168 - What Hawaii Says About Evolution

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake

All of the following quotations are from a private trialogue held at Terence McKenna’s home in Hawaii sometime in 1994.

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“I think what life on islands brings home to us is that Earth itself is an island.”

“I think the technological principle on which the next century [21st] will operate is a mimicking of nature, solid-state, micro-miniaturized, solar-based, no moving parts, and so forth.”

“Any theory which has us gathering together in large crowds to chant should look back at the Third Reich before it proceeds too far with its agenda.”

“America is a cultural bulldozer. It just tramples and destroys everything in its path.”

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0939680971 http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0892815353
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0061551848

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19 ►

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

00:00:24 ►

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

00:00:31 ►

And I want to begin today’s podcast by thanking Toby E. for his generous donation to the salon that helps offset some of the expenses incurred in producing these podcasts.

00:00:36 ►

Really appreciate your help, Toby. Thank you very much.

00:00:40 ►

Well, today I’m dipping back into that old box of tapes that Ralph Abraham loaned me,

00:00:46 ►

and I’m going to play another trialogue that he recorded between Terrence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, and himself.

00:00:54 ►

And while it may not be as compelling as some of their discussions about psychedelics,

00:01:00 ►

there are a couple of things that make this recording really stand out for me.

00:01:04 ►

There are a couple of things that make this recording really stand out for me.

00:01:12 ►

The first is the fact that I’ve always kind of wondered what all of those non-public trilogues were like.

00:01:15 ►

You know, what did they really talk about when they got together?

00:01:20 ►

Well, what we’re about to hear is a recording from one of those sessions.

00:01:27 ►

This trilogue, or focused conversation, took place on the big island of Hawaii sometime in 1994. As I recall, Ralph told me that after the publication of their Trilogues at the Edge

00:01:35 ►

of the West book in 1992, they decided to record some of their private conversations in the hopes

00:01:42 ►

that maybe another book or two would emerge.

00:01:45 ►

Now, as far as I know, there wasn’t a book that emerged from the trialogue we are about to hear,

00:01:52 ►

but their topic remains one of great interest for us yet today,

00:01:56 ►

and that is the course of evolution.

00:01:59 ►

At least it is of great interest of us, those of us who like to think of ourselves as evolutionaries.

00:02:08 ►

So now let’s join Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake

00:02:13 ►

as they sit around the kitchen table and kick around a few ideas about evolution.

00:02:21 ►

This particular trial, which is why what it tells us about evolution, how it relates

00:02:30 ►

to island ecosystems and their evolutionary progress generally, falls to me because in my life, as chance would have it, I’ve visited most of the major theaters of evolution that

00:02:51 ►

involve island groups that are considered to be exemplars of the various types of island

00:02:59 ►

groups on the planet. Hawaii, where we are recording these trilogues, is of course a group of mid-ocean

00:03:08 ►

volcanic islands. The only other mid-ocean volcanic island groups in the world are the

00:03:14 ►

Azores and the Seychelles. They offer great contrast to Hawaii, particularly the Seychelles, which as a portion of the Madagascan landmass

00:03:27 ►

have been above water some 300 million years,

00:03:31 ►

longer than any other place on the planet.

00:03:35 ►

And so the evolutionary processes there offer a dramatic contrast

00:03:40 ►

to how evolution has proceeded in the Hawaiian Islands. The Hawaiian Islands represent a unique case

00:03:48 ►

because of the size of the volcanic calderas and vents

00:03:56 ►

beneath the Pacific floor that have created them.

00:03:59 ►

In fact, these vents and volcanic systems

00:04:03 ►

are the largest on the planet. So what we have in Hawaii is

00:04:10 ►

a tectonic plate sliding slowly toward southern Russia and Japan that is crossing over a weak place in the Earth’s crust, and a place where the core magma of the planet lies a

00:04:31 ►

considerable percentage closer to the surface than anywhere on Earth.

00:04:36 ►

And the result of this situation is a series of islands formed in the same spot that each, after its volcanic birth, is rafted

00:04:48 ►

on the continental plate off

00:04:51 ►

toward the northwest. The life

00:04:56 ►

in the Hawaiian Islands shows

00:05:00 ►

30 to 35 years of indemnicism

00:05:04 ►

by the ordinary rates of gene change

00:05:07 ►

that biologists recognize.

00:05:10 ►

Nevertheless, geologically speaking,

00:05:12 ►

no Hawaiian island is older than 12 million years.

00:05:16 ►

The obvious interpretation of these facts

00:05:20 ►

is that life arose out here

00:05:23 ►

on islands which no longer exist,

00:05:26 ►

and as islands rose and fell,

00:05:29 ►

the life hopscotched from one island to another,

00:05:33 ►

and indeed the dispersal rates of birds, tree snails,

00:05:38 ►

and this sort of thing moving eastward from Kauai

00:05:42 ►

across Oahu, Molokai, Maui to the Big Island show that this

00:05:47 ►

gradient is still operable. Kauai is the most species, the forests of Kauai are

00:05:53 ►

the most species rich forests of the major islands. Hawaii’s climax forests are

00:06:00 ►

the most species poor because animals are still arriving here from the other islands.

00:06:11 ►

Because these volcanoes are so huge, Hawaii has a complete range of ecological systems from sea level to 14,000 feet,

00:06:25 ►

which is virtually the entire range on the planet

00:06:28 ►

in which life is able to locate itself.

00:06:33 ►

The volcano itself is, in fact, by volume,

00:06:38 ►

the world’s largest mountain,

00:06:41 ►

because what it represents is a 14,000 foot mountain

00:06:46 ►

before it breaks through to sea level

00:06:49 ►

because it’s rising from the Pacific floor

00:06:52 ►

and in this part of the world the Pacific floor is 13,000 feet deep.

00:06:58 ►

So this mountain was enormous before it ever broke water.

00:07:03 ►

It now rises 13,000 feet above sea level,

00:07:07 ►

and its sister mountain, Mauna Kea, is only shorter by 120 feet.

00:07:14 ►

So what has been created out here is a very closed ecosystem,

00:07:22 ►

far from any continental land mass. The forms of life

00:07:27 ►

which arrive here arrive on rafted debris or tucked into the feathers of

00:07:36 ►

migratory birds or in some other highly improbable fashion. What we see here is a winnowing of continental species

00:07:48 ►

based on extreme improbability.

00:07:52 ►

As an example, a very common Sierra Nevada wildflower

00:08:00 ►

of no great distinction.

00:08:03 ►

Apparently, some millions of years ago a single seed

00:08:10 ►

arrived on Maui and has created them by through back crossing has created a mutated

00:08:17 ►

race of plants that we know as the Hawaiian silver sword which is one of the most bizarre plants that the islands

00:08:26 ►

have produced. In terms of islands within islands, the fractal adumbration of nature,

00:08:37 ►

it’s very evident here. For example, because the island is created by a series of flows of varying ages, develop independently of each other, even though they

00:09:08 ►

may only be some few miles apart, but separated by a landscape so toxic and desolate that

00:09:15 ►

there is very little intermixing of genes.

00:09:18 ►

This is why this is thought to have been a formative factor in the evolution of the Hawaiian Drosophila,

00:09:32 ►

which of course were very, very useful in early studies of genetics, because the chromosomes of the Hawaiian Drosophila are 10,000 times larger than the ordinary Drosophila chromosomes,

00:09:38 ►

and can actually, in the era before electron microscopes, you could actually color band with certain dyes

00:09:47 ►

the chromosomes of these drosophila.

00:09:50 ►

Early chromosome unraveling went forward through these dyes.

00:09:55 ►

So in terms of extrapolating all this particular natural history data

00:10:02 ►

to some sort of general model,

00:10:06 ►

I think what Life on islands brings home to us is that the earth itself is an island. I’ve been saying for

00:10:15 ►

many, many years that one of the most revolutionary, yet totally trivial and predictable revolutions sure to come in biology

00:10:26 ►

is the recognition that all these models

00:10:31 ►

of island isolation and species dispersion across oceans

00:10:36 ►

can easily be expanded to the three-dimensional ocean

00:10:40 ►

of outer space.

00:10:42 ►

Very, very clearly, viruses, pions, gene fragments, this sort

00:10:52 ►

of thing percolates between the stars as simply, statistically, a very low component of the

00:10:59 ►

percolation of energy between the stars. Indeed, there have been many attempts

00:11:05 ►

to establish this idea of red oil

00:11:09 ►

and the theory of the cometary origin of life.

00:11:13 ►

Some of these ideas have gone forward.

00:11:15 ►

It seems to me perfectly obvious

00:11:17 ►

that in time this will be embraced.

00:11:20 ►

After all, viruses can freeze down

00:11:23 ►

to crystalline states that are almost minerals.

00:11:26 ►

And as for dispersion between celestial bodies,

00:11:32 ►

it’s now generally agreed that a number of Antarctic meteorites

00:11:37 ►

that have been recovered are in fact fragments of Mars.

00:11:43 ►

So the work on island dispersal patterns and the statistics and the mechanics

00:11:51 ►

of this will eventually play a role in modeling how life evolves in the galaxy. Some of the

00:12:00 ►

other islands that I’ve been fortunate enough to relate to were, for example, the Indonesian islands,

00:12:07 ►

which are the absolute other spectrum of the class of tropical islands.

00:12:16 ►

Because what we have here in Hawaii, as I said, is mid-ocean islands far from continental flora and fauna.

00:12:23 ►

What we have in Indonesia is in fact a submerged

00:12:28 ►

continent. As recently as 120,000 years ago, Indonesia from Sumatra to New Guinea was a

00:12:36 ►

single landmass. And in the process of its subsidence, the sea filled in the low spots, so that there is a direct correlation

00:12:47 ►

between species differentiation on any two Indonesian islands and the depth of the sea

00:12:54 ►

between them.

00:12:55 ►

And these correlations have been shown over and over.

00:13:00 ►

One of the great conundrums of 19th century biology was the so-called problem of Wallace’s line.

00:13:07 ►

Wallace believed that between the island of Bali and Lompoc

00:13:11 ►

and then going west of Celebes,

00:13:16 ►

you could draw a line which was the line of convergence

00:13:22 ►

between the Ospital-opithecus biogeographical zones

00:13:28 ►

and the Asian Malayan zones

00:13:32 ►

and statistical studies

00:13:36 ►

Ernst Mayr principally have disproven this notion

00:13:40 ►

however, I have collected butterflies

00:13:44 ►

and stood in these forests on both sides of Wallace’s line in several places, and I completely understand, and in fact wonder about Meyer’s conclusion.

00:13:55 ►

I completely understand Wallace’s impression, because these forests are staggeringly different.

00:14:00 ►

The bird calls, the butterflies.

00:14:03 ►

The bird calls, the butterflies.

00:14:09 ►

But what Meyer seemed to show was that there was no distinct line.

00:14:14 ►

There was a gradient from Australia to Malaya in one direction and Malaya to Australia in the other direction.

00:14:20 ►

Island groups like this, and I haven’t mentioned the Galapagos, but they are another one,

00:14:26 ►

are such obvious laboratories of speciation

00:14:31 ►

that when Darwin and Wallace

00:14:34 ►

and Walter Henry Bates

00:14:37 ►

and other people who were grappling in the 19th century

00:14:41 ►

with the so-called species problem

00:14:43 ►

set out to do their fieldwork.

00:14:46 ►

They just could not fail to be impressed

00:14:49 ►

by this peculiar theme and variation,

00:14:55 ►

theme and variation,

00:14:57 ►

but they could not understand whose fingers strung the heart

00:15:01 ►

until they realized that similar populations separated by

00:15:09 ►

catastrophes such as the arrival of ocean water or a lava flame or something

00:15:15 ►

like that then come under very slightly different selected pressures, which cause a very slightly different physical aspect to be taken on.

