The Universe Makes Diamonds

What if the cultural chaos of these times was part of a natural process, just as when nature turns coals into diamonds from the intense pressure? As philosopher Henri Bergson has famously said, is the “universe a machine for making gods?” Are we in a mechanistic universe or is there something more? Is consciousness itself generated in the brain or received as part of a larger emanation underpinning all things? If so, where does consciousness come from? What IS it, anyway? Can its bandwidth be shaped? Indigenous culture see consciousness in all things, and understand it fluctuates in the cyclic time of World Ages. Are all species on earth receivers for the consciousness broadcast, and how do plant and earth entheogens alter our consciousness to receive this signal?

So this talk is called the “Universe Makes Diamonds”, which I think is pretty spiffy title. And we'll get into that in a moment, but the reason I wanted to do this particular talk at this particular event and at this time in our culture and in late or early 21st century and late Babylonian times, is that everything seems to be hitting the fan.

And I really wanted to sort of address that and to look at well, what's hitting the fan? Why is it hitting the fan? And what is the fan? What can we do about it? What should we do about it? You know, can we just surrender to it? It seems to be that the universe or the tide of events that we're all going through it at this crucial juncture seems to be putting a lot of pressure on us, an incredible amount of pressure on a localized level individually, whether that's manifested in people's relationships or people's jobs or people's micro-level lives, or in a macro level with culture, or with a macro level with the planet herself.

It seems to me that there's an enormous amount of change coming and we're witnessing and living through it, but that herald of change is pressure, is this intense times that we're living in. So a bit of the riff about the title of the “Universe Makes Diamonds” is sort of, of course, you probably know that diamonds are made through intense pressure. It takes millions and millions of years of incredible density of pressure for the universe and the natural systems within that to turn coal into diamonds. And so I'm hoping that there's some similar type of alchemical process at work with us, because that would make things worthwhile with all this pressure we’re going through.

So it brings up the obvious topic. I mean, what is the universe? And also, you know, what is consciousness, what is this process at work that the universe is perhaps working through to put this pressure on us, and how does it all self-regulate and how does it all come to bear?

So from my experiences and from, I guess, a lot of people who had thought about this throughout history–and it's not just a thinking, it's an experiential type of experience. It's like a knowing–a gnosis was one of the terms for it. It's an ability to connect and to feel spirit at work; it's to feel that there's something greater than us in the sum of our parts going on in nature, in the processes that we're embedded in, and that we live in.

So if there is a universal intelligence behind things, orchestrating things, it appears to be, well, a hard taskmaster sometimes, but a loving taskmaster, and things seem to be orchestrated for our greatest good, or so I believe. So before the 21st century and the early 20th century, and in the late 19th century, there was a spiritualist movement. There was a wave of intellectualism and a wave of experientialism and a wave of people thinking and researching for themselves, the idea of spirit and the idea of philosophies.

A lot of things evolved rapidly in Western culture at that time and were sort of living in the legacy of those early eras. And one of the philosophers that I came across in my research is called Henri Bergson. And you might know this quote; he has a famous quote from one of his books. He wrote in 1907, the book was called Creative Evolution, and he's a French philosopher. And his quote was “the universe is a machine for making gods.” It's a very bold statement. And these days, I think we would probably have a little bit of a wrinkle with the word machine because we're getting beyond the mechanistic sort of idea of things, but in the early 20th century, when he came up with that phrase, it was a very potent meme that he released into the culture at the time.

And it was basically one of the first waves of this understanding that we're not just in an environment that we can rape, pillage and plunder, that we can use all the resources, as the post-Victorian era did when they needed to build the “black iron prison”–all the cities and all the ways that we live now. But the universe is, and nature herself is alive and is an organism. And it's a very bold statement that to this day, a lot of people in the mainstream sciences would not stand by.

Here's some more detail about Henry Bergson. He believed that there was a living force, a drive to evolution, you know, an energy behind the, the wire frame of reality, that that was orchestrating things. He called this, this force, the Elan Vital, or the vital essence. It's very similar to a lot of other ideologies where you have animism or this idea that there's, you know an essence in things, a spirit in things. But coming in the post-Victorian era, it was one of the first waves of this resurgence of this idea of spirit.

So he considered that the Elan Vital and this idea of the vital essence was basically the thing which would manifest itself in the world. And in that manifestation, there was a process that he also called novelty–and novelty is a term I actually came across from Terence McKenna. And a lot of his ideas actually come from some of these early 20th century, late 19th century philosophers. There was quite a lot of them at the time: there was Henri Bergson, there was William James who we'll get to in a bit, there was Richard Maurice Buck. There was quite a few different intellectuals and philosophers all working on these different ideas of what the world was and why it worked as it did.

