The Light in Nature

[Roy Tuckman Introduction]:


Roy Tuckman: So, I guess that's the end of my introduction, here's Terence McKenna!

[Audience Clapping]

Terence McKenna: Can you all hear me? Can you hear in the back? Yeah? Not very well? Make them hear in the back.

[Audience Laughter]

TM: Ok. Ah. That's much better isn't it? Is it better in the back? Good, good. Well I would like to, uh, join with Roy in thanking all of the people who made this possible. Mary Fowler, uh, worked long and hard to make this happen. Eric Ali did the wonderful graphics for the poster. Pam here, has controlled and managed traffic flow here this evening. Diane and Roy are, uh, incomparable treasures in the LA community. I was talking to someone today who said they had listened to KPFK very carefully in the month that Diane and Roy were away and it just ain't the same thing. [audience murmurs] It's terrifying to think that two human beings in a city of what, 11 million, are what's holding up the hip, uh.

[Audience applause, whooping]

TM: The hip end of things. As Roy said, this is, uh, a benefit for KPFK, and, uh, in a larger sense for Botanical Dimensions. Botanical Dimensions is the non-profit that, uh, uh, Kat and I and Rupert Sheldrake, and Ralph Metzner, Ralph Abraham, Frank Barr, a number of people have organized to carry out plant rescue operations for medicinal plants and plants with a history of shamanic usage and we uh have a botanical farm in Hawaii, 20 acres, maintain collectors in South America and occasionally support collecting in Africa. And, uh, this is our real-world political work, beyond the communicating and the publishing and that sort of thing, where we actually try to impact, uh, some of the more- some of the negative, so called, progressive changes that are taking place in the third world and disrupting rainforest culture and causing this shamanic and folk pharmacopeia to be lost. So I appreciate, uh, your being hear tonight in support of that. It's very important work, far more expensive than I thought it was when I organized the foundation, and, uh, it's ongoing so we never really seem to be ahead. So I want to thank you for your support of that.

In line with that, I've been living, uh, with Kat and our 2 children in the h- in Hawaii on the big island for the past year and not really doing any public speaking because there is none to be done there, and, uh, it was a very good opportunity to get out from under the electronic umbrella, of the sprawl of North American culture, and to sort of look at it and assess it. As this practice of speaking with groups of people has become more and more a part of my life it has sort of changed in my mind, from the addressing of certain topics and the building of a talk around a theme, to more, uh, just pointing and looking and saying "well, here we are, here's where we've arrived tonight. What is the situation? What is the state of the world? What is the state of the union?" Um.

I think psychedelics had a very large impact, I'm sure there's no argument on this in the 1960's. but in a way it was not ever anchored in anything. It was never explained to anybody by anybody how it fit into the historical context of what had preceded it. Perhaps because no one actually knew at that time. For instance, there was no, uh, the- the invoking of shamanism as an explanation for how plant hallucinogens work on psyche is completely alien to the literature of the 1960's. it just isn't there. And, speaking of aliens, the theme of alien intelligence or of hyper-dimensional, uh, organized entelechy contacted in the psychedelic state. That also was an absent theme. It was basically presented, it, the psychedelic experience, was basically presented - it, the psychedelic experience was basically presented as an exploration of the contents of the personality with a little bit of overflow into aesthetic issues. So I remember in the early days we would stack our Abrams books on Hieronymous Bosch and Pierra de la Francesca and Giotto, and the idea following Ald Hux that you would, uh, you would imbibe the meaning of these great works of art, uh, behind the kind of psychic freedom that the psychedelic substance was going to graft on to your ordinary consciousness.

While I think all those kinds of metaphors were useful, but it's been now, uh, 20, 25 years of looking at that phenomenon, and also of having the future continue to overtake us with ever more demands upon our cultural resourcefulness and our, uh, ability to cognize the cultural situation. And, uh, I think now it can be seen, uh, somewhat differently. And so these two nights in Los Angeles, uh, which are called Understanding and Imagination in the Light of Nature, are a kind of effort to take ter- several telescoping steps backward, and place the, uh, adventure of psychedelic self-exploration in context. To frame it in a number of different ways, because I think it's very important for us to know, uh, as the hermetic mysteries urge us to know, wither we have come, where we are, who we are, and whence we are going. All issues that the psychedelic experience, especially to my mind the plant hallucinogens, uh, bring into close focus. Here is an opportunity for a theater of cultural growth that is, uh, uh, unparalleled.

How did we find ourselves in this situation? What is, exactly, the nature of the cultural situation in which, then, the psychedelic response is called forth as part of a spectrum of cultural responses? Basically what's been going on in western civilization for about 500 years is the exploration of the metaphor of materialism, which began as a simple, limiting case. Since we're at the philosophical research society it behooves us to talk philosophy for a moment and remind you that there is what's called Occam's Razor. William of OCcam was, um a late mideval philosopher and his razor was the hypothesis should not be multiplied without necessity, without necessity. In other words, the simplest explanation should be prefered in all cases. The fewest number of elements should be put forward as necessary for an explanation. And following William of Occam's, uh, uh, statement of this notion as a, uh, logical way of proceeding, um, the assumption was made, then, a provisional assumption, at the beginning, that matter could be, uh, separated from the notion of soul and spirit. That it could be divided into its simplest units. And out of the activity of those simple units, a model could be built up that would explain more complex phenomena in the world. Cartesian Materialism, which, uh, was applied very successfully to, uh, physical matter, to the chemical elements, and so successfully, in fact, that the provisional nature of the assumption was soon forgotten in the explanatory zeal of the people who had latched onto this method. And so it was then applied, uh, out of the chemical realm and it moved into the biological realm, and the search was on for the biologically irreducible unit, which, uh, in the 17th century was the cell, and great excitement about the cell. And then in the 20th century, of course, first the nucleus of the cell and ultimately DNA, that, as the constituent of the nucleus which was, uh, controlling protein synthesis.

But strangely enough, the elucidation of the mechanics of the gene, through this program of reductionism, did not, uh, issue into the same kind of control over the products of the gene that the same program had, uh, the same kind of fruit that had been born of the analysis of physical matter. And in the early years of this century when the effort was made to extend the metaphor into, uh, psychology, the true inadequacy of it became clearly seen, so that, the effort to break the personality down into types, or complexes, or archetypes, or behavioral, uh, uh, strategies all failed. and at the same time that this process that this confirmation was happening in the social sciences, physics, which had been old reliable, in the matter of supporting this particulate, pointillistic, materialistic, school of explanation began, in fact, to betray it. Because the analysis of matter was pushed to deeper and deeper levels, until finally phenomena began to be elucidated which seemed, uh, incomprehensible in the mechanical model. It seemed as though what had been thought of as points of matter we in fact spread through time, and the notion of simple location began to give way to clouds of probability and this sort of thing. All of this reaching, uh, a culmination in 1923 with the Copenhagen conference on quantum physics, where basically a new vision of matter was elucidated.

And strangely enough, the new view of matter seemed to have a very mentalist sort of aura about it. It no longer was a theory of simple location, calculable energies, and specific predictions. It was probabilistic. Now this reemergence of a need for a wave-mechanical description of matter, can I think, now be seen from the vantage point of 55 years, as, uh, the first stirrings, or among the first stirrings of the reemergence of the spirit. and I think that, uh, what understanding and imagination in the light of nature argues for is the presence and re-emergence of the awareness of spirit in the world. This is what, uh, the so called and long heralded paradigm shift is all about. It is a vast turning over of the intellectual universe, which will eclipse many idea systems, and support many more. It- it is the idea of fields. Spirit need not be defined or even conceived in any sort of 19th century, or mentalist, or animist way. What spirit is, is, uh, a field of deployed energy that is somehow co-present at more than one point in space and time. It is, uh, it is the shadow that haunts the particularized world of Newtonian matter. And it is, strangely enough, the commonest object of experience. In other words, as we move through our lives, as we project our hopes, as we plan our days, as we execute our jobs, we move in this realm of spirit. The problem is that we have been very slowly, but very, uh, efficiently, corralled inside an intellectual system which gives no credence to spirit, and therefore has had a curious effect on the validation that we give our own lives.

For instance if you look at, uh, uh, positivist philosophy, which is the dominant philosophical paradigm in academic philosophy, there you learn that there are primary and secondary qualities to the world, and the primary qualities are charge, spin, angular momentum, velocity, this sort of thing. Things which nowhere come tangential to the felt world of the individual. Well then there are also, so called, secondary qualities: Color, taste, tone, feeling. All the things that make up the world that you and I experience. So somehow we are not traveling in first class on this metaphysical airliner. No we're back there with the secondary qualities, and the good stuff is all up front and it is described and manipulated by incomprehensible equations, uh, and uh, you have to enter into a priesthood to become part of it.

Well, uh, it's to our credit, I think, that we are waking up, and one of the reasons that we are waking up is because into the objects of common experience, by an exhaustive search of the objects of common experience, uh, diligent, clear thinking, seekers after understanding; people who are practicing, uh, who took seriously the Constitution's assurance of, uh, the pursuit of happiness, have, Robert Bork not withstanding, [audience chuckles] have found more than the right of privacy in the Constitution, but have actually found the right to alter your own consciousness for purposes of personal growth. Well, consciousness is like a still pool. If it is unperturbed it returns a clear image of the world, in the same way that the unperturbed surface of a pond will become a mirror to the environment around it. But if consciousness is perturbed by being shifted from its ordinary modalities, then the extraordinarily tenuous and provisional nature of what we call reality, swims into our can. And we see, you know, that what we take to be solid objects, what we take to be here and now, what we take to be personal identity versus, uh, Other in the form of other personalities. That all of these things hang by the most tenuous of linguistic threads and cultural conventions. And that beneath the surface of those conventions is utter terra incognito; a no man's land. The unexplored territory behind cultural assumption suddenly starkly totally incontrovertibly illuminated to the inspection of the individual. Well, this is, uh, feeding, indeed to my mind it is the major factor responsible for the reemergence of the awareness of the spirit. It holds out the possibility that we can create a new definition of our own humanness. That it was fine, for purposes of disentangling from the medieval church, to take the materialist rout, and to follow it into, uh, Darwinian evolution, to recognize our ascent from previous primate forms, and to, sort of, claim a dimension of existential freedom.

But that is not the whole story; that essentially is the legacy or the achievement of modernism, which was fully worked out by 1927 or 8, I would say. I mean those people: the pataphysicians, the quantum physicists, the Dadaists, the surrealists, [???] it was all worked out. And those of us who were born after that time and have come into this sort of pseudo-eschaton of regurgitation of modern values in art, fashion, and literature, have been living in this kind of a goldfish bowl ever since. I mean, really, it's astonishing the degree to which, in the most progressive and fast-moving century in the last 10 or, a- or, 20 for that matter, there has also been an extraordinary backward current. A very strong recidivism that has held at bay the true exfoliation of what modernity was supposed to mean. That's why, within the 20th century, the further back you go the more utopian the projection of the future becomes, and the further into the 20th century you go, the more like a dystopia it becomes, as we get not elevated railways, immortality, and, uh, hot pants, but, you know, bread lines, and germ warfare, and double speak, and all of these things. So, into this situation, of retrenchment and cultural recidivism, and the working out of modern values, which are materialist values, comes then, the beginning of the post modern era. I don't- I prefer a different term, which I call compressionism, the compressionist era, which follows the modern era, and its theme is the reemergence of the presence of the spirit, and its major, uh, cultural exhibit, or the major cultural force driving it, is the discovery of relativism, with regard to consciousness. Which does not only mean, uh, psychedelic drugs and hallucinogenic plants per se. It also means media, it also means literary expectation, reorientation of the senses through design, urban planning, the entire spectrum of effects which feeds consciousness back into itself is, uh, enunciating this theme of the emergent spirit, and it is not necessarily a welcome theme. Because, uh, all institutions attain a certain momentum toward the preservation of their own vested interest. And science, and the handmaiden of science which is modern technocratic government, uh, have, uh, created a number of cultural institutions that, uh, have a friction with the reemergence of the spirit.

First and foremost is the notion of the public. The public is this weird idea that was generated in the wake of the printing press that there were vast numbers of people who could be treated atomistically. They didn't have to be thought of as individuals, they could be thought of as various, uh, classes. Masses of people to be manipulated, and if you could sell these, the public, on the idea of democracy, which is another one of these atomistic notions, the notion of democracy is for us all to get together and have it work, we have to assume that we're all alike, see, so we each have a vote and you may be tall, you may be short, you may be rich, you may be poor, you may be black, you may be white, but that doesn't matter, we'll give everybody this charge, one vote, and then we'll see how these populations work themselves out. What they don't tell you is, that at the same time that you build this definition of the citizen, you also build the institutions which subvert the the citizen. So the citizen is not free to act out and express the wishes of the citizen. The citizen is a consumer of ideological models that are sold to the citizen through agencies of mass propaganda. So there's this peculiar playing off of one against the other. In the meantime what has also been happening is, the institutions of language, which previously were pretty much left to develop on their own, and, and that was the situation well into the 19th century. The, through the power of the printing press, the evolution of language also became, uh, something under the control of these institutions and they very quickly have replaced whatever reality may have been impinging into the lives of the citizens with concepts.

