Katie Norris: The Language of Symbols, Consciousness, Cycles and Quantum Reality

**Cliff Dunning** (0:17)
Oh, my God, can you believe it? We're at the end of August, moving in to September. I guess summer is officially over on the 21st of, or this year, 22nd of September. That's the beginning of autumn. I used to have a end of summer party at my place, and I'd have family and friends over. We did a, of course, I'm here in Northern California, we did a wine tasting, we call it a blind tasting, where you take a bag that you get at a liquor store that covers a bottle, and we would wrap up the bottles. What we would do is we'd do the best wine, like typically it was red or we'd do whites too, but we'd do the best of the Pinot Noirs, under $20, and so you had to select a wine, and you had to pay under $20, and we did these blind tasting. It was cool because we'd have like 20, 30 people, not everyone would bring a wine, but we'd probably have, I'm thinking, 10 or 12 wines, and we would have wines that were fabulous, and they were like under $10.
Pinot Noirs are a complex grape, and so a wine that is good for under $10 is a mindblower. Now, if you don't know about Trader Joe's, you need to, and I think they're pretty much everywhere, there may be parts of the United States, obviously in other countries that they're not available, but they go out and they'll buy a warehouse of a defunct winery or a new winery, they'll buy it really, really cheap.
They're Trader Joe reds and whites, they're pretty much straightforward, some of them are fantastic. And for a number of years, there was a Chablis, no excuse me, there was a Chardonnay, a white wine that was simply mind-blowing. We had a couple of years where we were doing our blind tasting at the end of the summer party. And this out of nowhere TJ Chardonnay was beating everybody. It even beat us $30 bottle. And look, I'm here in Northern California, we're at the crest of the Napa Valley. It takes me less than an hour to get up there. So I can tell you from experience that I'm not a wine connoisseur, but I know what I like, you know? And when I was drinking that, I was like, damn. So I would have got like, I think I got half a case. And I'm not a big wine person. I do like it though. And occasionally I'll have a bottle. But it's tough. I have a girlfriend who's really big on wine, so that makes it really easy. She goes through periods where she can't drink because she's doing a meditative retreat or she's whatever reason. So we have to be careful about that. And I can't drink a whole bottle of wine. Jesus, you can't do that if you're not able to function. So anyhow, these end of summer events were fun, really, really fun. If you want to have a good event with adults, do a blind tasting of select wine. Set a price. Now, I'm spoiled. We're here in the heart of the wine world. And so I can get a bottle for under 20 bucks. That's pretty damn good. And under 15, under 20, or under 10 Wow. And you know what you like. Some people like wines that I can't stand.
One of the wines I don't like, a white wine from Germany, is Gewürztamina, which is a very small grape that they almost rot, and it really gets high sugar content. And it's like a liqueur. It's so sweet. We had a tasting of Gewürztamina one year. And we're right in the heart of it. It was really good. So anyhow, something fun to do at the end of summer, having your friends together, thinking about what you did for the summer, and then getting ready for the fall.
And that's a big deal. And I got to say, I'm really enjoying the final phases of this work that I'm doing on this book. And I've been just simply blown away by the research, the archaeological record of the Maya. And I was astounded at how many, people are concentrating on Mayan studies. They're Mayanists. And so you go to school, you get an anthropology degree, and then you sign up and get your fieldwork. I can't remember how many hours it is. And you do your coursework for your archaeology credential. And when I began looking for what they call scientific papers, which is otherwise known as white papers and journals, there's a tremendous amount of research on Mayan hydrology, which is the study of water. And I was just blown away because what they have found is that the Maya, and this goes way back. Now, just the other day, I'm talking like 24 hours from now, I discovered that in Tikal, there is a water system that's been dated to 800 BCE. 800