So in the late 19th century, early 20th century the dominant ideology was still promulgating this idea of a mechanistic universe, basically a clockwork universe that things could be explained and they could be measured. They could be really boiled down and reduced to a formula, you know, and so this idea of a mechanistic world really came out of the Victorian era. But it doesn't really allow for the depth of experience and for what's really going on in a world that's full of spirit.

So now we come to the idea of what is the universe? If it is a spirit laden entity, if it is this “machine” idea, which again is a Victorian-era concept, and I'll get to a few modern terminologies and concepts for what we would probably describe it as now…  On the screen behind me, you can see some pictures that I've taken off the internet. But you can see the similarity. We've got in the top left-hand quadrant there a swirling galaxy, and you'll see that the swirl of the galaxy curls round in a clockwise direction, in the same way, basically that some of the other pictures do. The one on the top right-hand side is a hurricane off the coast of, it looks like north America. And that's going in a certain direction, but it's still the same swirl and it's following the same motion of events. But it's not just in those natural systems going to the current that they're in there.

[This patterning] is also embedded in a genetic level. And even maybe beyond that on some spirit level, on some template level. [For instance]: we see here in the plants, the curl of the plants, and in the other one here, it's the same pattern. And, you know, there's different ideas about this. There's the law of symmetry, the Doctrine of Signatures and things which we know are embedded within nature [like the Fibonacci sequence] which build up the template of what could be into what becomes and how novelty goes through the process of actualizing – and why do things become something versus being nothing at all?

If we're trying to figure out if there is a universal system at work and it is working upon us at this time, it's trying to figure out why? Why is it all like it is? Well there's a famous physicist called Freeman Dyson who was, was writing and working in the 20th Century. It's a bit of a long quote here.

He says: “It is a scientific fact that our universe is strangely hospitable to the growth of life and intelligence. Many details of the laws of physics and chemistry seemed to conspire to make our universe and the chemical forces to make our universe. If the chemical forces had been slightly different, life as we know it could never have evolved. Our form of life was able to adapt to the universe in which it originated, but there is no way in which any form of life could have adapted itself to a universe that collapsed into a fiery space-time singularity before it had given birth to stars and planets.” 

And here’s another quote from Paul Davis who was a late 20th century physicist, and he's still alive now. Davis said in his book, The Goldilocks Enigma:  “Somehow the universe has engineered, not just its own awareness, but also its own comprehension. Mindless, blundering, atoms have conspired to make not just life, but also understanding. The evolving cosmos has spawned beings who are not able to merely watch the show, but to also unravel the plot.”

I mean, it's a miracle, it's a miracle by any other name and, you know, the physicist and the reductionist and the mechanistic universe people who are still in that small box of Cartesian reality–I think they're feeling the box fraying. I think they know that things are changing, but it's outside the box. It's the great unknown. So the 20th Century also spawned the idea of quantum physics, which has often bandied about, but it's still an enigma to many people to, to physicists themselves. Einstein grappled with a lot of the projections of quantum physics and the results that he himself and other physicists figured out. Like you know, he refused to believe that God could play dice with the universe. He wouldn't believe that no matter what the math said, that that could be real. There was this ego in place which denied what was really going on.

But one of the interesting things about quantum physics is that it has this whole idea that the universe is interconnected. David Bohm is this physicist who had an idea of the “unfolding order”. And he said the universe is perhaps a bit like a hologram that it's projected like a hologram is projected onto a film or a canvas, from some extra dimensional reality, like some deeper reality. And that the whole world, or the whole universe is a projection of moving parts from what he called the “Implicate”. And this is the “Explicate.” This is where everything has become what it is and what we see here now. But there's a higher level reality. And this is physics. Obviously, you know, it dovetails and it parallels a lot of philosophies and religions as well. So there's been this marrying of ideas and streams of thought which are all coming to the same conclusion, which is sort of the death knell for the Western mechanistic universe.

So Einstein's General Theory of Relativity suggested that both time and space are not separate, but are in fact, parts of a larger continuum. Bohm went further than Einstein, saying that everything in the universe is part of this continuum and that on the Explicate level where everything comes from, everything is seamlessly connected. So it changes everything that idea of reality.

So what the physicists were saying is that a quantum projection from an Explicate order, or from a high dimensional source, is projecting this universe. But what actually that projection is, is consciousness. It's some level of intelligence that is condensing; it's coming down into matter and it's becoming things.

I guess it's almost like you had those new 3D printers. We're getting this ability on our cultural level with the internet and with technology speeding up and getting faster and faster to make real what we imagine. So our consciousness, which is present now, can have a thought and can make Explicate from the Implicate, all the things that, that exist.

So consciousness is the great enigma. Some other people have said Alfred, north Whitehead, who I mentioned before he is called consciousness, the awareness of awareness. It's like trying to find the pattern within noise. Everything can just be noise until we see those magic high 3d pictures, and it's all just noise. And to all of a sudden, you grok it, you get it, you fall into the pattern.

