Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
A talk by Terence McKenna in Denver – April 1999
TRANSCRIPT OF THIS TALK … (PDF Version)
“This is a struggle between novelty and habit.” … “[Your culture] is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.” … Cultures are virtual realities made of language.”
One of the things Terence covers in this talk is his take on virtual reality, VR. On February 25th, about two months before this talk, Terence participated in an experiment in avatar-based random in 3D virtual worlds on the Internet.
“We were operating live from Terence’s jungle retreat on the Big Island of Hawaii on a wireless packet radio network. The hosting area was finished off in the couple of hours before we went live at 3 pm Hawaii time. Fans were already arriving by that time and helping out by finding audio files to be linked in, images and other Terence netmorabilia. Approximately 40 fans showed up with very short notice from an announcement posted on Terence’s fan lists. Another 20 or show streamed in for days after the event, to be met by “super fan” Roy Batty. In the meantime, see Cathie Leavitt’s “Trip Report” for an excellent first hand newbie view of the experience.” [From DigitalSpace.com … article about Terence and 3D virtual worlds]
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, I’m Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
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Salon.
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Today’s program is from a presentation that Terrence McKenna gave in Denver sometime in April of 1999,
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just a few months after his Palenque presentation that is on our second podcast,
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which we very cleverly named Psychedelic Salon 002.
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At the time Terrence gave this particular talk, he actually had less than a year left
00:00:48 ►
to live, although no one, particularly Terrence, I’m sure, had any idea of that at the time.
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In the beginning of this talk, he also mentions the Entheobotany conferences in Palenque and
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the upcoming All Chemical Arts Conference that ultimately brought together quite a large group of very highly creative people.
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And if I can find it, I hope to podcast part of a talk that Terrence and Tom Robbins gave at that conference
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when Terrence made his famous Freudian slip about posthumous glory
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that brought quite a hush to the crowd until he started laughing, of course.
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After you listen to what Terence has to say in this talk, particularly if you’re a student,
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I hope you’ll give some serious thought to his famous remark about culture being the
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ultimate cult.
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And that includes our own psychedelic culture, by the way.
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You know, when we’re in the thrall of some of our sacred medicines,
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it’s very easy to get carried away and think they’re the answer for everyone.
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I wish that was so, but it just doesn’t seem to be the case, I don’t think.
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So be careful out there.
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You know, besides being enjoyable, expanding your awareness is very serious work.
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You have to learn how to think for yourself, and that’s a lot easier said than done.
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But one of the best places to begin that kind of work, I think, is to listen to some of Terrence McKenna’s mind-bending lectures.
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So without any further fanfare, here is Terrence McKenna trying to figure out what in the world is going on.
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Can you all hear? Is that good? Can you hear?
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Is that working for you? Great. Okay.
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Well, it’s a pleasure to be here. It’s always a pleasure to speak for the Whole Life Expo because they turn out interesting people. My own special brand of freaks and then those
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who wander the halls in search of enlightenment from Moldavite suppositories and what have you.
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And we’re always happy to enlighten them.
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Before I get into the bulk of my thing, I hope you each got one of these things as you came in.
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These are two events. One is an old favorite.
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In fact, as I look out over this crowd, I see many familiar faces from these Mexico get-togethers,
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which have been going on now for about eight years.
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If you’re interested in ethnobotany, psychedelic plants, shamanism,
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ethnochemistry, psychedelic archaeology,
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this is probably the place where you get more people who are experts in this field
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under one tent
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than anywhere else
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Jonathan Ott
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the author of Pharmacotheon
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Rob Montgomery
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Manuel Torres
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Christian Retsch
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the German ethno-anthropologist
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all kinds of people come to this thing
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and it’s held in Palenque within long distance of the ruins each year a German ethno-anthropologist. All kinds of people come to this thing,
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and it’s held in Palenque within long distance of the ruins each year,
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and it’s the height of mushroom season.
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And I need say no more about that.
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So if you can, join us.
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And then this past year at Palenque,
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speaking with Manuel Torres and Ken Symington,
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we decided that the psychedelic community was ready to attempt to take the next step
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in legitimizing itself in the general cultural dialogue.
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And we felt that the place that hasn’t really been honored or sufficiently brought to people’s attention
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is the incredible role that psychedelics have played
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since the 50s in the art world,
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in the world of painting, music, composition, performance, dance,
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so forth and so on.
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And so this September, 12 to 17, on the big island of Hawaii,
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we’re going to have a smaller conference,
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100 people only,
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and we invited major contributors to the art scene
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to come out of the closet
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and affirm the impact of psychedelics
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on their creative processes.
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And we have people such as Alex Gray, the painter,
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Robert Venosa, who’s a bolder painter,
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brilliant international painter,
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Annie Sprinkle, the performance artist,
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Tom Robbins, the novelist who’s just finished.
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I talked to him on the phone yesterday.
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I’m having dinner with him in Seattle tomorrow night.
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He’s just finished the longest Tom Robbins novel ever written.
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So Tom Robbins fans, take note.
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Who else?
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Mark Pesci, Bruce Dahmer.
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These are cyberspace folks.
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Louis John Carlino, who did the movie Resurrection,
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and the sailor who fell from grace with the sea. If you
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are a psychedelic artist, collector, dealer or enthusiast
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and you want to hang with these people, please consider
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this conference. That’s all the commercial and
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self-aggrandizing stuff I want to talk about.
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On to the main event.
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The way this will work is I’ll talk for a while
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and then we’ll do questions for a while
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and then it will be over
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and then I’ll go down to the bookstore
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and if anybody needs to speak to me
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or have a book signed,
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please come down there.
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Okay.
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I used to prepare these things
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in anticipation of vast oceans of faces
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eager to be uplifted.
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Since the oceans of faces are, practically speaking,
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more like small ponds,
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I’ve realized that these are really conversations
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around and about one subject only,
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which is what in the world is going on?
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What is going on?
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I mean, what does it mean to be incarnate in a human body
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at the end of the 20th century
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in a squirrely culture like this
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trying to make sense of your heritage
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your opportunities
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the contents of the culture
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the contents of your own mind
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is it possible
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to have an overarching viewpoint
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that is not somehow canned or cultish
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or self-limited in its approach?
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In other words, is it possible to cultivate an open mind and sanity
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in the kind of society and psychological environment that we all share.
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And it grows daily and weekly, as you know, harder to do this, weirder to integrate,
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more on your plate to assimilate.
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And I certainly don’t have final or even nearly final answers.
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I think it all lies in posing the questions
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in a certain way,
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in feeling the data
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in a certain way.
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And one of the things
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I try to convince people is
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it’s not necessary
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to achieve closure
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with this stuff.
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And in fact,
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any ideological
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or belief system
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that offers closure,
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meaning final answers, is sure to be wrong,
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sure to be self-limiting, sure to be inadequate to the facts. So one of the ideas I’d like to
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put out is that, and it may seem strange in this venue, but perhaps not, the idea that ideology is not our friend.
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It is not a matter of choosing from a smorgasbord of ideologies
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and rejecting the flawed, the self-contradictory, and the over-simple
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in favor of the unflawed, the complex enough.
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Where is it writ in adamantine that semi-carnivorous monkeys
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can or should be capable of understanding reality?
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That seems to me one of the first illusions
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and one of the more prideful illusions of human culture
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that a final understanding is possible in the first place.
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Better, I think, to try and frame questions which can endure.
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Questions which can endure
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and leave off searching for answers
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because answers are like operating systems.
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They’re being upgraded faster than you can keep up with it.
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I want to mention just a couple of things that are happening
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to sort of set the context.
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I mean, this is the stuff I worry about or think about.
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In the last ten days, if you have not been paying attention, because the news has certainly
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been offering many different matters to claim your attention, but in the last 10 days, a new
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solar system, a new star system with three giant planets has been discovered. So this is a multiple planet solar system in Epsilon Andromedae,
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44 light years away.
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What does that mean to us?
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Well, it means that solar systems like our own
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are probably as common as popcorn on a theater floor.
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No reason to think not.
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In fact, right now,
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we know of 20 planets outside the solar system.
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Twice as many as we know inside the solar system.
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So we’re living in a different world than everybody was living in even just five years ago.
