Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham: Trialogue at Esalen, 9/8/89 Pt. 1

Voices of Esalen

Please note that Terence McKenna spools forth a kind of complicated, highly erudite babble of text that is designed to be imbibed or absorbed in an almost osmotic fashion. His words don’t necessarily need to be decoded; they can simply be enjoyed, for their texture, for their sound, and absolutely for their message, though the message is often so abstract or so dense or so inventive so as to render it difficult to comprehend. Here are his words, from a random Terence talk delivered at Esalen in 1992: “Our task is not to understand. It is to appreciate.” Yes indeed. Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist and author, sometimes accused of being a new age author, who’s achieved some level of notoriety, primarily due to his widely debated concept of “morphic resonance.” Morphic resonance essentially suggests that there is a kind of collective memory in nature. According to Sheldrake, similar forms , or morphic units, resonate with and influence each other through time and space. For example, he suggests that if rats learn a new trick in one part of the world, rats elsewhere will learn it more quickly, as the morphic field of rats has been "tuned" to this new behavior. In Sheldrake’s words, natural systems ... “inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind." This collective memory is responsible for "telepathy-type interconnections between organisms.” Critics have cited a lack of evidence for the concept of morphic resonance, and noted the ways that it contrasts with established thought in genetics, embryology, neuroscience, and biochemistry. Yet this is precisely the sort of reasoning that a man like Terence McKenna, who was highly scientific and precise in his thinking yet wildly out of the box and creative when it came to systems of thinking, would be fascinated by. Ralph Abraham is a mathematician and pioneer in the study of chaos theory. What is chaos theory? Simply put, chaos theory explores how any action, no matter how small, can lead to complex and unpredictable behavior in physical systems. Abraham founded the Visual Math Institute in Santa Cruz and continues to teach there now. His work like McKenna’s and Sheldrake’s, examines consciousness, the nature of reality, and the intersection of science and spirituality. He is the author of a great number of books that tackle a variety of subjects, including the tome Foundations of Mechanics, the Evolutionary Mind , written with McKenna and Sheldrake, as well as “Hip Santa Cruz: First-Person Accounts of the Hip Culture of Santa Cruz, California in the 1960s.” Like the other two persons showcased in this delightful episode of Voices of Esalen, drawn from the prodigious Esalen archives, he is undoubtedly a really smart person. I hope you’ll enjoy this trialogue - this episode is really a part one of a really long, cool, strange conversation, that would eventually lead to a book authored by these three great minds, if I’m not mistaken: "Trialogues at the Edge of the West."