234 - The World Soul

Program Notes §

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

“I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it.” -Rupert Sheldrake

When asked if he believed in randomness, Terence quickly said, “No,” and then he went on to say, “Randomness is the least likely thing. Nowhere in nature do you encounter it.”

“If there is no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos?” -Rupert Sheldrake

“Not thinking about the World Soul but the individual soul, that the seizure of DMT is almost like a simulacrum of death itself, and that you seem to see into an ecology of souls.” -Terence McKenna

“The World Soul, I think, is in communication with us in the culminating moment of human history. This is all being scripted for a purpose and toward an end unglimpsed by us but tied up with the survival of everything.” -Terence McKenna

“Tourism is a kind of secularized form of pilgrimage.” -Rupert Sheldrake

“At the root of many problems is the denial of the problem and the fact that we maintain unconsciousness of the problem.” -Ralph Abraham

“I hold monotheism responsible for the mess that we’re in from Abraham right on down to the present moment. I think it is the metaphor which is responsible for the dominator break-out, and that until we get a more polytheistic, nature-oriented conception of reality we will be pretty much under the gun.” -Terence McKenna

“For my money, monotheism is the single most reactionary force in all of human history. I don’t even know what is running second.” -Terence McKenna

“Democracy is a step away from anarchy.” -Terence McKenna

“Perhaps to unify consciousness it isn’t a Western hemisphere goddess we need but simply a recognition of Gaia.” -Terence McKenna

Previous Episode §

233 - Ram Das and Timothy Leary – 1983 Harvard Reunion

Next Episode §

235 - Osmond, Stolaroff, & Hubbard Discuss Psychedelics

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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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And with me, at least virtually, is fellow salonner and regular donor, Mark C.,

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whose longtime support I really appreciate.

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So, hey, thanks again, Mark.

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Now, I’ve got something for you today that you’ve been waiting to hear for quite a while now.

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At least that is, if you heard my podcast number 67 that I posted on the 22nd of December back in 2006.

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That was when I was podcasting the first of the trial log tapes that Ralph Abraham loaned to us to use here in the salon.

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And as I told you in the introduction to that program, one of the tapes in the series didn’t get digitized. And what happened was that

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Bruce Dahmer and I were up for several days in a row doing the digitizing of a whole box of cassette

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tapes that Ralph had loaned us. And somehow during the night, I mistakenly recorded tape three in the

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first series twice and overlooked tape four. What really got to me was the fact that the missing

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tape was labeled, at least according to the notes that I made at the time,

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it was labeled The Mushroom and The World’s Soul.

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So, I shared a sense of disappointment with you when that tape went missing.

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Well, here we are, not even four years later, and guess what?

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Bruce and Ralph hunted that tape down and digitized it for us so we can play it today.

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Ralph hunted that tape down and digitized it for us so we can play it today.

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I guess it was probably about 20 years ago that I wrote a little short story titled The Crayon Drawer,

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which was about setting yourself up for a disappointment with too high expectations.

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And guess what? I’m still doing that to myself.

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I was sure that this talk would reveal the final secret that I’m searching for, or at least be another interesting talk about mushroom consciousness.

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But alas, once again, I set myself up for disappointment, because unless I missed it somewhere, the word mushroom didn’t even come up once.

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In fact, it took them almost 30 minutes to even get to the world soul part.

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And interestingly, at least to me, is the fact that they’d been talking for almost an hour before they discovered that they were talking about different concepts.

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If I heard them right, and I’m going to listen again with you right now, Terrence thought of the world soul as some sort of Gaian entity, while Rupert and Ralph were conceptualizing about a cosmic level entity. Actually, that was one of my favorite parts, to be honest, because it let me know that

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even guys as smart as these three can have a breakdown in communications, like I seem to have

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on a more frequent basis than I like to admit. Like that guy in the movie says, what we have here is a failure to communicate.

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And that may just be the biggest problem

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we humans have created for ourselves, I guess.

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The fact that even when we think we know

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what somebody is talking about,

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we probably are only coming up with an approximation

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of what they’re thinking.

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But rather than any more of me approximating what was said,

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why don’t we just listen to it now

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and see what Ralph Abraham,

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Rupert Sheldrake, and Terence McKenna had to say about the world’s soul

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way back in 1989.

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So, would anyone like to say anything?

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Anything you’d like about what you think is going on,

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what further things you’d like to see examined, what you think about it, anything?

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Yeah, I wanted to ask if the chaos, the whole idea of chaos, is there different stages, different transformations, different cycles of chaos you may have been talking about it the whole time and I missed it but I didn’t

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hear that

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there were

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different

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growth periods

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and so forth

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of chaos

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you mean

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in the

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mathematical

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models for

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chaos

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yeah

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is there

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like stages

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of being

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is there

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differentiations

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well

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the simplest

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and intuitively most meaningful descriptor

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of the mathematical models for chaos is the dimension.

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And the dimension is roughly the number of independent actors

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required in cooperation according to some game rule

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which can produce that particular kind of chaotic behavior.

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And this number is not an integer.

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So it’s called fractal dimension.

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Thus you have…

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It starts more or less with one.

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One is too simple to be chaotic.

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But some very chaotic systems have fractal dimension 1.1,

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and then it goes up to infinity.

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The largest that’s been actually observed is around 600,

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because it’s extremely difficult to measure this parameter.

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But still, according to Terence’s theory of the novelty wave,

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we should know just what form the transition to chaos would take.

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I mean, wouldn’t you expect the novelty wave to be involved in the transition to chaos?

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Well, in principle, they have to be the same thing.

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You know, you can push the fractal model to the point of reductio ad absurdum.

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Ralph and I were talking about this this morning.

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Everyone’s fond of saying that coastlines and forest distributions and all this stuff are fractal. Well, doesn’t this imply that there is then a global fractal? There is a fractal

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dimension which when you feed it into your computer and wrap the data

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around a sphere the continents and oceans of earth should appear and in principle again to the

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absurd level you should be able to then telescope in on that portion of this data that is wrapped around the sphere that corresponds to Northern

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California, and on your computer screen should appear Esalen hung on the cliffs of Big Sur

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with us sitting in a room inside discussing the matter. That would be the perfect proof of the

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power of that metaphor. But obviously obviously this is not going to happen,

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or at least I assume that the world is not that quirky,

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that there would be many a slip

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twixt the fork and the tongue

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before you got that clear a picture.

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But this is the…

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I’ve had experiences with fractal reality

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which prove to me, you know, it’s sort of eerie magical power.

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An example of a shamanic encounter with a fractal would be, there was a vast beach, a vast beach in both directions.

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And I began walking on this beach and I came to a

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The beach was absolutely empty and I came to a black stone of a certain size sitting there and

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I noticed it and then I kept walking on this beach and after quite a long while

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I came upon another black stone

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Exactly like the first one so strikingly like the first one, that I was just, you know, transfixed by it.

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And then an idea came to me, which is a way of saying that, and then the Gaian world soul touched me with information. and I put down the second black rock and turned back the way I had come and counted off my steps

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to return to the first black rock it was like seven hundred and sixty five steps and so then

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having reached the first black rock I continued in that direction and began counting my steps again.

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And in 770 steps, I came to a third black rock.

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These are the only three black rocks on this beach.

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was operating as a huge multiple parallel processing computer to solve all the wave equations inside this bay

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or in this coastal region

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and was then depositing these rocks.

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They were like the residuum of the solution to this equation.

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Well, being able to see into nature

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like that is

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to my mind to see into the workings

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of the world soul

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which is why I tell the story

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because we’ve mentioned the world soul here

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but it is not part of the loop of creativity, chaos, and imagination.

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It somehow is the umbrella and the subject about which all that is in orbit.

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So if, I just want to see if I have something straight here,

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if form arises out of chaos,

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then can I assume that the same is true for morphogenetic fields?

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They also are formed out of chaos.

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And if that is true, are those morphogenetic fields

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modulated by the novelty wave in terms of their density of novelty?

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Well, I think that new morphogenetic fields come into being

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in the indeterminacy of processes in the world.

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So in that sense, they’re born out of chaos, or they take form in chaos.

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The thing is, for a new pattern to arise, you have to have a space for it to arise in.

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And if everything’s full up with patterns, you know, just like if in a discussion everything’s full up with people talking like us,

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you know, there’s no space for other things to happen or get in. Just like if in a discussion everything’s full up with people talking like us.

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There’s no space for other things to happen or get in.

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And I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to rise up within it.

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But we come back to the question we’ve been talking about so much.

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How does the new pattern rise up within it?

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Is it pulled up from above,

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from the ocean of chaos, or is it pushed up from below? Or is it both?

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And so my question is also the relationship between that process and the novelty waves.

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Is there some relationship between them? I’m trying to correlate sort of all three of yours.

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All right. Well, the thing is that the novelty wave, as I used to understand Terence’s idea,

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was that there was this novelty wave that was principally manifested in human history.

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I now realize that he’s claiming that the novelty wave is a cosmic principle of the first magnitude,

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that it implies the expansion of the universe is not just a smooth expansion,

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but the universe itself is expanding at the rate of the novelty wave,

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which could be empirically tested by looking at redshifts in galaxies from day to day

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to see whether they’re fluctuating according to the novelty wave.

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We’ve just worked out a series of experimental tests of the novelty wave, of which this is one.

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And if that’s the case, then all novelty, all new form would come into being in accordance with this novelty wave, of which this is one. And if that’s the case, then all novelty, all new form,

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would come into being in accordance with this novelty wave.

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And the periods when the novelty wave was plunging into novelty,

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as Terence puts it, you’d get a lot of new patterns and forms emerging.

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At other periods, you’d get fewer.

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But this wouldn’t tell us where the fields or patterns came from.

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The novelty wave only tells you the rate at which novelty appears

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in the world. It doesn’t tell you what the novelty is. So neither morphogenetic

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nor morphic resonance nor the novelty wave theory actually get to grips with the problem

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of creation, how a new thing comes. Terence just says there’ll be a lot more new

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things happening.

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No.

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new things happening.

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None of them are deterministic.

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Pardon?

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None of them are deterministic.

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No.

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I’ve got this point of view down to a sort of an aphorism,

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which you can take to management,

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which is,

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if you want the world

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to work for you,

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you have to know

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how the world works.