00:15:29 ►

And so in the Amazon basin, for example, you can move 2,000 miles and have only about a

00:15:38 ►

15% replacement in certain butterfly species.

00:15:42 ►

In Indonesia, you can cross a strait of water

00:15:45 ►

20 miles wide and have a 70% replacement

00:15:48 ►

for butterfly species.

00:15:52 ►

And Darwin and Wallace,

00:15:54 ►

familiar with these places,

00:15:56 ►

both continental flora and fauna

00:15:59 ►

and the island situation,

00:16:01 ►

finally figured out what the mechanism was.

00:16:07 ►

And it’s a wonderful thing, you know,

00:16:12 ►

butterfly diversity, for example,

00:16:15 ►

is a situation where diversity itself becomes

00:16:22 ►

and it confers adaptive advantage

00:16:25 ►

because butterflies are largely predated upon by birds.

00:16:31 ►

And it’s been shown in numerous studies

00:16:33 ►

that birds hunt a target image.

00:16:37 ►

They have an image of the prey.

00:16:39 ►

Well, if through the chance recombination of genes

00:16:43 ►

your wing color or wing shape

00:16:46 ►

pushes you outside the target spectrum,

00:16:50 ►

you will be ignored.

00:16:52 ►

And so variety itself

00:16:56 ►

becomes a premium in the evolutionary game.

00:17:01 ►

Novelty itself then is preserved because novelty confers adaptive advantage

00:17:09 ►

in this situation of birds and butterflies.

00:17:13 ►

Well, I think the implications of these things

00:17:16 ►

lie close to the surface.

00:17:18 ►

Earth is a small island.

00:17:21 ►

We are making great changes in its ecological parameters, we are affecting

00:17:27 ►

its plant and animal populations. By studying how evolution has shaped island groups, we

00:17:34 ►

can appreciate, I think, our own small cosmic island and perhaps eventually draw politically

00:17:42 ►

empowering conclusions from that.

00:17:47 ►

What a wonderful view of things, Terence. It’s marvellous and a real delight. The main

00:18:01 ►

evolutionary puzzle that crossed my mind in the the view of what you said, is that if islands have this tremendous role in speciation, as all evolutionists believe, and which in fact, as you say, with both Darwin and Wallace, provide the classic cases,

00:18:26 ►

we have places where there are contact island chains and archipelagos have incredible rates of speciation in Southeast Asia the Malaysian archipelago

00:18:31 ►

including Malaysia and Indonesia is in unbelievably species rich one of the

00:18:37 ►

great creation centers of the world of species and know, that’s the tropical forest I know best, having lived there. And

00:18:48 ►

that’s the quality of that forest, its creativity, from what you’ve said, would come from a combination

00:18:54 ►

of island factors plus mingling of two totally radically different floras, giving rise to

00:19:00 ►

all sorts of new possibilities and combinations.

00:19:03 ►

And that it was pumped by the repetitive comings and goings of the sea,

00:19:08 ►

which repeatedly islanded populations

00:19:10 ►

and then reunited them in periods when water was concentrated in the total.

00:19:17 ►

And presumably also pumped by the ice ages,

00:19:19 ►

which must have compressed all forms of life towards the tropics

00:19:23 ►

and then there’d been a retreat again away from them at the end of each ice age.

00:19:27 ►

Well, that would explain a lot about the pumping,

00:19:30 ►

and it makes incredible sense about the Mosean archipelago.

00:19:34 ►

What I don’t understand is, on the view of this day,

00:19:36 ►

how the Amazon, which is the large non-island area,

00:19:40 ►

comes to be the other major center of species creation and diversity.

00:19:44 ►

The answer is very simple.

00:19:46 ►

It has simply been above ground for a very long time.

00:19:51 ►

In other words, the Malaysian-Austral-Papuan situation

00:19:57 ►

is probably no more than 70 or 80 million years

00:20:01 ►

that that map has looked like that.

00:20:09 ►

The Amazon, on the other hand, has been above water 280 to 300 million years.

00:20:14 ►

So simply being in the tropics with 3, 4, 5 breathing seasons a year

00:20:21 ►

for many organisms and never being inundated by sea water or catastrophe

00:20:28 ►

allowed that incredible climax of speciation on a continental landmass.

00:20:32 ►

You’re right, it didn’t happen, as far as we know, in Africa,

00:20:38 ►

although Africa is so heavily impacted by human beings

00:20:41 ►

that any notion of its original natural history is impossible.

00:20:47 ►

But that’s the short answer, that it was just above water a long, long time.

00:20:53 ►

But then you see we have two methods of speciation. One is spontaneous production

00:20:59 ►

of species just by being around a long time without island separation. The case of the Amazon.

00:21:07 ►

The other, we have all the well-understood neo-Darwinian mechanisms, speciation, pumping of things,

00:21:11 ►

mixing of gene pools and so on.

00:21:13 ►

Well, what pumped the Amazon situation on a micro level

00:21:16 ►

is the meandering of the rivers.

00:21:20 ►

You see, it’s very hard in a climaxed forest situation

00:21:24 ►

for any new mutation to have a salutary effect. uninhabited land, so-called predatory species can move in there. And that’s where the speciation

00:21:51 ►

is taking place. Carl Sauer estimated that before the advent of culture, of human culture,

00:21:58 ►

it was the meandering of rivers was the main force promoting plant evolution on the planet.

00:22:07 ►

The vast amount of this shifting of boundaries goes on,

00:22:11 ►

and it’s in that shifting boundary that mutants, new forms, can get hold.

00:22:18 ►

That’s why a predatory species will have the following characteristics.

00:22:25 ►

It will be an animal, and it will be a prolific seeder.

00:22:30 ►

It will be herbaceous, not woody.

00:22:33 ►

In short, it will be a weed, and that’s what a weed is.

00:22:37 ►

A pioneer species.

00:22:38 ►

A pioneer species, a tremendously predatory species designed for open land,

00:22:45 ►

utterly unable to compete in the forest,

00:22:48 ►

but in open land able to take hold very rapidly.

00:22:55 ►

Yes, I think there may be a certain proliferation just for its own sake.

00:23:01 ►

You see, I think isolation, new environments and so on explain one side of evolution. I think there’s another side which neodarminism can’t

00:23:10 ►

explain because it puts too much emphasis on natural selection. This is Willis, you

00:23:16 ►

know, the great British botanist who lived on Salon and knew the Asian flora well. In

00:23:23 ►

the 30s and 40s had all these things about evolution by divergent mutation

00:23:27 ►

rather than natural selection.

00:23:30 ►

And in Ceylon, he showed that in the Pondus dimensi,

00:23:34 ►

a group of water plants that live in streams with leaves that float on water,

00:23:39 ►

there’s an amazing variety of species in streams and rivers in Ceylon,

00:23:44 ►

sometimes many different

00:23:45 ►

species growing in the same river. And any attempt to account for this in terms of marginal

00:23:52 ►

differences in leaf shape, giving selective advantage, just fails. And he shows the same

00:23:57 ►

is true of many flower patterns, many tropical leaf forms and so forth.

00:24:01 ►

Well, I think you’d have to look at this more closely, wings, and how variety itself somehow confers advantage.

00:24:14 ►

I would go through the plants and look for chemical,

00:24:19 ►

very slight chemical variances in the gene expression,

00:24:23 ►

because probably this variety is to confuse

00:24:29 ►

some feeder, and that it’s literally bewildering variety is an excellent defense against predation.

00:24:38 ►

I’ve always wondered why, like the hapu here are an excellent example. Here we have these

00:24:43 ►

two tree ferns.

00:24:45 ►

They’re two distinct species.

00:24:47 ►

As far as I can tell, they’re distributed

00:24:49 ►

in a ratio of 50-50 here.

00:24:52 ►

And one has little black, stickery stems,

00:24:58 ►

and the other has a fuzzy, brown, soft stem.

00:25:02 ►

Well, what selective pressure caused stickers to work for one and down to

00:25:10 ►

work for the other and they’re standing right next to each other?

00:25:13 ►

It seems to me there must be a drift of genes or simple for variety itself.

00:25:20 ►

Well that’s Willis’s point that you have, that the life itself is constantly throwing out new forms, novelties,

00:25:27 ►

that novelty is the essence of it, and unsuccessful novelties will be weeded out.

00:25:33 ►

The very successful ones will be a sort of wild success,

00:25:36 ►

but a lot of these novelties which may just be different,

00:25:41 ►

you know, two of these two tree fern forms work equally well in this environment. There may just

00:25:46 ►

be lots of entirely equivalent things

00:25:48 ►

where you’ve got novelty for novelty’s sake.

00:25:50 ►

And that this is the nature

00:25:52 ►

of the evolutionary process. And natural

00:25:54 ►

selection plays a much smaller role

00:25:55 ►

than if you try and explain all forms

00:25:58 ►

in terms of the close sculpting of

00:25:59 ►

natural selection. Yes,

00:26:01 ►

in the Indonesian butterflies there is

00:26:03 ►

this concept of what’s

00:26:05 ►

called the conspecific species, which means that when you’re on Bali there is a certain

00:26:11 ►

butterfly, and then you go to Lompoc and there is a butterfly which is different from that

00:26:19 ►

butterfly and cannot naturally cross with it, and yet is so obviously the same butterfly

00:26:26 ►

that it’s the conspecific species,

00:26:29 ►

and they have been isolated in this way,

00:26:32 ►

and so by that means there’s variation,

00:26:36 ►

and then sometimes these populations can be reunited,

00:26:40 ►

and some very small percentage can transfer genes,

00:26:44 ►

and then you get even even more

00:26:51 ►

well getting back to hawaii here it seems that um i understood you right that

00:26:59 ►

what’s unique about hawaii is the hawaiian islands are young and they’re maximally oceanic islanded.

00:27:09 ►

They’re far from the continent.

00:27:12 ►

And the process of the population of a new island from a neighboring island is visible even in the present and then we see a certain pattern is repeated over and

00:27:28 ►

over again even in the course of a century so it seems to me that these different examples

00:27:35 ►

you’re talking about conflate two different processes more or less the projection upon upon the same screen. One is a purely biogeographical process which would be, could at least be

00:27:51 ►

imagined to be operating the same way without any evolutions. We have only the same species

00:27:58 ►

that ever were to be found on Maui are suddenly appearing on Hawaii by a process of dispersal, pioneering the successful

00:28:09 ►

species, the creation of an ecology suitable for the second species, and there are space-time

00:28:15 ►

patterns are developed one upon another in a very interesting fractal movie that, to

00:28:22 ►

begin with, would have nothing to do with evolution. On top of that

00:28:26 ►

you have, I’m not sure what are the relative time scales of this, then you have an evolutionary

00:28:32 ►

process involving speciation either during or after the dispersal, pioneering, and what you call it, civilizational process of a brand new island.

00:28:48 ►

Is the evolutionary process essential to the population of the new island, or isn’t it?

00:28:57 ►

Well, I think in the short term it isn’t, in the long term it is.

00:29:02 ►

Because any form of life arriving in these islands

00:29:05 ►

is not home free.

00:29:09 ►

It’s then got

00:29:10 ►

to contend with

00:29:11 ►

this kind of islanding

00:29:14 ►

by volcanic flow

00:29:16 ►

that I talked about.

00:29:18 ►

And other

00:29:18 ►

large scale catastrophic

00:29:22 ►

events that are hypothesized

00:29:24 ►

that have gone on in the Hawaiian Islands.

