Psychedelic Salon

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake

PROGRAM NOTES:

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

05:40 Terence McKenna: "Going back to this thing about language,

you get this same peculiar emphasis on language and letters in the esoteric doctrine that surrounds the chakras."

06:57 Terence:

"Linearity in print conferred upon language an inability to deal with the invisible world in any meaningful way, and so it just became pathology, but now it’s returning, and people such as ourselves who have one foot in each world have a real obligation to cognize this and move it forward."

09:55 Ralph Abraham: "There is very little discussion of the intelligent

science, mythology, and so on of these 100-, 200-, 300-thousand B.C., what is going on during these previous interglacials, and it could be that there was agriculture. There would be no way to rule that out."

15:30 Rupert Sheldrake: "If that’s possible [communicating with a star entity], what kind of information would such beings impart?"

17:27 Ralph:

"Myth is from mythos. Mythos meant the lyrics, the words of the song from the rituals. Myth gained the power it now has in our conscious and unconscious life through its secondary role in the ritual. The ritual and the myth together, I think, is one of the most important things for us to regain."

19:11 Ralph:

"Peace [in Crete], I think, was not produced by just a partnership paradigm in a lucky society to have escaped the bad habits of the dominator paradigm. There was also the conscious interaction with the peaceful initiative of the celestial sphere in bringing peace down."

22:12 Terence:

"I think when you go to the edges . . . then you discover there is an extremely rich flora and fauna in the imagination that has simply been ignored because our tendency has always been to look inward, to build inward, and to turn our backs on the raging ocean of phenomenon around us that entirely overwhelms our metaphors."

25:02 Rupert:

"The spirit of Satan is the spirit of self-sufficiency, of being in charge, and the spirit of denial of the whole other realm. . . . So the guiding spirit of modern science, according to the Faust myth, is a demon. It’s in fact a Satanic demon, a fallen angel, Mephistopheles. . . . How seriously does one need to take the idea that our whole society and civilization may be under the possession of such a spirit, worship through money?"

28:34 Rupert:

"If we take seriously these entities, how much can we admit the possibility that there are these malevolent entities, like Mammon or Satanic powers or fallen angles, which are actually guiding and perverting the progress of science and technology?"

30:50 Terence:

"Probably the process of civilization is going to reveal the final status of this shadow within us."

36:12 Ralph:

"I think we need the Gaian, and we need the Chaotic, that is the celestial sphere, to be re-connected, to be coupled, to the human spirit . . . that is the ultimate partnership."

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Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake

PROGRAM NOTES:

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

02:24 Terence McKenna: "When you start looking at the question of

these disincarnate entities, the first thing that strikes you is their persistence in human experience and folklore. This is not something unusual or statistically rare."

07:57 Terence:

"The eradication of spirit from the visible world has been a project prosecuted with great zeal concomitant with the rise of modern science."

10:01 Terence:

"If we examine the history of early modern science, we discover that some of the major movers and shakers were in fact being guided and directed in the formulation of early science by disincarnate entities."

12:59 Terence:

"The aversion to the irrational is something that science inherited from Christianity."

17:59 Ralph Abraham: "I think it was in 879 in the council of Byzantium

that spirit was made illegal, and then we went from three to two, so there’s only body and soul . . . and this is, I think, the reason why no one knows the difference between spirit and soul and thinks that they’re the same."

21:01 Terence:

"Did you know that the dogma of purgatory, in Christian theology, was not created by theologians in Rome. It was created by Saint Patrick in an effort to make Christian doctrine more commiserate with Celtic folk beliefs in the process of converting Ireland to Christianity?"

22:12 Terence:

"The major tool for contacting these entities in any kind of controllable fashion is psychedelic compounds, especially DMT and the tryptamines. And those sort of experiences seem to line up pretty well with the Celtic fokelore."

27:37 Terence:

"The irrational, in this objectified form, is very active in the process that we call history. It’s just that we don’t like to admit that because we’re committed to an official philosophy of reason and casuistry."

33:57 Rupert Sheldrake: "The realm of our dreams is a personal nightly journeying into these realms of other entities."

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Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake

PROGRAM NOTES:

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

05:38 Ralph Abraham: "It does seem very attractive to think of

the electromagnetic field as some kind of favored intermediary among all the physical fields."