So the pattern is always there, but not everyone has always seen it. Different cultures have different abilities to perceive different patterns; they've organized their, their reality grids so they can see the different patterns within the greater reality. So, all these philosophers from the early 20th Century were exploring different avenues of consciousness. Now, William James was the founder of modern American psychology, but he was also a bit of a tripper. He was also a bit of a consciousness explorer himself and an avid nitrous oxide fan. James was an ally of Henry Bergson's and they both stood up to this idea of the limitations of the mechanistic universe; of the fact that the mechanistic universe isn't enough to explain what's really going on.

James wrote a book called the Pluralistic Universe in 1909. And he said in that book, he: “renounced the intellectual, his method, and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be.” James “had to give up logic squarely and irrevocably as a method for reality, life, experience, concreteness and immediacy, what you will exceeds our logic, it overflows, and it surrounds it,” which is very true.

And there's some really good examples here of what they're saying about consciousness. If we have these consciousness receivers in our heads called brains–I mean, this is the whole idea that the mind is separate from the brain–and in the mechanistic universe they believe that the brain is what it is–it's all there. That the brain has grown as part of the genetics. It has the thoughts, it has consciousness. And once the brain goes in, the body goes, that's it, you know, game's over, that's the mechanistic universe.

So James and Henri Bergson and others said that doesn't really sit with them. There's ways beyond that. If you use the analogy–their cutting edge technology in the early 20th century was the radio. So they said if you have a radio and you go through all the dial you get different frequencies of information coming in. But if you damage the dial and you can't pick up different signals, it doesn't mean they're still not there. And if you totally destroy the radio, well, it's not picking up any signals, but it doesn't mean that there's still not radio signals out there.

In the same way, the same analogy, we're, we're saying now that in a non-mechanistic universe paradigm, the brain is not just a producer of consciousness. It's also a receiver. And if it is a receiver of consciousness as well as a transmitter, then consciousness survives and is independent of the brain itself.  Which is a huge leap for people in the mainstream to understand. It basically means that consciousness itself, if it's not embedded in the brain, is non-local. And if it's non-local in physics terms it means it's everywhere. If you're not local in space time, then you're outside of space, time, you're in the wire frame underneath everything, then it's everywhere. It's like it's in everything. And so that seems to be where, where this path of thought is leading.

So another speaker who's going to be here at EntheonGaia and doing a talk, I think tomorrow night, is Dennis McKenna. And Dennis, and quite a few other modern scientists as well, have posited this idea of the brain as a receiver of consciousness. Dennis has a good quote from an interview I did with him back in 2006, he said: “If the brain is a receiver of consciousness, then perhaps consciousness itself is a singularity points, much like black holes, where energy is compacted so densely in on itself, that it collapses. That collapse in the brain may be what causes consciousness.”

So this whole idea of a singularity point is very interesting because in physics, the singularity point is where, I guess things begin or things end, in the sense that it's beyond the normal event horizon of space time, it's an area with special conditions where things collapse in upon themselves and become able to happen. So we know that nature repeats “as above so below.” We we're looking at the pictures before of the swirling galaxy and the shell and the plants and the way that the universe has the same ability to manifest itself on different levels of existence. 

So in that sense, you know, we know that singularity, if you go all the way down to the micro level, you get to the atomic structure and then beyond the atomic structure, you get to the quantum level. But at some point you get so far down, we can't measure, and there's basically the unknown, but it's a singularity point. Like the whole building block of everything we've got here is probably a singularity at the same level as the macro level on the universal level, where we have the black holes, which by the way, seem to be from the latest astrophysics findings, seem to be at the center of every galaxy. It seems to be at the center of every galaxy is a black hole. Like at the center of an atom. It seems to be that nature works “as above, so below” again and is using the same principles and the same forces are at work.

So I'm bringing in this idea to get a bit deeper cosmic as well. Black holes or singularity points are very interesting. And I had this thought the other night. What if, you know, the whole galaxy is almost like cloud computing. We're talking about a mechanistic universe and we've talked about radios and all these old 19th century terms; we've got so many potent 21st century terms now through computing… We've had, you know, a few decades of computer linguistics embed ourselves in our consciousness. And language itself changes consciousness. So by being able to understand, not just say “uploading downloading”, but to be able to understand distributed consciousness, to be able to log onto Facebook and see thousands of your interconnected tribe at the same time, it's getting very close to digital telepathy. But what it's really training ourselves to do is to understand “distributed consciousness.”

And so one of the current fields of computing is cloud computing. So instead of hosting everything on your hardware, on one computer, you upload everything to a server into a cloud. So it's there on the net. It's omnipresent, just like consciousness itself. So I was having this thought if everything's like, as above so below, and perhaps the structure of the brain and the structure of the galaxy is similar.

