Program Notes
Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna
“The development of current brain size is not the reason that there has been this explosion of technical innovation recently. Brain size hasn’t changed much for 100,000 years.” -Rupert Sheldrake
“It’s much more likely that for most of human history it was not man the huntER but man the huntED. … It wasn’t until about 50,000 years ago that there was an improvement in hunting technologies all around the world, whereby human beings could indeed become fairly effective hunters. But for most of the three and a half million years of hominid history it was man the huntED.” -Rupert Sheldrake
“The shaman is a person, a designated member of the social group, who can mentally change into an animal, who can become so animal-like that other members of the social group are appalled and draw back.” -Terence McKenna
“The domain in which the change [from animal to human] was born, and in which we will live until we leave the body behind us, is the domain of the imagination. And this is what we created that is uniquely human and that has defined us ever since.” -Terence McKenna
“You don’t need to go straight beyond the universe to the divine mind, there’s plenty of lower-level minds than the divine mind that could be out there.” -Rupert Sheldrake
“My notion of the mystical is simply that which remains to be understood, and there will always be a residuum of mystery in principle, but in principle it is not mysterious.” -Terence McKenna [Rupert disagreed with this.]
“The idea that this evolution’s equipped us with minds, and language, and cognitive abilities that enable us to comprehend the entire universe, where it’s come from, where it’s going, what minds and mind may lie beyond what we see, the idea that this very small part of the evolutionary system, with all the limitations inherent in it, could comprehend the whole seems to me a rather improbable supposition.” -Rupert Sheldrake
“It’s not decided what’s going to happen next, there are imaginations of many levels, including human imaginations, at work here, looking at alternative possibilities. New things happen, and then what happens next depends on what’s happened already and the new possibilities of imagination that open up, but without the goal being fixed in advance.” -Rupert Sheldrake
“[Evolution] is a game, one of the rules of which is: The rules can change.” -Terence McKenna
“Time is not a tyranny. It’s a relativistic medium subject to all kinds of plasticity. There are many ways out of any assumed corner we paint ourselves into.” -Terence McKenna
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227 - Shulgin-Watts_ Sasha at MIT plus Alan Watts
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229 - Trialogue_ The Evolutionary Mind Part 2
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And I’d like to begin by first thanking Jared S., our longtime salonner Colin F., and Chris D., all of whom sent in donations this week to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
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And by the way, Jared, that was a clever message you inserted into your donation amount. At least I
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read it as such. So let’s get on with the program today. And I have to admit that even though we’ve
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only had one week off from Terrence McKenna, I was already beginning to feel the effects of
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withdrawal. So I decided to wean us off the bard McKenna by diluting him a bit with two other
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popular speakers here in the salon, namely Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake, who joined with
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Terrence for one of their final trialogues. Actually, you can find this trialogue in three
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parts on Google Video under the title, Trialogues at the Edge of the Millennium.
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But to tell the truth, I’ve never gotten around to watching it for two reasons. The first is that I find it kind of difficult to sit at my computer for that long at a stretch.
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And the other reason is that the title kind of put me off,
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since the millennium is now well behind us.
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But I came across a copy of the audio that Bruce Dahmer and I ripped
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from the video copy that Ralph Abraham gave us of this trialogue,
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and we digitized it, and for some reason I stumbled on it today
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and decided to check it out.
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Right away, Rupert Sheldrake began by saying that their topic would be
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the evolutionary mind.
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And so that’s why I titled this podcast the way I did.
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And after just a few minutes of listening to Rupert, he caught my attention to the point where I realized that you might also enjoy hearing this.
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And so here we are.
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So let’s go back to Santa Cruz, California on June 6th, 1998,
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way back before Windows 98 was even released.
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And we’ll join Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, and Rupert Sheldrake
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as they ponder over the evolution of consciousness.
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We’re going to talk about the evolutionary mind this morning.
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It’s the topic of our book that’s just coming out at the moment.
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And it prepares the way for thinking about the change in consciousness at the millennium.
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Obviously what happens at the millennium is something to do with our minds.
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It’s not as if the laws of nature are all
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going to change at the year 2000. It’s a mental event, a social event, a cultural event. And
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we’re going to start this morning by talking about the evolutionary context for it. Our
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book called The Evolutionary Mind comes at a time when there’s a tremendous amount of interest in evolutionary psychology.
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Psychologists in the last five to ten years have discovered Darwin.
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And I keep meeting psychologists who speak to me with that sort of enthusiasm and bright-eyed quality of the new convert.
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They’ve seen the light light they’ve discovered Darwin and
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I wonder why as a biologist they haven’t discovered Darwin a long time ago
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Darwin after all opened up the field of evolutionary psychology with his book
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the expression of emotions in man and the animals and there was a lot of
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speculation at the end of the 19th century about the evolution of consciousness.
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However, academic psychology this century has got involved in behaviorism, rats in cages pushing levers,
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and now cognitive psychology, computer models of neural processes, none of which has left much space for evolutionary theorizing. So
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they’ve come rather late to this evolutionary speculation. There’s been
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permission given to biologists to speculate about evolution of the mind in
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this way by the analysis of selfish genes. They feel if they’re talking
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about selfish genes it’s
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somehow scientific and it’s given everyone permission. This kind of
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discussion is epitomized in Steven Pinker’s recent book How the Mind Works
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and it’s based on the idea that human behavior is determined by genes. There’s a
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gene for everything and they then work out in theoretical terms
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what these genes would lead us to expect the selfish behavior of the genes
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unfortunately their conclusions are not terribly surprising or deep and at the end of a lecture
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he gave recently in london which was met with considerable skepticism somebody said well now
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just give us one
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the most important clear idea you’ve been able to deduce
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from your selfish gene theory
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and he said that after lengthy calculations
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they’d found that because females have only
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one or two eggs at a time
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which are a rare and precious resource that needs conserving
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whereas males
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produced millions of sperm they deduced after a lot of working out that women
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would tend to seek high-status males and want to stay with them whereas men would
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tend to be promiscuous to spread selfish genes more freely there was an air of disappointment in the lecture hall.
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Somebody was had to say, is that all? Anyway, the fact that this rather
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closed world of selfish gene speculation is going on has given other people
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within the scientific world permission to think more widely about evolution.
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Most evolutionary theories are purely speculative, since we don’t really know what happened in the past.
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Many of them are just so stories, rather like Kipling’s accounts of how the leopard got its spots, and so on.
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But there have been, in this modern explosion of speculation about our evolutionary past,
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there are several rather interesting ideas that have come up, and I just wanted to bring up two or three of these this morning,
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because although there’s no shortage of speculations about what happened in the human past in the books of Terence McKenna,
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there are several new ideas which might amplify
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these ideas about conscious evolution. The first ideas that I want to talk about are put forward
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in a book by Stephen Mithen, M-I-T-H-E-N, called The Prehistory of the Mind. He’s a British
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archaeologist, but in this book he’s brought together a wealth of evidence
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from the fossil record, from archaeology, from the study of primate behavior and from the study of
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child psychology to put together a very interesting discussion of what happened to human minds during
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the three and a half million years of human evolution before
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recorded history began. The first upright walking hominids are now believed to have emerged in
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Africa over three and a half million years ago, Australopithecus. These were upright walking
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tool using, they used simple stone tools, precursors of ourselves.
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Human history, three and a half million years of it,
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went on before we have the records from the great civilizations.
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The domestication of animals, the agricultural revolution,
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occurred 10,000 years ago.
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The first civilizations about 5,000 years ago, maybe 7,000 years ago.
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Industrialization, two or,000 years ago. Industrialization, 200 or 300 years ago.
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But for the vast majority of human history,
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people were living in quite a different way.
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And it seems to be a very reasonable supposition
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that a great deal of our psychology,
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a great deal of the working of our minds
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has been shaped by this enormously long period
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about which we know so little.
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What Maiden points out is that these, although we don’t know what they thought about and
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how they worked, these early human beings, these early hominids, must have had several
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different kinds of intelligence.
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They must have had a social intelligence, were social beings they lived in social groups
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and we know from studies of chimpanzees
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and other social primates
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that there are very subtle interactions within the group
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there are dominance interactions
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there are cooperative interactions
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and to get it right requires a kind of intelligence
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about how other members of the group are going to react
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what’s appropriate behavior and so on
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all social animals must involve some kind of social intelligence how other members of the group are going to react, what’s appropriate behavior, and so on.
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All social animals must involve some kind of social intelligence.
