And it’s all about infusing the quality of life with greater purity. We were saying around the fire last night that the way to relate to the millennium is to make it happen as soon as possible in your life so that you become a spectator to it as a historical phenomenon. Well the way to make it happen in your life is to not transcend desire but to transmute it so that what you really want is what you actually have, you know.

KM: I um, that, the mushrooms particularly, that to will, to choose, to become an archetype that I of course both have to be able to identify as an archetype, but one that I can relate to or wish to be, and become, you know, as large, a hundred, a thousand times larger than we are, and as smooth, and as...everything is light, you can practice being in the Tao so deeply in those states, and that everything you do no matter how minuscule it is you’re doing most gracefully, and everything you say you’re saying most eloquently. And, you know, even um, I’ve used the mending-sock thing, because sometimes I think that’s what I’m doing, that level of work, but that I’m doing it perfectly, you know, and that’s, that's a great feeling.

If you indulge in the feeling of being a Goddess, or a God or Goddess, or one of whatever you identify with, you know, you get to choose whatever, then you get to carry it back. It's a really good way to carry it back into your daily life, and, and uh learn to practice it either in moments when you’re wobbly and you suddenly need to grow into the situation, or in moments of ecstasy, you know, and to be archetypes making love is pretty good.


TM: Well that’s the technique of tantric practice, imagining these Gods in union with their consorts in sexual union…

[Guitar Music & Singing Interlude ends 1:10:19]

TM: The people burning to speak should speak. [Terence chuckles]

But I think we're all dancing around it very well. I think you’re dancing around it really well, and so I think we know something, not a lot perhaps, but we do know something. If words are that important and do have that meaning, meanings, whether it's what we’re saying is true, or the sound of our voice that is true, something is true right here. Uh, I think we're beginning to say the unsayable. I just have that feeling. [Audience chuckles] [Terence chuckles]

TM: And what a feeling it is! Yes, well, we're f- feeling the dizziness of the things not said, we feel it, we’re dizzy from it, it’s here.

Its about trust and that leap of faith to the other side to what you can understand, to trust it, as you trust your lover, as you trust a friend, it doesn’t always work out, but trust is the only way. Uh, because otherwise there’s only fear, fear of ourselves, fear of others, fear of ideas. I think this community is part of that building trust among people who have different ideas.” [1:13:10]


Q2: learning and teaching [???] psychedelic experience....You can use a lot of verbiage to explain to people what that search is about, but in the end probably the best communication is…dispense the sacrament (inaudible) I just want to express my appreciation to those involved in the work, with great respect for the sacrament, I just am very deeply wishing the best, it’s something I missed for a long time since the days in the 60’s was the last time I was around people who knew about that work and approached it with the kind of reverence that I see here.

TM: The great thing about the psychedelics is that they speak for themselves, so they need no priest, no interpreter, uh, they can deliver their message all by themselves.

Q2: [??] seem to be so wonderful with words. Even the unspeakable [???] togeth in silence. -to say. For me it was always babbling. It's quite an event.

TM: Well it’s wonderful that you feel so comfortable with people that you don’t have to rattle on. Why don’t you lead us now, Kat, in a meditation.


KM: Hold hands. We’ve seen, uh, many eggs in the last two days and had the pleasure of holding them and swallowing them, and um, I’ve spoken about luminous eggs and feeling very “eggy” today, resurrection and all that stuff. Um, so I was thinking that our luminous eggs should meet each other in maybe a less verbal way. Ok close eyes, and find your center, the light. And let it swell out into your egg, your shape. And then you feel that light of yourself moving into your head and letting everything else out of it. You can breathe through the top of your head, and through your forehead and your eyes and let it become, let your head become like a cloud of light. When it gets strong, that floats up above your head so you have a sphere of light that you can feel and see just above the top of your head that seems to get more charged as you perceive it. And then it grows. The light is


it. And then it grows. The light is growing, the sphere is growing rounder and fuller and softer until it meets the lights of your neighbors. And we have a huge halo over us together. If you travel through it, in your light, you'll encounter everyone very softly. And we can charge that halo of light to be stronger and bigger than us. I feel like it, uh, becomes a sphere, a dome above and beneath us which meets the light of the spirit of this place, the spirit that lives here. It's partly in the earth and partly in the air, and very old and wise with a sense of humor. And so we're all inside our collective luminous egg which we could take anywhere actually, but perhaps for now we should just greet the spirit of this place and gradually breathe and draw the white light energy back into ourselves, into our circle and into our individual spaces. Above and through and beneath us. And when we go out and


and beneath us. And when we go out and sit out on the rocks alone we can keep doing this even though we're not in a circle.


TM: Thank you. Mhm.

Q: I don’t know how to phrase this best, um, you were suggesting that this kind of, um, visual language, somehow, um, our future lies there, I know Gueyes talks about the future of technology being light and sound in probably the same way you’re talking about it. Um, I guess my interest in formulating this question has to do with, um, things like the Mayan hieroglyphic language system or, um, also Egyptian hieroglyphs, basically that kind of um, visual language that maps Northwest coast Indian designs were there’s very particular kind of uh, design patterns. Another piece of this question is the interface between the past use of that and the future use of that somehow. That is seems that- I mean, my sense of these hieroglyphic languages used in the past, they would literally see these things that are being drawn, or these things would speak to them and provide information as you are talking about. Um, and that somehow as we evolved we lost that ability somehow, or buried it, or shunted it off to one side. And so my question has to do with some sense of the re-emergence, or the uh, in the Joyce sense here comes everybody, the democratization of, uh, of that ability in future cultures.


TM: Yes well I think so, I think that the way that these, uh, hieroglyphic languages especially Mayan and Egyptian differ from uh, alphabetic languages is that, uh, etymology remains on the surface in a hieroglyphic language so that, uh, thousands of meanings are immediately visibly present. And, and so it’s more like an ideogram rather than like a word with a dictionary meaning. You couldn't really- I doubt that a Mayan could conceive of a dictionary of Mayan glyphs because they're, they're, uh, they infinitely shade off one into another so that- and, and that kind of sensitivity to the depth of language and to the uh, presence of the past in the present, in a word, in what Joyce is trying to do in Finnigans Wake, you know. And that’s why if you read it carefully, you feel many historical layers of meaning in the same passage because he wrote it with almost a pictographic consciousness of the meaning of the words rather than a lineal and literary sense of it. So yes in that sense, it’s like that. How this will be achieved in the future in our culture I’m not sure.

The control of the macintosh through an internationally set of unders- internationally understood set of control glyphs is very weird and if any of you have worked with a macintosh you immediately see “Ah” this idea which seems very odd, could in fact, I could learn this very quickly and anyone could do it, kind of thing, may be presages a world of illiterate computer users who communicate with computer through symbols, because literacy has been lost. But it's it’s very interesting.


Q: [??] So the computer plays a role in the visual component. Like I heard you talk about actually when you asked your question “Will computers become intelligent?” I’ve heard you talk about it more, and that the technology of computers will become available to us as almost a biological extension from the-

TM: Yes that’s what I think will happen. I mean my vision of a perfect world is where, you know, the earth is restored to its prehistoric, edenic perfection but technology has not been eliminated, it’s merely been micro-miniaturized to the point where the computers which maintain the history of the race and the governance of the planet have all been secreted in a certain pebble which lies on a certain beach somewhere on the planet and we walk around in perfect harmony with nature and in perfect and complete touch with an imaginary holographic world that is our self-expression, as a city is our self-expression.

To then be simultaneously, you know, in the world of techne and in the world of nature, but with neither violating the other, and I think that’s reasonable. In fact, I think perhaps in a sense this is what so-called preliterate cultures in the Amazon have achieved. That’s how it looks to them from the inside. They have an extremely rich inner life. It isn’t maintained by vast computer networks and projected into holographic space and taped on to magnetic tape and all of that, but it’s still, in feeling, it’s the notion that the richest world is within and that you uh, promote a balance with the exterior world, but then the purpose of the leisure created when you have achieved balance is not then to accumulate things but to explore the interior horizon of transcendence through the recitation of myth, and ecstasis, and uh, and this sort of thing.


Q: Terence, in connection with Roberts question, in conjunction with it, could you further elaborate this idea of the material externalization of the soul and the internalization of the body as a definitive thing in evolution.

TM: Well, I think imagination is where we want to go, that this has become the arrow of our epigenetic development because everybody says “In the future, you’ll have everything you want!” Well if we believe this then we have to think seriously about “what everything you want” is.

I mean obviously you want plenty of food, plenty of clothes, plenty of money, plenty of friends, but then if you get all that and they say “Well you still- you haven’t even dented your credit account” and you say “Well I want to live in Versailles, surrounded by brilliant robots who- and I want great writers and artists to have lunch with me every day, and then the Hope diamond, and Rembrandts.” Eventually this becomes very silly and instead there is an ascent toward truly grandiose aspirations, you know. Truly boddisatvic calling. And I think that uh, this- the rich imagination is the real frontier, this is why the poets and the artists are so important.


