December 31, 2010

The spark that has the way out of the labyrinth



1983 Santa Cruz, CA: Dynamics of Hyperspace with Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna

pt 1 History is what precedes the entry of a species into hyperspace


Question from the audience: Just assuming that humans are the vanguard of evolution and it's happening to this mutant monkey first and we leave biology behind, what continues to go on on the planet?
There's a whole planet world going on still and there are dolphins evolving towards this kind of escape.
What happens to the plants once we leave the planet?

Ralph) Well, I think the planet is like high-school: every year there's another graduating class. The school looks the same every year, but if you watch the individuals then you see it evolving. If you look at war games, the battle field is always there, but the individuals on it are always different. People grow through these stages of evolution. This planet is one step in a ladder of evolution and devolution.
I think there are two strategies for the growth of the spirit. One is the bottom-up one. This one requires these efforts of the research scientist since the bottom-up one assumes, pessimistically, that the top-down can't work, that telepathy will not be developed fast enough to put individuals in the kind of tight interconnective contact they have to have in order to survive these delicate balances with destruction that Terence has described.
The bottom-up strategy assumes that top-down can't work, so therefore it has to improve the communication of people by constructing computer networks, by tapping energy from the sun and bringing it down, and so on. All of technology is an effort to reach angelhood through material means, while mysticism is an effort to achieve the same goal by expanding peoples' capabilities with psychedelics, by meditation, by teachings from foreign planets, and whatever ...

Terence) You can't live on a planet and have the kinds of powers and ideas which we have because a planet is such a delicate thing. What we dream of is so outlandish and so centered upon ourselves that the only way it can be realized without being Faustian, without destroying us and everything else, is to build it in space.
The human imagination has to be lifted off the surface of the planet for our survival and the survival of the planet. It's like a mother come to term. This baby must now be born.

Ralph) It's an ecological imperative.

Terence) We must leave the womb for the sake of the mother and for the sake of the child.
This great separation, this cleavage, has to happen.


Question: I believe that the human mind is dependent upon a minimum quantity of atoms and that if you had the amount of atoms in a chicken's brain you couldn't make the human mind and that it requires spatial organization, whereas you both imply that the mind came before, that the mind isn't related to the brain. Can you explain this?

Terence) Evidence that numbers of neurons are important is incomplete. The Penfield experiments are the crudest indicators that there is some relationship between neural activity and thought, but what this relationship is has never been shown. A materialist like John Eccles took the position that the mind was something which could initiate quantum-mechanically balanced electron cascades. The mind shunts these one way or another and these events start avalanches of electron cascades which would then become what are measured as crude neural signals. But he actually had to posit an invisible force that could, at least at the level of one electron, push on the physical world. I'm not swayed by the idea that it's been shown what is going on with the relationship of neurons to thought.

Question: But neurons do seem to grow, as imprinting occurs in a chicken, and you do get an increase in mass with the neuron during the imprinting stage.

Terence) The neuronal material has a relationship to thought, but we do not know of what the relationship consists. In other words, does the brain generate thought, or does it receive thought?
Is it a generator, a receiver, or what is it?

Question: Why would the human mind need to exist if it weren't for the human body – the genes?
What would be the point of a human mind without a human body?

Terence) Well, perhaps mind is a generalized term. There may not be human minds and chicken minds, there may simply be mind and one perceives as much of it as one's neural network is able to transduce.

Ralph) The brain is an organ of perception.

Question: Normally when we think of "the millennium", "the omega-point," "the resurrection," we think of fundamentalist religion. How does that fit into the conservatism of most religions.

Terence) I said that the object, the transdimensional object at the end of time, cast a shadow over the three-dimensional landscape of history. Implied in that metaphor is the notion that the shadow is distorted.
I think that all empires and forms of social organization are attempts to get it right. Nobody, not even Hitler and Nero went around saying "I'm just the worst person to ever come down the pike." People always believe they are acting from a clear vision of what is required. But the fact is that the very nature of being in this low-dimensional space makes it very very hard to get it right. That's why the idea of Zen koans, where you are somehow to break out of a system of logic and perceive beyond it, is indicative of that.
I think the thing at the end of time will be a coincidencia oppositorum. It will be a union of opposites. It will not be rationally apprehendable. It will transcend rational apprehendability and, as you know, the British enzymologist, J.B.S. Haldane said: "The universe may not only be stranger than we suppose, it may be stranger than we can suppose." It's that thing which is stranger than we can suppose which is calling us through time toward it, and which we anticipate in visionary, mystical and psychedelic states.