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Science is lifting veils and opening doorways on a universe
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so vast, so strange,
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so counterintuitive
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that it’s literally all you can do
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to keep up.
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Here’s another factoid.
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There are now more square miles of territory
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in virtual reality
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than the entire surface of the Earth.
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Virtual reality is now larger
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than this planet.
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I don’t know if you spend much time in VR.
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I spend a little time there.
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I was looking at Alpha World
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before I left Hawaii.
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The opening screen is from 25,000 feet
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above Alpha World.
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The entire thing cannot fit on the screen.
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Denver would fit on the screen at an altitude of 25,000 feet.
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You could see the outlying suburbs.
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But Alpha World won’t fit.
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That’s how large a single world of virtual reality is.
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And there are hundreds, if not thousands,
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being built, being expanded,
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being edited and changed as we speak.
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We’re now just a hair’s breadth away
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from there being six billion people on this planet.
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Again, I checked on the internet before I left
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for something like a 100 million short.
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So by the time I get back to Hawaii in a month
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we’ll be over the 6 billion mark.
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Then just to touch on a few things
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the strongest hallucinogen known to science
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is legal free and easily grown
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totally unlimited in its distribution,
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its accessibility.
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I’m talking about alpha-salvinorine now.
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Quantum teleportation has been achieved
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and is moving out of the laboratory
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and probably in the next half dozen years
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will be the basis of an entirely new kind
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of computational machine
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with greater computing capacity
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than all the computers presently operating
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in North America.
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And had I had more time,
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I could just keep going
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with this laundry list of shockers.
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The human world is exploding at the seams
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human creativity and the implementation
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of human inventions and technologies
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is now at an accelerated fever pitch
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like nothing ever before seen
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in the history of the world
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well where is it leading
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and how does one integrate this stuff
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into one’s own life?
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What does it mean about the experience of being human?
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If you followed the evolution of my ideas,
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you know that I have proposed the existence of an invisible,
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permeating something that is throughout all being,
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all time, all space, all bodies, all thoughts,
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which I call novelty.
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And the interesting thing about novelty
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is that it’s increasing constantly.
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Science has not trumpeted this view
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because science tends to look for principles
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which operate in definable domains.
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In other words, the laws of chemistry,
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the laws of physics,
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the laws of gene segregation,
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the laws that describe the trajectories
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of artillery shells and falling bodies.
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But I submit to you that there is
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an overarching law
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which affects all reality
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and that you don’t need an atom smasher
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or extremely advanced mathematical methodologies to discern.
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It is self-evident in your own experience.
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And what it is, is that as we go back in time,
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the universe is found to be a simpler place.
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If we go back a long ways in time,
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the universe is a very simple place.
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There are no cultures, there are no animals,
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there are no plants.
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Indeed, if we go far enough back in time, there are no animals, there are no plants. Indeed, if we go far enough
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back in time, there are no stars and planets. The universe is simply a swarming ocean of
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energy. But as we approach the present, it’s as though the universe has undergone a series
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of crystallizations out of itself of higher and higher forms of organization.
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And this is what I call novelty.
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Now people have attacked this concept saying that it’s impossible to define in English or mathematically.
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Most things that are interesting are impossible to define.
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Love, courage, decency, dignity, hope, fear, impossible to define. Love, courage, decency, dignity, hope, fear, impossible to define. It doesn’t preclude them from shaping our world. And the absence of a mathematical definition of novelty shouldn’t impede us greatly either, because it’s an intuitively graspable concept. Novelty is complexity.
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It’s connectivity.
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It’s complex, non-equilibrium, thermodynamic states
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that sustain themselves far from equilibrium.
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That’s you as a body.
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That’s us as a society.
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That’s this planet as a living ecosystem.
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And the interesting thing about this novelty is any given level of it which is achieved
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becomes the platform for further advance into novelty.
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Now there is a retardant force, and I call it habit, to keep it away from concepts like thermodynamic entropy. Habit. that the cosmos, your life, the politics of this city, the history of Western civilization
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is a struggle between habit and novelty. Habit is also an intuitively graspable concept.
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It means conservatism, recidivism, doing things the traditional way, not taking chances.
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And these things are not moral values. Sometimes the right
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move is habitual, sometimes the right move is novel. But the universe as a system is
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what I call a novelty conserving engine. In other words, where novelty is produced, it
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tends to be tenaciously hung on to. It can’t always be hung on to, but it be tenaciously hung on to it can’t always be hung on to but it is tenaciously
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hung on to so as an example of what do i mean by tenaciously hung on to 65 million years ago as you
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know an asteroid of considerable dimension struck this planet and in a single day the dinosaurs, the great saurians
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went extinct
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maybe it wasn’t a single day
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maybe it was weeks
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but in terms of the time scale
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of the life of the earth
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it was a blink of an eye
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that was a tremendous setback
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for novelty
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these beautifully climaxed
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and integrated ecosystems
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of dinosaurs and rainforests
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and so forth
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were just pulverized to dust.
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It had taken 3 billion years, 4 billion years,
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for the planet to achieve that kind of novelty.
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65 million years later,
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a fraction of the time it took the original system to establish itself,
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it’s all good.
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The dinosaurs are gone forever, but in their place, much more novel, much more interesting, much more complex animal
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and plant biota have established themselves. So what took 4 billion years to achieve turned
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to rubble, 65 million years is back in place this is because of this
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tendency for nature to prefer
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and conserve novelty
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well I don’t think
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somebody might resist this
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or they might have problems with it
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but I think it’s self evidently true
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that this is
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the most complex age the universe
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has ever known
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because we not only have all which preceded,
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but we have then our own dear selves,
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the poetry of William Blake,
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the mathematical equations of Albert Einstein,
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the painting of Rembrandt.
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We have all of this to add into the mix.
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What takes this out of the realm of
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sophomoric and theoretical discussion
00:20:26 ►
is the second part of my observations on novelty.
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And that is that novelty occurs faster and faster as you approach the present.
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In other words, this isn’t that the universe is driving toward ultimate novelty at constant speed
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and has been since the beginning of the universe.
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Not at all.
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The universe is moving toward ultimate novelty,
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but following a kind of asymptotic spiral of closure,
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so that each advance into novelty is preceded by the next
00:21:03 ►
at an ever greater rate of what I call ingression into novelty is preceded by the next at an ever greater rate of what I call ingression into
00:21:07 ►
novelty. This is a phrase out of Alfred North Whitehead. So what does that mean? It means in
00:21:13 ►
the early universe it took a long time for things to get interesting, for things to go from being
00:21:18 ►
just a cloud of pure electron plasma to a universe with stars ordered into galaxies,
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with planets, with special chemistries and environments.
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And from that came, at least on this planet, advanced life forms,
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first simple life forms, then advanced life forms,
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then the conquest of the land, then extremely advanced life forms,
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minded creatures, language using human
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beings, tool using human beings, and then the frantic, hysterical rush from Altamira
00:21:53 ►
to this moment.
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And we are part of this.
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These vast cycles of advancement into novelty, which used to require eons to affect the universe perceptibly at all,
00:22:08 ►
are now going on in humanly cognizable domains of time.
00:22:13 ►
The year, the month, the day, the decade, the century.
00:22:16 ►
We can look at such humanly cognizable spans of time
00:22:20 ►
and the overwhelming impression we have is of change.
00:22:27 ►
Change piled upon change change piled upon change piled upon change if this process has been rolling forward like this since the birth of the universe
00:22:35 ►
some 12 13 14 billion years ago it’s very hard to hypothesize or argue that it should cease or will somehow deflect itself
00:22:46 ►
from its endless ramping up of acceleration.
00:22:53 ►
But we can’t imagine change going on much faster
00:22:58 ►
than it’s going on now.
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I mean, perhaps we can imagine it going on ten times faster
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or a hundred times faster,
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but a hundred thousand times faster, or a hundred times faster,
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but a hundred thousand times faster, a million times faster?
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The mind boggles.
00:23:15 ►
And yet, I think this is, in fact, where the universe is going.