This is why, I think, one of the aspects of the space thing that is never mentioned by the Al-Phi society or any of these engineering types who are so into it, is the interesting thing about outer space, we are not going to go through space to other worlds. That will be very incidental to going into space. Going into space will be going into space, that space itself is a medium with unique properties for a species such as ourselves, and one of those unique properties is the engineering, which on the surface of the planet always has to always be cognizant of stress, and bearing loads, and the limitation of materials, engineering is just going to become like ballet. And objects miles in extent can be created that are obedient only to the laws of the human imagination, and of course the funding available to create these things, in other words the constraints of nature are pretty much lifted.

Outer space is very much like what you see when you close your eyes in a dark room. It’s a vast unfilled void into which anything whatsoever can be projected. The hallucinations of the individual are, are the cultural artifacts of the species 500 years from now. I mean, all these visions and dreams that we have will been realized, I mean, in ways that we can not imagine, but realized nevertheless. This has been consistently what has been going on. The alchemical dreams of the 16th century are fully realized in the 20th century, you know. And of course it has facets that they never imagined.


But, uh, going into space and going into the imagination is the same thing, and in the same way that the new world presented a tremendously tight genetic filter to immigrants so that only the soldiers of fortune, the religious fanatics and exiles came to this place and that created a unique gene mix, space is going to be a much tighter genetic filter. I mean, most people who go are going to be very smart and very healthy, and uh, and uh, very quickly I think a space type will arise but I don’t think you can create a space-based civilization without recourse to psychedelic plants and the psychedelic experience, because it’s too much the same thing. You know, without- if you don’t integrate psychedelics into the leap to space and realize that what is happening is that more and more we perfect the uh, aspiration to vertical ascent.

In the myth of Icarus and Daedalus you get this, then in the brother Mongofie [??] and their gas-filled balloon, and then the Wright brothers, and then the Apollo project. All of these things are this aspiration to ascension. Apparently it is a biological drive, some people have suggested it is a nostalgia for the canopies of the rainforest that no longer exist, but whatever it is, it’s going to take us eventually outwards to the stars and inwards to the stars because, uh, you know the real question mark which hangs over all this is the nature of mind, and we do not know what mind is, and yet everything goes on upon the stage that is conditioned by and assumes mind as a given. And, uh, every society has assumed that it had the answers, that just fifteen years more of fine-tuning of the current ideology would do it. And no society has ever been right about that, so why should we be right?


We are hurtling toward an unimaginable future in the same way that our present would have been unimaginable to people 200, or 500 years ago. But it is uh, it is the imagination because it is consciousness that is growing and expanding and strengthening itself. And if we take the notion that these uh, psychedelic plants are consciousness expanding agents, this is what they were originally called, “consciousness expanding drugs,” if you take that seriously for a moment how can you not center it in your life? I mean obviously consciousness is what must be expanded as fast as possible at all costs in all times and places because it is a lack of consciousness that will, uh, be toxic to our species and the planet. Consciousness is the saving grace and so it has to be cultivated by any means, uh, available. Yeah.

Q: You were saying that this urge to ascend is related to this biological urge and that maybe something related to the rainforest.

TM: Well I think we are the trigger species...

Q: What I want to make is that, when we think of going to space we’re so human centered, yes us as humans can exist in space, but what I think is really important about going away from this planets surface is that it’s not just a human centered thing, it’s a totally biological thing and that we are just implements of it, we are the thinking conscious creative tool-makers that will be able to implement this getting off this “gravity trap”, this “gravity well” but it’s not just for humans it’s for all life, and we have to, it will be a complete synthesis of all biological life that will exist away from the planet.

TM: Yes if we go to space we will take everybody with us.

Q: Just like in a rainforest, it’s not just…..it’s everything.


Q: Just like in a rainforest, it’s not just…..it’s everything.

TM: That’s right we are the species that is deputized to use energy to do the thing for all life on the planet. That’s why I’m not pessimistic about history and I don’t see history as unnatural or somehow opposed to nature. What history is is a 10,000 year process by which the monkeys attain an understanding of physical processes to build the habitats in to which all life on the planet can then migrate. That’s what I was talking about this morning when I said “I think the planet senses the finite of its- the finiteness of its existence and that biology is a wild scheme for getting out to the stars for dispersal of uh, of life, and you’re right, we have great hubris and believe “we are doing this” and man will go to the stars. It’s more that man is the pecking beak of the cosmic egg- of the cosmic chick in the egg of life on earth, and the entire bird will emerge and fly but it was man with his atomic weapons and his radar and all this who, who can break the shell and then the whole of the biosphere will flow outward into space and escape the cycle of energy degradation that will eventually turn this solar system into a group of cold cinders rotating around a uh, a red giant or something.

TM: Yes, well we’re trying to compare our maps, everybody has seen different pieces of a geography whose total size we don’t know. So we don’t know, maybe none of our maps overlap, or maybe some do and some don’t. And maps which don’t overlap are not invalidated, it just means nobody has been there but you. I mean, I often have the feeling that I am seeing things that no one has ever seen before. Often.


Leon asked me to talk about time, Leon is off on alone time, so he’ll miss this. The thing that really interests me or draws me back to the psychedelic experience again and again is the notion that there’s something that you can learn that would somehow be, uh- have an impact on society at large, that when, that when you have the psychedelic experience, it’s like you’re a sailor on some kind of a vast ocean where you let down your net into the deeps and the hope is that you will snare an idea of some sort and of some size. And it may be, you know, that you come up with the equivalent of tuna, which is many small ideas, or- and perhaps you bring up your nets and see that they have just been shredded by something so large [audience laughter] that you scarcely care to imagine it.

But the, the hope is to land an idea of intermediate size that, uh, you can then fully, um, explore and understand. When you s- go into that ocean as a swimmer you see these things passing in review, uh, things of such beauty and intricacy and complexity that you are literally speechless, and even speechless in terms of an interior dialogue about what you’re seeing. You can't, uh, it just blows your mind and washes past you in such profusion that there seems to be- the notion of capturing it seems to be like a child emptying the ocean with a cup. But if you have a net, and I’m not sure what a net is exactly, but it’s a way of somehow capturing these psychedelic ideas and then bringing them back for examination.


And I think, um, part of it rests on a technique of, uh, cyclical recitation to yourself of what you have seen so that you carry a vision to a level of reflection in memory as you pull away from it, and then 10 minutes later you tell yourself again what has just happened, and then 20 minutes later again so that you get a series of telescoping images which are granted a compression of the original event, but nevertheless they bear the, uh, the uh, stamp of what the thing was.

So, the thing of this class that has happened to me is a very peculiar idea about time which was developed, uh, fairly suddenly as I would imagine ideas develop, uh, in me in the early and mid 70’s and then it was pretty much formulated in my head but it took the invention of small computers to make it possible to write software so that I could actually talk to other people about this idea. Well since we have no computers and not even a blackboard this will be a kind of feeling-toned uh, excursion into talking about this theory of time.

Its, um, it has an abstract foundation and a practical foundation. Its abstract foundation is the notion that, uh, time is different than we have come to conceive of it as the legacy of Western science. The legacy of Western science is that time is duration, that time is a dimension necessary for process, and it’s usually thought of as a flat plane against which some other fluctuating variable can be plotted. This is called, you know, “linear time."


Um, and Newton's physics took the same view of space. The Newtonian view of space was that it was essentially emptiness; it was something which you had to have if you wanted to put something somewhere, so it was a kind of an abstract, uh, plenum, but Einstein showed that space is actually some kind of a thing, it has properties of thing-dom, it is distorted in the presence of a large magnetic field and, uh, and so it beca- it rose out of the realm of abstraction and then was cognized as an objectifiable entity, a topological manifold that was real.

This is, I think, the same step that has to be taken for time. Time is not simply the dimension of duration required for the successive occurrence of occasions. It is rather some kind of conditioned topological manifold. We can think of it as, um, uh, a fluid medium flowing across a surface, a river in other words. In some places the river is very broad and shallow and meanders because the pitch of the incline over which it's moving is so slight that it can barely discern which way to move. You see this often in the Amazon. In other situations the incline increases and the speed of the flow increases, and the depth of the channel increases, and the sides o- distance between the banks decreases, so time runs slowly and it runs quickly. It has a kind of modulated speed.


Well, it’s been a, uh, a commonplace of Western cosmology since Darwin, although it’s never been elevated to the status of a law or even a principle that complex- steady complexification has occurred in the universe since its very beginning. That this is, uh, something that we see in the very first moments of physics and proceeding right up into our own day. In other words, in the era before physics, that period of time so short that it’s the period of time- it's less than the amount of time necessary for the photon to cross the radius of the nucleus of the atom, there was absolutely chaos and a complete absence of physics. And then what sprang into being was a physics of pure electrons, of pure energy. And it was not for many seconds that, uh, temperatures fell to a point such that other factors could come into play, such that free electrons could fall into atomic orbitals and, uh, and, and this sort of thing.


