377 - An Ecology of Souls

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“In the matter of deeper things, deductive reasoning rests only on the appeal that hope can lend to its case.”

“In the felt domain of experience called ‘living’, intuition is how most of us, even the most self-defined as non-intuitional, are operating.”

“[Nature] seeks to maximize cooperation, connectedness, mutual interdependability is the thing which holds the whole thing together. And the species that is most successful is not the species that can dominate all others, it’s the species that can make itself indispensable to all others.”

“Culture, as it is in a sense, the software of the infrastructure of the global civilization, which is the hardware.”

“Culture can be redefined as software and radically re-written so that it runs much more smoothly.”

“I did not say that we were software or hardware. We are neither. We are the user, and this is the important thing to remember. We are not scripting ourselves into some kind of machine future. We are designing the future that we want to have rather than allowing the blunders of our grandparents to dictate the kind of future we will have.”

“To offer instead a potential calendar in celebration of flux, change, growth, and feminism, which are the values that are going to have to be maximized if we are going to open a dialogue with our souls and [the] soul of the planet and save ourselves from the lethal momentum that so many hundreds of years of dominator culture have imparted to the machinery of our civilization. We must awaken.”

“The path out of the Dark Wood in which we find ourselves is cognition, thought, getting smart fast. We have to dance, sing, calculate, and drum our way out of the circumstances into which we have fallen.”

“To the degree that we can celebrate the irrational, the feminine, the unconscious, the transpersonal, and even the psychedelic, to the degree that we can celebrate these things we are giving permission for the order that is in nature to manifest. The plan wants to come to be. We have to get out of the way.”

“Life is some kind of opportunity. It’s an opening between unbridgeable chasms of the unknown. And yet, out of chaos, for twenty, forty, seventy years we come into a domain of immense opportunity. It is a conundrum. It is a puzzle. It is something to be figured out.”

“The path with heart is the path which astonishes.”

“All of our technology is an excretion of the imagination. All of our technology is the condensation of ideological intention.”

“My own private opinion about this is, I think that what psychedelics in these high-dose, correct set/setting situations carry us into is an ecology of souls… . Those ‘things’ in that place are our ancestors.”

“Do we know what we behold? We need to know what we behold because inevitably we become what we behold.”

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Minecraft: The Story of Mojang

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And with me here, virtually that is, are fellow saloners Philip M., Hugh K., Mike O., Tealack P., and old friend Auden P.,

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all of whom were kind enough to send some of their hard-earned cash this way to help us offset a few of the expenses associated with these podcasts.

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this way to help us offset a few of the expenses associated with these podcasts.

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And I guess I should say that my recent laziness in getting this podcast out to you has only come to an end because, well, I’ve begun to feel guilty about not doing a podcast after

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receiving these generous donations.

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So thank you guys, and thank you one and all for getting me up and going again.

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Actually, I’ve got quite a few great talks lined up for future podcasts,

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so I guess I should probably just stop rambling on here and get on with the show.

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Now, today we’re going to listen to the next-to-last session of the workshop that Terrence McKenna gave during the summer of 1989.

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As I listened to it the first time, every time Terrence launched into a new

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topic, I jotted down a potential title for today’s podcast. But I wasn’t able to settle on any one

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particular topic, and so I just used the last topic that he covered. However, as you’re about

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to hear, he covers a lot of ground before getting to the interesting question of just

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what or who are these entities that we seem to encounter in deep cyberdelic space.

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I’m going to join you now and re-listen to this talk once again, and maybe I’ll discover

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that one of the other titles might have been more informative in regards to the actual

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focus of this rap.

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Just for your interest, here are the other titles that I considered.

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Reason, Intuition, and Evolution.

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There is a Telos of some sort.

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Alchemy and Evolution.

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Designing Our Future.

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Evolution and Revolution.

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The Month of Remember.

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Flux is the only standard

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Changing our archetypes

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And the last delusion

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Those are all the ones I rejected.

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So now let’s join the bard and scholar McKenna

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and see if we agree with his final topic,

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which is about a possible ecology of souls.

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The first thing I wanted to talk about was

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because the summer solstice is a great pagan celebration

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and because I think we self-consciously celebrate it

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with the sense that we are participating in something which goes

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slightly against the grain of the dominator culture in which we’re embedded and because

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that culture has made a paragon of reason i thought it might be fun tonight to just talk a little bit about reason and intuition and the forms and the

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politics that attend each. So let me dig into this a little and think aloud. Reason, which always held up as the path to true understanding has two forms they are called deduction and induction and all forms of reason can be subsumed under these two types

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two types now deduction which is considered the stronger form of reason is called reasoning from first principles and it works like this you start from an idea which cannot be proven you accept it as given and you reason outward from it an example that is familiar

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to all of us would be uh euclid’s elements of plane geometry you start with what appears to be an incontrovertible truth

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or what we agree appears to be an incontrovertible truth

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in the case of Euclid, propositions such as

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parallel lines never cross, never meet

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well, you can imagine a railroad in your head

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and run your mind along it to infinity

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and then you’ve inspected the infinite railroad

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and lo and behold at no point did the rails cross.

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So you accept this as true.

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Then you can reason from it.

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Now, in the case of the Euclidean proposition that parallel lines don’t meet you test the

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truth of it by carrying out this imaginary inspection of the items involved and verifying

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that the statement appears true in all cases that you can imagine but other forms of other branches of human knowledge

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also use deduction interestingly enough theology theology so theology reasons like in the following manner. God exists. This is perhaps not Christian theology. This is a generic

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theology. God exists because Christian theology would seek to go further back and prove in some

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cases, such as in scholasticism, that God exists. But let’s just start with the given assumption that God exists.

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And then a second assumption.

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And God loves us.

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Given these two assumptions,

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then deduction goes to work and elaborates an explanation for why we are not with God,

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how we can get to God, and so forth and so on.

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So deduction is useful.

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Notice that my two examples have been drawn from, in the case of Euclid mathematics,

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in the case of the second case from theology, a branch of philosophy.

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from theology, a branch of philosophy.

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So deduction seems to have an important role in these abstract systems.

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But remember I said it was one of two forms of reasoning that are ordinarily dealt with. Now the second form of reasoning is, to mind more interesting. The second form of reasoning is induction,

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not deduction, induction. And induction, for those who believe in it, is thought to be, without doubt, a superior form of reasoning to deduction

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because it leads to a control and a manipulation of real consequences in the world.

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Okay, what is induction and how does it work?

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Well, it works like this.

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Well, it works like this.

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When I hit the water with a shovel, it makes a splash.

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Every time I hit the water with the shovel, it makes a splash.

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Therefore, this is the leap, the therefore,

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therefore, shovels can be used to make water splash.

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Now, notice what is interesting about this in contrast to deduction is that there is no untested first principle.

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You don’t state something and then reason from it.

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You make repetitious observations

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and then those observations which are most repetitious

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you raise to the status of laws

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induction

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and this was abhorrent

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to philosophical thinkers

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because it doesn’t have this Aristotelian purity

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that deduction has it doesn’t have this Aristotelian purity that deduction has

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it doesn’t have this mathematical

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elegance it’s messy it’s all down in the

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world observing and comparing and

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repeating experimentally procedures but

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nevertheless out of inductive reasoning

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comes the structure of modern science

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okay

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but now there’s a funny thing

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about induction

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it’s making an unstated assumption

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about time

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it is making the assumption that time is invariant.

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Because what it is saying is.

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If A precedes B in a thousand cases.

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Then it is likely that A will precede B in the thousand and first case.

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In other words it’s a probabilistic theory. It assumes

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that probabilistic laws give momentum to repetitious observation. Now the question is,

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is this so? And the answer is, well, it’s so in some cases, but not in the most interesting cases.

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cases, but not in the most interesting cases. The most interesting cases, I believe, are the cases which lie in the realm of primary experience of being, the felt experience of being. And in that

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realm, the realm of love affairs, divorces, lawsuits, religions, political upheavals, and that sort of thing,

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induction is no good guide at all. One love affair does not explain another, one

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marriage does not illuminate another, one revolution really does not shed light on

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another. There may be generalizations, but when you live through these things, what you take from them is the uniqueness

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of the experience. The first principles that are reasoned from in deduction, whether in the realm

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of a deductive mathematical system like Euclid or a rational theology,

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these things are seen to rest on foundations of sand

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because of this problem of the axiom.

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In mathematics, the axiom appears fairly secure

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because it’s self-evident, such as parallel lines never meet.

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It rests on its self-evidence to make its appeal to reason.

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You see, you can see that it is true, though no one has ever figured out how to prove this.

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You can see that it is true.

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But when you move from the realm of axioms

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to the realm of theological first principles,

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the appeal then is not at all to the obviousness of it,

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but to the desirability of it,

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that God exists, that God loves us.

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We hope these things are true,

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but they are certainly not self-evident in the scheme of things

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from the point of view of most of us.

