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The Rites Of Spring

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Last Updated: 15/09/18

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April 1986

Rites of spring, Ojai Foundation, Ojai CA

32616

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Terence McKenna: Well, the parachute never looked more like a mushroom than it does right now. [Terence chuckles]

I couldn't really see you all in the firelight last night so this is like seeing you for the first time. Welcome, and, uh, I hope you feel free to interrupt what's going on at any time and ask questions, or if something needs clarification please, uh, don’t hesitate.

My hope for these kinds of retreats is that it will quickly become so interesting to everyone that the, uh, presentational form will transform itself into a dialogue among many people. It seems to me that’s when it happens best. And I don’t think people would be here if they didn’t have strong opinions and ideas about probably everything which is said. So, that’s the way the group mind is generated, by everyone opening up and, uh, expressing how they relate to these things that we’re going to discuss.


I guess the place to start is sort of with looking at the notion that, uh, the dawning paradigm of post-modern consciousness seems to be the growing awareness that we don’t know what is happening at all. That all of the models whose implications have been worked out over the past 500 years or so have come to a place where they are now recursive and they no longer can be pushed forward as models of explanation. In other words, they are completed, and ontological analysis of how they work now shows us the limitations of their application to reality. They just simply cannot -m- there is not more blood to be squeezed from the stone of science. There may be further discoveries, but further growth and understanding along those lines now seems unlikely, what with the complementarity principle, Bells theorem, the primacy of language with the formation of ontology. All these things show the relative power of science to account for reality where before it was assumed that science would ultimately give a good account of reality.

So, postmodern living is living in the light of the fact that that faith has dissolved away, and that we’re now living in some kind of intellectual free space, or fire-free zone where everything is up for grabs. And the, uh, the 20th century’s fascination with the archaic, with shamanism and, uh, breakdown of perception through modern art, exploration of the unconscious through psychoanalysis, mass political movements, all of these things relate to this fascination with the archaic which is an effort on the part of the culture to stabilize itself because we really have- having seen the limitations of science, we have discovered we are in a small rowboat in a dark ocean and we’re being swept we know not where. So all past tradition is searched: magical traditions, alchemical traditions, lost philosophical traditions, pre-literate tribal traditions, everything is frantically searched for a key.


And while there are consoling perceptions that arise out of this search through all this other extended human knowledge, there haven’t yet emerged certain answers about what is going on. This is why several people last night referred to how weird the time is, how hopeful we are with so little reason, uh, on the surface to be hopeful. And, uh, it’s because the gelling out of this historical problem is happening right now, and it’s not clear, uh, what it will become. Meetings like this are efforts to uh, build an understanding of it. It doesn’t appear that it’s going to filter down through the transformation of institutions of control. It appears more like it’s going to be some kind of proletarian, uh, upwelling of a shift of point of view.

Now, the shorthand way of saying what I just said is that we now know that we don’t know anything. And things like uh, the psychedelic experience and the use of psychedelic plants throws open doorways that science was able to successfully keep closed during its heyday because they were areas where the number of variables exceeded science's power of description and therefore they said “Well we’ll just keep driving straight ahead, and we’ll go up those rivers later.” But now that is all changed and the exploration of, uh, the existential dimension of not-knowingness which psychedelics makes possible is what is forming modern people, I think. I mean, people who will be seen to have lead lives that were relevant 50 years from now, or 100 years from now, people who had actually figured out the context of the world they were living in and tried to come to terms with it.


And, uh, this morning I think we want to talk about uh, plants and how they relate to the planet, but before we do that I want to paint a picture for you of a, of a mandala which then I will discuss later in other meetings. But my notion of, of what the post modern person's mandalic projection on to the world should be in terms of a map of understanding is a, uh, a quadrated circle in which psychedelics, and feminism, and cybernetics, and space travel are the four parts of the circle. And in the center of the circle, looking backwards in time, there is a category that I would call conservation. Which means conservation of the planet, conservation of traditional and historical knowledge, conservation of values, conservation in the sense of intelligence husbanding the planet.

And when the mandala is flipped over and you look through it into the future, conservation has been replaced by art. Art is the ultimate expression of this transformation of, uh, unorganized matter into ideas, which human beings carry on. And we carry it on in a technical mode of necessity, but in the artistic mode, out of a kind of upwelling of ecstatic self-expression about the universe. So conservation is the way we relate to the past and human history is seen as an object of collective artifice-making in the future culminating in the notion of, uh, of the flying-saucer.


To do this, we have to completely re-design our understanding of reality which in terms of practical experience will mean that reality itself will appear to be redesigned. And I touched on this for a moment last night when I mentioned plants and said how admiring I was of them because they subs- they exist on sunlight, air, and earth, and that this is what we have to learn to do in order to release spirit out of the ape matrix that we’re bound in. And strangely enough the way this is to be done apparently is by a redefining of the nature of the biological world in relationship to this other kingdom of being which we call plants. Plants represent some kind of entire other dimension of existence of which we view the topological manifestation of the form, but are completely occluded as to the network or energy and information that this represents.

And like the zoological kingdom which has uh, thousands of forms of expression and progressively more complex forms which culminate in self-reflecting primates the vegetable kingdom seems to have intelligent species and gradations of awareness in the world so that we are opening a dialogue at the end of history with this other form in the biosphere which we are just beginning to cognize as our own understanding about what the world is really about falls into focus. And certainly a hundred years ago no one would have thought that this was in the direct line of historical development of the high tech civilizations, that they would have to explore the mind of the vegetable plant goddess who was the only force contending with them for control of the planet. That’s what it’s come down to.

So, with that kind of idea in mind, the idea of "plant and planet", which is a phrase of Anthony Huxley’s which is wonderful. Uh, Kath maybe you would want to talk about this, this is a good...


Kat Mckenna: Um, yeah. I was thinking uh, last night and this morning about plants particularly [clears throat], um, because of our talks that I anticipated and back at the tent a little while ago I had a gnawing feeling that I was ignoring the animals too much and then I, um, arrived here and they all began to gnaw on me. I just got about 14 ant bites just sitting here, you see the scratching on it, so I feel grounded again. [Kat chuckles] Uh, I don’t know about having a dialogue with the end of history through plants [laughter], I don’t know about that, but um, I do think they are this obviously great and ever-present mystery which we ingest all day long, um, without thinking of those as plants, without thinking of them as sacred plants in the way we do the sacred ones. Their chemistry- their input is influencing us all the time. Whether we eat meat or not we eat plenty of plants, and we breathe from them, and we soothe our nerves by seeing them and being near them, and we go out into places like this and see kinds we’ve never seen before and marvel at how they can survive. They're real models of graceful survival, I think.


Um, the jungle where we spent a fair bit of time, the competition it seems is for light and for protein, I guess, for, for organic matter, the animals competing. Here it’s obviously for water. They have a kind of, uh, a deal. If you look around under the bushes you see wonderful wildflowers right now, the rains have just held on, the moisture has held on long enough that many things are going- and the short life cycle plants are going through their intense short life cycle and they often need to shade to do it. So you can see- we found something that we were sure was an African violet bush yesterday, you know? You can see wonderful things if you look carefully and don’t bother anybody else that might be under there.

Um, the question I’ve been asking of myself recently, and of a few other people- now I have many of you to ask it I hope I get some answers, is, um, how can a plant be a teacher?

Um, I asked this of someone the other day who was deeply involved in neuro-linguistic programming and he got way off on a tangent about “What does this question mean?” you know [laughter] just broke down every part and phrase and it was wonderful, we never got to anything like what he thought about the answer but [Kat chuckles] uh, it does assume all sorts of things. You have to have an image of what you think of as a plant, which although we have sort of a language-verified easy answer it doesn’t really touch on the reality and, uh, and then of course you have to think what you mean by 'teacher'.


Well, I know there’s at least one biologist, serious biologist in the group here so I’m hesitant to define a plant. I guess from my point of view as an observer, I, I’ve done botanical illustration and I really value the opportunity I had to learn to really look and them. And then when you think you've really looked, look closer. You can just keep on learning from them just visually, that way. But they are, uh, organisms like us that that draw in all the elements: fire in the form of sunlight, and water and air and earth and, uh, go through this transformation of energy into, uh, something else, in the same way that we do. Um, this moment right now is when they are doing that most energetically for the year. They are taking that moisture in their…you can look at each one- the leaf tips are new, and the tissue is soft, and the colors are bright as well as the blossoming and all that.

Um, they are also laying out the structure as I understand it for that growth to become more permanent, or woody, the perennials anyway, so during the year they will fill that out, and next year they will come from that place doing this envisioning the future, what they’ll have to deal with, how to move to make their interface with it, and then how to reproduce. And, uh, and their little messages are going into the, uh, the seeds coming from the pollination of other plants. So it’s always like with us, you choose a mate it's your choice for how you’d like the future to be, right? My genes, your genes, here it goes down the line.


Um, really all I have about this is questions. I hope you don’t mind if I just throw questions up, if anyone wants to say anything, please do. Uh, one thing I wonder is, we regard ourselves as such individuals, we don’t think of ourselves a species much. Terence talks about that a fair bit. But in our daily life we really identify ourselves as individuals, as, uh, some of us having more power, more clarity, more energy, more talent, whatever. We divide that way. With plants we tend to think of each plant on a species basis, you know. I wonder if, um, how much that’s true. plants that we’re familiar with like ayahuasca, banisteriopsis capii in the South American jungle, if you want to make this visionary drink you go and find uh, a member of that species but different members have different potencies and different takes on the same kind of message. This gets to the teacher part.