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And we can reasonably assume that our ancestors, our hominid ancestors,
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had a social intelligence to enable them to live together and work together in social groups.
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They had a technical intelligence that enabled them to make stone tools and maybe other technical devices or technical things,
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maybe fibres and string which haven’t left traces in the archaeological record.
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They must have had a natural historical intelligence
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because if you’re living as a hunter-gatherer, as they did,
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then unless you know what to hunt and how to hunt it,
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what the habits of
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the animals are that you’re hunting if you know unless you know what to gather
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where to gather it what things are good to eat what things are good as herbs you
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don’t get very far and this requires an enormously detailed knowledge of natural
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history it’s not just human beings chimpanzees have to have this and many
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other creatures so this must have been part
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of their mental makeup and then at some stage they began to talk and they must have had a linguistic
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intelligence we don’t know when language began some people put it 50,000 years ago some people
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put it much longer ago but that really nobody knows language leaves no fossil traces but something very strange happened about
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a hundred thousand years ago our ancestors achieved brain sizes roughly the same as ours today
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so for a hundred thousand years human beings have had brains of the current capacity yet
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for a hundred thousand years they were not writing programs and
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building computers and thinking up Einstein’s equations and so on. Something
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else was going on with those brains and we haven’t a clue what it was. The brain
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size, the development of current brain size is not the reason that there’s been
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this explosion of technical innovation recently. Brain size hasn’t changed much for 100,000 years.
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And it wasn’t until about 50,000 years ago
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that there was the beginnings of art,
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paintings in caves and that kind of thing.
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Some things…
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What happened?
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Why did art and civilization only begin
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tens of thousands of years after the brain had reached its present capacity?
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And what enabled these different kinds of intelligence to give rise to the agricultural revolution, modern humanity, and so on?
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Well, the hypothesis that Mythen puts forward is that about 50,000 years ago,
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some crucial transition occurred whereby these previously separate intelligences somehow came together,
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cross-fertilized each other, and produced the beginnings of characteristically human mentality.
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The connection of social and technical intelligence
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meant that people started using technical skills
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for making things like jewellery, ornaments, grave goods
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the mixing of technical and natural historical intelligence
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led to a great improvement in hunting technologies
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in weapons, in axe heads and spear heads and arrow heads and so on.
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The merging of social and natural historical intelligence
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led to a whole kind of mythic understanding of the animal and the natural world,
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which we find in all cultures around the world today.
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And combining these with linguistic intelligence,
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with combining these with linguistic intelligence,
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there was a whole burst of human development, of mental development.
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He compares this to a cathedral,
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a Romanesque and Norman cathedral has side chapels almost sealed off from each other with no interaction,
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whereas the great Gothic cathedral sort of open up
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and all these different things can mix together.
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Somehow he thinks this transition 50,000 years ago was associated with the origin of religion
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and seems to have been based on a sense of human connection not just with the earth but with the heavens.
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When I asked Maithen how he understood this to have happened,
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especially given his chosen metaphor of the cathedral,
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I said, do you think there really was a breakthrough from some extra terrestrial intelligence into the human realm at that stage,
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since all your evidence points to it?
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And he said, of course course not that’s impossible and so I
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said how do you know it’s impossible since everybody all around the world
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according to your own evidence seems to have undergone this transition it seems
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to have shaped human mentality as we know it he said he said oh yes he said
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well the very fact everyone believes it shows that this is an incredibly persistent illusion.
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And I said, but how do you know it’s an illusion?
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He said, because it’s so persistent.
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And I said, surely you can have things that are true that are persistent too.
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He admitted in the end it was just
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a matter of opinion um but the everything he said points towards some breakthrough to another realm
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of consciousness around 50 000 years ago and something that happened with human groups all
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around the earth and i think this is the first time I’ve seen a convincing building up of evidence from somebody who’s coming from a very hard-nosed position
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that gives us some clue as to a major shift in consciousness that happened
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and it involved some connection with a higher dimension.
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Now, some people will like to interpret that in terms of visits of spaceships,
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chariots of the gods and so forth.
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I think that there are many other ways of thinking about it
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and I can guess that Terence will be able to suggest at least one.
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But before we get, there’s one other speculation about the past I want to mention which I found
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particularly interesting out of this year’s crop of books on the subject which is Barbara
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Ehrenreich’s book Blood Rites she’s an American writer based in New York and in her book Blood
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Rites completely changed around my idea of human prehistory. What she shows very
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convincingly is that our image of man the hunter striding forth onto the
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African savannah about three million years ago is in fact pretty implausible.
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Human beings were small, they couldn’t run very fast, they weren’t
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particularly strong, their tools were extremely primitive. It’s much more likely that for most of human history it was not man the hunter, but man the hunt head.
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In fact, most bone remains of early hominids show the marks and scratches and tooth marks of large cats on them.
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Human beings were on the African savannah with lots of game but also with
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lots of big predators. They were extremely vulnerable and a great deal of
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modern of human mentality she argues was shaped by millions of years of being
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preyed on by large predators. It wasn’t until about 50,000 years ago that there
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was a improvement in hunting technologies all around the world,
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whereby human beings could indeed become fairly effective hunters.
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But for most of the three and a half million years of hominid history, it was man the hunt head.
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She shows, very interestingly, that this sheds light on many religious traditions,
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because in many religious traditions
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there’s the idea of the victim, the sacrificial victim.
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If you’re a collective, a herd of wildebeest
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or baboons in a group out in the desert
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and a predator approaches,
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the predators usually attack isolated members of the group.
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The old, the young, or sometimes the young males who are defending the group the old the young or sometimes the young
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males who are defending the group on the periphery those are the ones that get
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killed first and when they’ve killed one of them they start eating it and very
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often the rest of the group then relax and they often stand around and watch
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the predator eating the prey because once they’ve got one victim they’re not
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it they’re they’re not hungry anymore they’re not interested in the rest.
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So one dies for the sake of the rest.
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This is a simple fact of predation.
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And she shows that this pattern, the idea of a sacrificial victim
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that dies for the sake of the rest, is deeply embedded in our consciousness
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as an archetypal pattern based in this biological fact of predation and the fact that we were preyed upon she also shows that most of the
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early visions of gods and goddesses were in the form of carnivores even jehovah is a carnivore
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the story of cain and abel where cain is a farmer and offers the fruit of the earth to God as a sacrifice
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and Abel is a herder and offers a sheep.
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God prefers the sacrifice of Abel.
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He prefers meat to vegetarian diet and that’s why Cain kills Abel.
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He’s jealous.
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Cain kills Abel. He’s jealous. And so this carnivorous quality of the gods is associated with images of the gods in association with predatory animals. She then goes on to show that
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whole nations identify with predators as a kind of justification for war making, where the whole
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nation becomes like a predator. The symbol of England and many other countries is the lion of America,
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of the United States, the eagle, and so on.
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All around the world you find these predatory animals as national emblems.
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Well, I think her insights are particularly interesting
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and because of this long history,
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it shows so much of our mythology, religious structure and fears
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are related to this long period of being preyed on. She shows the fantasies, the nightmares
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of young children in modern cities like New York until they’re about five years old, and
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not about child molesters and realistic fears, or at least the fears their parents have.
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They’re about being eaten by monsters and wild animals this is what
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most children’s nightmares are about and this would go back to a long period of history um so
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here we have um two ideas my then’s ideas and barbara erin reich’s ideas about early human
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history which would give memories i would think of them as memories in the collective memory
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through morphic resonance jung would call them collective archetypes in the collective unconscious.
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Things which are built into our past, our memory, that are shaped the way our minds
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are today, of which we’re largely unaware because our normal study of history begins
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with the civilizations of the Near East, with Egypt, with Greece, Rome and so forth
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and leaves out the previous three and a half million years of human history
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which have really done so much to shape our evolutionary nature
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and therefore condition the way we respond to each other today and in the future.
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I think that our evolutionary history is rooted in the past
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but I’ve been reading on my journey here
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this novel On the Edge
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just published in England last week
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by Edward St. Aubin
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it’s set in California
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the crucial scenes occur in Esalen
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and here’s a conversation going on in the hot tubs
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on page 130.
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According to Terence McKenna, said Flavia,
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who happens to be a genius instead of an arrogant British jerk,
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history is rooted in the future.
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So… History is rooted in the future. Can I jump in?
