TM: The Australian Aborigines say that one sings the world into existence.
RS: Singing doesn’t usually play a very explicit part in the relationship between dogs and their owners.
TM: No, but no human has as much experience with dogs from prehistory as the Australian Aborigines. And they’re very much the keepers of this gnosis of a dreamtime, an alternative dimension outside of history. It’s all about modes of time. If you perceive time in this a-historical mode, then what returns to you is a nature become alive, full of intent, intelligence, and information. If you don’t have that view of time nature becomes dead, a resource for exploitation. Don’t you think?
RA: Oh I think that dogs chant sometimes. They sing to music, they howl at night. Coyotes howl in choruses between different packs all through the night. And it could be that with the way we’re speaking with our pets it’s actually the music that they’re getting.
TM: I recall that Robert Graves tried to make a case that there was a kind of Ursprach, a primary poetic language that directly addresses the emotions. That human emotions could be addressed through shamanic poetry. He traced the function of language back deeper and deeper into the function of a poem, and what poetry seeks to evoke.
RS: Yes, quite. But what dogs and cats seem to pick up are intentions. They pick up when people are about to go away on holiday even before they’ve started packing. They pick up when people want to take them to the vet, and will often hide. Dogs often pick up when they’re going to be taken for a walk. Dogs can be trained to respond not just to words and whistles, but even to silent, mental commands. Many dogs and cats seem to know when a person they are bonded to has died, even when this happens far away. They seem to be sensitive to changes in the field that connects them to their people. This field is affected by the activities, emotions and intentions of their people—whether they’re coming back or going away, whether they’ve died, whether they’re in pain or trouble, whether they want to play. The animals seem to be picking up not specific messages but rather general changes in the tension of the field...
RA: In the mental field.
RS: Mental is perhaps not the right word. The field concerned is a social field, interrelating animals to each other, as in a flock of birds or people and animals, as in the case of pets and their human families.
TM: It’s always said that shamans can talk to the animals and that animals will come to visit a shaman. I’ve even heard stories of contemporary Ayahuasca groups where deer and raccoons would practically overrun the group in the night, come to join the circus.
RA: I think when you begin to take these ideas seriously then I’m going to see you become a true vegetarian.
TM: But Ralph, the most intelligent entities we know are plants.
RS: One thing that we haven’t explored much is the evolutionary connections between people and animals. Long before animals were domesticated, people were paying close attention to wild animals, if only so they could hunt them more effectively. And long before people appeared on the scene, predator and prey in general must have had a close interrelationship. And their responses to each other must have evolved, and must have been subject to natural selection.
TM: Human beings occupy an interesting position in all of this because until fairly recently the evidence suggests we were vegetarians, fruit-eating, canopy-living creatures, and then we became omnivores and began to predate small animals. There is no reason why a vegetarian animal should pay any attention to the behavior of other animal species. But for a predator, it’s very important to study the behavior of your prey, and that study actually represents a kind of identification with the prey. This process could have been an impulse toward the evolution of consciousness, the need to model the behavior of other animals mentally in order to obtain them for dinner. A horse, a cow, they don’t do that. But certainly hunting animals exhibit what we naively call intelligence.
RA: I think there is a reason for vegetarians to communicate carefully with other animal species and that has to do with the competition for resources. We have a tree full of fruit, the mongooses like to eat this fruit, and if they get it first then we won’t have any. So we have to know when the mongooses are on their way to steal the fruit.
TM: But if you were a monkey competing with mongooses for fruit, you wouldn’t study the behavior of mongooses, you’d study the fruiting habits of fruit trees.
RA: To get there first. But you would still want to know where the competitors are, how far away they are, and how much time have you got to harvest the fruit. And if you are a hungry predator, to catch an animal you want to eat, you have to know where it is even though it’s not visible.
TM: It may be that the shamanic link between humans and animals is that consciousness was at first not self-conscious. It was consciousness of others, of food. It’s only later that this consciousness moved into a position of self-identity within the psychic structure. The earliest conscious creatures were not conscious that they were conscious. They were conscious that the food was conscious.
RA: There’s no evolutionary advantage to self-consciousness, is there? What good is it, self-consciousness?
RS: One theory is that its origins are social. In intensely bonded social groups, internalizing the behavior of others, and learning how to predict their moods and behaviors, is of great advantage.
RA: So self-consciousness is actually a degenerate form of the consciousness of a flock field.
RS: It’s a form where you get intense individualized or personalized interactions within the group, as in small groups of eight or so. You have an internalized model of others who become part of your world. They have an internalized model of you. And through modeling others, you acquire an ability that can later be used to model yourself. It’s like what Terence was saying about predators modeling the prey, but it’s now modeling other members of the social group, and then modeling one’s self.