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Amen.

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That’s all.

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That’s all.

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That’s a stupid question.

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Will you believe in randomness?

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No.

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I believe it’s perhaps theoretically possible to design an algorithm, but I don’t know how you would test it. It seems like the randomness

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is the least likely thing.

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Nowhere in nature do you encounter it.

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It’s only necessary…

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See, I think the probability,

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the probabilistic view of nature

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is part of what’s going to have to go down in flames.

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And all these smooth curves that have been assumed

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to describe processes never actually examined

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are going to have to give way to novelty waves of some sort.

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Maybe not my novelty waves, but somebody’s novelty waves.

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And that the fine-grained structure of the universe

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is very highly complexified somebody’s novelty waves and that the fine-grained structure of the universe is

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very

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highly complexified and that

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averaging and and

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Sampling techniques and all these things smooth that out and then give a false picture

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that this is part of the revolution to get rid of the notion of

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probabilistic descriptions of nature.

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Oh, I don’t agree with that at all.

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Oh, you don’t? Oh, well, have a go at it.

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Well, I don’t know. Just briefly, I would say that the…

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I mean, it touches on one of our basic themes, actually,

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because if there’s no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos?

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Yes, well, chaos…

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Ironically, in the chaos revolution, as technical jargon of mathematics,

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I mean on level three we’re talking about mathematical models

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which share in whatever is the intuitive meaning of chaos.

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So originally when these models arose, they were called strange attractors.

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Then we saw that they were ubiquitous in nature,

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so they couldn’t be so strange.

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So there was a looking for the word,

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and somebody suggested they’d be called chaotic attractors.

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There was objection on these grounds

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that actually these models were the opposite

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of what chaos meant, because they have order.

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So, as I understand the question,

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I think that the question refers to

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random or chaotic behavior,

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which is outside the realm of these mathematical models for chaos,

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which are highly ordered, right?

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Like after the chaotic attractors of level three

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are done doing their job of mimicking nature,

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is there a little left, nothing left, or a lot left?

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Is that the question?

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Yes.

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And as I answered privately already to this question,

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I think that there is, beyond our can, you see, there’s a lot left.

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And we don’t know if in the future the models for this lot left would emerge or not.

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But since our evolution is an infinite process,

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I wouldn’t say it’s endless,

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but if given sufficient time to continue our present evolutionary path

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with science, mathematics, computers, and so on,

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I should think that the amount of so-called random,

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that in the sense of our ignorance of any structure in it,

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behavior in the universe would be on a sharp decline.

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Nevertheless, there is space for novelty.

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In the world of these mathematical models for chaos,

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there is novelty, mutation,

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and discovery of totally new patterns.

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That’s still in the picture,

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even if there was nothing really random left.

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I don’t think that we need random mutations

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in order to have the evolution of new forms

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and so on

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No, but what we do need is a universe

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that’s sufficiently open and undetermined

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for new forms to have space to arise in

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because if all of nature is already geared up

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to follow predetermined waves patterns forms

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etc that are all in terence’s computer or somebody else’s um then there’s not much space left for

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something truly new that hasn’t already been built into these waves to emerge and my view would be

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that the novelty wave is a concept of the quality of time but as time goes on as the universe

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develops the complexity of the novelty wave might be developing as time goes on, as the universe develops, the complexity of

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the novelty wave might be developing too, but not according to some simple algorithm,

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but in a way that’s truly unforeseeable.

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Well, this arises out of its resonances with its own past. It’s in the realm of the resonances

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that this very difficult-to-quantify complexification accumulates.

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I suppose my problem is that I think that the phenomenon comes first,

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the spontaneity and the creativity,

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and all these are attempts to construct sort of string-and-ceiling wax models

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of what’s going on,

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and these models will always be inadequate to encompass the phenomena.

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Yes, all models are provisional that that’s what preserves the open-endedness

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of the thing.

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The great intellectual

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emotional change that will accompany the paradigm shift is people will be able to accept

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not having a full explanation because

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they will understand that the depth of the mystery exceeds explanation that

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it’s always provision it’s always string and sealing wax the novelist Don DeLillo

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introduced in one of his novels the concept of what he called the value dark dimension.

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And what this means is that part of reality about which nothing can be known.

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Now chaos is in there somewhere, but much of this value dark dimension in principle could be known. And so then the task of human becoming and of mathematics and

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these intellectual tools is to cast light into the value dark dimension. And that gives a great

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sense of discovery and meaning to life. But it’s not reducible. Eventually there is a domain in

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the value dark dimension that is value dark in principle. The physical

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analogy that we have for this is a black hole, which, you know, just no information leaves it.

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The value dark dimension is like this. We have to build into our theories these kinds of trap doors

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and escape holes so that we don’t get trapped inside another illusion.

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You see, I was thinking before Terence started speaking just now

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that this attempt to tame chaos by having mathematical models of it

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is the modern version on a rather abstract plane of the old myth of Marduk and Tiamat,

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the solar hero conquering the sea monster, the dragon of

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the deep, the serpent of chaos. And then you get Horus, the Egyptian god who has a hawk

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form, a flying mind, an all-seeing eye, the dollar bill, the eye on the dollar bill is

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like the eye of Horus, the single all-seeing eye, the sun. This solar principle slaying the hippopotamus,

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which is the Egyptian equivalent of the sea monster.

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Then you get St. George and the dragon,

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which is the Christianized version of the same story,

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where St. George is a solar hero,

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shining light, piercing the darkness of the dragon.

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Then Terence went on to say how there’s this darkness

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of all these processes

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going on, but the light of reason could come in and through equations, fractal mathematics,

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et cetera, model them and in some sense gain a control or prediction over these powers

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of darkness and the dark unknowable powers or unknown powers. And then Ralph said, we can model some of these chaotic processes.

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That’s right.

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And because there might be a large,

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a small, medium or large residuum,

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but let’s assume it’s large,

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then we could build models and model some of the others.

00:21:16 ► §

And then from there it’s easy to slide

00:21:18 ► §

in this very familiar creode to the statement,

00:21:21 ► §

well, in principle,

00:21:23 ► §

it should be possible to model it all.

00:21:25 ► §

It’s the modern version of Laplace.

00:21:27 ► §

It’s the modern version of the idea that somehow, in principle,

00:21:31 ► §

the whole of reality could be engulfed within some kind of mathematical model.

00:21:35 ► §

In other words, that the world soul is in some sense subject to the supreme mathematical mind,

00:21:41 ► §

which is superior and transcendent of and prior to the whole natural

00:21:47 ► §

world so it’s it involves it slides over into a kind of metaphysics that’s very traditional

00:21:52 ► §

for mathematicians you see we’ve got to have a talk about this rupert and we’ve got to have a

00:21:56 ► §

talk about it right now because you have no matter how many times I try to correct this, you persist in a bad habit, a deep run-up.

00:22:11 ► §

And this habit is an arcane form of mathematical anxiety.

00:22:20 ► §

And it’s based on the conception of the mathematical…

00:22:23 ► §

I mean, it hasn’t advanced past the time of Plato

00:22:26 ► §

because your objection to models for chaos

00:22:33 ► §

is based on inappropriate view of this platonic ideals.

00:22:40 ► §

There are too many of them.

00:22:42 ► §

They are too complex and they don’t exist yet.

00:22:44 ► §

You see, the models are coming into existence by a process of evolution and discovery.

00:22:50 ► §

And I don’t think it would be at all appropriate to suggest that Plato or anyone before the invention of the computer could even imagine these.

00:22:59 ► §

You see, so it’s part of the evolutionary, the creative aspect of the world soul, as a matter of fact,

00:23:06 ► §

which for sake of discussion we could think of now in only two layers.

00:23:10 ► §

One layer where there’s the world of matter and energy,

00:23:13 ► §

where there are the discovery of new fields in evolution.

00:23:18 ► §

And the other, some kind of mental level, including verbal description

00:23:24 ► §

and mathematical models as an extension of language and so on.

00:23:27 ► §

Now, obviously, these two levels are in a process of coevolution.

00:23:33 ► §

And if there is Gaian unconscious supplying new forms out of chaos

00:23:39 ► §

for employment as the raw material of evolution,

00:23:43 ► §

employment as the raw material of evolution,

00:23:50 ► §

then it’s either supplying this raw material to both of these levels,

00:23:51 ► §

the mental and physical,

00:23:58 ► §

or there are two levels to the Gaian unconscious, one for each. But probably there’s a connection in, as it were, a triangle.

00:24:13 ► §

in as it were a triangle. And the idea that whatever we could conceive, perceive, grok,

00:24:20 ► §

whatever comes into consciousness, could have a mathematical model is not to conflict with creation because it’s not necessary to assume that mathematical models already exist, that all are there. There is the same infinite possibility of discovery,

00:24:32 ► §

invention, and novelty in this mental plane as in the material. Why not? What’s the difference?

00:24:38 ► §

Now, your bad habit, I think, is to be thinking that one or the other of these has to have

00:24:43 ► §

precedence over the other,

00:24:46 ► §

that either the mathematical model is abstracted from the material observation

00:24:49 ► §

or the material world concretizes, condenses around a mathematical model.

00:24:54 ► §

This is unnecessary. It’s just a process of co-evolution.

00:24:58 ► §

Sometimes the left foot ahead and sometimes the right. Why not?

00:25:02 ► §

Fine. That’s great. Wonderful explanation.

00:25:06 ► §

But, you see, I think that whereas you’re the mathematician

00:25:08 ► §

and yet not a Platonist,

00:25:10 ► §

Terence’s is, I think,

00:25:12 ► §

much more platonic. I think he thinks

00:25:14 ► §

that the novelty wave is coming

00:25:15 ► §

from some kind of higher realm

00:25:18 ► §

and actually somehow underlying

00:25:20 ► §

the kind of behind-the-scenes

00:25:22 ► §

mechanics of the cosmos.

00:25:24 ► §

Do you think like that?

00:25:26 ► §

Yes, I do think like that,

00:25:29 ► §

but I’m not sure whether it’s simply a mathematical description

00:25:34 ► §

of an enzymatically mediated process on the surface of the earth,

00:25:39 ► §

or, as you indicated, can be raised to the level of a higher principle. It is determined, but only

00:25:52 ► §

in this fairly weak way that sets the schedule of events, but doesn’t announce what the acts will be.