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Well, first of all, let’s just assume that I’ve responded to this with the usual rap about diet, mushrooms, so forth and so on
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that if you know anything about my work you have heard ad nauseum ad infinitum.
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So just go past that and say and remind you, Rup and I have not really had a good
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conversation for 20 months but I guess arranging ourselves according to the demands of the
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morphogenetic field we’re sort of thinking along the same creodes because
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in my trying to understand at greater levels this moment of transition 50,000
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years ago or this moment of breakthrough what exactly were the elements and how did it happen,
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I’ve sort of come very close to this area that Rupert’s indicating this morning,
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because I can’t help but notice that a successful predator must think
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like prey
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that there is this peculiar
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intellectual symbiosis
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that goes on
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between the predator
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and the prey
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and
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hunting cats
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top carnivores I think
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internalize the behaviors of their prey.
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Well, at the very dawn of the emergence of the evolutionary emergence of mind,
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the central human figure in that equation is the shaman.
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is the shaman.
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And the shaman at the high paleolithic stage is essentially a kind of sanctioned psychotic.
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In other words, able to move into states of mind
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so extreme that their immediate social efficacy is arguable.
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And to condense that into common English English what I mean is the shaman is
00:24:08 ►
a person a designated member of the social group who can mentally change into an animal who can
00:24:16 ►
become so animal like that other members of the social group are appalled and draw back and so in a weird way at this fractal boundary where
00:24:29 ►
human consciousness emerges the first human consciousness was not human at all it was
00:24:36 ►
a human ability to model effectively the thinking processes of other predators.
00:24:46 ►
With mathematical models.
00:24:48 ►
With mathematical models and precision, yes.
00:24:51 ►
And so, yes, what we’re talking about when we’re talking about hunting
00:24:59 ►
is we’re talking about strategic thinking.
00:25:02 ►
And strategic thinking always involves bifurcating trees of choice if we
00:25:10 ►
go to the waterhole at dawn perhaps we can make a kill if we take food and leave the women and
00:25:18 ►
children and go in this direction several days perhaps we we will make a kill. Perhaps not.
00:25:25 ►
Perhaps by abandoning the women and the children,
00:25:27 ►
we will undercut our gene pool
00:25:29 ►
and return to catastrophe.
00:25:32 ►
Strategic thinking.
00:25:33 ►
What strategic thinking requires
00:25:36 ►
is the ability to contemplate
00:25:41 ►
possibilities not immediately present.
00:25:46 ►
In other words, there’s a kind of time-binding function here.
00:25:50 ►
So I’m really not so much posing a question to Rupp as adembrating what he said.
00:25:56 ►
I think this is where it all comes together in this very complicated relationship between fear, expectation, strategizing, and the imagination.
00:26:10 ►
The two areas where I’m sure we spend a great deal of time studying these bifurcating trees of possibility
00:26:20 ►
were in the food gathering and hunting domain and then in the sexual domain,
00:26:27 ►
which today we call erotic fantasy.
00:26:31 ►
But in the high Paleolithic,
00:26:33 ►
erotic fantasy was rather closely welded
00:26:36 ►
to where your genes went
00:26:39 ►
and how your biological propagation process is preceded.
00:26:46 ►
So the key, whether you believe it was through the stimulation of psilocybin,
00:26:53 ►
or through the aping of the behavior of other top predators that we aspired to compete with,
00:27:00 ►
whatever the causal mechanism, the domain in which the change was born and
00:27:07 ►
in which we will live until we leave the body behind us is the domain of the
00:27:14 ►
imagination and this is what we created that is uniquely human and that has
00:27:22 ►
defined us ever since.
00:27:30 ►
And as this discussion today proceeds to look more into the future,
00:27:38 ►
I think we will see that as the imagination has been our past and the cradle of our humanness, so it also is the domain in which our trans-human metamorphosis will occur.
00:27:49 ►
Something like that.
00:27:52 ►
As far as I can see, this is dancing around an intellectual black hole or something.
00:27:58 ►
Here we have, the question is posed, as I gather, of Stephen Mython, that in the evolution of consciousness or culture, I’m not sure which,
00:28:11 ►
that there was a bifurcation 50,000 years ago, which is of interest to us because we’re in one now.
00:28:18 ►
And the question is, what was it caused by?
00:28:32 ►
And the question is what was it caused by? And then Rupert proposed that you would of course answer the psilocybin mushroom on the plains of Africa. But you didn’t.
00:28:34 ►
And the need to think strategically. throughout the three and a half million years evolution of hominids, but also in pungents, apes, bees, and swarming bees, schooling fish, and so on.
00:28:52 ►
This is more or less no news here.
00:28:54 ►
What was it then that happened 50,000 years ago, if anything happened?
00:28:58 ►
So I know that this will not be a favorite hypothesis in this audience,
00:29:05 ►
but it’s one that has to be counted.
00:29:07 ►
Do you ask, are there any other…
00:29:09 ►
What did he suggest, actually, Stephen Mython?
00:29:13 ►
He doesn’t give a very clear explanation as to why this might have happened.
00:29:17 ►
He’s a youngish man, I suppose.
00:29:21 ►
Who probably has not read the great books of his predecessors,
00:29:26 ►
such as, let’s say, for example, Alexander Marchand,
00:29:30 ►
who led a great group of, a combined group of two species,
00:29:35 ►
a neurophysiologist and archaeologist in the distant past,
00:29:40 ►
to propose that miracle that occurred, like the beginning of Cro-Magnon 50,000 years ago
00:29:46 ►
had to do with a structural change in neurophysiology.
00:29:50 ►
This presents the view, if you want to look at it that way, God as a brain surgeon,
00:29:57 ►
also known as the hole in the head, where the connection between the hemispheres was improved in the Corpus Colossum, and this physiological evolution provided an evolutionary advantage in the hunting and so on.
00:30:11 ►
And as an evolution theorist, you would have to say, well, if there was divine brain surgery,
00:30:21 ►
then it could have been in response to a leading element in the evolution
00:30:26 ►
of some morphogenetic field now thinking of this as a chicken and egg kind of thing is
00:30:33 ►
okay is like the physiological change there was a physiological change was there not didn’t
00:30:40 ►
Stephen Meython mention that well you can’t from skulls all you’ve
00:30:45 ►
got oh you can no no you can that’s the whole point that these skulls have been
00:30:49 ►
examined microscopically by Alexander Marshak and the changes in the skull
00:30:56 ►
morphological changes sharply divide that particular event including the
00:31:03 ►
enlargement of the frontal lobes,
00:31:05 ►
which was considered because of Brock’s brain to be the physiological foundation for the development of speech.
00:31:13 ►
Whereas we would say probably I’m guessing we would agree that the large brain Brock’s brain evolved
00:31:23 ►
because as we had already started speaking and had the need for more vocabulary,
00:31:27 ►
the things favored the larger vocabulary in terms of hunting, gathering, escaping large carnivores, and so on.
00:31:35 ►
Anyway, there’s a dichotomy of two different views about the spifurcation, the divine intervention one,
00:31:41 ►
and the physiological DNA, random random mutation natural selection one.
00:31:46 ►
Isn’t that it?
00:31:47 ►
And in this dichotomy, we see you opposed because Terence believes the eating psilocybin
00:31:55 ►
mushrooms is a purely material explanation, right?
00:31:59 ►
It requires no recourse to a divine intervention in the field.
00:32:03 ►
Angels, dreams, you use the word
00:32:06 ►
imagination suggesting a literal divine intervention he’s just speaking
00:32:11 ►
metaphorically right my then might be my then speaking metaphorically I think I’m
00:32:15 ►
speaking literally because I think you see one of the things we have to explain
00:32:20 ►
is that religion or some sense of a beyond the human realm of consciousness
00:32:25 ►
is found in every human culture today
00:32:27 ►
in some sense, in some way or another
00:32:30 ►
a world of spirits, a world of angels, of gods
00:32:32 ►
but to explain the universal distribution of this
00:32:37 ►
as part of traditional human thinking
00:32:39 ►
requires at some stage in the past
00:32:42 ►
there had been an awareness of this other realm of consciousness
00:32:46 ►
now this is not incompatible with psilocybin or any other drug hypothesis
00:32:51 ►
because those might have kick-started this connection with another realm of consciousness
00:32:57 ►
but if we assume that today all over the world
00:33:01 ►
shamanic cultures and all other cultures have the sense of other levels
00:33:05 ►
and other kinds of conscious entities beyond the human level
00:33:09 ►
some in animal forms and some in forms way beyond that
00:33:13 ►
we have to assume that at some stage in the past there was a linking with these other realms of consciousness
00:33:20 ►
whatever they are, not just metaphors, not just archetypes in the collective mind
00:33:24 ►
but forms of consciousness
00:33:26 ►
that might well
00:33:27 ►
and I think actually are
00:33:28 ►
out there
00:33:29 ►
well I’m
00:33:31 ►
in trying to think conservatively
00:33:33 ►
about the possibility
00:33:35 ►
of a non-human local intelligence
00:33:38 ►
it seems to me that
00:33:41 ►
in a way nature herself
00:33:43 ►
presents as an intelligence that in a way nature herself presents as an intelligence,
00:33:46 ►
that the understanding of nature is the understanding of complex integrated systems of such complexity
00:33:56 ►
that to deny them consciousness is just a reluctance of the reductionist mind,
00:34:03 ►
that for anyone not burdened by that prejudice,
00:34:07 ►
it’s self-evident that nature is alive, cognizant, responding.