TM: But a shaman is the person who has great ability to communicate with animals, even at a distance, because the shaman’s chief function is to locate the game. How simple that could be if he could look at the world through the eyes of the prey. A shaman is definitely a specialist in human-animal communication and in that sense perhaps closer to a prelinguistic state of mind. So that as the rest of the society socializes, bonds together in tight groups using ordinary speech, the shaman was intoxicated, chanting, communicating with the animals. The shaman exemplifies a more archaic style of being; he’s not social. He is rather nearly an animal himself.
RA: A vestige.
TM: A vestige. And a go-between not only in the world of human beings and souls and dreamers, but also between the human world and the animal world.
RS: This was certainly true of the only shaman that I’ve actually ever stayed with in the Saora tribe in Orissa, India. The village was down in the valley, but he lived at the top of a cliff, where the jungle began. He was often out in the forest trapping animals or just observing them. He lived on the edge; beyond him was the jungle, below him was the village. He was literally at the margin between the two.
TM: This phenomenon of animal-human interaction is bound to have deep archaic roots. I’m very interested in it as part and parcel of the archaic revival.
Truth is a very complicated concept and why shouldn’t it be? It’s motivated thinkers since thinking began. And, as yet, we have no certain index for it.
CHAPTER 8
SKEPTICISM
Terence McKenna: I thought it would be interesting to discuss the whole question of skepticism, and what I call the Balkanization of epistemology, because I think it’s an issue that more and more people are becoming aware of. What I mean is this. Somehow, as a part of the agenda of political correctness, it has become not entirely acceptable to criticize, demand substantial evidence, or expect people to make what used to be called old-fashioned sense when they are advancing their speculations. I think this tolerance of unanchored thought and speculation is confusing the evolutionary progress of
discourse.
I’m also aware that if you draw the parameters too tight, the baby goes out with the bath water—you become a defender of Scientism or some kind of orthodoxy. So, in my own situation, I’ve been trying to both understand what is strong, and to be supported in science, and what needs to be criticized. Equally, I’ve been looking at the alternatives to science—the counterculture, the New Age—and I ask myself, what is strong? What serves the evolution of discourse, and what is, in fact, this type of unanchored thinking that I’m concerned about?
First let me talk a little bit about how I see science. If any one of us were to take what is called a hard scientific approach to many of the phenomena that interest us—which we know exist, and we find rich in implications—they would simply not be allowed as objects of discourse. Psychic pets, the source of the content of the psychedelic experience, and other interesting phenomena would be ruled out of order. So, on one level, there’s something wrong with science—or what’s called empiricism, skepticism, and positivism. It has different names.
On the other hand, we also run into trouble if we go to the other end of the spectrum and are willing to admit the testimony of iridologists, crop circle enthusiasts, victims of alien abductions, those who channel Atlantis, those who believe vast alien archaeology dots the plains of Mars, and those who claim that pro bono proctologists from distant star systems are making unscheduled house calls. I’m sure that both of you realize that medical professionals, regardless of their species or star system of origin, do not make house calls anymore.
So then, I see this problem. Science is too tight-fisted. It misses much of what is interesting. But to abandon the approach of science is to be without a rudder in an ocean of strident claims and counter claims, many of which are preposterous and certainly not all of which can be true. So, I’ve been thinking about this for a while. My approach has been to say, well, science went from superstition to its present positivist position through a process of evolution and temporal unfolding. So, using a method I’ve advocated in other situations, I conducted the following exercise. I said I would move backward through the epistemological history of science to the last sane moment science knew and then analyze what that consists of. I haven’t completed this process, but what I find is that a curious betrayal has occurred in science. With the rise of capitalism and industrialism, science has actually allowed assumptions to be made that betrayed its original intent.
What I mean by that is this. Modern science relies on the statistical analysis of data. Measure ten times, add the values, divide by ten, and this tells you how much rain is falling, or how much voltage is flowing through a wire. Something like that. This approach to phenomena inevitably militates against unusual phenomena, because they are statistically insignificant. That’s the phrase that is actually used. I think you see my implication. The method of statistical analysis has produced general formalizations of nature’s mechanisms, and wonderful products that can be sold and patented, but it’s a coarse-veined view of nature. What it militates against seeing are the very things that feed the progress of science—the unassimilated phenomena, the unusual data, the peculiar results of experiments.