Concepts replace reality. You come into the world with a blank slate, and everything is what William James called "a blooming buzzing confusion". Well then, one by one you isolate phenomena in this confusion, and you name it. Once a sector of reality has been named, it stays still. It ceases to behave the way it would behave for itself. It begins to behave syntactically, because it has been changed into a linguistic object. When things behave syntactically they are either subjects or objects or the syntactical machinery which relates these two together. In that case, materialism, dualism, projection of authenticity beyond the self are all reinforced. So these are the factors which have, uh, impeded the spirit. Into this comes the psychedelic experience. It has a tremendous force to revivify the spirit, particularly because it is not an ideology. It is not something someone figured out. It is an experience and this is important to bare in mind. It horrifies me, I'm sure you've heard me say it, uh, to think of someone going to birth to the grave without ever coming tangential to the psychedelic experience. It's like going from the birth to the grave without ever discovering sex. It means that you died as an adol- as a pre-adolescent, you know; you never really came into your birthright. and we have been infantilized by our cultural institution to accept the notion of ourselves as citizens consuming this regurgitated, these regurgitated scientific models which are then hashed through by Madison Avenue, and then handed down to us by the organs of mass culture, and this is supposed to be what we anchor our lives on. It's no wonder that, uh, drug abuse, child abuse, self abuse is rampant in this society, because it all has been taken away from us. You may read 1984 and think "well, thank God it isn't that bad yet!" Well, the only difference between us and 1984 is we dress better!

[audience laughter, applause]

So I think that, uh, little gatherings like this, and I feel like this is definitely a family gathering, uh, this, this meeting was sold out, uh, before there was any promo, uh, other than Roy's show and a small mailing we did. So you are people who have passed through a very narrow filter. You stay up late [audience laughter] you listen to KPFK, and you tolerate Terence McKenna, so you are either thrice blessed or thrice cursed [audience laughter] I- I don't know which it is, but anyway, it feels to me like a family gathering. It feels to me like we are figuring this out, and there aren't that many of us, I think. But what we understand as a group, or what I imagine that, that we understand, is, that there is this twilight of reductionism. There is this end of the old model and yet we're not ready to proclaim the twilight of reductionism to simultaneously be the funeral of reason. You see, there are a lot of people, a much larger group than we represent who are prepared to bury reason along with reductionism and I think reason, uh may have been caught in bed with reductionism, but it may have been set up [audience laughter], is the the take that I have on it, and , and as they used to say in Watergate: "linked but not tainted" [audience laughter] so.

I am a very, uh, uh, some people even, someone said I was narrow min- I was accused of being narrow minded the other night [chuckles] because, uh, I come to this very honestly through the sciences, through trying to really find out what was going on, and not just accept everything that came down the pipe. I mean, I will believe anything if there's evidence, if it's self consistent, if the case is well made. I mean I think that the first thing that the truth will be is, uh, a pleasure to hear. You know, and not some turgid and tormented thing where you have to go to six meetings and not talk to anybody who doesn't believe it, and all of this sort of thing. So I think, uh, it's important as the, what I call the archaic revival, gets rolling, it is important for us to clarify where we're coming from. When we- when we were simply the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe it hardly mattered, but responsibility will devolve on us to say what we mean, and to have a position which is, uh, not only convincing to the converted, but convincing to the skeptics. That's who I'm after, you know, because I think that a great, uh, instance of cultural blindness is what we're confronted with on the issue of psychedelics. Psychedelics are to the science of psychology what the telescope was to astronomy in Galileo's time. And we are in a situation of increasing global pressure on our species, increasing outbreaks of neurosis, unhappiness, psychic epidemics, and we are leaving our best tools behind because of fairly preposterous cultural prohibitions. Cultural prohibitions which deny us our best weapons for overcoming, uh, the situation that we are in. And this is really an intolerable situation because, uh, the fates, nothing less than the fate of the human species probably hangs in the balance. We cannot afford the luxury of an unconscious. We cannot afford, uh, stupidity, closed mindedness, racism, sexism, uh, consumer materialism, selfishness, an absence of globalism. These things are not necessary for us, for our moral edification so we can feel like well bred ladies and gentlemen. These things are necessary for us so that we don't destroy ourselves. And the fact that, uh, this message is so slow coming out is a strong argument for activism on the part of anybody who thinks they have even the faintest glimmer of what is going on. You know, the future will not wait, uh. I see the most, uh, cryptofacist and intrans- intransigent of institutions slowly waking up to fairly basic facts, such as that a nuclear war is probably a bad investment

[audience laughter]

You know, so that even, uh, so that even a neanderthal a type as President Pinocchio is willing- isn't that a cruel thing for me to say?

[Audience laughter]

Is, is waking up to the fact that, uh, [clears throat] it just don't pay. But you know we have a lot of problems, it isn't going to be the millennium even if we achieve a massive cutback in strategic weapons, there's still going to be propaganda, sexism, starvation, uh, inability to correctly manage resources. These things will plague us, uh, unto, uh, the last syllable of recorded time unless we begin to undergo this kind of intellectual cohesion, the compression of our intent, the recognition of our group mindedness as a feeling, as a will, that can act in the historical context, and, uh, to my mind the psychedelics have always existed in the plants to promote precisely this. There were not language-using tool-making tribes of human beings in the absence of hallucinogenic plants. The hallucinogenic plants create the context for integrated organizational activity. This has been going on for at least 15- 20,000 years. The problem is that through a series of factors which we needn't go into in depth here, but factors which impinged on European civilization particularly, civilizations were able to evolve outside of the noetic input from Gaia, outside of the biological radio which envelops the planet and inputs into balanced tribal societies with functioning shamanic institutions. In Europe somehow the chain was broken. The link back to the elder Gods and Goddesses and to the biological organization of human society before history was lost. And this curious kind of ungoverned intellectual development occurred. Ungoverned in the literal sense of a machine which slips from the control of its, uh, of its governor. And uh, uh, it's, uh, in that situation materialism, which is an insupportable philosophy actually, if you have an openness, a sensitivity, any kind of cultivated feminine response to nature, it is utterly impossible.

Recall that the Cartesian, the point of view of Cartesian materialism pushed Descartes to actually claiming public debate that, m- that animals are machines. He said they feel nothing. The apparent display of pain is simply a, a, something which we project onto them. because we alone have a soul and, and Descartes you see had himself had not gone over completely to materialism, he believed there was a human soul but it came tangential at only one point to, uh, to the human body. Somewhere in the Pineal gland there was a switch and the, and the soul was running things like a telephone switch board operator from there. Well, uh, very shortly after Descartes his followers just said well we don't need this soul concept is just a thing to stay on the right side of the church and we don't need it and they cut it loose. An- Well once you cut that loose, then you have all kinds of permissions. You have permission to rape and exploit nature. Permission which had already been reinforced for Western man by the New Testament, but now raised to the nth degree by the assumption that nature is utterly without soul and this philosophy persisted well into the 1950's.

The essence of, s-, of Jean Paul Sartre's existentialism was, can be summed up in the na- in the statement "Nature is Mute" that was Sartre's position on nature. How many people thinking themselves existentialist and hanging out in coffee houses actually ever found, worked through what the consequences of the existential point of view was. Nature is not mute, you really have to have worked yourself in a weird place to believe that, you know. In fact, nature is entirely the something else. Nature is communication, because nature is psyche. This is what we haven't understood. We have somehow talked ourselves into the belief that into the natural world of Eden, God came and made man and from man, woman, and that men and women are of so ontologically a different level than the rest of nature that no conclusion about us can be drawn from an examination of nature. Nothing could a- I mean I, eeh, it's impossible for me to understand how this idea persists and has such momentum in the 20th century, where hierarchy theory has very very clearly, uh, explicated the notion of the linkage of higher-order systems to subsystems that are physically more simple. So you see really what we have is a kind of fractal universe. I- In fact it's not greatly different from the alchemical view of the 16th century where people said, uh, "as above so below" the microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm. What this is really saying is that at the level of a planet you get a certain level of organization and spectrum of peripheral effects. The same thing, such as self reflection, self regulation, intent, goal projection, steering toward perceived goal. You get the same kind of thing on the level of society, can be a beehive or a heard of antelope or whatever, and you get it in the human individual and the human society. So really, what is to be seen is the, we are the cutting edge of becoming. We are not a thing apart, we a unique level of a multilevel organism and we have been called forth out of nature, by nature, for a purpose, and what is our cast as individuals, I think, is to discover what that purpose is and then to align ourselves with it in a way which allows the plan, whatever it is, to most smoothly unfold.

Well what it seems to be is a progressive invocation of spirit. The theme with which I began the evening. That through language, through abstraction, through magical invocation, the formulation of religion, the projection of art, the field phenomena, the phenomena which are diffuse in space and time and not easily located are forcing, or intruding their way, into three dimensional space and time. If you were an extra terrestrial in a starship in orbit around this planet, what you would see looking down is a gene swarm. The species that seem to us to be animal forms extremely stable in time are actually highly permeable membranes over millennia and tens of millennia with genes crossing over, moving around, and being basically obedient to the expression of some kind of teleological form. And it was the concern of 19th century biology to eliminate teleology, to eliminate purpose and directedness, but it's very hard to avoid the impression of some kind of, of, uh, attractor, ahead of this planet, embedded in its history, and somehow channeling everything toward it. So that the progressive acceleration of human society, of information production, of communication, the proliferation of languages, natural and synthetic. All of these things are, uh, not something going on in the human domain and somehow sealed from the general state of nature, but are, in fact, part of the general state of nature. And the human experience, or the human animal as the carrier of this catalytic process, this speeding up and accelerating of process on the surface of the planet is not sealed from nature, but the leading edge; the leading edge of a process on this planet.

Now teleology was so antithetical to 19th century science because they were trying to pull away from the telos of, uh, medieval philosophy. They didn't want God, these 19th century English atheists: Darwin and Lyle and, uh, and uh that crowd. However, uh, we have come through the de- the so called death of God, and the elimination of, uh, of a theological raison detre for the Universe. And now we're looking more at a telos we would operationally define. Rather than define, for- it based on ancient revelation, which was the pre- you know, the previous the method was: the older the book the truer it must be, and the Bible is the oldest book and therefore it must be true. This is, uh, what Mercea Eliade called the nostalgia for paradise paradigm of time. We are overcoming that, it can now be seen that there is, in fact, some kind of transcendental object, and it's best to try and describe it phenomenologically. We don't know what it is, but we do know that it's an enormous attractor of some sort, and we are in the field of attraction, and by we I mean all life on the planet is being drawn in to this noble point. And it is possible to anticipate it through the psychedelic experience, because apparently the natural and the linguistic worlds are, uh, worlds which are organized along the principle of fractal curves.

Fractal curves are recently discovered mathematical objects- not all of them are recently discovered, some of them are known as late as the late 19th century, but most have been discovered using computers in the last 10 or 15 years, and they are self-similar curves such that, when you take a subset of one of these mathematical objects, it is found to have a whole pattern embedded in it. The Fourier transforms that describe holograms are these kinds of things, coastlines, mountain ranges, uh, data of all sorts, when analyzed in a certain way is found to be fractal. Apparently the world is a kind of vast spiral fractal that is achieving greater and greater closure with itself, and we experience this density of closure and this compressionism, uh, as the spectrum of effects which we call human evolution, human history, emergence of high technology, the present moment, the rush towards apocalypse. The most intense moments that the Universe have ever known are the next 15 seconds, and beyond that lies still more intense moments. Novelty, as a kind of generalized paradigm of the compression of connectedness throughout the cosmos is accelerating moment by moment, in the rocks, in the trees, in the stars, and in us. And so what we call history, which is not as modern- the modern theory of history is what they call "trendlessly fluctuating" that is their model of the world. You get order at the atomic level, order at the biological level, order, order, order, suddenly you reach human beings trendlessly fluctuating.

[Audience Laughter]

It's as though, you know we were brownian, effected by the brownian movement of random particles and yet we, somehow out of all this ordering we're to believe that then emerges the trendless fluctuation of human history. Actually, this is nonsense simply that there has never been a thoroughgoing theory of history. However, now we are ready for them because these wave-mechanical ideas that notions of closure, Sheldrake's idea about the presence of a past, the way in which a past drives the present, all of these things lay us open for an understanding of the compression and densification of time, and this is what is experienced in the psychedelic experience. Really, you know, Whitehead said of dove grey that it haunts time like a ghost. Well, I think that the compression of the three dimensional universe at the end of time haunts time like a ghost. It's the cosmic giggle. Here a messiah, there a shaman, there an ecstatic poet, and there the tiny ripple that is simply a congruent coincidence in the life of a single individual. Robert Anton Wilson called this the cosmic giggle. It's when something protrudes through the flor- the forward flowing momentum of rational causuistry and causes it to flow around it, and eddy and churn, and then you like you see through for a moment and you're like What is it? and there's a plottedness for a moment, there was, uh, the hand of the maker there but now I don't see it anymore. That is the going behind the veil. That is the seeing into the structure of being that lies beh- behind the conventionalized languages. That's why, uh, coincidence is so often reported as an accompanying phenomenon for the psychedelic experience, because really syntax is dissolved, and syntax is a filter for this sense of, uh, eminent connectedness. And when the syntax goes, the eminent connectedness flows in. Then it's a question of what you do with this. If it causes you to believe that you are going to save the world, then you haven't gotten the message right, that's inflation, and, uh, inflation is very bad, it drives up interest rates. So if you get that kind of a take on it, you are misusing it, nevertheless, the most advanced yogic techniques that are known are the techniques of the so called AYTYT and the tantric yoga techniques, and there the prescription is, it says in Herbert Nothers Treasures of the Tibetan middle way "You should think of your house as a resplendent palace. Think of your utensils as made of beaten gold. and think of yourself as having a body made of living mercury." What this is in western psychological terms is an invitation to inflation, but if it is a, if it is approached with the right analysis of mind, basically that it is, that there is nothing but Bodhi Mind and there is no particularization in time and space, then there is no fee- inflationary feedback into the ego.

