Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Among other things, Terence McKenna talks here about several books that now seem to have been forgotten. And then there is his story about his brother’s vision of bonding psychedelics with our DNA to launch a permanent trip “on the natch”. The Timewave makes an appearance also. All-in-all, it’s a fun ride from a young Terence McKenna.
Had you taken Terence’s advice and picked up a remainder copy of the Codex Seraphinianus for 600 today. Not bad advice, I’d say.
Codex seraphinianus Hardcover – January 1, 1983 ($650)
It may be hard to do, but if you take yourself back to 1988, where you didn’t know what would happen in 2000 or 2012, you can see how appealing the idea of the Timewave was back then. …. he admits that he was “hearing voices” … but, nonetheless, when he goes into his poetic description of the Timewave it seems to me that there is still something about the nature of time that remains undiscovered.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Three-dimensional transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
00:00:09 ►
Helpsychelles.
00:00:14 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
And today we’re going to listen to the final session of a Terrence McKenna workshop that somehow found its way to me.
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And the good news is that in the weeks ahead, there may be even a few more of Terrence’s talks that I haven’t played before.
00:00:38 ►
Another bunch of his cassettes has recently landed on my desk, and once I’ve had a chance to digitize them, we’ll listen to
00:00:45 ►
them here in the salon. Now in today’s program, Terence begins by talking about some books that he
00:00:51 ►
recommends for your psychedelic library. And I have to admit that I hadn’t even heard of many of them.
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And thanks to the internet, though, we can now find out more about them much easier than we could
00:01:03 ►
have way back when this talk was first given. Also, Terence treats us to a more detailed look into the
00:01:11 ►
very high weirdness that he and his brother Dennis experienced at La Chirera in the 70s.
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Eventually, then, he gets into a description of his time wave hypothesis. As you may know,
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I’ve not posted some of his time wave talks in the past because, well, he usually used a computer to display examples of what he was talking about.
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This time, though, he didn’t have a computer handy,
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and so he spent more time actually describing the inner workings of his idea,
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which is pretty fascinating.
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Now, while we seem to have written off the time wave as just a strange idea, I think that if you
00:01:50 ►
listen closely to his reasoning, you might pick up an idea or two about time that still is
00:01:57 ►
worth pursuing.
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So for the newcomers to the salon who haven’t been exposed to the time wave before, I think
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this is a really good place to hear it for the first time.
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And now, here’s Terrence.
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One of the things that people don’t do enough of
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when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.
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I mean, there’s a great deal of published literature on these things,
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historical, chemical, so forth and so on.
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And it’s good to be informed.
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I know that I often, I use reference books.
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I use Schultes, Botany, and Chemistry of Halicinogens for those aspects.
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Peter Stafford’s psychedelic encyclopedia is good for a kind of social
00:02:46 ►
history overview.
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Marlene
00:02:50 ►
de Rios has a book called
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cross-cultural perspectives
00:02:53 ►
on hallucinogens.
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Probably one of the books that I
00:02:57 ►
recommend most to people is Michael
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Harner’s anthology, shamanism
00:03:02 ►
and hallucinogens, where he
00:03:04 ►
gathered a bunch of very good articles
00:03:07 ►
together there.
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Hoffer and Osman’s old classic halocenogens, even though it was last updated in 68, still on the major
00:03:18 ►
halocinogens is the best source.
00:03:22 ►
And in addition to those, which I just mentioned but don’t have here to show you,
00:03:26 ►
I want to show you some of the newer or more interesting stuff in the field. This is a book
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that has not been widely distributed at all. This fellow might be a candidate for teaching
00:03:39 ►
at Esselin. I don’t know. It’s the science and romance of selected herbs used in medicine
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and religious ceremony
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by Anthony Ando.
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And Ondo has
00:03:54 ►
his own institute in San Francisco.
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He runs a nursery on Taravelle.
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He’s,
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judging by this book,
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an extremely knowledgeable person with a worldwide education in herbs
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and a special stress on folk usage.
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So there are, for instance, here’s an Egyptian illustration of Sanoffre, the royal garden,
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and his sister, Gardner, and his sister Marit.
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And there’s a lot of plant lore in here
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that you just don’t get anywhere else.
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And another book like that is William M. Bowden’s book
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Narcotic Plants.
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Terrible title. but a tremendous amount of information
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that doesn’t seem to appear anywhere else.
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Macmillan was the publisher.
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He’s African and specializes in, now we’re talking again about this book,
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in the Santeria, the herbs of the Sinteria religion
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in the southeast, the African transplanted herbally based magical religion that came long ago
00:05:14 ►
when the Africans came into that area and is still quite alive.
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So he’s a Bay Area resource that we certainly were not aware of until very recently,
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and maybe some of the rest of you, were not aware of until very recently and maybe some of the rest of you
00:05:26 ►
were not aware of him either. This is
00:05:27 ►
some, this guy should,
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he’s one of us, he should be
00:05:31 ►
part of the party.
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Then
00:05:35 ►
in terms of publications
00:05:38 ►
the publications
00:05:40 ►
on psychedelics that you may be
00:05:42 ►
familiar with such as high
00:05:44 ►
times and high frontiers,
00:05:46 ►
are sort of addressing this, trying to restart the youth rebellion, or, anyway, it’s not a full
00:05:56 ►
spectrum or deep look at psychedelics. This magazine, which was previously called Psychozoic Press, and has been renamed Psychedelic Monographs and Essays.
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Are you a psychedelic monograph?
00:06:14 ►
Oh, an essay.
00:06:18 ►
It’s published out of Florida, and it’s very, very lively.
00:06:25 ►
It has a huge letter section.
00:06:28 ►
Everybody you know seems to write one letter per issue in.
00:06:33 ►
And, for instance, this issue has articles on psychedelics, a woman’s right of passage,
00:06:40 ►
earmarks of psychedelic spiritual experiences, also by a woman.
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Psychedelics and lucid dreaming, doorways in the mind, also by a woman.
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And Tom Riedlinger, who some of you may know from Chicago,
00:06:54 ►
an article by him on psychedelic schooling.
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It’s simply printed, but it’s from the heart.
00:07:06 ►
It’s scholarly.
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It’s…
00:07:09 ►
The tone, I think, is very good.
00:07:13 ►
I would actually urge you to support these people by subscribing.
00:07:17 ►
We have nothing personally to do with it.
00:07:20 ►
It’s just that they’re on a good trip.
00:07:23 ►
And I’ll hand this around around and you can get the…
00:07:25 ►
I’ll hand them all around, and you can get addresses off of them if you want.
00:07:31 ►
This is Rupert’s new book.
00:07:33 ►
Rupert is…
00:07:34 ►
Rupert Sheldrake.
00:07:35 ►
Rupert Sheldrake.
00:07:37 ►
It’s just begun to be distributed.
00:07:40 ►
He is going to make a revolution in thinking about resonance and form,
00:07:46 ►
and it has an aspect in it that is very kind to our concern.
00:07:53 ►
The psychedelics are much more centrally important to understanding
00:07:58 ►
in a morphic resonance theory of nature.
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So Rupert is just a brilliant writer,
00:08:06 ►
even more brilliant than he is a talker.
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And this is a delicious book
00:08:11 ►
to just read 10 or 15 pages at night
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before you go to bed.
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This is a reference…
00:08:19 ►
I’ll send this one this way.
00:08:21 ►
This is a reference book
00:08:23 ►
that in terms of getting a lot of information
00:08:27 ►
between the covers of one book with a massive amount of color illustration,
00:08:36 ►
this is Richard Evans Schultes, the leading light of ethnobotany.
00:08:43 ►
He spent over 15 years in the Amazon
00:08:46 ►
and has led
00:08:50 ►
hundreds of graduate students
00:08:53 ►
into careers in ethnobotany
00:08:56 ►
and really has put the field on the map
00:08:59 ►
and his co-author is Albert Hoffman,
00:09:01 ►
who invented LSD,
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in terms of one book
00:09:05 ►
about psychoactive plants
00:09:08 ►
that is in print
00:09:09 ►
and readily available,
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I would go with this one, I think.
00:09:15 ►
Alfred Vandermark?
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Vandermark, I guess,
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did this edition. It was originally done by
00:09:19 ►
McMillan. This is
00:09:22 ►
Rion Eisler’s book,
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The Chalice and the Blade.
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It may not immediately
00:09:27 ►
appear to have anything to do with
00:09:29 ►
psychedelics, but it has to do
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with
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revisioning society
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by looking at ancient
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models of how men and women
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arranged
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social structure in the past.
00:09:45 ►
And like Rupert, this is a book with a secret agenda.