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So what this shows then, I think,

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is that in the matter of deeper things deductive reasoning

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rests only on the appeal that hope can lend to its case okay so for me this is

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a critique of deduction now what about induction I referred to the fact that its premises

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rest on this notion of temporal

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invariance which seems to be true only

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for the grossest of phenomena

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science has made great hay

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in that dimension by

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creating laws which are essentially predictive laws of cyclical phenomena

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that define for us

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what part of reality

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goes around and comes around

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in other words we can predict

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simple phenomena involving the

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mechanical orbits in gravitational fields.

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We can make simple predictions about the end results of certain chemical processes,

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certain nuclear processes, so forth and so on.

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But when you lay it against the background of nature and experience,

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it begins to look like pretty thin soup.

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It’s no basis for claiming epistemic preeminence.

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And this is the point that I want to make.

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Science claims epistemic preeminence.

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That means that science doesn’t say,

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we are an ideology like Buddhism and Taoism and the Tarot.

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They say, we are a meta-system. We shall judge all other systems in our scales. Well, this is politics, but not good philosophy, because there is no basis for this claim to epistemic preeminence. So this somewhat egghead rave

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is supposed to pass for a pagan polemic

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on the summer solstice

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because it’s an attack on the foundations of reason itself.

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And as you know know when reason goes

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barbarism and madness

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cannot be far behind

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and as a self-declared

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philosophical anarchist

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as in fact the founding member

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of the Henri Poincaré

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Anarchist International

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our motto is

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chaos is order

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I believe that it’s entirely

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appropriate to carry out an attack on reason okay so then what are we left

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with well what we’re left with is intuition.

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Intuition.

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And what is it and how does it work?

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Well, it’s a feeling into things that comes to answers and leaves no trail.

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That’s the thing.

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It leaves no trail so you have it

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but you haven’t the argument for it

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and so its power must reside

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in its truthfulness

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so the power of intuition

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lies in its ability to express truth

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in contravention to the forward flow of logic and

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kazoo astray well is it always to be this for you know how the Dow is presented as this Eastern

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concept that you can barely wrap your mind around and that hovers at the edge of intelligibility

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well really in these so-called obscure oriental uh philosophical stances always turn out to have

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a corollary in western thinking and the corollary to the dao to daoism is intuitionalism, is, you know, an ability to sense

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the constraints and opportunities in the moment

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and act through it. Intuition.

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And intuition is always presented

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in the dominator society as one vague, two

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feminine, three unreliable. But this is simply

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because of this bias toward deductive and inductive systems whose falsity I have just

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demonstrated to you. In fact, in the felt domain of experience called living, intuition is how most of us, even the most

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self-defined as non-intuitional, are operating. Intuition is a kind of field processing of both

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the foreground and the background of experience. It’s a gestalt understanding that is subliminal and that leads

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the whole organism through an invisible set of Creoles towards the maximizing of some kind of

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a goal okay end of Act one the second act opens in the middle of the 19th century

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with science responding

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albeit unconsciously

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to an understanding of what I’ve just said

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the inadequacy of reason

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the necessity of intuition

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and yet all this going on in a domain of Victorian gentlemen

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with beards to their belts and a world where pianos wore pants so you know it it worked its

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way out subtly in the notion of evolution and evolution is a very interesting

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concept that

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even those of us who profess to believe

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in it I think don’t fully

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grasp

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what comes in this package

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we all are taught

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that

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in the 19th century

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a great struggle was waged between science and religion

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because science had the audacity to suggest that human beings were descended from the great apes.

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And we all know who took what sides and the kind of polemics that were raised. And we all know the happy ending of this story

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with the great triumph of modern evolutionary biology.

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However, that, to my mind, looking at it from the point of view of a philosopher,

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is all sham.

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is all sham or it’s like the 11 o’clock news version

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of what actually happened.

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That’s how rather silly people

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understood the great intellectual watershed struggle

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of the 19th century.

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That is not in fact what it was about.

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That’s not what it was about. That’s not what it was about. The outrageous

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assertion of the evolutionists, of Darwin particularly and his school, was not that

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human beings were descended from the great apes. In fact, the outrageous assertion wasn’t even contained

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in the part of the manuscript

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that was called The Descent of Man.

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You recall it was called

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The Origin of Species

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and The Descent of Man.

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And where the real kicker was lodged

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was in The Origin of Species.

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Why?

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Because Darwin set out to show

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that nature could be the product

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of processes without purpose.

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That was the bit that brought the roof down.

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Ordinary people couldn’t understand this.

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This is called the so-called teleological issue

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but this is what brought the christian church roaring to its feet in confrontation with

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evolutionary biology the assertion that nature could it be accounted for by processes that were not guided toward a higher end by a higher power that simply random

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molecular processes and then pressures of environmental selection could cause to come to be

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animals plants and ultimately human beings but the fight was over teleology.

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The fight was over whether or not

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the universe has a purpose

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toward which all creation moves ineluctably

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or whether nature is what the Darwinists called it,

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which was trendlessly fluctuating.

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Trendlessly fluctuating. So it was an

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attack on God, not the divinity,

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not the divine status of man.

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That was peanuts in this poker game.

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It was an attack on the need for

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God per se as

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an efficient cause

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in the machinery of universal being

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well it’s a very interesting

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question and a very interesting

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struggle because we are still

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caught up in it. American transcendentalism

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while all this was going on in England

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American transcendentalism, while all this was going on in England, American Transcendentalism was exploring the transcendental realms of the human spirit cast against the background of the telos in nature was to make lifelong friends

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into enemies and sunder families.

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Alfred Russell Wallace,

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who was the co-discoverer of evolution

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with Darwin,

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really preceded him.

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He had a fever.

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He was a

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professional butterfly collector

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as I was once in my

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youth and on the island

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of Ternate in eastern

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Indonesia Wallace fell

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into a malarial fever

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and at the height of this

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fever he wrote down a page and a half

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of scribbling which

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when he came down from this

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illness and read it, it seemed to hold up. And what he had discovered was what all biology was

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seeking, what he called the solution to the problem of the species. And he looked at this thing,

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and what it was was a description of natural selection.

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And it seemed to work. Well, Wallace was from the lower classes and made his living in England as a surveyor,

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was essentially a field biologist because he was not accepted by the gentleman scientists of England.

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He didn’t know where to turn.

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scientists of England, he didn’t know where to turn.

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So he fired off a letter to the only person he could think of to ask, who was the greatest biologist of the day, Charles Darwin,

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at home in England in his garden,

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working over 20 years of notes on the problem of the species.

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When Darwin got this letter from this

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unknown character postmarked

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Ambon Dutch East Indies and read it

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he paled visibly

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and he went to his friend

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Sir Charles Lyle who was the

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greatest geologist of the day,

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the proponent of catastrophism,

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and was to develop into one of the great defenders of Darwin’s theory,

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he went to Charles Lyell and said,

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I’ve been working 20 years on this idea.

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This came in the post.

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This is it. it’s all here.

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And Lyell said, don’t worry, my friend,

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we will schedule two papers to be delivered at the Royal Society.

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They will be delivered on the same evening, and yours shall be first.

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And so it was.

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And so it comes down to us as Darwin’s theory of evolution.

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But in fact, in a way, for philosophical purists, it may have been better that way.

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Because Wallace, who was in many ways a deeper thinker than Darwin was a Fabian socialist

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was fascinated by paranormal phenomena

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as well as being interested

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in electricity, biogeography

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anthropology

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truly one of the last of the great polymaths

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Wallace was unable to take

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the final step on the question

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of teleology

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and he said I cannot

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believe that

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random processes

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ameliorated by

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natural selection

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can give rise to

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a creature such as man

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so this was

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the break

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in the 19th century.

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And it arises out of

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the earlier foundation

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of the struggle between

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intuition and reason.

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I mean, I think our intuition

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must place us

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in Wallace’s camp.

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That there is a telos of some sort.

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There is an omega point

00:27:29 ►

toward which all creation,

00:27:31 ►

however unsteadily, moves.

00:27:34 ►

And it is because of this omega point

00:27:39 ►

that we do live in a cosmos

00:27:41 ►

and not a chaos,

00:27:44 ►

not simply a raging confusion confusion but something that is structured

00:27:49 ►

and ordered well in spite of the fact that evolution was seeking to serve the most rigorous

00:27:56 ►

scientific desires to exclude teleology and to exclude god from the process of the natural world it introduced a

00:28:11 ►

bizarre concept which cut against its own purposes the concept is a kind of progress in nature where previously none had been so that uh from aristotle to the 19th century

00:28:32 ►

what you have as a theory of nature is what’s called the great chain of being or the great

00:28:39 ►

ladder of being and it stretches from god through the archangels the seraphim the cherubim down man

00:28:49 ►

then the animal kingdom the vegetable kingdom so forth and so on but it is imagined as static as put in place by the fiat looks of creation

00:29:05 ►

set in place for all time.

