This awareness of stars, the phases of the moon, and the general movements and positions of the planets, is widespread in traditional cultures. Of course the information is there in our culture, but it’s hard to find someone who actually can point to the constellations in the sky. We are generally ignorant of the skies. The skies are now regarded from a scientific point of view as only matter, and that’s the domain of astronomy. Oddly enough, even professional astronomers often don’t know that much about the sky as we actually experience it, although they’ve got a lot of equations about the life cycle of stars, about the nature of pulsars and other strange mysteries in the heavens. I was having dinner a couple of years ago with the professor of astronomy in Britain. We went out after dinner. It was a beautiful starlit night. There was a group of stars I didn’t know and I said, “What are those stars?” He said, “Oh I haven’t a clue, don’t ask me.” He learned astronomy from books, from computer models, not from looking at the sky. A friend who works at the big observatory in Arizona told me his colleagues go inside and look through a big telescope at a particular star or galaxy, but if you ask them to point to it in the sky, they don’t know. They just punch some figures into the computer to find it. They’re not seeing the wood for the trees, or the sky for the stars. They don’t see the bigger picture. Amateur astronomers and old-style celestial navigators are probably the only people who still keep alive the sense of observation and relationship to the heavens.
By contrast with the astronomers, astrologers have retained a sense of the heavens as meaningful, related to what happens on earth, but astrology has become detached from the actual sky. There’s no use asking the average astrologer if you see a bright star in the sky or a planet, “What’s that?” Most of them don’t look at the sky anymore than other people. It’s all done from computer programs and books. I was particularly struck in 1987, when there was a massive supernova in the Southern Hemisphere, the biggest since the one observed by Galileo and Kepler in 1604, which played a major part in the scientific revolution. All through history these supernovas—exploding stars in the sky—have been regarded as major omens of the greatest importance. I asked my astrologer friends, “What do you make of this?” The answer was they didn’t make anything whatever of it because it wasn’t in the ephemeris or in their Macintosh computer program. Astronomers, on the other hand, took great interest, but saw it with no meaning. I think a great move forward will happen when astronomy and astrology link up again.
I think much good will come from recovering a sense of the life of the heavens. We are coming to see the Earth, Gaia, as alive. I think we also have to take seriously the idea that the sun is alive and conscious. If one wants a scientific rationale for this, it comes ready to hand through the discoveries of modern solar physics. We now know that the sun has a complex system of magnetic fields, reversing its polarity every eleven years, associated with the sunspot cycle. With this underlying rhythm of magnetic polar reversals are a whole series of resonant and harmonic patterns of magnetic and electromagnetic change—global patterns over the surface of the sun of a fractal nature; patterns within patterns, highly turbulent, chaotic, sensitive, varied and complex. Electromagnetic patterns within our brains seem to be the interface between the mind and the nervous system, and here we have a comparable interface within the physical behavior of the sun. It’s perfectly possible that the sun has a mind that interfaces with the complex activity we can observe.
The solar system itself is an organism. This is largely what astrology has concerned itself with. We also recognize that the sun is part of a galaxy, the Milky Way, which includes all the stars we see in the night sky. Like other galaxies, our own has a galactic center, a nucleus, of unknown nature which emits enormous amounts of radiation. We could think of galaxies as organisms as well. They come in clusters and these come in superclusters. These too can be thought of as organisms at higher levels of complexity and greater size. Our solar system is a tiny part of these vaster organisms within which it is embedded. If the sun has a kind of consciousness, what about the entire galaxy, with its mysterious center? What about galactic clusters? What about the cosmos as a whole?
Thus there may be levels of consciousness far beyond anything we experience ourselves, of ever more inclusive natures. When we turn to ancient traditions, we find that this has always been the general belief. The entire cosmos is believed to be animate. God is seen as residing beyond the sky but also in the sky: “Our Father who art in heaven.” Although most modern people, including most educated Christians, assume that heaven doesn’t mean the actual sky, I’d like us to entertain the notion that it does mean the sky. If God is omnipresent, then he must be present throughout the heavens, and since the heavens are vastly greater than the earth—about 99.99 recurring percent of the divine presence must be in the sky.
We can take the same crudely quantitative approach to arrive at the same conclusions about the celestial Goddess, who can also be seen as being or living in the heavens. In Egyptian mythology the sky was the abode of Nuit, the sky goddess, who was the womb of the heavens, and gave birth to the sun and the moon and the stars. She was the cause of space, the night skies, the womb from which all things come forth. That was the image also of Astarte, and that image has been assimilated into Christianity through the image of Mary, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven. For example, the form of Our Lady of Guadalupe is portrayed as wearing a sky-blue robe, studded with stars.
In Christian, Jewish, and Islamic belief there are various hierarchies of angels, usually nine. We could think of these celestial hierarchies as reflected in the super clusters of galaxies, galaxies, solar systems, suns and planets. The planets and the stars were traditionally believed to be the abodes of intelligent beings, and our English names for the planets are still those of classical gods and goddesses—Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and so on.