And this is, um, this is the kind of opportunity that the psychedelic opens up. It is, uh, I've said many times quoting plato, time is the moving image of eternity. Time is the moving image of eternity. What the shaman does is he or she leaves the mundane plane and in Mircea Eliade's phrase is able to trigger a rupture of planes. And a rupture of plane carries the shamanizing person into another dimension. Literally, another dimension. And in that other dimension, all of time and space is beheld, as James Joyce said, in a nutshell, and in the nutshell of time and space everything is, uh, seen to be a part and a,a,a,uh aesthetically pleasing integral, necessary part of the transcendental object. In fact, what this universe is is a lower dimensional slice of that same transcendental object. Well, I guess what impells my career and what I really can't get over is that what I'm saying to you is true.
[Audience murmuring]

You know, that we, we sit here and we gather here, and even though we're talking about this extremely far out thing, still all the forms are in place. I'm here, you're there, everybody sits on their ass, nobody sits on their head. It all, uh, it all appears fairly mundane. How can it be that what we are talking about is the nearby presence of an impossibly alien dimension. Now if that alien dimension had been reported back to us by a robot probe dropped into the methane oceans of Europa we would be all hot to go there, to organize a 20 billion dollar expedition and a 15 year plan and go out there and found out what is happening. The amazing this is, that you know, each one of us in our own living room can be this Magellan, can penetrate into these dimensions. It really seems quite freaky to me. Freaky to me that such a thing is possible, and yet that we are such monkeys or so culturally constrained, or so blind that this is not what we're all talking about all the time, and by we all, I mean all 5 billion of us on this planet. Because we appear to be being pushed down a featureless corridor toward a furnace, and yet if you notice there are all these doors along the side of the so-called featureless corridor, and nobody seems to have cognized that you can just open these doors and walk through and short circuit the inevitability of planetary disaster. Amazing! Amazing! because we pride ourselves on, uh, our commitment that science allows us to look anywhere, inspect any possibility, our models are not dictated to us by the church, or by government, or by industry, when in fact they are dictated to us by the church, government, industry, mammalian organization and so we are no better off than all those benighted people in those previous ages where we look back upon them and say "well, they must have been so limited by their world views because they didn't know about quantum physics and ketamine and Michael Jackson and cable TV and all of these things" but the fact of the matter is that unless we push through culture to nature we, too, are dupes; we too are somehow being sold a line.

And, uh, and yet nature is there, outside of the cities, you know you drive an hour and a half from where we're sitting you're in the high desert and it is demon-haunted, paleolithic space. It is, uh, it holds the same promise for us as moderns that it held for the [?] indians who were initiated in to- into their shamanic institutions before the conquest, before history. So, nature is the final arbiter of cultural forms. This is what Taoism understood, and this is what, I believe, the psychedelic plant thing is pushing us toward. It was not immediately apparent that this was so, because as I said at the beinging of this talk, in the 60's uh th- the psychedelics came out of a laboratory, and only the most scholarly of the trippers bothered to study the natural origins and the anthro- and ethnographic context in which these things were coming from like the Eleusinian mysteries or the Mexican morning glory mysteries or the Wasson-discovered mushroom mysteries. but if we can somehow link a respect to nature, a sensitivity to Gaia. A valuing of ourselves, a, a, uh, complete placing of our own feelings and our own perceptions in the forefront of, uh, trustworthy sources and the psychedelics integrated into our lives, then there will be a tremendous cultural impact, a tremendous reorientation. Because the, the message that nature is trying to give, the steering signal on the human species comes through the accessing of this shamanic dimension outside of history. Revolutions are made by tiny percentages of the populations in which they are- in which those revolutions are wrought. The important thing is clarity and connectedness, and, uh, a, uh clear understanding of who one's antecedents are, what the source antecedents are and what the target goal is.

'New Age' is a pale label for what is going on. New Age sounds too much like new Nixon, new Reagan, new re-treaded everything. What is happening is an archaic revival. A parking back to cultural models 10 to 25,000 years old because the profane fall into history is actually ending. The way the fall into history ends is with the progeny of Adam, the human race, recovering the control of the human form. The control of the human soul. The ability to turn ourselves into whatever we wish to be. This comes through the union of imagination through understanding, into nature. The invocation of the dream, this is what the Australian aboriginal society is talking about, this is what the dream time is. Finnegans Wake says "up neent prospector you warp your woof and spread your wings. sprout all your worth." This upneent this end of time, this birth into angelhood lies ahead of us, but it is really part of the archaic return to the paradisical mode before history. The psychedelic hallucinogens are the catalyst. The minds that they touch become the catalysts within the society in general and from there the fashions, the social forms, the kinds of consciensousness, the innate decency that is, uh, that is called forth by the authenticity of the experience is what will transform us.

I mean in the same way that, uh, an affair can become a love affair if there is mutual authenticity of behavior, rather than simply a kind of flirting flirtation. In the s- in that same way our affair with Gaia can be a love affair if we can summon to ourselves the vision to make it so. And it means really being aware of the vastness of the options, of the precipice that late 20th century historical human beings stand on. We are about to leave for the stars. This is what is happening on this planet. The species prepares to depart for the stars. To do that, energy has to be marshaled. The lessons of the long march out of the trees and to this moment have to be collated, sifted, refined, concentrated, that is the alchemical goal. The historical process of the story of the prodigal son, of a wandering and a return. The return is meaningless without the wandering. The wandering has no meaning unless its fruits are given, uh, birth after the return. And I think that, uh the last thousand years has been the prodigal journey into matter, and it ends finally with modern pharmacology, modern ethnobotany discovering in the jungles of the Amazon, in the mountains of Mexico the body of Eros. Osiris, you know, fallen since the time of the flood, but awaiting the reemergence of the cognizant human connection. That is what the archaic revival holds out. It's actually our salvation

I mean I think I'm fairly hard nosed. I don't see any hope for us, I don't see any hope for institutional transformation unless it is done with an awareness of the transcendental object. And the religions that we inherit from the past are so screwed up that the only way to validate and empower the transcendental object is by self experience, and by direct accessing, and people say "Well can't it be done on the natch?" No it can't be done on the natch, generally speaking, because if it could be, it would have been done. I mean, we- there are plenty of elder societies on this planet that have the rap down, you know, but look at the kind of societies that they erect. I mean, horrifyingly dehumanized societies seem to be the breeding place of the most sublime religions there are! So, no, I think it has to be, there has to be a humbling. We have to bow our heads and abandon the dualism that we inherit out of our, out of Christianity and science and the whole judeo-christian-islamic schtick. We have to realize that it requires a symbiotic partner: It's a hand in hand effort. And if we're willing to take the hand which nature offers in, in the strange form of the alien vegetation spirit from the stars that seems to infuse us on plant hallucinogens then we will go forward into a bright new world. It's a partnership, it's a challenge, it's uh, the only game in the planetary village, and, uh, I appreciate your letting me share with you my notion of it this evening, thank you.

[Audience applause]

TM: We're gonna take about, uh, 10 or 15 minute break and then do question and answers. There are a bunch of, uh, handouts, catalogs, events coming up, stuff on tables at the back of the room which I urge you to take a look at.

[Tape Splice]

TM: Yeah?

[Audience Noises]

TM: We're going to start very quickly, because, uh, the philosophical society has asked that we, uh, wind ourselves down. I wanted to call your attention to a couple of things before I take questions. "Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Growers Guide" [audience begins to cheer] is back in print by popular demand.

[audience applause]

At health food stores, you buy agar.

[Audience Laughter]

But, uh, I do technical consulting at a hefty hourly fee. This, this can be gotten at Bodhi Tree, it's longer, it's on better paper, it has more drawings, it's as state of the art as, uh, as we can make it. It has brought freedom, prosperity and enlightenment to tens of thousands.

[Audience Laughter]

We have, uh- not to be outdone by Tim Leary, we have a piece of software [scattered applause] so if, if you own a 2E, 2C, or 2GS machine from apple, why you can run this Timewave software which, in my opinion, is actually my best trick, and I will be writing and talking more and more about, uh, about the wave of time because in Hawaii, finally developing this software gave me a real grip on it. Eventually we will market this for Macintosh and IBM-compatible machinery, but right now it's in the uh, 2e, 2c line. Um, also I'd like to mention that, uh, Kat and I will be at Esalen next weekend so if any of you are true gluttons for punishment why you can join us up there for 2 and a half days, and uh, it should be lots of fun. That will wind this all up.

And before I take questions I want to again remind you of botanical dimensions. It is a tax exempt non-profit, we do need donations, so, every- all the money that is given goes very directly into visibly manifesting, uh, the botanical garden in Hawaii, collecting the plants, in, uh, building a computer database, and basically support-, not even supporting but, uh, keeping a Peruvian collector in the field. Since I'm most familiar with Amazonian botany why that's where we've concentrated.

Well, usually questions are the most interesting, uh, how is this to be done? Are you going to have a microphone? Will people come up? Stand up? Stand up and speak loudly. In the middle in the back, yes.

Q: Yes, Terence. I was wondering if you could share with us your ideas about what the spirit is?

TM: Well, I think it, it's uh, my notion of it is it's an info- the way we experience it, it's an informing understanding. It's, on one level, it's simply appropriate activity, you know, knowing how to do everything because it is the Tao of the ancestors. In other words, you can sort of see yourself as the, as the most recent version of your family's genes, and in all traditional activities there's millions of years of morphogenetic fields stored up for how you pick something up. How you sit something down, so, in the immediate sense, the manifestation of spirit is appropriate activity.

What it really is, I think, is some kind of hidden how-ness that makes everything be as it is. And that's what the spirit is. In other words, science describes the possible things that can happen. Science is the study of possibilities, and what nobody has ever answered is how is it that out of the entire class of possibilities, certain things actually undergo the formality of occurring? Somehow they are selected out of the class of the possible and they become the actual. Well, the thing which mediates the coming into being of the actual out of the class of the possible is what I think the spirit is. It is the, the invisible hand, if you will. It is the guiding force. It is the invisible landscape over which becoming flows like a river. It defines, it creates, it is this telos that I mentioned, this attractor at the end of time. Other q-? Yes, back there.

Q: Uh, yes, Terence, uh, has there been any research you, uh, know of, uh, in in relation to electron spin resonance recently since the Invisible Landscape? And secondly can tryptamine act as a mechanism for the release of genetically stored material, uh, through that DSR or direct spin resonance with an interpolation [??] substances into the neural DNA, isn't it, uh, subset of genetic mechanisms for uh, racial?

TM: Well, in The Invisible Landscape, that's what we were suggesting, and The Invisible Landscape was published in 1975, uh, since then there's been a lot of work with MMR and ESR, none of it which overthrows this idea. It's a real question about the, uh, the where is the epigenetic data stored? In other words, all the memories that you accumulate during your life die with you. Your genetic material you can pass on at least half to your children, and, and so during the life of the individual this epigenetic material: experience, anecdotes, memories, anticipations. How- where is it molecularly stored, and is it molecularly stored? In The Invisible Landscape we were suggesting that, uh, thought is actually a naturally occurring ESR readout of portions of the DNA which were not associated with genetic expression but which were somehow like, uh, um, write- writable memory in a computer. The epigenetic stuff was being stored there. There's no data to overthrow that notion that I'm aware of, I'm not, I don't cling to it, um, as strongly as I once did. I- I look more and more, I, see I didn't realize that this was a fundamental break, this, uh, allowing of spirit into the scientific model of the world, and, uh, uh. I now think of the, the brain as a receiver of the phenomenon of consciousness. That- I don't believe that, that consciousness is generated in the brain anymore than that television programs are made inside my TV. You know, the box is too small.

[Audience laughter]

You know, that, I mean it just obviously is too small. I, I mean, it might not be if you didn't have the psychedelic experience, but once you spike that then well you say, well it's taking you know 10 high 16 megabytes of memory to store this database so, it just doesn't, I just don't think it would be done like that. I think there is, a- some how this field phenomenon that I keep returning to. This is another slice on what the spirit is, it is this field of some sort of energy that organisms, as they evolve, discover. Right? Already somehow present in the environment it is that, the apatition for being that drives organic, uh, evolution into this kind of dance of relatedness to this other thing which is transduced from another dimension. That's why, you know if you take "consciousness expansion" as a phrase, or consciousness enhancement seriously it must be very important because consciousness is after all what it's all made out of. That's the name of the game.

