Rupert Sheldrake - The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination & Spirit

Also by Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna,
and Ralph Abraham
Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness

Also by Rupert Sheldrake
A New Science of Life
The Presence of the Past
The Rebirth of Nature
Seven Experiments That Could Change the World
Natural Grace (with Matthew Fox)
The Physics of Angels (with Matthew Fox)
Dogs That Know When Their Owners
Are Coming Home
The Sense of Being Stared At

Also by Terence McKenna
The Invisible Landscape (with Dennis McKenna)
Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Growers Guide
(with Dennis McKenna)
Food of the Gods
The Archaic Revival
True Hallucinations

Also by Ralph Abraham
Chaos, Gaia, Eros
Dynamics, the Geometry of Behavior
(with Chris Shaw)
Foundations of Mechanics (with Jerrold Marsden)
Manifolds, Tensor Analysis, and Applications
(with Jerrold Marsden and Tudor Ratiu)
Chaos in Discrete Dynamical Systems
(with Laura Gardini and Christian Mira)
The Chaos Avant-garde (with Yoshisuke Ueda)

The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination & Spirit Copyright 2005 by Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher except in critical articles and reviews. For information contact:

Monkfish Book Publishing Company

22 E. Market Street

Rhinebeck, New York 12572

First published as The Evolutionary Mind: Trialogues at the Edge of the Unthinkable by Trialogue Press. Copyright 1998 by Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham.

Revised Edition
Design by Georgia Dent
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Catalogue-in-Publication Data

Sheldrake, Rupert.

eISBN 9781939681102

I. McKenna, Terence K., 1946- . II. Sheldrake, Rupert. III. Title.

98-90256 CIP

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

CIP data for first edition. For updated CIP data, please contact the publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing Company

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Monkfish Book Publishing Company
22 E. Market Street
Rhinebeck, New York 12572
www.monkfishpublishing.com

In Memory of
Father Bede Griffiths

Table of Contents

W e became firm friends when we first met in 1982, in California, and met for discussions and conversation at regular intervals, both in the United States and in England until Terences death on April 3rd, 2000.

Most of our time together was spent talking, trying out ideas, arguing, speculating, and enjoying each others company. Our professional interests and backgrounds were very different. Ralph is a chaos mathematician and pioneer in the field of computer graphics; Terence, a psychedelic explorer, ethnopharmacologist, and theorist of time; and Rupert, a controversial biologist, best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance, the idea that there is an inherent memory in nature.

Soon we found that these three-way discussions, which we call Trialogues, were especially stimulating and fruitful, at least for ourselves. We had no thought of them being anything other than private meetings of friends. But after some six years of these informal conversations, Nancy Lunney, of the Esalen Institute, in Big Sur, California, asked us to lead a weekend workshop together. As a consequence, our trialogues emerged into the public domain in September 1989. These discussions, together with others we held at Esalen in private over the next two years, formed the ten chapters of our book, Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness , published in 2001 (first published in 1992 as Trialogues at the Edge of the West ).

We have called this book The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination and Spirit because this title best summarizes the common themes of our discussions about the evolutionary mind. They are strongly influenced by the idea of the evolution of life, science, technology, culture, and indeed the entire cosmos. Our conversations are also influenced by the prospects for a greatly enlarged understanding of mind, expansion of experience and the transformation of consciousness beyond anything we presently conceive.

The trialogues in this book took place over several years and in several places: at the Esalen Institute, California; at Hazewood House, in the Devon countryside, in the West of England; at Terences rainforest retreat on the Big Island of Hawaii, on the slopes of the volcano Mauna Loa; at the University of California at Santa Cruz and at Ralphs home, in the redwoods near the university.

An earlier version of this book called The Evolutionary Mind: Trialogues at the Edge of the Unthinkable was published by Trialogue Press, Santa Cruz, in 1998. The present book replaces this earlier version, which has been revised, updated and includes two new trialogues.

As always, we are very grateful to Becky Luening of Word-rhythm for the accuracy of her transcriptions, and to Paul Herbert for the gift of his recordings. We are indebted to Nancy Kaye Lunney and the Esalen Institute for hospitality in 1992, to the University of California at Santa Cruz for hospitality in 1998 and to David Jay Brown for his editing of the 1998 transcripts.

Rupert Sheldrake, London
Ralph Abraham, Santa Cruz

November, 2004

POSTSCRIPT TO PREFACE

M y brother Terence McKenna, departed the corporeal plane in the spring of 2000. The rest of us remain stuck here, circumscribed by the limitations of space and time. For those who admired Terences ideas, and especially, for those who admired the intellectual synergies that emerged out of the mind-play and conversations of these old and excellent friends, and manifested in the world as the trialogues, this book, likely to be the last published edition in the trialogues series, emerges as a special gift. The trialogues reflect the contributions, conversations, arguments and intellectual riffs of three brilliant minds, each a brilliant intellect, each widely versed in diverse aspects of science, art, philosophy, and esoteric lore, each freely bringing unique insights and perspectives to their free-wheeling discussions. The trialogues are a jam-session of the mind, an intellectual moveable feast, an ongoing conversation that began over twenty years ago and remains as lively and relevant today as it ever was. Sadly, Terence had to leave the conversation a little earlier than planned. But the appearance of this book of trialogues at this critical historical juncture, while ever more dark and sinister forces cast their shadow over what we thought was to be the shining New Millennium, is a reaffirmation of the potency of the optimistic vision that the trialogues express. It is the same optimistic vision that Terence articulated so consistently in his teachings and writings. I would like to think that he would be very pleased to know that the message still resonates, twenty years after the conversation started and five years since he left the stage. We may think that we have witnessed much that would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago. The message of this new edition, which Terence would have heartily endorsed, is: just wait! You aint seen nothing yet!

Dennis McKenna, Iquitos, Peru