This is KZSU,

This is KZSU, Stanford.

Entitled opinions from the beginning unto the end, coming to you from the towering peaks of Stanford University,

overlooking the abyss of the San Andreas Fault.

Our topic today is the physics and spirit of crystals, and with any luck, by the end of the show, the

distinction between spirit and physics will become as indeterminate as the one between

thunder and wonder in the excitable minds of Vico's giants.

I'm not a physicist, only a shaman of the entitled Opinions tribe,

yet I get the impression that as it advances, physics is becoming more and more a science of spirit,

especially if we understand spirit as a rarefied refraction of matter.

The traditional dualisms of mind and matter seem to be giving way these days to a new monism

of general intelligence, of world's soul, of matter that thinks, matter that feels.

Who knows, physics may soon catch up with G Jacomo Leopardi, who two centuries ago

declared, I quote, that matter thinks is a fact. It's a fact because thought depends entirely on

sensation, which is a condition of our material bodies, and because we experience thought corporeally.

I've spoken at length on this radio program about the spirit of rivers, wind, forests, and even

of cigarettes. When the doors of perception are cleansed, everything appears in its

symbolical guise, where prolonged echoes

mingle in a deep and tenibrous unity, vast as the dark of night and the light of day,

and where perfumes, cool as the flesh of children, have the power to expand into infinity, with amber, musk, and

Benzoin singing the ecstasy of soul and sense. I borrow those images from one of the venerable

trustees of entitled opinions, Charles Baudelaire. William Blake is another. We are immersed in symbols,

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