Maybe galactic cloud computing and the cloud is all life forms, and there's this dimensional layering as things come into matter. And they go through these, this Bose Einstein-condensate, they actually, you know, condense down into becoming something instead of being up in the Akashic or hanging there in a template, but it's almost like if consciousness is embedded in everything and it's in the cosmos itself, it's almost as if there's these nodal points between galaxies and between the whole universal smear in this giant cosmic cloud computing mechanistic thing again but on a quantum level.

We're coming into this idea of black holes being a singularity of consciousness, as well as our own consciousness itself. So I want to go from the, the macro to the micro. So if we have this idea that consciousness originates beyond our brains and consciousness is in everything, it's also not just random. It's not just seeded from here to there. It's actually coming in from larger galactic levels. It's almost like a cosmic ecology. You have the idea of something like condensation or water vapor, and how, you know, you can't see any, any water around, but then all of a sudden there's moisture in the air. There'll be rain. Rain will come down, it'll go through the ground, it'll do what it needs to do in the earth. And then it will be absorbed back up again. It's a cycle.

And it, it seems to me again, using the same analogy above and below on a galactic macro level, consciousness itself may be experiencing this type of transition. We may be consciousness coming in from galactic center, from our local galaxy hub, into the stellar chain of the stars and the planets, into our biosphere, into life on earth.

So humans, animals, plants, all sentient species have different levels of consciousness. It's almost like, you know, the earth is a womb. The earth is this this crucible to hold the potential for life. But why? It’s like the earth is the hardware and consciousness is like the software. It's almost as if all the different species are like a satellite dish, receivers of consciousness, but all the different brain states from the different species are tweaked to a slightly different level in the radio frequency dial. And we're all bit torrenting. We're all getting this bit torrent from galactic center, and it's, it's then put together again, down here and, you know, and then the pattern forms, the pattern forms, the culture goes wild, things start to evolve.

So what if the planet creates the hardware–the species–to host the software, like BitTorrenting from galactic center? It's like we're all file-sharing this larger program [of consciousness]. And this is where I believe that some of the things like entheogens and the plant tools come in as receivers of consciousness to get this larger signal. They help us not just receive the signal, but expand upon it. So if you look at Mother Earth, there's this whole idea– and this festival, EntheonGaia has the word within it, Gaia–which I'm sure you're all familiar with.

James Lovelock was an ex-NASA scientist who coined the term [“Gaia Hypothesis”] in the early 1970s, from the Greek goddess of the earth. And again, it's a really potent meme to encapsulate this idea as the planet, as a living organism, and as the mother, you know, which, again, goes back to the tribal indigenous understandings of the world. So Gaia seems to grow species. If one species dies off–and by the way, there's been something like five mass extinctions of species on earth before, and science basically says, now we're living through the Sixth.

We're going through, you know, they're not unprecedented times. This does happen regularly in larger slices of time, not in his-story, but in larger geological and planetary time. But what I believe is that they're just the bio-mass, you know, they just, the physical shell, all the creatures that nature creates, she creates for a reason. And I believe they're just the hardware. So I'm starting to get into this idea of receiving consciousness and what the hardware does with the consciousness it receives.

So I remember once in Peru, between ayahuasca sessions, just being really open to this whole web of life and to be really–not thinking about it, not intellectualizing it–but to be really open and in a heart space. When you're in that space–and I know, you know, this–you're receiving a greater signal and it's not just a mental thing. When you're getting it, when you feel that web of life, you know, kinesthetically in your soul, you're connected. And when you're connected on that level, you “get” nature. And you're part of the wave of nature and the flow of nature and the greater consciousness. It's like a mesh network is another computer term. You know, if the internet was to go down there's these things called “mesh networks” where the more people that pool their nodal points together, the stronger the signal gets.

So if this is a great bio-mass die off happening in front of our eyes on the earth at the moment, I'm not worried because I believe that what it's freeing up underneath the shell of things is the potential for new things to come forth. You know, that the consciousness is pooling together into this reservoir of imminent change.

So what do plants, frogs, humans, insects, and all those different species that nature grows have in common? Maybe a few things. But the one I'm thinking of is dimethyltryptamine. It's been recently reclassified as a neurotransmitter. It's a bit like nature's vegetal browser. I call it, you know, Google for the vegetal internet. It's very unique. Nature threads this through all the dominant species, all the plants species, as far as I know, most of the animal species, insects have it, you know, if you've been in, into, into an entheogenic space on DMT, you may have encountered insect creatures. They seem to be in there as well. It seems to be like this, to use another computer term, like a chat room; this centralized space where all these overlapping consciousnesses are placed.  And the one thing they all have in common is dimethyltryptamine.

So as a neurotransmitter, DMT seems to be something that nature's threaded through everything to allow it to talk to everything, to interconnect it, you know? And if we think on the quantum level, which is one step above the biological level, if everything was interconnected and if the parts contain the blueprint of the whole in the part, and you had to then implement that on a biological level, you'd have to put something all throughout nature to interconnect it. And it's done that with, with dimethyltryptamine. So it seems to be from a biological to a quantum level that might maybe the bridge.