00:34:15 ►
It’s interesting that really all it seems we can agree upon here
00:34:20 ►
is that the time frame is roughly 50,000 years.
00:34:27 ►
here is that the time frame is roughly 50,000 years well so a whole bunch of things are triangulating on that moment one could say as I’ve argued that it was
00:34:33 ►
the eating of psilocybin mushrooms you could make a more general statement and
00:34:38 ►
say that was a subset of the consequence of an omnivorous diet.
00:34:51 ►
But if I may, where exactly were these mushrooms 100,000 years ago?
00:34:56 ►
Well, the way I think about it is there was an incremental involvement that had punctuated breakthroughs in it.
00:35:02 ►
In other words, the slow meeting of mind mushroom social complexity
00:35:08 ►
acoustical abilities linked to neural physiological states didn’t just smoothly proceed it all came
00:35:16 ►
together but then at a certain point it gelled and this is this 50,000 year point where social understanding, technology, linguistic repertoires, depth of diet.
00:35:32 ►
You know, we’re clinging to this material stuff.
00:35:35 ►
I think we can. It’s about time that we.
00:35:37 ►
Well, there will be a material.
00:35:39 ►
Even if you believe angels descended from on high.
00:35:43 ►
Well, I suppose that, OK, you have the software that draws the novelty wave.
00:35:48 ►
You’re a novelty theorist.
00:35:50 ►
We might appeal to novelty theory as an explanatory strategy here,
00:35:55 ►
a cognitive strategy in dealing with the bifurcation 50,000 years ago.
00:35:58 ►
If you run the program back for 100,000 years,
00:36:01 ►
do you or do you not find a kink there in the novelty wave in 50,000 BC no it’s not based on data only extrapolation but is
00:36:10 ►
there isn’t there well I think there were a series of breakthroughs for
00:36:14 ►
instance a hundred and twenty thousand years ago the modern Homo sapiens sapien
00:36:20 ►
form appeared in other words no in short no there’s no both and I think the
00:36:28 ►
invention of writing 9,000 years ago was an enormous breakthrough but all of
00:36:36 ►
these things proceed out of the further integration complexification of the
00:36:41 ►
nervous system in connection with the function of the imagination.
00:36:46 ►
I believe this, that you’re presenting yourself as a conventional materialist evolutionary theorist.
00:36:55 ►
The galactarians who built the mushroom in 10 years.
00:37:04 ►
This is your pal, your favorite.
00:37:07 ►
Well, you see, with the mushroom theory, you can always just say they encountered the mushroom and then it proceeded from there.
00:37:13 ►
But you can go one step back and say who placed the mushroom in their path.
00:37:17 ►
Go on, give your hand there.
00:37:20 ►
And that was the preceding civilization of Lemurians who… What’s wrong with Lemurians?
00:37:28 ►
They died out at that point because they had poisoned the environment with toxic chemicals
00:37:33 ►
and created global climate warming, which resulted in a drying of the desert,
00:37:38 ►
the Sahara Desert, from which sprung forth a bloom of psychedelic mushrooms
00:37:43 ►
that had been hiding under the surface previously
00:37:45 ►
because it was too wet.
00:37:47 ►
That’s why.
00:37:48 ►
The loud hum I hear is William of Ockham spinning in his grave.
00:37:57 ►
I see.
00:37:58 ►
You think that DNA and the expression of genes is a simpler explanation than a divine intervention
00:38:04 ►
at the level of the novelty wave.
00:38:06 ►
I think that the DNA is divine.
00:38:10 ►
Ah.
00:38:11 ►
But William…
00:38:13 ►
Ah, escape from his…
00:38:15 ►
his trap.
00:38:18 ►
Ruth, what you as a middleman should…
00:38:22 ►
I think, you see, I can’t quite get your position
00:38:27 ►
because the new hard-nosed skeptic that you’re revealing to us here
00:38:31 ►
in other places, you see, it doesn’t seem to fit too well
00:38:35 ►
with Terence McKenna on non-human entities, machine elves, etc.
00:38:40 ►
I mean, the idea of other kinds of consciousness,
00:38:43 ►
other forms of entity that are not just inside
00:38:46 ►
our brains and appearing in relation to deranged states of mind, pharmacologically induced.
00:38:52 ►
The idea that they’re out there seems to me an essential part of most of what I’ve heard
00:38:57 ►
you say over many years.
00:38:59 ►
Well, I’m sort of getting into what I intend to say later, but I think the key thing is not to concentrate on materialist versus non-materialist explanations,
00:39:11 ►
but to realize that the new vision of nature is not as matter or energy, but as information.
00:39:21 ►
And information is expressed in the DNA, it’s expressed epigenetically in culture
00:39:27 ►
what’s happening is that information
00:39:29 ►
was running itself on a primate platform
00:39:33 ►
but evolving according to its own agenda
00:39:37 ►
in a sense we have a symbiotic relationship
00:39:40 ►
to a non-material being
00:39:43 ►
which we call language
00:39:44 ►
and we think it’s ours and we think we
00:39:48 ►
control it this isn’t what’s happening it’s running itself it’s time sharing a primate nervous system
00:39:55 ►
and evolving toward its own conclusions now i have to shot my talk
00:40:01 ►
and it’s so early in the morning.
00:40:06 ►
Yes, well, this is this damn drug
00:40:08 ►
I’m drinking.
00:40:13 ►
It makes you give it all away too soon.
00:40:18 ►
But I think, I mean,
00:40:20 ►
the discussion so far
00:40:21 ►
has been remarkably earthbound.
00:40:23 ►
And if we assume that information is not confined to this planet
00:40:27 ►
if we, to put it in your information terminology
00:40:31 ►
if we assume that consciousness is not limited to the earth
00:40:34 ►
if we assume that there are not only conscious beings on other planets
00:40:38 ►
but also that other elements of the universe
00:40:41 ►
like stars, suns, galaxies may have minds or consciousness,
00:40:47 ►
which I do assume, then it becomes very likely that at some stage a consciousness on earth
00:40:54 ►
could link somehow with those higher forms of consciousness. Who knows how? Maybe by
00:40:59 ►
something like interplanetary telepathy, something of that kind. So if there’s some link of human consciousness
00:41:07 ►
with other forms of consciousness in the universe,
00:41:09 ►
then when that contact was established,
00:41:12 ►
there would be a big transition.
00:41:14 ►
That it could have been propelled or kicked off by drugs,
00:41:17 ►
it could be kicked off by some mutation
00:41:20 ►
that led to more nervous interconnections.
00:41:23 ►
But when it happens,
00:41:25 ►
this connection with other forms of consciousness
00:41:27 ►
would transform human nature.
00:41:31 ►
Yes.
00:41:31 ►
And it would fit with the facts,
00:41:33 ►
because there’s a belief in this.
00:41:34 ►
You see, now we’re off the planet at last.
00:41:35 ►
Can I remind you, Terence,
00:41:37 ►
of a quotation from the front pages of your first book,
00:41:41 ►
speculating that mushroom spores are intergalactic travelers that they have a hard
00:41:49 ►
case impervious to ultraviolet rays that enables them to float on the galactic wind from planetary
00:41:56 ►
system to planetary system bringing us as rupert suggests linguistic communications from other life forms, including immaterial life forms that they’ve been in conversation with in the past.
00:42:10 ►
I think that this is an approximate summary of your preface.
00:42:13 ►
But notice how materialist and space and time bound that hypothesis is.
