Preface
e have been firm friends since we first met in 1982, in California, and have been meeting at regular intervals ever since, both in the United States and in England.
We spend most of our time together talking, trying out ideas, arguing, speculating, and enjoying each others' company. Our professional interests and backgrounds are very different: Ralph is a chaos mathematician and pioneer in the field of computer graphics; Terence is a psychedelic explorer, ethnopharmacologist and theorist of time; and Rupert is a controversial biologist, best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance, the idea that there is an inherent memory in nature. We also share many interests and enthusiasms in common, not least our affinity for India, where we have all lived at different times.
We soon found that these three-way discussions were especially stimulating and fruitful, at least for ourselves. We had no thought of these being anything other than private meetings of friends. But after some six years of these informal conversations, we were asked by Nancy Lunney, of the Esalen Institute, in Big Sur, California, 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 basis of our book Trialogues at the Edge of the West, published by Bear and Co. in 1992.
This book has been translated into Dutch, French, German, Polish and Portuguese, and many people have told us that they found it stimulating, and that it has sparked off lively discussions among groups of friends. We have been encouraged to find that ideas and conversations can spread in this way, and hope that the present book will enable this process to go further.
We have continued to meet as opportunities have presented themselves, and this book, The Evolutionary Mind, is based on discussions at Esalen in September 1992; in June 1993 in the West of England, at Hazelwood House, in the Devon countryside; and at Terence's rainforest retreat on the slopes of the volcano Mauna Loa, on the Big Island of Hawaii, in September 1994.
We have called this book The Evolutionary Mind because this title best summarizes the common themes of our discussions. Most are strongly influenced by the idea of evolution--of life, science, technology, culture and indeed the entire cosmos; and also by the prospects for a greatly enlarged understanding of minds, expansion of experience, and transformations of consciousness beyond anything we can at present conceive.