So, uh, this transducing of, uh, higher states of consciousness then seems, uh, uh, very important even at that it would be, uh, necessary to elucidate the physical mechanisms whether it's ESR, MMR, or what it is. An interesting, um, sort of opportunity for psychedelic research, you see, the amazing thing about psychedelics is not only that they are illegal and restricted from the so-called ordinary person, but they are restricted to scientific research. Nobody can do research on psychedelics. I mean, it is professionally and practically impossible to do it.

Well there's no other area where this is true, I mean science probes obscenely into the pri- the most private areas of our sex lives, our social lives, our dream lives, monkeys are smashed against walls to study- There's no limit to it, and yet there's this total hands off atitiude to the psychedelics. So an interesting break in this front is the sudden need, because of, uh, computer assisted tomography, CAT scanning, the need for compounds which locate in certain highly defined parts of the brain. If you could triviate these drug compounds, uh, and make them radioactive you could make very nice pictures of various parts of the brain. So now suddenly there is an interest in all this old psychedelic research about receptor cites and location densities of molecules in the brain so we may be on break of an era where, to have a psilocybin trip in the evening you must have signed on for a CAT scan, uh, at general hospital in the morning. Someone else.

Q: I, I forgot my question I about the space of these plans that you need new rescue them from the Amazon and bring them to Hawaii, how many types of plants there are, that type of thing.

TM: Well, um, the, every time I have gone to the Amazon plant collecting I've observed that the cultures, the indidgenous rainforest cultures are more and more disrupted, and there's a lot of, uh, conservation and big organizations raising money to preserve the rainforest and to get large tracts of rainforest set aside. But, there is no awareness or social, uh, conscience about the fact that the presence of capitalism in the Amazon is totally disrupting tribal human culture. So these people who have been tribal for thousands of years, uh, the men are just totally walking out on the traditional lifestyle and taking their canoe 100 miles down river and signing on at saw mills and on oil drilling crews and this sort of thing. And, so the consequences of this is,that far more rapidly than the rainforest itself is being destroyed, uh, the human cultural interaction with the rain forest is being lost, and thousands and thousands of species of medicinal plants, antibiotics, immune stimulators, hallucinogens, analgesics, uh. All these different kinds of plants, this data, this lore is being lost and when you realize that, you know, 80% of the drugs sold in the United States are, in fact, traceable to plant sources, and in spite of the vaunted success of so called strategic pharmacology, where you just think up the drug you think you need and make it in a laboratory it really- it's still a lot of what drug companies do is screen for plants, uh, and cash in on folk lore, basically.

So, it's important to preserve these plants and, uh, the lore about them because, you see, I mean like, it's really hard to explain how some of these plants have been discovered, for instance in the case of Ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a visionary shamanic brew that happens to be made of two- two different plants Banisteriopsis caapi supplies an MAO inhibitor and P. Viridis supplies DMT. Either plant by itself is inert and you have to know to brew the wood and bark of one with the leaves of the other, and you have to know that it's in a certain proportion, and you have to know to concentrate it to a certain degree. Well, when you realize that in a square mile of Amazonian rain forest can have 120,000 species of plants on it, I mean, that's in contrast to when you go into the Sierras a square mile of forest may have 150 species. So, it's an ultra complex environment and human beings, who knows by what means, I mean, it is to my mind, that the vegetable spirits lead them to it, have sussed out all this knowledge that is, uh, you know, un, a seamless web of understanding about nature, and, uh, so this is what we're trying to preserve in Hawaii.

I think ayahuasca is a good example, it has tremendous potential for psychiatry. It is a purgative, it kills intestinal parasites, it, uh, appears in agar, in slant cultures, to kill the tramazone of malaria. Well, instead of delivering high priced drugs made in Germany and the United States to the outback of Indonesia where malaria is raging, you could simply send in thousands of cuttings of this plant. People could grow it as a door yard plant, take it as a tea on a weekly basis, and uh, malaria would be held at bay. There are over 200 plants, uh, in a recent review article that I saw, known from Africa that appear to be immune stimulative plants. Well, God, this should have everybody on the edge of their seat. the breakdown of the immune system and the whole aids related complex and all of that. It turns out that adaptations to plants in traditional cultures have confered, or have stimulated the immune system and confered certain kinds of immunity. Well then, this could be the basis for a drug strategy of some sort, and so on. So this is the kind of preservational work that we're doing there. Yes

Q: Yes Terence, um, a few days ago you were on KPFK with Roy and you mentioned briefly san pedro, that what you said right? you were talking about that, that, plant san pedro cactus that people can you just, can you just a background maybe a parallel or your experience with san pedro that to that of, um, psilocybin mushrooms. When I tried san pedro cactus mixing it with vanilla ice cream.

[Audience Laughter]

TM: I don't know what ... means but it must have startled your stomach

[Audience Laughter]

Q: ...


---1:29 REVIEW IN PROGRESS ----

TM well I am, I don't really know that much about San Pedro, I've never gotten around to it, I know a person who swears by it, that they have an elaborate way of cooking it up in a pressure cooker. Mescaline, which, and and hallamin, anhallomine, n methy mescaline, all of these things are occurring in that plant. Uh, it's an amphetamine related thing it tends to be pretty rough. of, uh og the natural hallucinogens that really the big ones as I think of them, mescaline is the harshest. An operating dose is considered to be actually close to a gram, 700 milligrams. One way that pharmacologists judge the toxicity of a drug is by how much it takes to get you off, and the less it takes then the more benign the drug is thought to be, so on that scale mescaline doesn't do too well, but my experience with mescaline is with peyote, which I gather is somewhat similar, but. It's been interesting, it's hard to take enough to really reach the deep water without it really acting on your stomach. It's not the cleanest way to go. I think that, having looked at these things in south Americana and in many places, in my experience the mushrooms just is it. I mean, other things have other aspects to it and bring it in, but, um, the mushroom is an extraordinary organism, it's like its engineered for that purpose, and I've spoken about how it's almost strewn in the past of developing primitive man in Africa, because, uh, it was associated with the manure of cattle, and on the, in the ungulate herds of Africa, evolving on the veldt at the same time that the Human animal was evolving a complex, uh, pack signaling language and so forth.

This set the stage, it seems to me, it was the catalyst, I really believe that we are in a symbiotic relationship with these plants and that the mushroom, by virtue of being global in its distribution, is probably a major slice relationally of that kind. And in other in other words the peculiar turn that evolution took in our species, the reinforcing of self reflective consioucness and the reinforcing of linguistic signaling has to do with the present in the human diet in that early stage of these mushroom, uh it's known that the mushroom, that low amounts of psilocybin, sub-threshhold doses of psilocybin increase visual acuity. Well, it isn't hard to think of, then, that if evolutionary pressure is opperating on a hunting species, a pack hunting species, that visual acuity is going to be, uh, uh, uh, at a premium, and if, uh, small amounts of psilocybin the food chain increase visual acuity those animals will be selected and survive. Well, then their habit of using, as accepting the mushroom as a food makes them open for this linguistic synergy, this symbol forming capacity, then, and then, the, the deeper more ecstatic experiences with psilocybin which are then projected onto the mushroom onto the cattle become the basis for a kind of cattle goddes mushroom, uh, a cycle of a heirophany. The discovery of the tremendum. I mean almost as though in the scene in 2001 where the apes encounter the monolith, was precisely that except that the monolith was a mushroom, it was a superbly genetically engineer omnivorous, uh, uh, organism that could insert itse;f into the ecosystem of a planet and begin to coax an effect out of a mammel that it had a relationship to, and this effect coaxed out of the mammal is this relationship to this higher dimensional wave form which we call the spirit or mind, which is , apparently, sigh, you know that's what it's all about. Why this is happening is not clear,. I mean in the mushroom book I suggested that it was because there is some awareness of planetary finitude. That the mushroom actually thinks on so large a scale that it is using us, uh, to make machines for it to purpetuate it, uh, throughout, uh, the nearby galaxy. That it is aware of the finite nature of our start. We don't know, we don't plan, yet, on those kind of scales; we're an infant race. Very obstreporous and, uh, the mushroom said to me once: "if you don't have a plan you become part of somebody else's plan!" one of it's slightly more paranoid, [Terence breaks into laughter] but it is good, I think, to have a plan, and to have allies, and uh, the mushroom is very contemptuous of the notion of, of humans having human allies. It says, you know, for one human being to think it could gain enlightenment from another is like for one grain fo sand to think it could gain enlightenment from another. So, really believes in, uh, heirarchical levels and trickle down gnosis, which I'm not sure how I view that,. I believe all secrets should be told and that we should just lay our cards on the table, but maybe I don't have as many cards as they do, so we play by there rules.

On the Isle.

Audience Member: uh, uh, if you're a wonderful convincing speaker... ceremony what your saying. Um, it's absolutely true that there's this intelligence that wants to connect... it's extremely informative, and uh, your saying, um that one way we can do this is through psychedelic experiences, I agree with this, but uh I 'd like you to talk a little bit about the western traditions of the mystery, which involves ritual. And using ritual in order to maintain, uh, to uh uh, to maintain contact with the nature spirit, which, uh, I might add, is, uh, is a spirit which is bursting at the seams right now to connect...

TM: Yes, well, um. Mircea Eliade talked about the difference between sacral and profane time. And he said the way you leave history is you sacralize a space, and youi sacralize a space through ritual. You, you abolish profane constraints of space and time, the here and now, and you imagine that you are what he, what he called innilio tempora, in the time before, in the paradisical time before the fall. This goes back to what I said about the AMTYT, the imagining of these titanic God-like states of mind as a ground for being. Yes! I would never have throught, I mean I've been pushed to my position by my experience. I mean, I'm amazed at what I have to say based on what I've experienced, because I never thought it could be this way. You know, I came up a whole different way, I was a Marxist, and an Existentialist, and all of these things, and ti was, as you testified: it's the pure evidence of it. I mean, you can, uh, you can convince yourself intellectually that something is true, but it's only in the, uh, in the, uh, embrace of the tremendum that it just sweeps over you how true it is, and uh, as far as the difference between establishing these connections through psychedelics and through ritual, I think deep psychedelic tripping, uh, is something that you don't do very often, simply because each time it's so rich. It takes a long time to process, uh, it's much better to go deeper, seldom, than, uh, than to diddle with it in the other ways as people do. I mean it often seems to me it's not even so much a matter of, uh, of of spreading the good word, and turning it into a mass movement. It might be much more interesting if simply the people who were already in on the secret did it more conscientiously and did it more deeply, although, uh, I hasten to add that you shouldn't do too much. You should never do more than about 6 or 7 grams of mushrooms. I say that because I keep hearing stories about people who think going deeply means doing a lot, and they do amounts that stand my hair on end. I mean, in the past month traveling around I've heard stories ... and people are crazy, you know, they say I couldn't remember whether you said five grams or five ounces-

[Audience Laughter]

So to be safe I did an ounce and a half!

[Audience Laughter][Terence clears throat]

You know, I mean, it- it's important, to, uh hahaha, ha, it is important to get there, granted, but it's [Terence chortles] important to come back. [Terence laughs more]

Oh lord yes.

Audience Member: In your talk you, um, the transcendental object, you go into more about that.