So 5-hydroxytryptamine is another scientific name for serotonin. And serotonin is one of those other very important neurotransmitters. Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) travels down the serotonin pathways. It's very interesting how the holographic matrix communicates with itself and how itself regulates from the chemical level, the biological level up to the quantum level and other levels as well.

And there’s this whole idea he coined about intuition, and he promoted this idea saying that, you know, there's things that the intellect can't grasp. If you've never been near water how would you know how to swim? You know, you have to go into it, you have to experience it yourself. You may have that feeling that intuition, but you have to go into it and you have to experience these things to really flesh them out and then realize what is possible.

So, a lot of these ideas I'm having are sort of clustering together concepts that are starting to seem very probable. Previously they've maybe been very disparate and we've used different terminologies coming from mechanistic universe to the quantum and all the biological, but we're living in these rapidly accelerating times where, I really believe it pays to listen to your intuition. You know, the, the more tuned in we get to what's happening, the more it potentiates, and the more you work that muscle, the more intuition will serve you in the times that are coming.

So psychedelics and entheogens engender intuition, you know one of the great things about them is that they’re ego dissolving. Now the ego is great for many, many things. Aldous Huxley, and other people that had this idea that what psychedelics are actually doing is getting rid of the filtering valve that the mind uses down here for survival. So we have the potential within us to unlock the brain and unlock the receiving satellite dish of our own consciousness and receive a deeper signal.

But we don't, we haven't in our past, in the last few thousand years of his-story. And maybe we've had to keep that reducing valve on and focus on what needs to be done, because it was all about survival. And I guess over the course of, you know history with different tribal cultures, they kept one little toe in the water where they were focusing on survival, but they had someone–you know, the, the village shaman or medicine people, or plant people–who would help with the tools to unlock that consciousness again and go back to the full mind at large.

The brain is a finely tuned organism. If you have something like nicotine then we have nicotine receptors in our brain. I remember smoking mapacho cigarettes in Peru as part of ayahuasca rituals, and mapachos have 19% nicotine and they, they're very, very potent and you feel the full rush of nicotine coming on and there’s this burst of receptive ability.

So there was a study done in 1966 by Cleve Backster. And he did this infamous study on plants where he got some he got a polygraph machine, a lie detector machine, and he did read outs on plants with it. So he did the electrical activity of plants, and he wired them up with little electrodes and he put them on there, and he read the plants with cutting-edge machines of the day to see what they were saying. To gage their thinking. And he was able to verify for his level of standards that there was something going on. And from his readings of plants, from the polygraph readout, he could say that there was a level of “primary perception”  happening. The plants themselves were actually giving off an electrical activity. And there was some level of consciousness in there.

Now that's just normal plants. As, as those of us who have been in entheogenic space, might have experienced, there's an even deeper level of intelligence, or mind at large with plants. There's this whole idea of spirits. So in the shamanic world and indigenous cultures, they believe that the plants and the earth, and even the mountains and rocks all have spirits within them. They have again, this animist idea of this not intelligence, but a spirit of consciousness that's within all these things. This is in Amazonian tradition, of course, as well. So when you go on a lot of the “dietas” in the Amazon, when you are abstaining from the electromagnetic pollution, from thinking, from conversation, from red meat, pork, alcohol, sugar, sex, all those things–all those things are, are very acute and affecting your sensitivity, your own biological matrix.

And you know, the body is 90% water and we're actually electromagnetic beings. So the more we give up all these things that are affecting our electromagnetic ability, the more we can tune in our receiving consciousness to receive the signal.  Now I was friends with a shaman in in Peru named Kevin Furnas, who was a, a Western student. And he encountered some difficulties with this whole idea, y’know–are plants sentient? Can you talk to plants? There's this whole ideological hump to get over, this idea of plant consciousness.

It's one thing to say that plants might be sapient, they might have a rudimentary awareness of their environment. And we know that they do engage with their environment. They do have influence and understanding, and they open up and receive the light and they close down in the dark. But it's another level entirely to go to the next level and say that plants have a mind, plants are able to communicate with us. But the deeper you go into “dietas”, and the more that you cleanse and the more you refine your own ability, then the more those subtle signals can be heard and they can be picked up.

So this whole idea of the “Shamanic Revival”–Terence McKenna had the idea of the “Archaic Revival” and part of that is the Shamanic Revival. And what we're seeing now in Western culture all across the world is this understanding of plants as healers, plants, as tools for consciousness. And this idea of opening up to our true potential within.

Why though is all this happening now? I mean, it's yet again at the end of a world age. There's been so much talk of 2012 and we've almost survived it, we've almost got to the end of it now [this talk was in Dec, 2012]. So here’s a very brief encapsulation of it. The Maya culture measured time in many different calendars, many different calendricals. The 26,000 year orbit that they measured that is coming to an end on December 21st, 2012, was the orbit of our Milky Way solar system traveling around the galaxy.

