Psychedelic Salon 228-230
Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna
1998 Trialogue (3 parts)

PROGRAM NOTES:

âThe development of current brain size is not the reason that there has been this explosion of technical innovation recently. Brain size hasnât changed much for 100,000 years.â -Rupert Sheldrake

âItâs much more likely that for most of human history it was not man the huntER but man the huntED. ⦠It wasnât until about 50,000 years ago that there was an improvement in hunting technologies all around the world, whereby human beings could indeed become fairly effective hunters. But for most of the three and a half million years of hominid history it was man the huntED.â -Rupert Sheldrake

âThe shaman is a person, a designated member of the social group, who can mentally change into an animal, who can become so animal-like that other members of the social group are appalled and draw back.â -Terence McKenna

âThe domain in which the change [from animal to human] was born, and in which we will live until we leave the body behind us, is the domain of the imagination. And this is what we created that is uniquely human and that has defined us ever since.â -Terence McKenna

âYou donât need to go straight beyond the universe to the divine mind, thereâs plenty of lower-level minds than the divine mind that could be out there.â -Rupert Sheldrake

âMy notion of the mystical is simply that which remains to be understood, and there will always be a residuum of mystery in principle, but in principle it is not mysterious.â -Terence McKenna [Rupert disagreed with this.]

âThe idea that this evolutionâs equipped us with minds, and language, and cognitive abilities that enable us to comprehend the entire universe, where itâs come from, where itâs going, what minds and mind may lie beyond what we see, the idea that this very small part of the evolutionary system, with all the limitations inherent in it, could comprehend the whole seems to me a rather improbable supposition.â -Rupert Sheldrake

âItâs not decided whatâs going to happen next, there are imaginations of many levels, including human imaginations, at work here, looking at alternative possibilities. New things happen, and then what happens next depends on whatâs happened already and the new possibilities of imagination that open up, but without the goal being fixed in advance.â -Rupert Sheldrake

â[Evolution] is a game, one of the rules of which is: The rules can change.â -Terence McKenna

âTime is not a tyranny. Itâs a relativistic medium subject to all kinds of plasticity. There are many ways out of any assumed corner we paint ourselves into.â -Terence McKenna

PART 2:

âBecause of this fact, that clear thinking can be mathematically formalized, there is a potential bridge between ourselves and calculating machinery.â

âGood thinking, whether youâve ever studied mathematics for a moment or not, can be formally defined.â

âWhat is important about nature is that it is information. And the real tension is not between matter and spirit, or time and space, the real tension is between information and nonsense.â

âAs our understanding of the machinery, the genetic machinery that supports organic being deepens, and as our ability to manipulate at the atomic and molecular level also proceeds apace, we are on the brink of the possible emergence of some kind of alien intelligence of a sort we did not anticipate.â

âVast amounts of the world that we call human is already under the control of artificial intelligences, including very vital parts of our political and social dynamo.â

âWhile weâve been waiting for the Palaidians to descend, or for the Face on Mars to be confirmed, all the machines around us, the cybernetic devices around us in the past ten years have quietly crossed the threshold into telepathy.â

â[Artificial intelligence,] this most bizzare and most unexpected of all companions to our historical journey is now, if not already in existence, then certainly in gestation.â

âTime is defined by how much goes on in a given moment, and weâre learning how to push tetraflops of operations into a given second.â

âSurely in a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years we, if we exist, will be utterly unrecognizeable to ourselves, and we will probably still be worried about preserving and enhancing the quality of human values.â

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Ralph Abraham.]

âThe very fact that we are at a hinge of history means that what we say and think, even individually, matters enormously in the long run. Thatâs the teaching, if there is any, of chaos theory.â

âIn the creation of societies it was altruism, essentially, that was involved in going from where we were to where we are, and it could well be that without love, for example, further evolution is impossible.â

PART 3:

âWho would talk about the evolutionary mind? Who cares about the good and evil in the evolution of species, and so on? This must be interesting only to the degree to which it informs us in this very present moment regarding our choices that we will make in the creation of our future.â -Ralph Abraham

âIn a dynamical system, or a massively complex dynamical system such as we live in, when there is a moment of bifurcation, which is the technical mass jargon for âthe snapâ, that is the only time you get to do anything about the evolution of the system. So according to this self-inflating view, we live at an especially important special moment in history where when we think something or do something it has actually an enormous effect on the future. ⦠What we do has some influence on the creation of the future more than at other times in history.â -Ralph Abraham

âThe edge of the millennium, any edge of any of the millennia, is particularly important to those revolutionary souls who want to make a change in things. It is a special time.â -Ralph Abraham

âSalvation is an act of cognitive apprehension.â -Terence McKenna

âThis is a moment of enormous opportunity, and those who find themselves in this moment with power, defined however you care to define it, have a moral obligation to act. ⦠What we must become is clear.â -Terence McKenna

âTo the degree that we can change our minds we will escape extinction.â -Terence McKenna

âIf you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity youâre going to end up with business as usual. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it is not paved with clarity.â -Terence McKenna

âI certainly agree that for me personally, psychedelic experience has enhanced clarity, whereas some people think the opposite.â -Ralph Abraham

âI think that grass root research, based on phenomena that are actually common sense, that are part of everyday life for many people, could help to wake us up, to give a greater clarity about whatâs really going on, and make us recognize that thereâs far more interconnection between us and other species, and us and other people, than is admitted in the scientific view of things, which is the world view which most people feel they have permission to talk about in public.â -Rupert Sheldrake

âWhat weâre saying is that we must dissolve the artificial boundaries that confine our perceptions. Someone once said, âIf we could feel what we are doing to the Earth we would stop immediately.â . . . So we have compartmentalized our lives, and this allows us to do the fateful and lethal work that is destroying the planet, destroying communities, and so forth.â -Terence McKenna

âCulture is a scheme for maintaining and creating boundaries. It replaces reality with a linguistically supported delusion.â -Terence McKenna

âAs long as we believe in mind and matter, rich and poor, living and dead, aboriginal and advanced, black and white, man and woman, then weâre inevitably going to carry on a dualistic analysis of our dilemma, and weâre going to produce incomplete agendas and answers.â -Terence McKenna

âThe great evil that has been allowed to flourish in the absence of mathematical understanding is relativism. And what is relativism? Itâs the idea that there is no distinction between shit and Shinola. That all ideas are somehow operating on equal footing.â -Terence McKenna

âThe enemy that will really subvert the enterprise of building a world based on clarity is the belief that we cannot point out the pernicious forms of idiocy that flourish in our own community.â -Terence McKenna

âYes, well it is an ambitious enterprise, and fraught with contradiction, but forward, ever forward!â -Terence McKenna

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