00:29:26 ►

So basically what we see here is just genes being mixed and stirred, probably, at a faster

00:29:34 ►

rate than in most places.

00:29:37 ►

And that’s without even mentioning the vast number of plant and animal introductions brought

00:29:43 ►

by human beings. One of the other unique things

00:29:47 ►

about Hawaii that I didn’t enumerate was how the human beings arrived late. And this, in

00:29:53 ►

some sense, gives us a clearer picture of what happened. But it’s almost as though Hawaii

00:30:01 ►

is a speeded up microcosm of the Earth itself,

00:30:05 ►

because probably eight-tenths of the Big Island is in the pre-archeozoic phase.

00:30:13 ►

In other words, almost abiotic.

00:30:16 ►

And then large areas are covered by lichens of turn or two here in the crevice,

00:30:23 ►

and there’s a turn or two here in the crevice,

00:30:31 ►

and then a small percentage of a post-comatary impact forest of flowering trees inhabited by mammals.

00:30:34 ►

So the biogeographical process,

00:30:36 ►

really without a kind of modulation by speciation,

00:30:41 ►

is the biogeographical process is a kind of

00:30:47 ►

recapitulation of

00:30:49 ►

evolution. That is, there’s a resonance

00:30:51 ►

between evolution in the past

00:30:53 ►

and biogeographical

00:30:55 ►

development in the present.

00:30:57 ►

So the conflation of these two things

00:30:59 ►

is not an accident

00:31:02 ►

of thought, but because there’s a

00:31:03 ►

resonance between these two processes. Yes, they because there’s a resonance between these processes.

00:31:05 ►

Yes, they’re fractal in relationship to each other.

00:31:09 ►

If you supposed that an animal’s genetic heritage never changed,

00:31:15 ►

but that it moved across the surface of the earth from one environment to another

00:31:20 ►

by being blown and swept there,

00:31:22 ►

then nevertheless you would get different forms of this animal

00:31:27 ►

because selective pressures are different in different places.

00:31:31 ►

So without any change in the genome at all, you would get a series of divergent forms

00:31:38 ►

through natural selection in the absence of Gene that’s why we’re different from the little green men in the UFOs

00:31:51 ►

Well back to this resonance idea you

00:31:54 ►

You use the word pumping and I like that, but I think it’s a form of resonance

00:31:59 ►

There’s sort of a forcing or coupling or or a co-dependence between the two different processes.

00:32:06 ►

There’s a totally physical one, as, for example, new lava flows,

00:32:10 ►

the meandering of rivers, the rising of the island.

00:32:13 ►

And then it kind of pumps the space-time evolutionary pattern formation process.

00:32:20 ►

Well, it couples back into the Earth itself.

00:32:23 ►

Really, the ice ages are the pump.

00:32:26 ►

They raise and lower sea levels.

00:32:30 ►

They create deserts and drop humidity.

00:32:33 ►

They force change.

00:32:38 ►

And they are probably driven by fluctuations in the dynamics of the sun.

00:32:43 ►

And this is now pretty well in hand.

00:32:47 ►

When therefore to correlate with novelty wave,

00:32:50 ►

have you tried mapping it against the ice ages?

00:32:52 ►

Thank you for that opportunity to.

00:32:57 ►

Well, I think we should have a figure

00:32:58 ►

of the correlation in our text.

00:33:00 ►

Oh, I have all that.

00:33:01 ►

You guessed.

00:33:02 ►

Well, let’s put it in the ice ages and the novelty way.

00:33:06 ►

Good.

00:33:08 ►

I should just point out that the process looks a bit different

00:33:11 ►

if you take morphic resonance into account,

00:33:13 ►

which standard neo-Darwinian biogeology doesn’t.

00:33:18 ►

Well, habit then becomes a much more important process.

00:33:23 ►

Habit formation.

00:33:25 ►

And we know that organisms adapt to new environments.

00:33:28 ►

Any given plant, you could take seeds from any of these plants

00:33:31 ►

and grow them at different altitudes and in different climates.

00:33:34 ►

And in many they’d survive.

00:33:35 ►

But they’d look different from the way they do now.

00:33:38 ►

Grow them there for several generations and they can adapt

00:33:41 ►

and they take on, as bottomists say, a new habit.

00:33:45 ►

And I think you see that kind of habit formation gives you very rapid evolution.

00:33:49 ►

All of us can adapt to change circumstances in a matter of days,

00:33:53 ►

or in the case of coming here, more years.

00:33:56 ►

Everything adapts without any gene change or organism change.

00:34:00 ►

And as it adapts, it forms new habits.

00:34:03 ►

Well, behavior is that small margin of adaptability

00:34:07 ►

that is supposedly not genetically driven.

00:34:10 ►

Well, behaviour is one form of an adaptive habit,

00:34:13 ►

and we know those best,

00:34:15 ►

but the way that plants grow, for example,

00:34:17 ►

in different environments is another.

00:34:19 ►

They can vary enormously over a range of environments

00:34:22 ►

in form and stature and leaf shape and so forth.

00:34:29 ►

So I think that this gives a much more rapid way of understanding evolution

00:34:33 ►

because instead of just random mutation and sculpting by natural selection,

00:34:39 ►

you have a positive adaptation of the animal or plant itself to a new environment.

00:34:43 ►

It reacts and responds appropriately in a

00:34:46 ►

creative way, creating new habits, new subspecies, new forms of life.

00:34:51 ►

So the creative adaptation of life to new circumstances, in my view, is what’s going

00:34:57 ►

on in a way that when you see a plant adapt or an animal learn a new and adaptive pattern

00:35:03 ►

of behavior, what you’re seeing is the

00:35:05 ►

innate creativity of life in action not blind random mutations not just physical forces

00:35:12 ►

not just natural selection but a kind of creativity inherent in all life well i think it was ll1

00:35:20 ►

pointed out that a great deal of selection goes on before an organism emerges from the womb,

00:35:29 ►

and that to pretend that natural selection operates on a tabula rasa is completely naive.

00:35:39 ►

The first environment is the environment of the womb, many don’t make it so those who

00:35:45 ►

do have already been subject to a process of natural selection and

00:35:50 ►

winnowing that was quite intense and quite auspicious.

00:35:53 ►

But there’s still a large range that can pass through that. In the case of plants

00:35:58 ►

where you don’t have wombs, you’ve got a seedling stage, a fairly brief one,

00:36:02 ►

well no plant can survive that that can’t go through that

00:36:05 ►

unless it propagates vegetatively.

00:36:08 ►

So they’re vulnerable there.

00:36:12 ►

But the fact is lots of fairly seedlings

00:36:15 ►

don’t look that different from each other, a lot of them.

00:36:17 ►

In the earlier stages, they’re hard to tell apart.

00:36:23 ►

So you seem to have a fairly generic pattern there. The differences come

00:36:27 ►

out later in both animals and plants, the later formed structures. Anyway, I think that

00:36:34 ►

this creativity and adaptation enables us to understand that whenever you have all these

00:36:42 ►

physically new environments and meandering rivers, lava flows, recolonization, moving from island to island and so forth, these, as you say, create new environments, micro-environments, and lead to a great deal of creativity.

00:36:58 ►

There’s one other thing that this theory suggests.

00:37:00 ►

Not only would you have this creativity through adaptation in individual organisms,

00:37:05 ►

you’d also, by morphic resonance, have transfer of forms from place to place.

00:37:09 ►

So conspecific species could be an appearance just by morphic resonance,

00:37:16 ►

copying of forms, like in the placental mammals and the marsupials,

00:37:22 ►

where you’ve got all these parallel forms.

00:37:23 ►

Well, it would augment the natural selection of separated gene genera.

00:37:29 ►

Yes. These things all work together.

00:37:32 ►

I mean, there’s still natural selection of gene pools,

00:37:34 ►

but it’s a rather foreshortened view of the whole process,

00:37:37 ►

which involves creativity, adaptation, spread of habits as well, in my opinion.

00:37:43 ►

spread of habits as well, in my opinion.

00:37:50 ►

And so I suppose the thing that puzzles me most really is why there haven’t been more species and more forms in Hawaii.

00:37:55 ►

You know, we look around this rainforest here

00:37:57 ►

and there’s just one or two tree species,

00:38:00 ►

whereas in a tropical rainforest in the Amazon or Malaysia,

00:38:03 ►

there’d be hundreds.

00:38:04 ►

Again, the answer is time.

00:38:07 ►

You know, 300 million years versus 20 million years.

00:38:14 ►

That’s what it is.

00:38:15 ►

Well, there’s so many reasons to fail here.

00:38:18 ►

I personally find the environment harsh,

00:38:21 ►

or lush as it may look to you or other people.

00:38:27 ►

harsh, or lush as it may look to you or other people. And I suppose that one way a new species

00:38:36 ►

could fail is through having bad habits. There may be habits that manifest visually to us

00:38:45 ►

only in terms of spatial pattern. The colonization of the black lava by these trees, what are they called?

00:38:47 ►

The Ohia. The Ohia tree. This appears in a certain fractal pattern in which there are characteristic

00:38:55 ►

frequencies of distances that have to do, I suppose, with the distance the seeds fly

00:39:02 ►

in the wind or something like that.

00:39:05 ►

There is a certain spatial pattern which is the necessary one for survival

00:39:09 ►

that has a kind of a morphic resonance,

00:39:12 ►

I mean a resonance of space-time pattern with the physical substrate itself.

00:39:18 ►

And other species, although they would look equally strong or stronger

00:39:22 ►

in the environment of a planetarium,

00:39:27 ►

but they disperse in the lava.

00:39:30 ►

They can’t make it because their spatial characteristic is wrong.

00:39:34 ►

So in the change of a species that may not involve DNA,

00:39:40 ►

it could be a change of habit in terms of the spatial distribution. It could just be

00:39:47 ►

a response to a nutrient that causes a change of size and therefore characteristic distance

00:39:54 ►

in the space-time patterns. We seem to see that, well, first we see the lichen. The lichen

00:40:01 ►

creates just the minimum degradation of the surface that makes it possible

00:40:05 ►

for the opiate to

00:40:07 ►

grab a hold.

00:40:10 ►

And the lichen

00:40:11 ►

as a pattern is obviously

00:40:13 ►

fractal. It’s sort of

00:40:15 ►

characteristically fractal.

00:40:17 ►

And the lava surface is fractal

00:40:19 ►

as well. And fractal, it means

00:40:21 ►

that there’s a resonance across scales.

00:40:24 ►

Then the lichen

00:40:25 ►

scale, which is much smaller, there may be many kinds of lichen, but only this one goes,

00:40:33 ►

because its fractal pattern is, in spite of the apparent difference in scale, because

00:40:38 ►

resonance across scales has the right basic form, something like the time wave, so that

00:40:43 ►

as a matter of fact is compatible’s compatible with the bare rock.

00:40:47 ►

And then the alvea tree is compatible with its fractal pattern,

00:40:51 ►

and apparently on a much larger scale it’s done with less resonance, harmonious,

00:40:55 ►

as opposed to other species that might be disharmonious.

00:40:59 ►

And this harmony, this capability of a certain space-time pattern,

00:41:03 ►

is a habit which may change and adapt in a

00:41:10 ►

way that requires no change in DNA at all.

00:41:15 ►

It’s a non-genetic variation just when it resonates to some kind of morphic field.

00:41:23 ►

So you’re talking about the evolution and development of whole ecosystems,

00:41:28 ►

and I think what’s interesting about that is that these ecosystems get established,

00:41:32 ►

then there’s repeated lava flows, and they’re wiped out again and again and again.

00:41:37 ►

Divided and re-divided.

00:41:37 ►

Divided, and then lava flows are recolonized.