00:42:21 ►
I could agree with everything Rupert said.
00:42:27 ►
is I could agree with everything Rupert said I think now our intellectual toolkit has been enriched by the virtual confirmation of the idea that there is a bell type non-local aspect to the universe so
00:42:37 ►
I do think we’re in contact with all intelligence in the universe through the bell non-local
00:42:47 ►
intelligence in the universe through the Bell non-local connection but that means that it has no historicity this connection it has always been there
00:42:52 ►
complete and entire so why there is a sense of progressing toward it or it
00:42:58 ►
erupting through into normal earthbound affairs is not because someone in the Andromeda galaxy makes a decision now
00:43:08 ►
we will reveal ourselves to the earthlings.
00:43:11 ►
It’s that the antenna system and the nervous system of the earthlings evolved through a
00:43:18 ►
point where suddenly this became self-evident.
00:43:22 ►
Well, now we’re coming to the question for the first time in the enlarged context in which we have not only all space but all time
00:43:32 ►
informing us and here I may remind you of father beads letter which is quoted
00:43:38 ►
in the last chapter of our new book where he challenges us to consider the
00:43:44 ►
mystical element,
00:43:53 ►
which he describes as more or less in the language of David Bohm’s implicate order, that all time and all space somehow exists as an interconnected ball of intelligence,
00:44:01 ►
which is, let’s just assume such a thing.
00:44:07 ►
of intelligence which is informed let’s just assume such a thing nevertheless the science of our colleagues is more or less a true story of evolution that there was a change that language
00:44:16 ►
did come upon us in a certain moment that before that moment we didn’t speak afterwards we did and
00:44:23 ►
and so the question arises and i think this in my interpretation, the question we started with here.
00:44:29 ►
How could it be that with or without a divine intervention, that there is this more or less linear progress in human intelligence,
00:44:39 ►
culture, capability, tool using and exponential population growth that is correlated
00:44:47 ►
without any causal implication with the descent of the novelty wave why do we
00:44:52 ►
have this peculiar artifact this is an observational fact that there is this
00:44:57 ►
increase in complexity in civilization apparently looking for a spectacular
00:45:03 ►
transformation which we are associating with the word
00:45:06 ►
millennium now what’s going on well novelty theory would just say the
00:45:12 ►
universe is a complexity conserving engine whatever complexity it achieves
00:45:18 ►
by any means it makes that the platform for a further thrust into deeper
00:45:24 ►
complexity if you don’t like novelty theory because the morphogenetic fields It makes that the platform for a further thrust into deeper complexity.
00:45:25 ►
If you don’t like novelty theory…
00:45:27 ►
Because the morphogenetic field never forgets.
00:45:30 ►
It forgets a little, but it can be set back, but it can never be set back to zero.
00:45:37 ►
And it always, once it gets out of the ditch, it heads back in the same direction.
00:45:42 ►
It has a vector field preference and then you
00:45:46 ►
mentioned david bohm his idea of emergent properties seems to achieve the same end without
00:45:54 ►
a telos of novelty theory he simply says when you complexify a system new properties will emerge suddenly and unexpectedly that couldn’t have been predicted.
00:46:08 ►
If you put emergence theory with novelty theory,
00:46:11 ►
you see that the universe could not but proceed along the line of complexification of morphogenetic expression,
00:46:21 ►
density of connectivity, and all the things that retard entropy and
00:46:27 ►
give rise to in fact the complex non entropic ordered apparently teleologically
00:46:34 ►
informed cosmos that we’re in well now we see them but what you’ve described
00:46:41 ►
What you’ve described is… Why do you laugh?
00:46:44 ►
It was one of those verbs that was a bit extraordinary.
00:46:47 ►
Okay.
00:46:49 ►
There is then revealed a kind of evolutionary theory as a cosmological hypothesis.
00:46:56 ►
This is a theological position, basically.
00:47:00 ►
It’s a teleological position.
00:47:02 ►
That there is a timeless, implicate order.
00:47:04 ►
And there is life on planet Earth and in the rest of the universe,
00:47:08 ►
which evolves according to this theoretical rule by an increase of complexity.
00:47:17 ►
When something is revealed, there’s a development.
00:47:20 ►
It’s not forgotten. It builds upon that.
00:47:22 ►
And this mystical unit, while knowing all, is not telling all,
00:47:29 ►
but revealing gradually because just that’s the law of life as we know it.
00:47:35 ►
In three-dimensional space and time.
00:47:37 ►
With Rupert and I, really, from my point of view,
00:47:41 ►
the only difference between the morphogenetic field that he has enthusiastically proposed and ideas of novelty theory is for Rupp it’s
00:47:52 ►
pushed from the past for me it’s pulled from the future. Well that’s what Teddy was
00:47:57 ►
saying in this book. Well what you get in the end of the day is the same thing
00:48:03 ►
it’s just a matter of preference and how much of orthodoxy you want to grind against.
00:48:08 ►
The phobia against telos is an artifact of 19th century deism and doesn’t go very deep.
00:48:19 ►
You described the complexification of the universe as self-evident and I believe it is self-evident and the failure of science
00:48:28 ►
to address this is what makes it so frustrating and imprecise so late in the game
00:48:35 ►
but the trouble with the emergence view you’ve been putting forward
00:48:39 ►
is that it’s still very earthbound you see there’s obviously been a major emergence of complexity in human culture
00:48:44 ►
still very earthbound you see there’s obviously been a major emergence of complexity in human culture there’s also been a huge emergence of complexity in the amazon jungle and the malayan
00:48:49 ►
rainforest um arguably far greater than anything we’ve achieved through technology and millions of
00:48:55 ►
species of beetles insects plants and so forth but the the it seems to me that long before all
00:49:02 ►
these things happened on earth we’ve got the possibility of much higher levels of consciousness outside the Earth.
00:49:07 ►
And as you know, I’m a devotee of the idea of the sun as conscious.
00:49:14 ►
And the stars.
00:49:16 ►
If you take the materialist view that consciousness interfaces with the brain
00:49:20 ►
through complex electromagnetic patterns of activity,
00:49:24 ►
then those on the sun, which we’re learning more and more about every day,
00:49:29 ►
have unbelievably complex chaotic patterns, resonant patterns of acoustic waves going through the Sun,
00:49:37 ►
polar reversals every 11 years, resonant patterns of electromagnetic waves. My thinking about this was much influenced by a science fiction novel by Fred Hoyle,
00:49:48 ►
published in the 50s, called The Black Cloud,
00:49:51 ►
where Fred Hoyle shows that to imagine intelligence necessarily grounded,
00:49:57 ►
either in copper wires and computers or in nerve cells and brains,
00:50:01 ►
is a limitation of this.
00:50:02 ►
So you could have an intelligent system working through a plasma,
00:50:06 ►
an electrically charged cloud,
00:50:08 ►
and indeed, I think, through something like the sun.
00:50:11 ►
So if the sun is in fact conscious,
00:50:14 ►
if stars have a kind of consciousness,
00:50:17 ►
then of course it raises questions,
00:50:19 ►
well, what do they think about,
00:50:20 ►
what do they do with this consciousness?
00:50:22 ►
But it’s very likely that the kind of consciousness
00:50:25 ►
they have would be at a vastly higher level than our own so when we’re talking about the emergence
00:50:30 ►
of higher consciousness in human beings it’s not as if for the first time in the universe some
00:50:35 ►
higher level of consciousness emerges it could be that for the first time in the history of the
00:50:41 ►
solar system our minds somehow contact the sort of
00:50:46 ►
intelligence that much greater intelligence that exists out there and
00:50:50 ►
because I think it’s possible to think of the stars and the Sun as conscious and
00:50:55 ►
then galaxies as conscious and you don’t need to go straight beyond the universe
00:51:00 ►
to the divine mind there’s plenty of lower level minds than the divine mind that could
00:51:06 ►
be out there and of course traditional views of spirits and angels tell us that there are many
00:51:11 ►
many many innumerable levels of intelligence beyond our own within the galaxy many associated
00:51:17 ►
with the stars so we don’t necessarily have to have the idea it’s all happened and emerged on
00:51:23 ►
earth through a complexification.
00:51:25 ►
We can have the thing, we reach a point where there’s like a spark passes
00:51:28 ►
between a terrestrial consciousness, a human one,
00:51:32 ►
with more interconnected halves of the brain,
00:51:35 ►
people in the first throes of a mind-boggling mushroom trip, etc.