00:09:50 ►
This book is a tracking horse for a new respectability for psychedelics,
00:09:57 ►
because when you begin asking the question,
00:10:00 ►
why was there a partnership society for so long,
00:10:04 ►
and why did it give way to a dominator culture?
00:10:08 ►
The answer lies, I think,
00:10:10 ►
in changing patterns of plant utilization
00:10:14 ►
and a changing relationship to the psychedelic experience.
00:10:19 ►
This is a wonderful book,
00:10:21 ►
maybe the most important book of archaeological scholarship in the last 10 years or so.
00:10:28 ►
Rianne lives in Carmel Valley.
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She is a local person and a great resource, and I’m sure that you’ll be seeing more of her
00:10:38 ►
in the Esselin catalog and around.
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She speaks very well if you have a chance to hear her speak
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why I would urge you
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to do it.
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Send that this way.
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This is just
00:10:54 ►
to remind you of our little book
00:10:56 ►
on cultivating mushrooms.
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I don’t think that if you have
00:11:00 ►
the time and the focus,
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this is really
00:11:03 ►
the way to do it shamanically, to get out of the dealing cycle and the not knowing what you’ve got cycle.
00:11:12 ►
And also, as I said earlier, this trains you to punctuality, cleanliness, attention to detail, all of these qualities, which, in fact, I used to say to people,
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once you’ve grown the mushroom, you know you’re ready to take it,
00:11:32 ►
because it has imbued in you the qualities you need to take it through the act of growing it.
00:11:39 ►
Don’t be fooled. It isn’t easy, and it isn’t that the process is difficult. It’s that you have
00:11:46 ►
bad habits that will get in the way of the process. Habits like leaving your apartment
00:11:53 ►
occasionally. You can’t do that anymore if you do this.
00:11:59 ►
I want to say something about this too. Also along with training you to have your act
00:12:04 ►
more together you really develop
00:12:05 ►
an intimate relationship with another organism
00:12:08 ►
which, whether you’re growing
00:12:10 ►
what you smoke or growing what you eat
00:12:11 ►
or growing what you seek visions with,
00:12:14 ►
you know, that’s a very important
00:12:16 ►
experience in life.
00:12:18 ►
And as the publisher and artist,
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Terrence and Dennis, were the authors
00:12:21 ►
of this book,
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it sold 100,000 copies through another publisher
00:12:25 ►
who ultimately, not for reasons of this book, went out of business.
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And so we rescued it, and we learned publishing in this process.
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And it got us launched.
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We are now self-publishing other things.
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So it also has in it, though, these little gems.
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I mean, with each edition, it gets a new bunch.
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It narrows a preface, a forward, and an introduction.
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All by.
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So, even though they’re signed differently,
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and a chronology of mushrooms in history,
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which is quite charming and glossary
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and little anthropological asides and all sorts of stuff.
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And it’s definitely much more than a growers’ guide.
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It contains a lot of, as Katte mentioned,
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a chronology and a lot of discussion about what the mushroom is.
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It also is the first place where these images from the African plateau,
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the Tessali Plateau in Algeria,
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have been reproduced from,
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and they are strong evidence
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for the use of mushrooms in Neolithic Africa.
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This is evidence which Wasson did not include
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in his books, new evidence,
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and both of the major rock paintings that argue for this point of view are in here.
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The next issue of revision will have a drawing by Cat on the cover and an article by me about mushrooms and the goddess.
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An article, it will be a psychedelic issue.
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Everything in it will be psychedelic,
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so you might watch for that.
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This is an African painting
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from this arid plateau, Algeria,
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3,500 BC approximately.
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Check it out.
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It’s not a place where mushrooms grow now,
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but it’s pretty clear that the sky was into something.
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I’m going to pass that.
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What is revision of monthly magazine?
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It is.
00:14:32 ►
It’s quarterly. It’s kind of hard to find.
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It’s very hard to find, but…
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It’s a new age type of magazine.
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It’s really the organ of the International Transpersonal Association.
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And then last, and just sort of as a fun thing,
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in case you’re not aware of this book, some people aren’t,
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it’s called the Codex Seraphrenius,
00:14:56 ►
and it is written in an unknown language.
00:15:00 ►
It contains hundreds and hundreds of color drawings,
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and since it’s written in an unknown language
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it’s impossible to figure out what it’s about
00:15:09 ►
because the drawings are all of objects which don’t exist in this world
00:15:15 ►
so it’s great fun it’s stimulation for the imagination
00:15:21 ►
it shows I think one person’s response to the
00:15:26 ►
psychedelic experience.
00:15:30 ►
This book was originally published at $75.
00:15:34 ►
It’s obviously a labor of love.
00:15:37 ►
It could not have been conceived of
00:15:39 ►
as a money-making proposition.
00:15:41 ►
Consequently, now it’s being remandered
00:15:44 ►
in most places.
00:15:46 ►
You can pick one of these up
00:15:47 ►
for 19 bucks, at least
00:15:50 ►
at Moes in Berkeley,
00:15:51 ►
and probably any other large
00:15:53 ►
volume bookstore
00:15:56 ►
like that. You can spend
00:15:57 ►
hours with this thing. I mean, it’s
00:15:59 ►
more than you can take
00:16:01 ►
in at one go.
00:16:04 ►
Several people have asked me to talk about our personal visions
00:16:08 ►
and some people specifically, the time wave and all that.
00:16:14 ►
So this morning I thought I would talk a little bit about time
00:16:18 ►
and insights into it that have come to me out of psychedelics.
00:16:24 ►
insights into it that have come to me out of psychedelics.
00:16:30 ►
What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something.
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I always felt and still feel
00:16:35 ►
that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things
00:16:40 ►
to bring something back.
00:16:43 ►
I mean, it could be something, a personal insight into a
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personal dilemma, or a more generalized idea, because I really think that the psychedelic realm is the
00:17:00 ►
realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world
00:17:06 ►
come first from that place.
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And I’m always a little reluctant to get into this
00:17:16 ►
because when I speak about my own ideas,
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I feel much more
00:17:23 ►
how much I’m asking from you as an audience.
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In other words, it’s like an ego trip because it’s my ideas
00:17:35 ►
and why spend an hour on my idea instead of talking about all these facts,
00:17:43 ►
careers, and established concerns.
00:17:49 ►
But you asked for it.
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So in 1971, when we went to the Amazon to look into DMT and all of these things,
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we really had no clear conception of what we were after.
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We just knew that we wanted to get more time in that dimension,
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more hands-on experience.
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Well, if any of you have read the Invisible Landscape,
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you know that my brother conceived of a certain kind of project
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where he thought that the psychedelic molecules
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could actually be bonded in to the physical body,
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into the DNA, using sound,
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and that they could be made briefly superconducting.
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And it’s interesting that that was a word
00:18:44 ►
that no one knew what it meant back then.
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He predicted room temperature superconductors in 1971 at La Chirera.
00:18:54 ►
Well, now room temperature superconductors are a huge concern of a vast part of the scientific research establishment.
00:19:03 ►
A whole new technology is promised by this stuff.
00:19:09 ►
He had this notion that you could bond psychedelic molecules into the DNA
00:19:15 ►
and that then the trip would sustain itself indefinitely
00:19:22 ►
and could be analyzed as a kind of waveform signature of the totality of the organism.
00:19:34 ►
In other words, he felt that the ordinary psychedelic trip is a fleeting photograph, and almost an x-ray, you could say, that comes into the mind when the psychedelic molecules
00:19:50 ►
occupy these bond sites and then flash to the higher cortical processing area of the brain
00:19:58 ►
a kind of gestalt of the state of the organism. And he felt that if you could stabilize
00:20:04 ►
and permanentize this,
00:20:07 ►
that it would be worth doing.
00:20:10 ►
I mean, it wasn’t clear
00:20:12 ►
whether he thought he would become a Taoist sage
00:20:14 ►
or turn into a flying saucer
00:20:16 ►
or what it was.
00:20:18 ►
I mean, it was a shifting image of totality
00:20:21 ►
that he was projecting.
00:20:23 ►
Well, I was very skeptical of this, and because it seems unreasonable, and basically I’m a
00:20:32 ►
reasonable person.
00:20:34 ►
But on the other hand, going to the center of the Amazon Basin had been our purpose, and
00:20:41 ►
here we were, and now somebody seemed to be coming up with something very interesting.
00:20:45 ►
So we let the experiment run,
00:20:48 ►
since it seemed to me
00:20:50 ►
it would either work as he said it would work
00:20:53 ►
or it would fail utterly
00:20:55 ►
because what was proposed
00:20:57 ►
was that you saturate your body
00:20:59 ►
with psychedelic molecules
00:21:01 ►
and then sing
00:21:03 ►
in a certain range and in a certain way.