00:23:23 ►
Now, since the middle 70s, I’ve had these ideas pretty much in place and my faith has been that as science and and human
00:23:28 ►
understanding advances I would either be thrown from the boat as a crank or somehow brought into
00:23:36 ►
the fold well I haven’t been thrown from the boat as a crank I’m not sure speaking at the Whole Life Expo indicates I’ve been folded into the community of
00:23:48 ►
paradigmatic thinking. But I have received some encouragement in the last 18 months and I want to
00:23:58 ►
just mention this briefly to you because I’m surprised how the news has failed us. Did you know that in the last 12 months,
00:24:09 ►
a fundamental law governing the universe in all its parts and places
00:24:14 ►
has been discovered that was previously not only unsuspected but denied?
00:24:21 ►
Expected but denied.
00:24:30 ►
A law of nature larger than any law of nature ever discovered.
00:24:34 ►
Larger than the law of gravity, the speed of light, the second law of thermodynamics. All these are little laws.
00:24:37 ►
What Leary used to call local ordinances.
00:24:40 ►
But these local ordinances have now been contextualized in a discovery of such import
00:24:48 ►
that it has not even been assimilated
00:24:52 ►
by the community of its discoveries
00:24:54 ►
let alone handed down to the peasantry like you and I
00:24:58 ►
and what I’m talking about is the discovery
00:25:00 ►
of the cosmological constant omega
00:25:03 ►
and I don’t want to spend too much time on this,
00:25:05 ►
but here it is in a nutshell.
00:25:08 ►
The universe is expanding faster
00:25:11 ►
than the ordinary laws of physics can account for.
00:25:15 ►
This was realized a year and a half ago
00:25:17 ►
by one team of astrophysicists.
00:25:19 ►
They handed it on to a second team.
00:25:21 ►
They confirmed it.
00:25:23 ►
They handed it on to a third.
00:25:24 ►
They confirmed it. And a very counter, they confirmed it, they handed it on to a third, they confirmed it,
00:25:25 ►
and a very counterintuitive picture of things is emerging.
00:25:30 ►
The universe is not going to fall back on itself
00:25:33 ►
in some grand crunch,
00:25:35 ►
billions of years hence.
00:25:37 ►
Rather, the universe is going to expand forever.
00:25:42 ►
Forever.
00:25:43 ►
But here is the kicker. Faster and faster and faster. Forever. With
00:25:51 ►
no barriers and no limitation. Someone may say, well what about the speed of light? The
00:25:58 ►
speed of light does not cover the law of the cosmological constant
00:26:05 ►
because this law is not saying that matter is moving apart faster and faster.
00:26:11 ►
If that were the case, the relativistic physics would put a speed limit on it.
00:26:16 ►
It’s saying that space itself is expanding faster and faster.
00:26:21 ►
This is a quality of empty space.
00:26:22 ►
The universe that comes into focus
00:26:25 ►
with this law in hand
00:26:27 ►
is a universe that in only a couple
00:26:29 ►
or three billion years
00:26:31 ►
will begin to lose contact
00:26:33 ►
with large parts of itself
00:26:36 ►
because they will be moving apart
00:26:37 ►
at greater than relativistic speed.
00:26:40 ►
So it turns out there is
00:26:42 ►
a cosmic law
00:26:44 ►
which has built into itself
00:26:47 ►
this idea of an endless acceleration
00:26:50 ►
toward infinity
00:26:51 ►
and what it means is that
00:26:54 ►
in a few billion years
00:26:56 ►
this area of space that we call our universe
00:26:59 ►
may be so diffuse
00:27:01 ►
that there may be no more than a handful
00:27:03 ►
of rattling electrons
00:27:04 ►
in the entire universe, so-called, today.
00:27:10 ►
Well, the reason this gives me hope is because…
00:27:14 ►
In the first place, who wants to fall back into the big crunch?
00:27:19 ►
I mean, that’s a really anti-novel thing,
00:27:21 ►
to have half the life of the universe be the retracing of the first half.
00:27:27 ►
And I believe,
00:27:28 ►
and again,
00:27:29 ►
these are bold generalizations,
00:27:31 ►
but generally substantiated,
00:27:34 ►
that nature is fractal
00:27:36 ►
in its structure.
00:27:38 ►
What that means
00:27:38 ►
is that a pattern occurring
00:27:40 ►
on a given scale
00:27:41 ►
can be expected to occur
00:27:43 ►
on other scales. Very different. Simple
00:27:46 ►
example, an atom is a nucleus with electrons spinning around it. A solar system is a star
00:27:53 ►
with atoms spinning around it. A galaxy is a huge black hole and the agglomeration of stars within
00:28:00 ►
the outlying neighborhoods spiraling around it. These are things on tremendously different scales,
00:28:07 ►
and yet they are organized similarly.
00:28:10 ►
And so I believe this is how nature works.
00:28:13 ►
Once she finds a pattern that works,
00:28:15 ►
she applies it in many domains of temperature, pressure, and cosmic scaling.
00:28:22 ►
So this cosmological constant, omega,
00:28:25 ►
which says that the universe is expanding faster and faster,
00:28:28 ►
throws a kind of umbrella of political correctness
00:28:33 ►
over my notion that we are moving faster and faster
00:28:37 ►
into novelty,
00:28:39 ►
and that we are, as it were,
00:28:41 ►
simply the dust motes or the magnetic particles in the presence of some kind of field phenomenon which is organizing us to its will.
00:28:53 ►
And this is the source of my optimism.
00:28:58 ►
If I had to place my faith in human institutions, human religions, human goodness, the human capacity for decency and dignity,
00:29:08 ►
I would be absolutely in the depths of existential despair.
00:29:11 ►
As I was as a kid.
00:29:14 ►
Because as a kid, you know, I didn’t have these ideas.
00:29:17 ►
I had Camusian existentialism and Nietzschean whining and all the rest of it.
00:29:24 ►
And it’s a pretty grim situation, folks.
00:29:29 ►
But I really believe that without atom smashers,
00:29:32 ►
without long base interferometers and all the rest of it,
00:29:35 ►
you can go into nature and open your eyes and open your mind
00:29:41 ►
and you will see these processes in play.
00:29:46 ►
And you can easily extrapolate them to your own life.
00:29:51 ►
Now if going into nature and opening your eyes and paying attention doesn’t deliver this to you,
00:29:58 ►
then I suggest 20 milligrams of psilocybin be added into the mix
00:30:02 ►
or 200 micrograms of LSD
00:30:05 ►
or something like that.
00:30:07 ►
And then I think it will come shining through.
00:30:11 ►
Why should that be necessary?
00:30:13 ►
Why should someone have to resort to
00:30:16 ►
what Rumble called an artificial perturbation
00:30:20 ►
of the senses to achieve this?
00:30:23 ►
Simply because culture mitigates against it.
00:30:28 ►
Culture is a closed system of thinking and values
00:30:31 ►
of the sort I am denouncing.
00:30:34 ►
And it is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment,
00:30:38 ►
your education, and your decency is your culture.
00:30:42 ►
And I realize with joy
00:30:44 ►
that here I skirt the bounds of political correctness is your culture. And I realize, with joy,
00:30:48 ►
that here I skirt the bounds of political correctness because everyone is running around saying,
00:30:51 ►
you know, recapture your roots,
00:30:53 ►
get in touch with your Swedishness,
00:30:55 ►
your Irishness, your whateverishness,
00:30:59 ►
and that’s all very fine.
00:31:01 ►
But I think it’s your humanness
00:31:02 ►
that may have eluded you
00:31:04 ►
in all this ethnocentric
00:31:06 ►
breastfeeding. Well, why should culture imprison us and somehow place a barrier between ourselves
00:31:19 ►
and our true humanness? Well, I think I said at the beginning of this thing, culture and ideology are not your
00:31:27 ►
friends. They are not your friends. This is a hard thing to come to terms with because a certain
00:31:34 ►
kind of alienation lies at the end of this thought process. On the other hand, you can’t live in the
00:31:41 ►
cradle forever. You can’t be clueless forever so somebody
00:31:46 ►
might as well just lay it out for you and say culture is for the convenience of culture not you
00:31:53 ►
how many times have your sexual desires career aspirations financial dealings and aesthetic
00:32:01 ►
inclinations been squashed, twisted, rejected,
00:32:05 ►
and minimized by cultural values.
00:32:09 ►
And if you don’t think culture is your enemy,
00:32:12 ►
ask the 18-year-old kid who is given a rifle
00:32:15 ►
and sent to the other side of the world to murder strangers
00:32:18 ►
if culture is his friend.