00:26:08 ► §

But I’m troubled by my Platonism.

00:26:10 ► §

I mean, I know enough of modern philosophy to realize that there are certain naive aspects of it

00:26:15 ► §

that haunt it.

00:26:16 ► §

That’s why I try to follow Whitehead,

00:26:19 ► §

because I think he was a Platonist,

00:26:22 ► §

he was a superb mathematician,

00:26:24 ► §

and he also was haunted by

00:26:27 ► §

the difficulties inherent in a strict Platonic interpretation. I don’t want these forms

00:26:36 ► §

to be eternal. I want them to somehow arise internally out of the ongoing process of the world.

00:26:46 ► §

But I haven’t quite figured out how to get these ducks all in a row.

00:26:51 ► §

Well, Whitehead preceded the computer revolution.

00:26:56 ► §

True.

00:26:56 ► §

And at that time there might have been some question

00:27:00 ► §

as to the preexistence of all mathematical forms, yes or no.

00:27:04 ► §

By now, there’s no question.

00:27:07 ► §

Well, but Ralph, I don’t quite understand this.

00:27:10 ► §

I’ve heard you argue in the past that mathematics might be culture-bound,

00:27:17 ► §

that we might visit a distant planet

00:27:19 ► §

and discover people practicing an incommensurate mathematics

00:27:24 ► §

that nowhere came tangential to our own.

00:27:27 ► §

I never said these things.

00:27:34 ► §

Well, it is an interesting idea,

00:27:36 ► §

but it pretty much shoots the world soul out of the water

00:27:39 ► §

because then you just say,

00:27:40 ► §

well, you know, mathematical truth is not truth at all.

00:27:44 ► §

It’s simply local style.

00:27:45 ► §

I want the world to know that it’s one, two, three here, and it’s one, two, three everywhere.

00:27:55 ► §

However,

00:27:56 ► §

However,

00:27:58 ► §

that the mathematics is a world of its own.

00:28:01 ► §

It’s a landscape with hills and valleys, and much of this terrain has not been explored. Some features have been identified by various travelers who came

00:28:10 ► §

back and gave their reports. The mathematical equivalent of Terence McKenna is maybe Whitehead.

00:28:17 ► §

I don’t know. We have then a process of discovery of the already existing landscape

00:28:26 ► §

and also the modification and evolution of that landscape

00:28:30 ► §

through the interaction of the human consciousness.

00:28:34 ► §

So although 1, 2, 3 here and 1, 2, 3 everywhere,

00:28:39 ► §

there is still we could land on a foreign planet

00:28:41 ► §

and find that they had explored, excavated, and modified

00:28:46 ► §

a region of the mathematical landscape never visited by us.

00:28:50 ► §

Well, so little of mathematics has to do with numbers, you know, I mean, with the integers.

00:28:59 ► §

There are all these…

00:29:00 ► §

I mean, I think once you figure out what mathematics is, every single one of us could invent a new branch of it.

00:29:08 ► §

It’s basically paying attention to the rules operating among defined sets of objects.

00:29:14 ► §

Well, I don’t believe that mathematics is the result of creative activity on part of people,

00:29:20 ► §

that it’s been invented.

00:29:27 ► §

part of people that has been invented. It hangs together with an integrity which is beyond the capability of the short history of human consciousness.

00:29:32 ► §

Does it hang together or is it an archipelago of islands? The people who are doing advanced

00:29:40 ► §

number theory have nothing whatsoever to say to the super-algebrists who don’t

00:29:46 ► §

have anything to say to the fractal people? No, it’s absolutely a single landscape and

00:29:53 ► §

all is tied together in complete integrity and… A wild-eyed claim. Yes. And in

00:30:04 ► §

principle argument. Well, it doesn’t matter too much these are just

00:30:08 ► §

impressions of travelers having returned from a different distant land. I think I

00:30:15 ► §

mean what’s come up here is I think it’s time for us to face this front on the

00:30:21 ► §

the soul of the world. We have seen in our travels,

00:30:26 ► §

and we know from reports in the Library of Congress

00:30:29 ► §

that other people have seen in their travels

00:30:32 ► §

different parts of the world’s soul.

00:30:34 ► §

Mathematics here, sensory experience there,

00:30:37 ► §

the Babylonian history here,

00:30:40 ► §

the chaos of the unconscious providing the novelty, and so on.

00:30:44 ► §

How do we put it all together?

00:30:46 ► §

What is the precedence of the existence of this thing and the human imagination?

00:30:53 ► §

Now, as far as mathematics is concerned, we have to speak about this another time.

00:30:57 ► §

Animal mathematics.

00:30:58 ► §

I mean, mathematics has been extensively traveled, mapped, experienced, and used in the biological world long before human species evolved.

00:31:11 ► §

And I think that the location of this mathematics

00:31:14 ► §

is a file drawer in the Gaian mind, in the cosmic mind.

00:31:22 ► §

So just to include this discussion

00:31:26 ► §

on the origin of mathematics in the all and everything,

00:31:29 ► §

I think we’ve repeatedly come to this juncture

00:31:33 ► §

and turned aside.

00:31:35 ► §

What is the relationship between the evolution of the world soul?

00:31:39 ► §

Does it evolve? Was it there before the Big Bang?

00:31:43 ► §

What does it have to do with our perception,

00:31:45 ► §

exploration, excavation, archaeology of knowledge? Is only what exists, what is perceived by

00:31:55 ► §

our species, what comes into our consciousness? I mean, what is it, the relationship between

00:32:00 ► §

our archaeology of knowledge and the actual existence of the soul of the world.

00:32:06 ► §

What is it?

00:32:09 ► §

What is it?

00:32:13 ► §

So what is it, Rupert?

00:32:15 ► §

You must have a notion since the past is your bailiwick.

00:32:30 ► §

Well, I mean, I can only say that I have a few.

00:32:34 ► §

I think one can deduce several things about the soul of the world.

00:32:39 ► §

One thing that I deduce is that since the world we live in, as we experience it,

00:32:41 ► §

is full of colors, qualities, sounds, smells,

00:32:46 ► §

all the things that reach us through the senses are experience, all based on the senses and on sensory qualities

00:32:48 ► §

the procedure of science since the 17th century

00:32:53 ► §

has been to ignore sensory qualities

00:32:55 ► §

and take only what were called the primary qualities of substances

00:32:58 ► §

namely their weight, position, momentum, etc

00:33:00 ► §

things which could be assigned numbers

00:33:02 ► §

and treated mathematically

00:33:04 ► §

and so the mathematical

00:33:05 ► §

process from then on

00:33:08 ► §

I won’t say right up

00:33:10 ► §

to the present because these computer graphics

00:33:12 ► §

are now coloured.

00:33:14 ► §

That’s an attempt to get something

00:33:15 ► §

a little bit back of sensuous reality

00:33:17 ► §

into the thing.

00:33:20 ► §

This abstraction left behind

00:33:22 ► §

all the qualities, the smells, the colours

00:33:23 ► §

and we’re then led to believe that qualities, my seeing red, your hearing middle C,

00:33:29 ► §

the smell of a rose or the smell of lavender,

00:33:33 ► §

that these qualities are somehow just subjective, just in our minds.

00:33:39 ► §

But the reality outside us is objective and mathematical and doesn’t possess qualities.

00:33:46 ► §

They’re inherent only in the mind of the subjective observer.

00:33:50 ► §

It seems to me that the world soul’s imagination

00:33:52 ► §

is going to work not just in terms of numbers,

00:33:55 ► §

mathematics, geometry and form,

00:33:57 ► §

but also in terms of qualities.

00:33:58 ► §

I think that the world soul will have,

00:34:01 ► §

as its imaginative activity and as its sensual experience,

00:34:06 ► §

a world of qualities. It will have colours, smellsative activity and as its sensual experience a world of qualities.

00:34:09 ► §

It will have colours, smells, vastly more colours,

00:34:13 ► §

vastly more smells and tastes than we’ve ever experienced.

00:34:16 ► §

All possible tastes and smells that exist in the world would in some sense be present as felt subjective,

00:34:21 ► §

if you like, subjectively felt realities within the world soul,

00:34:24 ► §

as the experience of quality.

00:34:27 ► §

So I think although mathematical aspect is one aspect of the world soul,

00:34:31 ► §

this world of qualities, forms, and the kinds of things we directly experience through our senses

00:34:36 ► §

as we walk around and talk to people, and the kinds of things we experience in our dreams,

00:34:40 ► §

a coloured world of changing forms and sounds as well,

00:34:44 ► §

in our dreams, a colored world of changing forms and sounds as well.

00:34:51 ► §

That the world soul will in some sense be a world as soul of qualities as well as quantities.

00:34:57 ► §

So it’s heaven?

00:35:02 ► §

No, it’s not heaven. It’s the soul of the world.

00:35:06 ► §

It’s the soul of the world contains not only everything that’s in the world, but also

00:35:07 ► §

the imagination that has given rise

00:35:10 ► §

to all things in the world and that is

00:35:11 ► §

continually active and giving

00:35:14 ► §

rise to new forms and possibilities.

00:35:16 ► §

Does that mean that the soul of the

00:35:18 ► §

world is not evolving, but already

00:35:20 ► §

there? The soul of the world

00:35:22 ► §

is continuous. Now let me

00:35:24 ► §

take another view of the soul of the world.

00:35:26 ► §

Another way of looking at it.

00:35:28 ► §

This way much more conventional.

00:35:29 ► §

I think we can bring them together.

00:35:32 ► §

According to Big Bang

00:35:34 ► §

cosmology,

00:35:36 ► §

what they’re trying to do

00:35:38 ► §

is to deduce how there can be a unified

00:35:40 ► §

field in nature. This was Einstein’s

00:35:42 ► §

goal to find a unified field theory.

00:35:44 ► §

How could there be a theory which would give us the idea of a single cosmic field, a primal field

00:35:50 ► §

of the whole universe, the primal field, from which the electromagnetic, the gravitational,

00:35:57 ► §

the quantum matter fields, and all other fields and phenomena of nature, in some sense, come

00:36:01 ► §

forth.