Question: I was wondering ... ever since we've been working with psychedelics we've been receiving guidance as to diet and choice of various things in our life to create an energy coordinate system that changes the dramas and energies that we draw into life.
If we choose a diet, or something that we haven't been channeled, it tends to imbalance the reality.

Ralph) This is the epitome of the top-down way, so that our experience, more or less, extends to all of us. It is a function of ego, I think, to reject guidance which clearly comes [...]

Question: If you think we're going to leave this body or move on from the planet, why are these beings so interested that we become pure enough to channel them, to become part of them? When you take the mushroom or LSD, it means you become part of their energies and that we're able to evolve in this way.
I've been told that they're working toward physical immortality, working toward balancing and energizing all our energy coordinate systems so that they will harmonize. You're actually going to be an ongoing entity that constantly changes in this way, constantly renews itself, constantly goes through a birth/death process?

Ralph) I personally am very pessimistic about our changes for survival to a goal without receiving guidance.
I don't think that the probability of our getting past the nuclear menace is zero. The computer could make a mistake and some chimpanzees actually believe that the planet can survive a limited nuclear war.
Our chances of making it through are dim and so we're pessimistic, but actually our chances of making it through to here were zero without guidance. To me it's a mystery, but the nature of the guidance and the direction in which it's going seems absolutely certain to me, so I'm hungry to take it.

Terence) I would differ with Ralph in that – I'm very optimistic.
I think that the most intelligent form of life on this planet is not the human individual and it is certainly not the social institutions that human individuals have pushed together. The things that make us so strange, that always make it a stumbling block to view ourselves as simply highly evolved monkeys, is the presence on the planet of something which you could call the human overmind. It has its hand on the tiller of history.
No government, no scientific institution, no occult organization is running history. The overmind is running history and it can drop the differential calculus simultaneously on Descartes and Liebnitz, it decides when it's steam engine time and when it's photon engine time. It will pull us through or it will pull something through. But history is a dash. A ten thousand year dash. From the point in time, when you cognize that you could go to the stars, to the point in time when you look back on the receding earth and breathe a sigh of relief and say, "we made it."
It's very tricky, but I think if the overmind didn't exist it would be entirely impossible.

Question: What do you think it is that the overmind is saying?

Terence) You probably know Phil K. Dick's book Valis, where he talks about the mad god.
He isn't the first one to talk about the mad god, and all I can say about that is my deepest intuition is that there may be a mad god. But in the true tradition of Gnosticism, beyond the mad god, beyond the machineries of fate that the mad god has imprisoned us in is the true, higher, hidden god, who cannot signal us at all because we are fallen into the black hole of the mad god. But we have within ourselves a spark of divinity that, if we study it carefully enough, the message – the way out of the labyrinth, is written there.
And once we, entirely by our own efforts, make our way out of the labyrinth, and this means the overmind as well, then the higher and hidden god will be present. But, yes, this universe appears to be as the Gnostics said, the creation of a monstrosity. This universe is a prison of iron. At least that was their view.


Question:
Well, is your idea of an overmind some version of Margolis and Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, and is that healthy?

Terence) I don't believe they think of Gaia as minded and directed as I am saying. They see it as a global system for maintaining meta-stability on the planetary surface. But I actually see it as something which is controlling perturbations, directing developmental processes down certain chains to make things be the way they are.
You see, I can believe the orthodox theory of evolution – the neo-Darwinian theory – except that it seems to me the time scale is preposterous. The theory works on a scale of twenty million years, but we are asked to believe that we came from the trees in half a million years. That's too fast.
If that's true, then there must be a higher governing order because that's too many right choices in a row. It couldn't possibly have happened that fast without it being a non-stochastic process.

Question: You've talked about a ten or fifteen thousand year history on the one hand and, on the other, something is out there pulling us towards the future ... I wonder whether you have considered that there's only one moment of time in which we're inventing both your ten and fifteen thousand year past and that thing that's pulling us towards the future. What we're doing here tonight is exploring ways of getting our heads together so that we project a reality that's a little more compassionate. I don't know any other words.
Perhaps we could make that agreement and not be quite so frightened in that case.