The, the, um- a friend of ours, Eduardo Luna, interviewed a number of shamans in the uh, jungle. They use this term “plant teacher” in Spanish as we’ve come to use it too and uh, he asked them, do you think that all plants have a, a plant teacher in them, or do you think that some do? And they were divided on this question, some people think that only the sacred plants do, right? Other shamans said “no all plants do, just some of the spirits; they call them ‘the mothers’, the mother of the plant, or the spirit or the teacher. Some are stronger.” So that implies that anytime we eat any plant we’re taking in that, that teacher. They um, they mix these plants with ayahuasca which already provides the vision. Then they take a new plant that they don’t know so well, or that they want some particular aspect of and they mix it in with that and take it and feel that they are radiating what is that plant, what is the personality, Whatever you want to call it, of that plant. And that they take on the qualities of that plant.

So um, I think the Indians in this area as I understand did that too with their plants, they wanted to take on the quality of the- peyote is a good one, you know. I mean, it's- it lasts a very long time in a very subtle way doing who knows what all that time when it’s not being eaten by something which is metabolizing the teacher in it. Is the teacher in it, when it’s just sitting there all that time? Is it experiencing the, the visions that come with, uh, that come into the, the animal organism that ingests it? I don’t know


I guess on the species and individual thing I wonder as a, an adjunct that, you know when you grow your own plants- anyone who gardens you know when you grow your own plants and vegetables how they taste different than the ones obviously at the store whom are probably grown, certainly with the same kind of physical care, but certainly not the same kind of attention.

TM: It’s the question for me, or what always astonishes me about it is where does the information come from? I mean, the peyote plant or the ayahuasca vine, or the mushroom growing there in the jungle or in the desert, how did it manage to tap in and become filled with a, a universe of alien Platonic beauty? Why is that there? All the rules of orthodox evolutionary theory conserve- only what is necessary is conserved. So it’s very hard to understand how- why a plant needs a uh, library card at the intergalactic library, uh, because it’s just sitting there in the desert of some planet alive and living. S-

KM: But each plant is different too, their library cards don’t take them to the same libraries even you know? Each one of these visionary plants provides something distinct. And sometimes you can see how it’s a cousin of that one and sometimes you can’t see that they are related at all.

Terence: Well isn’t it that mind is, somehow at the reflexive level, chemical? And that when you change the chemistry of the engine which is giving the pictures, the pictures change. There- sometimes it seems almost like a biological radio that you tune in to very strongly broadcasting stations, some of which are, uh, you know, alien high-tech insectoid science-fiction places, others are jungle worlds or things that you can’t even English.


KM: Giant human teachers, I met one who was 40 feet tall, you know, and he took me by the finger like a little child and let me through, what was that doing in the plant?

TM: Yeah what is it for?

Q: [???]

TM: Sure.

KM: Yes.

TM: When you take a longer slice, you realize that the individual existence is like an illusion,m= and that really the planet is involved in some kind of chemical process which is like a gene swarming, and it’s been going on for a billion years with more and more- and, and animals and plants, as species and as individuals, are just, uh, aggregates of genes of varying degrees of permanence. The individual is a very impermanent aggregate of genes. The species has a slightly longer duration. But what’s really happening is these information transferring molecules are just swarming on the surface of the planet, and controlling, as you mentioned, the weather, the chemistry of the soils, the rate of heat transfer. They’ve discovered now that plankton control weather in the oceans by controlling the surface reflectivity that- the question I think is the peculiar dualism in the world of information. Why does it seem that reality is not reality? Why are there co-present- actually two worlds are co-present in our experience. This is the taboo subject that we’re here to talk about: the weird fact that there are two worlds, one of which our culture doesn’t acknowledge but we all experience. That’s a very schizophrenic situation to be in. We all exist in both of these worlds, but our language, our culture, our institutions tell us “No there’s only one world.”


We have gotten into this lethal cul-de-sac where, by not acknowledging the second world we have, uh, have veered off on a tangent which is uh, threatens our extinction now, this obsession with control of world one, matter, energy, and the complete ignoring of the world of consciousness which stood in front of it and manipulated it, but just taking that as a given has created this fantastically imbalanced culture.

Q: I think that gets back to the plants as teachers because uh, since we do, as in your words, play with fire as human beings, perhaps the question you were asking as to the plants as being teachers, my feeling at the time was they are in communication with us as we are in communication with them, we’re all transparent beings, and you’re talking of gene swarming on the planet. There’s no, um, safe in which we lock our own human knowledge. It's, we’re transparent to all around us and if you get into intelligent plants which is what we were talking about earlier, perhaps, I mean if you follow that logically out, why not have teachers as chemicals? That's how they can manifest within this particular body and do the library cards as you said.

Q2: They realize that we are doers and shakers.

Q1: Well I think there is only one life on the planet though, and to say that we’re separate from the plants or from this or from the air is a fallacy.

TM: So that’s a great image, the growing transparency. That's, that’s a good idea for what the end of history is, it’s that everything becomes clearer, and clearer, and clearer, and as it becomes clearer boundaries disintegrate and everything is seen to be of the same, uh, of the same stuff.


KM: I think for much of the world, and still for instance in the Amazon and other cultures who are tuned into nature, it was very transparent for very, very long. Progress was the losing of that transparency and the you know forging ahead of certain parts of it and, and almost the point of either just eliminating to extinction or to the extinction memory, the, the lessons.

One day, I was just- I think it was during bookkeeping or something very much mundane, the little voice that interrupts every once in a while said that “A plant teacher is a teacher who has taken the form of a plant” and that raised all these questions for me you know, does that mean there are teachers floating around looking for places to land, right? And ways to interface with the other species? Or- and you know I’ve always thought of rocks, big rocks, many places in the world you can just sit on them and you can just hear them you know and feel them, really.

TM: I’m sure you're- you know Rupert Sheldrake’s theory, well its basically the idea of like kind resonate together, and, when- I've thought about this problem before, about LSD and where does it fit in to all of this. LSD is in, uh, is in the morning glories of central Mexico and the far Pacific. And what I think that makes a plant teacher complex is how many people it’s taken. And that a plant that has been used 100,00 years is filled with all of the contents of the minds of the people who took it over that time.


But I want to introduce the notion that life, the plants and the animals, are intrusions into 3-dimensional space of some kind of topological manifold of a higher order. You see, the way in which a chair differs from a giraffe is that if you, if you slice through the chair and then come back and examine it twelve hours later it will be the same, but the giraffe will have changed radically. This is because by cutting into the giraffe you will have intruded into the temporal dimension of its existence. It is more like a musical note than an object. It must be born, grow, mature, and die. I- it- and that process, growth maturity and death, is how 3-dimensional beings like ourselves describe the intrusion of these hyper-dimensional vortices into our world. That’s the mystery of life. Cannot be encompassed in 3 dimensions. Life is a hyper-dimensional object. All hyper-dimensional objects are organisms whether they be societies or animals. So the question of “What is the plant.”


animals. So the question of “What is the plant.” You know, when you ask yourself “What am I?” What you immediately concentrate on is what philosophers call your internal horizon of transcendence. You look into yourself to understand yourself. When we try to describe a plant, we inevitably give a topological mapping of it, how it appears to us: its uptake of minerals, it’s surface reflectivity, it’s weight. But the plant obviously experiences itself very differently. All life has an internal horizon of transcendence toward which it aims. Its, um, Whitehead called it “appetition,” its inclusion of sensory data out of which it maps being. But what the nature of this higher dimension is, that these vortices are intruding into our dimension from, is absolutely anybody’s guess. I mean you can call it a mathematical conundrum or a religious mystery, but it’s what’s making the world happen. It’s what- how the mystery of our being will eventually be shed one


mystery of our being will eventually be shed one more level of uh, veil to let us understand it.


You see an organism is a chemical system which does not run down. The, the second law of thermodynamics says that the whole universe tends towards the dissipation of structure and the release of energy in heat and then everything, all structure and all energy is dissipated. But, the, uh, life has achieved the miracle of, by being an open system and taking material into it, and extracting energy from it, and getting rid of waste, uh, life has been able to leave the main stream of thermodynamic degradation and establish itself at an equilibrium point off that graph and maintain itself there for, at least on this planet alone, four billion years. Now the average life of a star in this galaxy is on the order of 2.5 billion years, some last longer. But that means that biology is no epiphenomenon, no iridescence off the surface of matter as the 19th century physicalists wanted to describe it. It means that life is, uh, indicative of a physics of higher dimensions which intrudes into this otherwise thermodynamically degrading system which we call the physical universe.

And, uh, information, there seems to be an informational ghost of this universe which is somehow co-present at all points within the matrix, perhaps a-la Bell's Theorem, or something like that. And that’s what the psychedelic experience shows you. It shows you a hologramatic space of information where, by sitting still in your room and ascending the mind, you can cross the universe in an instant, you know, and return. And the question of “Is this real?” is in bad taste. [audience laughter] It violates the two ontological categories you see. I, I mean, uh, it just isn’t done.