In the sixteenth century there was a revival of ancient star magic. In Elizabethan England, John Dee and others invoking the spirit of particular stars, asked for guidance, help and inspiration. It was an attempt to actually contact extraterrestrial intelligences, and communicate with them.
Ralph Abraham: The star magic idea in Elizabethan England preceded the nucleation of science as we know it, and represented a transmission from the ancient world, with a lot of changes, simplifications and additions. The central idea was the ancient notion of “The Great Chain of Being.” In ancient Alexandria they liked to wrap up things in a package and send them into the future, and this idea actually reached us through the world of Islam. There were concentric spheres—nine, ten, or eleven, with the earth in the center. Outside of these spheres was nothing. The topmost sphere was the unmoving sphere of God and the other ones were of the planets and the sun and the moon, and they intermediated as midway stations in a kind of transmission, all the way from God down to us.
In Rome Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake on Easter Sunday in the year 1600 because he insisted on the infinity of the universe. He believed the stars were not on one sphere but outside the sphere of Jupiter, and that they filled all of space. The reason the church objected to this was that it left no space for God. Our Father in heaven had no place to go, and that was very threatening to the entire system.
I’m seeing in this cosmology you’ve presented an opportunity for us to construct a new cosmology of our own. A religion of the future could have a whole pantheon of gods and goddesses, including the living and sacred sun, moon, planets, Milky Way, quasars, nearby galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and so on.
I think the overall idea of a Great Chain of Being can be salvaged in our new cosmology without reference to our father god in heaven or even ideas of gods and goddesses and angels. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) would be a better description, because in our own journeys out of the body, we’ve sometimes left Earth far behind, reaching a realm difficult to name; transcendent, other; a realm well traveled by our forebears; brave travelers who have left all kinds of w
ritten records of their journeys. On our own journeys we’ve had the experience of meeting, conversing with, and being taught by extraterrestrial intelligences. Indeed our whole hope for the future is based somehow on these Gnostic experiences of direct contact with of extraterrestrial intelligence.
There maybe a physical location in space and time, somewhere in the universe, for this intelligence; and there may not. Nevertheless, it’s the conversation that is most important to us, not its identification with physical matter, energy or morphic fields. I’m not sure if I could connect an intelligent being I’ve encountered in out-of-body travel with the Milky Way or the planet Jupiter, although It makes sense to me when you say you believe they’re intelligent beings. I can imagine the sunspots running across the face of the sun in furious speed as a kind of Cephalopod, octopus-like communication between one sun and another.
Terence McKenna: Are you saying that it’s reasonable to connect up the entities in the psychedelic experience to particular places in space and time?
RA: Yes.
TM: It’s hard for me to imagine that the sun is an intelligent organism, unless it exists on a scale that’s fairly hard to relate to. In other words, I can imagine the Pacific Ocean to be intelligent, but its intelligence would be of such a nature that it and I probably wouldn’t have much to do with each other. Meanwhile, out in the universe, somewhere, entities exist which we do contact in the psychedelic experience. I’m never sure if they’re creatures of other levels or simply of other places. If other places, they seem to be so far away that the laws of physics are so different that it’s not like the difference between Chicago and Memphis, but like the difference between Chicago and Oz.
We’ve talked about how the morphogenetic field is a necessary hypothesis but hard to detect the way you can detect an electromagnetic field. The creative response is to hypothesize that perhaps the imagination is the detection equipment for the morphogenetic field. The brain-mind system is a quantum mechanically delicate enough chemical system that incoming input from the morphogenetic field can push cascades of chemical activity one way or another so that in the act of daydreaming or psychedelic tripping you’re actually scanning the field. If that were the case, what we call the imagination is actually the universal library of what is real. This possibility, to me, is very empowering, and I suspect this is the truth you learn at the center of the psychedelic experience, that’s so mind-boggling you can’t really return to ordinary reality with it. If thinking about the heavens as organic, integrated, and animate makes this more probable, I’m all for it.
Rupert and I, and perhaps to some degree Ralph come out of the influence of a school of thought called Organismic Philosophy that was put forth by Alfred North Whitehead, Joseph Needham and L.L. Whyte. Rupert makes a very eloquent case for organismic organization at every level. The reason this is unwelcome in science is because it raises questions about the signal systems that hold these organisms together.
A machine communicates mechanical force basically through direct contact. An organism operates through chemical systems of diffusion, or color signal, or in some cases language. It’s these higher-order forms of function, when called down to explain large chunks of nature, that begin to look like a reinfusion of spirit into nature. This is of course exactly what we need, although orthodoxy fights it tooth and nail in ongoing reaction to the nineteenth century battle where deism had the power to potentially frustrate Darwinian rationalism. It’s time to realize that battle was won long ago, and that trying to reason upward from the laws of atomic physics to organisms is not going to work. There are what David Bohm calls “emergent properties,” at every level. Think of a single molecule of water; it’s absurd to call it wet. Wetness is an emergent property that comes out of millions of molecules of water. At every level in the evolution of physical complexity, complexity itself permits the emergence of new properties, with the iridescence of mind and culture emerging finally at the top of the pyramid.