TM: The way I imagine that history works is- well, first of all let me say how the way the people I disagree with think it works. [apparently the tape skips for a second] Then you have cooling, development of molec- atomic and molecular and organics and ultimately culturals, and systems, adn ultimately technological systems, and, uh, this will go on indefinitely down until the heat death of the Universe, and the development of life and the culture has nothing to do with the physical, astrophysical level of things; it's sort of ancillary and a mistake. My view is somewhat different. It's that, if we have to have a singularity in our cosmology, in other words, it's so hard to figure out how you get from nothing to something. No philosophical school has ever been able to do it without some kind of singularity. So if we are goin to have a singularity in our system, let us try to make it as logically palatable as possible. So how to do that? It's not logically palatable to me to believe that the Universe sprang from nothing in a single instant. It seems to me if you believe that you're set up to believe anything! Right, I mean isn't that it "Well if you'll believe that, what wouldn't you believe!?" So, how about this instead? That the Universe, uh, it's origins are a mystery, and cannot be determined, but as we look at its history, the history of it that is available to our inspection, what we see is increasing complexity, ending in ourselves and our civilization so far as we know. Well, then if you're going to have a singularity, I think that the singularity as a kind of phase transition. You know, Illia Pregosian talks about, uh, a chemical system will suddenly and spontaniously migrate to a higher state of order. Well that's sort of how I think of this thing. It is capable of migrating to a higher state of order. So, uh, If we're going to have a singularity, isn't it more likely that it will emerge out of a situation of vast complexity, than a situation of utter metaphysical nothingness? I think so. So I think that what the transcendental object is, is it is, uh, the cause of the Universe, if you will, except that this cause is at what we would conventionally refer to as the end. It's what everything flows towards. It isn't, uh, something which wound up that runs down. It's something diffuse, which is gathered in to something. And th-, and this gathering in takes the form not only of a progressive densification of a physical level, but of a progressive complexification at the organizational level. It also is a kind of a spiral; it has a temporal closure, so that each epoch, of uh, of closure happens more quickly than the ones which preceded it. What I mean by that is, it took the, you know, the universe of 20 billion years old, it took the first 5 billion years it, well, no. The first 10 billion years it was all about star formation, and nuclear put down of heavier elements out of lighter elements. And then you get molecules, which signify a higher level of organization which can only go on at a lower temperature, so as temperature leaves the universe more complex systems become possible, and ultimately polimers of great lengths become possible. So, this complexification is occurring and it is,uh, at each stage more rapid than the last. Now, the emergence of self reflection, of self reflection in our own species is part of this. It isn't a fluke, it isn't an accident, it, it is obedient to the same natural law which created these other systems. And, the emergance of our own curiously alienated and at odds with itself culture is also, uh, a part of this phenomenon. We ,eh, are initiating a kind of crisis with the planet. It is in the same way that a foetus will ebcome septic if it is carried too far beyond term. There is a crisis now in the Gaia-Human system. The two must be parted, and the transcendental object is this knitting together of the organic intent of the planet to somehow expell us from the planetary environment. In some way, which is very hard for us to foresee and anticipate, because it is infact the transcendental object. I mean by appointing a committee to look into this weare not going to find out what it is. It is the- it is the face fo the abyss, it is the transcendental object, it cannot entirely be known, it is the living embodiment of Goedels incompleteness theorem. You know, science has taught us there are no mysteries only unsolved problems. this is a mystery not an unsolved problem. Nevertheless, it is, the- the narrowing vector of our timeline, and as some of your probably know, my, in my opinion, uh, around 2012 AD we will cross into, cross through novel epochs of concrescence, and, the transcendental object will be manifest. It's a very curious thing, it's something which is coming toward us from the future, that we are creating out of our intillectual and technological anticipation of diety. Really, I mean at tiome s I have spoken of it as the flying saucer. It is the flying saucer,a nd ti does enter history at a certain moemnt, and it is going towards us, and as we go toward it we are becoming what we behold. In effect I am saying the entirity of human history is a kind of psychedelic apotheosis where we are involved in a heiroschomos, a kind of alchemical marriage, and what th- you know what the next 25 years are about is advancing to meet the bride, and the bride is the unimaginable and un-, uh, un- um, -anticipitable, uh, fulfillment of our hearts desire. You know, we are becoming what we behold. Our metaphysical hypothitization of deity is becoming a cultural program for our completion and that's why communication is so important, because what we are trying to do is articulate this vision of the oversoul of our species. We are going into a kind fo swarm-state, or, there is a, uh, pheramonal transformation of our cultural modality. Our pheramones are infomation systems, and now information systems, ideologies, are being released into the mass psyche that are, uh, set us up to undergo this cultural compression, uh, and concrescense that the experience that transcendental ibject is.

If you haven't read William Gibson you might give him a go. His anticipation of a cybernetic future is part of the anticipation of the transcendental object, and what Gibson is saying, Neuromancer and Count Zero, is that data storage in hyperspace will become conventionalized the way the grids of cities are conventionalized in three-dimensional space, so that when you jack into cyberspace, you will find, you know, you will see the Bank of America database like an enormous red neon oblisk glowing off to your left, and over the horizon the transworld Airline database. In other words, the dimension of culture which, for fifteen thousand years or so has been, uh, for purposes of comparison lets say as thin as a thick sheet of paper, what has culture been ... a few mud huts, some brick streets, a cathedral here and there more recently, and then more recently a lot of knitted together electrified cheap construction. Suddenly the dimension of culture is about to be, which is orthoganal to ordinary reality, is about to eb explanded a hundred, a thousand fold, into a complete mind space. The cyberspace that Gibson is talking about, the psychedelic space that shamans have always known about, is about to be, uh, uh activated as a cultural artifact in high tech, uh, high tech society. Where we will ebcome whatever we imagine, you know, you will move off into this electronically sustained realm of mind. At least that's how I imagine it. I imagine that passage through the transcendental object leads into the imagination and that the imagination is really our true home, and that all of this electronics and culture and art and grubs and magic and ritual is about the prodigal return to the imagination as a cultural norm, and, uh, and, uh, the transcendental object represents a narrow neck, the narrowest place, the place where the phase transition occurs. At least that's what I hope, that's what I feel the symbiosis with the hallucinogens is coaxing out of us. Because we cannot go to the stars in the ape mindset, you know, iwth ape politics, and, uh, it's jsut impossible, and very clearly we are on the brink of taking control of our own self image. This is what the long cultural march has been. This is the justification, if there is one, for sceince, is that it does give us a certain measure of control over sutff, and it's out of, it is the mirror of our minds that we will make out of stuff that we will eventually perform this magical evocation in front of and walk through into the time outside of history, the place before history.

Another Question. Somebody over here. Yes.

Audience Member: ... I just wanna say you really.... [applause] anyway, I something mexico to the little villiage fo tijuahaca and my companion said... while you're looking around you might find some federales or something. So I decided to grow the mushrooms and that just ... but I was always of the fantasy that going to this palce in mexico there was something magical... and I wanted to know if there was a more p... wouldn't that be in the dnegaative time space fram. So my question is, ... and, um,

TM: that's the question.

AM: yeah.

TM: well,. um my, one of the best people one of the very best poepl that I've found in the so called new age is Rupert, Rupert shelldrake, and he and I are tight. And we've spent a lot of time just pushing these ideas around, um, ultimately I think proabbly he's very much onto something. It's interesting that it's such a, considered such a radical idea because think about what it says. It says that things are as they are because they were as they were. One can hardly imagine a more conservative philosphy. In fact, the, the problem for this philosophy is to therefore explain how anything ever manages to be different. How any kind of novelty could emerge out of the situation where the past is so present that it configures everything. So, uh, Rupert's idea and my idea, which I discussed except by implication tonight, I have this notion which is embodied in the software of a wave of novelty, a way of quantifying the flux of the toa, and, uh, a wave of novelty would be necessary to, uh, for Shelldrake's idea to support, uh, the coming into being of new forms. Uh, I mentioned this evening in the main body of my talk the term compressionism. I've just sort of begun to think about this. I like it because I like impressionism, abstract realism, I like it because it's an art movement, not a science, but I would number the compressionists that come to mind to be Rupert Shelldrake, Ralph abraham, Frank Bar, and myself bringing up the rear, and , uh, we all four of us ahve a slice on it. Each different but each leading to the same set of conclusions: that there is a set of hidden variables which we all describe differently, but that these hidden variables are channeling the development of events, and what this signifies is a new way of thinking about time. And it's all very much in flux. Rupert is a true, a truely great scientist and gentleman. If the theory of morphic resonance can be overthrown it will be and he will lead the charge. Our efforts whenw e get together, much of our effort is experimental design, we try to think of experiments that will disprove the notion, because it is a notion that will assert very firmly certain strange things about reality should be measurable anad discernable, so, uh, morphic resonance, my novely wave, the dynamic attractors of Ralph Abraham and, the, uh, fractal hierachrys of Frank Bar are all embryonic efforts. There's this feeling in the air, a sense of an idea to be, uh, nailed down. And I'm convinced, you know, that in the next 10 or 15 years one of us or somebody we know, or somebody sitting at the table near by will. uh. work it out. It's really the great intillectual adventure of our time, and it carries us all along with it. When this thing is figured out, it's going to be understandable to all of us. It's going to end the era fo the professional abstraction. You know, for the new paradigm to work it's going to have to transform the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and, uh, that's the point that's been diminished, uh, by the proponents of some of the more narrow versions of wjat tje new paradigm is. The new paradigm will be as understandable explanation of the world. Understandable to whom? to you, to me, not an abstraction sanctioned by a professional elite and handed down by adam.

Audience Member: .... translated into numbers in order to demostrate the,.

TM: well that's the beauty and the wonder and the delight of Time Wave theorum. Absolutely! I mean this, this was produced to convince scientists. What this thing does is it draws graphs of the ingression of novelty into time. I advance novelty as a new primary quaity of the space time continuum, on a par with charge, spin, angular momentum, novelty. This is the realm of the hidden variables, and this program makes thousands of experimentably testable assertions. This is not smoke and mirrors stuff, you give it an end date, you give it a date of interest, and it draws a mathematically defined graph of its opinion as to where the flux of novelty and habituation, these are the two opposed quantities, novelty and habituation, where they fall vis a vis this event system. So every time you activate the program it fills thec- the monitor with a screen full fo precise predictions about, about known historical phenomena. s it seems to be that if there were a body of informed give or take ont he matter we could quickly settle on whether, you know, I smoke too many little brown cigarettes, or that this kind of thinking is in fact going to underlie and restructure science. It's alright! I mean, why should we assume that the basic qualities of the Universe have been defined as of 1965 by modern physics. After all modern physics doesn't explain,uh, uh, the unicorn or the flower, so there must be more work in the universal mix than we have perceived. Well I think I'll do one more question.


Audience Member: historical biographical..


TM: Yes, that's exactly what it is. It's, uh, a way of looking at the life of an individual or society and asking a quest- see, the way I think this it will be this is good because. It, the spirit, to eastern philosophy, is the Tao, and the Tao is the howness of the way things happen. Well, we are so accustomed to allowing these eastern forms of thought to remain largely formally undefined that we never ask obvious questions about the Tao for existance, for example. Uh, in the Tao Te Ching, uh, the opening words in the Wailly translation are: "The way this can be told of is not an unvarying way." ok it's a double negative it's not an unvarying way, it's a varying way. So anything which varies is modulated. That's a mathematical term that has precise meaning. So if the way that can be told of is not an unvarying way then it can be mathematically described as a set of integers in flux. The problem, then, becomes what integers? well that's a long story, but, uh, it's all in here. huh huh huh huh huh

And it's, uh, and I'm, you know, not mad enough to claim that this particular take, this particular set of integers is correct. I'm very impressed by it's, uh, successes, but I am convinced that a theory of this class will eventually explicate, uh, time. Time is the spirit, not the time of flat duration in the newtonian universe, or the very slightly curved time of einsteins universe, but time as lived, from moment to moment it flows like a river, it runs here quickly, there slow and deep. Here there are cataracts, here there are vast lakes form, and all sense of direction is momentarily lost. Time i- is, uh, the continuum upon which our entire experience of being is deployed, and yet up until very recently the only model we've had of it is this flat or silghtly curved surface. That didn't explain the viscissitudes and synchronicites and the mystery of our own lives. Now, if we take a fractal model of time, the kind of fractals that we see in the psychedelic experience and the kind of fractals that we see whenw e unleash computers in the realm of pure mathematics, thenw e begin to see the time of pure experience, where every day is like every other but different. Every year is like every other but different. We grow, but we cha- but we stay the same. We move forward at the same time that we move backwards. All of these kinds of feelings... about movement and time are handled very well int eh fractal., So the Tao, what the psychedelic experience has done for me, above and beyond the heart openeing and what it's done for me as a person, what it's done for me as a seeker after truth has, uh, given me, you know, this total description of reality and I think our senses and our minds and our hearts are always trying to give us a total math, a total mandala, it's always trying to emerge out of the chaos of, uh, out of perception, but it appears to me that it can happen to any depth, and if you still your mind with psychedelics and with disciplin and you look into the black rivers that flow in our hearts and in our minds eventually you see not only the truth of yourself, not only the truth of ourselves, but formal truths. The truth of mathematics, and then you have sort of made a kind of closure. So this is what,this is my personal meditation in Time WAve Zero. I urge you to take a look at it, because,uh, its the most original thing that I have done, the rest is the descriptive diaries of an explorer well footnoted which I share with you gladly, but this other thing was actually, um, the logos from on high. That was what my particular relationship to the spirit was based arund. the revelation of this particular idea, because I had no interest in the i ching still elss in mathematics and all of the disciplins which impinged on this notion, but somehow, you know, I was chosen virtually becauase I was standing around whent he descision was made. You know I really beleive that. And, uh, and these things only mean somkething as their communicated. Well you see we have great anxiety about the pas- about the future, and if there were in fact fractal maps of the future, then that anxiety would lead us- would leave us and would leave us free. And in one sense I think thats the transcendental objkect, it's the manifestation of the spirit. The spirit is with us throughout historical time and space, but it is, uh, concretized at histories end. Well that's all I have to say, we're five minutes over, I appreciate you're being here very very much. Thank you!

Audience applause.