And at each successive level of cooling new forms of order became possible. At first everything was just this plasma of particles and energy, and then atomic systems sprang into being. And then at still lower temperatures these atomic systems were able to form molecular systems. The energy level in the general medium dropped below the level at which it would disrupt the molecular bond, so then molecules came into being. And then at that point there was the aggregation of stars and the cooking out of the heavier elements through the hy- the process of cooking hydrogen so that iron and carbon and these things then arose. And by this time the universe is much cooler than it was at the beginning, and then finally you get, uh, temperature regimes and environmental situations where very large colloidal molecular, uh, species can come into being, large polymerized molecules and, uh, and this sets the stage for DNA which once it emerges- and the, the thing to notice at each of these stages of complexification is that it requires a shorter time than the processes preceding it.

If the universe is, uh, let's uh, take the long view and say 20 billion years old, then the first 10 billion years not very much happened that was interesting in the realm of complexity. There was star formation and, uh, the percolation of heavy chemistry but not life and- or it's doubtful that life occurred in the early universe. So what we see then is the emergence of more and more complex animal forms at a greater and greater speed. And then finally the emergence of self-reflection in the primates, and then epigenetic methods of encoding information in other words writing, and storytelling, and language.


And uh, at each point what is happening is there’s a progressive time-binding of energy and a progressive intensification and speed-up of the complexification of certain parts of the universe. Right now the most complex part of the universe that we know is the human brain-mind situated in its network of computers and cultural conventions and social obligations and expectations and hopes and fears and historical aspirations, et cetera. This is the realm of the densely-packed that the Buddhists are talking about.

So it seems to me that this should be seen as the operation of a general law and we are not outside of this. We are in fact the cutting edge of it. Somehow of all the animal species on the earth the human beings are carriers of this temporal, speeding-up process which is now engulfing, uh, the entire planet. And, uh, so that’s the general law, or the general perception upon which this idea I elaborated was based, the notion that complexification is being conserved through time and being built up as, uh, some quality that the universe is very interested in maintaining.

And then I looked at the I-Ching which I hope, uh, is familiar to most of you. I’m sure it probably is. It’s a very ancient Chinese oracle system of- that uses what are called hexagrams which are 6-leveled ideograms of broken or unbroken lines, and the possible subset of these things is 64 which is an interesting number because it’s the number which DNA operates on because it uses 64 codons, and in fact I came to see that as no coincidence, that actually life was organized around this number and the I-Ching as well because both were subject to, uh, a set of rules which was, uh, surfacing in the phenomenon of biological organization and the organization of a Chinese oracular theory for understanding past and future time.


But- and I looked at what is called “The Sequence” which is the way in which you move from one hexagram to the next, and I sought order there and found order that I think had been lost since pre-Han perhaps pre-Zhou time. And I came to see the I-Ching as we possess it today as an archaeological artifact, a piece of broken machinery. It’s like the turbine of a jet plane. You puzzle over it and you see that it can be used for various things and you do use it for things and you see that it’s very effective but it’s really a piece of broken machinery from a very ancient technology which ceased to exist before the rise of the Han dynasty. And what it was, was, it was like a uh, Taoist technology of understanding time, that by the practice of certain techniques whose historical, uh, echoes I think you get in the stilling-of-the-heart techniques of Vadrayana Buddhism, these people were able to see into the quantum-mechanical foundations of thought and consciousness and they noticed there a flux which they called The Tao and it was a thing which came and went. The Tao Te Ching says “The way that can be told of is not an unvarying way” and they stilled their body functions and they looked inward with a cataloging, analytical mentality, and they noticed that while this flux was variable it seemed to be not infinite in its, in its, uh, in its uh, contributing factors but that in fact it seemed to have a pattern and they discerned the pattern as revolving around the number 64.


In other way- in other words, they discerned through this process of meditation temporal elements that had a kind of ontological validity that the material elements of the periodic table have for matter. That there is not one kind of time or two kinds of time, but actually 64 facets of the possible temporal jewel. And they saw that any moment in time was the combination and the overlay of, uh, this a a- wave system which they called Tao and it was a harmonic wave system, it had, uh, re- it had, uh, periods of self-expression which were very short in duration, on the order of seconds or hours or microseconds, it had levels of expression which were cognizable in the human world as years and decades and centuries, and it had vast resonant periods which were as large as history and then larger many times. Periods of historical- or periods of, uh, temporal resonance which could only be referenced to the life of the planet. And this is, I think, uh, you know, part of the Chinese notion of, uh, the Tao of heaven, earth, and man. These are different speeds at which these temporal waves of conditioning of the world of phenomenal appearance are moving.


And if you, if you take an idea like this, uh, seriously, even as a personal discipline of thought to, to picture it, to visual it- visualize it in a Vadryana spirit then you see that what’s really being offered is a map of time. It’s saying that, um, the condition of knowing a fading past and facing an unanticipatable future is not a n- ontologically given necessity of existence, that it is possible to imagine an existence in which one saw into time the way we as animals see into the space in front of us so that we are able to run, and leap, and dance among the rocks. It’s because we can see into space. A creature that- or a culture that could see into time could anticipate where the river of time would flow quickly, where it would broaden out and move slowly with a rich sense of the conservation of accomplishments achieved, where it would cascade and break-up its previous patterns and produce great cataracts of novelty. A civilization which knew these things, or a person which knew these things about their own life would claim a new dimension of existential freedom for being.


And um, you know, I was having this whispering entity, this daemon, this Logos show me these things and it was expressed on a very, very practical level. I mapped what is called ‘The first order of difference’ in the sequence of the I-Ching. That means how many lines change as you go from one hexagram to another. And I discovered that it looked like a random wave, it looked like a stochastic slice except that at the beginning and the end there were tongue-in-groove points of fit if you rotated the thing 180 degrees and brought it down against itself so that the thing achieved closure at the beginning and the end. This satisfied me that I was dealing with an artifact of natu- uh, that, you know, I was dealing with an organized structure either of nature or created by intelligence. And then using the principle of hierarchical resonance and stacking of modules into, uh, into hierarchies which is really the principle by which all Chinese metaphysics has operated from the very beginning, I created, um, a cosmic calendar which had- where each level was a resonance of the level below it, but either collapsed or multiplied by a factor of 64.


I discovered a very- well, recall that, um, because the I-Ching is 64 hexagrams with, uh, 6 lines in each hexagram, it’s composed basically of 384 “yao” or lines. And I discovered that this number 384 has a very interesting property, the, uh, cycle of the moon is 29.5 days so that if you take 29.5 times 13 it's something like 383.93, and it seemed to me then immediately obvious that, that part of what the machinery of the I-Ching was describing in the humanly cognizable phenomenal world was the cycle of the moon using a 384-day lunar calendar which precessed 19 days a year against the solar calendar. And when you take that 384 day unit and multiply it times 64 you, uh, get 67 years and some months and days. This is exactly six 11-year sunspot cycles, and China is the first place where we have historical records of the observation of sunspots.

So that’s one sunspot cycle for each line in the six-line hexagram. Also sunspots cycles have a greater peak every third cycle so that’s one large sunspot cycle for each hexagram in that trigram. And I saw then that there were, uh, these resonances. When you take that number, 67 years, again times 64 you get 4306 years. And uh, that was- that works out to...let's see 4306... two hundred, one hundred and fifty years for each zodiacal sign, each zodiacal sign is slotted to one trigram. These are all- notice that all of these things that this resonance calendar is predicting are things that are visible to the naked eye. We’re talking about movements of constellations, sunspots, and, um, and the moon.


So I saw then that this was a tremendously powerful natural calendar that- that, that was a, a technology developed by proto-Taoist central Asian shamanism very, very long ago. But it had this curious property of when the wave was mathematically analyzed in modern mathematical- by modern mathematical methods so that we could draw these maps of novelty, we could see then that it showed us the map of the temporal river from earliest beginnings to the collapse of the state vector at some time in the future. And so it was obvious then that if we could lay the map over the portion of reality we had already experienced we could then propagate the map forward into the future and know- and begin to take hold of ourselves in this other temporal dimension. And so it became a question of what is the best fit of this undulating wave of novelty?

And I used the word novelty out of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy because he, he had this notion that novelty was the concrescing of a force which knits things together. And, uh, and I like that, that’s what I felt it was, that the Tao is making itself and that this compression of novelty through the speeding-up of time will eventually reach a place where everything is connected to everything else. And this is, you know, the universe’s self-birthing of itself.

Well, you must be aware of all these, uh, very straight studies which say “If we keep increasing how fast we go by the year 2020 we’ll go 10 times the speed of light, if we keep increasing the amount of energy we release by so-and-so we'll release the energy in the sun. The propagation of all these curves of development become asymptotic and then nobody knows how to interpret what they mean, they just seem to mean that the whole culture is just going to go kazowie, you know.