00:29:08 ►

What Darwin did was to see it as not a great chain of being,

00:29:16 ►

but as an escalator of being.

00:29:18 ►

He added the notion of progressive movement

00:29:22 ►

toward higher and higher forms,

00:29:27 ►

more and more complex manifestations of the intrinsic ingression of novelty into actual events. And this idea is very, very

00:29:42 ►

interesting and cogent and pregnant with possibility for all of us and our world.

00:29:48 ►

You see, what it is really is it’s a recasting of an idea that had been banished for several centuries from Western thinking.

00:29:57 ►

It is the alchemical idea that nature is driving to perfect itself.

00:30:07 ►

This was what the alchemist believed they believed that through time lesser metals became gold and that what the alchemist was trying to do was to

00:30:18 ►

compress time he was trying to to catalyze a natural process so that what took

00:30:26 ►

thousands in their imagination

00:30:28 ►

of years in the

00:30:30 ►

body of the earth could be

00:30:32 ►

compressed into days or weeks

00:30:34 ►

in the alembic of the

00:30:36 ►

alchemist well as science

00:30:38 ►

defined itself throughout

00:30:40 ►

the 17th and 18th century

00:30:42 ►

under the impetus of Descartes

00:30:44 ►

and Kant and all of these people

00:30:49 ►

this notion of the world

00:30:53 ►

as a distillate apparatus

00:30:56 ►

was given up

00:30:57 ►

but it returns in the idea of evolution

00:31:01 ►

and we inherit it in the social world now this is a delicate point there is

00:31:11 ►

something called social darwinism otherwise known as fascism social darwinism uses a very vulgar understanding of evolutionary dynamics to justify

00:31:25 ►

class oppression

00:31:27 ►

by saying that

00:31:29 ►

it must be

00:31:32 ►

right that some people

00:31:33 ►

have their foot on

00:31:36 ►

other people’s necks

00:31:37 ►

because isn’t this what nature is about

00:31:40 ►

struggle of the fittest

00:31:41 ►

and survival of the

00:31:43 ►

longest fang the swiftest claw the fittest and survival of the longest fang, the swiftest claw, the sharpest tooth?

00:31:49 ►

Well, the answer is no, absolutely not.

00:31:52 ►

This rests on an understanding of nature that was in vogue 150 years ago that is not in vogue now.

00:32:02 ►

That’s what you see when you look at nature

00:32:05 ►

in the human dimension.

00:32:09 ►

But when you analyze nature

00:32:11 ►

as an integrated system of chemical reactions,

00:32:16 ►

gene transfer,

00:32:18 ►

catalytic self-regulating activities,

00:32:22 ►

hypercycles of energy, nutrients, and metabolism, When you analyze nature from that point of view, you see that it seeks to maximize cooperation, connectedness, mutual interdependability is the thing which holds the whole thing together and the species that is most successful is not the species that

00:32:46 ►

can dominate all others it’s the species that can make itself indispensable to all others look at

00:32:55 ►

the evolutionary success of the bacteria you know they settled in for the long haul and no higher form of life can operate without them and so the the possibility

00:33:09 ►

of bacteria becoming extinct is laughable i mean they’ll be the last to go because they have made

00:33:16 ►

themselves indispensable this idea then of evolution has strongly entered the human world and science

00:33:26 ►

hates this

00:33:27 ►

I had somebody once say

00:33:29 ►

to me if it doesn’t

00:33:31 ►

involve genes it ain’t

00:33:34 ►

evolution

00:33:34 ►

and you should not use the word

00:33:37 ►

evolution to describe

00:33:39 ►

progressive change

00:33:41 ►

they didn’t like that

00:33:42 ►

they said evolution is a technical term used by biologists and it applies to genetic material only. Waddington, Eric Yonch

00:34:06 ►

Wes Churchman, Paul Fireabend

00:34:10 ►

Irvin Laszlo

00:34:13 ►

have

00:34:14 ►

I think by the sheer force and volume

00:34:18 ►

of their writings overwhelmed this notion

00:34:21 ►

and reclaimed evolution

00:34:23 ►

as a much broader concept than it was understood

00:34:29 ►

to be in the 19th century evolution is now understood to be the triumphant march out of

00:34:37 ►

chaos into order connectedness self-expression and self-reflection that begins with the first

00:34:45 ►

moments preceding

00:34:47 ►

following the big bang

00:34:49 ►

in other words

00:34:51 ►

we have chemical

00:34:54 ►

we have atomic evolution

00:34:56 ►

evolution of

00:34:58 ►

atomic systems as electrons

00:34:59 ►

settle down into stable orbits

00:35:02 ►

we have chemical evolution

00:35:04 ►

into more and more complex molecular forms

00:35:07 ►

which finally become polymers

00:35:09 ►

these polymers further evolve into complex

00:35:12 ►

intergetic systems capable of self-replication

00:35:16 ►

motility and eventually

00:35:19 ►

the writing of operas

00:35:21 ►

so what we see when we look at

00:35:24 ►

the universe is that you have to be blind

00:35:29 ►

to this progressive tendency that has worked its will with the random plasma of pure electrons

00:35:39 ►

with the chemistry of stars with the molecular chemistry of primitive planets,

00:35:46 ►

with plant and animal life,

00:35:49 ►

with human epigenetic coding systems,

00:35:53 ►

carving, dance, ritual, vocalization, magic.

00:35:57 ►

And this process proceeds right up into the 20th century with this phenomenon that we all

00:36:05 ►

give

00:36:06 ►

some credence to

00:36:10 ►

the notion that we are living in a period

00:36:12 ►

of compressed time

00:36:14 ►

well

00:36:15 ►

so what are we to do

00:36:18 ►

with that

00:36:18 ►

I think what we have to do

00:36:21 ►

is begin then to

00:36:23 ►

design this process.

00:36:26 ►

It is now moving fast enough that it is within the ken of each one of us to see progressive consolidation of change taking place in the world around us we as human beings I think are destined to be the design and control

00:36:47 ►

element in this thing in this global guy and process never mind that we have done

00:36:55 ►

it so badly up to now because now meaning the 20th century, is a completely different kind of epistemic world

00:37:09 ►

than any world that preceded it.

00:37:12 ►

And to the degree that we can shed

00:37:14 ►

the inherited behavior patterns

00:37:18 ►

of previous centuries,

00:37:21 ►

previous cultural styles,

00:37:23 ►

and actually take hold of the tools present

00:37:27 ►

at hand we can guide and control this evolutionary process culture as it is in sense the software of the infrastructure

00:37:46 ►

of the global civilization

00:37:49 ►

which is the hardware

00:37:51 ►

we don’t need to make

00:37:55 ►

major design revisions in the hardware

00:37:58 ►

the hardware is how we produce

00:38:01 ►

and move around food

00:38:04 ►

how we produce and move around food, how we produce energy.

00:38:05 ►

The major restructuring there is simply a matter of cleaning it up, making it more efficient, less toxic, less enslaved to the notion of making a buck, more enslaved to the notion of serving human needs. So the hardware structure can be pretty much redesigned

00:38:29 ►

along the lines that are clear

00:38:31 ►

to even the engineering mentalities among us.

00:38:35 ►

What is not so clear

00:38:36 ►

is that culture can be redefined as software

00:38:40 ►

and radically rewritten

00:38:43 ►

so that it runs much more smoothly

00:38:46 ►

now notice

00:38:49 ►

that I did not say that we were software

00:38:52 ►

or hardware

00:38:53 ►

we are neither, we are the user

00:38:56 ►

and this is the important thing to remember

00:39:00 ►

we are not scripting ourselves

00:39:03 ►

into some kind of machine future.

00:39:05 ►

We are designing the future that we want to have rather than allowing the blunders of our grandparents to dictate the kind of future we will have.

00:39:18 ►

We’re very late waking up to the necessity for this. This is because we tend to operate

00:39:26 ►

along very short-term goals.

00:39:31 ►

It’s very hard for us to put in place

00:39:33 ►

a project that looks 40 or 50 years ahead.

00:39:40 ►

It was interesting, a couple of years ago

00:39:42 ►

there was an article in the Whole Earth Review

00:39:44 ►

about a chapel at Oxford

00:39:48 ►

that the main beam of this chapel, which was an oak beam about so by so,

00:39:58 ►

was rotted through with worms and had to be replaced.

00:40:06 ►

And it was no problem because 800 years ago,

00:40:10 ►

an English king planted an oak tree that was to be grown

00:40:16 ►

for the specific purpose of replacing this beam

00:40:21 ►

when it should need to be replaced.