So the planet revolves around the sun, the sun orbits around the Milky Way solar system and the solar system around the galaxy, all orbits within orbits and the grand cosmic orbit of 26,000 years is what it takes for us to go in that full orbit around and to be directed and fully pointing towards the galactic center. We’ve been pointing towards galactic center for quite awhile but we're coming up to this crescendo point where we're focusing back at the center of the galaxy. So it comes back to this idea, again, of the Mayans. For them “2012” wasn't just a Western idea. That's a Western label. They called it “0.0 0.0 0.” And it was that moment when one grand orbit finishes and another grant cycle begins. And so what we're pointing at as we passed December 21st, 2012 was the galactic center.

Now the Mayans had a name for what's at the heart of galactic center. They called it “Hunab Ku”, the Womb of the Great Mother. And NASA just confirmed in 2002, that at the center of the galaxy is a black hole, which is a bit like a womb in that the black hole drinks in everything, eventually; everything goes into the black hole, but it also spews out galaxy wide jets of plasma, which like when a bushfire goes through a forest starts to germinate the hidden potential with space dust and chemicals. And that's how the whole star systems are born–from black holes. So it is very much like a womb.

It's going to the sun, it's affecting the sun, it's affecting the earth. It's being absorbed by all the entities on the earth, which are conscious, including the plants, especially the plants with their relationship, with chlorophyll and absorbing sunlight. And it's transforming.

It's like all life on earth is the hardware. And consciousness is a great transformer as the energy is coming in, the signal coming in at this time. And, you know, in the last generation now we've all seen this tribe, all of us who are into the plants and into this idea of healing and into the idea of connecting with something greater than ourselves; of reconnection with the earth. So at the same time as we’re coming to this plateau of our cultural experience with the plants and with the idea of consciousness, the whole planet is coming to this place and this target window of opportunity with galactic center and with the larger cosmic ecology that it's all interconnected with.

So the pressure is on. At the moment we're being bombarded by cosmic rays. The magnetic field is changing. The natural galactic ecosystem is heating up and all around we can see pressures and extremes culturally on a macro level and a micro level. You might've seen this picture just recently. New York just had what they call a “Frankenstorm”, like a Frankenstein storm, the mother of all storms. We're seeing terms like, you know, “once in a lifetime” or “once in a century” extreme weather events. We're seeing all this incredible intensity of energy that's really just embracing the earth at the moment. And what I believe is all this is meant to be happening, all this is happening for a reason, according to plan, despite the intensity and despite all the trauma and all the drama, it's almost like the birth pangs.

There's something moving through us. There's something moving through the planet. When you're in nature you can only see the winds in the trees or on the water. You can't see the wind itself, but you can feel it. We can all feel like the wind, that something is happening now. Something very potent is happening at this time and something right on schedule. And so in the larger level, there has to be this surrender, this ability, not for our egos to chase the moment, not for our egos to try to control and try to figure out what to do, but to go with the flow, to go with what mother nature is intending to happen–and to let go of control.

So, so Terence McKenna also had this idea of the Timewave, which involved his idea of novelty coming in. And as we come into this 2012 target window, things seem to be speeding up. I'm not sure about you, but I've been really feeling this extreme quickening in my personal life. And also, you know, in the culture as well. One thing leads on to another and it's like a domino falling. One thing happens and it sets up the conditions for the next thing to happen and the next thing to happen. And we mightn't be watching, but out there, all this change is happening and, you know, the water's rising and the frog needs to jump. It's like things are coming to a head, and things are boiling down here on planet earth.

And the Timewave works exponentially. So as we go further into the last bits of 2012 things, actually exponentiate, like double the amount and then double the double the amount, etc. which will be interesting because it seems, doing a quick scan of the culture, that things are speeding up as we speak, and more and more people, even in the mainstream are realizing something's up. And its not going away. They can't deny it. You can't be an eschaton denialist any longer.

So if something’s happening then we've got to trust our intuition, trust our relationship with the plants, trust that things are going according to a greater plan, the we’re all part of that plan. It can often sound a bit like wishful thinking, but if you've ever been part of that flow… If you slow down and when you actually go with the events that are around and not try to control them with the ego–and again, the plants have been helping us nurture to this level as a culture, to let go of the ego and of the mechanistic sort of mind–you can get to this ability almost like the wind, you know, where you can flow through things without the impediment, without the heaviness, without the ego trying to control things.

So there was a really good story recently in the news. I do believe that the universe is shaping everything and all the pressure that we're going through, for an ultimate reason, for our best outcome. The Hopi  Elders say, you know, the current or the river is moving very fast now, and don't try to hold on to the edges, just let go. If you try to hold on you'll be swept away, but go with the current, go with the flow and just, you know, just flow and cruise. And you'll end up at a shore you'll end up where you need to be.