And this is sort of the idea that this theory implies, it implies that far from the universe being a steady-state entity uninfluenced by the existence of the human mind, which is going to go on and exist for billions of years until the stars burn out and the 2nd law of thermodynamics is going to reduce everything to heat death, that that’s all wrong, a hundred percent wrong, and that actually the universe is made by mind within and without organism, and that mind is a- capable of bootstrap leaps in its organizational self-expression and that we are, uh, privileged to be the witnesses of the final act of life going through some kind of immense transformative, um, unfolding from itself in a kind of vortex which has been building on this planet for billions of years but which has been accelerating to, you know, such excruciating intensities over the last 25,000 years that it has called forth self-reflective intelligence from the monkeys, and the invention of quantum physics, and spaceflight, and shamanism, and it is novelty upon novelty. Novelty so intensified that the genetic machinery can no longer carry it and it bubbles out into the epigenetic, into art, and language, and poetry, and religion, and religious mania and romanticism and, uh, all of these things. It is a progressive knitting together, an expression of the universe's will to become, that causes me to think that we may be in the shorter “gyres” as William Butler Yeats called them, the shortening spirals, of this vortex of novelty and compression.


You see, a curious quality about this kind of cosmology that I’m describing, a cosmology where each, uh, epoch is preceded by an epoch which is a 65- 64 times greater in duration. The curious thing about that is that you only need about 20 multip- instances of multiplication before you go from a period of time smaller than the duration of Planck’s constant, which is, uh, ten poi- 1.55 x 10^-23, which is a very short period of time, to- then by th- by 20 multiplications of 64 you reach a period of time in excess of the required time for the age of the universe, a period of time on the order of 72 billion years. Well, if each time the, uh, spiral goes into a state of collapse at the end of one of its cycles, then in the last 384 days of the existence of a universe like that it would transit through half of its epochs of transition. Do you see what I mean? It’s like a screaming mimi, it really winds up.


And, uh, instead of the w- the the vision which physics gives us, is that the really rapid transitions of phase and state occurred at the beginning of the universe, they- whole professional lives are given over to discussing the first ten pico-seconds of the physics of the universe, right? And well I'm saying it's- I don’t care about that, I think that the really interesting stuff will happen in a big hurry at the end of the universe. That the picture that the 2nd law of thermodynamics gives us of just…[sighs] you know, tumescence, maximum de-tumescence is what it's picturing is all wrong, and that actually this strange hyper-dimensional force in the universe called life and information transfer is in the process of working itself up into a real tizzy and wrapping all space and time around itself.

And, uh, what was startling and what made me think that maybe I was losing my marbles was that when you look at that time that way and push these novelty graphs against the historical continuum, I reached the conclusion that we entered the last 67-year period before the collapse of the state vector at 8:30 in the morning on August the 6th, 1945 when the atomic bomb went off over Hiroshima. You see, it was a temporal reflection of the birth of the universe. It was actually a- you could call it an event which was a reincarnation of the big-bang, because each cycle begins with a bang, and that cycle, initi- the fact that human beings had used atomic weapons on other human beings meant that we had entered a new era, a new epoch of moral danger, and the stakes had been raised, you know, by a power of 64 to a new level.


Now, using the mathematics inherent in the cycle, if you propagate forward from that date, 67 years, 104.25 days you reach, uh, um, late November of 2012 AD. And I concluded based on all kinds of factors, personal, and historical and so forth that that was the fit. That, that if Hiroshima was, was day 1, then the place where it all came together was this date in 2012. And I worked with that for several years before some kind soul, Henry Munn I think, pointed out to me that the Mayan calendar which is a cycle of three- of thir- the long-count calendar I’m now talking about, is a cycle of 13 time periods which are called baktuns, and the baktun is 396 years in duration. After 13 baktuns the world ends completely, and the 13th baktun of the classical Mayan long-count calendar is the winter solstice of AD 2012, within 30 days of the date that I had fastened in on, using a completely different, uh, path of analysis.

And so this raised all kinds of questions, uh, one of which is, is it simply that individuals and civilizations who take mushrooms become, I want to say privy slash engulfed by a certain mathematical secret about the cosmic machinery? What is so important about this date in 2012? You know, the meso-American cultures have the most uncanny history of, uh, successful prophecy in the world. I mean, the Aztecs anticipated the coming of the Spanish, the day, the book of Chilam Balam [pronounced wrongly as 'Belam' by TM], gives the day when the Spaniards would weigh anchor off the coast of Mexico. And of course, the fact that it happened exactly as prophesied was a major undoing of that civilization.


So I put this out, I- this was a very confusing experience for me to, uh, channel or transmit this idea because I was interested in the I-Ching, I had carried it with me in India, I used to throw it at each full moon, but I was not mathematically inclined and when…

s reading the philosophy of science, like Paul Firob [TM may have meant Feyerabend?] and Imre Lakatos, and reading the history of science, Thomas Kuhn, and all of those people trying to understand you know, well what is a true idea? What is true and what is false? And, and when you have an idea which makes claims as sweeping as these, then you want to try to understand just what the limits of knowability are, and I discovered that, um, all you can require of any idea is that it be self-consistent, that it not generate any contradictions within its own set of rules, you see. And that’s why astrology is, uh, beyond criticism, because astrology is a mathematical theory with an interpretive exegesis attached to it, and who can quibble with a mathematical theory? Well then the ma- the, the uh, interpretational exegesis has to do with the sensitivity and subtlety of the interpreter. Well, isn’t this true of mathematical data in science exactly the same way?


So, I discovered that what I had created was a self-consistent idea that appears to be sealed beyond refutation in some weird and uncanny way which makes it seem very non-human because you can’t really find your way in to telling whether it's- can answer- can be answerable to the notion of objective truth. So what I’ve decided about it is, that it’s a, it's a teaching, or it’s, um, it's a kind of- it an exemplary model about how all process goes on and it’s a way of learning how things happen. To see time as a modulated flux of elements; to see it as a series of waves moving at different speeds through which you are taking a vertical slice and then stacking that slice and that gives rise to the multiplistic ever-changing flux that is called the now. It is actually made up of reflections and adumbrations of the past, and it’s made up of, of, uh, anticipatory shock waves and intimations of the future.

The past and future are co-present in the now, they are in fact what’s making it happen.


You can almost think of it as a hologram where you have two- or, or a standing wave, where you two wave systems—one from the past, one from the future where they cross an interference pattern forms which has a curious, uh, stability as a system in, and of itself. And, and yet it’s almost a ghost created by these other two realities and that is the moving present. And uh, ah, mathematically this notion of time that I evolved delivers, you know, the map of novelty, a two-variable flux, a wandering-line graph that’s, uh, very pleasing for arguing with formalists. But what lurks behind it and what is so rich for the romantic, and the shaman, and the poet, is these- this wandering-line graph is the composite of s- of the the overlay of certain historical time periods which are in a state of flux at various speeds so that they give rise to an endless kaleidoscopic unfolding in what we call three-dimensional space and of what we call reality.

And this is why I often mention Finnigans Wake in my lectures because Joyce understood this, he understood that every moment is caused by everything that happened in the past, and everything that happened in the future, and I like to give, you know, the, the trivial example that you find yourself in Hadrian's hamburger joint, this is because the emperor Hadrian invaded England in a certain year and conducted a campaign.


We are ghosts of past and future events. And what the- what the chaos at the end of history that we are now living through is, is that for thousands and thousands of years people have felt a vague thing calling across time to humanists, calling us to be a certain way, to practice certain rituals, to observe the stars, to observe the plants, to observe birth, and observe death, a calling, and that thing which some people have called “God,” whatever it is, is throwing a gigantic shadow over human history now, because now the creode of development that leads to our merging with this thing the walls are very steep, the water is moving very swiftly, and it’s almost as though the future event is throwing off great sparks that are themselves faceted, contradictory epitomizations of this mystery. This is what Mo- Mohammed, and Christ, and Buddha are. They are human personalities that were situated in time in such a way that they became macrocosmic reflections of the super-ordinate edenic humanity that is going to be generated at the end of history.


And we are close, we are close. It is, uh, all of history can be seen as the shockwave of this eschatological event. This is what the prophets were anticipating: the culmination of man’s God-making effort in time will be the perfection and the release of the human soul. And it has- it- it’s not that we are doing it, you see, it’s that a natural law that we were previously unaware of is inexorably unfolding. And that is what all this cross-connectedness of, of, uh, man into matter, plant into animal, uh, earth into space, all of this flowing interconnectedness, this reaches right down into the rocks of the planet. This is not simply a phenomenon of biology. This is the unfolding of a general law of which biology is only the cutting edge of a wedge of becomingness which includes all being and reaches right down into the neutrinos.