DAY 2:

I want to mention this is a benefit for Botanical Dimensions and KPFK. Botanical Dimensions is the real world kind of real politick response to all the issues that Kat and I hammered out over the last 11 years. And what it boils down to is a plant rescue project built around a 20-acre botanical garden in Hawaii. What we're doing there is trying to bring in plants that are threatened in the warm tropics; either the extinction of the species is threatened, or the knowledge of its medicinal or herbal or shamanic use is in danger of being lost. There are a lot of fancy organizations, World Wildlife Fund, Earthwatch, Earth First!, that are saving the rain forest or at least fighting that battle, legally and by getting huge tracts of forests in the tropics made into reserves. But nobody really even cognizes or is focused on saving ethno-botanical lore, data that concerns the very subtle relationship between aboriginal people and botanical resources in their environment. So that's something we're doing.
A theme was touched on last night which is one of the centerpiece themes of aboriginal shamanism; the felt presence of some kind of alien intelligence. An intelligence that is somehow co-present with the human sense of self, for different people, in different ways, with varying degrees of intensity in different times and places. At the bedrock of shamanism is the notion that life is really finally a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but without resolution. Nevertheless as you close distance with this mystery there are a series of analogical metaphors that don't really suggest themselves but that are communicated to you by the other.
One of these analogical metaphors is the presence of an alien intellect, an organized other that is folklorically present in tradition as fairies, gnomes, elves, jinns, afreets, sprites, tree spirits -- that sort of thing -- and anecdotally present in rural cultures throughout the world as the poltergeist and the milk-souring fairy -- these things seem to reside in a curious area that is not epistemically clearly defined for the culture.
Among aficionados of these domains the question of, "is it real or not?" is thought to be mildly tasteless. You would intuitively sense if you were drinking in an Irish pub and people began to spin leprechaun stories, that the question "is it real?" is a real bring down. It isn't really like that because the question "is it real?" can ultimately be shown to be infantile in any situation. I mean is the Bank of America real? Immediately we realize that ordinary experience is simply assumption skating over the mystery.
But I choose to talk so much about the felt presence of the other because it was for me such an astonishing personal surprise. I was raised Roman-Catholic and indulged in the kind of theological fiddle-faddle that involves. And then grew out of that into atheism, into agnosticism; by the time I got to college I was reading Jean Paul Sartre and Husserl. My intellectual ontogeny had followed historical phylogeny and I had arrived in the 20th century. And then having thought I had absorbed the lessons of LSD, which seemed to me to be to reinforce and confirm the theories of Freud concerning the dynamics of the psyche: that it was about repressed memory, repressed desire, sexual neurosis, parental foul-ups and the imprinting of traumatic behavior experienced in infancy.
And then someone came to me one rainy February evening, in 1967, really a mad person, a kind of a social menace and intellectual criminal. A person who had said to me only months before, "we must live as if the apocalypse has already happened." Here he was on my doorstep, he wore little black suits that he buttoned up to the throat. He came in and he said "here's something that you might be interested in." And he brought out a sample of di-methyltryptamine that he had somehow come into contact with. And I said, "well what is it?" And he said, "well, it's short acting -- it's a flash." And I said, "how longdoes it last?" -- that was my first mistake. He said, "oh it doesn't last long." So I said, "OK, we'll do it." And we did it.
And I discovered, I had, I guess it's called a peak experience, or a core revelation, or being born again, or having your third eye opened, or something, which was a revelation of an alien dimension; a brightly lit, inhabited, non three-dimensional, self-contorting, sustained, organic, linguistically intending modality that couldn't be stopped or held back or denied. I sank to the floor -- I couldn't move. I had become a disystolic hallucination of tumbling forward into fractal geometric spaces made of light, and then I found myself in the sort of auric equivalent of the Pope's private chapel, and there were insect elf machines proffering strange little tablets with strange writing on them. And I was aghast, completely -- appalled -- because the transition had been a matter of seconds and my entire expectation of the nature of the world was being shredded in front of me. I've never gotten over it.
And it all went on, they were speaking in some kind of -- there were these self-transforming machine-elf creatures -- were speaking in some kind of colored language which condensed into rotating machines that were like Faberge eggs, but crafted out of luminescent super-conducting ceramics, and liquid crystal gels, and all this stuff was so weird, and so alien, and so "un-english-able" that it was a complete shock. I experienced the literal turning inside-out of the intellectual universe and I had come to this -- I thought -- fairly intellectually prepared: A kid, but nevertheless double-Scorpio, art history major, Hieronymus Bosch fan, Moby Dick, William Burroughs.
And as I came down -- this went on for two or three minutes, this situation of disincarnate dimensions orthogonal to reality engulfing me -- and then as I came out of it, and the room re-assembled itself, I said "I can't believe it. It's impossible. It's im-possible." That to call that a "drug" is ridiculous. It means that you just don't know, you don't have a word for it and so you putter around and you come upon this very sloppy concept of something which goes into your body and there's a change -- it's not like that, it's like being struck by noetic lightning.
The other thing about it, which astonished me, was there is no clue in this world -- in the carpets of Central Asia, in the myths of the Maya, in the visions of an Archembolo or a Fra Angelico or a Bosch -- there is not a hint, not a clue, not an atom of the presence of this thing. When you look at the religious hierophanies of the human species they don't have the same vibe, don't have the same charge. Religion is all about dissolving into unitary states of love and trans-linguistic oceanic unity and this sort of thing. This was not like that. This was more multiplistic than the universe that we share with each other. It was almost like the victory of neo-Platonic metaphysics -- everything had become made out of a fourth-dimensional tesseractual mosaic of energy.
I was quite knocked off my feet. And set myself the goal of understanding this. There was really no choice you see. I don't know how it hits other people. There are many things that can be said about introducing a chemical into your body. They've shown that certain people are 50,000 times more sensitive to the odor of certain compounds than other people. And part of the unique genetic heritage of each of us are our complement of synaptic receptors for psycho-active alkaloids. So that there may be something to the notion that the Celts tend to be poets, that certain peoples tend to be expressive in certain artistic modes, or certain senses seem to be accentuated for certain human sub-groups.
But whatever the explanation for how it hit me, I felt it like a call -- there was no turning back from trying to understand, because there is no place for it in our world, and yet it is overwhelmingly, existentially real. You see? And easily accessed. I'm not telling you that you have to go some place in India with poor sanitation and put yourself at somebody's feet for a dozen years or something like that. The enunciation of the presence of this dimension should inspire some kind of coming to terms with it. It's preposterous that we can entertain in our popular journalism the titillation of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and prop up all reductionist personalities, and trot them out to give the statistics on the distribution of G-type stars, and this sort of thing. Because the fact is, what blinds us to the presence of alien intelligence is linguistic and cultural bias operating on ourselves. The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world, you see.
We operate on a very narrow slice based on cultural conventions. So the important thing, if synergizing progress is the notion to be maximized (and I think it's the notion to be maximized), is to try and locate the blind spot in the culture -- the place where the culture isn't looking, because it dare not -- because if it were to look there, its previous values would dissolve, you see. For Western Civilization that place is the psychedelic experience as it emerges out of nature.
As human societies interact with the psychedelic experience in nature, they inevitably secrete the institution of shamanism. Like a pearl around a sand grain, a nexus point, a loci of inter-dimensional data-flow, which is really what it is. Under certain conditions, which have to do with molecules that have evolved in these species which have a weirdly quasi-symbiotic relationship to our species, you strike through the veil. Melville said, "if you would strike, strike through the mask." And that's what's done, you strike through the mask of the coordinates of apparent reality. And then, something is there which to me is a miracle.
It transcended any miracle I could ever ask for because it not only had the quality of a miracle as I imagined it, it had the quality of a miracle as I could not have imagined it. It was entirely charged with the energy of the other. It had the ambiguity of a pun: A kind of zany, impossible, improbable, hysterical revelation of the joke, the self-contradiction, the provisional nature of it all -- that it really is a Marx Brothers movie in some sense.
So I pursued it. First to Nepal, and involvement with pre-Buddhist shamanism in Tibet. The thing that puzzled me most, I guess because I was an art historian, was the absence of the theme in the artistic productions of human kind. I felt that maybe there was a trace of it in the artistic conceptions of the old pantheon of Tibetan shamanism. And that Central Asian Tibetan shamanism had actually created astronauts of inner space that had gotten good recon on this same area. The Dharmapalas -- the guardians of the Dharma -- are not Buddhist deities per se, they are autochonous Tibetan folk demons that protect the Dharma by virtue of the fact of having been overcome in magical battles by great Buddhist saints who came to Tibet. In fact, there are, or were before the Chinese occupation, monasteries in Tibet where the vow of fealty to the Dharma, on the part of the Dharmapala, had to be renewed by the monks every 24 hours or the thing would run amok and be on its own and bust up the countryside. (I'm just telling you what they told me.)
It seemed to me that the raw sense of the shamanically accessed demonic realm was there. I also saw traces in Hellenistic gnosticism, and alchemy. But such thin traces. So I went to Nepal, immersed myself in those studies, and decided ultimately that it was inaccessible -- I wasn't sure whether it was there or not. Then I placed myself in the context of nature by moving my sphere of operations to eastern Indonesia. To the climaxed, continental rain forests of the ancient continent of Sundaland. You see Indonesia was a continent until as recently as 120,000 years ago. And then with the melting of the glaciers and the subsidence of the land, it became a vast group of islands. It was my good fortune, or fate -- because it was prudent for me at that time in the late sixties to remain outside the United States -- to become the hero I had pretended to my friends that I was. Which I wasn't. I had an around-the-world air ticket and was entirely a preppie poseur. But suddenly return was not a possibility. So I became, and my apologies to Buddhists in the audience, a professional butterfly collector.
I pursued this blood sport for many months in these remote montane jungles of eastern Indonesia. And it was there that the missing link in the quest for the resolution of the meaning of DMT and spirit fell into place. Because I saw what most of us only see on National Geographic specials; the real fact of the rain forest; the real fact of organic nature. And how nature is communication. Not only are the species that comprise the biota linked by pheromones and acoustical signals and color signals and other various methods by which communication is seeping around.
In fact, nature ultimately resolves itself into a self-reflecting, syntactical metasystem, right down to the DNA. DNA working as it does, with nucleotide sequences that code -- that means arbitrarily assign association -- code for certain amino acids. It means that organic objects are essentially utterances in three dimensional space and express of some kind of universally distributed linguistic intent. This is what it means when it says, "In the beginning was the word." Nature is that word. This infinitely self-adumbrating, fractal, syntactical hallucination with an infinite number of facets for potential regarding and self-regarding.
And having said all of this, I might invoke here Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which as I'm sure many of you know was Kurt Godel's brilliant contribution to theoretical mathematics where he showed that the possible set of true formal statements generated by any formal system exceeded the possible set of true formal statements which the rules of that system allowed. He showed this for simple arithmetic. And what this means, friends, is that what was called truth up until the beginning of the twentieth century, is absolutely impossible. That's what Godel's Incompleteness Theorem secures. It shows that there is no ultimate closure in an effort to describe a formal system.
And so in a way, my take on nature, and culture, and man, is that human language is a meta-linguistic system, generated out of the necessary formal incompleteness of nature. Nature is a self-describing genetic language and yet out of it arises something which is not formally predicted by its constraints and rules. There's a symmetry break there, and a so-called emergent property comes into view. This emergent property is our unique ability to provisionally code sound to meaning so that we then can freely command and reconstruct the world. We imagine that we do this for our own purposes of communication. The analysis that I'm suggesting would seem to indicate that actually we do it because we are complicated enzyme systems that are moving linguistic charge around inside some kind of metasystem. A metasystem that is very important for the emergence of new order out of nature.
The fact that it is contrived, provisional, is very interesting. It doesn't arise out of the gene structure. Rather it is agreed upon by individuals who are living at the time that the linguistic structure, whatever it is, emerges into consciousness. Since individuals are replaced, the language is much more in flux than the genome. The genetic component of an organism is a physical structure stabilized by atomic bonds -- possibly stabilized by a phenomenon like room-temperature's superconductivity. In that the way nature works is to conserve the genes. Molecular machinery has evolved to do that. But there is no mechanism in nature with the same kind of binding force that conserves meaning. Meaning is some kind of freely-commanded, open-ended, self-evolving system. The rules are that there are no rules.
Meaning consequently addresses itself to a much larger potential modality of expression than the genes. The genes basically repeat themselves, over and over. Almost like Homeric poetry, where the idea is that it be memorized and repeated. And that's what sexuality is about: memorizing and repeating gene structures, handing on parts of the story. But the epigenetic domain is different, the creation of linguistic systems, where meaning can be freely commanded, allows very rapid evolution of cultural forms.
I suggested last night, and want to say more about it tonight, that this process is mediated by plants. It is synergized in human beings by plants, of all sorts. We are obsessed with drugs, and short-term spectacular effects, but think about the effect on a culture of the presence or absence of say, sugar; or the presence or absence of coffee. Human culture can essentially be seen to be a series of plant-established developmental creodes for a higher mammal. The fact that we are omnivorous lays us open for the formation of weird relationships to things in our food chain. Everybody is taught in school that the Renaissance, the close of the Middle Ages, the rise of urban culture all had to do with the search for spices. Bringing spices back to Europe. Why was it so important that a drive to simply broaden the palate of Europe is given credit for the re-defining of post-medieval civilization? Very strange.
