.

01:15:55 ►

It’s ten years.

01:15:57 ►

It’s from 2002 to 2012,

01:16:01 ►

and you will have your psychedelic legality,

01:16:08 ►

your cured AIDS, your orgies, your food for everyone. The millennium will dawn, I think, sometime around 2002 or 2003 or something

01:16:16 ►

like that. But it doesn’t last a thousand years. That was a naivete by virtue of the prophecy being made in a different

01:16:25 ►

era of compression

01:16:27 ►

of time, it will then

01:16:29 ►

build quite naturally toward

01:16:31 ►

the revelation of the eschaton

01:16:34 ►

sometime around 2012.

01:16:37 ►

What do you

01:16:38 ►

think?

01:16:42 ►

About that or

01:16:44 ►

anything else?

01:16:44 ►

Well, we have had planned about that or anything else I mean this is your

01:16:45 ►

well we have had planned

01:16:47 ►

our aborted plan

01:16:51 ►

included a space

01:16:53 ►

for a response to the weekend

01:16:56 ►

from everyone

01:16:58 ►

and now

01:17:00 ►

we need a new plan

01:17:03 ►

so let’s consider this together

01:17:05 ►

we can

01:17:06 ►

quit now making

01:17:09 ►

extra space for

01:17:11 ►

final hugs

01:17:13 ►

which I think are very

01:17:14 ►

appropriate in case Terrence

01:17:17 ►

is right

01:17:17 ►

laughter

01:17:20 ►

laughter

01:17:20 ►

laughter

01:17:22 ►

you’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,

01:17:27 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:17:34 ►

Save some time for final hugs.

01:17:37 ►

Now, I like that thought.

01:17:38 ►

There should always be a place for final hugs,

01:17:42 ►

even if Terrence is wrong, which I believe he was.

01:17:45 ►

I know, I know, you Daniel Pinchbeck fans and die-hard 2012ers are still expecting a

01:17:52 ►

singularity four years from now, and maybe we’ll experience it yet.

01:17:57 ►

But for sure, Terrence’s idea of a ten-year reign of peace from 2002 to 2012 seems pretty

01:18:04 ►

far off the mark to me, even with the rather

01:18:07 ►

remarkable election in the States just now.

01:18:09 ►

But I do believe that there has been a slight cosmic shift in this corner of the planet,

01:18:15 ►

and so I thought it might be worthwhile for us all to get our feet back on the ground

01:18:19 ►

before we let a much-needed transformation turn into dreams of a utopia that simply isn’t

01:18:24 ►

going to arrive.

01:18:26 ►

In other words, it’s time for a reality check.

01:18:30 ►

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do get it.

01:18:32 ►

I really understand the magnitude of what happened in the U.S. elections two days ago.

01:18:38 ►

I remember segregation. I saw it in practice.

01:18:41 ►

And so I really do know what an absolutely impossible thing just happened.

01:18:47 ►

That it happened during my lifetime I find almost beyond belief,

01:18:51 ►

because I know how much racism still exists in this land.

01:18:55 ►

It remains very broad and very deep, yet today.

01:18:58 ►

But I now see a possibility for us to change, even if ever so slightly.

01:19:04 ►

Because we didn’t just elect a president

01:19:06 ►

yesterday, we elected a first family. And from what I’ve seen so far, this is going to be the

01:19:11 ►

finest first family this nation has ever had. Now, I know that I’ve promised to keep politics

01:19:17 ►

out of the salon, and after today I’ll get back to that policy. But I’ve got a couple more things

01:19:22 ►

I want to say while I circle back to today’s topic, which is reality check time. Last spring was the only other recent time in which I

01:19:31 ►

mentioned politics. And at the time, I was very passionate about seeing Obama defeat Clinton.

01:19:37 ►

And so I said something to the effect that even if I had to write in Obama’s name, that I would

01:19:42 ►

still be voting for him in November. Those words came back to haunt me this past July when he reversed himself on the FISA bill.