07:41 Rupert Sheldrake: "There’s this mystery of light. I still

think Maxwell’s electromagnetic formulations of light are much too simple."

10:56 Ralph:

"I think that we ought to think about the possibility that this effect [the paranormal] will not be confirmed in laboratories."

15:39 Rupert:

"There is some sense in which our imagination, our image-making facility, is self-luminous."

25:54 Ralph:

"We have therefore in our individual consciousness a particular affinity with the electromagnetic field . . . as epitomized by vision."

30:41 Terence McKenna: "Why is divine omniscience a necessary concept?

Can’t the universe get along just being partially aware of what’s going on? . . . What problems are solved by hypothesizing that notion?"

33:36 Rupert:

"I find it more reasonable to find that our minds are in touch with larger minds and are in many ways shaped by larger mental systems."

33:57 Terence:

"The mind of the whole universe seems unnecessary to hypothesize and unlikely to be encountered."

45:14 Rupert:

"I think that the cosmic mind may be largely unconscious because I think that most things that happen in the cosmos are habitual and therefore unconscious."

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Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake

PROGRAM NOTES:

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

04:52 Rupert Sheldrake begins a discussion about light.

10:55 Rupert

"What kind of influence could be moving outward through the eyes as part of the image-forming perceptive process, and in this outward projection in some sense project the image we see, the image we see is part of this outward flux."

14:17 Terence McKenna begins his commentary on Rupert’s ideas about light, expanding them into the realm of imagination.

21:08 Ralph Abraham challenges Terence and Rupert on some of their points.

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Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake

PROGRAM NOTES:

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

02:29 Terence McKenna:

"The ego is essentially paranoia institutionalized."

03:53 Ralph Abraham:

Considers the possibility that ego became strengthened when psychedelic usage became less frequent.

05:29 Terence:

Talks about a "psychedelic rebirth."

08:15 Terence:

"A calendrical reform would be a wonderful thing, and I have just the calendar all worked out."

09:48 Terence:

"It’s an effort to deny man’s mortality, this solar calendar. It’s reinforcing a false notion of permanence, and what we actually want is a calendar that says ‘all is flow, all is flux, all relationships are in motion to everything else. It’s a truer picture of the world."

13:22 Rupert Sheldrake:

Comments on the fact that the Islamic calendar fits the definition of Terence’s suggested calendar.

16:22 Rupert:

"One of the things that’s clear is that chaos is feminine, and creation out of chaos is like the creation out of the womb, coming out of darkness."

20:56 Terence:

"I think it’s the notion of as above so below." . . . "In talking about these things you can’t force closure."

22:14 Ralph:

Explains how the painting in the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe (the black virgin) is actually a representation of the goddess chaos.

26:19 Terence:

Explains how the Faustian pact with the physical world that humans have made by adopting the "deadly cultural forms" of written language, moveable type, etc. have had a negative impact on our self-image. . . . "In the absence of this boundary-dissolving ecstasies, and replacing that with the machinations and plottings of the ego leads very, very quickly into a cultural cul de sac. . . . This was the wrong-turning."

29:15 Terence:

Explains the difference between dominator and partnership.

33:17 Terence:

"You cannot trust the dominator style not to go psychotic here at the end." . . . "Who is it who has the power to pry the dead fingers of the dominator culture from the instrumentality of power?" . . . "Everyone should understand this, that chaos provides opportunity for commandos of the new persuasion to rush forward and jam vital machinery of the dominator metaphor."

39:14 Terence:

Discusses the question of whether there can be consciousness without an object.

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Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake

PROGRAM NOTES:

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

02:29 Ralph Abraham: "So I should like now to speak about the chaos

of ordinary life and the relationship of this chaos to the imagination."

05:41 Ralph:

"Chaos, Gaia, and Eros are the gods, or concepts, of the primitive types."

13:56 Ralph:

"People have a resistance to their own creative imagination, and I’m suggesting that this resistance has a mythological base."

20:55 Terence McKenna: "Chaos is feminine. Chaos is intuitional. Chaos has a very flirtatious relationship with language."

22:16 Terence:

"The birthright that connects us to the divine is our poetic capacity, our ability to resonate with an idea of ideal beauty and to create that which transcends our own understanding in the form of art through the imagination." . . . "We have a secret history. Knowledge of which has been lost to us and only now is recoverable . . . " . . . "We are the victims of an instance of traumatic abuse in childhood as a species."