00:51:42 ►
But somehow, whatever happens, there happens does this like a spark a
00:51:45 ►
connection established and it seems to me that this hypothesis has the great advantage of actually
00:51:51 ►
accounting for what’s believed or unwell namely that there is some connection between human
00:51:55 ►
intelligence and that of the sky because in terms of imagination you see predators and
00:52:02 ►
we are we are human beings were both predators and prey,
00:52:07 ►
but so are lots of other animals,
00:52:09 ►
and presumably any hunting animal has to have the imagination
00:52:12 ►
and the ability to identify with the prey.
00:52:15 ►
In fact, René Tom, years ago, produced a mathematical model of predator and prey
00:52:19 ►
where there has to be a kind of internalization of the prey in the predator’s mind
00:52:23 ►
in order to get the right strategy this is not specifically human and it’s not enough as a basis of the
00:52:30 ►
imagination i think this connection with realms beyond the human which would give such an enlarged
00:52:35 ►
scope for imagination that to take literally what so many people around the world say in their myths seems to me the simplest hypothesis.
00:52:53 ►
Well, I’m more friendly to this idea of non-biologically based forms of consciousness than I was the last time we talked because of this fact I mentioned
00:53:00 ►
that I now think wherever there is a sufficiently complex informational environment,
00:53:07 ►
the functions of life, self-replication, et cetera, et cetera, mutation, adaptation can
00:53:14 ►
go on.
00:53:16 ►
But obviously, most of the intelligence in the universe would be utterly incomprehensible
00:53:23 ►
to us because it is so
00:53:25 ►
different so we’re transducing virtually the entire hologram of possible
00:53:32 ►
intelligence in the universe but the reason our fantasies of angels and
00:53:37 ►
aliens give us hominids with binocular vision who use acoustical speech, in other words, creatures very similar to ourselves,
00:53:47 ►
is because we only can recognize what is familiar
00:53:52 ►
in this universal information field.
00:53:55 ►
So we sail right past the star mind, the galaxy mind,
00:54:01 ►
to communicate with a race of winged hominids
00:54:04 ►
around Zenebel Ganu v. Prime, simply
00:54:07 ►
because they are enough like us that we can grok our possibility of a relationship.
00:54:15 ►
It seems to me that this is just very begging the question in traditional and cheap fashion.
00:54:22 ►
Oh, good, Ralph.
00:54:30 ►
traditional and cheap fashion because… Oh good Ralph. I mean I’m all in favor of celestial intelligence and in fact I could even entertain a conversation with
00:54:35 ►
a Pleiade and I don’t mind. But the question I mean we started with the
00:54:40 ►
problem of the evolution the evolutionary mind is in fact the title of our book
00:54:45 ►
and the question of the evolution the progress or even the origin of all these things is our
00:54:52 ►
ultimate question now if our view is local to planet earth we can say okay we’re being taught
00:54:58 ►
by bolts from the blue and we have these you know meddling celestial intelligence that are reaching
00:55:03 ►
out pretend to be bell and tell us bell are reaching out, pretend to be Bell,
00:55:05 ►
and tell us Bell’s theorem, give us mushrooms, pretend to be sent from the solar wind or whatever.
00:55:11 ►
But where do they come from?
00:55:13 ►
The evolutionary problem, then, is just transferred onto another more remote place.
00:55:18 ►
Now, as I understand, Rupert’s idea of the morphogenetic field is that these other places are also in evolution,
00:55:26 ►
and the whole system is in co-evolution.
00:55:35 ►
And that is an attempt, I think, one of the first ones in the history of intelligent discourse on this subject.
00:55:47 ►
The first attempt to get rid of the hypothesis of timeless truth. But if you get rid of that hypothesis you have a whole bunch of weird problems such as then you have to talk about the
00:55:52 ►
speed of propagation of novelty or morphogenetic fields and then you’re
00:55:58 ►
slammed to the wall because you have to either come up with a number which you
00:56:02 ►
fit into a mathematical architecture or you say that it’s instantaneous which returns you to this holistic more metaphysical thing
00:56:13 ►
if you don’t believe that it’s coming from the bell space
00:56:17 ►
then you have a whole bunch of these kinds of problems which I think
00:56:20 ►
intuitively make it too complicated
00:56:24 ►
let it be instantaneous.
00:56:26 ►
I mean, I think the whole question of time is, in fact, behind this problem,
00:56:31 ►
that we have this idea about time, and then we’re trying to talk about a timeless.
00:56:37 ►
So one way to eliminate this cognitive dissonance is to say,
00:56:41 ►
okay, there is no timeless, it’s all in coevolution,
00:56:44 ►
and we’re a little bit behind the evolution of the Pleiadians.
00:56:48 ►
And then, well, where does that come from?
00:56:49 ►
We’re stuck with the problem.
00:56:51 ►
So you, I think, you’re talking of the attractor at the end of time is more or less the beyond time
00:56:59 ►
is the intelligence that informs, that nourishes the accumulation of complexity as we go along, apparently in time.
00:57:10 ►
Well, I think the attractor is complete in and of itself in another dimension.
00:57:14 ►
The process of history and biological evolution is the growing complex enough to grow toward the thing and understand it.
00:57:24 ►
So is our process of
00:57:26 ►
growth then nourished or not nourished by some flow of something that comes
00:57:32 ►
from this attractor at the end of time in another dimension? It contributes the
00:57:37 ►
trajectory of our approach. It defines the the domain in which we are moving
00:57:44 ►
toward it. We couldn’t even talk this
00:57:46 ►
without chaos theory no chaos theory stands behind this very powerful I don’t
00:57:54 ►
know Ralph people have been talking about this for a long time before chaos
00:57:57 ►
theory came along but in such a muddled fashion fashion compared with the sublime clarity of our present conclusion
00:58:06 ►
precisely
00:58:06 ►
so I don’t quite see why chaos theory
00:58:14 ►
is an essential ingredient
00:58:15 ►
forget chaos theory
00:58:16 ►
I’m interested in the possibility
00:58:20 ►
that in your deepest musings
00:58:22 ►
on this problem you have rather
00:58:24 ►
avoided Father Bede’s challenge
00:58:26 ►
to grapple with infinity
00:58:28 ►
and that in the idea of the co-evolution of morphogenetic fields
00:58:34 ►
begs the question of the existence of a timeless or eternal
00:58:38 ►
truth, pattern, guidance or something
00:58:41 ►
which is, well
00:58:44 ►
I mean, Father father bead used the word
00:58:47 ►
mystical but of course he’s was a priest i don’t think he meant the essentially incomprehensible
00:58:55 ►
in other words i don’t think we’re going to get to a place where we then say from here on it is
00:59:00 ►
mystery and rational apprehension fails my notion of the mystical is simply
00:59:07 ►
that which remains to be understood and there will always be a residuum of mystery in principle
00:59:15 ►
but in principle it is not mysterious let me oh i think i don’t agree with that, I must say. But you might not. Well, we’d soon be out of business if we’re talking at the edge of the unthinkable,
00:59:31 ►
if we actually, everything suddenly becomes thinkable.
00:59:36 ►
Even in principle?
00:59:39 ►
I think that given the nature of a human mind,
00:59:43 ►
evolved to deal with large predators, hunting on African plains, gathering herbs, etc.
00:59:50 ►
Dealing with social problems, human relationships, etc.
00:59:54 ►
The idea that this evolution has equipped us with minds and language and cognitive abilities that enable us to comprehend the entire universe, where it’s come from, where it’s going,
01:00:08 ►
what minds and mind may lie beyond what we see.
01:00:13 ►
The idea that this very small part of the evolutionary system,
01:00:16 ►
with all the limitations inherent in it, could comprehend the whole,
01:00:21 ►
seems to me a rather improbable supposition. And I think that the point about about mysticism or what the Greek Church calls apophatic
01:00:27 ►
the apophatic that is that that the the ultimate in the end does lie beyond what we can think
01:00:33 ►
Our thinking can only take us so far and this isn’t just because we haven’t got enough professors of mathematics yet
01:00:39 ►
Or and it’s only a matter of bigger computers and so forth that there are grave limits on how far
01:00:46 ►
a very limited and evolutionary bound conceptual apparatus can take us
01:00:50 ►
we’d never be able to embrace
01:00:53 ►
as you yourself pointed out
01:00:54 ►
the kind of mentality of the sun or a galaxy
01:00:57 ►
because its concerns are so much greater and more remote than our own
01:01:00 ►
let alone the universe as a whole
01:01:02 ►
but in principle some other form of organization
01:01:06 ►
could in other words these things are not sealed from understanding in principle they are simply
01:01:14 ►
difficult for primate based minds running limited software at low hertz rate to accommodate.
