Podcast 061 – “Creativity and Imagination” (Part 2)

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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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