But- you're right, and the plants seem to be the things which shake us out of these cultural conventions. We have this very bad habit of when we encounter a new experience we describe it, and as we describe it we erase its reality and replace it with a map. And forever after when we encounter that input, we access the map and overlay it over the things and say “Aha I know what this is” and so by the time a child is five years old they have completely entered into a symbolic construct which hides the real world from them. And, uh, fortunately, uh, these plant teachers seem to have the unique ability of showing you the relativity of language which for us is the relativity of being. And then you are freed because you have seen something incontrovertible, there’s no going back. You know, you are-that is the great first gateway on the path, to realize the relativity of language and the malleability of, of, of the world.

And for instance, coming out in to the desert is typical of people seeking visions, the first thing you have to do is leave the polis. Culture is this effort to hold back the mystery and replace it with a mythology which is then in the control of those who recite that mythology whether they be shamans or priests. This holding back of reality is this strange- is what Christian theologians call “The Fall”, our strange alienation from nature that causes us to crowd into cities and mint money, and uh, put a price on everything.


This is why it’s so important to go back to the Amazon and Eastern Indonesia, and these places and try and understand what spark it was that those people kept, you know, over the millennia while we became the prodigal son and wandered into matter and, uh, you know, horde on the cities on the plain. We have now come full circle and returned at the end of history with the dilemma that we have made such a mess of things that there’s nothing we can do now but lay…

Each stage is a greater distancing from the wellspring of being, and it’s brought us, you know, to the valley of dry bones, to the valley of the apocalypse. And, uh, now the fat is in the fire. Now we’ll find out what stuff man is made of as, uh, the chickens come home to roost. But, uh, well no, I- I’m very optimistic!

Q: The metaphors!

TM: Well is it my metaphors or my pessimism? Oh the horrible metaphors... Yes well the rhetorical hyperbole unbridled…

Q: Asking about the multiple worlds “It interests me greatly, do you think there's two worlds, or do you think there’s many, many worlds?”

TM: Yes well I think you’re right, but there are different orders of different worlds. I mean, I guess it was the physicist Wheeler who thought that every time there was a choice, the universe took both paths and had always done this, so that the number uh, and kinds of universes was, uh, you know, staggering.

Q: [unintelligible]

Right.

Q: [unintelligible]


Q: [unintelligible]

Right.

Q: [unintelligible]

I don't- I find that cumbersome [laughter], but there certainly seem to be a number of universes and there seems to be different kinds of universes, for instance, uh, you can tune from channel to channel, but some of them you can’t make heads nor tails out of, you know. It’s just too far away from your conceptual schema for you to be- so it’s sort of like watching, uh, ideological mandalas or something. You can’t say much about it afterwards, but it certainly was compelling while it was…[audience laughter] And, uh, well, I don't know, Robin. You've, you're such a skillful questioner, you've brought yourself to the doorway of my most recent mania. Maybe I should unburden myself briefly about it. [audience laughter]

One of the weird things about, about growth, or trying to make your ideas always become new is that you always assume you’re going to, uh, to, uh, know what the next step is, that even though you’re going to become more and more enlightened, there won’t be any surprises. In, and- uh, so, a few weeks ago I was meditating in my usual fashion and uh, I began to get this new idea which was so weird that I immediately shifted into “Aha this is, this is not the truth, this is not a transmission about the nature of reality. This is a plot for a science fiction novel that I, that I should write” and try to hold that as the defense. That was my shield against the onslaught of this thing.


And I’ve never been one for Atlantis, or Lemuria, or all these invisible pre-historic lands and places that people enjoy so much, but I was told a very funny thing which I will share with you. It’s, uh, a funny idea. Now let's see, how does it go. It has two versions, one of which speaks a scientific language, the other speaks a mythological language. Ok, so the scientific language goes like this: There’s something in the universe called a fractal soliton of improbability. This means it’s a unicate event, it only happens once in the lifetime of a universe. You can think of it as a wavelength with one wave. That’s why its called a soliton. And if, if one of the- and these things move not in ordinary 3-dimensional space but, but in some kind of much higher spatial manifold, and when they collide with a planet, or when one collides with a planet in a universe the time stream of that planet is divided and two copies of the entire planet spring into existence without either having any knowledge of it, it just is something which happens. So this voice was telling me that, uh, this had happened to the earth, and that this was the secret that we were all striving to understand, was that an event in the past had actually divided our time stream, and that a twin of this planet had come into being in another dimension.


Ok, so that’s the scientific explanation of it. So the mythological explanation was that the universe is Gnostic, that the creation of a demiurge, not the highest expression of divinity, but a kind of demon, a fallen creature, and that this demiurge was able to coax itself into being and actually incarnate into history as a human being. And that when this happened this was then the mythological expression of the fractal soliton of improbability. And when it happened the time stream split.

KM: The universe was the creation of the demiurge, and the demiurge impelled itself in in the form of an individual?

TM: Right.

KM: It waited a long time!

TM: When you're a demiurge, who can hurry! [laughter]

KM: Ok, go ahead.

TM: Ok so, so the time splitting event had to do with the career of Christ who was an extraordinary manifestation of energy in the historical time stream, not to be confused with a Buddha, or a Mohammed, or a Zoroaster, who were great saints. And, uh, it was something else. It was in some sense what it claimed to be, but in some sense. Ok? So now at the moment of, and you can choose either the immaculate conception or the resurrection depending on which side of the bed you got up on today. But at that moment the time stream split and this other place came into being without having any awareness that- and they were identical at that moment, these two worlds.


Now, Christ had no children, so- oh, what I forgot to say was that the event, the fractal soliton of improbability, has this quantum mechanical half-charge so that in one of the universes it happens, in the other universe it doesn’t happen. And so everything about these two worlds was the same, except that in one of them the immaculate conception had not taken place, or the resurrection had not taken place. Now because Christ had no children, the world in which he was absent, it was not a genetic line which was missing, it was an ideological line which never received expression. And consequently, as time passed, first decades and then centuries, the absence of this particular intellectual influence in the world changed the world radically in the following way: Greek science did not suffer the suppression that occurred with the conversion of Constantine. The academies were not closed. The hermetic knowledge was not repressed.

-Audio cuts off here and starts again at "Greek science did not suffer the suppression..."

Conversely, the Empire was stronger and was able to repel the barbarian invasions of the second to the fifth century, and, and mathematics, which had halted in our world at Diaphantis, proceeded through his disciple Hypatia to develop a calculus by AD 370 so that the millennium of Christian stasis that occurred in our world did not occur in that world. And as time passed and engineering advances occurred by around 850 they had ships which were able to cross the Atlantic ocean and they encountered the Mayan civilization reaching its fullest flower on- in Guatemala and on the Yucatan peninsula. And in fact in this vision I saw the Roman Emperor Cosmodorus the Fifth make a pilgrimage to Tikal in 920 to be present at the coronation of a king at the end of that Baktun 8.


Anyway, this Greco-Roman imperial culture immediately recognized the genius of the Mayans in mathematics and astronomy and, and Europe was transformed into am- an amalgamation, a Greco-Mayan civilization with, uh…[clears throat] [laughter] So let me see, and, and this civilization continued to develop. Now one of the influences around the year 950 was their extremely sophisticated psychopharmacopaeia and shamanism. And this mated with Neo-Platonism and Hermeticism, so that rather than science developing as it developed in our world, a kind of magical, psychopharmacolitic technology of thought and understanding was what was developed over the centuries. And then in later centuries, centuries before it happened our world, they contacted the orient and the Sung- the dynastic influence of the Sung poured itself into the creation of the global civilization such that by around 1200 AD they were able to land on the moon and create a cybernetic global civilization similar to the kind we have now. They continued evolving with all this psychotronic and shamanically derived, and now by this time you can imagine it was an unbelievably exotic and alien, uh, civilization compared to our own.

The fruits of their psychedelic and psychoanalytic investigations into higher space was the discovery of our world. [laughter] They found out what had happened. They figured it out by studying dreams and by making deep journeys into the psychedelic space they were able to discover our sleeping unconscious with its repository of the legacy of the Christian centuries under the reign of this demiurgic ideology. And they conceived of the notion of saving us.


And it, it has to do with this whole thing about the UFO’s, and influencing dreams, and astral traveling, and the other side, is actually the manifestation of this bizarre Greco-Mayan, postmodern, star-faring civilization trying to reach across the dimensions to save us from the momentum of our history by making us aware of, first of all, their existence, and also their technology which is evolving towards a point where, I think around the Mayan millennium, around 2012 the time island will be f- we will flow past the time island and the two time streams will be rejoined, and we will make peace with this civilization which is now 1,000 years more advanced than us with this totally different cultural history and this completely different take on reality. So this came to me in the space of about 15 seconds [audience laughter] and uh, more details have flowed in, I use it mostly as a meditational device because it’s so interesting ask to be told about how this other civilization developed.

Its amazing exoticism, you know, its Neo-Platonism, its Daoism, its Mayan influences melded into a completely different kind of civilization than the one that we inherited. I’ve always thought, you know, that the, that Christianity, without making any judgement about Christ himself, that Christianity is hands-down the single most reactionary force in all of human history, and where would we be had that 1,200 years not been given over to this peculiar meditation, you know? All the pieces were in place for the kind of civilization that I’ve outlined, it was just, uh coincidence. Kat does not endorse this idea, [laughs] or even encourage it...


KM: He only told it to me a couple of days ago in Apache Junction at a truck stop or something, and he didn’t tell me it’s the plot for a science fiction novel he said ‘this is the truth!’ and I said ‘let's get back to it being a good science fiction novel.’

Q: Well the thing is that it, it would on our level explain perhaps the questions you were asking earlier. Why the teaching plants?