Hofmann and Ruck and Wasson, showed that the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were the philosophical and experiential linchpin of the ancient world's cosmology -- the Hellenistic cosmology -- was a cult of ergotized beer. Every September at Eleusis, this Mystery was carried out, and everyone who was anyone participated in it. The rule was that you only got to do it once in your life so you had only one opportunity to understand it.
The point is clear: in human culture in all times and places, the way in which our cultural institutions have been molded by these so-called tertiary compounds in plants is very suggestive. It seems to me that the felt presence of the other, the alien intelligence felt as being from outer space, is actually co-present with us on this earth. And that the problem is not the finding of it, but the recognizing of it when it is seen. In the same way that in the present cultural crisis everyone is crying `answers, answers, we have to have answers,' the fact is we have the answers. The question is to face the answers.
The answer to self-empowerment lies in the psychedelic experience. The answer to dissolving the hierarchically-imposed set of mythical conventions that disempower us, lies in the psychedelic experience. Because what is really happening is a return to the primacy of feeling. And feeling is not something you convey to people the way you convey facts to them. Facts can be handed down every week through Time magazine, and the latest issue of Science News and Nature. But feelings will not lend themselves to that marketable, hierarchically-distributed system. Consequently feelings represent a backwash against that. Yet feeling is the modality in which we all operate. So as long as we are under the umbrella of the print-created, linear, post-medieval institutions that promote the myth of the public, the notion of the atomic individual, the notion that we are all basically alike then we are going to be unempowered.
The amazing thing to me about the psychedelic experience, is that it can be kept under wraps; that people don't insist; that somehow we're leaving it to experts to figure it out. But did you know that the experts are not allowed to work it out? That in this particular area, the entire human race has been relegated to an infantile status. It is not really professionally possible, to do work with these things.
Nevertheless, our cultural crisis is deepening. Deepening mainly because we have very poor connections among our fragmented and autonomous psychic structures -- within ourselves as individuals and within ourselves as a society. Our whole problem is that we can't communicate with each other, we can't express intention. Yet the psychedelics are sitting there waiting to unify us, to introduce us to the trans-linguistic intention. To carry us forward into a realm of appropriate cultural activity, which is to my mind, the realm beyond history. Beyond history lies effortless and appropriate cultural activity. And nature has proceeded us, as it always does, by laying out models that can be followed to realize this.
As an example, I'll point out that the 19th century had a titular animal. Its titular animal was the horse, idealized as the steam engine, the Iron Horse. Marx talked about the locomotive of history, and there was a whole focusing on the horse archetype. Which in the 20th century, gave way to the titulary animal, the raptor, the bird of prey, as exemplified by high-performance fighter aircraft, as the kind of ultimate union of man and machine in some kind of glorification of the completion of a certain set of cultural ideals.
In thinking about this and in thinking about how language is the cultural frontier of our species, I went to nature looking for models of how we might move beyond the bird of prey, which when you think about it, is the American symbol. It was also the symbol of the Third Reich. A lot of creepy scenes have actually been into birds of prey, when Alleric the Visigoth burned Eleusis, it was the crow that fluttered on his battle standard as the greasy smoke swept by. These dark birds have been ever with us.
In looking for a new titulary animal and drawing the conclusion of what it would mean, I was drawn to look, strangely enough, at cephalopods, octopi. Because I felt, first of all, they are extremely alien. The break between our line of development in the phylogenetic tree, and the mollusca, which is what a cephalopod is, is about 700 million years ago. Nevertheless, and many of you who are students of evolution know, that when evolutionists talk about parallel evolution, they always bring out the example of the optical system of the octopi. Because, isn't this astonishing? -- it's very much like the human eye, and yet it developed entirely independently. This shows how the same set of external factors impinging on a raw gene pool will inevitably sculpt the same organs or attain the same end, and so forth and so on.
Well, the optical capacity of octopi is one thing. What interested me was their linguistic organization. They are virtually entirely nervous system. First of all, they have eight arms in the case of the octopods, and ten arms in the case of the squid, the decapods. So coordinating all these organs of manipulation has given them a very capable nervous system as well as a highly evolved ocular system.
But what is really interesting about them is that they communicate with each other by changing the color and texture of their skin and their physical shape. You may know that octopi could change colors, but you may have thought it was camouflage or something very passive like that. It isn't that at all. They have a vast repertoire of traveling bars, dots, blushes, merging pastels, herringbone patterns, tweeds, mottled this-and-thats, can blush from apricot through teal into dove gray and on to olive -- do all of these things communicating to each other. That is what their large optical system is for. It is to be able to see each other.
The other thing which octopi can do -- besides having these chromatophores on the surface of their skin --they can change the texture of the skin surface: can make it rugose, papillaed, smooth, lobed, rubbery, runneled, so forth and so on. And then, of course, being shell-less molluscs, they can hide arms, and display certain parts of themselves and carry on a dance.
When you analyze what is going on here, what at first seems like merely fascinating facts from natural history, begins to take on a more profound aspect. Because it is an ontological transformation of language that is going on in front of you. Note that by being able to communicate visually, they have no need of a conventionalized culturally reinforced dictionary. Rather, they experience pure intent of each other without ambiguity because each octopus can see what is meant -- this is very important -- can see what is meant. And I think that this heralds, or could be made to herald, a transformation in our own definitions of language and communication.
What we need is to see what we mean. It's not without consequence or implication, that when we try to communicate the notion of clarity of speech, we always shift into visual metaphors: I see what you mean, he painted a picture, his description was very colorful. It means that when we intend to indicate a lack of ambiguity and communication, we shift to visual analogies. This can in fact be actualized. And in fact, this is what is happening in the psychedelic experience. There we discover, just under the surface of human biological organization, the next level in the organization of language: the ability to generate some kind of acoustical hologram that is manipulated by linguistic intent.
Now don't ask me how this happens, because nobody knows how it happens. At this point it's magic. Nevertheless, the fact is it does happen -- you can have this experience. It represents a synesthesia in the presence of ongoing communication. It is, in fact, telepathy. It is not what we thought telepathy would be, which I suppose if you're like me, you imagine telepathy would be hearing what other people think. It isn't that. It's seeing what other people mean. And them also seeing what they mean. So that once something has been communicated, both parties can walk around it and look at it, the way you study a Brancusi, or a Henry Moore in an art gallery.
By eliminating the ambiguity of the audio signal, and substituting the concreteness of the visual image, the membrane of separation, that allows the fiction of our individuality, can be temporarily overcome. And the temporary overcoming of the illusion of individuality is a much richer notion of ego-death than the kind of white-light, null-states that it has imagined to be. Because the overcoming of the illusion of individuality has political consequences. The political consequences are that one can love one's neighbor, because the commonalty of being is felt. Not reasoned toward, or propagandized into, or reinforced, but felt.
This is why there is a persistent notion, which accompanies these psychedelic compounds, of a new political order based on love. This was a hard thing to say in the panhandle in 1965, it's not easy to say in heavy-metal LA.. in 1987. But it seems to be the fact of the matter. That love, which poets have celebrated for eons as ineffable, may in fact have certain ineffable dimensions attached to it, but it may in fact be more affable than we had previously cared to imagine. And the invoking of the effability of love has to do with discovering the shared birthright, the atemporal dimension that is co-present with this reality, a dimension that is a vast reservoir of anchoring -- existential anchoring -- for each and all of us in our lives.
So my response to feeling the political pull of this, feeling the power to transform language, that resided in these things, was to go to the people who I thought would know most about it: the shamans for whom hallucinogenic shamanism has never been an issue; for whom the notion that you're supposed to do it on the 'natch, is a patent absurdity. If you're serious about doing it on the 'natch I suggest you eliminate all food. Because this notion of the pristine self somehow riding above the muck of the world, carrying on a spiritual evolution is absolute foolishness. We are made of the stuff of the world.
People who do not confront the presence of the hallucinogenic possibility, are turning their back on their birthright. In the same way that if you do not experience sex throughout your life you are turning your back on your birthright. After all we could argue that to allow another person to touch you, is to not do it on the 'natch, right? But, dear friends, we're slicing too close to the bone here to take that approach. It's much better, I think, to open to the world.
The world is communication. Nature is the great teacher. All human gurus are simply distillations of the wave of nature that is coming at you. So you can just short-circuit the whole human boil-down, and go straight to the executive suite by putting yourself under a tree in the wilderness. The Great Ones all have said this but they need to be taken more seriously on the subject of their own expendability. Me too.
Going to the Amazon with these kinds of notions, and looking at what had been achieved there, I came to have a vision then, of the future that could be. That we are hurling ourselves into a new stone age, where the fruits of the prodigal wandering, that I discussed in such detail last night, can be used to infuse new meaning into that paradise. That the imagination of man and woman is so incomparably rich, and exerts such an attraction on us as the builder-monkey, that we have to honor that. We cannot demonize that and preach a kind of naturalism that if actually put in place would cause the starvation of tens of millions of people.
We have passed the point where some kind of Luddite reform can save us. Only self-indulgent elites can preach voluntary simplicity, because a lot of people are experiencing involuntary simplicity. And, unless you're one of them it rings rather hollow to be told that Zen values are best.
Re-inserting ourselves into nature is inspiration for cultural design. That's what it is -- it's not flight from the design process but a re-invigoration of it. Some of you may be aware of the concept of nanotechnology in which everything is built at the molecular level. By studying the mechanisms of the cell, and the immune system, and DNA, we begin to have a picture of how molecules and atoms are the machine parts of a microcosmic world that if we were elf chemists we could make our way into and create anything that we could imagine. I can foresee a world where all machines will be made by DNA-like polymers that will code base materials into larger and larger aggregates.
The minaturization of our world is a great frontier. As culture becomes more enveloping, its physical manifestation should become less material. So the ultimate notion is of the world turned back to the form it held, let's say 35,000 years ago, in which people lived in an environment of entirely climaxed natural perfection. However behind their eyelids would lie a culturally and consensually validated data phase space that is culture, civilization. Turn each of us into a telepathic aquarium, that has a direct pipeline to the general ocean of mind and being. This is possible. In fact, its not only possible, it may be the only decent solution: to down-load ourselves into another dimension. (And I want to note in passing the collapse of Max Headroom. What a tragedy I think it is that his last show was tonight. This was a weird force for cultural transformation, but to be applauded. If anybody here tonight has anything to do with it, I wish them luck.)
But this sort of notion -- the Max Headroom people and the William Gibson people have a very high-tech take on this, because they are interested in accentuating this tight blue-jean, cyber-punk kind of notion. But in fact the worlds that they describe will have many many different social sub-groups and social eco-systems forming in them. What the future really means is choice to become who we are, to flower out, to find our own way.
McLuhan saw all this 20 years ago: he said that the rise of global electronic feudalism would create an atomistic fragmentation of culture. It may well be that within 50 years the largest organizational entity on the planet will be corporations with a few million loyal employees, and all larger social institutions will have disappeared because they were unable to command loyalty in a social environment where direct experience has become empowered. And this empowering of direct experience, this return to the feminine, this legitimizing of the presence of the vaster regions of the unconscious -- these are all aspects of this emerging paradigm of the spirit. Understanding and the imagination in the light of nature, which is what this two-night party has been called, is a definition of the spirit.
In other words, true understanding, poetic imagination, standing as a mirror before nature as object, will cause the hologrammatic presence of the spirit to magically appear. It will be then seen to be a kind of emergent quality of the situation that was previously masked, simply because the elements had not fallen into the correct arrangement. As we move forward through time over the next 25 years there will be many prophets of the transcendental object at the end of time, many takes.
The important thing is to recall Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, and to always recognize the provisional nature of the metaphysical goods that you're going to be sold. Nobody has the faintest notion of what's going on. It's important to keep that in mind. If you have that in mind, then the game proceeds much more cleanly.
What is ahead of us is true high adventure. The essence of it is its unknowability. Its promise is transformation. Its theater of occurrence is the here and now. We are not waiting for it to begin, it has already happened for us, and our job is to understand how that can be so.
Plato said time is the moving image of eternity. My notion of shamanism is, it is that state of mind which accrues to those who have seen the end. By cultivating this notion of closure with hyper-space, imaged as the archaic return to the world of the pre-cultural ambiance, we can have an anticipation of the transcendental object. It is still in Eden. It is we who have undergone the fall and the recurso. And now the laden prodigal son returns to beat at the doors of the manorial home, the birthright. And within lies the beginnings of true civilization.
We are the forerunners of a truly moral and ethical human society. The deepest aspirations, however badly mangled and mishandled by our traditions, nevertheless still have the potential for archetypal fruition within them. The torch that has been passed from generation to generation, ad infinitum back into the distant past, is alive. And by some strange quirk of the metaphysical machinery it's our great privilege to live through this symmetry break, this revelation of the next level of the open-ended mystery. I think that the real thrill lies in relating to our world with an open mind, a sense of caring, a sense of wonder, and a sense of real, grounded, intellectually firm hope. So that's all I want to say this evening. I think we'll break for about 15 minutes and then we'll have questions. Thank you very much.