01:01:29 ►
Yes, but I mean, presumably the solar mind, if there is one,
01:01:32 ►
could understand, have a pretty good intuitive understanding of the minds of other suns.
01:01:35 ►
I mean, if the sun has a mind, part of its activity, I think,
01:01:39 ►
would be concerned with the solar system,
01:01:41 ►
if you like, the brain of the solar system.
01:01:44 ►
But part of its activity would be concerned
01:01:46 ►
with its peer group, namely
01:01:47 ►
other stars
01:01:48 ►
and then part of their
01:01:51 ►
activity would be related to
01:01:53 ►
the mind or purpose
01:01:55 ►
or telos of the entire galaxy
01:01:58 ►
and those kinds
01:02:00 ►
of concerns, you know
01:02:01 ►
the kind of relationship problems that our sun
01:02:03 ►
may be having with other suns or double star systems like that of Sirius the kind of
01:02:10 ►
relationship problems those are rather beyond the scope of human psychotherapy
01:02:19 ►
and or indeed human thought there may be so many things going on as indeed there
01:02:24 ►
are at levels we’re not very…
01:02:26 ►
we don’t really understand very well the world of the goldfish or the ant.
01:02:30 ►
So, there are certain limitations,
01:02:33 ►
which I don’t think are just a temporary limitation
01:02:37 ►
on what we can conceive or imagine.
01:02:39 ►
Well then, until we run out of energy to conceive and imagine,
01:02:43 ►
are we conceiving of the solar mind, if it exists, as evolving or fixed?
01:02:50 ►
No, it must evolve.
01:02:51 ►
It must evolve, perhaps, on a different time scale,
01:02:54 ►
which is the time scale of relationship in their own community,
01:02:57 ►
which is the 15 billion year time frame since the Big Bang.
01:03:03 ►
Is that what you’re thinking, that we’re coming to the crux of it here the evolution of the solar mind would be
01:03:09 ►
related to what happens here because we’re part of the solar system and I
01:03:14 ►
would assume that because all planets and everything that’s happening within
01:03:17 ►
the solar system feeds back and influences the solar mind that it would
01:03:21 ►
somehow it’s not just the mind of the sun it’s the mind of the solar system but it’s evolving since the birth of the milky way and uh that’s right what’s going on
01:03:31 ►
here is part of its evolution we’re in within it and contributing to it so the morphogenetic field
01:03:38 ►
then of all and everything had a birth moment with the big Bang? Is that what you’re thinking? Well, I’m assuming that if we take the Big Bang theory to be… if we assume there was a Big Bang,
01:03:50 ►
I know you’re very skeptical about the Big Bang, it’s only a story, it’s a myth.
01:03:54 ►
But if we take this creation myth of modern science, then that must be the birth of the field of the whole system.
01:04:01 ►
Yes. And modern physics in the unified field theory
01:04:05 ►
super string theory
01:04:07 ►
tries to explain
01:04:07 ►
how you start with a unified
01:04:09 ►
ten dimensional field
01:04:11 ►
that then evolves
01:04:12 ►
the other fields of nature
01:04:13 ►
within it
01:04:14 ►
so we thought
01:04:15 ►
that’s standard physics
01:04:16 ►
I mean it’s not
01:04:17 ►
part of my particular
01:04:19 ►
view of things
01:04:20 ►
no but the consciousness
01:04:20 ►
of this
01:04:21 ►
all and everything
01:04:22 ►
I mean the
01:04:23 ►
ok the solar minds contribute to the consciousness of the Milky Way,
01:04:27 ►
which is one galaxy, which then has the psychotherapist in its relationship with the nearby galaxy.
01:04:33 ►
Yes, in the galactic cluster.
01:04:34 ►
And actually there’s a synchrony of thought due to the fact that Bell’s theorem connects them from the Big Bang and so on.
01:04:43 ►
But isn’t all you’re saying is that the universe is a modular hierarchy
01:04:48 ►
from atom through cells, societies?
01:04:51 ►
I’m challenging you to answer where the morphogenesis comes from
01:04:55 ►
that leads to complexity and things like the birth of life
01:04:59 ►
if it’s simply the co-evolution of a physical system since the Big Bang.
01:05:04 ►
Novelty theory has answered this question.
01:05:08 ►
It comes from the future.
01:05:09 ►
To the satisfaction of your mind and all smaller.
01:05:16 ►
Well, at least to the satisfaction of someone.
01:05:22 ►
But it doesn’t explain either the origin of the novelty wave itself, nor does it…
01:05:28 ►
You see, there are many models, of course, of cosmic evolution.
01:05:33 ►
One of them is that because you have the cosmic expansion, that for some reason the primal explosion, Big Bang, throws everything apart.
01:05:42 ►
So it’s all moving apart that means things cool down as they
01:05:45 ►
cool down more form and order can appear and it literally makes more space for things to happen in
01:05:51 ►
that the driving the arrow of time the arrow of evolutionary time and the driving engine of
01:05:56 ►
evolution is the cosmic expansion which means nothing can ever be stable can ever stay the
01:06:01 ►
same because the whole cosmos is unstable it It’s always expanding and cooling. And given that, through all sorts of phase transitions, as you cool
01:06:10 ►
a plasma down, as atoms appear, and then as gases condense to liquids and liquids to solids,
01:06:16 ►
the cooling process involves the appearance of more order, more form. When there was less
01:06:21 ►
before, there was very little, the moment of the Big Bang so the cooling and expansion
01:06:26 ►
more or less force
01:06:28 ►
the appearance of more
01:06:30 ►
structure, pattern, order
01:06:32 ►
and you could say
01:06:34 ►
that that gives scope for creativity
01:06:36 ►
all the time, there’s always the scope
01:06:38 ►
for new things to happen
01:06:39 ►
and it’s a long standing debate among evolutionary
01:06:42 ►
theorists as to whether this is following
01:06:44 ►
a pre-established plan,
01:06:46 ►
or being drawn towards an already existing future goal,
01:06:50 ►
or following a pre-existing set of laws or rules, like the novelty wave,
01:06:55 ►
or whether it’s all being made up as it goes along.
01:06:58 ►
And I’m much influenced in my thinking by Bergson, you know, Henri Bergson, in his book Creative Evolution.
01:07:06 ►
He very strongly defends the idea it’s all being made up as it goes along. That doesn’t mean to say that
01:07:11 ►
around the evolutionary process are not minds and imagination, but it makes the creative
01:07:16 ►
process of evolution more interesting rather than less, because it’s not decided what’s
01:07:21 ►
going to happen next. There are imaginations of many levels including human imaginations at work here
01:07:27 ►
looking at alternative possibilities
01:07:29 ►
new things happen
01:07:31 ►
and then what happens next depends on what’s happened already
01:07:34 ►
and the new possibilities of imagination that open up
01:07:37 ►
but without the goal being fixed in advance
01:07:40 ►
no I have no problem with that
01:07:42 ►
I don’t see how for instance someone could hypothesize that
01:07:46 ►
all the laws came into existence simultaneous with the big bang for example did the laws of
01:07:53 ►
gene segregation come into being a billion years before biology existed anywhere in the universe
01:08:00 ►
that seems naive and preposterous Whitehead had this idea of what he called the aboriginal god.
01:08:07 ►
What we call natural laws are simply habits of a very ingrained sort.
01:08:15 ►
And habits can change.
01:08:18 ►
And in more dynamic regimes, the mind, the society,
01:08:23 ►
habits can change overnight.
01:08:25 ►
So what is given is that there shall be ever greater complexity.
01:08:32 ►
What is not given is how this complexity shall arrange itself
01:08:37 ►
or what the final end state will be.
01:08:40 ►
It’s a story that’s being told as it unfolds it’s a game who’s one of the rules of
01:08:48 ►
which is the rules can change how are we doing here time-wise good good real good good good
01:08:58 ►
well we’re getting nowhere
01:09:06 ►
in other words this is the problem
01:09:07 ►
there’s the watch in the desert
01:09:09 ►
it’s ticking by itself or God put it there
01:09:11 ►
we don’t know
01:09:12 ►
the question posed at the beginning
01:09:16 ►
we actually haven’t progressed
01:09:18 ►
at all in settling
01:09:19 ►
although it looks like there’s a kind of convergence
01:09:22 ►
in that
01:09:23 ►
is this right? no I have a feeling it looks like there’s a kind of convergence in that.