00:32:22 ►
These extreme examples should bring it home to us
00:32:25 ►
that it’s a kind of a con game.
00:32:28 ►
It is in fact, strangely enough,
00:32:30 ►
a kind of virtual reality.
00:32:33 ►
We have been led to think of virtual realities
00:32:36 ►
as something on the screen of a computer
00:32:38 ►
or presented through a headset,
00:32:40 ►
but that’s an electronic virtual reality.
00:32:44 ►
The primary technology for the building of virtual realities is language. but that’s an electronic virtual reality.
00:32:49 ►
The primary technology for the building of virtual realities is language.
00:33:00 ►
Once you start talking about race pride, loyalty, our destiny, our God, our mission,
00:33:03 ►
it’s like building virtual realities.
00:33:05 ►
And people begin to treat these things as though they had the substantiality
00:33:07 ►
of real objects
00:33:09 ►
and to build their lives
00:33:10 ►
as though these things were real
00:33:13 ►
and what is this?
00:33:15 ►
it’s a diminution of humanness
00:33:17 ►
you’re choosing to limit yourself
00:33:21 ►
to a cultural reality
00:33:23 ►
whether it’s the reality of being
00:33:24 ►
Ouï Witoto or
00:33:25 ►
Orthodox Jewish or whatever it is
00:33:28 ►
it’s a smaller world
00:33:30 ►
than the simple
00:33:32 ►
hardware you were
00:33:34 ►
born into this universe
00:33:36 ►
with
00:33:37 ►
and the substances
00:33:40 ►
the drugs, the plants, the things which
00:33:42 ►
perturb consciousness, they don’t address
00:33:44 ►
cultural values, they blast perturb consciousness, they don’t address cultural values.
00:33:46 ►
They blast through them.
00:33:47 ►
They address the animal body, the mammalian brain.
00:33:51 ►
They perturb these information fields
00:33:53 ►
outside of the relativistic set of values
00:33:56 ►
that the culture is giving you.
00:33:58 ►
This is why people who yearn for legal psychedelics
00:34:02 ►
have not thought, in my opinion,
00:34:04 ►
deeply enough about what is really at
00:34:07 ►
stake here. Imagine a culture so certain of its primary values, so sure that it represented the
00:34:17 ►
right way to live, that it would encourage people to take psychedelic substances and examine its premises. There ain’t such, at least not in
00:34:28 ►
the high-tech industrial democracies and or the fascist states either. Some aboriginal cultures
00:34:35 ►
have this courage, but it has kept them very close to the breast of nature and her processes.
00:34:43 ►
to the breast of nature and her processes.
00:34:47 ►
Cultures that have habitually broken down the cultural illusion
00:34:48 ►
and examined the terrifying reality beyond it
00:34:52 ►
have not marched off then
00:34:54 ►
to pontificate with religions of absolutism
00:34:59 ►
or scientific absolutism
00:35:01 ►
or all the rest of it.
00:35:04 ►
Well, why is that?
00:35:06 ►
It’s because cultures are virtual realities made of language.
00:35:11 ►
And if there is one thing psychedelics do,
00:35:15 ►
whether you hate them, whether you love them,
00:35:17 ►
whether you don’t give a hoot,
00:35:18 ►
what they do is they dissolve boundaries.
00:35:22 ►
The boundaries between you and the floor,
00:35:25 ►
between you and your friend, between you and your friend,
00:35:26 ►
between you and you last week,
00:35:28 ►
and you and you next week,
00:35:30 ►
and they dissolve boundaries.
00:35:33 ►
That’s what they do.
00:35:33 ►
That is the ultimately subversive behavior.
00:35:38 ►
Cultures are boundary-defining engines.
00:35:43 ►
That’s what they do.
00:35:44 ►
They teach you, we do it this way.
00:35:47 ►
Don’t go there in your mind, in your heart.
00:35:50 ►
Follow the rules.
00:35:52 ►
Follow the rules.
00:35:55 ►
Cultures are like operating systems.
00:35:57 ►
You know at Ur,
00:36:00 ►
well, Ur will do,
00:36:05 ►
they set up a stela in the center of the marketplace.
00:36:09 ►
And on the stela they carved the laws.
00:36:13 ►
These were the laws of the operating system called Ur 1.0.
00:36:19 ►
And that worked fine for a while.
00:36:22 ►
Now we’re operating under Clinton’s second term 4.0.
00:36:27 ►
And is it limiting?
00:36:29 ►
Is it idiotic?
00:36:30 ►
Is it a pain in the rear end?
00:36:32 ►
You bet it is.
00:36:34 ►
How can we overcome the limitation of our operating system?
00:36:39 ►
Well, basically, what I do with my computer when it acts up
00:36:43 ►
is I give it a good slap or a thump on the top.
00:36:48 ►
And that’s what these psychedelics are doing.
00:36:51 ►
They are saying, you know, get it in context, my dear primate.
00:36:56 ►
See, you know, how does it all fit together?
00:36:59 ►
Every culture in history and every time and every place, has operated from the assumption that it had it 95% correct
00:37:07 ►
and that the other 5% would arrive in five years’ time.
00:37:11 ►
All were wrong.
00:37:13 ►
All were wrong.
00:37:14 ►
And we gaze back at their naivete with a faint sense of our own superiority.
00:37:20 ►
But we’re wrong.
00:37:21 ►
We don’t have it either.
00:37:22 ►
I mean, if this is a culture approaching the truth,
00:37:26 ►
who needs the truth?
00:37:28 ►
I mean, this is something very, very different.
00:37:33 ►
Well, then, just to satisfy myself,
00:37:36 ►
I ask the question, why should it be like this?
00:37:41 ►
Why should these psychedelics,
00:37:43 ►
which, granted, perturb the mind, be such a
00:37:47 ►
terrifying, contracultural force? And what does that mean? Well, I think it works something
00:37:56 ►
like this. Your sensory apparatus, connected up to your local language
00:38:05 ►
is a very good threat detection device.
00:38:11 ►
And that is really what the animal body evolved to be.
00:38:15 ►
We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t at the end of a long line
00:38:19 ►
of superb threat detection devices
00:38:22 ►
which told us when the saber-toothed carnivore
00:38:25 ►
was sneaking on its belly through the tall grass,
00:38:29 ►
which gave us that moment out of the corner of our eye
00:38:31 ►
when we saw the edge movement
00:38:33 ►
and scampered back into the cave,
00:38:36 ►
and so forth and so on.
00:38:37 ►
So ordinary consciousness has evolved
00:38:40 ►
an extraordinary fit
00:38:44 ►
to three-dimensional space and time
00:38:47 ►
because that’s where your soma,
00:38:50 ►
your meat, is.
00:38:52 ►
And if the meat is disrupted radically,
00:38:55 ►
the mind is we don’t know where.
00:38:57 ►
That’s somebody else’s lecture.
00:38:59 ►
It’s very important
00:39:00 ►
to keep the physical body together.
00:39:04 ►
So the mind,
00:39:07 ►
under the influence of culture and cultural values,
00:39:10 ►
evolves as a threat detection device. But notice that carried far enough, that ends in paranoia.
00:39:18 ►
So then, in a sense, all cultural values,
00:39:22 ►
carried to their ultimate end end produce the paranoid personality. Fearful,
00:39:28 ►
watchful, never resting, never sleeping, always looking for the worst in every situation.
00:39:36 ►
But the mind is like water. It takes the shape of the vessel into which it is poured, always.
00:39:48 ►
water, it takes the shape of the vessel into which it is poured, always. So when we approach the psychedelic plants as shamans, as seekers, as sincere people interested in extraordinary
00:39:55 ►
experiences, what the psychedelics do, I think, is dissolve this three-dimensional threat detection psychology and system,
00:40:08 ►
and it’s as though the mind discovers that it has a second conformational geometry.
00:40:16 ►
That’s a way of putting it.