00:36:03 ► §

Well, Einstein couldn’t find that because he was just trying to do it by pure mathematics

00:36:07 ► §

or by applied mathematics.

00:36:10 ► §

What’s happened with the Big Bang theories?

00:36:13 ► §

Instead of saying we’ve got to treat it as if it’s an eternal problem, they say, look,

00:36:17 ► §

let’s crank the whole universe back in our calculations right back to the very beginning.

00:36:21 ► §

The temperature rockets up to billions of degrees

00:36:25 ► §

centigrade. Everything changes. Things don’t behave the same way they’re behaving here.

00:36:29 ► §

And things become more symmetrical. And crank it further and further until you arrive at a state

00:36:37 ► §

of primal unity where nothing is differentiated at all. The electromagnetic and the gravitational

00:36:42 ► §

fields are not separate from the field of

00:36:45 ► §

the world. The world field, the primal field, which is supposed to be the base of all the

00:36:50 ► §

fields of nature. And according to super string theory, this field has nine dimensions of

00:36:56 ► §

space and one of time. As the universe develops and expands, symmetries break and the fields

00:37:02 ► §

of nature, as it were, crystallize out out within it all the forms and patterns of things that develop in the world

00:37:07 ► §

have their own organizing fields

00:37:09 ► §

that are all derived in time from the world field

00:37:12 ► §

which still remains as the all-encompassing field of the world

00:37:16 ► §

all these fields remain within it

00:37:19 ► §

it still is there as the field from which they all arise

00:37:24 ► §

and in which they develop and so the world

00:37:26 ► §

field since it contains everything within it has a kind of evolutionary quality because it embraces

00:37:31 ► §

everything that’s happening yet it is at the same time the source of all the fields of nature

00:37:36 ► §

this is the conception to work towards which modern cosmological speculation is pointing if

00:37:42 ► §

within this vision of the developing world field, giving rise

00:37:46 ► §

to fields within it, very similar to Plotinus’s idea of the world soul, giving rise to all the

00:37:52 ► §

souls of nature within it. If the evolutionary process is ongoing, then memory is inherent

00:38:00 ► §

within this field. The field has a memory of everything that’s happened within it already.

00:38:04 ► §

inherent within this field. The field has a memory of everything that’s happened within it already.

00:38:10 ► §

And this memory would also work back on the imagination of the world soul, because the imagination depends on memory. And so it would be an imagination with an ongoing memory in a world

00:38:17 ► §

whose physical body, as it were, was shaped by the habits that nature had built up within this world field or world soul.

00:38:26 ► §

And so far this conception that I’ve now been talking about,

00:38:30 ► §

growing out of standard contemporary science,

00:38:33 ► §

still has this kind of black and white mathematical abstract quality to it.

00:38:39 ► §

And what I was trying to do before was to say that any reasonable conception of the world soul

00:38:43 ► §

would have to have not just this kind of mathematical scaffolding, but also something that was full of a sensuous

00:38:49 ► §

reality of colors, tastes, smells, and qualities.

00:38:54 ► §

Well, don’t you think the way to move toward that, I mean, if we take, why do we use the word soul for the world soul? It’s because we sense an analogy with the soul of the individual as we imagine it.

00:39:15 ► §

Well, then if you begin to carry forward that analogy, I think you get into some fairly astonishing places.

00:39:22 ► §

some fairly astonishing places. If the soul of the individual is a non-localizable, non-material essence

00:39:32 ► §

that survives death, that is somehow like a higher dimensional form

00:39:38 ► §

that is erected through the process of life,

00:39:42 ► §

and then the body dies and the soul is released

00:39:46 ► §

into the higher dimension

00:39:48 ► §

that is its source and home,

00:39:51 ► §

which is, I take it,

00:39:52 ► §

the basic notion of a soul.

00:39:56 ► §

In another context,

00:39:57 ► §

I have thought,

00:39:59 ► §

not thinking about the world soul,

00:40:01 ► §

but the individual soul,

00:40:02 ► §

that the seizure of DMTmt is very we’ve talked about

00:40:08 ► §

this how it is almost like a simulacrum of death itself and that you seem to see into

00:40:15 ► §

an ecology of souls well then talking about the world soul is the world soul the invisible, unseen,

00:40:26 ► §

organismic structure that has been erected

00:40:30 ► §

through the evolution of physis on this plane

00:40:34 ► §

and is in fact the destiny of the world soul

00:40:39 ► §

incomplete until it severs itself

00:40:43 ► §

from the matrix that created it.

00:40:46 ► §

And that actually all this global crisis and inner searching and turmoil

00:40:54 ► §

is the dawning realization that what we are facing is actually the death of the world soul.

00:41:02 ► §

actually the death of the world soul.

00:41:06 ► §

And that the death of the world soul means its severance from the dimensions

00:41:10 ► §

which allowed it to accrete and form.

00:41:14 ► §

And that when this happens,

00:41:15 ► §

this is what all these projections

00:41:18 ► §

which sail off the ends of their various graphs are about.

00:41:23 ► §

That what we are witnessing

00:41:24 ► §

is the death agony of the world soul.

00:41:29 ► §

Well, I must say I’m feeling very uncomfortable with this discussion,

00:41:35 ► §

and I’m astonished to think that I would be sitting here thinking of you guys,

00:41:40 ► §

of all people, you know, to accuse you of thinking small.

00:41:41 ► §

of you guys of all people,

00:41:43 ► §

you know, to accuse you of thinking small.

00:41:47 ► §

But I

00:41:48 ► §

find the whole

00:41:50 ► §

idea extremely claustrophobic

00:41:52 ► §

that the world’s soul is going to be

00:41:53 ► §

confined in a space-time continuum

00:41:56 ► §

of four

00:41:57 ► §

or ten dimensions

00:42:00 ► §

and that

00:42:01 ► §

the world

00:42:03 ► §

soul had no chance of existence

00:42:06 ► §

until the Big Bang provided matter and energy or something.

00:42:10 ► §

I just can’t buy this, Rupert, your suggestion

00:42:14 ► §

that the world sensorium even should come into existence only after a Big Bang.

00:42:20 ► §

Even though I’m doubtful about the Big Bang, suppose so,

00:42:24 ► §

I still think the

00:42:25 ► §

whole idea of soul is to suggest the aspiration of eternity for consciousness or unconsciousness

00:42:37 ► §

or some ultimate essence of the life experience. It could be that solar systems come and go, universes come and go, and the

00:42:47 ► §

soul is that we’re incarnated in one universe after another. After a Big Bang, there may

00:42:53 ► §

follow a collapse to an end, followed by another Big Bang. I don’t know, but the idea of the

00:43:01 ► §

world soul coming to an end once and for all because of a nuclear winter or something,

00:43:06 ► §

I think this is very confining.

00:43:08 ► §

Well, no, I’m not suggesting that it ceases to exist.

00:43:11 ► §

I’m suggesting that it is liberated into another dimension.

00:43:15 ► §

Yes, I mean, yours is the Hindu model,

00:43:18 ► §

and Terence’s is the Christian.

00:43:20 ► §

No, it’s not.

00:43:20 ► §

I’m talking about an existence of the world soul

00:43:24 ► §

which is beyond space and time. No, the idea is that the existence of the world soul which is beyond space and time.

00:43:26 ► §

No, the idea is that the soul, it comes from this realm beyond space and time.

00:43:30 ► §

It’s incarnated in the body, but its true destiny is not in the body and it doesn’t.

00:43:34 ► §

And then the body dies, it’s reborn in another.

00:43:37 ► §

But always it remains in touch with Brahman or the source from which it’s come,

00:43:42 ► §

which is far greater than any of its embodied existences can be.

00:43:44 ► §

So why are we rejecting this, or at least this magnitude of conception of the thing? or the source from which it’s come, which is far greater than any of its embodied existences can be.

00:43:45 ► §

So why are we rejecting this,

00:43:46 ► §

or at least this magnitude of conception of the thing?

00:43:49 ► §

Well, I’m just saying this is one possible traditional model,

00:43:53 ► §

is that the universe would die and it would be reborn

00:43:55 ► §

and it would be a reincarnation of the previous cosmic soul.

00:43:58 ► §

But I was just contrasting it with Terence’s model,

00:44:01 ► §

which is the Christian eschatological model,

00:44:04 ► §

which takes the… You’d have the death of the universe.

00:44:09 ► §

The universe would reach a culmination. In the words of St. Paul, the whole creation groaneth in travail.

00:44:16 ► §

The idea was that the whole creation, the entire universe, was groaning in travail for a new order to be born, something new would be born out of not just humanity, not just this earth, but the whole cosmos. Out of bios. Out of bios

00:44:30 ► §

would come some totally new order of existence. Now that would correspond

00:44:34 ► §

roughly to your notion of the world soul, in some sense its embodiment coming to

00:44:41 ► §

an end, and presumably you’d mean not just on this earth but in the entire

00:44:44 ► §

cosmos,

00:44:45 ► §

a kind of dissolution of the cosmos.

00:44:47 ► §

Yes, in its most extreme version.

00:44:50 ► §

Yes, well, that’s the most extreme version

00:44:53 ► §

of Judeo-Christian eschatological thought.

00:44:56 ► §

You know, it’s the…

00:44:58 ► §

It’s the…

00:45:00 ► §

The devil, you say.

00:45:01 ► §

The devil.

00:45:01 ► §

The devil, you say.

00:45:10 ► §

Well, but I am actually, it is the most extreme,

00:45:13 ► §

and out of devotion to my theory, I give assent to it. But my personal notion of the world soul is not as metaphysical, I think, as either of you.

00:45:21 ► §

You really are into it as God Almighty.

00:45:27 ► §

Oh, no, I’m not.

00:45:27 ► §

And I’m into it as sort of the largest, smartest creature imaginable.

00:45:36 ► §

But it isn’t the thing which hung the stars like lamps in heaven.

00:45:41 ► §

It isn’t the world soul is not the force

00:45:45 ► §

which spins the galaxies

00:45:46 ► §

on their axis.

00:45:48 ► §

The world soul is something

00:45:49 ► §

that has arisen out of biology.

00:45:52 ► §

It’s an organism.

00:45:54 ► §

It is as much within

00:45:55 ► §

the universe of space and time.