00:40:24 ►

And so this 750-year year old oak tree was cut and the beam

00:40:30 ►

hewn and put into place and the it inspired them to plant another oak tree

00:40:38 ►

which is not a bad idea okay well

00:40:45 ►

so that’s maybe enough about evolution

00:40:48 ►

now I want to talk about revolution

00:40:51 ►

which is also in the solsticeal theme

00:40:55 ►

because what the solstice

00:40:59 ►

marks is the return

00:41:01 ►

of the heliacal rising of the sun

00:41:04 ►

to a certain fixed star against the background of the heliacal rising of the sun to a certain fixed star

00:41:07 ►

against the background of fixed stars

00:41:09 ►

in our calendar system.

00:41:12 ►

What it really celebrates

00:41:14 ►

is the longest day of the year,

00:41:19 ►

the day when the sun makes its most northerly,

00:41:30 ►

when the sun makes its most northerly, its deepest incursion into the northern latitudes.

00:41:36 ►

It’s interesting, the theme of revolution is dealt with in the I Ching,

00:41:50 ►

and since, of course, the I Ching was one of the five Confucian classics, you might turn to that passage expecting a discourse on political reformations.

00:41:55 ►

And when you look at the hexagram revolution,

00:42:02 ►

it says nothing about political guidance to revolutionaries.

00:42:05 ►

It says instead, the magician is a calendar maker.

00:42:09 ►

He measures the seasons and he sets them right.

00:42:15 ►

And so the last idea, maybe,

00:42:19 ►

that I want to leave with you tonight

00:42:21 ►

is a few thoughts about the calendar. because I have fastened on to the

00:42:29 ►

calendar as an interesting vehicle for changing people’s conceptions of reality I don’t think we

00:42:37 ►

realize how thoroughly our worldview is dominated by the unconscious preconceptions

00:42:46 ►

that are built into our calendar.

00:42:51 ►

The Chinese understood this.

00:42:54 ►

This is why when there were great social revolutions,

00:42:56 ►

a new calendar was always put in place.

00:42:59 ►

We have used the present calendar with a minor correction for 2,000 years for one entire

00:43:07 ►

zodiacal age and we assume I assume we assume that we use this calendar that we do because

00:43:20 ►

it must be a very good one and it must be the best of all and it must be the

00:43:26 ►

simplest and it is true that when you look back into time you do find bizarre calendrical

00:43:35 ►

arrangements for instance i don’t know if you knew this but roman months counted up to the middle day of the month and then like a rocket launching

00:43:46 ►

counted down to the end day of the month

00:43:49 ►

this is why the middle day of Roman months

00:43:53 ►

which was called the Ides

00:43:54 ►

was considered an unlucky day

00:43:57 ►

because that was the day that the upwards switched

00:44:00 ►

to a downward count

00:44:01 ►

well we would find this very clumsy

00:44:04 ►

but notice that what our count the the

00:44:08 ►

logic and we’ve talked about logic reason and deduction this evening the logic behind our

00:44:17 ►

calendar is that it is a good solar calendar well what do we mean by a good solar calendar well calendar makers

00:44:27 ►

will tell you that a good solar calendar is a calendar such that on the same day

00:44:35 ►

of every year the Sun rises in the same place against the background of the fixed stars this is what we mean when we say the sun is in Aries

00:44:47 ►

we mean that at dawn the constellation Aries

00:44:52 ►

is blotted out by the heliacal light

00:44:56 ►

of the rising sun

00:44:58 ►

but the sun is this solar

00:45:03 ►

masculine Apollonian archetype.

00:45:08 ►

It is the archetype of the ego as God.

00:45:15 ►

It is the archetype of the center, the unity.

00:45:20 ►

Solar calendar is set up so that we do not have what is called a precession.

00:45:26 ►

A precession is where the days slip against the background of the fixed stars.

00:45:33 ►

The notion of our calendar is that it is an agricultural calendar

00:45:38 ►

and we want our great agricultural holidays to always fall in the times of harvest and

00:45:45 ►

planting so a solar year must be used but what this does is it has an

00:45:53 ►

underlying assumption which is false and which is has been inculcated into our

00:45:59 ►

psychology with two detrimental ends and it it is this, that this obsession with fixing the solstices

00:46:10 ►

and the equinoxes against the fixed stars

00:46:13 ►

is the effort to build a structure

00:46:17 ►

on the very largest level,

00:46:20 ►

the level of the planet itself,

00:46:23 ►

to build a structure that is fixed, that is enduring.

00:46:28 ►

And the great pride of our calendar is that we say it does not slip.

00:46:33 ►

That means it’s fixed and enduring.

00:46:36 ►

Well, you may not know that the reason it doesn’t slip is because there’s a fudge factor in it.

00:46:42 ►

because there’s a fudge factor in it.

00:46:48 ►

We’re all familiar with the fudge factor of leap year,

00:46:53 ►

that every four years we have to add a year to keep it okay.

00:47:01 ►

But how many of you knew that every century year divisible by 400 is also a leap year, even if it occurs out of sequence.

00:47:06 ►

The year 2000 will be such a leap year.

00:47:10 ►

It is a century year divisible by 400.

00:47:15 ►

So was 1600.

00:47:18 ►

And so in that case, you have a leap year,

00:47:20 ►

even though the previous or the following year may be a leap year.

00:47:24 ►

So there is a

00:47:25 ►

fudge factor in the high and mighty solar paternal calendar that keeps it on track well somewhat

00:47:34 ►

facetiously what i propose at least as a thought model is an entirely different year length 384 days now 384 days is an interesting number it’s 13 lunations

00:47:50 ►

precisely 13 lunations and uh so we would have therefore a need for a 13th month in the calendar and i propose that the 13th month follow august and

00:48:09 ►

precede september and be called remember and the month of remember will be a month of great

00:48:19 ►

mnemonic celebration and recovery of the past it will be a celebration of the past well okay now we have 13

00:48:29 ►

months that’s wonderful but we have purchased this 13th month at the expense of 19 days

00:48:36 ►

that overshoot the solar year what about that well instead of viewing that as a problem as it has always been viewed

00:48:46 ►

let’s view it as an opportunity

00:48:48 ►

what happens if you use a day length

00:48:52 ►

19 days longer than the solar year?

00:48:55 ►

well, it means that the great festivals

00:48:58 ►

of the solar year

00:49:00 ►

Easter, Christmas, the 4th of July

00:49:04 ►

will, let’s call it Independence Day

00:49:08 ►

so we don’t confuse ourselves

00:49:09 ►

because it’s going to move

00:49:11 ►

that these great festivals

00:49:13 ►

will do what is called precess

00:49:17 ►

each year they will come 19 days later

00:49:21 ►

against the solar year than the year before

00:49:24 ►

so in such a calendrical system

00:49:27 ►

you would be as a child christmas would occur let us say in winter by the time you were in your

00:49:36 ►

middle teens christmas would be occurring in springtime by the time you were in your mid-twenties, Christmas would be occurring in high summer,

00:49:46 ►

and in your mid-thirties, it would occur again, it would occur in autumn. And through a life

00:49:54 ►

of 60 or 70 years, the solar festivals would migrate through the seasons. Well, this may seem trivial to you and hey it may be but the the

00:50:10 ►

psychology of it is that it’s trying to build in at the highest level a truth

00:50:18 ►

which we have lost sight of which is the idea that everything flows, that everything is impermanent,

00:50:28 ►

that flux is the only standard.

00:50:35 ►

Flux is the only thing you can depend on.

00:50:39 ►

If we gave ourselves permission at the highest and deepest psychological level,

00:50:45 ►

the place where we measure time and the spectacle of our life

00:50:50 ►

as spread out against the grid of the history that we live through,

00:50:55 ►

if we were to give that permission to be portrayed on a grid

00:51:01 ►

that emphasized flow, transience, change, and recursion, rather than this constipated

00:51:11 ►

solar square against the fixed stars, then what we are really doing, you see, is changing

00:51:19 ►

archetypes.

00:51:21 ►

We are changing archetypes.

00:51:23 ►

And what are we changing we’re changing the apollonian

00:51:26 ►

solar paternalistic dominator archetype for the feminine oceanic intuitive

00:51:34 ►

giving and taking archetype of flow and life and death and completion through change,

00:51:46 ►

rather than completion which seeks to stave off change

00:51:52 ►

and then is inevitably swept away and therefore somehow touched with pathos.

00:52:00 ►

Well, maybe that’s enough.

00:52:02 ►

Maybe there are questions.

00:52:04 ►

This was somewhat meandering. I’ll recap it for you to try and give you the illusion that there was a plan.

00:52:22 ►

and logic in favor of the primacy of intuition

00:52:26 ►

in spite of its

00:52:29 ►

nakedness

00:52:32 ►

intuition cannot clothe itself

00:52:35 ►

in the armor of logic

00:52:37 ►

but I hope I demonstrated to you that the armor of logic

00:52:41 ►

is wide mesh chain mail

00:52:43 ►

in fact it’s chicken wire.

00:52:47 ►

In fact, it may be chicken shit.

