Video

A discussion with Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham from Metamorphosis recorded at Esalen. Terence McKenna (1946-2000) has been studying the ontological foundations of Shamanism and the Ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation for the past quarter century. An innovative theoretician and spellbinding orator, Terence has emerged as a powerful voice for the psychedelic movement and the emergent societal tendency he calls The Archaic Revival. Poetically dispensing enlightened social criticism and new theories of the fractal dynamics of time, Terence deobfuscates many aspects of the visionary lexicon, and then some. As Artist Alex Grey suggests, "In the twilight of human history, McKenna's prescription for salvation is just so crazy it might work." Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge and philosophy at Harvard, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. He took a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Cambridge in 1967 and was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology until 1973. As a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he carried out research at Cambridge on the development of plants and the aging of cells. In addition to his numerous books, he is the author of more than fifty papers in scientific journals. His experiments into unusual and unexplained perceptiveness in humans make a compelling case that intuition, precognition, and telepathy are not paranormal, but are, in fact, normal functions drawn from our biological past. RALPH H. ABRAHAM has been Professor of Mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz since 1968. He received the Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1960, and taught at Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton before moving to Santa Cruz. He has held visiting positions in Amsterdam, Paris, Warwick, Barcelona, Basel, and Florence, and is the author of more than 20 texts, including eight books currently in print. He has been active on the research frontier of dynamics -- in mathematics since 1960, and in applications and experiments since 1973. He has been a consultant on chaos theory and its applications in numerous fields (medical physiology, ecology, mathematical economics, psychotherapy, etc.) and is an active editor for the technical journals World Futures, and the International Journal of Bifurcations and Chaos. In 1975, he founded the Visual Mathematics Project at the University of California at Santa Cruz, which became the Visual Math Institute in 1990, with its popular World Wide Web site since early 1994. He has performed works of visual and aural mathematics and music (with Ami Radunskaya and Peter Broadwell) since 1992. http://deoxy.org/t_ppp.htm http://www.sheldrake.org http://www.ralph-abraham.org/