And it is, uh, you know, i- to be a being in time is to share in the immense flood of pre-cognitive anticipation that fills the universe in, uh, anticipation of this event, and that’s what being is and that’s why it's so rich and complete within itself, and yet always somehow pointing beyond itself because, uh, the, the richness of the matrix through which we are moving is, uh, incomparable and beautiful.


And, uh, and so I- this is the basis of my extreme optimism, is I think that everything is under control, that we are in the grip of a force so powerful that the notion that we could jeopardize or overthrow it is completely preposterous because uh, we are acting in accordance with a resonance that was set going millions and millions of years ago. And of course being is fraught uh, with danger, but uh, the stakes are uh, you know, to be at play in the fields of the Lord, to be at rest in the mansions of the Goddess, and uh, it's- it’s soon I think. At least the historical mimicking of it is clearly soon because, uh, the- the thrust toward the millennium of this society will not be, uh, turned aside, if it is not a law of the universe then it will become a myth of human beings and be created anyway. So, since we are human beings I see us as the central actors in that mandala, and this is the task of the next hundred, or five hundred years to realize the alchemical nature of, uh, humanity and being and have everything fused into a super-numinous concrescence that is time. Joyce said “All space in a nutshell”, you know, all time bound into a lenticular vehicle which is bo- both everyone’s and mine alone, and yours alone, and yours alone…


What I want to talk about this morning is an idea, I’ve talked about it in a couple of places, uh, some of you may have heard it before. I think it bears repeating. It’s a much more serious idea than what I put out yesterday which had a note of whimsy in its genesis. This idea is important, whatever that means, because it would change, uh, not only the area of its concern but our view of the world generally. And Easter is an appropriate time to discuss this because it concerns the genesis of man, of consciousness and self-reflection which is what the Easter mythologium is uh, also an expression of.

So what I wanted to talk about this morning is a new notion of how human evolution occurred, and what the critical factors were in it and how to draw a, uh, picture for us that shows how our intellectual complexity and symbol manipulating facilities could have emerged naturally from a background of animal existence and over a fairly rapid period of time. Over the last, uh, 3 to 5 million years actually the African continent has been growing more dry and has experienced fluctuations of aridity. Nevertheless as recently as, uh, 2,000 years ago the Roman historian Pliny called North Africa “The breadbasket of Rome” because wheat was being grown over thousands and thousands of acres. Now, it’s in this same area [TM clears throat] of Northern Africa, the great rift zone of the Serengeti plane where physical anthropologists place the origin of human beings and it has to do with the following sequence of events.


Arboreal primates living in an unbroken ra- continental rainforest ecology achieve a close adaptation to existence in the canopy and this is stabilized for millions of years. They are insectivores they have the opposable thumbs and binocular, or uh, rudimentary binocular vision. The drying up of the African continent caused the breakdown of this continental rainforest into a configuration of patches of forest with uh, grassland in between. And in this grassland ecology, uh, herds of mammals evolved, proto-cattle, proto-bison, exotic mammals like giraffes and gazelles of all types. At the same time the primate adaptation to this increasing aridity was to begin to descend from the trees and to hunt in packs and to shift from a diet of, uh, canopy fruits and berries, and roots dug from the ground to an omnivorous diet that could include meat.

So, in this situation these, uh, tribal monkeys developed a complicated repertoire of signals to aid in pack hunting in exactly the same way wolves are known to do. Now, into this situat- their, and their habit was nomadic and to follow behind these great herds either killing the animals that were uh, less well and could be killed by the crude means at their disposal, or living off [TM clears throat] the kills of other carnivores and this is still the habit of uh, baboons.


Now into this situation comes a mushroom which grows in the manure of the ungulate animals that have evolved on this plain. And in this protein intensive environment where there is pressure on the availability of protein, these foraging primates are testing every object in the environment for its food value. So, uh, Rolland Fischer who was a researcher into the effect of psychedelic drugs and the structure of consciousness showed that small doses of psilocybin, sub-psychedelic, thr- uh, sub-threshold doses of psilocybin actually increase visual acuity and he had a very elegant experiment where t parallel lines could be deformed by turning a dial, and you would put graduate students in front of this stoned, and unstoned, and ask them to press a buzzer when the lines no longer appeared to them to be parallel. And he showed that consistently a small amount of psilocybin allowed you to detect this change uh, sooner than an ordinary subject was able to. And he said to me, he said you see that “This proves that drugs give you a clearer picture of reality than their absence.” And what it means is that these primates who were inculcating the mushroom into their diet were gaining a subtle adaptive advantage over their fellows who were avoiding the mushroom, because they were gaining in visual acuity which is one of the critical parameters that a uh, pack hunting carnivore would be subject to in that kind of an environment.


So, uh, without any teleology being involved, without any invocation of extraterrestrial intelligence we see that a feedback loop was established in the food chain of these primates very early on. Those who ate the mushroom tended to survive and outbreed those who did not, at the same time the relationship between these animals and these herd ungulate mammals was shifting from a hunting situation to a situation of domestication which was bringing the mushroom ever more into the fore, and if you look back, uh, at the archeological evidence in North Africa, especially the paintings, the uh, late Neolithic paintings on the Tassili Plateau in Southern Algeria you see there magnificently portrayed herds of cattle, and, and, I mean, num- beautifully painted. More sensitively portrayed cattle than you find at Altamira and Lascaux, and you see also shamans dancing with mushrooms sprouting out of their body and with mushrooms clutched in their hands, groups of them running holding on high with geometric matrices of connected dots all around them.

And, uh, now of course in that area its very similar to this, its an area of sculpted sandstone, and uh, cross-cut arroyos with undercut cliffs. And it’s very dry, but in some places the Neolithic detritus is several meters deep. And the people who lived in the Tassili Plateau when the aridity of the Sahara further increased are the people who migrated east to the valley of the Nile and established the proto-Egyptian civilization of six to ten thousand years ago.


The important point I want to make about this later phase of the, uh, human involvement with the mushroom was that it was always intimately connected with cattle. And the Goddess religions of Ancient North Africa and the Middle East are, are, uh, religions of cattle Goddesses, and this connection between the cow and the mother Goddess and the mushroom is some kind of, uh, key to understanding the evolution of, of uh, religious sensitivity in early man and that part of the Middle East.

It carries forward into, uh, historical time with the mysteries at Eleuisis where there is a, uh, a clear indication that a psychedelic substance is being used. Either ergotized rye or, uh, a mushroom of some sort. And this, uh, this notion that uh, it was the presence of the mushroom on the African veldt at a critical bifurcation of primate evolution that created uh, the feedback loop which eventually developed into self-reflecting consciousness. Because you see at lower doses the psilocybin is giving increased visual acuity and it seems like increased symbol-processing ability, its strange effect on the language centers. But of course inevitably they would have discovered its higher dose effects which would be to convey then into an inner tremendum that became then the cultural guiding image. In other words it was perceived as, as a God, as a Goddess, as the Goddess and became then the arrow for cultural dynamics and evolution.


And the reason I think this is important is because the spinoff implications of the acceptance of an idea like this would bring us into much greater harmony with our environment. We sort of have the anxiety of an orphan about our origins because our best people in physical anthropology don’t give very good accounts, can’t seem to make sense of how we could have l- been forced out and emerged out of primate organization. And so there’s been much talk in the 20th century for the search for the missing link which was always been conceived of a physical skeleton of a certain kind of intermediate hominoid form. But it isn’t a missing link I think, it’s a missing factor. And the factor which accelerated the forward the evolution of the brain size of this particular primate line was the inclusion of psychedelic plants in the diet, which then fed the tendency towards symbol formation and self-reflection.

If this idea gained wide acceptance uh, some of our laws and some of our ways of relating to nature and to medicine plants in particular would have to be altered and brought into line. This is the source of our humanness. Apparently the, the psychoactive compounds being elaborated by plants throughout nature are regulators of various forms of evolution in animals, and food chains and all this which appear very trivial on the surface are actually the message-bearing, uh, medium of the, of the hand of God which is forming and sculpting nature along these various creodes of development.


And, uh, the thing to understand about this, or why this has impact in the future is because it’s a continuous process which we can foster and husband, uh, and help develop in healthy ways if we recognize that it’s going on. I mentioned Eleuisis as this kind of thing going on in historical time, also of course Soma, the sacrament of the Vedic civilization, appears to have been a mushroom, was certainly a psychedelic plant. And it isn’t only psychedelic plants but all plants which affect and shift consciousness.

I mean, a history of the human race could be written analyzing it not it terms of class struggle of the impact of great personalities but as a shifting set of interactions between sugar, tobacco, opium, caffeine, uh, alcohol, and psychedelics so that, you know, we need to understand that- chocolate, that these food- cocaine- that these foods and drugs and spices, we have subtly overlooked them and taken them for granted. They have regulated human history, and individual self-expression, how much you know, how you look, how, uh, pure your transmission of your genetic heritage to the next generation, all of these things are being regulated and controlled by these plants in this way.