TM: Ye- sure.

KM: Yeah.

Q: Another thing I was curious when you were talking, the physics nowadays you can have an electron on one side of the universe and split it into two and separate them on two sides of the universe and they are still in communication with each other so is that why, logically, you can bring the time island back together again?

TM: Yeah, this would be a quantum-mechanical super macro-physical Bell's Theorem event, a kind of, a kind of hyper dimensional vacuum fluctuation where the two worlds spring apart, sail along for a period then parity is conserved and they're rejoined.

Q: Well this is interesting. I’ve had dreams that are parallel, and its very interesting that you bring this up, I’ve not heard of it before,

TM: It's a-

Q: It, it- another thing I was curious is that this takes place, uh, this would be on a human experience level, uh, what you’re speaking of. Now the plant kingdom, would they remain in, uh, connection between the species?

KM: Interesting question.

Q: Uh...

TM: We're free to have it any way we like. [chuckles]

KM: So it- how has Christianity possibly affected the evolution of plant species in this time stream as opposed to the other. Have they gone on..


Q: How did our lack of say 100,000 or one million species in the last 200 years that the other planet has- how does that affect the parity between the two? Uh..

TM: You mean how does our destruction and contort... Well, the part of the myth which I didn’t tell you which I will now tell you [audience laughter] was, uh, that, uh, naturally, well, they were developing and exploring technical options many hundreds of years ago and they, uh, theoretic- they discovered the theoretics for nuclear fusion and fission but they never used it, until a few hundred years later one of their great theoreticians- this was after they had discovered our time stream -made the prediction that the physics of atomic explosions were such that they would cross the time stream, and so they performed an experiment by detonating an atomic device in what is our year 1907 and this was the Tungusca-

KM: ...yes sir, can anyone guess?

TM: ...the Tungusca, the Tungusca event. And then by monitoring the dreams of Siberian shaman which they had in clear focus, they saw aha, this explosion which we actually set off did occur in both time streams and at that point they became very interested in monitoring our, uh, time stream because they were picking up the dreams of a Swiss telegraph worker [audience chuckles] who seemed to be pushing toward an unimaginable conclusion. So now there is a certain amount of urgency because if we explode our atomic stockpiles it will wreck the place that they call “Home world”.

Q: [unintelligible]


Q: [unintelligible]

TM: Yes, yes. Not self-preservation because they now have star flight and encompass many systems, but preservation of Home World which on the other side is a vast botanical and ecological preserve from pole to pole, I mean it’s a sacred site of pilgrimage, it’s, uh-

KM: ...the earth

TM: ..the home of the species, it’s the Earth. And the notion that suddenly great parts of it will be blown apart by leakage from hyperspace of one of our atomic wars is impelling them now to attempt to open the doorway and rejoin the time streams, and we'll be allowed a few years inside the botanical park to acclimate and then most people will ship off for the stars, I imagine.

The British science fiction writer, Ian Watson, has a wonderful book called “Chekov’s Journey” in which he talks about the Tungusca event, and his theory is that it was a catastrophic failure of a Soviet time-travel experiment conducted shortly after the turn of the next century. [audience laughter]

KM: Tough one to prove, right? [chuckles]

TM: Obviously! Why didn't I think of that! [laughter] Well, I mean, I’m not sure, I’ve thought of that before, you know, it’s the claim of Christian theologians that Christ comes in the center of history, they speak this same language. Before Christ no souls were entering Heaven. He freed the valve and now it's possible to enter into heaven. Before his intercession that was impossible.

Q: [unintelligible from the audience]

TM: You're....

[audio splits here 56:20]

So I thought that the millenium had come, that forever after we would - BREAK

All trash... Muzare Sharif

[this seems to repeat?]


All trash... Muzare Sharif

[this seems to repeat?]

efore I had this idea, I had another which I’ll tell you (laughter) which was a completely different kind of idea and it’s the idea that there is an overmind, this doesn’t involve other dimensions.

There is an over-mind co-present on this planet and when technology, when the development of technology exceeds the development of ethics then this over-mind can work miracles. Because the over-mind is plugged into each of the individual minds that compose it, this miracle always has this unbelievably creepy quality of being exactly the thing which can convince you to change your mind.

In other words it like it reads you so perfectly that it’s able to present the one situation which you can not refuse, so in the case of Rome, you know Rome was a pigsty, Pasterna called it ‘a bargain basement that ran on two floors’ it ran on slavery and it ran on brutality and captive populations and outrageous garrisoning of military power in foreign lands.

People like Diophantus, this mathematician I mentioned and hero of Alexandria, these people were on the brink of the calculus and the steam engine. So the over-mind is seeing that and seeing their appalling ethical state sent their miraculous personage of Christ who in a world where information could not move faster than a horses gallop, this religion within 60 years was beating at the gates of Rome itself, it was like a fire you know just burned through the empire, and changed everything, and halted technical advance.

Everything stopped, now I created this idea in an effort to explain the UFOs because the new theory of UFOs or the new school of UFOs says “we’ve been wrong to ask what are they, that has not been fruitful, what we should be doing is asking what are they doing?”

What are they doing?


What are they doing?

And we can analyze what are they doing in the same way that we can analyze what anybody is doing through sociological polling of human populations we can find out what the flying saucers are doing.

So they polled human populations and what they discovered is that what the flying saucers are doing is that they are sowing disbelief in science.

They cause people to not believe in scientists, because scientists come off so lame when asked to explain flying saucers.

It’s like, the flying saucer is a confounding of science in the same way that the resurrection was the complete confounding of Greek stoicism, and democracy, and materialism in the Roman world. It’s conceivable that the flying saucer, the statistics are now something like 12 or 11 percent of the American population have seen a flying saucers 52 percent believe flying saucers are real.

And so forth. It is a faith which is percolating up from the lower levels, its people who live in trailer courts and read Fate magazine who are the believers in this thing.

What it may be is an intercession on the part of the over-mind, which it can do anything, it can do ANYTHING from our point of view.

In the most extreme version of this idea I said “What if enormous space-crafts were to fall into orbit around this planet?” and “What if television images of this craft were to be beamed into every home on the planet?”

Then a teaching revealed some completely mind boggling thing which you could have thought of it yourself but you never did, which is always how these things are.

Then suddenly, then after 30 days of melting the nuclear arsenals and causing all cancers to disappear and curing all infectious diseases and delivering this message the enormous spacecraft disappears, 30 days…


Then everybody says “My god, we have been abandoned, we have abandoned again into time.”

And you know…history would halt, everybody would do nothing but study the teachings of the saucer and try to figure out how we can get right with them, how we can figure out how to get them to come back. Dogmatism, theories of communication, priestcraft, the whole thing.

Though I am fascinated with the flying saucer, and what it says about the malleability of mind and matter, I think mature civilizations should not be haunted by Messiahs or Flying Saucers. That these things are like metaphysical spankings imposed from on high that are saying it’s a boot in the tail, wake up! Stop repressing.

K: Lets take your two ideas, because neither one of them is that old, what does the over-mind have to do with, or think of the double time stream?

Terence: Now that’s a question I never would have asked. You mean if that’s true? I sort of think of these as mutually exclusive. I think the demiurge is a negative expression of the over-mind. I think of the over-mind as the logos, you know, it’s the understanding and self-existence which permeates everything and the demiurge is the force of matter and time and cosmic destiny which is always trying to lock in the logos and condition it and make it subject to the rules of the physical universe of space and time. The logos is like something from like, this is all Gnostic theology by the way this is just straight from the book. The logos is trying to struggle through the labyrinth of the material universe to escape, to rejoin the real source of itself which is outside of matter. Matter is viewed as an entrapment.


If any of you have read the late works of Phillip K Dick, he was probing in these areas, he was a genius, his book Veilus is pure exegesis of internal, unravelment of what was going on.

His take on it was that he believed from AD 69 until 1948, no time had actually passed and that we were living in apostolic time, and that the crucifixion lay only 75 years in the past, and that the demiurge had inserted a false history, and the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, he believed, were actually the logos as printed letters and when the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were deciphered it was like this information creature would come alive and again be present on the earth.

Like the Logos in 1948 was beginning to infuse everything and that shortly it would dissolve the illusion of the intervening 1,860 years or whatever it was and then we would realize that the prophecy would be fulfilled and that the last days were upon us.

He didn’t get around to the anti-Christ, to his credit probably.

You have to distinguish between Christ the person, the teacher, and this thing called the Christos, which is the archetype of such power and force that immediately people of ill-intent could get lined up behind it and impose their will. Yeah sell love, and sell forgiveness, what a scam.

The Christos is the thing history is ruled by the archetypes which the people can generate, I mean most people are very ordinary, I mean your Mick Jaggers and your Henry Kissingers are very ordinary people but they are able to project an archetype and that is the thing which sets them apart.


And when that reaches the kind of super intense focus that you get in a Mohammed or a Christ, then you know history is just putty in the hands of the force, not the person, the person is usually martyred in some horrible way. But the archetype draws energy to itself, and we don’t understand how this process works.

If there ever is developed by benevolent or malevolent forces a science of social control, it will be a science of knowing how to project archetypes.

Different archetypes apparently are suitable to different times, I mean you can almost pause at an astrological theory of archetypes, but its something about how…what’s appropriate for the 1st century AD is not appropriate for the 15th.

When the archetype is appropriate, nothing can stop it.