Terence) Well, the psychedelics carry you to the end of time. You discover the secret. You leave history and you experience the secret outside of time. It's what Mircea Eliade calls the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane. I think that's what is so exciting about the psychedelics.
The government can't control the truth, the secret of the future cannot be hidden from people who do it. I don't know if this addresses your question, but it's the only source of optimism, of existential optimism, that I know. I think that Ralph would probably agree.
It affirms that there is a way outside the labyrinth.
It lifts you above so that you can contemplate the topology you were enmeshed in.


Question: We've taken some giant steps because this evening would not have been possible fifty years ago, or twenty years ago even. Something different has happened.

Terence) Language ...

Ralph) I want to reply also ... I'm sorry I've made myself so unclear as to be so completely misunderstood.
I am not pessimistic. What I tried to say and what I want to say is that I would be very pessimistic about our chances of making it on bottom-up evolution without any guidance from the top-down information. However, it is my experience that we have an abundance of this and that many of us here are running one hundred percent on intuition from above. One hundred percent ... many of us. As a matter of fact, I am not pessimistic.

Terence) Psilocybin induces this phenomenon – at the lowest level the strong intuition of what you should do, and at the highest level, the direct verbal order.

Question: In your book you sketch out what you call a quantized modular hierarchy that tries to pinpoint the points in history where all this information floods in from outside the manifold.
I'm wondering since you wrote the book if you have had any further insights into that?
One question I want to ask you, why did you pick 2012? It is also the end of the Mayan calendar.

Terence) Peter Broadwell, who is sitting in the front row, has labored mightily to make the time-wave theory accessible to people. My original reason for choosing the 2012 date was very idiosyncratic. It had to do with temporal distances from the date that the atomic weapons were used on Hiroshima. But once we had this program running well enough that I could see what was happening, I felt that the time-wave gave very good agreement with the historical data. The time-wave maps novelty, coming and going, from historical time. Configure it so that you'd have the zero point in November 2012 – in that case the deepest ingression of novelty before modern times was in that fifty year period in the fifth century B.C., when Lao Tse, Mencius, Ezekiel, and Zoroaster, and Plato were all active. Such a moment! Nothing has been done since except adumbrations of that work. Then, of course, as you mentioned, the end of the Mayan calendar, which is a very, very strong coincidence. The Mayan calendar was right once before. They predicted that on a certain morning on a certain day in a certain year, men would come in white ships and should be treated like gods. And on that morning of that day of that year, the ships of Cortez dropped anchor off the coast of Mexico. We're talking about forces which wrecked a civilization. Are we to believe that the Aztec civilization was wrecked on the basis of a coincidence? It isn't like that. The prophecy was fulfilled. They had good agreement between prophecy and fact, but it set them up psychologically to be conquered in a way that would never have happened had they not had that prediction in their world view. I don't want to get into it in great detail, but I think the modern relationship of science to the flying saucer is approximately at the same level of sophistication as the Mayan astronomers sophistication was to his ability to predict future events. So prophecies do have a way of coming true when you look at civilizations on the scale of millennia, and it usually bodes great change for the society in which it happens.

Question: All the people you mentioned that lived during that time, I've been told that there was a planetary alignment, the same as the kind of planetary alignment that we're experiencing now until 1989 where certain planets are lining up.

Terence) Well, I don't know if what you're saying is true, but it should be true if my theory is correct, because you've got to have agreement in the sky and on the ground. The time-wave that I propagated is only thirty years away from the zero point – this is like approaching a black hole. We have sunk below the event horizon. The Millenarian event has now exerted such hold, the creode is so deep, that it's calling us toward this moment. The walls are so high that there is no way out now. Very definitely we are tidally locked to that future event. The Mayan calendar was a five thousand year cycle and it starts out with everything in a certain configuration and then it returns to that exact configuration on that date. The theory that I developed was a hierarchical wave that can be derived from the I Ching and I derived my fit empirically or, in a sense empirically, by putting the wave against stretches of historical time and asking myself if the wave configuration fit my intuition of how that historical period should be graphed.

Question: I'm not trying to be too materialistic, but I'm really trying to understand your paradigm. If you don't believe the mind is intimately connected to the organization of the brain, why would we bother to ingest a chemical to effect the brain, to effect the mind?