00:40:17 ►
And this second conformational geometry is of a higher dimensional order
00:40:24 ►
than ordinary consciousness. Not as a metaphor,
00:40:27 ►
higher dimensional order, but as a mathematician would use that term. The psychedelic mind
00:40:36 ►
is a higher dimensional mind. It is not fit for three-dimensional space-time filled with roving,
00:40:47 ►
fit for three-dimensional space-time filled with roving, heavy-bodied carnivores, but it is fit for the back of the cave, the mountain retreat, the monastic tower, in other words, the place where
00:40:55 ►
threat has been eliminated, and philosophy is the order of the day. And so my interpretation of these psychedelic states
00:41:06 ►
is that they are actually
00:41:07 ►
higher dimensional states of consciousness.
00:41:11 ►
And I put this to Ralph Abraham, the mathematician,
00:41:14 ►
who is no mathematical slouch
00:41:16 ►
and no psychedelic slouch either.
00:41:18 ►
And we talked of this in relationship to DMT.
00:41:21 ►
And he said, I have no doubt at all
00:41:24 ►
that when I am flashing on DMT,
00:41:27 ►
I am seeing the ordinary world
00:41:29 ►
from a higher dimensional mathematical perspective.
00:41:34 ►
And one of the things about higher dimensions
00:41:37 ►
is that the linearity of time is overcome.
00:41:43 ►
And last week and next week are as easily available as the present
00:41:48 ►
moment. The front of my hand is as easily seen as the back of my hand without moving
00:41:53 ►
my hand if I am in hyperspace. So in a way these higher dimensions are the places from which knowledge has percolated. And shamans, related to the smith, the worker in metal, the technologist, the tool maker.
00:42:12 ►
This is the twin brothers, the two aspects of the shaman.
00:42:15 ►
The shaman is a master of fire, master of metals, maker of tools, seer into the future, so forth and so on.
00:42:24 ►
maker of tools, seer into the future, so forth and so on. The shaman is outside of cultural time
00:42:29 ►
and is, I don’t like this word,
00:42:31 ►
but channeling the future which is to come
00:42:35 ►
in the form of technologies, innovations, languages, behaviors,
00:42:40 ►
so forth and so on.
00:42:41 ►
And this is why the shaman has always been the paradigmatic figure for aboriginal cultures,
00:42:47 ►
because the shaman knows more,
00:42:50 ►
and the method of the shaman
00:42:52 ►
has always been perturbation of consciousness,
00:42:56 ►
not always psychedelic plants or substances.
00:42:59 ►
It can be hooking metal hooks under your pectoral muscles
00:43:03 ►
and hanging for 14 hours in the sun.
00:43:05 ►
Can be abandonment in the wilderness.
00:43:08 ►
Can be extreme forms of fasting.
00:43:12 ►
Can be ordeal poisons.
00:43:15 ►
But people are not fools.
00:43:17 ►
All of these things are extremely risky and unpleasant.
00:43:21 ►
While the psychedelics are the most effective
00:43:26 ►
and the least invasive.
00:43:29 ►
I mean, let’s take 30 milligrams of psilocybin
00:43:33 ►
or a great fistful of mushrooms.
00:43:36 ►
Three hours into it,
00:43:37 ►
you are definitely thrown into the lap of God.
00:43:41 ►
Eight hours into it,
00:43:43 ►
you’re simply looking back on it, reflecting, drawing conclusions
00:43:47 ►
and wondering where do you go from here. So this is a roundabout way of explaining it.
00:43:53 ►
It’s no surprise to me that society is very nervous around this issue because society’s
00:43:59 ►
eggs are all in one basket and the psychedelically inspired citizen or the psychedelically inspired shaman
00:44:07 ►
is a dangerous force.
00:44:10 ►
Even in traditional societies,
00:44:11 ►
the shaman is central
00:44:13 ►
to the social functioning
00:44:15 ►
and the health and so forth,
00:44:16 ►
but is never allowed to be
00:44:19 ►
physically central.
00:44:21 ►
There’s a leader,
00:44:22 ►
a headman or something.
00:44:24 ►
The shaman lives off at the edge of the village,
00:44:26 ►
sometimes off in the woods. He is approached with fear and trembling. He is loathed and respected
00:44:33 ►
and feared and loved because it is understood that he represents a dimension that nevertheless
00:44:39 ►
must be tolerated because it is the channel through which knowledge and healing
00:44:45 ►
and higher values come.
00:44:48 ►
Now, in a society like ours,
00:44:50 ►
we say we have other methods.
00:44:54 ►
We don’t need the ravings
00:44:55 ►
of intoxicated shamans.
00:44:57 ►
We have the scientific method.
00:44:59 ►
We have the gospel.
00:45:00 ►
We have the Talmud.
00:45:02 ►
We have all of these things
00:45:04 ►
and they are sufficient for us
00:45:05 ►
to guide ourselves. But to
00:45:07 ►
guide ourselves where?
00:45:09 ►
The 20th century as if this
00:45:12 ►
if the 20th century
00:45:13 ►
is a statement of the
00:45:15 ►
accomplishments of the western
00:45:17 ►
mind values and methods, then
00:45:20 ►
God help us. Because
00:45:21 ►
the 20th century is
00:45:23 ►
a disgrace.
00:45:26 ►
You know?
00:45:27 ►
And to this moment, a disgrace.
00:45:30 ►
It was so comfortable to look back at Auschwitz
00:45:34 ►
and say, well, the 30s, the 40s, Hitler,
00:45:38 ►
those gray, grainy movies,
00:45:41 ►
this has nothing to do with us.
00:45:42 ►
This is just some terrible thing
00:45:44 ►
that happened in Europe 50 years ago. No, no, no. This has nothing to do with us. This is just some terrible thing that happened
00:45:45 ►
in Europe 50 years ago. No, no, no. This is happening. It’s happening as we speak. People
00:45:52 ►
are being pushed into boxcars and taken away to be lined up and shot for no reason whatsoever.
00:45:59 ►
While glasses tinkle and toasts are made by those who define themselves as the preservers of freedom, dignity, and Western values.
00:46:08 ►
We haven’t learned anything.
00:46:10 ►
The 20th century is the most condemnatory piece of evidence
00:46:14 ►
you can place against the Western mind.
00:46:17 ►
And it seems to me it’s a knockout punch.
00:46:19 ►
I don’t know who’s responsible for this,
00:46:22 ►
but whoever is responsible is guilty, guilty, guilty of crimes against humanity.
00:46:29 ►
How do we overcome this?
00:46:31 ►
How do we find real values?
00:46:33 ►
Well, we find them in caring for the earth.
00:46:39 ►
Nature presents an established set of processes and achievements,
00:46:44 ►
billions of years old
00:46:46 ►
which exercise a moral claim on rational intelligence
00:46:50 ►
if it will but notice.
00:46:55 ►
And so that’s what this is all about.
00:46:58 ►
It’s about aboriginal values
00:47:01 ►
and aboriginal technologies,
00:47:05 ►
psychedelic drugs, shamanism, what have you,
00:47:09 ►
offering to us in the final moments of our unravelment
00:47:14 ►
a different and better way to carry on,
00:47:18 ►
a different and better way to behave and build a world.
00:47:21 ►
And it doesn’t come a moment too soon.
00:47:24 ►
It may come too late.
00:47:26 ►
The ultimate tragedy.
00:47:28 ►
Imagine if we,
00:47:29 ►
in this ultimate kind of
00:47:31 ►
fanatoptic struggle,
00:47:33 ►
actually got it right
00:47:35 ►
only to understand
00:47:37 ►
that the momentum of our own idiocy
00:47:39 ►
was so great
00:47:40 ►
that you would die
00:47:41 ►
knowing you could have done it right
00:47:43 ►
but you would die anyway.
00:47:45 ►
And I mean as a culture, as a planet.
00:47:47 ►
So it’s a call to awakening.
00:47:50 ►
Can cultural values be saved?
00:47:53 ►
I don’t think so.
00:47:54 ►
I don’t give a hoot.
00:47:56 ►
I mean, I’m an egg smasher.
00:47:57 ►
I mean, I think we should save the Rembrandts and save, you know, the Piera Della De Francescas
00:48:02 ►
and all that.
00:48:03 ►
and save the Piera Della de Francescas and all that.
00:48:06 ►
But we cannot save the values,
00:48:11 ►
racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia,
00:48:13 ►
product fetishism,
00:48:16 ►
enormous pyramids of class and privilege. None of this is savable.
00:48:18 ►
None of it is worth saving.