Now, if we could create a civilization or even a, even uh, a clique within a civilization that understood this and that had its fingers on a vertical monopoly of research from the jungle to the clinical hospital, great things could be understood. Uh, this is the way to do it, to systematically explore these relationships and see that Gaia apparently works through the intercession of catalytic compounds that convey revelation, and revelation is then the factor which has historical impact. The people, the messiahs, and the teachers are merely the pipelines for ideas and the, the metabolic release of these ideas in the macro-environment is being controlled by the plant-animal interaction. And so it will be on into the foreseeable future, and by understanding this a kind of new science looms into view. A kind of integrated, dynamical understanding of, uh, the flux of energy mediated by chemistry in the environment so that the, the guiding image of culture can be revitalized and realized, uh, in a much shorter period of time. And this whole shortening period of time thing has also been going on for a while.


You see it isn’t astonishing I think that self-reflection could emerge giving basic- given basic primate organization, but what is astonishing about it is the speed with which it happened. I mean in the last thirty to fifty thousand years the human brain has changed more than it changed in the previous 3 to 5 million years. So, you know, factor has entered, a catalyst is in the mix and it must be something in the food chain, or something in the environment, or the hand of almighty God, or the extraterrestrials, or, you know, elf invasion from hyperspace… but something is causing this accelerated development. And I thi- and what I said this morning could be criticized as being reductionist, I try to give a very sober account of it, I haven’t said why the mushroom appeared in the manure or discussed whether it has awareness or a stake in the catalyzing of this primate evolution. I just introduce it as a chemical factor, and that’s how it would be written if it were presented to a straight audience.

The fact of the matter is that it raises all kinds of questions, I mean why is this process being catalyzed in the primates? Is it just by happenstance? Where has the mushroom been? Is it, uh- what is its relationship to the evolution of other forms of life on this planet? Did it drift in from the stars? If so, long ago or recently? And with intent, or by chance? And, you know just a host of questions. The thing that puts us in such an existential situation, individually and culturally, is this puzzlement over our origins.


We are not strictly speaking religious in the 19th century way so that we can not really, I think, accept that, you know, God sculpted us out of clay and set us down here on a world he created, and yet if you were to look for the thumbprint of God on this planet you would certainly have to focus in on the human beings and their activities as a special case of natural phenomenon. Perhaps so special a case that it had to be accorded a separate ontological status. We are different and, uh, why, and for what?

Um, I think that probably we are the agent of change that Gaia has unleashed upon herself, that the planet itself is aware of the finiteness of planetary existence. And it's sort of like the story of the ant and the grasshopper. You can have a planetary consciousness which says “Well I look forward to 3 to 5 billion years of sentient existence and then I am willing to be extinguished with the death of my star” or you can have a plant with an an- a planet with an ant-like mentality that says “I can sense winter coming 3 to 5 billion years down the line and I’m going to organize some wild strategy to break through the tyranny of the energy cycle of one star and I’m going to organize biological existence so that energy can be brought- greater and greater amounts of energy can be brought under control so that eventually a kind of liberation can occur where life can burst out of the planetary cradle and disperse itself through the universe.”


And here are apparently several strategies for this, one is evolve intelligence and build starships. Another is, you know, become a mushroom and produce 3 to 5 million spores per minute during sporulation, that are particles small enough to percolate by Brownian movement away from the atmosphere of the given planet and by sheer numbers, uh, and the slow gradient of drift by light pressure and that sort of thing, emanate through the universe, and establish yourself in any planetary regime that is suitable.

The- the obvious next great revelation in biology, and it’s strange that we can state it because once it’s stated by Carl Sagan it will be headlines everywhere, but it’s obvious that space is no barrier to life. It’s a- it's a- it's a barrier, in the same way that the Pacific Ocean was a barrier to life’s colonization of the Hawaiian islands, but that’s all. It’s just a tight filter, but spores and starships, and shamans probably get through to other, uh, closed topologies in orbit around other stars. You know, there must be a dimension somewhere where all surfaces in the universe are contiguous, and if you could move into that dimension you could just walk to Zeta Reticuli.

So, uh, the means by which life will penetrate these larger dimensions that free it from its dependency on the energy cycles of the material universe are not by any means clear. I mean, it may be that it’s about organizing the mind and building an inner vehicle and moves off into the imagination. The imagination may be, in fact, a 3-dimensional slice of a higher dimensional universe that is holding all of this, uh, in being and causing it to happen. The imagination, it’s hard to account for it in evolutionary terms if it is not, uh, somehow mapping a, uh, field of data that is important for development.


So that’s that notion, the notion of the importance of, uh, psychedelics in the formation of the- this species and a continuing formation of the cultural design. I think what the psychedelics do is they de-condition from cultural programming and allow models to be replaced at a much greater rate of speed so that, uh, that the culture that uses psychedelics can trim itself to every historical current. And this is really the challenge of the future. We are moving as a culture faster and faster through the temporal medium, through the historical space, and this is creating a compression of events. And it’s almost like an airfoil approaching the speed of sound. There is a wave of concushi- concussive shock building in front of our culture and we have to almost re-design ourselves in mid-flight in order to push through that barrier and into the, uh, different order, the different set of laws that will prevail once we have gotten through that. But this whole sense of everything accelerating, of all historical input being intensified and all previous times being somehow co-present, this is the phenomenon of the winding down of a universe, or the building up of an eschatological shockwave in front of a, uh, a vehicle that is trying to transit out of history and into some kind of millenarian space that is not, uh, not subject to the anxiety that history involves.


And that’s what the whole crisis and, uh, around the millennium and the whole 20th century really is about, you know, is this, this effort to create a complete summation that can also be used as the force to propel us beyond everything we have been or thought before because there’s obviously no other escape from the culture crisis. It is, uh- that kind of situation is called a forward escape. It means the only thing you can do is move forward into the crisis at ever greater speed, because the only solution is to pass through it and move beyond it.

And, and, as we move toward the millennium and as, you know, the intelligence of our machines, the size of our databases, the desperation of our politicians, the intensity of the visions of our visionaries, all of this will build to a crazy concatenatious climax. It can’t be any other way because Christian civilization has wired us up for these things at the end of every 1,000 year period.

I mean, in the year 1000 everything just went haywire, I mean people stood in the streets for months just gaping at the sky, no work got done, you know, there was such an eminent expectation of the onslaught of the millennium. Nevertheless this archetype of renewal is seeking in thousands and thousands of ways to be born, and I think that the rediscovery of psychedelics, LSD, everything that Wasson did, all of these things are critical factors in this cultural mix that is going to gel towards the recognition of the things which we hold as clichés. You know, that the inside and outside are the same thing, that the universe can be crossed by thought in an instant, all information is somehow co-present, and, uh, and so on.


Are there any questions about any of this? Yes, I said that what we take for granted, that the inside and the outside are the same thing, these things will be assimilated by the larger culture. And things like, uh, you know, human-machine interface and the ego identification with the body, I think all these things are going to be obviated. That, you see, we don’t know what man is and we have a strong association that humanness is related to the monkey body, but yet our whole historical career has been of projecting ideas into technical, uh, accretions, and now that we have computers and things which, uh, mimic intelligence we are beginning to explore, you know “What is humanness ontologically?” That’s what people are really talking about when they say "can machines think? Will machines think?" They mean “is what we have focused in on as the defining factor of our being that sets us apart from all other things something which we could manufacture?”


And the answer is probably to some degree yes. Because much of what is intelligence, or appears superficially to be intelligence is simply data and retrieval so that, you know, more and more of the culture is being hardwired into an electronic coral reef that is simply the outermost of each of our own exoskeletons. We all, uh, have telephones in our homes. Many of us have computer terminals. These things introduce us to a global skin of information but as the hardware grows more and more unobtrusive we will more and more come to identify these things with our own ego. And we won’t even realize that we’re being charged for thinking about certain questions because we’re actually accessing a database somewhere which is feeding us data. So that the commonality of mind is I think going to be- somehow the triumph of socialism would be the commonality of mind in a capitalist context. That there really will be an ocean of thought that you will swim in and that will be composed of deeper and deeper levels of integrated information. Perhaps this is all that hyperspace is, is the entirely expressed informational ghost of this physical universe.

And that it’s in the, it's in the informational reconstruction of the physical universe that the mind will eventually come to swim like a fish, you know, and will come and go from various constellations of aggregation and integration. I mean you see, what’s going to happen is that the rules of the imagination are going to replace physics so that we are going to be able to do and be whatever we can imagine. Well, none of us have ever probably put in much thought to what would I be if I could be anything I could imagine?