00:45:58 ► §

Well, I don’t want to say that, no.

00:46:00 ► §

But it is within the universe

00:46:01 ► §

of space and time

00:46:02 ► §

in some sense.

00:46:04 ► §

It didn’t make the universe.

00:46:06 ► §

It’s an inhabitant of it,

00:46:08 ► §

but on a scale that make us mere atoms within its form.

00:46:16 ► §

That’s my notion of the world.

00:46:18 ► §

So I shy away from…

00:46:21 ► §

Rejecting pet rocks, huh?

00:46:25 ► §

Well, no.

00:46:29 ► §

As a white-headian, I also have to agree that, you know,

00:46:35 ► §

consciousness penetrates down into the crystalline and metallic and like that.

00:46:42 ► §

But the quality of the consciousness, this aboriginal consciousness, what is it?

00:46:43 ► §

How recognizable would it be to us as consciousness?

00:46:48 ► §

I’m not sure.

00:46:49 ► §

Also, I’m not as interested as I think you are, Rupert,

00:46:54 ► §

in always dematerializing it.

00:46:57 ► §

For instance, yesterday you gave all these wonderful examples

00:47:01 ► §

of processes on the earth which could be physical processes going on in the Gaian mind,

00:47:08 ► §

the tides, the atmosphere, so forth.

00:47:10 ► §

Magma.

00:47:10 ► §

But then you said, but actually it’s more elegant

00:47:13 ► §

to think of it as somehow superseding matter.

00:47:17 ► §

But I think, you know, that planets are living forms

00:47:21 ► §

and that mind is a projective force

00:47:25 ► §

and that, you know,

00:47:29 ► §

for instance,

00:47:30 ► §

it would be possible to convince me

00:47:33 ► §

that human history

00:47:34 ► §

was a message beamed to earth

00:47:37 ► §

from Jupiter

00:47:38 ► §

and that Jupiter,

00:47:40 ► §

with its metallic ices

00:47:42 ► §

and exotic chemistry,

00:47:44 ► §

is actually a kind of thinking organism

00:47:47 ► §

that reaches out to try and impact

00:47:50 ► §

in other chemical regimes and energetic regimes

00:47:55 ► §

where it can image itself in the form of a message.

00:47:59 ► §

So I like to create complex structures out of available material

00:48:06 ► §

that sort of stay away from this God Almighty thing.

00:48:11 ► §

Fortunately, Jupiter’s not the only one.

00:48:14 ► §

Yes, well, the solar system is very interesting,

00:48:17 ► §

but what’s going on beyond the solar system

00:48:20 ► §

in terms of the novelty wave, universal constants,

00:48:26 ► §

morphogenetic fields and all that.

00:48:30 ► §

I think that’s where all our theories, at least Rupert and mine,

00:48:33 ► §

become basically just chit-chat.

00:48:35 ► §

Your models seem to go out and… Well, I think that we’re all involved in a kind of compromise.

00:48:39 ► §

What we need here is a coda group or something

00:48:41 ► §

that we have to reprogram ourselves out of this

00:48:45 ► §

childhood conditioning in the Hindu, the Judeo-Christian, and the scientist. And whereas our work,

00:48:56 ► §

thought, talk, and relationship are very much inspired by our own travels to the spirit, where we have seen, felt, and so on,

00:49:07 ► §

the largeness of the world soul.

00:49:11 ► §

When we discuss or try to bring down into language

00:49:15 ► §

or relate to ordinary reality,

00:49:18 ► §

then I think there’s a kind of tendency to conservatism,

00:49:22 ► §

which ends up kind of looking like anthropocentrism, where

00:49:28 ► §

we have identified too much, we have compressed what we have experienced on a grander scale

00:49:34 ► §

down to the human scale and related too much to human consciousness and human history.

00:49:42 ► §

Well, but when I look at human history,

00:49:45 ► §

I see the accumulation of a sense of urgency

00:49:48 ► §

long before anybody started worrying about ecocide and all that.

00:49:54 ► §

I mean, it’s almost as though the world soul

00:49:57 ► §

is a thing which wants to live

00:50:00 ► §

and senses instability

00:50:02 ► §

and is trying to build a lifeboat out of the clumsy material of protoplasm.

00:50:09 ► §

Has an infection.

00:50:10 ► §

Yes, or it could be solar instability.

00:50:13 ► §

This is my fear, that it actually senses the finite life of the sun

00:50:18 ► §

and through the crude medium of protoplasm

00:50:21 ► §

it’s trying to build a lifeboat for itself to cross to another

00:50:25 ► §

star. But how in the world can you cross to another star when the only material available

00:50:30 ► §

is protoplasm? Well, it takes 50 million years, but there are strategies and it has to do

00:50:38 ► §

with these epigenetic languages and then a creature which deals with matter and abstracts

00:50:46 ► §

and then a creature which deals with matter and abstracts and analyzes,

00:50:50 ► §

and you get technique, but it’s all an enzymatically mediated process.

00:50:55 ► §

It’s a plan in the mind of the world soul to survive.

00:50:57 ► §

It seeks to live.

00:51:03 ► §

Isn’t there in our experience of the Logos, the divine, and so on,

00:51:06 ► §

the feeling that we have gone beyond the physical plane of protoplasm and so on? Is this not already a kind of star travel? Yes, but then, you know,

00:51:13 ► §

why is there this increasing urgency, century after century? It’s been going on now for 15,000

00:51:20 ► §

years, increasing anxiety, increasing the following of creodes, increasingly irrational,

00:51:28 ► §

unless there’s a real problem with the stability of the environment. And then if there is a real

00:51:35 ► §

problem with the stability of the environment, the last 10 years of human history make perfect

00:51:39 ► §

sense. It was an evacuation. It was a frantic project to find an answer.

00:51:48 ► §

And that’s why these things were allowed to tear loose,

00:51:51 ► §

which poisoned the oceans and stripped the continent.

00:51:55 ► §

The world soul, I think, is in communication with us

00:51:59 ► §

in the culminating moment of human history

00:52:02 ► §

that this is all being scripted for a purpose and

00:52:06 ► §

toward an end, unglimpsed by us, but tied up with the survival of everything.

00:52:13 ► §

Do you mean the Gaian soul or the cosmic soul?

00:52:16 ► §

Well, world soul is the Gaian soul to my mind.

00:52:19 ► §

Oh, well, to my mind it’s the cosmic soul as well, because the anima mundi is the soul of the universe.

00:52:27 ► §

Well, see, that’s too large a concept,

00:52:29 ► §

because the Earth, its problems, the star…

00:52:31 ► §

You can easily write it up here.

00:52:33 ► §

And its problems…

00:52:34 ► §

Cosmos, Gaia, Terrence, no problem.

00:52:39 ► §

No, we have a local problem.

00:52:42 ► §

It’s all confined within about 12 light hours of this star.

00:52:47 ► §

I guess I’m looking for something more than this annealment of perspectives

00:52:51 ► §

and backgrounds and lore and so forth into some sort of…

00:52:58 ► §

I like the festival talk.

00:52:59 ► §

That made a lot of sense to me as a mechanism.

00:53:03 ► §

Or, well, I’ll just look back into it. That made a lot of sense to me as a mechanism, or as a way of doing something,

00:53:09 ► §

of holding the hand of this dying structure,

00:53:14 ► §

a little hospice on this going away of this hard time.

00:53:20 ► §

And is there something that you see that we can be doing

00:53:24 ► §

to mediating this transition so that it’s less dangerous to the planet?

00:53:35 ► §

Well, I think you have to act as though it all rests on our hands,

00:53:40 ► §

I mean, responsible activity and that sort of thing,

00:53:44 ► §

but not in a context of hopelessness,

00:53:47 ► §

which is usually how that’s put.

00:53:51 ► §

You know, the response that my wife and I have

00:53:55 ► §

is to run a botanical garden and preserve plants.

00:54:00 ► §

Somebody else, you know, gets people to get off infant formula

00:54:04 ► §

and return to breastfeeding.

00:54:07 ► §

All of these things.

00:54:08 ► §

What you have to do is, it’s an old cliche,

00:54:12 ► §

but act locally, think globally.

00:54:15 ► §

But I think it’s fine that we’re all on track.

00:54:19 ► §

Everything is unraveling at the proper speed.

00:54:23 ► §

We just need to try a little bit

00:54:27 ► §

harder like the Grateful Dead says you know just a little bit more just a

00:54:32 ► §

little bit more well let me try and say something about that too I think that if

00:54:41 ► §

we’re trying there are several steps in this. One is that the

00:54:45 ► §

recognition that nature’s alive rather than just a machine raises the question we’ve been

00:54:50 ► §

discussing. If it’s alive, if it’s animate, what sort of thing might the world’s soul

00:54:53 ► §

be? Nature, on this model, not just having a body, which the materialists recognize,

00:54:59 ► §

but a body and soul, like we have, a living body.

00:55:07 ► §

Then there’s also the question of how consciousness fits in.

00:55:11 ► §

These are all just thinking about the larger problem.

00:55:14 ► §

But when it comes to seeing the world as alive,

00:55:15 ► §

if we see the planet as alive,

00:55:18 ► §

then it means we can change our relationship to it.

00:55:24 ► §

And since most traditional peoples in the past and our own ancestors saw the planet as alive,

00:55:27 ► §

there are many traditional ways of relating to the ongoing larger life of the cosmos.

00:55:32 ► §

One such way is through the observation of seasonal festivals.

00:55:36 ► §

And I thought that Ralph’s description last night of how in many parts of the world

00:55:41 ► §

there’s this festival where you get a kind of chaos, a reenactment of chaos, and then the conquest of chaos by the forces of light and order.

00:55:50 ► §

It was a very good summary of these principles.

00:55:53 ► §

We actually still have the traditional seasonal festivals.

00:55:57 ► §

And actually, in America, Halloween is the main time at which there’s the return of the chaos.

00:56:02 ► §

And Halloween is All Hallows’ Eve, the eve of the great festival of the dead.

00:56:06 ► §

November the 1st and the 2nd, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day,

00:56:09 ► §

are the old Celtic festival of the dead,

00:56:11 ► §

which was the beginning of the British New Year.

00:56:14 ► §

And at that crack in time, the dead became present.