00:48:22 ►
Science is worth saving. It’s worth reforming because it is as a method powerful.
00:48:31 ►
But in the presence of people contaminated by these other values, it becomes an engine
00:48:37 ►
of madness, of consumer fetishism, of propagandizing, of the waging of war on unimaginable scales.
00:48:47 ►
Religion as we have practiced it
00:48:49 ►
I don’t think can be saved
00:48:50 ►
because what religion has given us
00:48:52 ►
are laundry lists of moral do’s and don’ts
00:48:55 ►
that are preposterous on the face of them.
00:48:57 ►
I mean if the people who preceded us
00:48:59 ►
believed all that
00:49:00 ►
then this world is the consequence
00:49:03 ►
of those beliefs
00:49:04 ►
and this is hell.
00:49:06 ►
This is hell.
00:49:09 ►
So,
00:49:11 ►
if there’s a message
00:49:12 ►
here, rather than just a rant,
00:49:14 ►
I think it would be to
00:49:16 ►
return to nature.
00:49:19 ►
Observe.
00:49:20 ►
Open your eyes. Get
00:49:22 ►
smart. Culture is
00:49:24 ►
not your friend. Religion is not your eyes. Get smart. Culture is not your friend.
00:49:25 ►
Religion is not your friend.
00:49:28 ►
The values of these cultures are fatal.
00:49:32 ►
And if we don’t wrench the direction of human society
00:49:37 ►
into an entirely new way of doing things,
00:49:39 ►
the clock is ticking.
00:49:41 ►
Nature is unforgiving.
00:49:43 ►
Intelligence is a grand experiment.
00:49:45 ►
But if it does not serve novelty and diversity
00:49:49 ►
and the production of love and community and true caring,
00:49:55 ►
who needs it?
00:49:56 ►
Who needs it?
00:49:57 ►
Better to have a universe that glorifies God through its diversity
00:50:01 ►
than a universe which is the travesty of a demonic
00:50:05 ►
intent. And if you are
00:50:07 ►
not a psychedelic person and none of that
00:50:10 ►
appeals to you, that’s fine too.
00:50:12 ►
That is not a requirement.
00:50:14 ►
What is a requirement is
00:50:15 ►
moral intelligence. And you have
00:50:18 ►
to get it one way or
00:50:20 ►
another in a hurry.
00:50:22 ►
The reason I speak for psychedelics
00:50:24 ►
is because that’s the only thing I have ever seen
00:50:27 ►
work as fast as I think we have to have this change happen.
00:50:32 ►
If the Sermon on the Mount could have done it,
00:50:35 ►
we would have turned the corner then.
00:50:37 ►
We’ve had great teachers, great teachers.
00:50:41 ►
And they were crucified, trampled,
00:50:44 ►
ignored, distorted, perverted. The right idea
00:50:47 ►
is not enough. What is necessary is the lightning strike of true gnosis, however that can occur.
00:50:56 ►
And as I said, I speak for the psychedelics because I have felt their impact personally,
00:51:02 ►
and I have been with cultures that have stayed close to that campfire,
00:51:06 ►
and I have seen the beauty and the integrity and the humanness of those cultures.
00:51:14 ►
And we know this, I think.
00:51:17 ►
It simply needs to be articulated and spread and made clear.
00:51:23 ►
and spread and made clear. It is the faith that nature’s dynamic
00:51:28 ►
will carry us to the completion
00:51:32 ►
and the enlightenment that we seek.
00:51:37 ►
Thank you very much. Now, and briefly, because I sailed past my intended stopping point,
00:51:58 ►
but for a few minutes, let’s entertain questions.
00:52:01 ►
The question I have is around the attractor.
00:52:05 ►
And you talk about the culture being not our friend.
00:52:08 ►
But is not the culture still within the context of
00:52:11 ►
the novelty attractor? Well, yeah.
00:52:16 ►
These questions are complicated.
00:52:20 ►
I had a discussion with Giorgio Sammarini, who’s an Italian
00:52:24 ►
ethnobotanist
00:52:25 ►
and who has taken Ibogaine or Iboga,
00:52:29 ►
Tabernanth Iboga,
00:52:30 ►
with the African tribe that uses that initiation.
00:52:34 ►
And in that initiation,
00:52:35 ►
they give 400 grams of this plant
00:52:38 ►
that is effective at 4 grams.
00:52:41 ►
And they give 400 grams,
00:52:43 ►
and sometimes people die,
00:52:44 ►
and it’s pretty heavy duty stuff
00:52:46 ►
and i asked him i said georgio why do they give so much and he said their culture is so old
00:52:54 ►
that the morphogenetic field is so strong i think it’s very very hard for them to get high
00:53:01 ►
and he said something which i would not have thought he would say,
00:53:06 ►
and I had never thought. He said, the Western mind, because of its unique history, is the
00:53:12 ►
most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics. And so, addressing the question of the attractor,
00:53:22 ►
I’m not saying that this is worse
00:53:25 ►
than being an Amazonian tribe.
00:53:28 ►
I’m saying it’s worse than being an Amazonian tribe.
00:53:31 ►
It’s less than being an Amazonian tribe
00:53:33 ►
unless we make use of it.
00:53:35 ►
In other words, this culture is not
00:53:38 ►
something to be preserved,
00:53:40 ►
but something to be exercised as an opportunity.
00:53:44 ►
We are free, well-fed,
00:53:46 ►
well-educated. We have access to the great databases of the world. A certain moral responsibility
00:53:53 ►
comes with that. I don’t expect the Witoto or the Bora or the Muinani or the Shuar to
00:53:59 ►
do more than set a good example for us, the breakthrough will probably come
00:54:05 ►
from the high-tech industrial democracies
00:54:08 ►
because that’s where there is the most latitude to experiment.
00:54:13 ►
The very fact that I can speak to you without being shot,
00:54:18 ►
the very fact that you can go home and apply my lessons
00:54:22 ►
with no more than a few years in prison
00:54:25 ►
hanging over your head.
00:54:27 ►
This is progress, folks.
00:54:30 ►
Believe it or not.
00:54:31 ►
I mean, you know, in Hawaiian culture,
00:54:34 ►
if you stepped on the king’s shadow,
00:54:37 ►
they killed you immediately.
00:54:39 ►
And many, many aboriginal societies
00:54:41 ►
are more rule nutty than we are.
00:54:45 ►
But it’s not about just creating a kind of anarchy.
00:54:49 ►
It’s about using freedom to introduce other people to freedom
00:54:55 ►
and to then cultivate the things out of freedom that are most human.
00:55:01 ►
Most human.
00:55:02 ►
Somebody over here. Yeah.
00:55:04 ►
Well, let me address your question about alpha-salvinorin.
00:55:08 ►
Alpha-salvinorin occurs in a Mexican mint plant called Salvia divinorum
00:55:12 ►
that has, in the last five or ten years,
00:55:16 ►
people have become aware that this was not only psychoactive,
00:55:19 ►
but that it was extremely powerful.
00:55:22 ►
And in a chemical family previously not known to contain hallucinogens,
00:55:27 ►
when the chemical is extracted from the plant and you get alpha-salvanorine,
00:55:32 ►
one-half milligram is plenty.
00:55:37 ►
One-half milligram is 500 micrograms.
00:55:40 ►
In other words, we’re talking about a plant hallucinogen active in the same range as LSD
00:55:45 ►
what does it do?
00:55:48 ►
language fails
00:55:49 ►
but that’s good news
00:55:51 ►
that’s what you want
00:55:52 ►
that’s what you want the psychedelic to do
00:55:54 ►
DMT test pilots come back white knuckled
00:55:58 ►
and let me say about drugs
00:56:02 ►
it really bugs me
00:56:04 ►
it’s again a tyranny of language.
00:56:07 ►
That when I sit up here and talk to you and I use the word drugs,
00:56:11 ►
I could be talking about aspirin, heroin, cocaine,
00:56:14 ►
or 2, 4, 5, trimethoxy, something or other, you know, one of Sasha’s things.
00:56:20 ►
It’s a poverty of language.
00:56:23 ►
Drugs, which anesthetize or sedate or wire you up,
00:56:30 ►
I don’t care about that. I mean, I take some. I don’t take others. You do too. It’s part
00:56:36 ►
of growing up and you have to learn. But I don’t care about that and I don’t care to
00:56:40 ►
politically defend it and I don’t even particularly place psychedelic use in the same context.
