Podcast 059 – “Creativity and Imagination” (Part 1)
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
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PROGRAM NOTES (Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:36 Rupert Sheldrake: Bringing together the idea of creation and imagination, or evolutionary creativity. . . . There is a profound crisis in science that will change science as we know it because the two fundamental models concerning the basic nature of reality that we have are coming to a head-on collision. "If the universe is evolving, then the laws of nature are evolving as well." . . . [Perhaps] "things are as they are because they were as they were." . . . "There must be an interplay between habit and creativity." . . "Could there be a kind of imagination working in nature?" . . .
16:32 Terence McKenna: "If the laws of nature are eternal, where were they before the big bang?" . . . . "The immense improbability that modern science rests on, but cares not to discuss, is this: The belief that the universe sprang from nothing in a single moment." . . . "History is the tracks in the snow left by creativities wandering in the divine imagination." . . . "Chaos is the birthplace of order. Chaos is not the problem. Chaos is the answer."
33:55 Rupert: "Matter is in a sense dense because it is so deeply habitual." . . . "I’m interested in the posibility that the imagination isn’t all there, all worked out in potential in advance, but rather that the world truly is made up as it goes along." . . . "And instead of [imagination] emerging, as it were, from the light in the future, or from a kind of Platonic mind, it may emerge from something much more like the unconscious mind. It may come into light from darkness, and the formative processes of the imagination may not be sparks leaping from the mind of god but rather new forms welling up from the womb of chaos."
41:24 Terence: "It seems to me that the problem revolves around this notion of purpose." . . . "Time is a topological manifold over which events must flow subject to the constraints of the manifold, and I call the surface of the manifold "novelty".
46:50 Rupert: "The question is, ‘Are the new forms arising in the attractor, or is the attractor simply attracting what is already a diversity of forms through a process that lies between them, as it were, the imagination?’ "