00:21:08 ►
And I thought either nothing will happen, 99 chances out of 100,
00:21:14 ►
or since he’s so impassionately convinced something will happen,
00:21:19 ►
the thing he’s convinced will happen will happen.
00:21:22 ►
So we performed this experiment,
00:21:25 ►
and if you’ve listened to true hallucinations,
00:21:28 ►
you know what a riot it was
00:21:31 ►
and what chaos it set off.
00:21:33 ►
And I won’t really review that,
00:21:35 ►
except for those who didn’t read true hallucinations,
00:21:39 ►
what he said would happen didn’t happen.
00:21:42 ►
But on the other hand,
00:21:43 ►
my expectation that nothing would happen was
00:21:47 ►
completely frustrated. And instead, he seemed to initiate what at first brush looked like a psychotic
00:21:57 ►
break. He became unaware of the people around him. He would talk right through other people’s
00:22:04 ►
talking as though he couldn’t hear them. He would talk right through other people’s talking
00:22:05 ►
as though he couldn’t hear them.
00:22:07 ►
He began to make less and less sense.
00:22:10 ►
He lost motor control.
00:22:13 ►
And everyone assumed that he was slipping
00:22:19 ►
into some kind of psychosis.
00:22:22 ►
What complicated this was I, who had been cast in the role of the skeptic and the witness,
00:22:30 ►
had noticed that the moment he had forged the joint, as he called it,
00:22:37 ►
something began to happen for me, something very unusual.
00:22:43 ►
What it was was the teaching voice familiar from psilocybin experiences,
00:22:50 ►
but with none of the ambiguity and difficulty of connection
00:22:54 ►
that I had associated with the psilocybin experiences,
00:22:58 ►
instead it just came on and appeared to be locked in place.
00:23:04 ►
And he was saying, that’s it.
00:23:07 ►
We’ve succeeded.
00:23:09 ►
This is what it is.
00:23:11 ►
And all the hallucinate…
00:23:13 ►
I wasn’t even on mushrooms.
00:23:15 ►
He had taken ayahuasca.
00:23:17 ►
But there were no hallucinations.
00:23:18 ►
There was no feeling of being stimulated or depressed.
00:23:23 ►
There was nothing but this voice.
00:23:26 ►
And it was talking at such a speed that I would walk these jungle trails like this.
00:23:35 ►
Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yes. Yes. Yes. And it was just, you know, at that speed, not for minutes, but for months, you know.
00:23:49 ►
And what it was concerned to convey is what I now call the time wave.
00:23:58 ►
And I will attempt without blackboards or mathematics or being boring, I hope, to explain what this is.
00:24:07 ►
And that’s a formidable problem because this is an idea as rigid as the kind of ideas that
00:24:15 ►
run subway trains and send submarines back to their bases. I mean, it’s a formal, tight idea.
00:24:22 ►
But the way it was taught to me
00:24:26 ►
was in a steady process of self-amplifying parables
00:24:32 ►
or teachings, you could almost say.
00:24:37 ►
So how it began was it said to me,
00:24:40 ►
have you noticed that every day is like every other day?
00:24:45 ►
Somewhat? He said, yes, I’ve noticed that every day is like every other day?
00:24:46 ►
Somewhat?
00:24:49 ►
He said, yes, I’ve noticed that. And have you noticed that every week is more or less like every other week?
00:24:58 ►
Yes.
00:24:59 ►
Well, did you know that?
00:25:02 ►
And this is a typical mushroom construction, this, did you know?
00:25:07 ►
I’ll bet you did know, and then the whammy.
00:25:11 ►
So did you know, I’ll bet you did know, that every day has a relationship to four other days.
00:25:22 ►
And they are not the four days preceding it.
00:25:25 ►
They are scattered back through time.
00:25:29 ►
One of them may be six months in the past.
00:25:32 ►
One of them may be thousands of years in the past.
00:25:36 ►
But each day is actually an interference pattern
00:25:42 ►
caused by the resonant,
00:25:46 ►
the coming together of the resonances of other times.
00:25:53 ►
And so it never occurred to me.
00:25:56 ►
I mean, it’s a weird idea.
00:25:57 ►
It never occurred to me that that was a possibility.
00:26:02 ►
And so then it said, go get your E. Ching.
00:26:08 ►
And I went and got my E. Ching.
00:26:10 ►
And it said, we’re going to look at the first order of difference.
00:26:16 ►
I said, what’s the first order of difference?
00:26:18 ►
It said, oh, you don’t know what the first order of difference is.
00:26:21 ►
The first order of difference is how many lines change
00:26:24 ►
as you go from
00:26:25 ►
one hexagram to another. Now, I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the I Ching,
00:26:32 ►
but I assume most somewhat, right? Okay, the I Ching is composed of structures which have six
00:26:39 ►
levels called hexagrams. They are either broken or unbroken lines. The first one, called the creative,
00:26:46 ►
is all solid lines. The second one, called the receptive, is all broken lines. Who can tell me
00:26:53 ►
the first order of difference between the first and second hexagram? Here’s a clue. It’s the number
00:27:00 ►
of lines that break. No fair.
00:27:08 ►
Six. I don’t know why you’re not leaping forward with it. It
00:27:09 ►
makes me wonder how far we can go.
00:27:13 ►
Six.
00:27:15 ►
Anyway,
00:27:16 ►
to try and shorten
00:27:17 ►
this story, what this
00:27:19 ►
teaching voice was concerned with
00:27:22 ►
was structure
00:27:24 ►
in the I Ching, previously hidden structure.
00:27:28 ►
So it said, we can’t go forward with this conversation until you get some graph paper,
00:27:36 ►
because this is going to be not only conversation, this is going to be diagram.
00:27:41 ►
So I got graph paper, and it said,
00:27:43 ►
draw the hexagrams in a descending line in the King Wen
00:27:47 ►
sequence and then make a graph of the first
00:27:52 ►
order of difference, the number of lines that change as you go from
00:27:56 ►
hexagram to hexagram. I did this and I got a
00:28:00 ►
wavy line obviously. You can tell that
00:28:03 ►
the values will
00:28:06 ►
lie between one and six.
00:28:08 ►
In some cases,
00:28:10 ►
six will change, in some
00:28:11 ►
cases only one.
00:28:13 ►
Never none, because each
00:28:15 ►
hexagram is different.
00:28:18 ►
So…
00:28:19 ►
Yeah.
00:28:23 ►
Wouldn’t there be possible for there never to be none
00:28:27 ►
For instance, one that was the inversion of the other one?
00:28:31 ►
Well, there will still be lines change
00:28:34 ►
Oh, okay, I see, straight across
00:28:36 ►
Absolute position
00:28:37 ►
In fact, in teaching me about the order in the I Ching,
00:28:42 ►
the first thing it did was teach me everything
00:28:44 ►
That is already known,
00:28:46 ►
which I didn’t know.
00:28:48 ►
And if you will look at the I Ching
00:28:50 ►
and ask yourself, it’s like a meditation.
00:28:53 ►
Ask yourself the question,
00:28:55 ►
why is the King Wen sequence the way it is?
00:28:59 ►
Simple question.
00:29:00 ►
The first thing you will notice
00:29:02 ►
is that it’s not just 64 random hexagrams, it’s 32 pairs.
00:29:11 ►
The pairs are formed by inverting the first term.
00:29:16 ►
Now, in the first two hexagrams, you have the creative.
00:29:21 ►
It’s six solid lines.
00:29:23 ►
What happens when you turn it upside down?
00:29:27 ►
Nothing. Good.
00:29:29 ►
Nothing happens when you turn
00:29:31 ►
it upside down. In that
00:29:34 ►
case, a new rule is
00:29:35 ►
invoked. If turning a hexagram
00:29:38 ►
upside down has no effect
00:29:40 ►
on it, then all lines
00:29:41 ►
change. And you see
00:29:44 ►
that the second one is
00:29:45 ►
all lines change from the first one.
00:29:47 ►
But that occurs only eight times
00:29:50 ►
in the entire sequence.
00:29:52 ►
The ordinary way of generating
00:29:55 ►
the second term is by simply
00:29:57 ►
inverting the first term.
00:30:00 ►
Okay. So that was known.
00:30:02 ►
Baines taught, I mean,
00:30:08 ►
Richard Wilhelm in his book, nine lectures,
00:30:12 ►
or is it eight lectures on change, anyway, in that book,
00:30:14 ►
he mentions that.