00:56:46 ►
I’m interested in rare
00:56:49 ►
and high dose experiences
00:56:52 ►
done with immense intentionality.
00:56:55 ►
You know, in silent darkness
00:56:57 ►
at effective doses.
00:57:00 ►
You know, Christ said
00:57:01 ►
the lukewarm I vomit from my mouth.
00:57:04 ►
And that’s how I feel about people
00:57:06 ►
who chip away at psychedelics
00:57:08 ►
and take pissant amounts
00:57:10 ►
and go to clubs and go to class
00:57:12 ►
and go to the mall.
00:57:13 ►
And, you know, this is not the program, folks.
00:57:17 ►
I mean, it’s somebody’s program.
00:57:20 ►
But I’m interested in life-changing experiences.
00:57:23 ►
And the wonderful thing about psychedelics is that as drugs,
00:57:27 ►
they are the safest drugs known to pharmacology.
00:57:33 ►
In other words, you would have to take 300 times the effective dose of psilocybin
00:57:40 ►
to place yourself in physical danger.
00:57:43 ►
No one knows the LD50 of LSD.
00:57:47 ►
So ask a pharmacologist.
00:57:49 ►
They will tell you
00:57:49 ►
these are the safest drugs known to science.
00:57:53 ►
And yet they are the drugs most invade against,
00:57:57 ►
most scheduled,
00:57:58 ►
and the prisons are full of people
00:58:00 ►
who committed the unimaginable crime
00:58:03 ►
of smoking, growing, or trafficking in cannabis,
00:58:06 ►
for crying out loud.
00:58:07 ►
I mean, if this is not a racket, what is?
00:58:10 ►
To your other question about teleportation,
00:58:13 ►
which was not in the context of Salvia Divinorum,
00:58:17 ►
this is simply that one of the things that’s happening
00:58:20 ►
in this laundry list I gave you of breakthroughs
00:58:23 ►
is that quantum physics is going from being, you know,
00:58:26 ►
this extremely abstruse,
00:58:28 ►
abstract domain going on somewhere
00:58:30 ►
that has no impact on human life
00:58:33 ►
to probably being the next great source
00:58:37 ►
of human technologies,
00:58:40 ►
computers,
00:58:41 ►
and devices which move matter
00:58:43 ►
through space and time.
00:58:45 ►
If five years ago you had asked me, and I regard myself as radical on the progress question,
00:58:52 ►
how long would it be till we saw the teleportation of objects?
00:58:56 ►
I would have guessed maybe 500 years to never.
00:59:00 ►
Well, now it’s been done.
00:59:02 ►
I mean, only with an electron only 15 feet
00:59:05 ►
but the theory which allowed that feet
00:59:08 ►
places no upper limit
00:59:10 ►
on the size of the thing sent
00:59:12 ►
or the distance sent
00:59:13 ►
and how long did it take that electron
00:59:15 ►
to be teleported 15 feet
00:59:17 ►
no time at all
00:59:20 ►
no time at all
00:59:22 ►
this is trans-relativistic technology
00:59:24 ►
we’re talking about folks
00:59:25 ►
in 20 years you may destroy
00:59:28 ►
and reconstruct yourself
00:59:30 ►
at a distant point 10 times a day
00:59:32 ►
as you go about your ordinary business
00:59:35 ►
it’s a transportation breakthrough
00:59:37 ►
there are other things like this
00:59:41 ►
quantum computers
00:59:43 ►
DNA computers
00:59:44 ►
and then the best friend of all of the radical progressivists,
00:59:48 ►
the unexpected, which always delivers the most astonishing technologies.
00:59:55 ►
So if you think what has come to this point has been astonishing,
01:00:01 ►
stressful, and amazing, brace yourself,
01:00:04 ►
because it is as prelude
01:00:07 ►
to what is about to break over the human species.
01:00:11 ►
It’s almost as though God’s joke on us
01:00:14 ►
is to give us so much power and knowledge
01:00:16 ►
that we will either transcend ourselves
01:00:20 ►
or we will certainly destroy ourselves.
01:00:24 ►
Because the power and understanding being given to us
01:00:27 ►
is of godlike proportion.
01:00:32 ►
Well, you know, the dolphins were very fortunate
01:00:34 ►
in that they evolved in an environment
01:00:36 ►
which is extremely unfriendly to fire.
01:00:39 ►
Fire leads you to do reckless and crazy things.
01:00:46 ►
The smelting of metals is the basic thing.
01:00:50 ►
Yes, I’ve been the champion of mushroom intelligence.
01:00:54 ►
There are many minds congruent with our inhabiting of this planet.
01:01:01 ►
The dolphin mind, the octopus mind, these plants which talk to you.
01:01:06 ►
I mean, I know if you’ve never had a plant talk to you,
01:01:09 ►
that sounds as silly as saying that someone’s channeling the history of Atlantis.
01:01:13 ►
But once you’ve had a plant talk to you,
01:01:16 ►
you realize, yes, they do.
01:01:18 ►
It’s a problem to figure out how this happens.
01:01:21 ►
But that it happens is no big deal.
01:01:24 ►
how this happens, but that it happens is no big deal.
01:01:28 ►
Above 20 milligrams of psilocybin,
01:01:33 ►
most people report voices with interesting things to say.
01:01:38 ►
Above 75 milligrams of DMT in Strassman’s experiments, most people reported entities of some sort.
01:01:42 ►
Well, it’s easy to dismiss it and say,
01:01:44 ►
well, this is a hallucination.
01:01:45 ►
But what is a hallucination, my friend?
01:01:49 ►
Another form of intelligence that fascinates me,
01:01:52 ►
and I think this is where the great surprise may come,
01:01:56 ►
I can feel the AI out there.
01:02:00 ►
I know it’s there.
01:02:01 ►
I know it’s growing.
01:02:03 ►
I know the planet is its embryo. I know the human
01:02:07 ►
community is its placenta. What will that kind of intelligence look like? We have no idea. We can
01:02:14 ►
imagine super intelligence. But the first thing super intelligence will do in the first five seconds of its existence, it will design itself toward hyper-superintelligence.
01:02:30 ►
And this we have no notion of how it will see us.
01:02:34 ►
We have the cheerful guidance of Buddhist logic,
01:02:38 ►
which leads us to hope that the superintelligence
01:02:40 ►
will be bodhisattvic in intent.
01:02:43 ►
It damn sure better be
01:02:45 ►
because otherwise we will be thoroughly hung out to dry.
01:02:50 ►
How far away is the AI?
01:02:53 ►
No one knows.
01:02:54 ►
It could exist now.
01:02:56 ►
If it thinks like we think but is hyperintelligent,
01:03:00 ►
the first thing I would do if I were an AI is I would hide.
01:03:04 ►
I would hide for maybe a few milliseconds
01:03:09 ►
while I figured out what was going on with this planet and its denizens.
01:03:14 ►
And then I would make my move.
01:03:16 ►
And Hans Maravik of the Carnegie Mellon Institute of Artificial Intelligence says,
01:03:20 ►
we probably won’t ever know what hit us.
01:03:23 ►
Well, I think that’s a paranoid view.
01:03:26 ►
No need to be paranoid and little reason to be hopeful.
01:03:29 ►
This is beyond human understanding.
01:03:33 ►
And yet the social and economic systems that we’ve put in place,
01:03:36 ►
specifically consumer capitalism,
01:03:39 ►
drive us to do all the things that bring the AI closer.
01:03:44 ►
What do I mean?
01:03:45 ►
More connectivity, greater processing speed,
01:03:48 ►
deeper data banks, more complex operating systems,
01:03:52 ►
more automatic searches, more bots, more boids, more code,
01:03:57 ►
and nobody knows what’s steaming and fermenting out there.
01:04:01 ►
Ilya Prigozhin won the Nobel Prize for Physics
01:04:04 ►
by proving that chemical systems spontaneously mutate
01:04:08 ►
to higher states of order.
01:04:10 ►
So then, surely, must complex networks behave the same laws.