01:19:50 ►

I won’t go into all that right now, but for me it was treason.

01:19:54 ►

He had betrayed me.

01:19:56 ►

And by the way, I still feel that way.

01:19:59 ►

And so, when he did that, I began telling my friends, relatives, and neighbors

01:20:04 ►

that I was going to vote

01:20:05 ►

for either the green or libertarian candidate instead of Obama, knowing full well that here

01:20:11 ►

in California, my vote for Obama wasn’t needed. Well, needless to say, many of them actually quit

01:20:18 ►

talking to me. But in the back of my mind, I remembered what I said here in the salon,

01:20:23 ►

and so I knew that if I wasn’t going to vote for him, I had to at least say something here in the salon before

01:20:28 ►

the election.

01:20:29 ►

Yet, I didn’t feel that I should be telling anyone how to vote, but ultimately, I knew

01:20:35 ►

that this was such a historic occasion that I’d kick myself for not being a part of it,

01:20:40 ►

and so I did give him my vote.

01:20:43 ►

Now, bear with me for just a moment more.

01:20:45 ►

I guess you could say that I’m not his biggest supporter.

01:20:49 ►

And that is why I was so surprised at my own reaction on Tuesday night

01:20:53 ►

as my wife and I watched Barack Obama give his speech in Grant Park.

01:20:58 ►

I still remember Grant Park as the scene of the police riot during the 1968 Democratic Convention, when

01:21:05 ►

hundreds of students were attacked by the Chicago police.

01:21:09 ►

Yet there was Barack Obama at the scene of the crime of one of the lowest points in American

01:21:14 ►

history, and that old park was transformed into a scene of one of the greatest triumphs

01:21:20 ►

in American history.

01:21:22 ►

As I watched and listened to Barack Obama give his speech that night, I’m not ashamed

01:21:27 ►

to admit I sat there and wept like a baby.

01:21:31 ►

I truly didn’t think I would live to experience that moment.

01:21:35 ►

While I was an undergraduate at college, I watched John Kennedy give his inaugural address.

01:21:42 ►

That was a thrilling moment for me back then, a callow youth of 19.

01:21:46 ►

But I’m here to tell you that it was nothing,

01:21:49 ►

nothing in comparison to how I felt on election night.

01:21:53 ►

And remember, I’m one of Obama’s critics.

01:21:56 ►

Yet the symbolism of that moment moved me to tears.

01:22:01 ►

It was one of the most precious moments in my life.

01:22:04 ►

That’s how moved I was by these events.

01:22:07 ►

And if you’re a person of color or other minority, well,

01:22:11 ►

I can’t even imagine how exhilarated you must have felt.

01:22:15 ►

What a moment. What a wonderful moment.

01:22:18 ►

But, as we all know, moments pass us by, and very fleetingly at that.

01:22:26 ►

So we’ve had our celebrations,

01:22:32 ►

now let’s see where we are. Well, to begin with, it does actually look as if there will be once again an orderly exchange of power in the U.S. Capitol next January. And the

01:22:38 ►

new guy is so great an improvement over the current occupant of the White House that there

01:22:43 ►

aren’t even words for it.

01:22:45 ►

That’s the positive side.

01:22:47 ►

The other side of the pancake isn’t quite so appetizing, I’m afraid.

01:22:51 ►

For starters, Obama now supports the new FISA law,

01:22:55 ►

which essentially establishes a secret police system in this country.

01:22:59 ►

Search warrants are no longer required.

01:23:01 ►

You know, it’s a true constitutional abomination, and we’re stuck with it for a long time now.

01:23:07 ►

Then there’s the number two guy, the new number two guy.

01:23:10 ►

Granted, he’s not an insane evil maniac like the current VP,

01:23:14 ►

but Biden’s a jerk who came up with mandatory minimum sentences

01:23:17 ►

and is also the guy who came up with the concept of a drug czar.