00:52:49 ►

So the primacy of intuition

00:52:55 ►

and how that intuition led into a peculiar episode

00:53:00 ►

in 19th century science

00:53:02 ►

where committed atheists found themselves serving the recovery

00:53:08 ►

of the alchemical ideal through the notion of nature as an engine of telos and progressivism

00:53:17 ►

and then from that the notion of our own century as the concrescence of this

00:53:27 ►

teleological process that is leading everything into

00:53:32 ►

deeper and deeper modes of self-reflection and connectedness

00:53:36 ►

and then finally to put the snake’s tail in its mouth

00:53:40 ►

to return to the theme of the solstice

00:53:43 ►

and to offer again a counter pose to the calendar of

00:53:50 ►

reason the calendar of solar pater to have to be maximized if

00:54:10 ►

we are going to open a dialogue with our souls and the soul of the planet and save ourselves

00:54:20 ►

from the lethal momentum that so many hundreds of years of dominator culture

00:54:28 ►

have imparted to the machinery of our civilization.

00:54:33 ►

I mean, we must awaken.

00:54:36 ►

And these little probes, games about logic and calendars

00:54:41 ►

and shifting perspective on these various issues.

00:54:46 ►

This is just a way to promote cognitive activity,

00:54:51 ►

to say, you know, the path out of the selva oscura,

00:54:59 ►

the path out of the dark wood in which we find ourselves,

00:55:09 ►

path out of the dark wood in which we find ourselves is cognition, thought, getting smart fast. We have to dance, sing, calculate, and drum our way out of the circumstances into

00:55:19 ►

which we have fallen. And to the degree that we can celebrate the irrational the feminine the unconscious

00:55:29 ►

the transpersonal and even the psychedelic to the degree that we can celebrate these things

00:55:38 ►

we are giving permission for the order that is in nature to manifest the plan

00:55:46 ►

Wants to come to be we have to get out of the way and what that means is

00:55:54 ►

All the tricks in the book to diminish

00:55:58 ►

Ego to diminish ego as a cultural ideal. I mean ego is not a male problem it’s not a yuppie

00:56:06 ►

problem it’s not a white people problem it’s just a problem and until we get

00:56:14 ►

this higher perspective we are going to continue to rattle the bars of our cage. The higher perspective depends on seeing things on a scale of thousands of years

00:56:31 ►

and potentially millions of light years.

00:56:37 ►

A cosmic scale, the correct scale, the scale on which we are truly operating.

00:56:44 ►

I mean, the minutia of our personal lives is that it’s

00:56:49 ►

that our lives are an opening into a transpersonal opportunity you know I mean I’ve said this in my class I take the notion of Tantra seriously if by Tantra what we mean is

00:57:08 ►

the shortcut path that life is some kind of opportunity it’s an opening between

00:57:18 ►

unbridgeable chasms of the unknown and yet yet, out of chaos

00:57:25 ►

for 20, 40, 70 years,

00:57:28 ►

we come into a domain

00:57:31 ►

of immense opportunity.

00:57:33 ►

It is a conundrum.

00:57:35 ►

It is a puzzle.

00:57:37 ►

It is something to be figured out.

00:57:40 ►

And I have the faith

00:57:41 ►

that if we can figure this out,

00:57:44 ►

we can figure this out, we can somehow not only make a better world for our children, but in some other profound way, we can even undo what has been done and this would be the ultimate the ultimate dream that somehow

00:58:06 ►

we can discover an elegant escape that will leave us with the clear

00:58:16 ►

understanding that the problem was an illusion it was an illusion it was the last illusion what is what what

00:58:29 ►

in your position is the effect of no myth what has happened to our society do

00:58:36 ►

you think by virtue of fact we have the obvious cooperative evolutionary process

00:58:41 ►

of all this everywhere and yet we don’t have a myth that fits it

00:58:45 ►

what will happen to us if we don’t get a myth well we do have a myth we just don’t call it that

00:58:53 ►

i mean our myth is the faustian myth that reason can wring the secrets from nature and thereby make man a god

00:59:06 ►

and this is the myth of modern science

00:59:09 ►

all of the alchemical dreams

00:59:13 ►

of the 16th century

00:59:15 ►

transformation of matter

00:59:17 ►

prolongation of life

00:59:20 ►

so forth and so on

00:59:22 ►

have been achieved by 20th century science.

00:59:26 ►

The problem is that our myth is a fatal one.

00:59:31 ►

That’s what I’m saying.

00:59:31 ►

Where is a myth that fits the evolutionary concept?

00:59:34 ►

I hear the calendar as a myth that would fit.

00:59:37 ►

Yes, well this is a…

00:59:39 ►

What happens to us if we don’t get one?

00:59:41 ►

Well, what happens to us if we don’t get one

00:59:43 ►

is we just drive this bicycle right over the cliff

00:59:46 ►

in the next 40 or 50 years.

00:59:54 ►

The myth that is trying to be born in science,

00:59:59 ►

and it has to be born there

01:00:01 ►

because that’s the dominant church,

01:00:10 ►

the myth that is trying to be born there because that’s the dominant church. The myth that is trying to be born in science is the rebirth of the spirit.

01:00:17 ►

The spirit has been banished from science and not that long.

01:00:20 ►

Don’t think that it’s been that long.

01:00:27 ►

As late as the early 20th century, were people like Dries in Germany who were embryologists who were looking at the morphogenesis of form and they

01:00:36 ►

said there must be what they called the Elan vital there had to be a vital spark there had to be a indestructible something there well then of

01:00:50 ►

course DNA came along to explain that no no it isn’t that at all it’s just these proteins are

01:00:56 ►

uncoded and so forth but spirit has never really died in certain branches of biology and psychology

01:01:08 ►

you see there are problems for science

01:01:11 ►

the chief problem is this one

01:01:13 ►

that I can hold out my hand

01:01:17 ►

that I can tell you that I’m going to close it

01:01:20 ►

and that this happens

01:01:23 ►

what you see is mind over matter.

01:01:28 ►

What you see is free will.

01:01:31 ►

You see mind willing

01:01:34 ►

matter to behave and it happens.

01:01:39 ►

Within the confines of the body, paranormal

01:01:42 ►

activity appears to be going on.

01:01:46 ►

None of these hot shots can explain how you can conceive of turning your hand into a fist

01:01:53 ►

and cause it to happen.

01:01:56 ►

Right there is the defeat of 2,000 years of rational scientific philosophy.

01:02:03 ►

And they just say yes

01:02:06 ►

that’s right but we make great fighter

01:02:09 ►

planes so

01:02:11 ►

I see

01:02:14 ►

Rupert Sheldrake

01:02:18 ►

as very important in the process of building

01:02:21 ►

a new scientific myth because what he is saying

01:02:23 ►

is on one level completely

01:02:26 ►

outlandish on another level he completes a program that has been going on since the 1850s

01:02:34 ►

tonight i talked about biology and evolution but there were parallel events in the 19th century

01:02:41 ►

going on in the field of the study of magnetism and electricity.

01:02:47 ►

And people like Faraday and Helmholtz and James Clerk Maxwell were discovering fields.

01:02:57 ►

Well, fields are extremely sort of metaphysical phenomena.

01:03:05 ►

I mean, they are invisible.

01:03:08 ►

They pervade all space.

01:03:11 ►

They can’t be seen.

01:03:13 ►

And yet instruments can be seen to detect them.

01:03:17 ►

And not only that, we can transmit music and voice

01:03:19 ►

hundreds of miles.

01:03:21 ►

Right now, this room is interpenetrated

01:03:24 ►

by hundreds and hundreds of long- Right now, this room is interpenetrated by hundreds and hundreds of

01:03:27 ►

long-distance telephone calls, high-frequency radio transmissions, high-frequency television.

01:03:34 ►

We see none of this. If you had told someone in the 1850s that in the 20th century people would

01:03:42 ►

live in an ocean of invisible vibrational energy

01:03:46 ►

carrying messages over thousands of miles.

01:03:49 ►

They would not have believed it.

01:03:51 ►

Sheldrake is simply saying that the part of reality

01:03:58 ►

that science has hitherto been unable to account for is going to have to be accounted for by adding a field into the already

01:04:08 ►

allowed fields which are the electromagnetic field basically the electromagnetic spectrum well

01:04:16 ►

this field which sheldrake wants to establish is called a morphogenetic field. It means that somehow the history of this glass

01:04:29 ►

is attendant upon it.

01:04:32 ►

The history of the glass has followed it here this evening,

01:04:36 ►

as has the history of the pillow,

01:04:38 ►

and your history, and your history,

01:04:41 ►

and that we are in fact not,

01:04:43 ►

in your history, and that we are in fact not,

01:04:50 ►

that the past is present in the present.

01:04:57 ►

That in fact the present is somehow a cascade of effects coming out of the past, not along the lines of causal declension,

01:05:02 ►

cause and effect, but also in this other way.

01:05:07 ►

And I think that there’s a lot to this,

01:05:10 ►

and I think that eventually Sheldrake will be heard.