00:30:18 ►
Getting further than that is very difficult.
00:30:20 ►
It’s like you just come against a wall.
00:30:23 ►
You’ve gotten it now where you have 32 pairs,
00:30:45 ►
but how do you go from one of these pairs to the next? It wasn’t clear. So the voice said, draw the first order of difference. I did this, and it looked just like a wiggly line. I could not, it looked like a stochastic process, as they say in probability theory. It’s random, in other words. But then it said, look at the beginning of the line you have drawn, and look at the end of
00:30:51 ►
the line you have drawn.
00:30:53 ►
And the beginning looked like this, and the end repeated that pattern.
00:31:00 ►
So then the voice said, this means that if you will rotate your graph
00:31:06 ►
in the plane,
00:31:09 ►
meaning not lifting it off the paper,
00:31:12 ►
but just rotating an image of it in the plane,
00:31:15 ►
it will fit against itself
00:31:16 ►
with perfect closure
00:31:18 ►
at the beginning and at the end,
00:31:21 ►
but nowhere else.
00:31:24 ►
This is obviously an artificial construction.
00:31:29 ►
And I should also mention,
00:31:31 ►
remember how I said the possible values
00:31:35 ►
for the first order of difference
00:31:37 ►
would lie between one and six?
00:31:39 ►
That’s the possible range of values.
00:31:42 ►
When you look at the real values
00:31:44 ►
generated by the King Wen sequence,
00:31:47 ►
the first thing that strikes you is there are no fives.
00:31:51 ►
We wrote a computer program to randomly generate I Ching sequences
00:31:57 ►
on this pairing principle,
00:31:59 ►
and we discovered that if you randomly generate sequences,
00:32:03 ►
you get sequences with no fives once every 6,700 times roughly.
00:32:11 ►
So what we were revealing was that there is intent in the sequence of the E Ching,
00:32:19 ►
and it is mathematical intent of a very sophisticated sort.
00:32:24 ►
Well, now I want to skip over some of this
00:32:28 ►
because this is not a course in how to do this.
00:32:34 ►
However, around Thanksgiving time,
00:32:36 ►
apparently we’re going to do a five-day course
00:32:39 ►
that will be nothing to do with psychedelics.
00:32:43 ►
It will send you out of here
00:32:45 ►
absolutely conversant with this wave
00:32:49 ►
and the theory behind it and how it works
00:32:51 ►
and where it comes from.
00:32:52 ►
It will be an I Ching course
00:32:54 ►
that will confound even scholars of the E Ching
00:32:58 ►
because this is all original stuff.
00:33:02 ►
This is not coming out of the Chinese tradition.
00:33:06 ►
Anyway, what this steadily amplifying set of revelations came to be about
00:33:14 ►
was building a wave pattern out of these first order of difference backward and forward-running modules
00:33:27 ►
to create like a super hexagram
00:33:30 ►
a hexagram made of hexagrams
00:33:35 ►
made of the entirety of the E Ching
00:33:38 ►
expressed on the three levels
00:33:42 ►
that all hexagrams contain
00:33:44 ►
every hexagram the three levels that all hexagrams contain.
00:33:47 ►
Every hexagram has three levels.
00:33:51 ►
The linear level called the level of the Yao,
00:33:54 ►
the trigramatic level,
00:33:58 ►
which is three times larger than the Yao level, and is composed of two what are called nuclear trigrams,
00:34:04 ►
and there are eight of them possible, and each hexagram is composed of two what are called nuclear trigrams and there are eight of them possible
00:34:05 ►
and each hexagram is composed
00:34:07 ►
of two of them
00:34:08 ►
and then on the largest level
00:34:11 ►
the hexagrammatic level the coherency
00:34:13 ►
of the whole
00:34:14 ►
there’s an analogy between these three levels
00:34:18 ►
and what in Taoism is called
00:34:20 ►
the way of heaven the way of earth
00:34:22 ►
and the way of man
00:34:23 ►
in any case what I came up with then,
00:34:28 ►
notice that in a complete sequence of the I Ching,
00:34:31 ►
you have 64 hexagrams of six lines each,
00:34:37 ►
therefore you have 384 units to work with.
00:34:40 ►
The voice said to me,
00:34:43 ►
look at the 384
00:34:46 ►
and think about time.
00:34:49 ►
And I thought maybe
00:34:51 ►
what it was suggesting
00:34:52 ►
was that it was like a calendar.
00:34:56 ►
And so I looked at it and I said,
00:34:58 ►
well, 384 is an odd count
00:35:00 ►
for a calendar
00:35:02 ►
because it’s 19 days longer than a solar year. So if you had a 384-day
00:35:09 ►
calendar, it would do what is technically called precessing. It would precess 19 days a year.
00:35:17 ►
That means that Christmas, as a fixed holiday, would progressively move through the seasons.
00:35:26 ►
Every year it would come 19 days later than it had come the year before.
00:35:33 ►
So over a period of about 18 years, you would have Christmas in the winter, the spring, the summer, the fall, and again in the winter.
00:35:44 ►
spring, the summer, the fall, and again in the winter. Well, this is certainly an objection to a calendar
00:35:48 ►
because we are so ingrained into the masculine, paternal,
00:35:55 ►
Apollonian archetype that we can’t conceive of a calendar that isn’t solar.
00:36:02 ►
But I then, having been given this clue by the teaching voice,
00:36:06 ►
I then looked at calendars.
00:36:08 ►
I discovered there was an…
00:36:09 ►
The Jews are the only people I’m aware of
00:36:15 ►
who have actually used a 384-day calendar
00:36:20 ►
in pre-exelic Judaism
00:36:22 ►
before the Babylonian captivity, there were
00:36:25 ►
lunar calendars of 384
00:36:27 ►
days duration. In Islam
00:36:30 ►
now, there is a lunar calendar
00:36:32 ►
kept like this along
00:36:34 ►
with another calendar.
00:36:38 ►
Now, the interesting thing,
00:36:40 ►
why did they want
00:36:42 ►
384 days in their
00:36:44 ►
year?
00:36:50 ►
What made it attractive since it didn’t then keep track with the sun?
00:36:56 ►
What made it attractive was you can take the numbers inside the I Ching,
00:36:59 ►
the numbers that are used to construct the I Ching,
00:37:09 ►
and use them with the number 384 to create a hierarchy of imaginary cogs that keep track of other kinds of motion.
00:37:13 ►
For instance, if you have a 384-day year
00:37:17 ►
and you multiply it times 64,
00:37:21 ►
you get 67 years, 104.25 days.
00:37:28 ►
This is six 11-year sunspot cycles.
00:37:32 ►
Six times six is 66.
00:37:34 ►
This is six 11-year sunspot cycles.
00:37:37 ►
And they have recently discovered
00:37:40 ►
that sunspot cycles also have a larger cycle of 33 years.
00:37:44 ►
So the linear level keeps track of the small sunspot cycles also have a larger cycle of 33 years. So the linear level
00:37:47 ►
keeps track of the small sunspot cycles, the trigramatic level keeps track of the 33-year
00:37:55 ►
sunspot cycles. When you read Joseph Needham’s book Science and Technology in China, you learned that
00:38:06 ►
the first people on earth to
00:38:07 ►
observe sunspots
00:38:09 ►
were the ancient Chinese.
00:38:12 ►
Naked eye observations through
00:38:13 ►
smoked glass. They reported
00:38:15 ►
black spots moving across the
00:38:17 ►
surface of the sun in the
00:38:19 ►
pre-Han dynasty. So they
00:38:21 ►
knew about this. Okay,
00:38:24 ►
so you look at the 67 year cycle you say well
00:38:27 ►
what would happen if we multiplied it by 64 when you multiply it by 64 you get 4,306
00:38:38 ►
years this is precisely two zodiacal ages, one for each trigram.
00:38:45 ►
And I don’t think I mentioned that the number 384 is, as you know, a lunar cycle is
00:38:55 ►
29.5 and a fraction days. If you multiply that number by 13,
00:39:10 ►
you get 383.83.83 days.
00:39:17 ►
So what I had found, or what had been revealed to me, I thought, was an ancient Neolithic calendar,
00:39:22 ►
a hierarchical calendar based on one, the unity, two, the broken and
00:39:29 ►
unbroken line, three, the trigram, six, the hexagram, 64, the complete set of hexagrams,
00:39:39 ►
384, the complete set of Yao, and then lunar months, sunspot cycles, zodiacal motion, so forth and so on.
00:39:50 ►
What I felt we were discovering was that the I Ching, as we possess it today, is actually a piece of broken machinery.
00:39:59 ►
The Eurostock oracle, and even later the Coin T oracle, these were developed in the Han Dynasty and later.