24:34 Terence:

"Once we lived in dynamic balance with nature, not as animals do, but as human beings only could but in a way that we have now lost." . . . and then he explains what it is that we have lost and how it was lost.

27:46 Terence:

"There are certain episodes in the life of a female which are guaranteed to be boundary dissolving."

29:00

Terence: "The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is the ability to accept an inherent messiness in your explanation of what’s going on." . . . "For me, the creative act is the letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and the attempt to bring out of it ideas."

32:37 Terence:

"For me the imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams."

37:30 Terence:

"There will come a moment which will be an absolute leap into space, and we will simply have to have the faith that there is something waiting there, because the dominator style has left us no choice."

45:01 Terence:

"Fear it is that guards the vineyard." . . . "So the fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control."

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Guest speaker: Sheldon Norberg

PROGRAM NOTES:

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

02:40 News of a Mexican informant for the DEA who committed murder while wearing a wire for the U.S.

05:30 Reminiscences of (and synchronicities at) Burning Man 2006

08:15 Discussion about Sheldon’s book, Confessions of a Dope Dealer

10:44 How Sheldon got into the dope dealing business

18:24 Using cannabis is a socializing ritual for young people

24:25 On being un-comfortably numb and doing work with psychedelics

31:08 Do most heavy users eventually reach a point where they move from using psychedelics primarily for pleasure to using them primarily for a studied expansion of their own consciousness?

34:36 Psychedelics are astronomically more powerful and completely different from alcohol

36:40 The "Third I" theory of tripping

43:38 Living in tripland isn’t always beneficial

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Links:

Sheldon Norberg – Progressive Drug Educator

"Confessions of a Dope Dealer"

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake

PROGRAM NOTES:

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

02:14 Ralph Abraham: Takes issue with McKenna’s and Sheldrake’s interpretation of chaotic attractors. . . . To a mathematician, the word ‘attractor’ does not necessarily imply attraction.

07:23 Rupert Sheldrake:

"But Newtonian physics and the triumph of the mechanistic system, in my opinion, only works because what it was seeking to deny was introduced into it by a kind of subterfuge and pretended that this was a mechanical principle whereas it was something else."

09:37 Ralph:

"The idea of two dimensional time could aid us here." . . . The problem with the teleological approach is that the cause is in the future.

10:54 Ralph:

"The more interesting idea is to make a model for evolution itself." . . . "The determinant of evolution [in the case being discussed] is the free will in the moment as the collective action of the citizens in the present."

13:24 Rupert:

… discuses the concept of morphic attractors as a way of dealing with the fact that somehow, in the present, the person, etc. is subject to the influence of a potential future state that hasn’t yet come into being. "But that future state is what directs and guides and attracts the development of the present system."

14:26 Terence McKenna:

"Well, this is all very interesting." . . . "The modeling task, ne plus ultra, is history. This is where you’re no longer playing a little game to demonstrate something to a group of students or colleagues." . . . "I think the whole reason history has bogged down in the 20th century is because of the absence of belief in an attractor."

20:31 Terence:

"Our cultural phase transition that we are going through, vis a vie machines, may signify that we are not, as I have always thought, very close to the maximized state of novelty, but that we’re out there somewhere in the middle of that wave . . . "

22:41 Rupert:

"I think there’s a very big difference between spoken language and written language."

25:16 Ralph:

"Well, I imagine, just to be contrary, that mathematics preceded not only writing, but mathematics probably preceded language as well." . . . "We could reach a point where we had models that were decent in some sense to aid us in the understanding of complex social relationships."

33:06 Terence:

"[Ralph] do you still cling to the mathematical proof of the impossibility of monogamy?"

34:16 Terence: "And in a way that’s what I see the three of us and others mentionable as doing. We’re trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy where it’s such a good idea that it will act as an attractor, and the world will move toward that form."

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Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake

PROGRAM NOTES:

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

01:23 Ralph Abraham: A short primer on chaos theory. . . . The emergence of form from a field of chaos.

08:57 Rupert Sheldrake:

"The problem I have with chaos theory . . . " The issue of indeterminacy in the real world. . . . The illusion of total predictability. . . . Indeterminacy may exist not just at the quantum level but at all levels of natural organization. . . . How form arises from chaos. . . . In some sense, energy may be seen as an agent of change.