01:09:26 ►
Is this right?
01:09:30 ►
No, I have the feeling we’ve actually made some progress.
01:09:33 ►
But I always have that feeling.
01:09:39 ►
Well, the attractor at the end of time, then, as I gather,
01:09:45 ►
only has in it simple rules of a board game that says the complexity is going to increase and how it’s evolving and things like DNA rules and stuff.
01:09:49 ►
We can make up as we please as we go along.
01:09:52 ►
Whatever natural selection approves of will then come to pass.
01:09:57 ►
Complexity will increase. That’s the only rule.
01:09:59 ►
And so, in fact, you agree that time is slowing down.
01:10:02 ►
And so, in fact, you agree that time is slowing down.
01:10:12 ►
Well, time is slowing down as the events potentially contained within any given moment exponentially expand.
01:10:17 ►
In other words, we’re sort of in a situation of a spaceship falling into a black hole.
01:10:22 ►
From the point of view of a distant observer, the spaceship falls into the black hole,
01:10:25 ►
there’s a flash of hard radiation and the story is over from the point of view of the people on the spaceship
01:10:28 ►
the relativistic stretching of the timeline
01:10:32 ►
means you fall forever
01:10:34 ►
and you never reach the conclusion
01:10:36 ►
so in fact the consummation of the universe
01:10:39 ►
may be only 14 years away
01:10:42 ►
but there may be enough time between now and then to reiterate the
01:10:48 ►
life of this universe a trillion to the trillionth times. Time is not a tyranny, it’s a relativistic
01:10:57 ►
medium subject to all kinds of plasticity. There are many ways out of any assumed corner
01:11:07 ►
we paint ourselves into.
01:11:18 ►
I think we’ve ground to a halt.
01:11:25 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:11:28 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:11:34 ►
Well, I have to admit that when this recording began,
01:11:38 ►
I was a little concerned that it was going to be too dry for us.
01:11:42 ►
But by the time Rupert got to postulating the sentience of our sun
01:11:46 ►
and that it may be having relationship issues with its peers,
01:11:50 ►
well, that’s when I knew that this was going to be a fun ride once again.
01:11:56 ►
And while I appreciate the mainline story
01:11:59 ►
as to the origins of what we call historical humans
01:12:02 ►
that allegedly began around 12,000 years ago,
01:12:05 ►
as Rupert pointed out early on,
01:12:08 ►
I think you may find it interesting to also take a look at some of the newer ideas
01:12:13 ►
about how far back in time civilized human history actually may reach.
01:12:17 ►
But I’ll leave those avenues of inquiry up to you.
01:12:21 ►
All I’ll say is that I found some fascinating material about that
01:12:24 ►
when I followed
01:12:26 ►
some of those trails myself. But we’ll leave that for today and get on with a couple of announcements.
01:12:33 ►
First of all, there’s a relatively new podcast that you may be interested in.
01:12:38 ►
I found it through a link on our Notes from the Psychedelic Salon podcast blog,
01:12:43 ►
and you may not be aware of this, but on the left side column I’ve attached the feeds from Thank you. a link on our blog in that left column. And it was through a link to Dose Nation’s story that I found
01:13:07 ►
the In a Perfect World blog, where Rock Brazom’s number 28 program is an excellent interview with
01:13:15 ►
the research pioneer and ethnopharmacologist Dennis McKenna, who talks primarily about the
01:13:23 ►
global reach that ayahuasca is now extending.
01:13:26 ►
But Dennis also gives what I consider to be an excellent criticism of Terence’s time wave musings.
01:13:33 ►
I guess I like it because it parallels my own thinking about the time wave,
01:13:36 ►
but I know that several of our fellow salonners are working with that concept,
01:13:41 ►
and they may want to avail themselves of Dennis’ critique before
01:13:45 ►
getting too deeply stuck in what may very soon be a discarded working hypothesis.
01:13:51 ►
Or maybe they’ll find me in 2013 and say they told me so.
01:13:56 ►
Now that would be really nice, but I’m not counting on it.
01:14:00 ►
Another thing you may be interested in, particularly in the light of the ever-growing disaster caused by deep ocean drilling,
01:14:07 ►
is the investigation of yet unknown forms of potential energy.
01:14:12 ►
Unfortunately, the establishment press has sidelined most of the stories about advances in the research of what physicists may be calling dark energy.
01:14:21 ►
However, there is still a significant amount of work being done in this field that I think
01:14:27 ►
deserves wider recognition if it is to at least be properly judged.
01:14:31 ►
And to nudge the mainstream in that direction, my friend Chris Toussaint, along with Matt
01:14:37 ►
Baird, is developing 13 one-hour episodes for television and the internet, a program
01:14:44 ►
that’s titled The Ultimate Energy Showdown.
01:14:47 ►
And it’ll demonstrate and prove or disprove new energy devices that could power our home automobiles and the electric grid.
01:14:57 ►
And what they plan to do is to combine the do it yourself practical does it work philosophy that the Mythbusters program uses, but along
01:15:06 ►
with the scientific integrity and creative imagination of NOVA.
01:15:11 ►
So if you would like to help get this project off the ground, you can go to www.kickstarter.com
01:15:18 ►
and find the Ultimate Energy Showdown page where you can pledge to help.
01:15:24 ►
Another thing you may want to become a part of is a new Google group that Bruce Dahmer recently started.
01:15:30 ►
It’s under the group name Terrence McKenna.
01:15:33 ►
It’s all lowercase, one word.
01:15:36 ►
But the URL is groups.google.com slash group and then slash T McKenna, all lowercase.
01:15:45 ►
You’ll find it, I’m sure.
01:15:47 ►
Now, right now, there are only 13 members,
01:15:50 ►
so if you are interested in joining, this would probably be a good time to do it.
01:15:55 ►
Also, I have an update on what I had hoped to be a trip to the UK this summer.
01:16:00 ►
The bad news, at least for me, is that I’m not going to be able to make it over there myself this year.
01:16:06 ►
But I want to thank all of our fellow salonners who offered to help me get a place to speak,
01:16:11 ►
places to stay, rides, and all kinds of wonderful offers to help.
01:16:16 ►
I sincerely appreciate your offers and still hope to make it there again one day.
01:16:21 ►
It just won’t be this year.
01:16:24 ►
But the good news is that Bruce Dahmer is still going to be there
01:16:28 ►
and, in fact, has now scheduled a talk and get-together
01:16:31 ►
that I think is going to be held on July 13th.
01:16:34 ►
Yeah, definitely July 13th at the October Gallery.
01:16:38 ►
And it’ll be part of their Ecology, Cosmos, and Consciousness lecture series
01:16:44 ►
in association with the Scientific and Medical Network.
01:16:48 ►
Now, Bruce’s talk is titled,
01:16:50 ►
Terence McKenna’s Elves, Eckhart Tolle’s Egos, and Bruce Dahmer’s Avatars,
01:16:55 ►
New Tools to Forge or Forgo a New Earth.
01:17:00 ►
And for those of us who can’t be there in person,
01:17:02 ►
I’m sure that Bruce will record it and post it on his own website
01:17:07 ►
which is damer.com
01:17:10 ►
D-A-M-E-R dot com
01:17:11 ►
and you can find a lot of other little goodies
01:17:13 ►
out there right now too
01:17:14 ►
I’ll try to give another reminder about this
01:17:18 ►
in a week or so
01:17:19 ►
but if you’re planning on attending
01:17:20 ►
you should probably make your reservation soon
01:17:23 ►
as I understand space is going to be limited. And you can find out more about the details
01:17:28 ►
on the October Gallery’s website at www.octobergallery.co.uk.
01:17:36 ►
Well, that’ll
01:17:37 ►
do it for today, and so I’ll again close today’s podcast by
01:17:41 ►
reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the psychedelic salon
01:17:45 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the creative commons
01:17:50 ►
attribution non-commercial share like 3.0 license and if you have any questions about that just
01:17:55 ►
click the creative commons link at the bottom of the psychedelic salon web page which you can find
01:18:00 ►
at psychedelicsalon.org and if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the psychedelic salon,
01:18:07 ►
you can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation,
01:18:11 ►
which is available as an audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:18:17 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:18:22 ►
Be well, my friends.