It’s interesting the way the culture has changed its attitude toward the heavens. One revolution in our thinking that is fairly fundamental is that no one at this point believes in the human conquest of space. This has gone from a national commitment in the ‘60s to the chic thing to be into in the ‘70s, to hardly being mentioned today, either by freaks like us, or presidential candidates, or right wingers, left wingers, middle-of-the-roaders or anybody else. It all seems to be over. The heavy lift launch capacity that resided in the Soviet military-industrial complex and that held the keys to reaching near earth orbit has been allowed to drift into obsolescence. I appreciate your attempt to animate the cosmos, because apparently we’re turning away from it, having become a part of the past era of grandeur and glory, seeming not to be repeated.
We held a Virtual Reality conference at Esalen recently and Howard Rheingold had a revelation in the middle of the night down on the platform in front of the Big House when he said, “My God, now I understand what virtual reality is for! It’s to keep us from ever leaving the Earth!”
RS: It seems to me, in terms of communication with other planets, the SETI program which is now based on radio telescopes and high technology won’t get very far. There seem to be three points in favor of another approach. First, if we’re trying to communicate with beings on our own level, i.e., biological organisms on planets somewhere else in the universe, it may be that shamanic journeys into the heavens, which are a long part of a very long tradition going on for hundreds of thousands of years, may already have contacted beings of a similar order to ourselves.
Second, there’s the possibility of communication with a higher kind of mind or intelligence, like the Pacific Ocean, the Sun, the solar system, or the galaxy. Terence, I think you dismissed it too quickly. The idea that our minds are very much smaller parts of a very much larger mental system, incomprehensible to us because it’s so much larger, working on different time scales, is of course a very traditional idea. We don’t have to stay at our own level. Perhaps we can communicate with these higher levels of intelligence through prayer, mystical insight, or intuition. Most forms of mysticism today are extremely fuzzy because as soon as we get beyond the human level, we lack maps. When it comes to a sense of absorption into the nature of a place, or Gaia, or the solar system, or the galaxy, or the cluster of galaxies, or the cosmos, or the unifying spirit pervading the entire cosmos, most people don’t quite know where one leaves off and the next begins. All they know is that all these things are bigger than them. It may be that in the past people had a better sense of just where they were going. The doctrine of hierarchies of angels was a way of recognizing that there are many different levels of intelligence or mind beyond our own.
The third point is that in order to contact extra-terrestrial intelligences, it may help to direct these efforts toward particular parts of the heavens. There are traditional beliefs about the qualities of particular stars, and these might provide a guide as to what to expect. Regulus, for example, in the constellation Leo, was considered a star of good omen. Looking at it, going into an altered state having invoked its spirit, making the appropriate prayers and preparations, could result in a form of directed mind travel that would go beyond random journeying. This would be a new frontier of space exploration that can be done on a very low budget. It could open up a great range of possibilities.
TM: I think it’s a wonderful idea. I can envision using the Keck telescope, punching up Algol on the screen and then smoking DMT and putting your hand on the radio, as they used to say. It could work! I don’t doubt it for a moment.
RA: I do know somebody who undertook a program like this. It was me actually. The technical equipment that made this project possible, empowering me to travel to my destination, the stars, was my hot tub, an instrument that makes it comfortable to sit outdoors for a long time watching the sky. I explored primarily the polar constellations and the Milky Way. I found that some kind of conversation with the Milky Way is possible, as well as with the Zodiac and the zodiacal con
stellations, particularly the lunar and solar constellations. They each have a lot to say about the morphic field.
I return to John Dee and his conversations with angels. Dee interpreted mathematics as being a healing art, in which the stellar influences could be used for healing human diseases. We could apply this idea on a larger scale, where our future and the biosphere’s future are threatened. We could ask the Guardian Angel of the Anima Mundi, for example, to give aid in our planetary predicament by instructing us not as individual humans, but collectively as a human species. This was the program that I had in mind in my experiment. I was asking for guidance in a visual form—a vision of the kind that I’ve been struggling with machinery to reproduce. I’ve not so far received a solution to our problems, but I do think this is a program that an individual can pursue, even without psychedelics. It requires a considerable commitment of time.
RS: We can start nearer to home with the sun, of course. At sunrise and sunset in many traditions people have communicated with the sun. In India a traditional part of the daily ritual is to greet the sun as it rises in the morning, in order to form a conscious relationship with it. Our own civilization is based to an extraordinary degree on what’s jocularly called “sun worship.” Millions of people spend the winter fantasizing about which beach they’re going to go to in the summer. This curious movement in our civilization toward a new relationship to the sun is relatively recent. In the nineteenth century very few people lay around in the sun.
RA: I think we should reconsider the moon. The Lunar Sphere, among the nine celestial spheres, is somehow the most important to us, as it’s the membrane for our kind of life. The traditional idea was that everything inside the lunar sphere decays and dies, and everything outside the lunar sphere is eternal. The moon was somehow always seen as the boundary of mortal life. Furthermore, everyone loves to look at it, and probably love and the emotional structure of the human and mammalian system has evolved by moonlight. The moon might be our likeliest possibility for actually having a conversation and renewing our contact with the living and intelligent universe.
The Evolutionary Mind Page 18