The modern term for archetypes is paradigm.

We expect it not to be a person, not a messiah, but an idea which will save us all which will then give us certain affinities with Mystical Judaism where the Messiah was expected in the form of an idea, and this is sort of our faith. We are Messianic ideologues or something like that.

(brief commentary, inaudible)

Oh I agree with you I think dualisms have to be dissolved in the notion that there is one thing, you know that’s the Platonic faith. The problem is all these secondary and tertiary operational levels and you know we’re actually trying to operate in a universe of scarcity and a body which requires energy and all these things. This is really the central problem in Western thinking, I think.

The tension between dualism and unity and matter and spirit, and how do you do it?


The tension between dualism and unity and matter and spirit, and how do you do it?

I think we are spiritualizing matter, this is what technology is. The spiritualizing of matter is the highest expression of our technological output and that this will become more and more of what this is about, so that in the next century the difference between mind and brain and cell and machine will all have been subsumed under a new vocabulary.

Because we are hard wiring our minds and we are making the artifacts of our culture intelligent, and we are breaking down the barriers between ourselves and larger databases, and this kind of thing so that the old “I am an ego inside a skin” definition gives way to a much more malleable and plastic thing.

(Commentary) “In astrology, something I like is that the symbol for Pisces is a symbol with 2 lines and a line going through it, it’s the definition of relationship quality by opposition, it’s polarity, it’s right and wrong, good-bad, male-female, Russians-Americans.

The Aquarian one which is 2 lines of waves over each other is one of resonance, it’s one of dolphins jumping in the water together, it’s one of people coming together and realizing how I resonate with you and what I have to give you and what you have to give me, but you’ll have something to give me that other people can’t and so on, and we need to swim together.


That breaks down all the of the dualistic bonds, and I think we’re right at the crux right at the moment, the place between Pisces and Aquarius where we’re kind of 2 worlds again, flipping from one side of opposition, being torn from life and death and seeing, as the Christ I feel was that prototype, that template, of light and spirit and matter coming together and saying “I can dance in this, I can leave it, and I can come back into it, I have this power it’s my conscious compassionate love that is just so unbounded that it give me the opportunity to play in clay, if I so choose”

Much of what I say is Alfred North Whitehead, his philosophy and believe me if you’re looking around for a serious ontological foundation you don’t have to read Sanskrit, ANW will serve very admirably, science in the modern world, process and reality. He was and remains the great psychedelic philosopher of the 20th century and the heir of Burgson. You had another question?

Yeah I’m going to be 84 in the year 2012 and I’m wondering how to manage my life so I’ll be ready for the concrescence.

Well I don’t know, I think that the canyons of the creode down which we as individuals are moving, those walls are getting higher and higher too.

A lot of times when I had this intense contacts with the teaching entity I would have an anxiety about “What should I do? What is it for me to do?”

And it always said “Nothing, relax”

Your function is to just…you’ll be present where you’re necessary, and this isn’t a fatalism, this is a kind of recognition of the dynamics of time that the thing is trying to teach you see.


It’s trying to say that, if you understand how process works you will always understand where you are in any given process, and then you won’t have anxiety about not occupying some other point in that process, you know.

When I began having these ideas, the only way I could previously relate to the notion of the end of the world was that I had a head full of cartoons of bearded men in sandals carrying signs on street corners saying “Repent! Repent!” and here was I, former Marxist, former this former that espousing these unimaginable things.

It’s always good to do your homework, and I discovered there’s this wonderful book called Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Comb in which he details the history of Milinarianism, that’s what this phenomenon is, belief by a person or a group of people that the end of the world is about to occur.

It existed among the Jews in the Exilic period, it’s part of the phenomenon, or part of the social expectation that gave Christ his entre.

The early Patristic Christians lived in the imminent expectation of the end of the world, and then during the Medieval period the most utopian prophetistic Millenarian movement before Marxism was Floraism, or the people who followed the teachings of Wakiin of Flora who was a wandering monk who predicted the end of the world, I think for 1244 and he died in 1222, but his followed carried on and the Pope had to send out armies to quell uprisings as people wanted to distribute the wealth because they felt the end of the world was upon them and why should anybody go to work you know this sort of thing.

Similarly in the year 1,000 there was great expectation of Christ’s imminent return.


Similarly in the year 1,000 there was great expectation of Christ’s imminent return.

This is the thing which the human mind, at least in its Western expression seems to seek to do. Islam too has its apocalypses, 1967 isn’t bad, I thought it was happening, I thought we were months away from a new secular order for the ages.

My theory of history views these things not as evidence against such a thing occurring, but as evidence that it will occur.

That these uprisings, that these outbreaks of irrational expectations of the millennium are in fact temporal reflections, they are catching the light on the temporal prisons from the object at the end of history contains the apocalyptic scenario.

It’s very important to manage the apocalypse in the millennium.

It’s very important that people not confuse the cleansing flames of transcendence against the ability to use thermonuclear weapons against your ideological enemies.

It’s a very delicate matter because our mythologies and our fears run so deeply, but I think that its an awareness of this potential of the existence of this law of temporal compression.

And of course institutions don’t promote Millenarianism because institutions want people to invest their money at low interest and long term, and have the expectation that everything will carry on pretty much as it has.

An examination of the last 500 or 1,000 years of human history would lead anyone I think to the conclusion that everything is going to be swept away, and that everything that replaces it is going to be swept away, and we are just moving into an era of change that might as well be called apocalyptic and it must be made Millenarian, otherwise it will just end in some kind of Goterdamuron and the worst Bogey men will emerge and destroy it.


(Commentary) I know how the wave accelerates and comes towards this transition point, I never call it the end because then the beginning of a new series of many (muddled?) waves is there I guess I believe in flux so the whole process is one wave and at that moment we begin another process. At that point we discuss being the end of the universe as you did a little while ago and sometimes I feel like when everything is accelerated like it seems to have recently and when you’re close to a moment of transformation of some sort as it seems to be you see great strives forward being made and great slips backward being made all at the same time right. It seems possible that the transformation will be so fantastically physical as the end of the universe or turning inside out of the, whatever this is. But actually as we sweep through world wide peace of mind, what if that occurred?

That’s large enough to qualify, it seems to me for the change-over in the wave.

Terence: Yeah I think the hardest thing to know is the nature of what this ultimate compression is. What it means. Like one way I imagine it, and that’s why I love to quote Joyce about “Man becomes dirigible” I imagine it as “The day when your mind becomes your home” and all over the world people just realize that their mind is their home.

(Question) “But do you feel free to describe that as the end of history or the end of the universe?”

Not the end of the universe, the end of history because I think history is some kind of involvement with matter, it’s a wrestling with the angel of matter and the end of history is when you pin the angel of matter to the mat. Then you stand up and you say “I am the ademic human being made of light” and you leave the realm of matter and you return to some previously hidden dimension.


Whitehead called these things epochs, these long periods of time. He called transition from one to the other “a shift of epochs” well we’ve only been dong things like measuring the speed of light since 1910, all the so-called constants of our physics are based on miniscule periods of actually monitoring these things to see if they are constants.

So I can imagine it as a shift in the laws of the universe that somehow cause consciousness to perceive itself more as it must truly be. I am always trying to find physical models for these transcendental hallucinations, the one which fits this is a few years ago this Scandinavian astronomer called Hans Altden wrote a book called Worlds and Anti-worlds and in it he talked about what’s called a vacuum fluctuation.

A vacuum fluctuation is where suddenly out of nothingness there emerge a stream of particles and they are equally particles and anti-particles. And they sail along for a period of time and then they collide again and each particle is destroyed by its anti-particle.

What is called parity is conserved, meaning that when you add up all the charges positive and negative you get zero. So it’s ok that this matter came from nothing, and returned to nothing, it violates no laws as long as parity is conserved.

The interesting thing about this phenomenon called a vacuum fluctuation there seems in quantum mechanics no rule which would limit the size of such a phenomenon as this.


It’s conceivable that our entire universe is an enormous vacuum fluctuation and its just you know 10^72 particles that emerged from nothingness and are hurtling through space and in another parallel dimension the anti-dimension which is the twin of this universe is also hurtling through space and at some point in future time, completely unpredictable from the state given within each universe, the two will collide and parity will be conserved, and all particles and anti-particles will be conserved. However the interesting thing is that photons, which is what light is composed of, do not have anti-particles.

They are this one weird exception. So that when the universe collided with its anti-matter twin what would be left would be a universe made only of photons, and those photons would be in the configuration they were in in the moment when the cosmic collapse of the state vector occurred.

Well we have no idea what the physics of a photonic universe would be about, a limiting case or a good try would be that it is just nothing, no life, no self reflection, but why posit that?

There is such a persistence in the perennial philosophy of the notion that spiritual development is somehow related to light, and to the cultivation of inner light, and to the creation of light bodies, and to the stabilizing of light.

It’s possible to suggest that the world of the imagination is simply the world of internal light, that it’s a world where light is manipulated by thought in the way that in this world physical organism manipulates matter. You live in the radiant castles of the imagination after a shift of epochs in which the photonic mode predominated. That’s just one way of imagining it.


It’s one of the richest meditations there is, to try to imagine the millennium, again it’s this thing, what would you have if you could have anything? Sometimes I imagine it, Heronomous Bosche’s great trip to the garden of earthly delights where men and women of all races mingle among giant rends and strawberries and feed each other pomegranates under autumnal sun in an endless rolling park-like world of exotic vegetables and sexual excess hard stuff to (base?)