00:40:08 ►
And the oldest commentaries are older.
00:40:13 ►
So I was puzzled as to why an Amazonian mushroom wanted to talk about the archaeology of ancient China.
00:40:25 ►
And so what that this resonance calendar existed?
00:40:31 ►
But then it said, no, no, you don’t understand.
00:40:33 ►
We have just, we are now in the atrium of what it is I want to reveal to you.
00:40:40 ►
I want you to go back and look at the first order of difference wave,
00:40:45 ►
and I want you to understand that, and I already knew this, but I hadn’t done much with it,
00:40:52 ►
that the reason the I Ching is based on 64 is because 64 are the number of codons that DNA runs on.
00:41:04 ►
The I Ching is not an arbitrary construction.
00:41:08 ►
It is something that comes out of a deep, formal inspection
00:41:13 ►
of what the human organism is.
00:41:15 ►
The human organism is a molecular machine
00:41:19 ►
that runs on an iterative program of 64.
00:41:24 ►
And the proteins which compose our bodies are like this, so forth and so on.
00:41:29 ►
And then I said, well, I understand about DNA.
00:41:33 ►
I understand how the I Ching mirrors that,
00:41:36 ►
but I don’t understand how then it’s also a calendar.
00:41:41 ►
And the voice said, well, don’t you see,
00:41:48 ►
calendar and the voice said well don’t you see perception can be only organized out of the matter which composes it time appears to you in your psychological perception of it in the way
00:41:58 ►
that it does because time is a property of matter that is being amplified by biology
00:42:06 ►
into the theater of awareness.
00:42:12 ►
So in other words,
00:42:13 ►
and this is now me speaking, not it,
00:42:15 ►
my interpretation of what it was saying
00:42:17 ►
was life is a phenomenon
00:42:20 ►
of quantum mechanical amplification.
00:42:24 ►
And because we are organized
00:42:26 ►
on the blueprint of this quantum mechanical pattern
00:42:32 ►
that is very deep at the sub-molecular level of matter,
00:42:36 ►
then all our institutions, languages,
00:42:41 ►
religions, love affairs, everything has this pattern as the base embedded in it,
00:42:49 ►
almost like these fractals which give rise to endless amounts of a certain kind of beauty.
00:42:56 ►
But if you were to see the equation which generates the fractal, you know, it has six terms.
00:43:01 ►
It can be written in 15 seconds.
00:43:05 ►
So then there were years past,
00:43:10 ►
and a great leap had to be made
00:43:13 ►
because I was like non-functional.
00:43:17 ►
Because I worked with this wave,
00:43:20 ►
I felt I had the signature of the universe
00:43:23 ►
that a great gift of truth had been given to me.
00:43:28 ►
But when I tried to tell people,
00:43:30 ►
they just backed to the wall and said, you know,
00:43:33 ►
get help.
00:43:36 ►
Now, now get help.
00:43:38 ►
I said, you know, you can draw maps of time with this.
00:43:43 ►
This is a map of time.
00:43:45 ►
This is a model of how things happen in the real world.
00:43:50 ►
But it would take me like a day to produce one of these graphs of time out of this theory.
00:43:58 ►
It involved hundreds of arithmetic calculations, which I would do on a little calculator.
00:44:04 ►
And in the Amazon, I even did them, you know, on the natch.
00:44:08 ►
So maybe to make one of these graphs, there would be 5,000 addition, small addition
00:44:14 ►
and subtraction problems would go into making one of these graphs.
00:44:19 ►
Well, a single mistake would screw the pooch.
00:44:22 ►
So an unfortunate turn of phrase
00:44:26 ►
that
00:44:27 ►
I’ve picked up.
00:44:32 ►
So then in
00:44:33 ►
1977
00:44:34 ►
and we did work
00:44:37 ►
somewhat with computers
00:44:39 ►
at Cal. I was a student
00:44:42 ►
at Cal at that time and every student
00:44:44 ►
got a few hours on the C.D.C. 6400.
00:44:48 ►
So we used what was then, one of the world’s largest computers, to work on this.
00:44:53 ►
But I look back on it.
00:44:55 ►
It was the Stone Age. We used to actually punch cards.
00:44:59 ►
Have you ever sat at a key punch?
00:45:01 ►
You’re supposed to be at the cutting edge of the technological revolution,
00:45:05 ►
and you have this machine which every time you hit a key, it goes, and the whole room shakes.
00:45:13 ►
So we worked with that for a while, but in 1977, personal computers were invented. We bought an
00:45:21 ►
Apple II, one of the first 20,000 machines sold,
00:45:26 ►
and immediately began working on implementing this thing.
00:45:30 ►
Again, skipping over years of work and unimaginable personal expense,
00:45:38 ►
we did it.
00:45:40 ►
We got it onto a computer, and what it is works like this now.
00:45:47 ►
I have told you the foundations of the thing.
00:45:50 ►
If you were to approach it now as a standalone product,
00:45:54 ►
here is what you would see.
00:45:56 ►
You sit down at a computer terminal.
00:45:58 ►
It asks you what date you’re interested in.
00:46:03 ►
Can be any date.
00:46:07 ►
You enter the date, then it asks you the end date
00:46:10 ►
now this is where we hit
00:46:12 ►
the first stumbling block of this theory
00:46:14 ►
and for some people this is the last
00:46:16 ►
stumbling block
00:46:18 ►
this is a theory that time
00:46:20 ►
is a wave mechanical flux
00:46:23 ►
of something I now see that this is what wave mechanical flux of something.
00:46:25 ►
I now see that this is what Taoism
00:46:29 ►
has been telling us all along.
00:46:30 ►
If you will recall the first lines of the Tao Te Ching,
00:46:34 ►
it says the way that can be told of
00:46:36 ►
is not an unvarying way.
00:46:39 ►
We’re dealing here with an ebb and flow of variables.
00:46:44 ►
So because we’re suggesting, or the mushroom or Gaia
00:46:49 ►
is trying to tell us that time is a wave mechanical phenomenon,
00:46:53 ►
all waves have what is called a wavelength.
00:46:56 ►
The wave length is the place where the wave ends
00:47:01 ►
and the next wave begins.
00:47:04 ►
Well, we are accustomed to thinking of time
00:47:07 ►
as just extending onward into the future
00:47:11 ►
for uncounted billions and billions of years.
00:47:14 ►
We grant that someday through entropic heat death,
00:47:18 ►
the universe may come to a kind of minimal energy state,
00:47:23 ►
but that’s billions of years in the future.
00:47:26 ►
We look back toward the so-called Big Bang, but it’s billions of years in the past.
00:47:31 ►
Nevertheless, it is a curious spot in modern science’s story of how the cosmos is put together
00:47:42 ►
because it has the entire universe
00:47:45 ►
springing out of
00:47:47 ►
nothingness. How likely is this?
00:47:51 ►
I mean, it seems to me it’s highly unlikely
00:47:54 ►
but they haven’t been able to find
00:47:56 ►
a way to get the universe in place any other way.
00:48:00 ►
So at the very beginning of science’s story
00:48:03 ►
about how we came to be,
00:48:06 ►
it asks you to swallow an unswallable possibility.
00:48:11 ►
This theory will make it slight, I don’t know whether this makes it easier or harder,
00:48:17 ►
but this theory takes the singularity and puts it at the end of the life of the universe,
00:48:24 ►
rather at the beginning,
00:48:27 ►
and presents a picture of a cascade of complexity,
00:48:31 ►
where the universe begins in an extremely simple state.
00:48:38 ►
There is just plasma.
00:48:41 ►
There aren’t even atoms settling down into atomic orbits around nuclei because the temperature
00:48:48 ►
and energy of the universe is higher than the bonding strength of the electron so it can’t form
00:48:57 ►
stable atomic systems. Then as the temperature of the universe falls, eventually these stable atomic systems can form,
00:49:07 ►
and then you get helium, hydrogen, the simple primitive elements, then there are stars form,
00:49:14 ►
there is cooking out of the so-called heavier elements, iron, carbon, and then as the temperature
00:49:21 ►
of the universe falls still further, it eventually falls below the energy level of the molecular bond.
00:49:28 ►
At that point, molecular chemistry comes into being.
00:49:32 ►
Very complicated structures can exist.
00:49:35 ►
After a while, millions, hundreds of millions of years, life emerges.
00:49:44 ►
Then life carries on.
00:49:46 ►
Higher forms are elaborated.
00:49:49 ►
Sex is invented.
00:49:51 ►
Then self-reflection
00:49:55 ►
in our own species
00:49:56 ►
and then the spectrum of effects
00:49:59 ►
that we call culture.