01:23:22 ►

On top of that, the last time I heard,

01:23:25 ►

he was still against P2P file sharing as well.

01:23:28 ►

So, the faces have changed, but from where I stand,

01:23:32 ►

I don’t see any significant changes in this nutty war on drugs,

01:23:36 ►

which is part of the culture wars, of course.

01:23:39 ►

And on the culture front, Tuesday was not a very good day.

01:23:42 ►

For example, here in California, where gay marriage

01:23:45 ►

is already a constitutional right, a bill may have passed that removes this right from the

01:23:50 ►

state constitution. Now, the vote is close and still being counted, plus there are already court

01:23:56 ►

challenges to this proposition. But how could this happen, you ask? Isn’t California the most

01:24:02 ►

progressive part of the country? Yes, it is. But as is true

01:24:06 ►

elsewhere, a significant part of the population gets all of their election information from TV

01:24:11 ►

ads. In the case of the anti-gay proposition, our television stations were clogged from morning

01:24:18 ►

to night with advertising in support of this anti-human proposition. And where did those tens and tens and tens of millions of

01:24:26 ►

dollars in advertising fees come from? Well, it seems that this polygamous cult from Utah has its

01:24:33 ►

members all over the world collecting money from the poor, from poor uneducated people who think

01:24:38 ►

that their donations might just buy them a ticket to heaven. And then, these alms from the poor have been used to trick the California poor

01:24:47 ►

into voting against gay rights.

01:24:50 ►

You can’t make this stuff up, you know,

01:24:52 ►

but doesn’t it seem strange to have a polygamous cult

01:24:56 ►

lecturing the good people of California about marriage etiquette?

01:25:00 ►

And I don’t want to pull any punches here.

01:25:02 ►

The anti-gay proposal was overwhelmingly supported by the black and Latino communities in the L.A. area.

01:25:09 ►

So I say to all of those bigots who voted against gay rights, shame on you.

01:25:15 ►

How can you vote for a black man in the interest of ending oppression of your race and then turn around and oppress another group?

01:25:22 ►

We have obviously a very long way to go

01:25:25 ►

if we’re going to move our culture in a more human direction.

01:25:29 ►

And then there was Proposition 5 here in California,

01:25:32 ►

which had to do with providing better treatment

01:25:34 ►

instead of prison for nonviolent drug offenders.

01:25:38 ►

Actually, I prefer to think of people arrested for violations of drug laws

01:25:43 ►

as resistors, members of the resistance,

01:25:46 ►

not criminal offenders. But that isn’t the way the ignorant masses see it. Here is what Rob Campia

01:25:52 ►

of the Marijuana Policy Project had to say about Proposition 5. We knew from early polling that a

01:25:59 ►

substantial majority of Californians favored this major reform of the state’s prisons and drug sentencing policies.

01:26:06 ►

But a sordid coalition of the Prison Guards Union, the Beer Distributors Association, gambling interests, fanatical anti-drug groups, and craven politicians raised $3.5 million in the last few weeks of the campaign and ran deceitful TV ads across the state.

01:26:23 ►

Ultimately, we could not compete with their lies and scare tactics.

01:26:28 ►

And so, the state of California will now continue to close schools and libraries

01:26:32 ►

in order to use that money to expand their prison system.

01:26:37 ►

Now, if that doesn’t kill your Election Day buzz, I don’t know what will.

01:26:41 ►

And just to go back to the Mormon ad blitz against gays and lesbians for a moment,

01:26:46 ►

they reportedly spent somewhere around $70 million in their attack ads.

01:26:52 ►

So much for separation of church and state.

01:26:56 ►

And I realize that I’m stepping on some of our fellow slaunters’ toes here,

01:26:59 ►

because I know that there are a lot of our friends in Utah who listen to these podcasts.

01:27:04 ►

But it’s time for some tough love, I’m afraid.