You can really take a readout on yourself by seeing how would you like things to be. I have sometimes my fantasy is “I would like to be alone on a star ship 10,000 light years from home with all the books in the universe and I would dress like captain Ahab and I would stride around the catwalks inside this echoing star ship and faithful robot slaves would bring me crumbling volumes of ancient lore which I would say…” no this is a little too Vincent Price.

If any of you are into science-fiction the science-fiction of Cordwainer Smith is really wonderful, and one of his stories The Starship is really George Washington’s estate Mount Vernon in New York. And it’s all exactly like Mount Vernon in Washington’s time except that in the library of the big plantation house there is one room from which the thing is controlled and its actually a starship in mid-flight.

(Question) Yes I had a question, you mentioned how the now is flooded with future perception and I have, its really part of the Tibetan practices, it’s always something which captures my imagination, how come it’s now, now?


The fact that these future perceptions are so tremendously tangible to us, especially while sitting in meditation, while taking a meal even or something, and how come it’s not yet today? And how come it’s not tomorrow? How come I am here now when I just have to flick my mind and I’m in yesterday, and equally easy in tomorrow. I wonder if you have anything to say on that?

Well I think that life precedes through time, it’s an effort by organism to map something one-dimension larger than itself, so it takes a whole life to do it, a life is an effort to map a something, and the now is the moving edge of the mapping process. You cannot map it instantly, or you would be it.

So what being in time is, is experiencing the incremental mapping of this higher order object, and that’s why hopefully a long life would give wisdom, because a person would begin to get the whole picture.

What did Plato say? The present is the moving image of eternity. That’s pure good Platonism.

You can think of the now as a kind of laser which is moving over a larger surface and illuminating it, you know scanning it. It’s scanning something and it takes it a while to scan it, and in the end all the data is in place and you say “Oh yes I see now what the object of cognition was” and our faith is, and there’s no reason to doubt it, that this is a great transcendent experience.

This is the peace that paseth all understanding as you sink into death.

It’s just that we like to think that the psychedelic experience gives us preview, no one escapes the final realization, it’s just that some people do postpone it to their last act,

But there’s no reason for that

Because it is the mystery, the culmination, it is the depalm and the wellspring.


Because it is the mystery, the culmination, it is the depalm and the wellspring.

(Commentary) I’d like to…I’m always interested in pursuing things from the Mayan days and I’d like to ask about how this theory of time relates to the individual, somewhat related to BJ’s question, there’s some sense I have that in their techniques and certainly you’ve experienced this, and other people have experienced this with the mushroom at high doses of traveling through time and actually seeing the future or seeing the past. I was wondering if you could say more about that, and some framework for understanding how that is possible.

Yes will I think psilocybin seems to be the great teacher of history and part of its teaching is…it views a person without a history as a person with amnesia, a person with a diminished capacity because your history gives you your power of convictions.

The way I use the wave, or the way I’ve been using it recently is I’ve been trying to study the time immediately ahead of us so we don’t misjudge what is going on, and you know it’s a mathematical process, there’s no indeterminacy about it, if we anchor the whole wave system on 2012 and what I see from that anchorage point is in the 67 year cycle from 1945 to 2012 we have reached that point which resonates with the larger 4,306 year cycle at that point which corresponds to the collapse of the Roman empire around 475 AD, in other words, we have been through a period of Imperialist expansionism which has lasted for a number of years, certainly since the beginning of the 80s, but I see a re-treanchment of that and a recidivus tendency, a tendency towards religious fundamentalism, rigid social structures and in short the sorts of things which could be seen as valid resonance patterns to the early Medieval phase of European civilization.


The period from AD 474, lets for shorthand call it 500 AD, the period from 500 AD to 1500 AD, in other words till the discovery of the new world by Columbus, that 1,000 year period is the resonance that we are going to experience from now to the late 90’s, from now until 1998 we will reach the beginning of the Renassaince and the discovery of the new world, but we are going to have to endure a period not entirely to our liking, we represent the pagan Helenistic spirit which has held full sway within the empire for the past 25 years. We may feel constricted now but I think that our ideas and our position in society has further constriction to undergo before it reflowers downstream a bit.

When I first realized that I felt very pessimistic, then I asked myself “What aspects of Medieval life could I groove? What aspects of that Medieval eschatology were solitary to my needs and wishes?” then I discovered it was an age of great mystical faith and illumination, it was an age of communities of like-minded peoples seeking transformation far from the turbulence of the collapse of the empire.

My theory leads me away from those people in the New Age who think we’re about to be catapulted into the corridors of power, I think that’s preposterous, and the evidence for it: Zero

I think better we should tend our gardens and form brotherhoods and sisterhoods of affinity and realize that the task of transformation is one of a lifetime, our lifetimes you know.

Every time someone like Dick Price or Tony Lilly moves from the wheel I always wonder “How did it feel to know it wasn’t finished?” To go with it undone?


I have no doubt that when the saucer comes that Tony or Dick will be in control, one of them. What is it Bob Dylan says in his song? “Ezra Pound and T.S Eliot fighting in the captains tower”?

But yes so I don’t know if that answered your question but I wanted to get it in because the real meat for most people for this idea about time is not the mathematics of it and the symmetry of it, that’s only pleasing to a certain mentality. But really what does it tell us about the years immediately ahead?

What it says is “consolidation, illumination, community, and self-discipline”

(Commentary) I can always say thanks a thousand times we don’t have to go through it for 1,000 years, and only for like 15 years, this acceleration seems to be very, very convenient. Imagine if we were born in 500 AD and we had to look forward to that

Yes well that’s why I say you know, imagine the people who lived in times when the temporal river was stagnant, or even when counter currents swept it backwards. This is the anguish of the ancestors, this is the sacred trust that must not be betrayed, the pagrons and the invasions, and the atrocities conducted across history can only be somehow redeemed if we, who are the living way front of this genetic experience do not fumble the ball. All our ancestors are watching to see how we will do.

Kat: It seems like you were asking on a more mechanical…how did this happen,

Commentator “Well yeah how can it be that the Mayans or we on psychedelics can travel through time and see these things”


Kat: My image for it that explains that phenomenon to me and I’ve had the same experience, past and future, is Terence just referring to the temporal river. It’s a river which flows two ways, from the past to the future and from the future to the past

And if you put yourself out in the middle of it, let go of control, let go of fear and maybe you want to choose your orientation, or maybe you don’t…

You can just find out where you float and sort of face the past or face the future and just float there. I mean this is not a physicists explanation of how this happens but it seems to work that way you know and we think perhaps far too much of the past creating the future and that we should think more, and perhaps other people have of how it’s flowing the other way.

And this is how some so-called primitive people have managed to conserve the very simple effective beauty of their lifestyle, and that REAL strong feeling that every moment is now…because they’re thinking of it simultaneously…

(commentator) I think about it and that also sets my mind off, you know that’s kind of like the river is flowing both ways, and if you take a step to the side somehow that you’ll catch the current from the future. That’s appealing, but I am always playing with these metaphors and maybe I’m literalizing too much. Is it possible to step out of that stream in some way and then looking above sort of choose where you are going to descend into and then another image that came to mind was…are there somehow holes in the fabric of time that you can shoot through, sort of like in 2001 the Stargate opening up and there’s this hole in between and where you emerge is not the other side of it but some place completely different


Terence: If you take the wave seriously and apply it on these short scales of time, you know you can find your way into unique configurations of the moment, it’s like astrology in that way. Often the content of a psychedelic experience can be later seen to be because of the situation of historical resonance that you weren’t perhaps even aware of at the time.

Kat: Or if there are parallel worlds, one or many, which ones happen to be adjacent in that moment as the cosmic weather comes, you know sometimes I’ve taken the mushroom just to say like a weather person would say “I just want to see what’s happening out there right now” not with a will, you know you can find that it’s about knitting in your rocking chair you can find that you are just in some landscape that you couldn’t have conceived of before.

Terence: The essence of Tao is the correct apperception of process. That’s what Taoism is, is to understand processes to be Taoist. I think that this is almost a formal rendering of the notion of Tao, almost an effort to create a mathematics, an algebra of the Tao.

And as long as it’s true to the notions of what Taosim conserves, which is flow, and determinacy, and indeterminacy, it serves. This is what understanding time is to understand process, but to understand it so well that it’s like a sense for you, it’s like seeing. This is the kind of seeing that is very important, to see into time.

It’s what history and culture have experimented with.

It’s what we now, by identifying that as what is going on, can accelerate much faster.

(Commentary) I was picking up a conversation earlier this morning, maybe you could talk more about The Other.


Oh, the other……well I’m not sure exactly what he meant by talking about the other, I mean the other is just a way of thinking about all of these things that we name “spirit, God, demon, void” it’s that there just necessarily is a place off our map, whenever you have a map it implies the part that is not on the map.

The other, the truly other, it lays outside the domain of language, its like the unspeakable, all you can do is point at it, you know.

The Gnostic idea of God was that it was totally other, that there was nothing in this universe that gave any clue whatsoever as to the nature of God. That that was its essence, to be completely other.

The other trickles through and reverberates in our lives in all kinds of dimensions, the first other that you meet is the world, and a later point in your development, your attachment to another human being can become a confrontation with the other. It’s just a way of shorthand, signifying, right?

The dimension that carries you beyond yourself into the things that you previously couldn’t expect or imagine.