And just 20 minutes of that meditation will lead you into pretty strange places. So what would it be like if the culture evolved for a thousand years in that way? If you could be anything. I guess the first step everyone takes is they imagine themselves as the flying saucer, the lenticular, uh, mind-object made of light that can move at any speed and become any object and answer any question. And, uh, well its an archetype of wholeness in Jung in his flying saucer book, uh, talked about this thing in alchemy called the “rotundum” which is the thing which spins, you know? It’s also in alchemy called “the scintillia”, the spark, and it's, uh- simply because it’s round and spins it’s a symbol of wholeness, but its like the exteriorization of the human soul. The realization that, you know, expressing what is within us may culturally eventually mean actually exteriorizing the human soul and interiorizing the human body so that this world is traded in for the imagination. And this is sort of what art has always been trying to do, but we’re talking about a breakthrough in ways and means on such a scale that you can just march off into this art.

Q: Terence, do you find it reasonable to anticipate that eventually human technology will succeed in producing computers that are just as conscious as we are, and can be able to do anything that we can do?


TM: Oh yes well Kat and I did that without even a flashlight battery, just by having children. [audience chuckles] I mean there’s an epigenetic combonent and a genetic component and, but what I’m saying is the difference between these things may become dim indeed, in other words the way a person is made is the way a DNA message is read by RNA, and it’s a, it's a group of codons of nucleotide bases which are then templated and then a ribosome reads it and, and assembles little pieces correctly and then the protein is created.

Well, there’s no reason why anything should be made any other way. All machines should be produced by the transcription of molecular templates, so then all our machines will become strangely quasi-biological. You wo- Chevrolets will not be manufactured, they will be grown [audience laughter] in yeasty vats and when they talk to you, the question, you know, becomes very moot as to whether this is a pet, a friend, a colleague, or uh [Terence chuckles]… Because that's- you see, nature works with very low energies, DNA can make anything and there’s no smelting, no huge release of toxic byproducts and uh, and the amazing thing about these proteins is that the ribosome stamps them out and they come out in like a line, but they have forces, electrostatic, and other kinds of forces, uh, scripted into them so that they fold in very, very complicated ways, and they always fold the same way. And their memory of how to fold, where this comes from is one of the great, uh mysteries of molecular biology, it’s not at all understood. Well imagine if we could make machines which just uh, emerged as a strange form of spaghetti which then folded itself into jet planes, refrigerators, automobiles, color television sets, lipstick cases, and what have you.


This has to do with my notion that uh, really the next evolutionary leap is uh, well, I shouldn’t call it an evolutionary leap, is uh, it’s a leap in epigenetic development, but is what I call the genesis of visible language. That there is an ability just under the surface of human organization waiting to be coaxed out either through yoga, or slight genetic engineering or something like that, and it is, uh, something that was anticipated by the Alexandrian philosopher Phylo-Judeas. He talked about the Logos, and- which is this teaching voice, this informing thing which is heard, and he was interested in what is called “The more perfect Logos.” And he said “What is the more perfect Logos?” and then he answered his own question and said “it would be a Logos which went from being heard to being beheld without ever crossing over a uh, border of transition.” In other words a form of synesthesia.

Well, what using ayahuasca and DMT and compounds like this which are very closely related to our ordinary brain chemistry, and practice and dedication, you can begin to explore places where a vocal synesthesia becomes a colored topological manifold. And you can communica- you can show someone your thoughts by singing in such a way as to condense visible objects into the air in front of them. And these objects are, they are hyper-words, they are words which you don’t hear but which you see. And they are, and like objects they have sides, and facets, and can be rotated and examined from all sides.


Well now, the biases in our language that cause us to say things like “I see what you mean” when we mean “I understand you fully” shows that we really place a greater emphasis on seeing the truth than on hearing the truth. So, the truth seen is somehow more valid than the truth heard. And, uh, ayahuasca is a perfect example of a plant which communicates with a visible language. The mushroom, you often hear it, and often the hearing evolves into a uh, visible synesthesic field of photonic input. But the ayahuasca always communicates visually, and it’s like the Mayan glyphs or something. It’s this fantastically complicated surface which is conveying alien meaning. After an ayahuasca trip you just feel like your eyes are sticking out of your head because you’ve just been looking, a- as one looks as the page of a book, for hours and hours as this strange, uh, alien, uh, 3-dimensional language flows through your mind.


But I believe this is a human ability just under the surface, and that in psychedelic states of mind this happens to people. This is why all the fiddling with glossolalia, it’s the hope of reaching, you know, that concordance of chemistry and that the moment will allow this to happen because it’s for some reason very satisfying, it’s like an utterly harmless siddhi- it seems to ha- it is true magic and the person doing it is utterly transported by their ability to project vis- visual beauty. But it appears to have no use other than entertainment of one's self and others, but eventually when it is integrated as a cultural mode I think it will be- it is what telepathy will be. Telepathy will not be hearing other people’s thoughts in your head. Telepathy will be when you switch into the language which lets people see what you mean. It will be the “see what I mean" language.

And I think that, uh, psilocybin from the very beginning was catalyzing the language centers, and in fact the kind of language that I’m speaking to you right now is a prototypic type of this eventual development in human organization, and that this is the thing that makes humans unique, is this ability to make small mouth noises which are arbitrarily coded with conventionally agreed-upon meanings, which allows us then a vast control of a previously invisible, uh, linguistic space. And it’s in that linguistic space that we have erected our cathedrals and conducted our pogroms, and gone about all our, uh, forms of business. And, uh, and becoming aware of this, of language as a thing to journey into, and language as a thing to avoid the pitfalls of. To be- you know, the Buddhists say “awareness of awareness” maybe it’s easier if one thinks of it as “awareness of language,” you know.


Q: I wanted to, um, pursue this thing of the visual language, because they'll have their mouth open and there will literally be these beautiful things coming out of their mouth with flowers and they interpret this flowery speech, but perhaps, uh, they were in fact doing what you’re talking about.

Q2: Huh!

TM: They don’t interpret that as flowery speech they call it that, that yes I think that’s what it must have been. This is all very puzzling to me, and if anybody knows, if anybody is an acoustics person, or I don’t know what’s going on exactly, but the question of how- “what is voice?” and “what can you do with self-generated sound?” How neutral is it to your own organism? In other words, any of you who read The Invisible Landscape, the theory in there is that you take a certain drug, a certain plant, and you hear and interiorized tone which is not a psychological phenomenon, but rather it is actually the electron-spin resonance of this highly biodynamic molecules by the millions entering into the synaptic cleft and competing with the endogenous, uh, transmitter there for uptake.

And that this “mmmmMmmMMmmMm” is molecularly real and hence can be treated as a manipul- a variable to be manipulated with the input of other kinds of sounds such as the sound which cancels it or sound which uh, reinforces it to then manipulate these molecules in, in one's body.


And this is uh, this is really I think the frontier of shamanism world-wide, that everybody is trying to figure out how far you can go with sound, and what you can do with it and also how dangerous is this? How permanent can some of these brain changes be? And what is the mechanism? You know, is the electron spin resonance thing pretty close to it or is that just a myth, and that an entirely different set of coupling mechanisms are, are making that happen?

But all of the ayahuasca shamans are great hummers, and great controllers of their voice, and, uh, you know, they do operate on your body with light and sound, and there are sounds which can slice into your body. And, uh, and it seems to me this is where experiential and experimental work with these things should concentrate to try and understand just how much of humanness can we take control of?

How bound in are we? What do these special abilities mean and uh, and uh that tradition, if any, have anticipated them?

The thing---

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Shamanic Approaches to the UFO

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21 November 1987

Angels Aliens and Archetypes 1987 Conference, San Francisco, California

1128

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Understanding and the Imagination in the Light of Nature

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17 October 1987 (Potentially incorrect)

Philosophical Research Society, Los Angeles, California(Potentially incorrect)

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LIGHT IN NATURE" TALK, PART 2. WHICH IS NOW FULLY TRANSCRIBED.)

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Nature is the Center of the Mandala

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12 September 1987

Shared Visions Bookstore, Berkeley, California

5167

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the lecture is “Nature is the center of the mandala”. And his is really, basically, simply a structure to anticipate and discuss where nature lies in the future, the cultural future that is unfolding in front of all of us. And to background my thoughts on this matter a little bit, I have always had a relationship to nature which I pretty much took for granted, but perhaps it was, uh, it was more intense and somewhat unique than most peoples'. I grew up uh, in a small town in Colorado. I was really early into being a rock hound and then a butterfly collector. I had no interest in stamps or baseball cards or anything like that. It was always natural objects, and the attraction of tropical butterflies was the exuberant expanse of color, the affirmation of the uh, patterned richness of the universe that was seemed to be thrown out like a spark by these things. And eventually I pursued it quite foreign was

another lecture I give in which I go into this in great detail. I try to show that mushrooms in the dung of ungulate animals on the veldt of Africa 150,000 years ago drove a series of processes which resulted in self-reflecting human beings. That process didn't end with the invention of language or the domestication of cattle, it continues right up to the present day.

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aka Suggested Reading List

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Easter 1987

Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California

5697

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What's so Great About Mushrooms?

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1987

Unknown

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Psychedelics Before and After History

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1987

California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California

787

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from 49:50...