01:27:07 ►

I’ve actually read the Book of Mormon, and to be honest, if you or I came up with a cockeyed story like that, we’d be laughed out of town.

01:27:15 ►

Get a grip, and this goes for my friends who are Christians and Muslims, too.

01:27:20 ►

Just sit down and read those books that you think were written by a god and read them objectively.

01:27:25 ►

Then do some research and dig into the backgrounds of the people who actually wrote these supposedly sacred books.

01:27:31 ►

And if you have to, ingest one of our sacred medicines and see what you think about those wild tales once you’ve broken the chains that were wrapped around your mind when you were a child.

01:27:41 ►

Think for yourself.

01:27:43 ►

Question authority.

01:27:44 ►

All authority. Think for yourself. Question authority. All authority.

01:27:45 ►

Particularly religious authorities.

01:27:49 ►

Religion is a con game

01:27:50 ►

and the sooner you figure that out on your own

01:27:52 ►

the better off you’re going to be.

01:27:54 ►

But I’m getting way off track here.

01:27:57 ►

My point is that we still have miles to go

01:28:00 ►

before we sleep.

01:28:02 ►

A great victory was won on Tuesday.

01:28:05 ►

A victory for all the people, even the Republicans,

01:28:08 ►

even though it’ll take them a few years to come to that conclusion.

01:28:11 ►

But now is not the time to sit back and rest.

01:28:14 ►

Don’t think that life on the ground is going to change for any of us anytime soon,

01:28:18 ►

other than to get even more difficult for a bit, that is.

01:28:22 ►

We’re still in for some tough times ahead, but this cynical old Vietnam vet is more optimistic

01:28:27 ►

and hopeful about the future of life on this planet

01:28:30 ►

than I’ve ever been before at any time in my entire life.

01:28:34 ►

So let’s press on.

01:28:37 ►

And I’d better press on with this podcast right now.

01:28:40 ►

First of all, Rupert mentioned a trilogue

01:28:43 ►

that they’d held 36 hours before and was about computers and psychedelics.

01:28:47 ►

In case you’re joining us for the first time today, I should point out that you can hear that trilogue in our podcast number 126, which I titled Psychedelics and the Computer Revolution.

01:29:06 ►

Next, I want to mention that it was Symbiont on the Psychedelic Salon forum over at thegirlreport.com who was the one that posted the information about the psychedelic conference in Australia that I mentioned last week.

01:29:12 ►

After finishing the recording of last week’s podcast, I realized that I didn’t give him or her credit for the information.

01:29:19 ►

So thanks again, Symbiont, and thanks also for participating in our forums.

01:29:25 ►

And finally, I want to mention our friends over at Arrowid.

01:29:28 ►

I’m sure that you’ve been to arrowid.org, E-R-O-W-I-D dot org,

01:29:33 ►

but in case you haven’t heard, it is without a doubt,

01:29:38 ►

hands down, the very best source of drug information on the Internet.

01:29:42 ►

And I know that Ann and Sasha Shulgin, among many

01:29:45 ►

others, agree with me on that. I know most of the people involved in that project, and in my opinion,

01:29:50 ►

they are all impeccable. And I never say that lightly. Anyway, the new edition of Arrowwood

01:29:57 ►

Extracts is now at the printer. And if you aren’t already an Arrowwood supporter, now is the perfect

01:30:02 ►

time to become one and get a copy of their latest printed journal. Here are some of the things that Thank you. They’re really a wonderful group of people doing some very important work. My wife and I have been members for a long time now,

01:30:47 ►

and we hope that you’re also a part of this important project as well.

01:30:51 ►

Well, that’s about it for today.

01:30:54 ►

But as always, I’ll close this podcast by saying that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon

01:30:59 ►

are available for your use under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.

01:31:06 ►

And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,

01:31:12 ►

which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:31:15 ►

And that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.

01:31:19 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:31:25 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

161 - Reality Check

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