00:56:17 ► §

There was a kind of crack when the past and the chaos

00:56:21 ► §

and a confusion of times took place.

00:56:27 ► §

And there was a reversal of the social order where people as in these chaos festivals kids servants and people in inferior positions can

00:56:33 ► §

take a dominating role and demand what they want of others and and they could the servants become

00:56:39 ► §

the masters and if the masters don’t play then the result is chaos the modern American version of this entire cosmic drama

00:56:46 ► §

is appropriately enough trick or treat

00:56:49 ► §

and you know the

00:56:51 ► §

so I think we still have these

00:56:54 ► §

we’ve got the midwinter festival and Christmas

00:56:56 ► §

we’ve got the spring festival and Easter

00:56:58 ► §

the next great festival is September the 29th

00:57:01 ► §

the feast of St. Michael and all angels

00:57:03 ► §

the angel festival so there are a whole traditional set of seasonal festivals September the 29th, the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, the Angel Festival.

00:57:06 ► §

So there are a whole traditional set of seasonal festivals which I think connect us to the larger life of the cosmos.

00:57:12 ► §

And I personally find observing these a great help in locating not just my life but our collective life in the cosmos.

00:57:22 ► §

So that’s one way.

00:57:28 ► §

in the cosmos. So that’s one way. Another way, I think, is since we can’t relate to the outer regions of the cosmos very much, except by looking at distant stars or galaxies through telescopes,

00:57:34 ► §

we can relate to the earth. And I think that if we recognize the sacred places of the earth,

00:57:41 ► §

which are places where people, they’re places with stories, places where people have places with stories

00:57:45 ► §

places where people have felt a connection of where they are in that

00:57:48 ► §

place to larger dimensions of reality um I’m sorry up links or down links in some

00:57:57 ► §

cases because some places like caves connect one to the heart of the earth

00:58:00 ► §

and these these sort of portals to upper or lower realms of reality,

00:58:08 ► §

these sacred places are traditionally observed

00:58:10 ► §

in all societies.

00:58:11 ► §

People traditionally go there.

00:58:13 ► §

I mean, medieval churches, cathedrals, temples,

00:58:17 ► §

Stonehenge, megalithic monuments, etc.

00:58:19 ► §

There’s many examples all around the world.

00:58:22 ► §

These were traditionally places of pilgrimage.

00:58:24 ► §

And pilgrimage still goes on in many parts around the world. These were traditionally places of pilgrimage, and pilgrimage still goes on in many parts of the world.

00:58:28 ► §

What has been replaced with in the Protestant North,

00:58:32 ► §

which suppressed pilgrimage, is tourism.

00:58:34 ► §

Tourism is a kind of secularized form of pilgrimage.

00:58:38 ► §

And I think the biggest paradigm change we could have,

00:58:41 ► §

which would really begin to relate us back to the earth,

00:58:43 ► §

is to turn tourism back into pilgrimage, So that when you go to a place, when you go to a foreign country, when

00:58:50 ► §

you go to see the pyramids, the great cathedral of Chartres, you know, the national parks of America,

00:58:55 ► §

Yellowstone, Yosemite, and so on, that these are sacred places, the national parks are America’s

00:59:00 ► §

sacred groves and high places. And that by turning both in our own lives

00:59:07 ► §

and helping to promote a mass movement

00:59:10 ► §

whereby tourism’s turned back into pilgrimage,

00:59:12 ► §

we’d have hundreds of millions of people

00:59:14 ► §

who are going around the world as tourists.

00:59:16 ► §

If they became pilgrims, the whole world would be linked up

00:59:19 ► §

with the sacred place of the earth in a kind of global network.

00:59:22 ► §

So I think that a sense of recognising the life of the earth, recognising the soul of the earth in a kind of global network so I think that a sense of recognizing the life of

00:59:26 ► §

the earth, recognizing the soul of the world

00:59:28 ► §

the animating principle of nature

00:59:29 ► §

one of the ways we can really relate

00:59:32 ► §

collectively is through sacred places and

00:59:33 ► §

sacred times

00:59:34 ► §

I think that’s excellent

00:59:36 ► §

and I think that ties in and lays over

00:59:40 ► §

you throughout the old saw about

00:59:41 ► §

acting locally and thinking globally

00:59:43 ► §

but I think this linking process

00:59:46 ► §

that’s rapidly changing now has redefined the locality to one of global it’s a global locality

00:59:54 ► §

we can be everywhere at once on it well and and the other thing you can do that should probably be mentioned is you can notice

01:00:05 ► §

who your affinity group is.

01:00:07 ► §

The thing really is

01:00:09 ► §

a meme competition,

01:00:12 ► §

a meme war.

01:00:13 ► §

And we need to clarify

01:00:16 ► §

communications among ourselves

01:00:18 ► §

and then replicate these memes

01:00:21 ► §

and put them out there

01:00:22 ► §

because they are like viruses

01:00:24 ► §

infecting the body of dominator

01:00:27 ► §

society and competing within the body politic for attention loyalty and energy if we don’t

01:00:36 ► §

put the meme out into the environment to compete then it never is an issue whether it can gain ascendancy or not.

01:00:47 ► §

So I hope that get-togethers like this empower every person who attends

01:00:55 ► §

to become then a transmitter for the new meme,

01:01:01 ► §

because by spreading rhythm around, you get a dance basically I’ve been involved

01:01:11 ► §

with is the is carrying that one step further plans for seizing the media for broadcasting

01:01:19 ► §

means ideas and so on the overall theory is that the problems can be solved.

01:01:27 ► §

They’re not easy to solve,

01:01:29 ► §

like the crack problem could be solved.

01:01:32 ► §

It may not be easy,

01:01:33 ► §

but certainly it won’t be solved

01:01:35 ► §

if nobody is working on it.

01:01:36 ► §

So at the root of many problems

01:01:39 ► §

is the denial of the problem

01:01:40 ► §

and the fact that we maintain

01:01:43 ► §

unconsciousness of the problem.

01:01:46 ► §

So in many different therapeutic strategies, we have the idea that if something can be

01:01:51 ► §

brought into consciousness, then the problems will be found.

01:01:55 ► §

It might work out.

01:01:56 ► §

Certainly not without that.

01:01:57 ► §

So that would be the first step.

01:01:59 ► §

And over these past five years or so, I’ve been little by little working out and publishing plans

01:02:06 ► §

for putting consciousness of these problems into the media.

01:02:10 ► §

For example, the political weather report is an idea that within the ordinary weather report,

01:02:16 ► §

there would be some graphics showing the current prevalence of international terrorism

01:02:21 ► §

and cutting down the jungles and the pollutants and things like that.

01:02:27 ► §

Even this morning, we had a new thought in this direction

01:02:30 ► §

of an intervention through the Daily News,

01:02:34 ► §

and that would be the publication of the recent variation

01:02:37 ► §

of the speed of light as measured by astronomers

01:02:41 ► §

aiming their instruments at nearby galaxies,

01:02:44 ► §

or the Red Shift, just sharing this information with people.

01:02:49 ► §

So our problem as a species is the habit of denial and repression of problems.

01:02:57 ► §

I mean, it is difficult.

01:02:58 ► §

Nobody wants to talk about the population explosion, for example, every day.

01:03:07 ► §

And if we don’t talk about it every day,

01:03:09 ► §

I don’t see what can be done about it.

01:03:12 ► §

So another suggestion along this festival line,

01:03:15 ► §

but a little different, is this Sabbath idea

01:03:17 ► §

that with a certain frequency,

01:03:19 ► §

one day would be set aside for just thinking about things,

01:03:22 ► §

that this would be a crack in the shell,

01:03:24 ► §

a window through which denial could be transcended

01:03:28 ► §

by some kind of group of practice

01:03:31 ► §

that we could develop within the families as it were.

01:03:35 ► §

And particularly important, as somebody has pointed out recently,

01:03:39 ► §

to pay more attention to long-time, slow-developing trends

01:03:43 ► §

because our minds are programmed to focus

01:03:47 ► §

on short-term trends, emergencies, emergencies that are just over the horizon.

01:03:55 ► §

So we’re always planning and thinking about doing something that’s right upon us.

01:04:00 ► §

The trouble is that the really serious problems that are going to kill us are developing

01:04:05 ► §

bit by bit by bit. Somebody has a wonderful analogy to this. He tells me, I believe this

01:04:11 ► §

is true, that if you put a bullfrog in a pail of water and set it on the stove, the bullfrog

01:04:17 ► §

will sit in there until he dies. And afterwards, you can boil that bullfrog because increase in the heat is at no point

01:04:25 ► §

sufficiently rapid

01:04:28 ► §

to cause him to

01:04:29 ► §

sense the emergency and to jump out

01:04:32 ► §

and so he sits in there

01:04:34 ► §

thinking no problem you know it’s just getting

01:04:36 ► §

a little warm well we’re in the same condition

01:04:38 ► §

as that bullfrog

01:04:39 ► §

we’re sitting in that pale water and god damn it

01:04:42 ► §

it’s going to boil us

01:04:43 ► §

Kathleen

01:04:44 ► §

I guess I wanted to slide in a plug

01:04:47 ► §

for the thing that houses

01:04:49 ► §

consciousness and that we seem to be

01:04:51 ► §

overlooking the

01:04:53 ► §

innovative ability of the nervous

01:04:56 ► §

system and I’m wondering if

01:04:58 ► §

the chaos that’s going on

01:05:00 ► §

on the planet now isn’t forcing

01:05:01 ► §

this innovative nervous system

01:05:03 ► §

into some sort of evolutionary

01:05:05 ► §

funnel and that it will not be technology or all of that that takes us from the planet

01:05:11 ► §

but something that rises out of the potential of the human being.

01:05:18 ► §

Well, certainly the stress in the environment of all kinds, chemical and behavioral and so forth,

01:05:29 ► §

is creating a tremendously intensified rate of mutation.

01:05:34 ► §

I mean, it would be nice to believe that it isn’t a flight out to the stars

01:05:40 ► §

through some biomechanical Faustian deal that we cut,

01:05:44 ► §

but that we could just go into the imagination,

01:05:48 ► §

that the imagination could be found to be somehow a place as real as any other place,

01:05:57 ► §

and then we could just migrate there.