Terence) I didn't say it wasn't intimately connected. I just said perhaps it wasn't generated by it.
For instance, think of a television. It does not generate the signal that it receives but, by making changes in the television, you can certainly change the quality or you can get new channels, or wipe out all channels.
So I see the brain as a receiver and the chemicals as various resistors, tubes, transducers, this and that, which you drop in and then say: "Well, what do we get if we turn to this channel ...?"

Question: But you do believe that you have your religion, whatever your parents told you, inside that brain?

Terence) Perhaps we can have the best of both worlds here. Perhaps there is a small reservoir of personal experience and memory that is actually coded into the wetware of the brain. But one of the things that's always struck me about the psychedelic experience is that if you take the theory of evolution seriously, then you have to say, well, if evolution is an endless economizing of what is good for us in terms of maximizing our survivability, what in the world is all this information doing there that is released by the psychedelic? Why should I see the planets around Zeta Reticuli? Why should I see all this material that cannot be organized by my linguistic faculties? It seems as though the evolution of the organism did not sculpt and strip away the accessibility of that information. It remained accessible because it was actually independent of the organism, consequently the evolution of the organism did not modify or limit that information. Interestingly enough, the same problem can be posed of Tantra. Obviously, evolution economizes the propagation of the species, without that there is no evolution. So why in the world should there be a fantastically transcendent experience that is accessed through the control of ejaculation? In other words, all evolution pushes for that to happen. How can denying ejaculation possibly deliver an important and transcendent experience. Again I would argue that it's because there are fields of information that are not modified and filled or lost according to the evolutionary needs of the species of the individual. These fields, these psychedelic information fields, are there to be perceived in the same way that three-dimensional manifolds are accessible.

Question: Would you say something about exteriorizing the soul, () the body and perhaps something about the balance to strike between these two?

Terence) I think alchemy, in the Western tradition, is the great way, the great metaphor for doing that.
The alchemists in the late phase, fifteenth century forward, were talking about the stone – The Sophic Hydrolith – some kind of thing which was matter but beyond matter. It was exteriorized: it could do anything and yet it was somehow simply material. Yet it had all the properties of thought. When we went to the Amazon in 1971 – the incidents that are written about in The Invisible Landscape – what led us down there were a series of reports about a plant preparation called Ayahuasca which some of you may know about. It is a beta-Carboline DMT combination. There were reports that on Ayahuasca there were shamans who vomited a black fluid that was not visible to anyone except other people who had also taken the plants. We were told that they would vomit this fluid as part of their curing ceremony. They would spread it out on the ground and look into it. It was described as a phosphorescent, obsidian black, translucent material. It was translinguistic matter. It was, as James Joyce says, "all space in a nutshell." There were stars in this stuff ... it was impossible. It was not simply a body fluid in the normal sense, it was actually a product of some kind of metabolic process that you could think of as transdimensional in some sense. One could think of it as a psychedelic molecule that had its trip on the outside of itself so that to look upon it is to see the psychedelic phenomenology unfolding. But it was liquid and not fixed. Our idea was that if this had any objective reality to it at all, then alchemical metaphors could be brought to bear on it. Our goal was to fix this translinguistic material.
It is essentially one's mind exteriorized, it has one's name written on it. If you need to take a shower, you just stretch it out over your head and water comes out of it. If you're hungry, you eat it. If you need to go somewhere, you sit on it and it takes you there. If you need to know something, you ask it and it tells you.
It is something which we have a great deal of trouble conceiving of because it violates all our notions of category. But something like this will come. The fact that it can be experienced in the psychedelic state seems to indicate that it is only in the imagination. That means that all that is necessary to experience it in three-dimensional space is for one to be in the imagination. Then it will be found not only to exist but to be a microcosm which is mirroring a macrocosm, which is also in the imagination. It's a way to cosmicize the self and yet realize it as an object which you can wear as a bead around your neck or put in your pocket or carry in your mouth.

Question: I wonder if psilocybin ever told you where it came from?
I know in the forword to your magic mushroom book there's a wonderful quote from the mushrooms.

Ralph) Which was a discussion we had the day we met ...