So looking at that, I then said, where are we in the history of science? Where did this happen and how was it before? You may wish to correct me a hundred years either way, but I’m very interested in bringing back and appreciate William of Ockham. Aside from the nice things I’m saying about him here, he also had a notion of what he called “unlimited progress” that hasn’t been much appreciated. He comes very close to novelty theory belief, that the universe progresses into a merging with the nature of God. But the thing about Ockham that bears on all this is, of course, his famous razor. Although it’s been interpreted many ways, this simply says that hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity. Or, to put it more simply, the simplest explanation of any phenomena should be preferred until found inadequate. Explanations should not be complexified beyond the demands of the problem against which it’s being brought to bear.
If we abandon the statistical analysis of nature, we will probably realize that the assumption of temporal invariance about the underlying fields of nature is, in fact, just that—a cheerful assumption, untested and unproved. So, in my hypothetical reformation of epistemological dialogue, we should get rid of statistical analysis. We should dial science back to the late medieval period of Ockham, and we should leave science that way. By applying Ockham’s razor we’re quickly able to cut away the underbrush that the peripheral and alternative people have brought to the table. Some of it’s good, such as things like hypnotism, acupuncture, nutrition therapy, rational approaches to telepathy, and clairvoyance. I don’t have a problem with any of this, or with people proposing new models of nature.
What I have a problem with is unanchored, eccentric revelations taking their place at the table—channelings from the Pleiadians, the Sitchinite reconstruction of Ancient Near Eastern archaeology, and the Arguellian distortion of the Mayan accomplishment. I find these things pernicious and easily dealt with if we use Ockham’s razor. But when we go too far into the statistical analysis of nature, then we begin to cut away at our own beliefs and assumptions about nature. This threatens Rupert’s Morphic Field Theory, my Novelty Theory, and there must be some aspect of all this that would threaten Ralph, if extremely empiricist and positivist criteria were brought to bear. In other words, we’ve all been called soft in our time. But, in fact, I think our softness indicates a failure of science.
Science has whored itself to the marketplace, and to technology, and interesting high order phenomena like societies, economic crashes, and complex system behavior are going to remain forever blurred in our understanding as long as we rely on statistical analysis. It’s a tool that had its place, but to hold onto it indefinitely is going to retard mathematics’ ability to give a deeper account of nature. A perfect example of this would be the enshrinement of the so-called uncertainty principle in physics throughout the twentieth century, and the supposed great bridge between science and mysticism. It turns out that’s malarkey.
There is no uncertainty principle. David Bohm’s formulation of quantum physics gives perfect knowledge of velocity and position without ambiguity. It calls forth the notion of nonlocality. That’s why the Heisenburg formulation was preferred. But again, once nonlocality is accepted, some of the things we’re interested in are permitted—telepathy, information from other worlds arriving by the morphogenetic field, and so on. Maybe I haven’t been as rabble-rousing as expected, by naming in term various heresies to be consigned to the flames, but I do think there are too many loose heads in our canoe, and that no revolution of human thought, that I am aware of, succeeded through uncritical speculation.
Rupert Sheldrake: I think that we have to see the regional problem here—that skepticism or Ockhamism are carrying different social balances in different parts of the world. You live in Hawaii, and Ralph lives in Santa Cruz, California. There’s a level of weirdness among some of the theories people have in these areas. Most of the phenomena you’ve named are typical of Hawaii and California. When you live in England, things take on a rather different perspective. There’s a general level of popular skepticism. The general tone of an English pub is one of skepticism.
TM: But aren’t crop circles and Graham Hancock all homegrown British phenomena?
RS: They are. But in any pub where they are discussed, every one of them would always have skeptics in the discussion. You’re never going to have a kind of thing where you have all believers, except in small crank societies of true believers, which exist. But the general cultural tone is one of skepticism. So the need for a great deal more skepticism doesn’t feel quite so urgent if you live in London as it does in Hawaii or California.
Secondly, I think that the skepticism of science that you talk about is a serious threat, and I think that’s done more than anything to drive science in a dogmatic direction. It’s this kind of skepticism that rules out “
paranormal” phenomena at any cost, and feels it has to deny telepathy and other aspects of the sixth sense. According to this perspective, if nonlocality appears to happen, it’s just the peculiarity of the details of quantum theory.
TM: Statistical anomaly gets rid of all problems.
RS: Yes. But there are plenty of dogmatic skeptics, like the devotees of the Skeptical Inquirer. That kind of skepticism has done a great deal to force science into this narrow mindedness. Common sense of the type found in British pubs, and probably in most parts of the United States, would deal quite satisfactorily with the pro bono proctologists from outer space. Anyone who claimed they had had an unscheduled house call would be the butt of a great deal of humor within moments.
The Evolutionary Mind Page 14