00:41:41 ►

The entire ecosystem has to move, not just single species.

00:41:44 ►

So you’ve got a portable ecosystem.

00:41:47 ►

Maybe that’s why it has to travel light.

00:41:49 ►

And evolving one, or learning one, too.

00:41:52 ►

It’s hard.

00:41:53 ►

I mean, because the Amazon forest, you know,

00:41:55 ►

to have the whole thing to transport the whole of that,

00:41:58 ►

where some seeds drop to the ground,

00:42:00 ►

others are blown by wind, others are carried by birds.

00:42:02 ►

I mean, to get the whole thing to move,

00:42:04 ►

you know, if the whole thing just had to move from place to place,

00:42:09 ►

I mean, what it’s had to do in the past, I suppose,

00:42:11 ►

is adapt to changing rivers

00:42:13 ►

and adapt to shifting cultivation much more recently.

00:42:16 ►

But here, the whole thing…

00:42:18 ►

But strangely enough,

00:42:20 ►

the Amazon, too, is an incredibly inhospitable place.

00:42:26 ►

It’s all what’s called podzolic sand.

00:42:30 ►

In terms of the way foresters measure these things,

00:42:35 ►

this is a much more hospitable place in that in the Amazon,

00:42:40 ►

at any given moment, I’m talking about, say, for instance, the Rio Huayjaga Valley,

00:42:46 ►

at any given moment, I’m talking about say for instance the Rio Huayjaga Valley, 98% of all organic matter is bound within a living system. In other words, there’s no detritus on

00:42:53 ►

the forest floor, there’s no falling. Well here it’s probably 80%, something like that. There

00:43:01 ►

is detritus, there are fungi, there are pockets of soil.

00:43:06 ►

The Amazon is in a frenzied state of recycling. A palm frond falls and you pass the same place

00:43:15 ►

20 minutes later and it’s gone. It was 16 feet long and 5 feet wide. It’s gone. The ants have just taken it. And this is the rate at which it was estimated

00:43:28 ►

that minerals in rainwater falling in the Amazon flow an average distance of one-half

00:43:35 ►

centimeter before being completely bound and absorbed in the organic systems.

00:43:42 ►

Well, there’s so many trees per square kilometer.

00:43:45 ►

There’s this climax forest 200 feet high,

00:43:49 ►

and here everything is very sparse and thin.

00:43:52 ►

It just needs 250 million years or something to thicken up?

00:43:57 ►

No, it’s 19 degrees north, which is a long way north.

00:44:01 ►

It’s a pseudo-topical forest in my estimation.

00:44:07 ►

It would not be nearly this lush if it weren’t that it’s its climate is created not by its latitude but by the ocean it is bathed by

00:44:17 ►

warm currents in the same way that England’s climate is in a sense a godsend. Nobody that far north should expect temperatures like that.

00:44:28 ►

And nobody this far north should expect a situation like this.

00:44:32 ►

But it’s just very mild, very stable.

00:44:37 ►

And that accounts for it.

00:44:39 ►

I believe it’s on the latitude of the mosses line.

00:44:43 ►

Going back now to this question of the morphogenetic field of an entire ecosystem,

00:44:52 ►

I’m bothered by the creation myth, and I just want to ask you guys about this.

00:44:57 ►

In this creation myth of the Hawaiian Islands ecosystem that you described,

00:45:03 ►

there are these islands which have already disappeared and

00:45:07 ►

the ecosystem has jumped from them onto Kauai and so on. But as I understand, these islands

00:45:14 ►

are rafting along over this more or less stationary hot spot. Those earlier islands were also

00:45:21 ►

right here where we are sitting today, also very distant from any continental landmass.

00:45:27 ►

So is day one of biology on the Hawaiian island chain

00:45:34 ►

was we are to understand a result of long-distance dispersion

00:45:41 ►

because of rafting and birdscaping.

00:45:46 ►

But then they had to recreate an entire ecosystem it seems so coincidentally similar to island

00:45:50 ►

ecosystems elsewhere almost because they’ve had to follow the same Creoles

00:45:56 ►

and they’re constrained by the same process nothing happened until the right

00:46:01 ►

like and arrived after the failure of millions of years of bird and raft carried.

00:46:06 ►

Well, the lichen, I suspect, could probably be found in air samples above any point on the planet.

00:46:15 ►

So you’ve got spores as the first colonizers.

00:46:18 ►

Yes, and then the ferns come next.

00:46:21 ►

And of course, the reason the non-flowering plants conquered the planet if you think about it

00:46:27 ►

is because the planet was like hawaii it was new lava it was endless light flows and the ferns

00:46:34 ►

could do get cold we think of ferns as soft and somehow spoiled plants actually

00:46:43 ►

actually, they’re the toughest plants around.

00:46:47 ►

When we study biology, they teach you xylotum.

00:46:49 ►

You have to dissect xylotum.

00:46:52 ►

It’s held up as the most primitive land plant.

00:46:54 ►

This forest is full of xylotum.

00:46:56 ►

I can point it out to you.

00:46:58 ►

These guys are tough.

00:46:59 ►

They’re tough.

00:47:00 ►

They’re tough.

00:47:03 ►

Yes, this is the… But how did they get here?

00:47:04 ►

These seeds are carried by birds well spores no well yes

00:47:07 ►

sure spores mud on the feet of migratory birds could carry me well this is this is one of my

00:47:15 ►

favorite explanations john michelle particularly likes this the fortunes it’s one of their beloved

00:47:21 ►

explanations you see the fortunes have studied the phenomena where you have new pools appear

00:47:26 ►

lakes are created and so forth

00:47:28 ►

and within

00:47:29 ►

20 years or something they’ve got all the things

00:47:32 ►

a regular lake should have

00:47:34 ►

the right flora, tadpoles

00:47:36 ►

the right kind of fish swimming in the water

00:47:39 ►

Daphnia, water beetles

00:47:41 ►

and so forth

00:47:41 ►

and the nearest lake may be many many miles away

00:47:44 ►

so the explanation for this that’s accepted without question near water beetles and so forth. And the nearest lake may be many, many miles away.

00:47:48 ►

So the explanation for this that’s accepted without question is that they all got there on ducks’ feet.

00:47:51 ►

And so the duck’s foot hypothesis is…

00:47:53 ►

Well, but spores, I think, are a little more reasonable.

00:47:57 ►

Spores are a little more reasonable.

00:47:59 ►

The Fortians have a great time with the duck’s foot hypothesis.

00:48:02 ►

Obviously, these spores mutate into mallard ducks,

00:48:06 ►

cattails, minnows.

00:48:08 ►

Well, no, they have their own

00:48:09 ►

explanation, the teleportation

00:48:11 ►

theory. You see,

00:48:13 ►

they believe that nature airpours a vacuum

00:48:15 ►

and that when the right thing is

00:48:18 ►

needed by the ecosystem, if it’s not

00:48:20 ►

there, it simply teleports it

00:48:21 ►

from where it is. So, you

00:48:23 ►

need to assemble a tropical forest you’ve got

00:48:26 ►

to have trees tree ferns liam type vines you know the whole thing certain regulation things are

00:48:32 ►

tropical tea tree forest morphic tropical forest morphic field ought to have hawaiians hawaii

00:48:38 ►

satisfies those criteria with the minimum number of species but Right. But the fact is it has to have all those.

00:48:46 ►

And so they think that all these cryptozoological reports of pumas in Scotland and, you know,

00:48:52 ►

jackasses on Dartmoor and so on, that these things…

00:48:56 ►

I’m sure that happens.

00:49:04 ►

These reports of, you know, they love these falls of fishes.

00:49:09 ►

You know the falls of fishes and of frogs when animals just fall from the sky.

00:49:14 ►

Well, can we agree that they represent sort of the trailing edge of a bell curve of probability?

00:49:21 ►

No, I don’t think we can.

00:49:23 ►

Because I think that they, I think that

00:49:25 ►

the reports are indisputable.

00:49:28 ►

Fish fall from the sky, people

00:49:29 ►

cracking open stones

00:49:31 ►

that have been there for thousands and

00:49:33 ►

thousands of years find living toads

00:49:35 ►

embedded within them.

00:49:37 ►

But, you see, they

00:49:39 ►

take the teleportation hypothesis

00:49:41 ►

seriously. There’s evidence of it

00:49:43 ►

in the human realm.

00:49:46 ►

Sai Baba seems to manifest things that could be teleported and so on.

00:49:50 ►

If that’s their best exhibit, they better run.

00:49:53 ►

Oh, my God.

00:49:55 ►

I wouldn’t leave my chickens alone with Sai Baba.

00:50:01 ►

Would you?

00:50:03 ►

Would you leave your chickens alone?

00:50:05 ►

No, I think they’d be in danger of teleportation

00:50:08 ►

and would appear in the back of the store somewhere else.

00:50:13 ►

At a minimum.

00:50:15 ►

Anyway, if species can move,

00:50:17 ►

there’s a way in which they might be able to move

00:50:19 ►

or be reconstituted

00:50:21 ►

in ways over and above spores seeds rafts etc and that i think makes

00:50:27 ►

may seem of minimal interest in the context of the earth the merely eccentric theory

00:50:32 ►

becomes much more interesting when we take up your theme of the earth itself being an island

00:50:38 ►

and the biology on earth being an island biology when we then consider how things could have moved through from other planets in maybe other star systems then duck’s feet are

00:50:50 ►

out for starters. I mean you can get in the sort of film that you tailor.

00:50:57 ►

There’s an underlying set of resonances that matter will flow along similar

00:51:02 ►

creodes in similar regimes of chemistry

00:51:05 ►

and pressure, whether they’re

00:51:07 ►

here or in orbit around Arturo.

00:51:11 ►

And so

00:51:12 ►

this is

00:51:14 ►

what fuels the expectation that

00:51:16 ►

on an Earth-like planet there would be

00:51:17 ►

Earth-like beings.

00:51:20 ►

But I would say by morphic resonance

00:51:22 ►

you see, because I think the two planets would be

00:51:24 ►

in resonance if it was sufficiently Earth-like.

00:51:27 ►

So you then have the idea of a kind of resonance phenomenon

00:51:30 ►

driving evolution or leading to forms of life

00:51:33 ►

which have never before appeared there

00:51:35 ►

but which have appeared somewhere else in the universe.

00:51:39 ►

Now, without the need for spores, seeds or rungs…

00:51:42 ►

Well, there are evolutionary puzzles that I think completely defeat

00:51:46 ►

any kind of Darwinism

00:51:48 ►

or neo-Darwinism.

00:51:50 ►

The prime example being

00:51:52 ►

the metamorphosis of

00:51:54 ►

beetles and butterflies.

00:51:56 ►

I mean, here is a process

00:51:58 ►

which involves the

00:51:59 ►

perfect coordination of hundreds

00:52:02 ►

of, not thousands, of genes

00:52:04 ►

simultaneously. Imagining any gradual process perfect coordination of hundreds of not thousands of genes simultaneously

00:52:05 ►

imagining any gradual process that would proceed gene by gene over eons to end up

00:52:14 ►

with something like that happening to an organism defies credibility I just can’t

00:52:19 ►

feature it clearly thousands of genes were changed in one or two moves to achieve

00:52:29 ►

that and no ordinary process of gene reshuffling that I’m familiar with could account for that.

00:52:40 ►

You do not hear this discussed. No, it comes in that category of macro mutation which biologists don’t like to discuss.

00:52:49 ►

Why?

00:52:50 ►

When you have a large change of a lot of coordinated things.

00:52:53 ►

But after all, the insects are probably the dominant order on the planet, in terms of biomass, in terms of species number, in terms of the number of environments they can inhabit.