Or Vitchkinstein’s Unspeakable or, you know, I’m always fond of quoting this poem by Trumble Stigny where he says “I lean over your meanings edge and feel the dizziness of the things you have not said” That’s the other, it’s the dizziness of the things unsaid, the things that lay beyond the edge of meaning.


(Commentary) Part of the question to do specifically in the mushroom experience in high doses, this sense of alien intelligence or other, I think that like you said I think that its some of our conceptions of God, many psychedelic experiences, at least with LSD or other light doses are that I am connected to that, I am part of that thing, but somehow the tryptamine said its this alien intelligence, I mean what do you make of that?

Well I don’t know what quite to make of that, LSD is self-reflective and integrative I think. These tryptamines seem to be informational, and largely unconcerned with the impact that the information they carry has on the perceiver.

I don’t know I think it just must have to do with the fact that the universe is not all smoothed out and filled in, and that this is really an area of personal exploration where you can penetrate into an area, a terra-incognito, a place where nobody knows exactly what is going on.

We’re not used to that experience. We expect to have maps of everything we look at and everywhere we go. And it is strange that in this one area we don’t, that apparently our taboo at looking at the unconscious or delving into the mind has made us content to just fence off this area.

Well then if you climb over the fence and start wandering around out there, you don’t know what you’re going to find because the culture has carefully engineered itself to go around all of this stuff.

Even I think shamanism is largely concerned with gaining power to protect yourself from the onslaught of the other.

I mean, you know they’re very concerned…to hold stuff back, they don’t really have this “Lets hurl ourselves into it” attitude that we have.


We found in the Amazon, we were looking for this one plant which had DMT in it, and the ayahuascera that we were working with, I kept leading the questioning back to the matter of this one plant, first he said that it was “comida del perro” food for dogs, which seemed like maybe a putdown of some sort.

Then he went back over it again and he said “Whoa it’s mallen bizarre, it’s too strange!” So this was a man who his whole life was about taking ayahuasca and triggering hallucination, but he felt to go into that plant it was too weird. You often have the feeling with those people that they involve themselves in the psychedelic effect like a dancer, almost as little as possible to get the job done.

Kat: Refers to the history of that particular man and his opinions on psychedelics including mushrooms, and do different things on different nights and he would try new plants and new combinations, he was pretty intrepid, he did have boundaries.

Terence: In 1983 or whenever it was that I was down there last we were dealing with a different group of shamans on the upper Apeyaku and it was to get this orally DMT thing made from tree resin, and we had pure chemical DMT as a trade item, or we weren’t sure why but just in case we needed it.

Then talking to the shaman that could make the verolla paste stuff we said this and he said “oh you have the essencia, you have the essence!” and we said “so what is that like?” You don’t take it orally, you don’t take it by mouth, you smoke it.

He said “Oh what happens?” So we described it a typical DMT trip to him and said “would you like to try it?” and he said “No thank you” (laughter)


So they’re not thrill crazy by any means

(Commentary) I read the Castenada books he goes into what he calls the old seers and the new seers, and the old seers, maybe you’re more aligned with them, but they were more willing to explore any territory, they made a division between the known and the unknown. It was the new seers that came up with the third category of the unknowable, in other words there’s this reality which is the known, then there’s the other realities you go to which are the unknown, which maybe the ayahuascero takes you to the unknown, but then there’s this other realm where they don’t go, they would probably call the unknowable because the impact it has on you to go there would be dangerous,

(2nd commentator) From the place of the unknown they could glimpse very briefly the unknowable, which is usually a pretty shattering experience.

Well that’s interesting, it makes me think of you know I mention Vitkenstein’s Unspeakable I think the unspeakable and the unspoken, and all these esoteric and initiatory religious numbers are trading in the unspoken, you know you come to them and they will whisper in your ear the previously unspoken teaching, they will give you an oral empowerment but beyond that lies the unspeakable which no teacher can orally impart, or impart any other way because it lays outside the bounds of transmissibility by its nature and to some degree I would think so, and that’s the thing which you validate, you can only validate it for itself, in itself for itself.

It is the private object of being, it is not something which I can tell you about or you can tell me about, it’s the private mystery that is ontologically private because it’s unspeakable.


Kat: I don’t think what we call the unspeakable is the same as the unknowable, I think that all of us who have pursued these dimensions have many experiences that it’s very hard to talk about, or that when you talk about them its very silly compared to what you experienced, right?

Its on of the challenges of having this kind of group discussion or these kinds of workshops, to try to talk about that. But there is, I think a big area that just doesn’t language, the ineffable is all I can think of……

Terence: Well you can sort of chip away at it, the whole progress of human development is maybe slowly eroding the unspeakable and turning it into the spoken.


(Commentary) That is the process of everything from the very beginning to the very end, we as human beings on the planet are just somewhere in the middle of this process of the unknowable becoming the known. Tying back to your whole thing with time yesterday, you say that the physicists are interested in the first second, or parts there or and what you’re interested in are the final or coming up moments as things speed up, what the physicists are looking at is basically the form, but you’re looking at it as the ideas which are coming into being more and more, time is more and more recognition so it’s really like spirit, or mind, or knowing, so its like the opposite end, and one is the latter coming into form in the beginning, and the former is the knowing of all of this just coming to a point. An ant, or whatever lower level of consciousness, or say a cell, or an amoeba, they have their thing, and there’s the unknowable which is what we are acting in. What about the blood cells inside our body can they know about our world of communication and symbols, such as we are on this unknowable is really a greater universe, a higher level of just known by a higher way of being, so it’s like each end, the matter here and the mind coming into it, this point comes shortly, this 2012 is significant in that it is possibly the opposite end of knowing becoming complete, like life becoming completely aware of all life in and of itself. But is that the end of everything?

It seems that its just a point, like a mid swing of the pendulum.

Yes well then some other process having to do with the career of spirit instead of matter is initiated.


Yes well then some other process having to do with the career of spirit instead of matter is initiated.

Yes well that’s the end of everything, it’s a complete end of one way of being, of us a species as a life development, it’s not just humans, it’s all life, if that life entity goes through a great metamorphosis another way of saying what happens to the rest of the universe is that the universe is a concept in our minds. Right well that’s the metaphysicality of it.

But to say what’s never been said, to do what’s never been done, to paint what’s never been painted, to dance what’s never been danced, this is somehow you are acting for everybody when you do that.

It’s an amazing thing to do what’s never been done, it means once you’ve done it, it’s been done!

Refers to something like a big fence that is becoming larger and more extensive and the great minds fence off a particular area where all of humanity can run around and you know it’s a whole process of…

It’s what aeronautical engineers call “stretching the envelope” when you fly a figher plane you have the predicted engineering performance characteristics, but once you validate that it can do that, then its up to the pilot to find out, to stretch the envelope, to find out what it can really do…how fast it can turn, how fast it can climb.

That’s what we as creative artists can do for the human enterprise.

The lacking ingredient is courage, I think.

Often I have the feeling that it’s no longer at least in my own life about seeking the answer, its about facing it.


It isn’t about “Is it yoga? Is it Taoism? Is it this is it that?” I think now I know, at least for me what it is, but that the answer is so appalling and requires such courage to execute it and carry it through that I don’t know what to do.

I have no doubt that we could all become the Taoist hermit on cold mountain, and be that person of whom people in the valley say “Oh him! We see him sometimes when it snows very deeply, because he comes further down for wood” He comes and goes in the mist and never talks to anybody, we could all become that person.

There are no barriers to ultimate spiritual attainment, but what about your mortgage? And your lover? And your devotion to French chocolate? And all of these things.

That’s tricky. That’s very, very tricky.

For instance like the matter of the flying saucer, I have no doubt that if you took 10 people selected from this group and trekked days east of Death Valley and stayed up all night and everybody took 8 dried grams of mushrooms and hoped and hollered and waited that something would happen that would be so appalling and so destructive to our preconceptions of what’s possible in this universe that you just come out of it pointing into the desert saying “mmMMM mmMMM MMMMM!!!”


I’m careful, I don’t doubt that appalling, appalling, appalling things can happen and reality can be completely pulled to pieces, I don’t know what that means but I really want to deal with that on my terms. That’s a kind of fear you know, it’s a kind of holding back. That’s why, I know people who seem to me superhumanly reckless, I mean they tell me the thing they do and I just shake my head, you know because of the power, of the vistas of the energies that they must have laid their hands on. It’s too much for me, I am a simple scholar and bookish collector type. I am like Brother John here.

We like our home and hearth. But that’s the challenge you see, that’s the weird things of psychedelics. It’s a path, but in a sense it’s the end of the path, and then what do you do? Now it’s up to you, it’s no more about the guru says “In 5 years you’ll make progress, or if you just keep eating this spiralina, or fiddling with your crystals” or something, but no, you’ve arrived, now what do you do with it?

Do you really want to be a wandering figure at the edge of civilization glimpses occasionally with your tattered clothes and your wild ravings…

Kat: Nick and I were talking this morning about envisioning something and how these plants help you to generate a vision of something real that you want to create or organize in the world and then they help you to have the discipline and dedication to carry it out.

In the real day-to-day telephone call, how do I get the money for it? Kind of way.

That I think is a real strength for it that all of us have, it’s one of the responsibilities of being granted the visions is to make the visions then as real as you can.