"Now, as a culture we must come to grips with the fact that the world is not simple, in the same way that a nine year-old must come to grips with the fact that the world is not simple – it is not as mummy and daddy said it was: there are tremendous vistas and abysses to be plunged. Ask your uncle and he will tell you that nobody knows what's going on in these areas. Ask a shaman and he will tell you that nobody has found the bedrock of the psychedelic experience. Nevertheless this wish to live with a bedrock of experience is a kind of trivializing of the great mystery in which we find ourselves embedded. We would have a far more accurate and complete picture of Reality if we were willing to live with the felt presence of the Mystery. And the way to do this is to experience what these plant teachers are trying to say, what these planetarily manufactured information-bearing pheromonal molecules are trying to imbue into us. Now,


molecules are trying to imbue into us. Now, shamans throughout history have short-circuited the Fall. They are those who know. That's what gnosis is : it is privileged knowledge vouchsafed to the courageous. And the fact that we have fallen into a neurotic or childish style of relating to being, is nothing more than a statement about the inherent biases of our languages and our institutions. Many people have not, perhaps because they carried out their lives in the vastness of the tropical forests, where the force of Nature cannot be denied. You see, had we stayed in the tropics, we probably would never have taken the Fall into History. The Fall into History is what happens when one moves into a progressively more and more barren landscapes, and substitutes for the input of organic Nature, the self-generated neurotic maps that are based on incomplete information. Now, that cycle is being closed. I often think that the discovery of the New World and its subjugation, which


of the New World and its subjugation, which was like the carrying out of the ultimate fantasies of these neurotic Judeo-Christian tradition – a world to plunder – ends very oddly : with Gordon Wasson and Valentina Wasson in 1953 penetrating into the jungle highlands of Mexico and finding there something more astonishing than a flying saucer or an alien artefact, finding there the true heritage of the human species, in the form of the intact mushroom psychedelic religion. Eros lost since the dismemberment of Osiris! Lost since great Pan’s death at the rise of the Christian era! But not dead, only sleeping! And now, through cultivation techniques and the propagation of ethnographic literature and the work of people like Metzner, and Hoffman, and Wasson, and Schultes, shoved directly in the path of the careening cultural juggernaut of Western civilization. This is why I have called the weekend Psychedelics Before and After History, because I see history, as


Before and After History, because I see history, as I say, as a prodigal hiatus, a wondering in the desert of Unknowing, an indulgence in an easily cured neurosis, if we will but take upon ourselves the personal – personal! – responsibility for cultivating a relationship with the Mystery! We have bought in so thoroughly to the notion of a hierarchy of information and a declension of truth from experts – whether they be politicians, priests or scientists – that we have devalued ourselves as the primary instruments of our knowing. And this is why I think among other reasons why psychedelics are so repressed, why it is so important to society to keep them out of the hands, not only of children and high-schoolers and hedonistic experimentalists, but to keep them out of the hands of research psychologists, pharmacologists and physiologists as well, because fully appreciated they will explode the Newtonian, Einsteinian universe the way a stick of dynamite explodes a rotten


way a stick of dynamite explodes a rotten apple. And in the process, the hierarchies of paternalism, scientism and reductionism will just be completely swept away! And this is all going to happen, God willing, in our lifetimes. My faith is that if it doesn’t happen then the cultural momentum toward a lethal conclusion will continue on to the ultimate catastrophe. And so that’s why I am willing to address groups like this and seek to inspire psychologists and chemists and students of anthropology and culture to examine this. Because I think we have wandered far from our birthright and trivialized a mystery of Being in the process, and to recoup that mistake we are going to have to become as little children in the face of the shamanic phenomenon and investigate it intellectually, experientially, linguistically, individually and collectively. Only in that way will we be able to rescue the enterprise from its momentum towards catastrophe. "


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Mushrooms, Elves and Magic

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30 November 1988

Big Sur, California

6494

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Vision Question Through Sacred Plants

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(9-14) October 1988

International Transpersonal Conference, Santa Rosa, California

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Vision Plants - The Transpersonal Challenge

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1988

International Transpersonal Conference,

8507

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Before and Beyond History

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1988

Ojai, California

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Places I Have Been

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15th, May, 1988

Hermosa Beach, Los Angeles, California

6013

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Morphogenic Fields and Psychedelic Experiences

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1988

Shared Visions Bookstore, Berkeley, CA

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The Light in Nature

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1988

The Esalen Institute (Benefit for KPFK and Botanical Dimensions), Big Sur, California (Big Sur Tapes, Big Sur, California)

24471

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DAY 2:

I want to mention this is a benefit for Botanical Dimensions and KPFK. Botanical Dimensions is the real world kind of real politick response to all the issues that Kat and I hammered out over the last 11 years. And what it boils down to is a plant rescue project built around a 20-acre botanical garden in Hawaii. What we're doing there is trying to bring in plants that are threatened in the warm tropics; either the extinction of the species is threatened, or the knowledge of its medicinal or herbal or shamanic use is in danger of being lost. There are a lot of fancy organizations, World Wildlife Fund, Earthwatch, Earth First!, that are saving the rain forest or at least fighting that battle, legally and by getting huge tracts of forests in the tropics made into reserves. But nobody really even cognizes or is focused on saving ethno-botanical lore, data that concerns the very subtle relationship between aboriginal people and botanical resources in their environment. So that's something we're doing.


A theme was touched on last night which is one of the centerpiece themes of aboriginal shamanism; the felt presence of some kind of alien intelligence. An intelligence that is somehow co-present with the human sense of self, for different people, in different ways, with varying degrees of intensity in different times and places. At the bedrock of shamanism is the notion that life is really finally a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but without resolution. Nevertheless as you close distance with this mystery there are a series of analogical metaphors that don't really suggest themselves but that are communicated to you by the other.

One of these analogical metaphors is the presence of an alien intellect, an organized other that is folklorically present in tradition as fairies, gnomes, elves, jinns, afreets, sprites, tree spirits -- that sort of thing -- and anecdotally present in rural cultures throughout the world as the poltergeist and the milk-souring fairy -- these things seem to reside in a curious area that is not epistemically clearly defined for the culture.

Among aficionados of these domains the question of, "is it real or not?" is thought to be mildly tasteless. You would intuitively sense if you were drinking in an Irish pub and people began to spin leprechaun stories, that the question "is it real?" is a real bring down. It isn't really like that because the question "is it real?" can ultimately be shown to be infantile in any situation. I mean is the Bank of America real? Immediately we realize that ordinary experience is simply assumption skating over the mystery.


But I choose to talk so much about the felt presence of the other because it was for me such an astonishing personal surprise. I was raised Roman-Catholic and indulged in the kind of theological fiddle-faddle that involves. And then grew out of that into atheism, into agnosticism; by the time I got to college I was reading Jean Paul Sartre and Husserl. My intellectual ontogeny had followed historical phylogeny and I had arrived in the 20th century. And then having thought I had absorbed the lessons of LSD, which seemed to me to be to reinforce and confirm the theories of Freud concerning the dynamics of the psyche: that it was about repressed memory, repressed desire, sexual neurosis, parental foul-ups and the imprinting of traumatic behavior experienced in infancy.

And then someone came to me one rainy February evening, in 1967, really a mad person, a kind of a social menace and intellectual criminal. A person who had said to me only months before, "we must live as if the apocalypse has already happened." Here he was on my doorstep, he wore little black suits that he buttoned up to the throat. He came in and he said "here's something that you might be interested in." And he brought out a sample of di-methyltryptamine that he had somehow come into contact with. And I said, "well what is it?" And he said, "well, it's short acting -- it's a flash." And I said, "how longdoes it last?" -- that was my first mistake. He said, "oh it doesn't last long." So I said, "OK, we'll do it." And we did it.


And I discovered, I had, I guess it's called a peak experience, or a core revelation, or being born again, or having your third eye opened, or something, which was a revelation of an alien dimension; a brightly lit, inhabited, non three-dimensional, self-contorting, sustained, organic, linguistically intending modality that couldn't be stopped or held back or denied. I sank to the floor -- I couldn't move. I had become a disystolic hallucination of tumbling forward into fractal geometric spaces made of light, and then I found myself in the sort of auric equivalent of the Pope's private chapel, and there were insect elf machines proffering strange little tablets with strange writing on them. And I was aghast, completely -- appalled -- because the transition had been a matter of seconds and my entire expectation of the nature of the world was being shredded in front of me. I've never gotten over it.

And it all went on, they were speaking in some kind of -- there were these self-transforming machine-elf creatures -- were speaking in some kind of colored language which condensed into rotating machines that were like Faberge eggs, but crafted out of luminescent super-conducting ceramics, and liquid crystal gels, and all this stuff was so weird, and so alien, and so "un-english-able" that it was a complete shock. I experienced the literal turning inside-out of the intellectual universe and I had come to this -- I thought -- fairly intellectually prepared: A kid, but nevertheless double-Scorpio, art history major, Hieronymus Bosch fan, Moby Dick, William Burroughs.