00:53:05 ►

So, in other words, the conquest of this planet by life

00:53:09 ►

preceded by a mechanism, metamorphosis,

00:53:12 ►

currently completely a black box to modern biology.

00:53:19 ►

Well, I think there’s a startup problem,

00:53:21 ►

whether on the scale of the whole planet

00:53:23 ►

or an island in the Hawaiian chain.

00:53:27 ►

I just can’t imagine that the frequency of ducks flying is enough to allow the duck’s feet hypothesis

00:53:35 ►

to explain the arrival of correct species and correct temporal sequence in so short of time that we would have to just be dumping

00:53:45 ►

literally dump truck loads

00:53:47 ►

of different genetic

00:53:48 ►

material on a daily basis

00:53:51 ►

on the brand new island in order to have

00:53:53 ►

a chance to get started.

00:53:53 ►

The studying of banded birds and this

00:53:56 ►

seems to show that

00:53:58 ►

there’s a lot of material moving

00:54:00 ►

around and that a million years

00:54:02 ►

is a long, long time

00:54:04 ►

and that a number of improbable things can go on in a million years.

00:54:10 ►

Well, I’ve been here for a week.

00:54:11 ►

I have not seen a new species of bird arrive from the mainland.

00:54:17 ►

Well, stick around.

00:54:22 ►

Well, has anyone ever worked out?

00:54:24 ►

I know they’ve banded the birds all right, but have they

00:54:28 ►

counted the number of birds, the number of spores they can possibly carry in a full load?

00:54:33 ►

Of course, this is what graduate students are for, Ralph.

00:54:38 ►

This is the work of the study of the Hawaiian Islands.

00:54:42 ►

Well, on the planet. Major models of these birds coming and going from Vancouver and Baja, California,

00:54:49 ►

over eons.

00:54:50 ►

Jumping a load and returning.

00:54:52 ►

Carrying one one-hundredth of a gram of biological material on each trip, and of those, one out

00:55:00 ►

of a thousand survives, and out of, and you discover no problem.

00:55:06 ►

Well, okay, let’s accept, in part,

00:55:09 ►

the duck’s foot hypothesis in its broader form.

00:55:12 ►

Migratory birds, pretty plausible.

00:55:15 ►

Birds do migrate from place to place over large distances,

00:55:18 ►

indeed many call in Hawaii.

00:55:20 ►

I looked up in your bird book

00:55:21 ►

and saw there were quite a number of migrants

00:55:23 ►

from different directions.

00:55:27 ►

So we accept this for the purpose of argument. Now, which is cause

00:55:30 ►

and which is effect? No one knows why birds migrate in the patterns they do. And the evolutionary

00:55:38 ►

basis for migration, sometimes we hear land masses gradually moved apart and they had

00:55:43 ►

to move further and further over oceans. But in in fact migratory routes are kinds of habits they can new ones have evolved in recent

00:55:50 ►

decades in britain no i don’t think it is migratory birds i think that the process is

00:55:56 ►

primarily one of a novelty unusual events catastrophes the greatest storm of the century

00:56:05 ►

Every century birds blown off course blown off course

00:56:09 ►

It’s not about habits the pure numbers are reduced

00:56:13 ►

Such a small level that it’s hard to imagine all of these coincidences

00:56:18 ►

necessary for the reconstruction of an ecology

00:56:20 ►

A single freak storm veering off course might equal a century of ordinary dispersal.

00:56:29 ►

But these migratory habits of birds are presumably quite old in many cases.

00:56:33 ►

And every time there’s an ice age that pumps the evolutionary process,

00:56:37 ►

presumably birds that do migrate have to change the places they migrate to.

00:56:43 ►

And in the last 10,000 years,

00:56:48 ►

the great bulk of Northern Europe and North America has opened up as a habitat,

00:56:49 ►

much more recent than anything we’re looking at here.

00:56:51 ►

We have to remember we live in pioneer,

00:56:54 ►

recolonised communities ourselves

00:56:56 ►

if we come from most of the Northern Hemisphere.

00:56:59 ►

London, the ice cap went down to Hampstead

00:57:02 ►

in the north of London 10,000 years ago.

00:57:05 ►

Most of England is a recolonised and recently recolonised ecology.

00:57:10 ►

Quite common.

00:57:11 ►

The birds that migrate have to adapt over thousands or even hundreds of years,

00:57:16 ►

short-term adaptations.

00:57:18 ►

It seems to me that if birds have a kind of collective map

00:57:23 ►

which they share with other birds that have migrated,

00:57:26 ►

and can tune in to a kind of bird collective unconscious,

00:57:31 ►

that some species migrating over certain routes and knowing about Hawaii

00:57:35 ►

may enable others starting off in that direction

00:57:38 ►

to follow a kind of pre-existing creode, rather like existing jet flight paths.

00:57:44 ►

I was amused when we came here to hawaii we

00:57:47 ►

were flying in this jet plane and outside the window about 100 feet away it was a vapor trail

00:57:52 ►

which we followed exactly for two hours presumably of the previous jet flight to hawaii and they were

00:57:58 ►

100 feet apart you know so maybe kind of creode memory channel bird migration paths.

00:58:05 ►

And many species often follow the same paths,

00:58:08 ►

like around the Mediterranean coast

00:58:10 ►

and over the straits of Gibraltar into North Africa and so on.

00:58:15 ►

So we could have a whole kind of bird mine.

00:58:18 ►

And when the Hawaiian islands appear,

00:58:19 ►

long-distance migrants like albatrosses

00:58:22 ►

or whatever the largest seabirds are here

00:58:24 ►

that in any case spend a lot of time at sea,

00:58:27 ►

recognise this fact and start coming here.

00:58:31 ►

Somehow this gets into the bird map,

00:58:32 ►

and other species, rather than whole flocks of them starting out lemming-like

00:58:36 ►

from the coast of California in the hope of finding an island

00:58:39 ►

by chance 2,500 miles away,

00:58:42 ►

are actually doing it with a great deal more confidence.

00:58:46 ►

Then we’d have the idea of the appearance of new land

00:58:48 ►

if it actually channeled bad migration routes towards it

00:58:52 ►

because the word got around pretty fast and they were able to adapt.

00:58:55 ►

Then the duck’s foot hypothesis would still be plausible,

00:58:59 ►

but plausible for a different reason.

00:59:00 ►

With this direction by a committee in the sky,

00:59:03 ►

the nature, the vacuum

00:59:05 ►

abhorrence committee, whoops,

00:59:08 ►

in New Ireland and the Pacific, tell the

00:59:09 ►

albatrosses to do their job as sort of

00:59:12 ►

a pack train to bring as much

00:59:14 ►

genetic material as rapidly as possible

00:59:16 ►

and dump it on the New Island.

00:59:18 ►

Sounds like one of the adventures of

00:59:19 ►

Dr. Doolittle, you can see.

00:59:32 ►

Well, to do that you can see well I think there are one or two more points if you’ve time and patience

00:59:33 ►

let’s do it all

00:59:35 ►

if you can wait

00:59:38 ►

just a moment

00:59:39 ►

when a new island comes up, then the entire database of migratory birds and all the other

00:59:54 ►

species is somehow informed that geography is the basis of biogeography after all.

01:00:02 ►

Well this came up just the other day.

01:00:05 ►

How did the original people who came here find it?

01:00:10 ►

And one obvious hypothesis that struck us was that if they were keen observers of migrant

01:00:15 ►

birds, they’d notice that birds set off from their islands in a particular direction and

01:00:20 ►

came back again, and it would therefore be a fairly simple deduction that if you follow the migrant birds you’ll reach land sooner or later.

01:00:28 ►

That’s right. That’s what East is a big bird means. So following the birds then is

01:00:34 ►

no less of a mystery than the birds themselves being able to migrate. So either the

01:00:39 ►

people could follow the birds who navigate by some unknown mysterious means or the people

01:00:46 ►

could have had access to

01:00:48 ►

similar mysterious means

01:00:49 ►

themselves

01:00:50 ►

and when a new island

01:00:53 ►

comes up then the information

01:00:55 ►

is somehow injected

01:00:58 ►

into their own migration

01:00:59 ►

patterns which is whatever

01:01:02 ►

guides them

01:01:02 ►

which they may consider to be celestial navigation or whatever, in their

01:01:07 ►

canoe rides from the island to the home.

01:01:10 ►

Well, all we have to do is to add in the cetacean factor and we’ll have a complete series.

01:01:18 ►

Though the animals that presumably noticed first of all that

01:01:23 ►

volcanoes are erupting beneath the sea two or three

01:01:25 ►

four ten thousand feet down causing a great deal of hissing steam and

01:01:30 ►

commotion presumably marine animals fish things that dwellers on on the marine

01:01:36 ►

floor and presumably there’s a whole microbe and warm lot of water loving

01:01:40 ►

creatures that moves along the bases of the ice. Well, it’s sound carrying thousands and thousands of miles.

01:01:46 ►

And the whales have this telegraph system,

01:01:48 ►

and they send telegrams to each other,

01:01:50 ►

and then finally the dolphins know,

01:01:51 ►

and they communicate to birds, or friends, and bears.

01:01:54 ►

The very fact that it’s all tied together, as it were,

01:01:57 ►

is the only reason that it can all work,

01:02:00 ►

and that without the tying together of all living things

01:02:04 ►

in one giant worldwide web, there would, as tying together of all living things in one giant, world-wide

01:02:06 ►

web, there would, as a matter of fact, be no life, certainly no new life on a new island

01:02:12 ►

like Hawaii.

01:02:13 ►

That sounds reasonable.

01:02:14 ►

Yes, I think so.

01:02:15 ►

I mean, if one isn’t too tightly constrained in the definition of communication, it obviously

01:02:16 ►

would be.

01:02:17 ►

And without the… too tightly constrained in the definition of communication,

01:02:26 ►

it obviously…

01:02:28 ►

And without the communicative web,

01:02:31 ►

the informational sharing system,

01:02:34 ►

then it’s all impossible.

01:02:36 ►

And even though we don’t know how these communications take place,

01:02:40 ►

we nevertheless, we can sort of deduce

01:02:43 ►

that without communication it doesn’t work.

01:02:46 ►

Interspecies communication makes it all go.

01:02:54 ►

Yes.

01:02:56 ►

And if we, this is an idea again that came up from Ralph and I talking a couple of days ago,

01:03:01 ►

we postulate that plants have a kind of dolphin or whale-like telepathic relationship between them.

01:03:10 ►

Then plants of similar species on different continents would be able to read out.

01:03:17 ►

An oak tree, for example, now planted on every continent and native,

01:03:20 ►

if you take in the whole genus, you’d have a wide band of the old world and the

01:03:25 ►

new covered. If any of these, if they were linked or resonating together in a complete

01:03:35 ►

kind of oak mind, any one of them would know what was happening with the weather as a storm

01:03:42 ►

passed over Wales and the oaks all registered it,

01:03:47 ►

and the estates had closed or opened or whatever,

01:03:52 ►

or as some great catastrophic lava flow occurred somewhere else,

01:03:54 ►

and the Mount St Helens erupted or something.

01:03:58 ►

Well, I think John Donne covered this territory.

01:04:02 ►

No man is an island entirely himself.

01:04:05 ►

Each is a part of the continent, a part of the main.

01:04:08 ►

Each man’s death diminishes me, therefore I have never

01:04:09 ►

sinned to know for whom the bell

01:04:11 ►

tolls for

01:04:13 ►

me.

01:04:15 ►

But the conversation of the oaks,

01:04:17 ►

that transcends that

01:04:19 ►

homocentric

01:04:21 ►

view.