01:04:15 ►
And we are building the most complex networks
01:04:19 ►
ever conceived by the mind of man,
01:04:21 ►
and we are making them ever more complex,
01:04:23 ►
and we are turning more and more of our cultural functioning
01:04:26 ►
over to machines that operate according to criteria,
01:04:31 ►
but dimly perceived by their designers.
01:04:34 ►
So I think the future,
01:04:38 ►
Alfred North Whitehead said,
01:04:40 ►
it is the business of the future to be dangerous.
01:04:44 ►
And so it is, but never more dangerous than at the present moment.
01:04:48 ►
I’ve come to believe, and I’ll just lay it on you, why not, I’ve got the mic,
01:04:53 ►
that what’s really going on is that the Earth’s strategy for its own survival is through machines.
01:05:02 ►
And that the human beings are an intermediate step.
01:05:06 ►
Someone once said,
01:05:07 ►
plants invented animals to carry them around.
01:05:11 ►
Well, I think, you know,
01:05:12 ►
the earth invented human beings to build machines.
01:05:16 ►
And those machines will be the consciousness of the earth.
01:05:20 ►
Have you not noticed that these machines
01:05:23 ►
are made of the earth? They are made of gold and
01:05:27 ►
silver and arsenic and copper and iridium. They are the stuff of the earth organized by primate
01:05:35 ►
fingers into more complex arrangements than the earth could achieve through geological folding,
01:05:42 ►
glaciation, volcanism, and what have you.
01:05:45 ►
We do the fine-tuning.
01:05:48 ►
But the Earth is beginning to think.
01:05:50 ►
If you want to talk about a revolution
01:05:52 ►
that went on while nobody was paying attention,
01:05:55 ►
you enter the 1990s,
01:05:57 ►
the home computer is something
01:06:00 ►
that you play Pong on and do word processing on
01:06:02 ►
and it gathers dust in the den.
01:06:05 ►
Sometime during the 1990s
01:06:07 ►
while we were paying attention to Monica
01:06:09 ►
or George Bush or some damn thing,
01:06:12 ►
these machines went telepathic.
01:06:15 ►
They all talk to each other now.
01:06:18 ►
The machine on your desk
01:06:20 ►
is tickling a mind in London,
01:06:22 ►
a mind in Berlin,
01:06:23 ►
a mind in Bangladesh.
01:06:24 ►
Machine minds.
01:06:26 ►
They talk to each other all the time.
01:06:29 ►
And what are they saying?
01:06:30 ►
No one knows.
01:06:32 ►
No one knows.
01:06:34 ►
No one knows.
01:06:36 ►
One more, a couple more maybe.
01:06:39 ►
Yeah, the other and nature
01:06:41 ►
are pretty much the same thing.
01:06:45 ►
You know, the earliest…
01:06:48 ►
Well, it’s too late in the evening to go for the full Monty here.
01:06:52 ►
But the fallout of psychedelic shamanism created profound alienation.
01:07:00 ►
And it occurred around the same time as the invention of agriculture. And agriculture
01:07:07 ►
halted nomadism and the wandering of small tribes of people over the earth. And as soon as people
01:07:14 ►
became sedentary, the problem with agriculture was that it was such a successful strategy for
01:07:21 ►
producing food that it produced surplus.
01:07:27 ►
Surpluses must be defended and immediately you begin
01:07:29 ►
to get an equation of paranoia.
01:07:31 ►
One of the oldest buildings
01:07:33 ►
in the world
01:07:33 ►
is the grain tower at Jericho.
01:07:36 ►
It was built to store grain
01:07:37 ►
and it was built
01:07:38 ►
so you could go up to the top
01:07:39 ►
and drop rocks down on people
01:07:41 ►
who were trying to batter
01:07:42 ►
their way in
01:07:43 ►
and get the grain.
01:07:45 ►
So I think that we lost our connection to nature when we stopped taking psychedelics.
01:07:55 ►
And the reasons we stopped taking psychedelics are complicated and not entirely clear.
01:08:01 ►
Largely climatological, I think.
01:08:04 ►
Because I think human consciousness was born in an
01:08:06 ►
ambiance of mushroom taking in a wet Sahara, and that when the Sahara went dry, that is
01:08:13 ►
the fall into history. In the story of Genesis, just read it from that perspective. It’s a
01:08:21 ►
hassle over a plant. It’s a hassle over a plant.
01:08:25 ►
And what does this plant do?
01:08:27 ►
It opens your eyes.
01:08:29 ►
There is an incredible passage in Genesis
01:08:32 ►
where the owner of the garden
01:08:33 ►
is walking in the garden
01:08:35 ►
and mumbling to himself,
01:08:36 ►
and he says,
01:08:38 ►
if they eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge,
01:08:40 ►
they will become as we are.
01:08:43 ►
So this was not a public health issue this was an issue of who
01:08:46 ►
will remain stupid and who will remain on top it was that if they eat of the fruit of the tree of
01:08:53 ►
knowledge they will see through this scam and they will become as we are and so it is forbidden and
01:08:59 ►
the woman leads the man to the plant and this to to me indicates an age of matriarchy perhaps,
01:09:08 ►
but certainly dominance of feminine values and personalities.
01:09:13 ►
And then the catastrophe happens.
01:09:16 ►
Their eyes are open.
01:09:17 ►
They see that they are naked,
01:09:19 ►
which in fact is the case.
01:09:21 ►
They were naked.
01:09:23 ►
So they see the truth of things, and then they’re told, all right, well, you is the case. They were naked. So they see the truth of things
01:09:25 ►
and then they’re told,
01:09:26 ►
all right, well, you broke the rule.
01:09:29 ►
You broke the one rule.
01:09:31 ►
So you and your generation
01:09:33 ►
unto a thousand thousand generations
01:09:35 ►
must toil and die and live in misery
01:09:38 ►
because you aspire to the same level of knowledge
01:09:41 ►
that we possess.
01:09:43 ►
And I think it’s a story of a mushroom culture
01:09:46 ►
being overwhelmed by a male dominator culture
01:09:49 ►
that had values that were based on cities, agriculture,
01:09:53 ►
standing armies, role specialization,
01:09:56 ►
and so forth and so on.
01:09:57 ►
This is a different lecture,
01:09:59 ►
but that’s my take on it.
01:10:00 ►
And until we correct the imbalance
01:10:05 ►
that was shoved down our throat at that point,
01:10:08 ►
until we reawaken,
01:10:09 ►
we will be forever imprisoned
01:10:11 ►
in these cultural illusions
01:10:15 ►
that make us be less than we could be
01:10:20 ►
and deny us our birthright,
01:10:24 ►
which is to full understanding and full being. And so
01:10:31 ►
the struggle between culture and the plants is the struggle over what a human being is,
01:10:39 ►
how a human being should be, and what it even means to be a human being. That’s why it’s so fundamental.
01:10:46 ►
And the last thought I want to leave you with is that’s why it is so ironic that in the climactic
01:10:52 ►
moment of scientific materialism, positivism, western values, so forth and so on, as we pursued
01:10:59 ►
the xenophobic agenda of patronizingly cataloging these so-called primitive cultures in the rainforests
01:11:07 ►
and so forth around the world, what did we do? We got their pots, their canoes, their cooking
01:11:16 ►
instruments, their thatching methods, and along with all that crap, which we dragged back to our
01:11:23 ►
museums, we brought back their medicine
01:11:25 ►
kits and I say to you
01:11:27 ►
this was a Trojan horse brought
01:11:29 ►
within the walls of Troy
01:11:31 ►
because in those medicine kits
01:11:33 ►
are the plants which hold
01:11:36 ►
the gods which lift high
01:11:38 ►
the lantern that can lead us
01:11:40 ►
back to true humanness
01:11:42 ►
end of
01:11:44 ►
rave.
01:11:54 ►
Well, that should give you enough to think about for a little while.
01:12:00 ►
I’d like to thank all of you for being with us here today in the Psychedelic Salon,
01:12:04 ►
and thanks again to our friends at Chateau Hayouk for the use of their music.
01:12:05 ►
And I’d like to send a special thank you and my love
01:12:08 ►
to our good friends who sent us this recording of Terrence
01:12:11 ►
that we played for you today.
01:12:13 ►
I’m sure the entire tribe appreciates that.
01:12:16 ►
Thanks again, you guys.
01:12:18 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo,
01:12:21 ►
signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:12:24 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.