01:06:00 ► §

I mean, this is the science fiction fantasy of hyperspace,

01:06:29 ► §

I mean, this is the science fiction fantasy of hyperspace, a certain brand of hyperspace that I find very attractive and that I’ve actually seen things which lead me to believe this may not be impossible, but it’s not something that lies developmentally directly ahead out of orthodox science. It’s magic to open a doorway to the surface of a planet 10,000 light years away and just step through

01:06:33 ► §

and take our civilization and everything with us.

01:06:37 ► §

This would be a neat solution.

01:06:39 ► §

I wonder if we’ll be so lucky, but I hope so.

01:06:43 ► §

And that would be the body.

01:06:44 ► §

I see that this portal is somehow in the body,

01:06:48 ► §

that the psychedelics and the way in which it’s the doorway to that kind of an escape

01:06:56 ► §

is somehow in the perfection of the body.

01:06:59 ► §

So that’s good. That’s a good point.

01:07:02 ► §

I’m not sure I know how to ask my question.

01:07:04 ► §

I think I’m directing it to you.

01:07:06 ► §

If you comment on the relationship

01:07:08 ► §

between what you’re talking about

01:07:10 ► §

and what’s happening to the state

01:07:12 ► §

of formal or traditional religion

01:07:14 ► §

in the world today.

01:07:15 ► §

I don’t see with people elsewhere

01:07:19 ► §

that there is really a reaching

01:07:22 ► §

for things to replace religion that they don’t believe anymore?

01:07:29 ► §

Well, I mean, I think it depends where you are and whereabouts you see the process going.

01:07:37 ► §

I think there’s a widespread awareness there’s a problem with the environment.

01:07:41 ► §

And there’s a widespread awareness that this problem’s got a great deal to do with us

01:07:46 ► §

and the way our social and economic systems are set up.

01:07:50 ► §

In other words, we’re polluting, spoiling, raping, defoliating, etc., the world.

01:07:55 ► §

I think my own reading of the mood is that it’s a kind of Jonian phase.

01:08:01 ► §

I don’t know whether on Terence’s novelty wave

01:08:03 ► §

we’re entering a resonance with the period

01:08:05 ► §

of St. John the Baptist, but St. John the Baptist’s role was to say to people, repent

01:08:10 ► §

for the end is at hand. Well, Terence is the local representative of the St. John the Baptist

01:08:21 ► §

principle. And you see, he proves to us all the ends at hand by his novelty wave.

01:08:27 ► §

And then he engages us all in discussing what will happen at 2012

01:08:31 ► §

when the novelty wave reaches infinity.

01:08:35 ► §

It’s the end of the world.

01:08:36 ► §

You can have a variety of opinions about what that might mean.

01:08:40 ► §

You know, will it mean there’s no more gasoline for cars in Los Angeles?

01:08:43 ► §

Will it mean that the cosmos is dissolved into the entire cosmos?

01:08:48 ► §

Anyway, the end is at hand.

01:08:49 ► §

Some extraordinary transition is about to come upon us.

01:08:53 ► §

We’re nearing the year 2000, which as a millennium will inevitably bring millenarian sentiments into the air

01:08:59 ► §

in the sense of a change of era.

01:09:02 ► §

So at any rate, we’re nearing the end of an era. So there’s

01:09:07 ► §

a sense of an impending end, which is one element of St. John the Baptist’s message.

01:09:12 ► §

The other is a sense of repentance, a sense of awareness of what we’ve been doing and

01:09:17 ► §

the fact this can’t go on. We have to change our consciousness, metanoia, this change of

01:09:22 ► §

mind, this moving into a higher perspective on what we’ve been doing.

01:09:27 ► §

That, I think, is the present religious mood of the age.

01:09:30 ► §

And John the Baptist offered initiations into new ways of seeing, a sense of death and rebirth through drowning,

01:09:37 ► §

holding people under just long enough that they had a near-death experience.

01:09:41 ► §

I think that’s what was going on.

01:09:42 ► §

They come up from the water in the Jordan and they say

01:09:45 ► §

they’ve been born again. They’ve seen, they’ve died and they’ve been born again and they see

01:09:49 ► §

everything in a completely new way. So this seeing things in a new way is part of the initiatory

01:09:54 ► §

experience. Not many people here have had it by drowning, either deliberate or accidental,

01:10:01 ► §

but quite a number have had it through psychoactive substances

01:10:06 ► §

or near-death experiences or in other ways, which have opened a new vision of reality.

01:10:11 ► §

So I think that’s the phase we’re in, and I think that what people will be looking for,

01:10:15 ► §

as they were at the time of St. John the Baptist, is some new way of relating everything together,

01:10:21 ► §

a new religion that will link them back. And whether this will happen through a return to the traditional religions in a new and reinvigorated form,

01:10:31 ► §

or whether through the emergence of new ones, I don’t know.

01:10:33 ► §

I myself foresee a reinvigoration of the traditional religions, in particular Christianity and Judaism.

01:10:41 ► §

And this may seem a peculiar prediction, but I think that the alternative, you see,

01:10:46 ► §

we’ve had the last 20 years, we’ve had a new age melee of imports and exotic forms of religion

01:10:53 ► §

from all over the place, who knows, from Hawaii, Ramakrishna Mission, Tibetan Buddhists, Vipassana

01:11:01 ► §

meditation, Rajneesh, Maharishi, Sufism, shamanism from Africa.

01:11:09 ► §

The world has been scoured for all these traditions.

01:11:11 ► §

They’ve all been tried out, many of them in California.

01:11:14 ► §

And the result is the place where most of them have been tried out most, Los Angeles, is Los Angeles.

01:11:22 ► §

It’s obvious that these are not the answer.

01:11:32 ► §

So I think that the… I myself think that the way I’ve seen my own way forward, at any rate,

01:11:38 ► §

is reconnecting with the Christian tradition

01:11:40 ► §

and relinking through the traditional festivals and sacred places and

01:11:45 ► §

pilgrimage to a traditional sense of location in the cosmos, in space and time. I’m not saying

01:11:51 ► §

this is the only form of rooting one needs. It isn’t. But it’s certainly very helpful to be

01:11:56 ► §

rooted in those ways through traditional forms, I find, in my own experience.

01:12:01 ► §

Now, I think it’s also, some people feel easier with making up their own rituals or finding their own sacred places,

01:12:07 ► §

but an individual religion will never work

01:12:10 ► §

in bringing about a collective transformation.

01:12:13 ► §

And what we need is a collective transformation,

01:12:15 ► §

not just individual ones.

01:12:16 ► §

We’ve had 20 years of people trying to change themselves

01:12:19 ► §

without much attention to the collective.

01:12:22 ► §

So I think we have to have a new religious and political movement

01:12:26 ► §

which goes along with individual transformation.

01:12:29 ► §

And I think the green movement in politics

01:12:31 ► §

is the beginning of this new consciousness

01:12:35 ► §

taking on a mass political form,

01:12:39 ► §

where it’s already beginning to change the way the world is run

01:12:42 ► §

and the political landscape of Europe, at least.

01:12:42 ► §

to change the way the world is run and the political landscape of Europe at least?

01:12:48 ► §

I hope that that’s not what’s going to happen.

01:12:52 ► §

I mean, I hold monotheism responsible

01:12:55 ► §

for the mess that we’re in,

01:12:59 ► §

all from, you know, Abraham, not this one,

01:13:02 ► §

right on down to the present moment.

01:13:06 ► §

I think it is the metaphor which is responsible

01:13:09 ► §

for the dominator breakout

01:13:14 ► §

and that until we get a more polytheistic,

01:13:20 ► §

nature-oriented conception of reality,

01:13:24 ► §

we will be pretty much under the gun.

01:13:27 ► §

So this is a place where we’re far apart.

01:13:31 ► §

It’s probably because I was raised Catholic,

01:13:34 ► §

so I’m ready to hang the Pope.

01:13:36 ► §

Your question is about polytheism.

01:13:39 ► §

Pardon?

01:13:40 ► §

What do you mean by polytheism?

01:13:42 ► §

Well, see, I mean, Rupert and I agree that what is needed

01:13:46 ► §

is a revivification of old forms of ritual.

01:13:50 ► §

But when I say old, I mean 15,000 years ago.

01:13:54 ► §

He means 1,500 years ago.

01:13:58 ► §

I think that we have to get into, again, it’s this thing about closure

01:14:05 ► §

the attraction of monotheism is obvious

01:14:09 ► §

it’s elegant

01:14:10 ► §

everything is reduced to one God

01:14:13 ► §

and this drive to reductionism

01:14:17 ► §

and to elegance

01:14:19 ► §

is fine in a philosophy class

01:14:22 ► §

but the psychological consequences

01:14:24 ► §

of imaging yourself

01:14:26 ► §

against a

01:14:27 ► §

single

01:14:29 ► §

God, it flows

01:14:32 ► §

back into psychology as

01:14:33 ► §

empowerment of the ego

01:14:35 ► §

and all of these dominator

01:14:37 ► §

societies had this

01:14:40 ► §

unitary solar

01:14:42 ► §

Apollonian

01:14:43 ► §

fixation and you know the Rupert’s very concerned

01:14:50 ► §

with the presence of the past maybe this is lies behind his openness to

01:14:59 ► §

Christianity because from my money monotheism is the single most reactionary force in all of human history.

01:15:09 ► §

I don’t even know what is running second, because it’s so clear, you know.

01:15:15 ► §

Atheism? It’s so brief. It’s so brief.

01:15:19 ► §

I mean, it’s had 70 years. Christianity and Judaism and Islam, I mean, this thing will not die. You know,

01:15:27 ► §

you just get it under control in one place and it sprouts a hydra-headed new model and

01:15:33 ► §

then it rolls another millennia or two. And it’s, you know, very bad on relationships between men and women and things like that.

01:15:46 ► §

So what I preach is what I call the archaic revival,

01:15:51 ► §

the going back into, it’s a paganism,

01:15:54 ► §

but it’s even older than what is normally thought of as paganism.