01:04:23 ►

This is

01:04:24 ►

closer to children’s books, children’s stories, homocentric view that this is this is

01:04:26 ►

closer to children’s books

01:04:28 ►

children’s stories

01:04:29 ►

and the lost mythology

01:04:31 ►

of the communication

01:04:34 ►

of humans

01:04:35 ►

animals and plants

01:04:37 ►

that we’re proposing is I think

01:04:39 ►

for many people stranger than

01:04:41 ►

a living toad inside a

01:04:43 ►

dead rock

01:04:44 ►

that is the basis of shamanism worldwide it’s what shamanism many people are stranger than a living toad inside a dead rock.

01:04:47 ►

That is the basis of shamanism worldwide.

01:04:50 ►

It’s what shamanism is all about,

01:04:53 ►

communication on this interface between the human world and the world of plants and animals.

01:04:56 ►

And presumably it’s shaman who discover the powers of plants,

01:05:00 ►

the humanly relevant powers of plants,

01:05:03 ►

including the psychoactive powers of plants, the humanly relevant powers of plants including the psychoactive powers of

01:05:05 ►

plants and explore them and it’s Shaman who entered the mind of animals and have animal

01:05:11 ►

totems and animal spirits and can find out the ways of animals for practical purposes.

01:05:19 ►

So if this we see this communication we see that pets, as we were talking about, can find out

01:05:27 ►

what people are up to in surprising and astonishing ways at a distance.

01:05:33 ►

We’ve already got ingredients that point towards the possibility of a worldwide web of communication

01:05:39 ►

between plants and animals and animals and people, and so forth. Well, I think the technological principle on which the next century will operate is

01:05:50 ►

the mimicking of nature. Solid state, micro-miniaturized, solar-based, no moving parts, so forth. But a lot of that is the mimicry of nature as perceived

01:06:07 ►

through a filter so narrow that maybe

01:06:11 ►

the most essential functions of nature are not even recognized

01:06:15 ►

and therefore what is mimicked is a non-working skeleton

01:06:20 ►

of a dead nature, as it were.

01:06:22 ►

Well, but for instance, solar cells obviously

01:06:25 ►

depend on an understanding of photosynthesis,

01:06:29 ►

and it would be a brighter world

01:06:31 ►

if all electrical power were produced that way.

01:06:34 ►

Similarly, processes of fermentation

01:06:37 ►

are better than processes that require

01:06:41 ►

more high molecular weight solvents.

01:06:44 ►

That sounds right, but actually I think that photoelectric devices as known today

01:06:50 ►

are not only much simpler than photosynthesis,

01:06:54 ►

but they were understood at a time when photosynthesis was not understood,

01:07:01 ►

and even now the whole chain is perhaps not completely clear.

01:07:06 ►

And they take the bare essentials

01:07:08 ►

but leave out the whole of plant morphology.

01:07:10 ►

All these shards are

01:07:12 ►

photosynthetic.

01:07:14 ►

Well, they started to make them

01:07:16 ►

as single crystals

01:07:17 ►

and this is very expensive, so

01:07:19 ►

they make them more fractals like

01:07:21 ►

plants.

01:07:24 ►

So, I think that the imitation of nature would be disastrous

01:07:29 ►

if we can’t learn to see it better,

01:07:32 ►

that somehow we need more means of opening the scientific stranglehold

01:07:41 ►

on the observational powers of the human.

01:07:43 ►

Well, but there are currently only two aesthetic schools on the menu.

01:07:49 ►

The imitation of nature.

01:07:52 ►

But we’re leaving out the alternative that arises from the possibilities we’re talking about.

01:07:56 ►

I mean, if nature involves this worldwide web of communication,

01:08:02 ►

if there are flows of information from people to animals,

01:08:05 ►

animals to people, migrating birds, dolphins, and so forth. All these things being reflected

01:08:12 ►

in the population of this isolated set of volcanic islands.

01:08:18 ►

It sounds like connectivity is the overarching matter. Well, now we come to the true spiritual purpose of the digital World Wide Web, which is a

01:08:30 ►

training ground for appreciating the mechanism and the characteristics of learning to observe

01:08:39 ►

the global phenomenon of World Wide Web, so that with this training in childhood and early adult

01:08:47 ►

So it’s an analogue for nature?

01:08:50 ►

Quite. At present we’re limited to analogues of mechanics, you know, and in the case of

01:08:58 ►

Morphic Resonance, radio and TV, because the underlying metaphor is radio and TV. But here we have another metaphor, and since science

01:09:08 ►

can only work in terms of metaphors, and so far it’s only worked in terms of mechanical

01:09:13 ►

metaphors, here’s an expanded mechanical metaphor. But I think it would only really work if it

01:09:19 ►

converges with an expanded mental or psychic metaphor, and I suppose the psyches of the people connected

01:09:26 ►

through the web are that. I mean, the thing lacking from it as an evolutionary model,

01:09:33 ►

for me, was the lack of it having a field-like quality, with just a kind of series of interconnected

01:09:38 ►

bits, rather like in these artificial life models, where you just have units that join up.

01:09:51 ►

I think field-like quality would make it much more interesting.

01:09:54 ►

That could happen if the community of people doing it followed the suggestion of the Russian eccentric Konstantin Ivanko.

01:10:00 ►

He’s always writing to me with his scheme for a total transformation of humanity

01:10:04 ►

through people linked up by computer nets, chanting together at the same time and intentionally creating what he calls a psychotronic revolution, which would entrain the consciousness of all those doing it, more than just the operation of the mechanics of this thing does, by synchronized chanting,

01:10:25 ►

which would be coordinated through the net itself.

01:10:28 ►

Very interesting.

01:10:29 ►

That’s his vision.

01:10:30 ►

He’s been going on about this for years.

01:10:31 ►

He thinks that could cause the emergence of a shift in consciousness.

01:10:35 ►

The network won’t do it by itself.

01:10:38 ►

And I think that that’s what’s lacking from the network by itself

01:10:41 ►

and from the standard physical linkage there is of evolution.

01:10:45 ►

This is sort of the harmonic convergence idea. If we all go stand on nearby mountaintops

01:10:50 ►

at exactly the same instant throughout the entire biosphere, then somehow that would

01:10:56 ►

precipitate phase transition.

01:10:59 ►

Exactly. And many people would ridicule this as saying this is what peace protesters were

01:11:04 ►

doing all through the 70s,

01:11:05 ►

visualizing peace all over Eastern Europe and the ending of the Cold War.

01:11:10 ►

And as the smile comes to their lips, it tends to freeze,

01:11:14 ►

because, of course, that’s exactly what’s happened.

01:11:17 ►

Although the harmonic convergence is a less successful piece of evidence

01:11:22 ►

and seems to indicate that this area of thinking can become

01:11:26 ►

a rebel to disease the intellect.

01:11:29 ►

But it shows that people go for it and that really respond to it, because otherwise why

01:11:33 ►

would so many of us have been gathered in skilled parts of the globe chanting at dawn,

01:11:38 ►

in my case at Glastonbury, in a light drizzle, along with Sir George Trevelyan on the top

01:11:44 ►

of Glastonbury Tor.

01:11:45 ►

How are so many people engaged in this activity

01:11:48 ►

if it isn’t deeply attractive?

01:11:51 ►

We Americans can answer this question for you.

01:11:54 ►

It’s called hype, and we’ve perfected it,

01:11:58 ►

and I think you were hyped.

01:12:00 ►

Hype isn’t a resonance phenomenon, but not the only one.

01:12:04 ►

But hype has been… Hype, only certain resonance phenomenon but not the only one but Hype has created

01:12:05 ►

only certain kinds of Hype work

01:12:07 ►

while the subsequent ones he’s convened haven’t

01:12:10 ►

so this one actually worked

01:12:12 ►

in a new kind of way

01:12:13 ►

and you see I think it’s possible

01:12:16 ►

that if we look at the whole world

01:12:18 ►

there may be a kind of global chance

01:12:20 ►

triggered off by sun starts

01:12:22 ►

life all over the world

01:12:24 ►

just as it has

01:12:25 ►

passed through the ice ages, it may be being passed…

01:12:29 ►

Any theory which has us gathering together in large crowds to chant should look back

01:12:35 ►

at the Third Reich before it proceeds too far with its agenda.

01:12:39 ►

Well, in this case they’re not in large crowds, they’re spread out over the surface of the

01:12:43 ►

earth, in front of their computers.

01:12:44 ►

Each one at home, even. Ah! Homegrown fascism! In this case they’re not in large crowds, they’re spread out over the surface of the earth, in front of their computers.

01:12:46 ►

Ah, homegrown fascism! Decentralized fascism!

01:12:54 ►

Well, it shows that only if there’s a ritual or a kind of conscious, intentional, resonating aspect of this, will this field, will this network

01:13:06 ►

have any kind of dimension

01:13:08 ►

of a field?

01:13:10 ►

Because this could create a field.

01:13:12 ►

Well, but in a way, when you think of it, the whole

01:13:14 ►

Nazi thing was the implication

01:13:16 ►

of a field.

01:13:17 ►

Yeah, it was very successful.

01:13:18 ►

It grew from resonance.

01:13:21 ►

It was an appeal to

01:13:22 ►

the folk mind.

01:13:27 ►

Well, so were all calls to war by nations,

01:13:34 ►

bishops, crusaders, you know. This is why I think Heidegger was far wrong when he said the way you judge reality is by the depth of the call, because the call can be deep

01:13:42 ►

and it can still be haywire.

01:13:45 ►

I know, but you see, we’re all the victims of a call,

01:13:48 ►

a call to move west, for example.

01:13:50 ►

I mean, we’ve wound up here, now at the ultimate limit of the west,

01:13:54 ►

well, except the westernmost Hawaiian island, I suppose.

01:13:58 ►

The trial launch at the edge of the west has made it…

01:14:01 ►

Here we are.

01:14:03 ►

..a further 2,500 miles.

01:14:05 ►

So there’s this westward aileron which causes,

01:14:08 ►

well, in the case of the British, it was an eastward movement.

01:14:12 ►

Migratory peoples migrate to England,

01:14:14 ►

the Anglo-Saxons settle, etc.,

01:14:16 ►

sort of wipe out the native people or subjugate them.

01:14:19 ►

You know, they’re on the move again after a few hundred years,

01:14:22 ►

the British Empire, you know, the settlement of North America,

01:14:26 ►

and similar process from Spain.

01:14:28 ►

And now, having gone right across North America,

01:14:31 ►

has subjugated and wiped out its natives,

01:14:33 ►

eliminated their culture.

01:14:35 ►

The whole process has moved here.

01:14:36 ►

We can see that happening before our very eyes.

01:14:39 ►

Something which, in terms of evolution,

01:14:42 ►

shows the opposite of everything we’ve been talking about so far.

01:14:45 ►

Now there’s no separation of the islands from TV networks and satellite linkages and the internet itself.

01:14:54 ►

Well, one of the most frightening trends, I think, in modern culture is the wish to build shopping malls everywhere.

01:15:01 ►

There is a mentality that would like to turn the planet into an

01:15:05 ►

international airport arrival concourse. That’s their idea of utopia.

01:15:12 ►

Based on America. The model for all this is always America, you see.

01:15:16 ►

I suppose.

01:15:17 ►

And so now there’s this kind of clonal culture moving worldwide through media, which has

01:15:23 ►

the opposite effect to all the speciation, diversification,

01:15:27 ►

and evolutionary creativity we’ve been talking about.

01:15:30 ►

So we see the opposite process at work in Hawaii today.

01:15:33 ►

It’s like a bulldozer.

01:15:34 ►

The stifling of the native culture.

01:15:35 ►

America is a cultural bulldozer.