Back in 2012 there was also the quite horrific Aurora shootings in in America at the Batman premiere. And I have this little quote here from one of the victims who survived the Aurora shootings. This is the thing: it's like, we can all be going through such terrible tragedies. And it's like, there's a tragedy in one sense and a miracle in another. And because we don't often have the perspective in our linear reality, in our consciousness which is going through these events one step at a time, we can't see the bigger picture. 

And so in a way to back up that, I'll just read you this story. The Associated Press reports: “Petra Anderson, 22, was at the midnight premiere of 'The Dark Knight Rises' in Aurora, Colo., when she was shot four times by a gunman who had opened fire in the crowded theater, the Associated Press reports. Three shotgun pellets hit Anderson's arm and another went through her nose -- riding up the back of her cranium and hitting the back of her skull. "Her injuries were severe, and her condition was critical…The doctors prior to surgery were concerned because so much of the brain had been traversed by the bullet," Anderson's pastor, Brad Strait, wrote in his blog.

“According to Strait, Anderson was saved by a miracle birth "defect" that no one could have anticipated.  The doctor explained that Petra’s brain has had from birth a small “defect” in it. It is a tiny channel of fluid running through her skull…Only a CAT scan would catch it, and Petra would have never noticed it.  But in Petra’s case, the shotgun buck shot…enters her brain from the exact point of this defect. Like a marble through a small tube, the defect channels the bullet from Petra’s nose through her brain. It turns slightly several times, and comes to rest at the rear of her brain. And in the process, the bullet misses all the vital areas of the brain.”

I mean, this woman – let's get this on a linear time scale, let's get this right. So we've been led to believe it's a coincidence that she was born with a birth defect, the exact shape of the bullet that was in her brain from this horrible Aurora massacre 22 years after her birth. So that is a statistical anomaly on one level, or it could be a miracle on another. And it could be an example that the university is really out to help us.

So Henry Bergson actually had this idea of effect and causality. And he was saying that, you know, it doesn't happen in a linear sense because what we've described previously that consciousness is omnipresent. It's non-local. And because it's like quantum interconnected, things from the future–or what, when we're inside the box, seems like the future–can actually affect the past as much as the past affecting the present and the future. Basically its all one grand “hyperobject.”

If you were to step outside space and time, just step up a dimension and look at it, you would see this hyperobject. You know, it's almost like those little cutout dolls you make when you're a kid and you pull them all out in a string, then you put them all together and they’re one again. That’s space–time, past, present and t he future. And it's all One. And interestingly enough, I've had different visions, actually, not on any entheogens. It was actually on a stone I got from the Amazon, from deep in a hot spring whilst searching for a magic “piedra”, one of the magic stones.

And I slept with it one night when I was in Peru and I had it on my forehead and I had–it's recounted in my book, Aya: A Shamanic Odyssey, but I had the most profound psychedelic experience from no psychedelics at all. And I had this vision three times and it was like showing me this thing. And it was basically this hyperobject. It's this idea that all spacetime is like magnetic tape over writing itself. There's a canvas and that's what we see as existence. But all of it, all of it is intelligent. All of it is aware. All of it is alive. And all of it is conspiring with all the other bits of it for the greatest outcome. It's like the wind on the water, again, just rippling and overwriting itself. And then a new history is formed, a new history, and it's like, it's continually “Rubiking” through space-time and changing itself.

And it's a bit beyond our monkey minds at the best of times. But I do believe that, you know, to not be trapped in linear time and not trapped in this idea of causality within the normal boundaries of space time. Causality happens all the time from an omnipresent sense.

So I'm getting near the end here, but there's this wonderful quote I found on Facebook and it says:

And that's by Charlotte Joko Beck. And I believe that's true. Walt Whitman, the famous poet said: “I do not see one imperfection in the universe. I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the universe. The whole theory of the universe is directed to one individual, namely to you. The universe works with you and for you, it is not your enemy.”

So one last thing. Basically what I'm getting to in a nutshell is, all of the pressure we're feeling, all the stuff that's going on planet earth, whatever is happening it's about letting go. It's about surrendering to the moment, to the trust of it's all going to be okay.

And only just, okay, it's all perfect, because the end result of these millions of years of pressure is a diamond, this perfect, flawless, beautiful work of nature.

Just like you.

There we go.

Thank you.  

Audience:  Rak I’m just a bit struck with some of your descriptions at the end, when you were talking about the bullet going through the brain and stuff like that, the ideas that you're talking about, the way you express them sounds very similar to something like intelligent design where you're saying, how could this bullet have just happened by itself?