21:24 Rupert:

The question of how do new fields, new forms, come into being in the first place? Where do they come from? . . . The nature of the mathematical realm, the formative realm. Is there a kind of mathematical realm before the universe, somehow beyond space and time. [lozo: he goes on a kind of Olaf Stapelton riff] . . .

26:04 Rupert:

"The view that I want to consider is that the world soul, or the world imagination, makes up these forms as it goes along, that there isn’t, out there, a kind of mathematical mind already fixed or already full."

28:40 Ralph:

"I think that with mathematics we can make a model for anything." . . . "Mathematics could be regarded simply an extension of language. . . . Words, I think, are frequently inadequate."

34:18 Ralph:

"But the truth is this theory can be used to model everything. So it never settles any questions as to the origin of things or the true nature of ordinary reality."

37:40 Rupert:

"Are the fields of reality more real than the models we use to model them with. Or is there a kind of mathematics yet more fundamental the fields?"

38:57 Ralph:

What mathematics means to me . . . a description of the mathematical landscape. . . . "Mathematics is the supreme tool for the extension of our language for dealing with complex systems."

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake

PROGRAM NOTES:

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

01:34 Rupert Sheldrake:

"It’s like the creative process is like the welling up of new forms." . . . "I think in our own case the one model for this is dreams." . . . "It seems almost impossible to have an expected dream." . . . "Our imagination is also released through psychedelics, in its extreme form." . . . "Is there a kind of Gaian dreaming taking place on the night side of the planet?"

05:03 Terence McKenna: "I think a Gaian dream would be human history." . . . "It [the psychedelic experience] seems rather to be an ontological reality of its own that the human being has simply been privileged to briefly observe." . . . "To my mind, the imagination is the source of all creativity."

07:53 Rupert: "So do you think that the psychedelic experience is then the tapping into the Gain imagination?"

08:02 Terence: "Absolutely, and I think psychedelic experiences and dreams are different only in degree." . . . "Imagine in hindsight the wisdom we would impute to Gaia if we were to suddenly realize that what is happening on this planet is that nature knows that the sun is going to explode.". . . Perhaps our species has been called forth to organize an escape. . . . "The Gaian mind is a real mind, and its messages are real messages, and our task . . . is to try and extract this message…"

14:54 Rupert: "The question for me is this . . . how is the Gaian imagination related to the solar system, and how is the solar system’s imagination related to the imagination of the galaxy . . . ?"

15:21 Terence: "Well, I’m not sure I want to follow you into the cosmic Christ." . . . "I think there should always be some physical stuff to hang these things on." . . . "There are enough places in the solar system where there is enough complex chemistry that I can imagine these very large, self-reflecting entelechies to get going over billions of years."

17:41 Rupert: "I think a factor that changes everything is the discovery of dark matter. . . . This recent discovery effectively tells us the whole cosmos and every material thing in it has a kind of unconscious."

18:34 Terence: "I assume that psychedelics change your channel [of the imagination] . . . to a channel which is playing the classical music of an alien civilization . . . " . . . "Appearances are merely the local slice of the divine imagination."

29:26 Terence: "A new phenomenon has been discovered in the universe, which is its drawing togetherness, its tendency towards cohesion, its tendency to move toward greater and greater states of wholeness, and not incrementally but in sudden highly punctuated stages that allow phenomenon like history or the 20th century to come into being. These are great leaps forward that nature pushes toward." . . . "We each have our own apocalypse, and so I think we should live life in anticipation of it."

32:02 Terence: "I think probably self-reflection arose fairly early in the history of the Earth, and that the Earth is a minded, integrated kind of entity. . . . The planet thinks. It perceives."

35:05 Rupert: "The Earth is alive, and it involves some kind of organizing principle." . . . What kind of consciousness, then, does it have? . . . "Does Gaia have dreams and imaginings?"

42:24 Terence: "Language seems to be seeking to decouple itself from matter." . . . "This now is apparently the only way we can keep from destroying the planet, is by literally going off into the imagination, which is not a dimension of the physics of space and time, it’s actually a syntactical dimension." . . . "For my money, language is on a journey to the eternal imagination through the process of creativity, having begun in chaos and having a kind of inevitable end in chaos more properly re-visioned, re-met, re-understood.

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