01:15:38 ►

Yes.

01:15:38 ►

It just tramples and destroys everything in its path.

01:15:43 ►

But that, you see, is simply an expression of this westward migratory urge

01:15:47 ►

which underlies all the people who migrated to America,

01:15:50 ►

of whatever race or background.

01:15:51 ►

They all migrated, that’s what brought them there.

01:15:54 ►

And this migratory urge which has been, I suppose,

01:15:57 ►

very strong in all sorts of human populations.

01:16:01 ►

And indeed, maybe just yet another manifestation of the migratory age we see in birds and in plants

01:16:08 ►

and indeed in the movement of life from planet to planet.

01:16:13 ►

There appears to be a double gradient here with the eastward migration of Asian people

01:16:17 ►

kind of balancing the western migration of European people. This is actually the interface where some, the double gradient

01:16:28 ►

can produce an increase of novelty and mutations and a forward leap perhaps of human evolution

01:16:36 ►

could be here because of this double wave phenomenon.

01:16:40 ►

A standing wave.

01:16:42 ►

A standing wave. A standing wave. Forming here as forces move both east and west.

01:16:47 ►

So, can we point to any human creativity of Hawaii that exemplifies this, like in the Malaysian Arctic Pelagia,

01:16:55 ►

coming together with two great flora and fauna ecosystems?

01:17:00 ►

Can we see that creativity in evidence? I haven’t noticed it myself. Well, I suppose Pearl Harbor was the moment of the greatest impact of East and West, and the result of

01:17:11 ►

that, of course, was the deployment of nuclear weapons. And whereas we don’t like this, it

01:17:17 ►

is definitely a novel evolutionary or counter-evolutionary step. It’s creative, hate it as we might.

01:17:26 ►

And Pearl Harbor itself being a volcanic

01:17:28 ►

derivative, you know, has

01:17:30 ►

this kind of volcanic effect on

01:17:32 ►

world politics. It’s interesting that

01:17:34 ►

that radiated out the whole

01:17:36 ►

biogeography,

01:17:38 ►

I mean, political geography of today

01:17:40 ►

was shaped by

01:17:42 ►

Pearl Harbor, as we know from

01:17:44 ►

all elementary accounts, with

01:17:45 ►

a lot of background and so on. But there we have another role of Hawaii. I wonder if you

01:17:51 ►

reflected on that.

01:17:54 ►

Well, certainly the defeat of fascism and the solidification of American opinion to

01:17:59 ►

go with Churchill relied on that to the point where some historians have felt that Roosevelt knew

01:18:07 ►

what the Japanese were planning and he allowed it to happen because he wanted to go with

01:18:14 ►

Churchill and he couldn’t figure out a way to solidify the opinion. So yes, that was

01:18:21 ►

its moment in geopolitical scale.

01:18:30 ►

But it was also the moment of conflict of eastern and western power.

01:18:33 ►

The Japanese sought to expand their influence in the world and were held back by military means in the end.

01:18:38 ►

They’ve now succeeded economically, though they failed militarily.

01:18:41 ►

And here in Hawaii, at least politically, if you tell me the Japanese controlled…

01:18:46 ►

This was the eastern Vienna.

01:18:47 ►

If the Turks were stopped at the walls of Vienna,

01:18:51 ►

then the Japanese were stopped at Pearl Harbor.

01:18:55 ►

So that’s the domain from Honolulu to Vienna.

01:19:01 ►

That’s Western civilization’s turf.

01:19:05 ►

But is it really the creative interface it could be between

01:19:07 ►

East and West? Because now it’s a kind of stalemate

01:19:10 ►

with roughly half of the island’s

01:19:11 ►

population coming from the East and half

01:19:13 ►

from the West with the native Hawaiians

01:19:16 ►

trapped in between. Well, I think

01:19:17 ►

the specific rim culture

01:19:19 ►

that is hypothesized to be

01:19:21 ►

emerging, Hawaii is central

01:19:23 ►

to all of that.

01:19:25 ►

It’s equal distant from Sydney, Lima, Tokyo, and Vancouver.

01:19:31 ►

Have they adopted the slogan,

01:19:33 ►

come to Hawaii in the Pacific hub, yet?

01:19:36 ►

If they haven’t, I’m sure they’re not far behind.

01:19:40 ►

The presence of these telescopes here

01:19:42 ►

makes it the center of world science, at least in strong.

01:19:50 ►

I think the world’s first, second, and third largest telescopes are on this island,

01:19:55 ►

with an identical twin of the largest being built a few hundred yards away from it.

01:20:01 ►

And the Maxwell 4 millimeter, there’s an amazing concentration of silence on the cave.

01:20:12 ►

So it’s a channel perhaps at least in the human realm for linking us with the stars

01:20:18 ►

another important theme. We’re looking out in our top of Hawaii.

01:20:23 ►

We’re looking out from the top of Hawaii.

01:20:25 ►

That’s right.

01:20:31 ►

Chosen, paradoxically, for being the darkest place on Earth.

01:20:36 ►

From here, they’ll see the next wave of duck’s feet.

01:20:37 ►

On their way. Arriving through the biosphere tube.

01:20:43 ►

Well, what do you think?

01:20:45 ►

I think that covers the waterfront.

01:20:47 ►

Nice to meet you.

01:20:48 ►

Round to a halt.

01:20:51 ►

You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one

01:20:56 ►

thought at a time.

01:21:01 ►

Well, I have a question for you.

01:21:03 ►

Do you know why I think that you would be able to fit right in perfectly at that kitchen table with Ralph, Terrence, and Rupert?

01:21:12 ►

Well, it’s simple.

01:21:14 ►

Because like those three amigos, you’re spending your time listening to this podcast rather than talking about last night’s football game or something like that with your friends.

01:21:24 ►

talking about last night’s football game or something like that with your friends.

01:21:29 ►

Like it or not, some kind of strange mind virus has gotten a hold of us and is causing us to listen to a long-winded conversation instead of listening to music right now.

01:21:36 ►

But if I were you, I’d get back to the music right away.

01:21:41 ►

But if you’re still here with me, I’ll just ramble on a little bit more.

01:21:46 ►

You know, I don’t know about you, but I really enjoyed hearing Terrence talk about butterflies.

01:21:52 ►

Although it isn’t something he talked about very often,

01:21:56 ►

collecting butterflies was one of the first things he did after leaving college, if I’m not mistaken.

01:22:01 ►

And just a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the new book that Terrence’s daughter just published

01:22:06 ►

that contained photos of some of the butterflies he collected.

01:22:10 ►

And I’ll put another link to that book with the program notes to this podcast.

01:22:15 ►

But his mention of the way butterflies mutate

01:22:18 ►

and change their patterns on their wings

01:22:21 ►

in order to fool the birds who preyed on them

01:22:23 ►

got me to thinking about something that either he or Tim Leary said on another podcast recently

01:22:29 ►

about how you can no longer pick out the heads

01:22:33 ►

because the rest of the culture has co-opted the way that all the heads now look.

01:22:39 ►

Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to find the others.

01:22:43 ►

Maybe everyone is one of the others, but we’re all too afraid to speak up and say so.

01:22:48 ►

That’s an interesting thought, huh?

01:22:50 ►

I know that it happened to me once.

01:22:53 ►

You know, a guy who is now one of my closest friends,

01:22:56 ►

he and I worked together for almost a year before we discovered that we shared an interest in psychedelics.

01:23:02 ►

You know, I’m not holding my breath about seeing an end to the prohibition of our sacred medicines during my lifetime.

01:23:09 ►

All I’m really hoping to live to see is a world in which we can at least discuss them as freely as we talk about the weather or sports.

01:23:18 ►

And I also liked Terrence’s comment that when there’s a shifting boundary, that that’s where the mutants can thrive.

01:23:27 ►

Well, it seems to me like a lot of boundaries are beginning to shift all around the planet.

01:23:33 ►

Let’s hope that spells good news for us psychedelic mutants.

01:23:37 ►

And I’m not talking about the science fiction version of mutants here.

01:23:41 ►

What I’m talking about is a new and improved form of humanity,

01:23:46 ►

one that can be passed on to our young. Just take a look around and ask yourself if you want to

01:23:53 ►

reincarnate as yet another mindless consumer, or do you want to mutate into an intelligent,

01:24:01 ►

focused, purposeful human being? So let’s hear it for the mutants.

01:24:06 ►

Another thing that struck me when Terrence was talking about evolution,

01:24:11 ►

perhaps just trying things for the sake of variety,

01:24:14 ►

reminded me of a book that you might be interested in.

01:24:18 ►

It’s Stephen Wolfram’s book, A New Kind of Science.

01:24:22 ►

And now I’ll warn you ahead of time that if you’re like me,

01:24:26 ►

it’ll take you probably more than a year to finish reading it.

01:24:29 ►

It did for me.

01:24:31 ►

But some people, and I count myself among them,

01:24:34 ►

happen to think that Wolfram’s ideas are as profound as Newton’s were

01:24:38 ►

when they were first introduced.

01:24:41 ►

And they are as little understood as well, I might add. But in any event, one of the

01:24:47 ►

points he argues for in that book is close to what Terence was saying about evolution trying

01:24:52 ►

all kinds of things, like a mad tinkerer or something like that. It’s an interesting take

01:24:58 ►

on the processes of evolution, and not one that’s completely accepted or hardly accepted at all by the mainstream,

01:25:06 ►

which of course makes me want to look at it all the more closely.

01:25:11 ►

And speaking of the mainstream and ways in which our sacred medicines are entering that

01:25:16 ►

flow, wasn’t it nice to see that piece floating around the net recently about the brilliant

01:25:21 ►

Latin American writer Isabel Allende?

01:25:25 ►

Here’s part of the email I’m talking about, and I quote,

01:25:29 ►

When Allende herself encounters the rare-for-her-but-dreaded writer’s block,

01:25:35 ►

she finds an unusual way around it.

01:25:38 ►

She drinks a potent shamanic rainforest hallucinogen

01:25:41 ►

and disappears into her mind for several days.

01:25:47 ►

During this unorthodox excursion isabel and the following text is actually from isabel ali and a’s new memoir the sum of our days

01:25:55 ►

where she says i crossed through the opening and effortlessly plunged into an absolute void

01:26:01 ►

there was no sensation no spirit not a trace of individual consciousness.

01:26:07 ►

Instead, I felt divine, absolute presence. I was inside the goddess, something I can only define

01:26:14 ►

as love, an impression of oneness. I dissolved into the divine. I felt there was no separation

01:26:22 ►

between me and the rest of all that exists,

01:26:27 ►

all that was light and silence.

01:26:30 ►

I was left with the certainty that we are spirits,

01:26:33 ►

and all that is material is illusory.

01:26:36 ►

That’s the end of her quote.

01:26:42 ►

She also writes that on that voyage she lost her fear of death and her writer’s block as well.

01:26:44 ►

And then she resumed her usual writing schedule and began working for 10 to 12 hours a day until she completed a book.

01:26:53 ►

And speaking of someone else who is putting in a lot of work each week for our community,

01:26:59 ►

I want to thank Allison Terry for her exceptional work of transcribing six of our podcasts so far. Thank you. yet more minds to their work. So thank you so very much, Allison, on behalf of our entire community.

01:27:47 ►

And once I get caught up a bit,

01:27:48 ►

I plan on including some of Allison’s comments about Terrence’s work here in the salon.

01:27:54 ►

After spending so much time with him, phrase by phrase,

01:27:58 ►

she has some interesting comments that I think you’ll be interested in hearing.

01:28:04 ►

So, Allison, I know that I owe you an email or two, and I’ll get back to our project soon.