00:50:00 ►
Now the interesting thing to notice
00:50:02 ►
about these successive leaps into higher organization is that each one follows more quickly on the heels of the other. I mean, after the, in the primal plasma, it took a long, long time for it to cool down and then a long time for the next stage. But higher mammals and sexuality and all that emerged about 65 million years ago in the plant realm
00:50:32 ►
at the same time that the mammals emerged.
00:50:36 ►
Culture, well, let’s call it language probably came about 35,000 to 50,000 years ago.
00:50:44 ►
Culture, 10,000 years ago, culture, 10,000 years ago,
00:50:48 ►
electronic culture 50 years ago,
00:50:51 ►
and you get the picture that everything is being…
00:50:54 ►
Now, everyone knows this,
00:50:57 ►
that time is speeding up,
00:50:58 ►
that things are happening fast and faster,
00:51:00 ►
but it is generally presented as uncoupled from nature.
00:51:07 ►
It’s that nature is eternal and endless,
00:51:11 ►
and the world of human beings is undergoing this curious acceleration and unfolding.
00:51:17 ►
This theory that was coming at me out of the Qing
00:51:20 ►
was saying, the universe works like this.
00:51:28 ►
The entire universe is caught in a tightening spiral of concrescent implosion.
00:51:35 ►
And the appearance of human beings and language and society is an indication that we have come
00:51:42 ►
into what Whitehead called the short epochs.
00:51:47 ►
In other words, we are very close now to the culmination of the universe’s raison d’etre,
00:51:54 ►
its reason for being.
00:51:56 ►
It lies in us.
00:51:58 ►
Now, what the computer program showed, and that was a digression to a purpose,
00:52:04 ►
to explain to you why there must be an
00:52:06 ►
end date why the computer demands that you assign a termination date to the wavelength the
00:52:14 ►
computer program is set up so that it will accept any end date but by using best fit programs
00:52:23 ►
to fit the wave to historical data,
00:52:27 ►
I reached, to me, fairly astonishing conclusion.
00:52:33 ►
And here’s where we separate the men from the boys,
00:52:37 ►
the women from the girls, and the wheat from the chaff.
00:52:40 ►
The conclusion that I reached was that this universal wave, which has been operating for several billion years,
00:52:50 ►
will reach its maximum concrescent state of enfoldment at dawn on the 22nd of December, 2012 AD.
00:53:04 ►
This immediately
00:53:05 ►
puts me in the
00:53:07 ►
nut category.
00:53:09 ►
This is what’s called
00:53:10 ►
messianic delusion,
00:53:13 ►
millinarian
00:53:14 ►
grandeur, so forth and so on.
00:53:18 ►
Nevertheless, it’s a persistent
00:53:20 ►
intuition of
00:53:22 ►
most religious ontologies,
00:53:24 ►
perhaps not the Buddhist, but the Hindus, the Jews,
00:53:28 ►
the Muslims, the Christians, all appoint an end to their world. And the, the, what gives this
00:53:38 ►
position, I think, interesting weight, I almost said, proves it, proves it to me, but what makes it an interesting
00:53:46 ►
contender for consideration is that it is willing to make millions of predictions that should allow
00:53:56 ►
it to be disconfirmed, just like a good scientific theory. If you have a scientific theory,
00:54:02 ►
then somebody will say, well, what does it predict?
00:54:10 ►
Well, did that happen? If it did, your theory is still in the running. If it didn’t, you’re in real trouble. So what you do with this computer program, which is the distillation of this teaching
00:54:17 ►
from hyperspace, is it first asks you the date you’re interested in. Let’s pick a date.
00:54:30 ►
asks you the date you’re interested in. Let’s pick a date. How about January 1st, 2790 BC?
00:54:36 ►
Okay. Then it says, what is the, now why did we pick that date? That’s because roughly that’s the dedication date of the Great Pyramid. So then it asks the end date. What is the end date? As I explained to you, we use the end date December 22nd, 2012, AD,
00:54:50 ►
but it will accept any end date.
00:54:53 ►
And then it asks you, how much time do you want to see on the screen?
00:54:58 ►
Do you want to see the five days surrounding Jan 1, 2790 BC?
00:55:04 ►
Or do you want to see the 10,000 years surrounding Jan 1, 2790 BC, or do you want to see the 10,000 years surrounding Jan 1, 2790 BC
00:55:10 ►
with 5,000 years on each side? Well, if you choose, let’s say you want to see 6,000 years on the
00:55:21 ►
screen, the 3,000 years following the dedication of the great pyramid
00:55:27 ►
and the 3,000 years preceding it.
00:55:29 ►
Now, I haven’t explained what it is that the screen is now going to draw a graph based on
00:55:36 ►
the first order of differences that we discussed in the Eaching, put through a logical but
00:55:44 ►
complex process, which I won’t detail here.
00:55:47 ►
But what the computer is going to do is going to draw a line. What is this line?
00:55:53 ►
It is, like all line graphs, it portrays the change of some quantity in time, like pressure, energy,
00:56:03 ►
gross national product, something like that. What this graph
00:56:08 ►
draws is a graph of novelty. Novelty is a concept that is highly developed in the philosophy
00:56:15 ►
of Alfred North Whitehead. Novelty is the thing for which we as a scientific culture have
00:56:23 ►
no description.
00:56:30 ►
But it’s the most important thing to all of us.
00:56:37 ►
If I told you that here is a picture of the ebb and flow of novelty in your life,
00:56:42 ►
and it was a flat line, you’d be heart sick. You’d say, oh, geez, no know, no excitement, no setbacks, no leaps to faith,
00:56:47 ►
no taking chances, no winning, no losing, just, but no life is like that.
00:56:55 ►
Every life could be portrayed as an ebb and flow of novelty on a time-scaled graph
00:57:01 ►
and the life of a company, an empire, anything else.
00:57:07 ►
So that’s what this program draws. When the line moves down, novelty is increasing. When the line moves upward, the opposite of novelty,
00:57:18 ►
which can be called chaos, entropy, but I really like Rupert-Cheldr’s suggestion to me. He said, I think you should call it habit.
00:57:28 ►
And then what you see is that life is an ebb and flow of habit. And when we fall into our habits,
00:57:38 ►
the spontaneity, the joy, the life in life is fled, is compromised,
00:57:46 ►
is compressed. And when we open
00:57:48 ►
to novelty, or when it opens around us,
00:57:51 ►
then, you know, love affairs,
00:57:55 ►
inheritances, sudden invitations to travel,
00:57:59 ►
promotions, meeting old friend,
00:58:02 ►
all of that kind of thing increases.
00:58:05 ►
And sometimes people say, well, you’re trying to do what astrology does.
00:58:10 ►
To my mind, astrology betrays its intent by trying to say too much
00:58:18 ►
because every planet in all aspects can be interpreted.
00:58:21 ►
This is a on-off system for predicting the future.
00:58:27 ►
Notice that, and another objection is people say,
00:58:31 ►
well, you’re a determinist.
00:58:34 ►
You’re saying that the future is predestined.
00:58:38 ►
No, that isn’t it at all.
00:58:39 ►
All I’m saying is that there is an invisible parameter in time
00:58:45 ►
that events as they unfold will fulfill.
00:58:50 ►
We don’t, the theory doesn’t say, what events will happen?
00:58:55 ►
People always say, well, can you tell me what’s going to happen?
00:58:58 ►
No, we can just tell you when to be alert to the high probability of change
00:59:03 ►
and when to not be frustrated by a backwash of
00:59:08 ►
of habit what’s going on here well it seems to me that science a possible definition of science is that
00:59:23 ►
science tells us what is possible.
00:59:27 ►
You know, you ask a question, can water flow downhill?
00:59:31 ►
The scientist replies, no, water cannot flow downhill.
00:59:36 ►
But what science does not explain, and what is really mysterious and important to every one of us in our personal lives is how,
00:59:48 ►
how, out of the class of what can happen, are certain things selected to actually undergo the formality of occurring?
01:00:01 ►
In every situation, there is a vast set of end states which are possible, but only one will be realized through the actual process of occurring.
01:00:17 ►
I think it means that our science has been lacking in a tool for discussing how possibilities come to be, how they are selected out.
01:00:28 ►
And this is what the novelty wave seeks to be. And I think that it is nothing more than a
01:00:35 ►
restating in cognizable terms for Western people of the ancient Chinese notion of the
01:00:44 ►
Tao.
01:00:46 ►
And why does it work?
01:00:48 ►
It works because it’s coming out of the molecular structure of life itself.