01:05:16 ►

As yet, he’s unable to stride to the blackboard

01:05:19 ►

and write the equations for the morphogenetic field.

01:05:23 ►

But this could come in time and when it does it

01:05:27 ►

will elucidate the hidden dimension that so be devils are understanding because it will explain

01:05:34 ►

why things are as they are that they are as they are because they are a wave front out of the past meeting the the boundary constraints

01:05:50 ►

of the present situation the the whole my own personal effort to restart a dialogue on the issue is because I believe that psychology has reduced its field of expertise unnecessarily

01:06:14 ►

by seeking to see everything as an adjunct to the functional or dysfunctional human personality.

01:06:22 ►

the functional or dysfunctional human personality

01:06:23 ►

in other words

01:06:25 ►

we don’t know what the mind is

01:06:28 ►

the notion that it arises

01:06:30 ►

out of the brain

01:06:31 ►

is something that the reductionists

01:06:34 ►

hypothesized with

01:06:36 ►

Sherrington in the 20’s

01:06:38 ►

my god they’ve had 60

01:06:40 ►

years to make good on this

01:06:42 ►

and they’ve gotten nowhere

01:06:44 ►

you know how long do you beat a hypothesis

01:06:49 ►

before you proclaim it a dead horse you know same thing with molecular biology i mean dna was decoded

01:06:58 ►

in 1950 35 years ago and you know

01:07:05 ►

has molecular biology taken a significant step since

01:07:09 ►

I mean yes I know about operons and all that stuff

01:07:12 ►

but that’s really the details

01:07:14 ►

no understanding of the mechanisms of life

01:07:18 ►

have emerged out of reductionist biology

01:07:21 ►

and no understandings of the mechanisms of mind thought and cognition

01:07:27 ►

have emerged out of reductionist psychology so what we’re going to have to admit and this is a

01:07:34 ►

tough thing but this is what goes along with intellectual revolutions is the inadequacy of the present models. And the paradigm reformers

01:07:45 ►

are in for big

01:07:48 ►

trouble because these paradigms

01:07:50 ►

can’t be reformed.

01:07:51 ►

These paradigms have to be junked.

01:07:54 ►

It’s junk.

01:07:56 ►

It’s worthless.

01:07:58 ►

I mean, it’s fine if you want to make fighter planes,

01:08:00 ►

but what does that prove

01:08:02 ►

about your knowledge of the nature

01:08:04 ►

of being? It doesn’t prove anything. It’s just a cultural artifact. So I think the myth that is seeking to be born is the rebirth of the spirit. all know it but we live in such a top-down ecology of knowledge that until time magazine

01:08:28 ►

proclaims the rebirth of the spirit nobody’s going to cop to what’s going on yeah intuition

01:08:34 ►

is this same kind of thing i mean the feminine is the same thing i mean i don’t want to burden

01:08:41 ►

this group because you haven’t stuck with me over days and days,

01:08:45 ►

but what I’m saying in what I think of as course is that we had a symbiotic relationship

01:08:53 ►

as recently as 20,000 years ago with a vegetable mind, an organized entelechy, a goddess

01:09:06 ►

a spirit, whatever you want

01:09:08 ►

to call it, a

01:09:09 ►

mind that was

01:09:12 ►

brutally truncated

01:09:14 ►

our symbiotic relationship

01:09:16 ►

was brutally truncated

01:09:18 ►

by climatological

01:09:20 ►

and historical factors that

01:09:22 ►

caused us to fall

01:09:24 ►

from that state of grace, ecological balance,

01:09:28 ►

symbiosis, into the wandering herd of car thieves that we are.

01:09:45 ►

our own we, our existential discomfort,

01:09:53 ►

our angst is a product of this severing of our relationship to spirit.

01:09:57 ►

We are the children of a dysfunctional relationship that we have to bring to the surface.

01:10:00 ►

And if you are what I imagine an ordinary person

01:10:05 ►

this will begin to sound

01:10:07 ►

this will start out sounding preposterous

01:10:10 ►

begin sounding

01:10:12 ►

menacing and I hope

01:10:14 ►

end up convincing you

01:10:16 ►

01:10:17 ►

are worthless

01:10:20 ►

without

01:10:21 ►

a stabilizing

01:10:24 ►

umbilical connection to the mind at large in nature.

01:10:30 ►

And the way we have always achieved this is through shamanism, natural magic, and ecstasy.

01:10:37 ►

This is, in fact, what ecstasy is.

01:10:41 ►

Ecstasy is being in the presence of the other. And the other is not a philosophical

01:10:48 ►

hypothesization or somebody’s notion. The other is the thing we share this planet with.

01:11:00 ►

That we, we as a culture, have not glimpsed for a thousand years

01:11:05 ►

because we’ve retreated into walled cities and walled languages and walled idea systems.

01:11:13 ►

We nowhere come tangential to the flesh of the earth.

01:11:18 ►

When we do, alone in the wilderness, then it overwhelms us.

01:11:26 ►

It moves us.

01:11:28 ►

It terrifies us because we have been so long away from it.

01:11:32 ►

So this is what the reclamation is about.

01:11:37 ►

The spirit is not some airy-fairy notion

01:11:40 ►

floating above everything.

01:11:41 ►

I mean, the spirit is something which,

01:11:48 ►

when it enters into your cross section of reality it leaves your knees knocking and your heart pounding I mean the the path with

01:11:55 ►

heart is the path that astonishes and that that sense of astonishment can only come from an other,

01:12:06 ►

from a lover or an other.

01:12:11 ►

It cannot come out of the self.

01:12:15 ►

So it’s the other questions on all of this.

01:12:18 ►

Your section where you’re covering abolition,

01:12:21 ►

you imply that this was the time to really take some intention

01:12:28 ►

with respect to the direction of our evolution. And I wonder if maybe that’s just an illusion

01:12:33 ►

whose time has come. And it’s part of the illusion of separateness. And the process

01:12:38 ►

will go on and this is part of the process to have the illusion that we actually replay

01:12:43 ►

with. part of the process to have the illusion that we actually replayed well we won’t

01:12:45 ►

know till we try but what we have very very suddenly almost overnight put in

01:12:53 ►

place is number one a entirely global system for collecting information about

01:13:00 ►

reality and ourselves we never had this before We didn’t even have it 30 years ago.

01:13:08 ►

Now you can find out what’s going on.

01:13:13 ►

You can go, if necessary, anywhere you need to go.

01:13:16 ►

Within 72 hours, you can be on the ground,

01:13:19 ►

almost anywhere on Earth, checking out what’s going on.

01:13:23 ►

In the meantime, anthropological data sociological

01:13:28 ►

data climatological data demographic data political data defense strategy that all of this stuff is

01:13:36 ►

available we now know at least what cards are in play and this is the first time this has been so we are now a

01:13:46 ►

global culture you know from the rainforests of the Amazon to the wastes

01:13:52 ►

of the Kalahari from Nome to Santiago it’s one family one people a a nuclear

01:14:01 ►

power explosion that happens in the Western Soviet Union is measured two weeks later in Johannesburg and everywhere else on the planet.

01:14:11 ►

So I think we are living under extraordinary conditions, that there are opportunities in place.

01:14:18 ►

The other thing is, you know, we’re connecting nine million computers a month are being connected together now people think that

01:14:27 ►

computers are office machines but all of our technology is an excretion of the imagination

01:14:35 ►

all of our technology is the condensation of ideological intention and the fact that we now have turned our attention to information the true stuff of

01:14:48 ►

reality is a hopeful sign for three centuries we’ve been obsessed with matter we thought that

01:14:55 ►

was the true stuff of reality well it turns out that’s just you know, nonsense, a flawed philosophical premise gave us this bias in favor of materialism.

01:15:10 ►

But with information, changes can really be made. And also, information informs people.

01:15:26 ►

I’m very much enamored of the notion of the meme. A meme is the smallest unit of an idea.

01:15:32 ►

It is to ideas what genes are to proteins.

01:15:38 ►

Genes make proteins, memes make ideas.

01:15:49 ►

proteins memes make ideas and the way you encourage a meme is the way you encourage a protein you replicate it there are two ways of replicating memes

01:15:55 ►

you can tell somebody and they will tell somebody or you can tell two people you

01:16:03 ►

can repeat yourself or you can tell a bunch of people

01:16:06 ►

and the idea is that we are now

01:16:09 ►

the global meme pool

01:16:12 ►

is now in place

01:16:14 ►

all ideas are in competition

01:16:17 ►

and it’s a level playing field

01:16:20 ►

this is to my mind what accounts for the overnight evaporation of

01:16:25 ►

Marxism this was a meme which could not survive on a level playing field when

01:16:32 ►

the playing field was leveled meaning when a free press was allowed that was

01:16:38 ►

it for that mean that was like it you know trying to sell flying pigs in Brooklyn.

01:16:48 ►

Just people are too smart.

01:16:51 ►

So it’s not going to happen.