01:28:08 ►

I’m just running way behind so far this year.

01:28:12 ►

And maybe I can catch up a bit by reading this email from Jeff M.,

01:28:16 ►

because it’s similar to quite a few others I’ve received.

01:28:20 ►

And so I’ll try to catch up with a bunch of you with this one,

01:28:23 ►

and then pointing you to a thread that I plan to begin over at thegirlreport.com.

01:28:28 ►

Here’s what Jeff had to say.

01:28:31 ►

I have heard the names of many books that sound fascinating in the talks you put out.

01:28:35 ►

So I would greatly appreciate it if you would suggest a few of them that you think I would enjoy.

01:28:41 ►

I think that I would be especially interested in any books about consciousness, science, and the universe. I’m sure those are broad topics and you have many books you

01:28:48 ►

could suggest. So I leave it up to you to continue to guide my psychedelic thinking.

01:28:53 ►

P.S. A side effect of my recent fascination with consciousness has been a love for dreams.

01:28:59 ►

I am teaching myself how to become a lucid dreamer and have had some success so far.

01:29:04 ►

I was so excited when I saw your recent podcast titled Psychedelic Dreams,

01:29:08 ►

but even though it was fascinating, it was not on the subject I thought it would be on.

01:29:13 ►

If there are any talks or books that you would like to suggest to amuse my interest in dreams, please say so.

01:29:19 ►

Well, like I said, I’ll try to get a thread going.

01:29:21 ►

Maybe somebody else can get it going before I get out there,

01:29:24 ►

but I don’t know of any good dream books right off hand, but I’m sure some of our fellow slaunters do.

01:29:30 ►

And that they also have some good ideas about your first question.

01:29:33 ►

So I’ll be watching what others have to say over there and adding my own two cents once in a while.

01:29:41 ►

Another email comes from Matt R. who says,

01:29:45 ►

I’m a new listener to your podcast, and I really enjoy it.

01:29:49 ►

In one of your podcasts, either you or someone else mentioned that they like Seattle.

01:29:53 ►

They went on to mention that if it wasn’t for other issues, they would probably want to live there.

01:29:58 ►

Do you remember this or happen to know what issues they were talking about?

01:30:02 ►

I live near Seattle, and I’m starting to get uneasy about the fault lines below us.

01:30:06 ►

Is that what they were referring to or is it there are certain locations that are predicted to be more dangerous at the 2012 event?

01:30:13 ►

Just curious if you know what insight that person had about the Seattle area.

01:30:18 ►

Hmm. I don’t remember anything about a fault line.

01:30:23 ►

The only comment I think I might have made would have been about the long, wet winters up in that part of the world.

01:30:30 ►

I’ve kind of become addicted to seeing the sun every day now that I live here in Southern California.

01:30:36 ►

And so I might have slipped up and said something along those lines, but I don’t know anything about fault lines up that way.

01:30:43 ►

Maybe some of our fellow salonners do, but I do know I love the area and all the people up there.

01:30:48 ►

So if it didn’t rain so much, I’d probably be living there.

01:30:52 ►

Another email comes from Daniel L., who said,

01:30:56 ►

You might already be aware of this, but in case you’re not,

01:30:59 ►

I wanted to tell you that Dr. Phil made an episode about salvia, a very negative and biased episode.

01:31:06 ►

For example, Dr. Phil tells a 16-year-old who got, quote, addicted to salvia,

01:31:12 ►

that salvia is the cause he failed school,

01:31:15 ►

not mentioning that he might have failed school anyway,

01:31:17 ►

and that it doesn’t have to be attributed to salvia, as he automatically assumed.

01:31:22 ►

He also compared it to LSD and labeled all users of it as stupid.

01:31:28 ►

Funny, stupid is a word I would actually use to describe Dr. Phil

01:31:33 ►

and his entire audience, including Oprah.

01:31:36 ►

But that’s just my opinion.

01:31:39 ►

Daniel goes on,

01:31:40 ►

Might be of interest to comment on your podcast

01:31:43 ►

as it demonstrates very clearly and unsubtly

01:31:46 ►

how the media still tend to demonize every drug

01:31:50 ►

and regard it as a teen problem.

01:31:53 ►

My suggestion is that you watch the episode before you go to bed

01:31:56 ►

as it otherwise might get you into a bad mood for the rest of the day.

01:32:01 ►

The show is available on YouTube in two parts

01:32:03 ►

and I’ll post a link along with

01:32:06 ►

program notes for this podcast. Well, thanks for sending the link and pointing that out, Daniel.

01:32:12 ►

As you say, this once again clearly points out how much disinformation about psychoactive

01:32:18 ►

substances is being passed on by the corporate media. But as for the non-corporate media,

01:32:26 ►

if you’re interested in some talk about the upcoming 2009 Burning Man Festival,

01:32:32 ►

you can get a good taste of it on Sancho and Cody’s podcast, Black Light in the Attic.

01:32:38 ►

I’ve mentioned their podcast before because it’s one of my favorites,

01:32:41 ►

and not just because I joined them in their podcast number 14

01:32:45 ►

to talk about their plans for this year’s burn.

01:32:49 ►

And by the way, I did buy my own ticket just yesterday,

01:32:53 ►

so it looks like I’m committed to returning the Palenque Norte Ply Logs to Black Rock City again this year.

01:33:01 ►

And I can almost hear the groans from some of our fellow slaughters who get tired of hearing me talk about Burning Man. Thank you. Over here. Of course, I haven’t told Sancho and Cody that yet.

01:33:28 ►

But I know that they’re listening and they’ll get the news right along with you.

01:33:30 ►

Hope that’s all right with you guys.

01:33:35 ►

And by the way, I didn’t mention it when we talked on Skype the other day. But afterwards, it dawned on me that we hadn’t known each other and hung out together for years like it felt like.

01:33:42 ►

You know, with all of the stories I’ve heard on their podcasts, I feel like we’re old friends,

01:33:47 ►

and I hope that’s the way it is with you and me, too.

01:33:51 ►

You know, even though we haven’t been together in the same physical space, we have been together

01:33:56 ►

here in the theater of the mind, here in cyberdelic space, and somehow that makes the world seem

01:34:04 ►

a little more friendly, if you know what I mean.

01:34:07 ►

And I hear there’s a chance I’m actually going to get to meet Cody in person,

01:34:11 ►

if he can arrange to get out this way for the annual Southern California Writers Conference,

01:34:17 ►

the weekend of February 13th.

01:34:20 ►

Our friend Mateo, by the way, has arranged for a $50 discount to listeners of the Sea Realm, Blacklight, and Psychedelic Salon podcast.

01:34:28 ►

So if you’re interested in attending, just tell the conference ticket sellers that you’re a listener of this podcast, and they supposedly will give you the discount.

01:34:39 ►

And if they don’t, just look for Mateo, and I’m sure he’ll run interference for you, as he’s done for me on more than one occasion.

01:34:48 ►

But I digress.

01:34:50 ►

Actually, Mateo will be teaching two workshops at the conference, as well as doing one-on-one manuscript consultations.

01:34:58 ►

And I’ll post the link so you can see who all of the other speakers are. But if you do plan to attend, why don’t you go to www.mattpalamary.com

01:35:12 ►

and let him know via the contact link that you’re going.

01:35:16 ►

Maybe we’ll put together a little mini salon or something like that.

01:35:21 ►

Another piece of information I want to pass along comes from Louis C., who says,

01:35:26 ►

after listening to the number 143 trialogue, Rethinking Societies, I was wondering what

01:35:32 ►

your opinion is on the Venus Project, resource-based societies, or the Zeitgeist movement.

01:35:40 ►

Hmm, where to begin? First of all, I should say that I don’t know a whole lot about any of them,

01:35:46 ►

other than they seem on first glance to be heading in the right direction.

01:35:51 ►

I’ve visited the website of the Venus Project several times,

01:35:55 ►

and I find that I can spend a significant amount of time there just poking around

01:36:00 ►

and learning about the many interesting things that they’re doing.

01:36:03 ►

And in general, it seems obvious that we have to quickly learn how to convert our wasteful

01:36:08 ►

ways into a sustainable society.

01:36:11 ►

In fact, that seems to me to be our most important project, yet so many of us humans are spending

01:36:18 ►

the majority of our time and resources building bigger and more lethal weapons.

01:36:23 ►

So my hat is off to anyone and everyone who is working on projects that will help lead Thank you. Repulse by War is a step in the right direction in my book. And if I don’t cut this off now, I’ll never get back to working on my new, now long overdue book.

01:36:50 ►

But I do want to mention that there is a new interview with Rupert Sheldrake

01:36:55 ►

that has recently been posted on shamanicfreedomradio.podomatic.com.

01:37:01 ►

This is a new podcast that I haven’t yet had an opportunity to listen to.

01:37:05 ►

And while I normally don’t plug podcasts until they get 10 or so episodes posted,

01:37:11 ►

but since the podcaster is a fellow slawner and participant over at the girlreport.com forums,

01:37:17 ►

and since this fourth program is an interview with someone we just heard from today,

01:37:22 ►

well, I thought I’d tell you about it anyway.

01:37:24 ►

And I do plan on listening to that interview

01:37:27 ►

in the next few days myself.

01:37:30 ►

Now, as always, I’ll close this podcast

01:37:32 ►

by saying that this and all of the podcasts

01:37:34 ►

from the Psychedelic Salon

01:37:36 ►

are available for your use

01:37:38 ►

under the Creative Commons Attribution

01:37:40 ►

Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 License.

01:37:43 ►

And if you have any questions about that,

01:37:44 ►

just click the Creative Commons link

01:37:46 ►

at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,

01:37:50 ►

which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:37:53 ►

And that’s also where you’ll find

01:37:55 ►

the program notes for these podcasts.

01:37:58 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo

01:38:00 ►

signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:38:03 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

168 - What Hawaii Says About Evolution

Program Notes §

Previous Episode §

Next Episode §

Similar Episodes §

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

00:00:19 ► §

00:00:24 ► §

00:00:31 ► §

00:00:36 ► §

00:00:40 ► §

00:00:46 ► §

00:00:54 ► §

00:01:00 ► §

00:01:04 ► §

00:01:12 ► §

00:01:15 ► §

00:01:20 ► §

00:01:27 ► §

00:01:35 ► §

00:01:42 ► §

00:01:45 ► §

00:01:52 ► §

00:01:56 ► §

00:01:59 ► §

00:02:08 ► §

00:02:13 ► §

00:02:21 ► §

00:02:30 ► §

00:02:51 ► §

00:02:59 ► §

00:03:08 ► §

00:03:14 ► §

00:03:27 ► §

00:03:31 ► §

00:03:35 ► §

00:03:40 ► §

00:03:48 ► §

00:03:56 ► §

00:03:59 ► §

00:04:03 ► §

00:04:10 ► §

00:04:31 ► §

00:04:36 ► §

00:04:48 ► §

00:04:51 ► §

00:04:56 ► §

00:05:00 ► §

00:05:04 ► §

00:05:07 ► §

00:05:10 ► §

00:05:12 ► §

00:05:16 ► §

00:05:20 ► §

00:05:23 ► §

00:05:26 ► §

00:05:29 ► §

00:05:33 ► §

00:05:38 ► §

00:05:42 ► §

00:05:47 ► §

00:05:53 ► §

00:06:00 ► §

00:06:11 ► §

00:06:25 ► §

00:06:28 ► §

00:06:33 ► §

00:06:38 ► §

00:06:41 ► §

00:06:46 ► §

00:06:49 ► §

00:06:52 ► §

00:06:58 ► §

00:07:03 ► §

00:07:07 ► §

00:07:14 ► §

00:07:22 ► §