01:00:56 ►
Time is not an independent variable from organism.
01:01:01 ►
Time is something that we are putting into the world. It is coming out of organism. Time is something that we are putting into the world.
01:01:05 ►
It is coming out of organism
01:01:08 ►
and because organism
01:01:10 ►
is maintained
01:01:12 ►
and structured by DNA
01:01:13 ►
then time has
01:01:16 ►
the imprint
01:01:17 ►
of this energy system
01:01:19 ►
upon itself.
01:01:21 ►
Well,
01:01:22 ►
now,
01:01:24 ►
can we know if this is true, or is this just a rap like, you know, Jose’s got a rap and somebody else has there? Can we know if this is true? The answer is maybe. The way to do it is to look at the historical record and what we know about it
01:01:45 ►
and see if the novelty wave fits.
01:01:49 ►
Obviously, if the wave describes novelty,
01:01:53 ►
then there’s going to have to be a huge downward movement of the wave into novelty
01:01:58 ►
at the time of the Greek rebirth, at the time of Plato, Socrates, those people. Again, there’s obviously
01:02:08 ►
going to have to be a huge surge into novelty at the time of the Renaissance and the collapse
01:02:15 ►
of the medieval world. Now, people say at this point usually, well, this is an idiosentric. It’s a
01:02:22 ►
white man’s theory. You’re just talking about European civilization and so forth and so on.
01:02:26 ►
But all archaeologists have remarked on the fact that great civilizations seem to rise and fall in different parts of the world in sync with each other.
01:02:38 ►
So that, for instance, on the wave, you get a tremendous surge into novelty in the 900s, 900 AD.
01:02:48 ►
We Europeans say, well, God, Europe in 900 AD was just a flea-bitten rat’s nest.
01:02:56 ►
That’s true.
01:02:58 ►
But Islam was reaching toward a pinnacle of cultural glory like nothing ever seen before.
01:03:05 ►
And so were the chimirs at Angkor Vat in Cambodia.
01:03:10 ►
And so were the Mayans in Central America.
01:03:13 ►
They were reaching toward what’s called the classic climax.
01:03:18 ►
You’ve probably had that climax.
01:03:22 ►
So it isn’t a white man’s theory, it isn’t a European theory,
01:03:26 ►
but it is a theory that integrates,
01:03:31 ►
integrates the ebb and flow of civilizations
01:03:34 ►
into the ebb and flow of nature,
01:03:37 ►
the ebb and flow of individual lives,
01:03:40 ►
into the ebb and flow of civilizations,
01:03:43 ►
into the ebb and flow of nature, into the ebb and flow of nature.
01:03:46 ►
And by looking at the wave with certain end dates,
01:03:52 ►
with what’s called a best fit strategy,
01:03:56 ►
I was led to this December 22nd, 2012, AD, date.
01:04:02 ►
That is the date where I feel the wave fits. You get the down slope at ancient
01:04:09 ►
Greece and the birth of Buddha. You get the terrible upslope that follows the fall of Rome.
01:04:16 ►
You get the long recidivist period of empire building that followed the European Enlightenment.
01:04:26 ►
It fits.
01:04:28 ►
And then I offer as a sort of final piece of evidence
01:04:31 ►
coming from outside the system,
01:04:34 ►
once I had decided on December 22nd, 2012,
01:04:38 ►
fate chose to inform me that the Mayans,
01:04:43 ►
who had a very complicated calendrical system, which begins about
01:04:47 ►
3,500 BC, operates on 52, 396 and so on sets of nested cycles. They appointed an end to their
01:04:59 ►
calendar as well. They chose December 22nd, 2012 AD.
01:05:06 ►
Well, I don’t know
01:05:08 ►
if I can convey to you the
01:05:09 ►
emotional impact
01:05:11 ►
on a crazy person
01:05:13 ►
like myself of coming
01:05:16 ►
across a piece of
01:05:18 ►
information like that. And then
01:05:20 ►
I went to people and said, you see,
01:05:21 ►
this proves it. And they said,
01:05:23 ►
I told you before therapy. Now I beg you.
01:05:27 ►
I really, I’m a little shy about this because I, because it’s so personally mine, nobody has ever made a contribution to this idea that was substantial. I just, it seems to be
01:05:49 ►
mine alone and welcome to it. And yet, I want you and historians and paleontologists and primatologists
01:06:01 ►
and people who are experts on time in different sizes
01:06:06 ►
to look at this wave,
01:06:09 ►
it’s working, ladies and gentlemen.
01:06:11 ►
It does in fact describe the ebb and flow
01:06:15 ►
of this thing called novelty.
01:06:18 ►
Now when I question the mushroom about this,
01:06:21 ►
it almost makes it trivial.
01:06:23 ►
For it’s an, of course. of course you of course you are made of
01:06:28 ►
DNA DNA is made out of matter matter has to have time as a precondition of its
01:06:35 ►
existence the signature of time embedded in the atomic structure is amplified to the
01:06:43 ►
molecular structure then is amplified to the organism structure, then is amplified to the organismic structure,
01:06:49 ►
and that’s called a human life well-lived, then it’s amplified to the societal structure,
01:06:55 ►
that’s called the birth, growth, and senescence of empire, and then it’s magnified to the global structure, and that’s called the coming of the hyperspacial object at the end of time.
01:07:12 ►
It’s also a theory of resonance.
01:07:15 ►
It’s saying that large scales of time have their themes and concerns
01:07:23 ►
condensed and revivified in the smaller components.
01:07:30 ►
Now, this is somewhat hard to understand but rich enough to pursue.
01:07:35 ►
It’s this idea.
01:07:37 ►
And now I’m going to use James Joyce’s classic example.
01:07:40 ►
Joyce wrote a book called Ulysses.
01:07:42 ►
Ulysses is a book about a man who rises on a bright morning day in June in 1905 or 6.
01:07:51 ►
He wants to fry some kidneys for breakfast.
01:07:55 ►
So he gets his wallet and heads out into Dublin to score some kidneys to bring back.
01:08:00 ►
And he has all these adventures.
01:08:03 ►
But Joyce understood that this man on this day was
01:08:10 ►
also Ulysses with his brave component of men journeying to the end of the Mediterranean laying siege
01:08:20 ►
to Troy for nine years winning the Tro War, returning to their homelands.
01:08:28 ►
In other words, he understood that in each of us, we are acting out larger and larger scales
01:08:34 ►
of time that give color and precision and depth and interest to our being.
01:08:41 ►
So if you find yourself on a Saturday night in a place in San Francisco
01:08:46 ►
called Hadrian’s hamburger joint, it has something to do with the Emperor Hadrian and his
01:08:54 ►
conquest of Britain and his effort to hold back the barbarians. Life carefully examined is actually
01:09:03 ►
a form of allegorical literature
01:09:07 ►
with a very tight, constructural grid laid over it.
01:09:15 ►
This is a rich idea, and as I say,
01:09:18 ►
I’ll be giving a five-day workshop on this only,
01:09:21 ►
because this is the only psychedelic idea I’ve ever brought back
01:09:25 ►
other than, you know, idiotic
01:09:28 ►
realization such as
01:09:29 ►
everyone’s little finger
01:09:32 ►
precisely fits their nostril.
01:09:35 ►
You know, there’s no market for that.
01:09:38 ►
But this,
01:09:39 ►
this would actually create
01:09:42 ►
a revisioning of time.
01:09:44 ►
And had we more time this morning,
01:09:47 ►
I would tell you how it could be turned into a calendar of the goddess,
01:09:52 ►
how by living with a solar year that always puts Christmas
01:09:56 ►
with the same slant of sunshine coming in,
01:10:01 ►
that we have locked ourselves into a paternalistic, masculine-dominated
01:10:07 ►
structure. What the universe is is flux. Nothing lasts, nothing abides, everything moves on.
01:10:15 ►
Women know this. Man don’t, and we’re living under a solar, masculine calendar. The reason our ideas,
01:10:23 ►
and by our ideas, I’m now speaking of the entirety of the
01:10:27 ►
New Age and all of this stuff, the reason our ideas meet resistance is because the framing
01:10:34 ►
around the entire discussion of the spirit and feminism and transforming. The frame is always
01:10:43 ►
the masculine solar time frame.
01:10:48 ►
As long as we operate under that calendar,
01:10:51 ►
we will have a very difficult time advancing our ideas.
01:10:55 ►
The Chinese understood this.
01:10:57 ►
This was why when great reforming emperors arose,
01:11:01 ►
the first thing they did was change the calendar.
01:11:04 ►
If you want food for thought, look at hexagram 49. emperors arose, the first thing they did was change the calendar.