Terence) That's right. I don't believe everything the mushroom says. I don't think you can believe anything anybody says or all that anybody says. My brother was telling me just recently that psilocybin is, I believe he said, the only four hydroxylated indole which occurs in nature. Well, that's very interesting. That single fact right there seems to me to make good grist for an empirical argument that this gene was inserted into Earth's ecology from outside. How else could it be that the only four hydroxylated indole in nature could be associated with this organism? Psilocybin occurs in a number of mushroom species, but they are all fairly closely related.
It seems to me the whole problem of extra-terrestrial intelligence has been ill conceived. The scientists have been allowed to make the rules of the game and their rules are very self-limiting. The current, rather primitive state of molecular biology is already talking about taking control of the genetic code and genetic engineering and that sort of thing.
Obviously, once that's done, once a species discovers how to do that, its form is no longer dictated by the evolutionary constraints of its planet of origin. Its form is dictated by imagination.
If a species wanted to radiate through the galaxy and was searching for contact with other minded species, a good approach would be to create a probe which is more biology than technology. After travelling a given distance, say one astronomical unit or something like that, this probe replicates itself into four and then, as these probes move out from each other at a certain astronomical distance, they replicate again. What you get is an expanding sphere of probes, but the number of probes is increasing as the sphere grows in size. When any one of these probes contacts a world where there is the potential for the evolution of minded beings, a gene is tailor-made or is already in existence in the programming of this bio-mechanical probe, and it inserts that gene into an organism or set of organisms that can be seen to have already occupied their ecological niche, so they are not going to undergo radical evolution. The fungi are in this category. If you want to write a message to someone, the pyramids are six thousand years old and they're wearing away. The only slate you can write on and hope to have your message last over tens of millions of years ...

Ralph) A self-replicating one.

Terence) Yes, a von Neumann machine. The DNA will carry a gene along for hundreds of millions of years, unmodified – the morphogenetic field. So then when this psychoactive molecule is taken by a primitive human group, shamanism emerges. Shamanism is about predicting game movement and weather on the functional level.
In hunting and gathering groups, this is what the shamans' prognostications consist of, because these are the only future events that matter. Movement of game and weather, this information is being fed into the ecology from the probe – the part of the probe which remained somewhere else in the ecology.
I don't know if psilocybin throws open the door to contact with a minded species like that, but it seems to me highly possible. At the level of fifteen milligrams, which is usually five dried grams or so of mushrooms, the phenomenon of an organized entelechy, a voice speaking with greater knowledge than you or your subconscious possess, is very marked.

I began this evening by talking about how the Freudian and Jungian maps were inadequate. I was just edging up on this matter. For Freud and Jung a voice in the head was pure psychopathology. I am saying that beyond their model there is the voice in the head which is, simply, the contact with this sophisticated entity. It's non-technological, you know. This is another unsettling thing. It doesn't come in enormous ships at hyperlight speed. No, it radiated through the stars by the slow pressure of radiation. The spore itself is one of the hardest organic materials known and has an electron density close to that of metals.
Imagine the mushroom shedding the spores which then, by Brownian motion, percolate to the top of the atmosphere of a planet. As they pass through the outer levels of the atmosphere of a planet, there is a lot of electrostatic charge present, and they pick up what are called global currents, which initiate electron flow over the spherical surface of the spore. These global currents become, perhaps, superconducting.
At that point the imperviousness of the spore to radiation is such that it has no trouble surviving the drift between the stars, even if it has to lay dormant for millions of years. And millions of years is an unnecessary amount of time. The earth goes around the galaxy every 275,000 years. There is great percolation of material in the galaxy.

I will anticipate a revolution in biology right here by making a prediction which will be obvious to everyone in this room, but which no biologist has ever said: Outer space is only a barrier to species drift, no more a barrier to species drift than oceans are. All of the processes of drift and establishment of new populations on desert islands that we're familiar with in earth-based ecology happen on a galactic scale. The galaxy is an organized bio-system.
It's simply that the species which developed the strategies which allow them to drift across the galaxy are either minded and do it as we propose at our current level of civilization to do it, with ships and suspended animation and the whole gamut of science fiction techniques, or biology can carry a species to it another way by creating a spore-bearing organism. Or it may be that once the mushroom was a monkey, but it decided to repackage itself as a mushroom because that was a more viable evolutionary strategy when the galaxy is viewed as the biome that one wishes to populate rather than the surface of a planet. Let's call a halt. Thank you very much.

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