01:16:54 ►

So I believe then that memes compete with each other

01:16:58 ►

and that the best ones are the ones which rise to the top I have a real faith that on that

01:17:07 ►

ideology in this case will mirror biology and that more and more complex

01:17:13 ►

and well adapted and efficient and co adaptive and mutually self reinforcing

01:17:21 ►

and mutual community feedback

01:17:26 ►

and all of these things that the

01:17:28 ►

memes which support

01:17:29 ►

which maximize these

01:17:32 ►

evolutionary goals

01:17:34 ►

will fall naturally into

01:17:36 ►

place and so

01:17:37 ►

this thing which

01:17:40 ►

happened in China

01:17:41 ►

was a struggle about

01:17:44 ►

the meme meme because democracy is the idea

01:17:50 ►

that gives permission for all the memes to compete I mean democracy is very close to the heart of any

01:17:58 ►

anarchist you know Plato said you can always tell a democracy when you approach them from the sea because unchained dogs run on the wharf.

01:18:09 ►

Well, what he was referring to was the chaos and the disorder of democracies.

01:18:16 ►

So releasing memes into a competitive environment is very important. Every government on earth, no matter what a bunch of repressive,

01:18:26 ►

totalitarian, militaristic clowns

01:18:29 ►

they may actually be,

01:18:31 ►

they have to give lip service

01:18:32 ►

to the idea that they support a free press

01:18:35 ►

and free exchange of information

01:18:38 ►

and so forth and so on.

01:18:39 ►

The battle over that has been won.

01:18:42 ►

Now it’s about how we interpret

01:18:44 ►

what we call victory.

01:18:46 ►

Nevertheless, as the little people in the world,

01:18:51 ►

I think it behooves all of us to seek to promote this process wherever possible.

01:18:56 ►

If you have a good idea, say it.

01:18:59 ►

For God’s sake, say it.

01:19:01 ►

I mean, we’re drowning for lack of good ideas.

01:19:04 ►

We need every good idea we can get. If the future is not going to be made of good ideas, it’s going to be made of bad ideas, and we’ve seen enough of what that can bring.

01:19:25 ►

history is the briefest of all natural phenomena it began 10-15,000 years ago

01:19:29 ►

and appears as though it will quench itself within 500 years

01:19:33 ►

it is obviously a self-funneling process

01:19:38 ►

that digs its walls higher and higher

01:19:42 ►

because it is going towards some kind of transcendence

01:19:46 ►

it is a metamorphosis

01:19:47 ►

it is not a steady state

01:19:50 ►

history is some kind

01:19:52 ►

of process balanced on a

01:19:54 ►

pinnacle and it either goes

01:19:56 ►

back I suppose

01:19:57 ►

into

01:19:58 ►

speechless animal organization

01:20:02 ►

if we blow up the world

01:20:04 ►

or it turns into something else but it is

01:20:08 ►

not something to be maintained it is transitory and designed to be so it’s like a birth it’s a

01:20:16 ►

it’s it tears the planet apart it contorts the people undergoing it. Before it’s over, the heavy metals are ripped out of the surface of the earth.

01:20:29 ►

The forests are cut down.

01:20:31 ►

This thing happens.

01:20:32 ►

And then, let us hope, it is over.

01:20:37 ►

And we go to some less materialistic, less destructive phase.

01:20:44 ►

less materialistic, less destructive phase.

01:20:49 ►

This is why the question that the psychedelics raise for each of us as individuals

01:20:52 ►

is the question that the culture is going to have to answer

01:20:57 ►

collectively in time as well.

01:21:00 ►

It is, what are we when we can be anything we can imagine i don’t know i think we are

01:21:08 ►

surrounded by mystery i think the the the psychedelics because they enlarge the dimension

01:21:16 ►

of mind they bring the mystery in close they allow us to contemplate possibilities that we would

01:21:26 ►

never have contemplated

01:21:27 ►

because they give us the power of the imagination

01:21:30 ►

and the data

01:21:32 ►

how can we

01:21:33 ►

take these new

01:21:35 ►

datum

01:21:37 ►

that enter experience

01:21:39 ►

and integrate them meaningfully

01:21:42 ►

into ourselves

01:21:43 ►

well I think that the way you do this is by realizing

01:21:48 ►

that the drama that is unfolding must be a human drama so for instance uh the the entities that

01:21:59 ►

are glimpsed in these uh exotic psychedelic states that inform the shamans and so forth.

01:22:08 ►

We say it’s another dimension

01:22:12 ►

and we hypothesize then that these are extraterrestrials

01:22:17 ►

or demons or plant spirits.

01:22:22 ►

We never face the fact that to redeem our own anxiety,

01:22:30 ►

they have to be something more than plant spirits.

01:22:34 ►

They have to be something more than demons.

01:22:38 ►

They have to be something more than friendly extraterrestrials.

01:22:43 ►

something more than friendly extraterrestrials.

01:22:49 ►

My own private opinion about this is I think that what psychedelics

01:22:54 ►

in these high-dose, correct setting situations

01:22:59 ►

carry us into is an ecology of souls.

01:23:10 ►

This is what we’re seeing i mean if that’s not a shocking enough way of putting it how about this what we’re seeing is the dead those people those

01:23:18 ►

things in that place are our ancestors it’s as though there is an ecology

01:23:26 ►

and a cycle of energy

01:23:29 ►

that reaches beyond visible life.

01:23:33 ►

There is an ecology of many dimensions

01:23:36 ►

that life is transformation

01:23:40 ►

into a transcendental realm.

01:23:43 ►

That those self-transforming

01:23:45 ►

jeweled elf machines

01:23:47 ►

that are manufacturing

01:23:50 ►

the talking Fabergé eggs

01:23:52 ►

and the liquid crystal lattices

01:23:55 ►

of multiple fractal dimensions

01:23:57 ►

those are dead friends

01:24:01 ►

these places lie just over the hill.

01:24:06 ►

This is what is meant when it’s said that shamans know how to pass through the doors that the dead pass through daily.

01:24:19 ►

That the adventure of being, I think, is not going to stop with saving the rainforest or feeding everybody or going off to our tourists.

01:24:31 ►

That the adventure of being persists through time.

01:24:48 ►

immediacy and the weirdness the charge the numinosity of the contact in hyperspace if this is an ecology of souls if what we are seeing is in fact

01:24:56 ►

what we always thought we would never see or know which is information about the next stage of existence, then this is a tremendous

01:25:08 ►

salutary force pouring into existence. And when you think about it, isn’t this the most

01:25:14 ►

likely hypothesis? We know how improbable extraterrestrials are, and the only organized intellect keys we have ever contacted or had

01:25:28 ►

familiarity with our people therefore isn’t it likely that what we’re dealing

01:25:34 ►

with our people well then hypotheses multiply perhaps their people from the

01:25:39 ►

future perhaps that’s the future and then we like that because it holds everything in the

01:25:46 ►

dimensions we’re familiar with. The idea that it’s the dead is a little more hackle-raising,

01:25:53 ►

a little more peculiar, a little more heartful, a little more hard to assimilate, and probably

01:26:00 ►

closer to the mark. That it is an ecology of souls.

01:26:06 ►

That’s where we go.

01:26:07 ►

That’s why they can make objects out of language.

01:26:13 ►

It’s because it is the flesh becoming word,

01:26:18 ►

and then the word becoming flesh,

01:26:20 ►

that this is a cycle between two dimensions of existence,

01:26:27 ►

and only the shamans know what is happening because only they operate outside the confines of profane history

01:26:33 ►

only they make the journey into the matrix where for some reason the living and the dead are co-existent well this you know just

01:26:49 ►

seems like raving madness except that this is what every anthropologist has

01:26:55 ►

collected in his notebook books from every pre literate group worldwide

01:27:02 ►

they’re into the ancestors not extraterrestrials not

01:27:07 ►

voyagers from the far future but the dead and it is it has the ring of truth

01:27:17 ►

to me this would explain this intuition that the psychedelics somehow have a historical role to play

01:27:28 ►

because deny it as we may wish to we are in a great dying it is well advanced so

01:27:38 ►

then you know there’s this sobering realization that, my God, what we feared most is possibly about to happen.

01:27:49 ►

Well, then, if we believe in the Tao, if we believe in the unobstructed unfolding of things from the first moments of the universe,

01:28:02 ►

then what we have to do is take hold and face the music.

01:28:08 ►

And I don’t think it’s that bad,

01:28:10 ►

but I think there’s a hard swallow in the transition.

01:28:14 ►

There is a leap into this other possibility.