01:15:57 ► §

It’s paleolithic shamanism based on boundary dissolution through psychedelic drugs and in its original

01:16:06 ► §

recension through

01:16:08 ► §

group sexual activity

01:16:10 ► §

that is not possible

01:16:11 ► §

it’s not important to me to

01:16:14 ► §

preserve that aspect of it in a

01:16:16 ► §

modern context because these were

01:16:18 ► §

private tribal people

01:16:20 ► §

that was not a society

01:16:22 ► §

of minions how can you have

01:16:24 ► §

orgies in a society of minions how can you have orgies in a society of

01:16:26 ► §

minions but I think that you know we have to go back 10,000 years ago was

01:16:32 ► §

where the mistakes were made and you know agriculture was the beginning of

01:16:38 ► §

the end that was the beginning of the end And how we’re going to step back from our cultural momentum toward the lethal,

01:16:50 ► §

I don’t know.

01:16:50 ► §

It’s going to be a very delicate dance.

01:16:54 ► §

There is only one leader in the world at the present moment

01:16:59 ► §

who actually has a public stance of repentance.

01:17:04 ► §

Mikhail Gorbachev knows that the world he inherited

01:17:08 ► §

was put together by paranoid megalomaniacs, and his job is to very carefully dismantle

01:17:16 ► §

this time bomb, while the anti-communists and the anti-Soviet factions take great glee in his discomfiture.

01:17:26 ► §

The fact of the matter is every society is now riddled with contradictions

01:17:32 ► §

and needs to be very, very carefully deconstructed so that it doesn’t explode.

01:17:40 ► §

Our system doesn’t work.

01:17:42 ► §

We don’t have to stand in line to buy potatoes,

01:17:41 ► §

Our system doesn’t work.

01:17:44 ► §

We don’t have to stand in line to buy potatoes.

01:17:51 ► §

But, you know, we have Love Canal and staggering rates of fetal deformity and $5millionhousesbeingsmasheddowntoputup$15 million houses

01:17:58 ► §

that have people sleeping on the heating grates in front of them.

01:18:02 ► §

So I think we need a very radical reconstruction of society,

01:18:07 ► §

and I don’t think we’re going to be able to save much of monotheism once it’s all…

01:18:13 ► §

I think there’s something else with monotheism and polytheism,

01:18:17 ► §

is that if you have a system, even like the one that prevailed in ancient Rome or ancient Greece,

01:18:23 ► §

like the one that prevailed in ancient Rome or ancient Greece,

01:18:31 ► §

of multiple cults, multiple religions, and the various mysteries,

01:18:34 ► §

some of which are known and some of which are private,

01:18:37 ► §

some of which are so extremely private that they’re lost.

01:18:50 ► §

Some of them only have their names, and I presume there are some we don’t have it in here, it creates inherently a situation of competitive viewpoints,

01:18:53 ► §

multiple ways of looking at the world, whereas the monotheistic religions with the unified priesthood

01:18:59 ► §

and frequently the Inquisition tend to route out the dissidents.

01:19:05 ► §

They tend to remove the alternate ways of looking at the world,

01:19:11 ► §

and they tend to enforce a high level of conformity.

01:19:14 ► §

And yet that is the sort of situation

01:19:18 ► §

that will lead your whole society over the edge.

01:19:21 ► §

There will be nobody to provide alternatives.

01:19:20 ► §

over the edge there will be nobody to provide alternatives

01:19:24 ► §

well obviously we’ve reached

01:19:28 ► §

a point of

01:19:29 ► §

opened up lots of questions

01:19:31 ► §

I think the model of pluralism

01:19:34 ► §

for me is Los Angeles

01:19:35 ► §

that is the most pluralistic

01:19:38 ► §

religious society anywhere

01:19:39 ► §

I should think

01:19:40 ► §

so is that better

01:19:43 ► §

I think there are hundreds of questions

01:19:47 ► §

that Terence has suddenly landed on us.

01:19:52 ► §

Here at two minutes before the end.

01:19:55 ► §

Well, I’d just like to end with one question myself,

01:19:58 ► §

just in 30 seconds,

01:19:59 ► §

which is if one’s to recognize the goddess of America,

01:20:03 ► §

how does one do it?

01:20:04 ► §

You know, there’s no recognized feminine principle of the Americas or the American continent.

01:20:09 ► §

In Europe, Europa herself is a goddess, or at least a feminine hero, heroine.

01:20:19 ► §

So there’s Columbia.

01:20:20 ► §

Now, is Columbia the goddess of America?

01:20:22 ► §

Most Americans I’ve asked haven’t a clue who she is except from a picture on Columbia Motion Pictures.

01:20:29 ► §

British Columbia, District of Columbia, Columbia River, Republic of Columbia, named after Columbus.

01:20:35 ► §

1492, 500th anniversary. 1992, just two and a half, two years away, two, three years away,

01:20:42 ► §

is the 500th anniversary of Columbus coming to America.

01:20:48 ► §

So is Columbia, she’s a female personification of America named after Columbus, but she has

01:20:52 ► §

no content. No one knows anything about her, no one’s dreamed her. The women’s movement

01:20:56 ► §

have ignored her. Then, if we want the goddess of the land, another candidate arises, Our

01:21:02 ► §

Lady of Guadalupe. Her title in the pictures

01:21:06 ► §

of her is Queen of Mexico and Empress of America. This is her title that she’s given. Her shrine

01:21:12 ► §

was built over the temple of the earth goddess of the Aztecs. Her shrine is at Tenochtitlan,

01:21:19 ► §

now engulfed by Mexico City. Is she a better candidate? Now, Terence perhaps thought that

01:21:24 ► §

somebody said, well, because she’s been adopted or Christianized by the Roman Catholics, then

01:21:29 ► §

it’s tainted with monotheism, shouldn’t have anything to do with her. Then who else? You

01:21:33 ► §

know, if one is too picky, then one’s going to end up with the present situation, which

01:21:39 ► §

is nothing, a kind of vacuum. And so I think the problem is to find our way through.

01:21:43 ► §

Columbia is good.

01:21:44 ► §

Well, I think Columbia, but then she needs to be dreamed and

01:21:47 ► §

we’re just beginning this process yes I agree it was Columbia

01:21:51 ► §

who rose spontaneously out of the crowd in Tiananmen Square

01:21:56 ► §

I mean it was the goddess of liberty it was a direct

01:22:00 ► §

connection and that was the archaic revival I mean

01:22:03 ► §

democracy is a step away from anarchy

01:22:06 ► §

I thought it was a tremendous

01:22:08 ► §

drama that

01:22:10 ► §

this would happen that way I think

01:22:12 ► §

Colombia it is the goddess

01:22:14 ► §

re-emerging

01:22:15 ► §

we need a kind of closure

01:22:16 ► §

we’re going to

01:22:18 ► §

well Buffalo

01:22:23 ► §

that’s right

01:22:28 ► §

but then which one would you choose

01:22:30 ► §

if you had buffalo woman would she mean much to people

01:22:33 ► §

whose buffaloes have been killed off

01:22:34 ► §

oh yeah

01:22:36 ► §

I think though that we are now

01:22:39 ► §

just after 11.30 which is our

01:22:41 ► §

destined ending moment

01:22:42 ► §

we end in a moment of

01:22:44 ► §

where we’re

01:22:46 ► §

obviously ready to go on

01:22:47 ► §

obviously ready

01:22:50 ► §

for another weekend

01:22:51 ► §

starting right now

01:22:53 ► §

yes

01:22:54 ► §

well perhaps Gaia

01:22:57 ► §

to unify consciousness

01:23:00 ► §

it isn’t a western hemisphere

01:23:02 ► §

goddess we need

01:23:03 ► §

but simply a recognition of Gaia

01:23:05 ► §

and then her local shrines and manifestations

01:23:08 ► §

her many

01:23:10 ► §

her American form

01:23:11 ► §

her American form

01:23:13 ► §

and thank you all very much

01:23:15 ► §

you were a wonderful group

01:23:17 ► §

thank you

01:23:17 ► §

to stick with us You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:23:30 ► §

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

01:23:36 ► §

Democracy is a step away from anarchy,

01:23:39 ► §

so says the bard McKenna.

01:23:42 ► §

And that, at least to me,

01:23:44 ► §

is as good an argument for democracy as any I’ve heard.

01:23:48 ► §

Maybe we should try that out someday and see if we can finally evolve to a more highly organized state called anarchy.

01:23:55 ► §

And in case you’re afraid of anarchy, I should point out two shining examples of successful anarchy in action.

01:24:03 ► §

One is the Burning Man Festival, and the other is the

01:24:06 ► §

Internet. Both highly functioning anarchies. Of course, I’m sure that there are fellow salonners

01:24:12 ► §

who would take issue with this, and hopefully they’ll state their positions in the comments

01:24:16 ► §

section of the program notes for today’s podcast. And I guess I should mention that I’ve set the

01:24:22 ► §

comments to be moderated, which only means that I’ll personally read them before they get into the public view.

01:24:29 ► §

So if you’re trying to reach me, and I seem to ignore you,

01:24:33 ► §

along with several hundred others who have sent emails,

01:24:36 ► §

so I should add that you shouldn’t think that I’m picking only on you,

01:24:40 ► §

but post a comment on the blog.

01:24:42 ► §

And it won’t become public until I approve it, so if you write a personal note to me, I’ll just respond without posting it as a comment on the blog and it won’t become public until I approve it

01:24:45 ► §

so if you write a personal note to me

01:24:47 ► §

I’ll just respond without posting it as a comment if you’d like

01:24:50 ► §

well like you the events of the summer are pressing

01:24:54 ► §

and so this will have to do it for now

01:24:56 ► §

so I’ll close today’s podcast again

01:24:59 ► §

by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts

01:25:02 ► §

from the Psychedelic Salon

01:25:03 ► §

are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects

01:25:06 ► §

under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareLike 3.0 license.

01:25:11 ► §

And if you have any questions about that,

01:25:12 ► §

just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,

01:25:17 ► §

which you can find through psychedelicsalon.org or.us or.com or.net.

01:25:24 ► §

And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon,

01:25:27 ► §

well, you can hear all about it in my book,

01:25:29 ► §

The Genesis Generation,

01:25:31 ► §

which is a novel that’s available as an audiobook

01:25:34 ► §

that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.

01:25:37 ► §

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

01:25:43 ► §

Be well, my friends.