Question and Response

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Now comes my favorite part of these things which is the period where there's interaction because I think this is really a group process. Every one of you to some degree has taken upon yourself the role of the Magellan-in-the-living-room, and probably every one in this room has at some time or another gazed upon things no other human eye has ever beheld. The psychedelic dimension is not yet a science. We're more like explorers comparing our crudely drawn maps, and hastily scrawled journal notes, trying together to get a picture of this new continent in the imagination. So, I'm yours. Sir -
Question: You have said in your book that the mushroom was genetically engineered for producing psilocybin by an alien intelligence. What do you think now about the possibility of us using psilocybin genes within other kinds of organisms like fungi or plants, or, I don't know about animals.
Response: Well, interesting question. The question was I've described the mushroom as genetically engineered by some other agency for the production of psilocybin, what do I think about the possibility of human beings being able to genetically manipulate organisms to produce psychedelic compounds? I think that the technology and theory has reached the stage where, if there's an enterprising graduate student within the sound of my voice, the way to go is to locate the gene for psilocybin in the mushroom genome, and to translate it via standard techniques to E. coli, to Escherishia coli. Then you would have an easily grown bacterium which would be a chemical factory for pouring our psilocybin. So if any of you are aspiring genetic pharmacologists, this would be a fine project.
I might elaborate on the answer for some of you who are not familiar with the premise. The reason I suggested that the mushroom might have been engineered and be in fact an artifact of an alien intelligence was number one, of course, the informational content of the trip, but number two, the fact that psilocybin is one of the few four-phosphoralated indoles known to occur in nature. Out of thousands and thousands of compounds and organisms, only a few four-phosphoralated compounds are known. This suggests that such compounds are artificial, or at least highly unusual.
Every week the science magazines are full of talk of strategies for locating and identifying extraterrestrial life. Well a very obvious practical and scientifically reasonable way to proceed would be to look at the DNA of various life-forms on earth, and see if there are any in which there is a wild statistical departure from the norm. Whenever you get an organism which is producing, or has genes that no other organism has, this is highly suggestive. Because species evolve incrementally out of each other. So you would expect that there would be a relative smoothness in the expression of chemical taxa. That one fungus would be rather like its taxonomic near relatives. One member of a genus would be chemically similar to another. In fact, of course, we do find subtle chemical variations, but the presence of a four-phosphoralated indole in a fungus like that is very suggestive.
There's an interesting book by Cyril Punampurama called Perspectives on the Problem of Extraterrestrial Communication. In it he outlines what he believes would be a general strategy for extraterrestrial contact that any kind of species would have to operate with if it were to seriously conduct a search through space. And the model posits a ship, which at a certain distance from its origin planet, must replicate itself. And then at a certain distance, replicate again. And then again, in order to keep the density of ships constant as the sphere of the area being explored expands. These ships could be as small as an animal cell. They don't have to be thought of as Star Trek-type ships.
But the point is this ship contains instructions that you must read and follow in order to call in. There are so many planets and star systems to be surveyed that the only way such a survey could be conducted is if there were a message in the ship-qua organism, such that in the gene swarm of an alien planet it would eventually be read by an organism on the planet that would act to do the things necessary to call the central switchboard. Then the folks who made the ship would say: `ah-ha, we have contact in sector alpha sub-N 362,' and they would concentrate all their attention there.
Q: Yes would you speak on the time-line a little?
R: Oh what a kind questioner, to lead me to my favorite subject. Well, it has to do with why (people do this for different reasons), why people take psychedelic plants and what lies behind it always. And what always lay behind it for me, from that very first DMT trip that I described to you at the beginning, was the notion, `My god, this stuff has historical significance. Nobody knows about this,' carrying with it the notion, `we are discovering it.'
If we could bring it back, somehow, it would change the world. Perhaps people are bringing it back, by designing buildings and creating fashions or fashioning mathematical descriptions of reality. I never had that aspiration. I just simply defined myself, more humbly than that, as a consumer of ideology, as an intellectual who would learn what has been said and done and proposed.
But after the DMT experience I realized that there is unclaimed stuff out in those dimensions. James Joyce says in Finnegan's Wake, "Up-nee-ent prospector you sprout all your worth and woof your wings." Well, the key word is prospector. A prospector is a rock hunter. I wanted to prospect for the alchemical stone, for the lapis philosoforum. And I conceived it as an idea: the timewave -- I think it would come differently for each of us -- for me it was an incredibly formal, aesthetically symmetrical, and therefore satisfying idea about what time is.
That the Tao is something which could be mathematically described as a flux of a quality in time. A quality that I named Novelty. And once I had enunciated it for myself I saw that it was the part of the world that we have no description for. Science gives us descriptions for what is possible. But we have no descriptions for what, out of the set of the possible, undergoes the actual formality of occurring. Why are certain things selected to come to be? And I saw then the notion of the Tao, which is generally presented as a kind of intuitive notion -- you're not supposed to demand too much hard-edged clarity. You say, `just flow with it man, flow with it.' Well when someone says flow to me, I think of equations which would describe flow. Flow as a dynamical system which therefore can be mathematically modeled.
What the timewave is, is a seeing that the very largest patterns which describe the whole birth, evolution and death of the universe, are repeated at successively shorter and shorter spans of time, down into the quantum-mechanically and micro-electronically cognizable realms of time. The realm of nano and pico seconds. I saw the I Ching, which as a kind of phenomenological description of time, produced by the oriental mind completely unencumbered by our particular set of cultural conventions. Certainly it has its own set of peculiar conventions -- but not ours -- that there is a pattern in nature, not in three dimensional space, but in time, a pattern in time on many levels that reproduces itself and can be known, can be formally described. And once known, can be seen to control the ebb and flow of connectedness. Or the forward and backward surge of novelty. I thought that this was a great insight -- since it was the only one I had, I could hardly sell it short. And what pleased me most about it was that a rap is only as good as the rapper. But here was a mathematically formal idea, that could stand on its own; be examined in the absence of the rapper; be examined by critics who were as hostile as they cared to be.
It's simply a tool. It's in a long line of tools that stretches back toward the first chipped flint, and stretches forward toward the soul made manifest as starship and alchemical transformation. But it was the tool that I came upon and what is always put against the psychedelic experience is they say, `well, big deal, what's ever come out of it?' So I was pleased that here was a concrete notion that came out of it. Richard -
Q: Along the line of this timewave, can you give us a reading of our current time in the not-too-distant future?
R: I would be only too happy to. The question is would I care to prophesy based on this timeline? Yes, one of the assumptions built into the theory is that time is a series of nested resonances. And that each time is composed of resonance with previous and future times on varying levels. The time we are living through, I call the Roman Twilight. Simply because we are living through a period that is in resonance with the time of the last Roman emperors. And I think that if you look at it carefully, you can begin to see the way this theory proposes to be analogical and yet formal at the same time.
What was happening in the decades immediately preceding the fall of Rome? A progressively weakened series of self-indulgent propagandists ruled the greatest empire on earth with a more and more shaky hand as they succumbed to gonorrhea, mercuric poisoning, various occult pursuits, millenarian obsessions and so forth. Meanwhile in the east, in Byzantium, a new civilization was unleashing itself, and if you think of those events, which unfolded over a few hundred years, as telescoped into a few years in our own era, you see that with the rise of Gorbachev and the continued mis-management of the American empire under the crypto-fascist series of rotating bimbos and buffoons that we have suffered through; that what is happening is an empire is being betrayed into eclipse by self-indulgence, stupidity and bad management, and its cultural adversary is in ascendancy.
Now Byzantium never conquered Rome -- it doesn't happen like that -- but what ended was the Roman world of indulgent, cohesive imperialism. And what it was replaced with was a rise in religious fundamentalism, a stricter and more puritan kind of morality, the rise of epidemic diseases, and a vast economic retrenchment which initiated what we call the Dark Ages.
Now, in the present situation of the 20th century these themes are being recapitulated at an extremely rapid rate. So their Dark Age is for us, a tough three or four years, fortunately. It's said history occurs first as tragedy, then as farce. We are the heirs of the vast tragedy of extended history who live through the curiously mediaized and dehumanized farce of the recapitulation of these same themes. Because the very notion that the last ten Roman emperors could be symbolized by someone like the present American chief executive cannot fail to bring a small smile to any open mind.
So what I see happening over the next twenty-four years really, is first this retrenchment which, hell, it may be upon us judging by the market's performance Thursday and Friday, I may not be doing prophesy at all, this may be recap at this point. But whether that is a technical move, or the actual beginning of the unraveling of the over-bought western capitalistic system, one can't say. But I will say that by mid-1989, by the time the next presidential ritual has been enacted, it will be clear I think, that we have entered into a whole new kind of temporal domain. A kind of temporal domain that will appear superficially to be fairly bleak. Because the situation will be highly chaotic, highly novel, and tending to oscillate wildly around a mean. So in other words there will be no clear trend visible. There will appear to be progressive surges, and then losing of ground, and then progressive surges, and losing of ground. And this will go on through until the mid-nineties.
Around 2000 the resonance pattern will have shifted, and we will be occupying a relationship to the late high Middle Ages, and the emergence of the new social forms created by the emergence of the mercantile class and the bourgeois. In other words private wealth, cities, end of cultural insularity, a re-starting of the economic machinery, and a kind of new flowering. But still under the shadow of these fundamentalist forces that will have come into ascendancy in the previous dark age.
Then in 2004 we come into that area which is in resonance with the period of the discovery of the new world. 1492 in other words. And the exploration of the New World and its subjugation over about a hundred and fifty years will be going on as we open the millennium.
What the discovery of the new world will mean, in terms of our reenactment of these great themes, is any body's guess. It could be the vindication of my style of rap: a nearby inhabited dimension filled with alien intelligence. Or it may be the vindication of a more orthodox sort of expectation of extraterrestrial contact. Or perhaps, ultimately, the launching of large telescopes into orbit which will confirm for us the existence of oxygen-rich water-heavy worlds around nearby stars. That alone would make an intellectual revolution that would leave our world unrecognizable to itself.
We have to recall that as recently as 500 years ago the continent that we are inhabiting was unknown, it was something talked of by wild-eyed dreamers. It was an impossibility, a psychedelic dimension. Everyone knew that when you sailed west far enough there be monsters and that was the end of it. It was, literally, the unconscious. Now we deal in the real estate of thatunconscious. And there is no reason why our children should not deal in the real estate of the psychedelic dimension that we are discovering and confirming over the next ten years or so. Let me carry this through to the end because the good part comes at the end.
After the turn of the century, the acceleration of the unfolding of these resonances becomes more and more intense and eventually we reach the super-compression of modern times. This is why I proposed to you last night, the term "compressionist" for this school of thought that myself, and Sheldrake, and Frank Barr, and Ralph Abraham represent. Because we all are talking about the dense nesting of concrescent systems. And ultimately, in my own point of view, the emergence of a transcendental object at the end of time. And the end of time is not far off. As Joyce says in The Wake -- it may not be as far off as you wish to be congealed. It is, I think within the lifetimes of all of us, that there will be an ontological transformation of the human mode. The transcendental object is emerging.
Once it has emerged there will be no big deal about it. In the same way that we look back at the emergence of language. And nobody gets excited about it, or only a few philosophers do. And yet the fact that we possess language is the thumbprint of God upon our species. It's an impossible break with previous animal organization. You can talk all you want about Coco the talking gorilla, this and that, but then you turn to a poem by Andrew Marvel you realize there is an ontological break here -- there is not an even progression.
So as we anticipate this thing, it could be anything. It could be the visible language that I indicated as a possibility earlier this evening. It could be emergence in an extraterrestrial mind. It could be the transcendental emergence of all and everything -- the Tao made flesh, the actual collapse of the state vector into some kind of mysterious completion. It's much more rational to place this kind of singularity at the end of a complex evolutionary process, like the life of the universe, than at the beginning which is the scientific approach. To just say everything sprang from nothing, for no reason, in a single instant, and please don't ask questions about that because our map begins one ten-trillionth of a pico second after that happened. We don't talk about that. Well isn't this somewhat begging the question, for an intellectual enterprise that purports to offer an explanation of how things came to be?
The transcendental object, suggests to me a negative casuistry -- a purpose in the universe that is focusing and drawing everything toward it. And in fact I've said, history is the shock-wave of eschatology. History, which lasts 10,000 years, is a microsecond of ultra-complex experience, where the penetration of the natural world by the transcendental object occurs, each exists co-temporaneous with the other for a historical or geological microsecond and then the two terms are merged and all opposites are dissolved and somehow the gift is claimed, the pearl is restored and the project is ended.
We are living through that moment. A 10,000 year rush, from chipping of stone flint, to walking through the violet doorway of a self-generated, hyper-dimensional vehicle that carries us to our true home. No wonder it leaves an explosive set of eddies in its wake. This is what happens when a culture prepares to depart for the stars. This is not business as usual, this is something else entirely. And it's the intellectual adventure and challenge of our time for each of us to understand this in terms relevant to ourselves and the people immediately around us.
So this is the inspiration for TimeWave Zero. This is what it maps. The odd thing is that when the time-map came through, it wasn't only a map of historical process, but there was the transcendental object mapped into it, and all of its sub-reflections could be seen. This is what Christ was about. This is what Buddha was about. This is what your most enlightened moment was about. You, each of you, and me. It is the hyper-dimensional, particulate reflection of God-head scattered back through the flatter plane of this lower-dimensional slice of experience. It's hard to say it any clearer than that...