01:28:18 ►

So it is not simply an opportunity for a political revolution or a social

01:28:26 ►

revolution or an ecological revolution it’s all that it’s much more it has to

01:28:33 ►

do with deconstructing the dualism of life and death itself and creating the

01:28:41 ►

ontos of a new reality that is based on the presence of eternity that’s what eternity

01:28:49 ►

is eternity is the present at hand hyper dimensionally beheld and it is found to be magic and caring and mystery that

01:29:06 ►

mingles life and death

01:29:08 ►

as the only possible way

01:29:10 ►

of overcoming the contradiction

01:29:12 ►

it has always

01:29:14 ►

in hindsight

01:29:16 ►

appalled me

01:29:18 ►

as I when I go into

01:29:20 ►

the truly deep psychedelic

01:29:22 ►

places

01:29:23 ►

how casual one becomes about death.

01:29:29 ►

Not that you seek it,

01:29:32 ►

but that it seems almost a trivial issue

01:29:36 ►

because these two things are seen to be all of a piece.

01:29:43 ►

There is continuity,

01:29:47 ►

but there is astonishment.

01:29:51 ►

We do not recognize ourselves.

01:29:55 ►

The shaman alone has the privileged vantage point

01:30:00 ►

to know what he beholds.

01:30:03 ►

And I think that’s how we define where we are

01:30:07 ►

on the shamanic path do you know what you behold I mean some people come down

01:30:13 ►

and say pretty pictures other people come down and say dancing mice

01:30:21 ►

hieroglyphs do we know what we? We need to know what we behold because inevitably

01:30:30 ►

we become what we behold. That’s all folks.

01:30:43 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:30:46 ►

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

01:30:50 ►

Do we know what we behold?

01:30:53 ►

The Bard McKenna asks, well, just after he says,

01:30:57 ►

eternity is the present at hand, hyper-dimensionally beheld.

01:31:02 ►

Which, I have to admit, I’m not really sure I completely understand.

01:31:06 ►

And then he followed it and said, there is continuity, but there is astonishment.

01:31:11 ►

And I feel like I understand that a little better.

01:31:14 ►

All in all, I think it’s safe to say that descriptions of the psychedelic experience

01:31:20 ►

are quite difficult to pin down.

01:31:23 ►

However, if you want to hear more about attempting

01:31:27 ►

to get our heads around this interesting phenomena, you can listen to Joe Rogan and Graham Hancock

01:31:33 ►

discussing this very same topic on one of Joe’s most recent podcasts, number 417, I believe it is.

01:31:40 ►

And by the way, for you Joe Rogan fans, it looks like I’ll be a guest on his program next week.

01:31:46 ►

Once the day is set, I’ll tweet it via psychedelic lozo.

01:31:50 ►

But right now we’re looking at Tuesday the 19th in case you want to catch it live on ustream.tv.

01:31:58 ►

Now, in just a moment, I’ll be adding one more comment about the talk that we just now listened to.

01:32:03 ►

But before I do, I’ve got

01:32:05 ►

a couple of other things that I’d like to mention. First, here is part of an email message I received

01:32:10 ►

a bit ago, and I’m bringing it up for what may seem like a strange reason, particularly when

01:32:17 ►

you hear my answer to the questions that were asked. The message read in part, I am writing to

01:32:23 ►

you because recently a memory has come up

01:32:25 ►

where I remember seeing Mayan-slash-Aztec-type hieroglyphics.

01:32:30 ►

Happens a lot, actually.

01:32:32 ►

But when in the altered state, I notice the hieroglyphics have an expression

01:32:36 ►

that can only be understood with the altered state.

01:32:39 ►

So, for the last 20 years, I’ve had intense curiosity

01:32:43 ►

why I project these hieroglyphics.

01:32:46 ►

Where do they come from?

01:32:48 ►

Anyway, not sure if you have experienced another asking you similar things, or heard about this in your podcasts.

01:32:55 ►

Well, here are my very unsatisfactory answers.

01:33:00 ►

I’m sorry to say that, well, I have no idea where they may come from, and I can’t recall being asked that question before,

01:33:08 ►

but there is a chance that someone at some time spoke about this in one of the podcasts.

01:33:13 ►

However, again, I’m afraid to say I have no memory of it. Sorry.

01:33:17 ►

Now, you may wonder why I’m taking time to say that I don’t know the answer to some questions.

01:33:23 ►

Well, the reason I’m mentioning it here is because of the way the email ended.

01:33:27 ►

It read,

01:33:29 ►

Hope the fact that I’m using Gmail doesn’t dissuade you from answering.

01:33:33 ►

Thanks for all you do, Sean.

01:33:35 ►

Well, Sean, you see that, yes, your use of Gmail actually did keep me

01:33:41 ►

from just simply hitting reply and saying that I didn’t have any answers for you but i want to thank you for giving me an opportunity to say that i’m no longer

01:33:50 ►

responding to email addresses that come from the big corporations you know because they they read

01:33:56 ►

every message so they can scan the contents for keywords that then go into each of our files so

01:34:02 ►

that their advertisers can use the information to better target us.

01:34:07 ►

So that’s my grumpy old man rant for today.

01:34:11 ►

Thanks again for letting me get it off my chest.

01:34:14 ►

And just a quick note about an old friend of ours, the Occupy Movement.

01:34:19 ►

In case you’re wondering, yes, I’m still following the now low-key activities of various Occupy groups

01:34:25 ►

around the world, and for what it’s worth, the movement has not gone away. It’s just gone quiet

01:34:32 ►

for a spell. But one group that recently made the news is the original Occupy Wall Street group that

01:34:38 ►

ended up with about $400,000 in donations left once the camp was overrun by those police goons.

01:34:46 ►

Well, guess what? They didn’t go out and blow the money on a big party.

01:34:50 ►

Instead, they bought up the credit card debts of people who wound up in serious financial trouble

01:34:56 ►

due to excessive medical bills primarily.

01:34:59 ►

And while they couldn’t help all that many people since they only had $400,000,

01:35:03 ►

nonetheless,

01:35:09 ►

they bought up and then canceled over $15 million in debts.

01:35:15 ►

More importantly, they’ve now begun to teach people who have become buried in credit card debt that they can actually go out and buy up their debts for amounts that are orders

01:35:20 ►

of magnitude lower than the credit thugs are trying to get out of them.

01:35:24 ►

that are orders of magnitude lower than the credit thugs are trying to get out of them.

01:35:30 ►

The work goes on, and my hat is off to all of you who are still carrying the Occupy torch.

01:35:37 ►

In closing, I’m going to go way out on a limb here and make a statement that,

01:35:40 ►

well, I probably won’t live long enough to see if it’s correct or not.

01:35:46 ►

So it’s going to be difficult for my critics to tell me that I’m wrong about this.

01:35:50 ►

My thought came was when I heard Terrence in this lecture say,

01:35:58 ►

what are we when we can be anything we imagine? Now I’m going to have to approach this kind of obliquely. So if you have better things to do, you may as well go do them now, because this is only wild speculation.

01:36:05 ►

A very brief background first. Back in the late 1970s, I founded a personal computer company,

01:36:13 ►

and it was several years before IBM first entered the business and then legitimized it. But at first,

01:36:20 ►

selling home computers was kind of like trying to push a wet noodle up a hill.

01:36:24 ►

selling home computers was kind of like trying to push a wet noodle up a hill. It could be done but it was a very tedious task. At the time we were selling an

01:36:31 ►

8-bit computer with only 16k of RAM, a 12-inch black and white monitor, and a

01:36:37 ►

cassette tape player for input and output. The complete systems sold for

01:36:42 ►

$3,000 each and we sold hundreds of them.

01:36:46 ►

When a parent would ask me why they needed to buy such an expensive toy, seemingly a toy for their children, my answer was always the same.

01:36:56 ►

I don’t really know why myself, other than I feel certain that if your children don’t know how to use a computer, they’re going to be left behind over the next 30 years.

01:37:06 ►

As it turns out, well, I think I was right.

01:37:09 ►

But since those early days, which was over a decade before the web first came into existence,

01:37:15 ►

well, since then I haven’t again had that feeling that something big was about to take the world by storm.

01:37:21 ►

Until now, that is.

01:37:23 ►

And maybe in some other podcast, I’ll explain my reasons for

01:37:27 ►

thinking this, but this podcast is already longer than I normally do, and so I’m just going to say

01:37:33 ►

what I think is so important, and then let you surf around, gather some information, gain some

01:37:39 ►

experience with it, and then see what conclusions you come to. What it is, is a new platform for consciousness,

01:37:48 ►

although it’s called a game. If you watch the documentary that I’ll link to in the program notes,

01:37:54 ►

which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us, if you watch that documentary and then give it a

01:38:00 ►

spin yourself for a few months, and I’ve actually been using it for almost two years now myself, well, I suspect that maybe you’ll agree with me that a mastery of this platform

01:38:10 ►

is going to give a massive boost to those who take advantage of its full range of opportunities

01:38:16 ►

for creative experiences.

01:38:19 ►

So, are you ready for this revelation?

01:38:21 ►

Don’t laugh, but it’s a game slash open-ended platform for creation

01:38:26 ►

called Minecraft. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

377 - An Ecology of Souls

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