Rak: I totally believe in intelligent design. I mean, the thing is “isms” get appropriated by culture and culture is a cult, right? So just because one cult uses the ism, or what may be a valid perception, doesn't mean the perception itself is wrong. I believe in an intelligent creator–I believe the intelligent creator is you and you and you and you and you and me and all the yous and us. I believe, in a holographic sense, if there is a Source, if there is a Creator/ Source, where is it? Why is it? How is it? And that's what we're all figuring out. And some of the terminology we’re using–it's not just intelligent design, but think about it. If there is a Source, why did it transmit itself? Why did it fragment itself? Unless it is something like pan-galactic bit torrenting, transmitting across impenetrable voids of comprehension.

But I totally believe in intelligent design. Absolutely. I wouldn't say I believe in a Roman Catholic dogma where the world was created 6,000 years ago with the dinosaur bones at all. But really I believe that, you know, there's an intelligence in nature–or nature is the intelligence. And the nature of the planet is only one nature amongst many natures; that life exists through the entire universe and that the conditions for life become probable in certain sectors of the universe.

And then when the conditions are probable, like the panspermia theory, life finds the seed, finds the womb planet, and Bob's your uncle! But I'm willing to dialogue about it. I don't know, again, as I say, I work from intuition and as a writer, I get very mythopoetic. I find, you know, metaphors and riffs and I cluster bomb and put things together and sometimes like a Super Hadron Collider, sometimes things work, and sometimes there's no facts in them at all.

Audience:  If you were a superhero, what would your special power be?

Rak: I am a superhero! And this is my special power, actually, actually. Okay, well, I think the best superpower I can imagine is something that we all have, the ability we all have, the abilities, they're all basically encoded within us, but you know, that interconnected web of life –when I have felt fully connected to the web, part of the web and that wholeness and that completion and that joy…

Some of the things which happen on ayahuasca, some of the people believe that, you know, some of the visionary components of it is because you're accessing your DNA. So you're going into your whole DNA ability to traverse through your genetic heritage and your history and all your ancestors and all their abilities and all their memories. And also all the other creatures of earth. Like if you go far enough back, we're all connected. We're all One, we've all come from a single cell and we've just kept growing and growing. But the best superpower of all I think is consciousness. It's awareness of the fact that we're all One and that we're all interconnected.

Audience:  Rak, what’s your idea of the best outcome? Do you think that humanity maybe has a restricted idea of what the best option is?

Rak:  Totally. Well, again, again, it's because I think humanity has this egocentric attachment, in the whole Buddhist sense. They say don't have an attachment. You know, it's like, you know, the whole village gets carted away and gets killed and there’s just one survivor. Is it a good thing? Maybe? But you know, we're attached to outcomes, we're attached to survival, we're attached to wanting things and desires and egotistic sort of things. And that's the human level.

And we want those things because I think we've forgotten what our place in nature is and what we're really meant to be doing. Like I do wonder if, when we let go of the ego and when we're in this ego-less state and connecting to all things, a lot of people come back from those entheogenic experiences with a renewed joy and a renewed sense of not just connection, but wanting to then do something for the world, wanting to do something for their family or repair their relationships or do something better, you know?

And if that's an attachment, well, that's probably okay. But I mean, it's that desire to help others which I think some of these entheogenic experiences can, can engender. But in, in general, I mean, it's the isms again. I mean, you have the cult of Western culture, it's attachments and what it wants from life, and what it says is the white picket fence reason for existence, which is very shallow and meaningless. So if we put that to one side, I think that there could be a whole lot of other outcomes that we could invest envisage and imagine and dream in as a culture. If we are “satellite receiving dishes of consciousness” and we pool ourselves together and when we're in a tribal sense, it's like we become supercomputers parallel processing together.

Imagine that you get a huge mega tribe together, maybe on an entheogen, maybe not, but if you're on an activating thing and you've gotten rid of your egos together and you're in a circuit and you create that circuit of energy with the right intent, which isn't like, we want to win lotto, but like, we want to help the planet, or you tell us what we should be doing. And then that intent, and that attachment to want to receive more from the planet herself. That'd be great. I can see us blossoming and opening up like these satellite dishes. I think that would be the next step.

Terence McKenna As a Distributed Consciousness

Audience: I don't have a question, but I’m awed how Terence, like you, wove all that together. Magnificent. Yes. Thank you.

Rak: Well, you know, what I like to say about Terence as well is that he may have passed physically, but he's now a distributed consciousness. Terence is literally, he's been at every festival I've been to for the last 15 years on the wind, in a song, in a sample, on a video screen, in a book, in some talk, in a word as a meme, as an idea, Terence lives on within the tribe and within the greater tribe. And on the internet, I hazard a guess, he must perhaps be the most represented individual. I mean, there's no one out there who has as much content as Terence, spliced up reformatted, YouTube and everything and the memes are percolating, the memes are saturating.

And, you know, I'm a product of Terence's memes. And I think a lot of us are. Even if some of the ideas weren't right. I’m not saying they have to be right. But if he makes you think and if I make you think, that's the true joy, that's the beauty. That's the thing I would say thank you for.

Thank you.