We do have our bodies here on earth for some time to come, we do have pleasure of course which we should all indulge in, but we also have responsibility to make it as much as like, even if it’s a small step, as much like as that fantastic thing we can see in our visions and I think that it gives you the object then it helps you move towards it, and we need to do that work and keep refreshing our vision if it starts to get weak or we start to give up on it. If we need to shift directions slightly.

(Commentary) Let me go back to astrology, with Saturn being on a ring around a vision and then Saturn stairway, envisioning the steps that it takes to get there, and how you can’t jump 40 steps up without losing part of the foundation, as an artist myself I’m finally getting to a place of patience that the slower it goes, the better it gets, and my statement goes “If I only had more time, I’d use less words to write”, I would start using things carefully, and allowing the process, for years I was just like “I gotta get this out!” but not anymore, I’m just taking the slow, patient steps to create a foundation strong enough to someday, even if its not in this lifetime to manifest that dream.

KM: If you use the quality of your daily life as your currency for how you’re proceeding towards something. If you know the quality of your daily life is good, deep, and satisfying and you have a goal, you’re probably on the right path.

But if you’re saying “God it’s just going to be hell for 3 years until I can get this project together” you maybe should think about it again.


I could reflect all this on a greater scale to the evolution of life itself, and that if life were to very quickly achieve the knowing pure spirituality, then what good is it? And that’s like (through humanism?) and through history and through all of our time, and even this coming moment 2012, that might just be this reflection of another even ultimate, and it most likely is, it’s just that reflection, and it’s really endlessly drawn out patient process is just taking its time as long as possible so that every aspect can work into place.

This quality of daily life thing is an interesting point, because I think it was yesterday or two days ago we meditated or thought “What would you do if you could do anything? How you imagine…or if the genie were to tell you you had not 3 wishes but thousands, and you begin to dabble in fulfillment and of course all the trivial and superficial things I mentioned, palaces and Ferraris and all this, but then things that you could move anywhere instantly, how would you choose to travel instantly if you could move anywhere instantly?

At La Chorrera, these possibilities were to real to us that we actually grappled with it sufficiently to see how it would develop. How it develops is that if you discover that you can do anything, the only values which have any meaning, if you can do anything and have anything, are aesthetic values. If you could travel anywhere instantly, how would you travel? You would walk…obviously. You know, because it’s so tasteful, it’s so completing, it’s such a complete reverence for space and time in your body and the correctness of the situation. Time and time at La Chorrera, someone would be doing something some way, and someone else would be saying “Well you’re omniscient, why don’t you just make it be done?” and the answer is that is crass to do that.


The way to do things, if you can do anything, is to do them right.

KM: Cooking is like that.

I guess, but that realization of the total richness and correctness of the moment is that’s the correct interpretation of the attainment of these cities. The things that would go on at La Chorrera, as an example of how the Tao works, I would walk out into the jungle and there would be butterflies circling.

I would hold out my hand and speak to the butterflies with my mind and invite them to come down and land on my hand and display themselves. And the butterflies would do this, they would come and land in my open hand and turn, and strut, and show me all facets of themselves, and this would go on for 2 or 3 minutes where I would experience gratitude, reverence, delight, and then this other emotion: the need to show somebody else what I could do.

Then I would walk back to the camp and smiling with a bizarre inward smile I would select one of my camp mates and ask them to walk out into the jungle with me. Then to their horror, I would stand underneath this tree and gesture, and ask for the butterflies to come down from the trees and land in my hand, and people would just turn away in a mixture of horror and embarrassment that anyone could be such a jackass first of all, and that anyone could be so mentally deranged as to operate like that. Of course the butterflies would have nothing to do with me, I would be left just sputtering and it happened many times. It was not only the butterflies, it was that as long as I had no ego I could work magic, but it was magic that was the necessary magic.


It absolutely had no use other than to make my life a more perfect work of art, as an example we had a pot in which we could de-vein (…?) every morning it was our magic pot, and the scrubbing out of this pot was a major pain in the neck and was consequently a rotating camp duty. So at the height of this it was my turn to scrub this pot and I went down to the little spring where the sand was, and I squatted down by the water and I picked up the sand and I rubbed it on to the pot to get ready to scrub it. Then I looked and the black stuff was just flaking off, it was like easy off or something, and I just took the pot holding it by it’s 2 little protrusions and immersed it in the spring like this and looked and all the black stuff was just flaking off and crudding off and I was just amazed. The magical scouring agent.

So then I went back to the camp and got my most severe critic and again, smiling with inward benign-ness I lead them down to the river and said “I’m going to teach you how to wash a pot”, the Zen master you see. So we squat across from each other by the spring and I pick up the sand I put it on and she says “So I’m supposed to know that sand can wash a pot?” I say no, look. And again it failed me. By then I was getting the message, and I stopped…and there was one other instance which was actually very puzzling because I saw another person go into it too. It had to do with this prophecy which my brother had made.


One of the motifs which circled in his mind space during this period was what he called ‘The good shit’ and this was, he had claimed, imagined that sometime in the past he had got a sample of Afghani hash that had had cow manure, very, very carefully worked into it and the hash had been infected with psilocybin mycelium and all of the cow manure had been converted into psilocybin, so he had this psilocybinated hash, and he had this notion that he would invent a musical instrument like an electric guitar, which when you played it, it would cause this stuff to come out of the air and reign down on great crowds of people.

So anyway there was this thing about the good shit, and one night he announced that the good shit would appear at a certain time. So then I went back to my hammock in this hut in the jungle and the woman who was with me came as well and we had no watches, but he had said that at 11 PM the good shit was going to get here. I was settling down to roll my evening joint, and it was this Colombian weed that we had brought in with us. As I lit the joint, this little thing fell out of the end of it on the floor burning, and I picked it up and I smelled it and it was unbelievable hashish, I mean hashish to die for. I put it in the pipe and I smoked it and I said to this woman, and I said “Smoke this” and she agreed that it was astonishing. I looked and opened this baggy with this stuff and started smoking it, it didn’t change its appearance, but the odor and everything was just the most finest hash I’ve ever smoked. I thought the millennium had come.


So I thought that the millenium had come, that forever after we would all trash. Yes. The end of the world is when all trash, as Muzare Sharif, uh [Terence laughs] ...when trash becomes hash. [more laughter]

But, but at the crack of dawn the next morning I went tearing down to my harshest critic and knelt beside her hammock and woke her up and said, you know “You’ve got to smoke this!” and of course, you know, garbage was back! [Terence laughs]

So, so I don’t know why I got off into this, I guess it was the 'life is art thing and this thing about what would you do if you could do anything.

K: Enhance that. The

myth, isn't it from New Guinea? Uh, about the good ship? Remember that one, where they generated.

TM: You mean the thing about the resin, where the resin bar grew longer?

I’m not sure how this relates to it, but I’ll tell it. In the study of Messianic movements, in fact you can read about this in Sylvia Thrupp’s book Millenial Dreams in Action where she talks about a number of millennial religious groups. There was a movement around 1910 in Java called the calloupan [?] movement and it was some guy was sitting on his porch on day in a hut off in the jungle, and he was playing his flute, and they collect Kopal in the forest there and sell to traders. And as he was playing his flute, he noticed that this bar of rolled-out Kopal multiplied to twice its size right in front of him. And not only did this happen, but the same moment it happened his mind was flooded with the sudden realization that the meaning of this event was that all human lives were now going to be twice as long as they had previously been before.


And he started, uh, he told people in his village and he had the proof because they had this bar of Kopal that was twice as long than anybody had ever rolled them in the village. So it spread from village to village and, uh, before long people from all over, uh, Java were vectoring in on this place, and, uh, eventually the army had to be sent to put up road blocks and turn people back, and uh, it all had to do with uh, this piece of resin which had doubled in length while this guy was playing his flute.

KM: And that is what you call a cognitive hallucination..

TM: A cognitive hallucination..

KM: Right, where an idea becomes so real to you that you see it, but then there's this funny border where maybe it becomes so real that other people see it, and maybe that's actually how we keep enlarging and complicating reality is by having consensual cognitive hallucinations of what's possible.

TM: That's right, that's right.

KM: Yeah.

TM: The ayahuasquero that Kat mentioned she liked so much and worked with in Peru, Don Fidel, he lived behin- he lived off this road we knew and a few miles down this trail, and we would go over there often and we would walk with him back and forth between his house and where we could catch these little Jitney busses into town.


And he said one afternoon as we were walking along the Amazon jungle, apropos of nothing he said “This is the path that Christ walked when he lived on Earth” and it became so. You saw that somehow this was not a logical statement, this was a statement about the transposition of time and dimensionality, and that he was living in the light of Christ, that he was living in the presence of the master through being enveloped in a cognitive hallucination, and uh, I think our entire culture is headed for being enveloped in a cognitive hallucination where our real wishes will be fulfilled and that’s why its so important to, uh, to find out what our real wishes are.

One of the most powerful forms of yoga, one of the highest forms of yoga is what is called Yanutatara-Yoga-tantra and it involves a series of visualizations and they say “Imagine your home as a sp- splendid palace, and imagine the common utensils of your everyday life as golden vessels, vessels of beaten gold encrusted with jewels. Imagine your raiment as being made of the finest silk, and imagine yourself as a God centered in the midst of all of this splendor. Well, this is like trying to induce what is called in Western psychotherapy “A delusion of grandeur.” A delusion of grandeur is when you are a hell of a lot happier other people think you should be, you know? [audience laughter] And uh, say “What do YOU have to be so happy about?!”