01:11:09 ►
If you want food for thought, look at hexagram 49.
01:11:11 ►
It’s revolution.
01:11:16 ►
You open it up expecting sage political advice. It talks only about the calendar.
01:11:19 ►
And it talks about the magician as a calendar maker.
01:11:23 ►
In fact, it says the magician as a calendar maker. In fact, it says the magician is a calendar maker.
01:11:28 ►
So I think that what this teaching that came out of this experience in the Amazon was all about
01:11:36 ►
was it was a totality symbol. Dennis had thought that the flying saucer would emerge out of his body as a spinning violet
01:11:47 ►
disk of translinguistic matter that would become showerhead pizza or Mercedes depending on what
01:11:55 ►
you needed at the moment.
01:11:56 ►
He thought it would become matter in the act of appropriate activity.
01:12:01 ►
Instead, what emerged was a totality symbol. And Jung talks about how in the
01:12:09 ►
individuation process, you always hope that the patient or the client will generate a totality symbol.
01:12:15 ►
But he usually means a kind of individual and wavering totality symbol like a mandala or a cohesive structure or something.
01:12:27 ►
I think we got, and I try to say this without hubris,
01:12:31 ►
because I felt like I was nothing more than the vessel into which this thing was being poured,
01:12:35 ►
what we got was the totality symbol in a complete version,
01:12:43 ►
not certainly not a total version, because I don’t think the human mind can encompass the complete version, not certainly not a total version,
01:12:45 ►
because I don’t think the human mind can encompass the total version,
01:12:49 ►
but we got a skeletal blueprint of what totality is in the world.
01:12:54 ►
What it is is knowing how things happen,
01:13:00 ►
knowing that all processes, the firing of a nerve,
01:13:05 ►
the culmination of a love affair, the firing of a nerve, the culmination of a love affair,
01:13:07 ►
the fall of an empire,
01:13:09 ►
has a pattern.
01:13:12 ►
And if you know the pattern,
01:13:14 ►
you will be at ease with any process
01:13:17 ►
in all or any of its stages.
01:13:21 ►
Because you will just say,
01:13:22 ►
ah, this is the time of resistance.
01:13:24 ►
It will soon be followed by
01:13:26 ►
the time of forward motion. That will be followed by the time of re-infoldment. And what this does
01:13:34 ►
is it eliminates anxiety, ultimately. That’s the bottom line. Our anxiety about death and our anxiety
01:13:44 ►
about the future and our relationships and money and all this stuff can be boiled down to anxiety about the unknowable aspects of the future. If we could assimilate a model like this, we would be Taoists. The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds.
01:14:08 ►
They are always right and with it in each moment.
01:14:13 ►
So I think that we’ve always talked about the I Ching, Taoism,
01:14:17 ►
and all this sort of thing as the culmination of mysticism.
01:14:22 ►
But to make it a living faith in our own lives, there should be nothing
01:14:27 ►
mystical about it. And I maintain to you, there is nothing mystical about it. It’s simply that we are
01:14:34 ►
at such a primitive stage of culture that we haven’t yet understood what time is. A hundred years
01:14:43 ►
ago, we were at such a primitive stage of culture that we didn’t understand
01:14:47 ►
what time was.
01:14:48 ►
Einstein had to come along and say, you know, time is not an abstraction necessary to have a
01:14:55 ►
place to put objects that you want to examine.
01:14:59 ►
Time itself is an object.
01:15:02 ►
It is curved in the vicinity of massive gravitational fields.
01:15:06 ►
It has a topology.
01:15:08 ►
It has a surface.
01:15:09 ►
I think what we need to understand out of this idea,
01:15:13 ►
ultimately what the psychedelic experience is teaching,
01:15:16 ►
ultimately what Taoism is trying to say
01:15:18 ►
is that time is a topological manifold.
01:15:22 ►
It is a surface.
01:15:24 ►
Events flow across it like water over land.
01:15:28 ►
And like water flowing over land,
01:15:30 ►
when the land is flat,
01:15:32 ►
the water becomes reflective
01:15:34 ►
and moves slowly.
01:15:36 ►
When the landscape becomes disrupted,
01:15:39 ►
the water moves faster,
01:15:41 ►
and chaotic attractors appear
01:15:43 ►
and new kinds of activity emerge.
01:15:46 ►
And out of that new activity then comes the new states that define the future.
01:15:54 ►
Well, I’m going to stop there.
01:15:57 ►
I haven’t shown you a graph or written a number or drawn a hexagram.
01:16:02 ►
And I think that’s remarkable.
01:16:04 ►
This is the feeling tone.
01:16:06 ►
This is the good stuff that you get,
01:16:08 ►
if you go through those graphs, numbers,
01:16:11 ►
and time on at the computer.
01:16:13 ►
But this is the totality symbol
01:16:16 ►
that I was able to get out
01:16:19 ►
of living a psychedelic life,
01:16:21 ►
and I believe that there are as many of these kinds of totality symbols
01:16:26 ►
as there are people willing to trip. And each one of them is different. You know, we create them
01:16:34 ►
for each other. They complete our lives. They assuage anxiety. And they give us a tremendous
01:16:42 ►
appetite then for the adventure of being rather than the
01:16:48 ►
ordeal of being. And they arise out of using psychedelics to amplify and inspect the quantum
01:16:56 ►
mechanical and subconscious and super conscious portions of the human mind. This is why the psychedelic experience
01:17:07 ►
and psychedelics are so important.
01:17:10 ►
It’s because they are tools
01:17:11 ►
for understanding and revisioning
01:17:15 ►
the reality in which we all live.
01:17:19 ►
The personal growth is a wonderful thing
01:17:21 ►
and will naturally follow along.
01:17:23 ►
But it’s more important than that.
01:17:26 ►
It’s a way to make a new world that is Taoistic,
01:17:32 ►
feminine, free of anxiety,
01:17:35 ►
and in great anticipation of further stages of completion
01:17:40 ►
lying into the future.
01:17:44 ►
That’s where the mystery, the transcendental object,
01:17:50 ►
the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is waiting.
01:17:54 ►
And we can know this in the here and now.
01:17:58 ►
We can prove it to ourselves.
01:18:01 ►
This idea is not a metaphor.
01:18:03 ►
It’s a scientific proposition. I wish I could show you
01:18:07 ►
the wave and show you how it picks up the building of the pyramids, the fall of Rome,
01:18:12 ►
the rise of the Renaissance, the collapse of the Maya. Seeing that it has perfectly described
01:18:20 ►
the past gives one great conviction that it will continue so to do on into the future.
01:18:28 ►
And as you imbibe that truth, a great weight is lifted from one.
01:18:35 ►
And I think that’s the job of each of us to show our best toys and our best tricks that lift us and our friends to higher and higher levels.
01:18:46 ►
And there is no end to this bootstrapping process.
01:18:49 ►
The future of the human mind and body and the future of humans together is endlessly bright.
01:19:02 ►
There’s one thing that I forgot to mention in the introduction to this talk,
01:19:06 ►
and it was to point out that we’re listening to it with the benefit of hindsight.
01:19:12 ►
Obviously, Y2K and the 2012 excitement were both duds.
01:19:17 ►
But when this talk was given, the World Wide Web still hadn’t even been invented and overlaid on the Internet.
01:19:24 ►
Where were you in 1988?
01:19:26 ►
And, at the time, were you concerned about 2012 and a possible end of history?
01:19:33 ►
It was a strange time back then.
01:19:36 ►
Of course, not nearly as strange as things are today.
01:19:40 ►
The other day, a friend of mine asked me why I thought Terrence McKenna became so popular on the speaking
01:19:45 ►
circuit back in the day. And considering how offbeat some of his ideas were, it’s a, well,
01:19:51 ►
it’s a good question. And I think there’s a lot of different answers for that question. One of them,
01:19:57 ►
I think, is what he didn’t say. I remember being pleasantly surprised the first time I attended one of
01:20:04 ►
his workshops when, just before our first break, he said, with a smile on his face, before you ask, I don’t have what you’re looking for.
01:20:14 ►
But no matter what it is, someone here has it.
01:20:20 ►
I’m still friends with one of those someones that I met that morning.
01:20:24 ►
And for many of us, well, Terrence was the source of the psychedelic community’s morphogenic field using Rupert Shelderick’s idea.
01:20:32 ►
It’s hard to believe that Terrence McKenna has now been gone for almost a quarter of a century.
01:20:37 ►
However, at this very moment, his spirit remains alive in your mind.
01:20:43 ►
Make the most of it.
01:20:45 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo,
01:20:47 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:20:50 ►
Namaste, my friends.